Temporal fell harsh from incongruously full lips. “Unattached Agent Komozino,” she identified herself. “Quick, tell me, are any of my rank at these coordinates?”
It stabbed in him: Trouble. She knew more, and probably had a better brain, than he did. Army habits from the Second World War, almost forgotten, brought him half to attention. “Me,” he clipped. “Manson Emmert Everard.”
“Good.” She got off and approached him. Through the tight control in her voice he heard the tension, the dread. “What data I could access indicated you might be. Listen, Manson Emmert Everard. We have had a catastrophe, some kind of temporal upheaval. As nearly as I have been able to ascertain, it occurred approximately on Julian day 2,137,000. Beyond that, events diverge. No Patrol stations appear to exist. We must rally whatever forces we have left.”
She stopped and waited. She knows what a hammerblow she’s dealt me, trickled down the back of his mind. I’ll need a minute to catch my balance.
The astronomical number she’d spoken—Somewhen during the European Middle Ages? He’d calculate exactly, no, he’d ask her. Wanda was bound for twentieth-century California. “Now” she won’t come out into anything of the kind. And she isn’t trained for such a situation. None of us are—our job is to prevent it—but to her it’ll be no more than vaguely remembered classroom theory. She’ll be stunned worse than I am. My God, what’ll she do?
II
The dining room in the lodge accommodated all guests and staff, though chairs around tables got a bit crowded. Light came silver-gray and uneasy through the windows, for clouds swept low before a wind whose booming went as an undertone, the sound of autumn on its way south. Everard knew he imagined, but he felt as if a breath of the cold outside seeped inward.
More did he feel the gazes upon him. He stood at the far end, beneath a vigorous mural of bison that a local artist had painted some fifty years ago. Komozino was at his side, impassive. She had told him he had better take the lead. He was much closer in birthtime, memories, ways of thinking, to everybody else. Moreover, behind him lay a relevant experience unique among them.
“We spent most of the night talking, when we weren’t shuttling message tubes in hopes of more contacts and information,” he said into the appalled silence that followed his announcement. “So far, we know very little. There’s reason to think the key event is in Italy, mid-twelfth century. At least, the Patrol has a man then at Palermo, island of Sicily. He got word that the king there was killed in battle on the mainland. It was not supposed to happen. His database says the king lived on for nearly twenty years and was important. Like a sensible fellow, our man sent a tube a short way uptime to his milieu headquarters. It returned, informing him that that office was gone, spurlos versenkt, never founded. He called other stations contemporary to himself, and they checked their own futures—very cautiously, of course, not venturing more than a couple of decades ahead. No new Patrol agencies anywhere. As you’d expect, otherwise the scenes weren’t strange. They wouldn’t be—yet—except perhaps in southern Europe. The effects of a change propagate across the world at varying speeds, depending on factors like distance, ease of travel, and closeness of relations between countries. The Far East might begin to be touched, slightly, pretty soon; but the Americas may well go on unaffected for centuries, Australia and Polynesia longer still. Even in Europe, at first the differences are probably mainly political. And … that’s a whole new political history, about which we here know nothing.
“Anyhow, naturally, our bases in the twelfth century started communicating with those downtime. This led to contact with Unattached Agent Komozino.” Everard gestured at her. “She happened to be in Egypt—uh, Eighteenth Dynasty, did you say?—tracking down an expedition from her home millennium that’d gone back in search of cultural inspiration and evidently gotten lost…. No, plain to see whatever became of it, there was no noticeable effect on history…. She took charge of the entire emergency operation, pending the availability of more people with the same rank. A data scan suggested me, so she came in person to inform and confer.” Everard braced himself. “At the moment, unless a Danellian shows up, we, ladies and gentlemen, are on the edge of the effort to salvage the future.”
“Us?” cried a young man. Everard knew him peripherally, French, period of Louis XIV and assigned to that same milieu, as most agents were assigned to their own eras. It meant he was bright. The Patrol got few recruits from before the First Industrial Revolution, and very few from prescientific societies. A person who hadn’t been raised in that style of thinking was seldom able to assimilate the concepts. At that, this lad was having difficulties. “But, sir, there must be hundreds, thousands of our kind active before the crisis date. Shall we not gather them all together?”
Everard shook his head. “No. We’re in deep enough trouble already. The vortices we could generate—”
“Perhaps I can make it a little clearer,” Komozino offered crisply. “Yes, quite probably most Patrol personnel go into the pre-medieval past, if only on vacation, like you. They are present, so to speak, there and then. Often more than once. For example, Agent Everard has been active in settings as diverse as early Phoenicia, Achaémenid Persia, post-Roman Britain, and viking Scandinavia. He has repeatedly come to this lodge for rest and recreation, at various points of its existence, both downtime and uptime of the present moment. Why should we not call on these Everards also? Certainly two Unattached make an insufficient cadre of leaders.
“The fact is, we have not done so. We will not do so. If we did, that would change reality again and again, hopelessly, beyond any possibility of comprehension, let alone control. No, if we survive what is ahead of us and prevail over this misfortune, we will not double back on our world lines and warn ourselves to beware. Never! If you try it, you will find that your conditioning against such antics is as powerful as your conditioning against revealing to any unauthorized person that time travel occurs.
“The mission of the Patrol is precisely to maintain the ordered progression of history, of cause and effect, human will and human action. Often this is tragic, and the temptation to intervene is almost overwhelming. It must be resisted. That way lies chaos.
“And if we are to execute our duty, we must constrain ourselves to operate in as linearly causational a fashion as possible. We must always remember that every paradox is more than mortally dangerous.
“Therefore I have been flitting about, seeing to it that the news does not reach most of our remaining personnel. It is best confined to a few indispensables, and to selected off-duty individuals like yourselves. To further disturb the normal pattern of events is to risk obliteration and oblivion.”
Her stiff height sagged a little. “It has been hard,” she whispered. Everard wondered how much of her lifespan she had spent on that frantic task. It wasn’t just a matter of dashing from post to post, passing on the word here and hushing it up there. She had to know what she was doing. Mostly she must have been immersed in records, databases, evaluations of people and periods. The decisions must frequently be agonizing. Had she been at it weeks, months, years? Awed, he knew that such an intellectual achievement was altogether beyond him.