And yonder rose Nob Hill and Russian Hill. Or did they? She knew them covered with buildings, not brush. In the opposite direction, a glimpse of Twin Peaks seemed familiar; but what had become of the television tower? Of everything? She hadn’t appeared in a subterranean garage but on the surface, surrounded by solitude.
Instinct stormed awake. She kicked the power pedal and flung her machine aloft. Air brawled by the force-screen. At once she knew she’d panicked. She grabbed self-control, halted, and hovered on antigrav two thousand feet high. Her ears had popped. They hurt. That helped make things real for her, no fever dream but a mess to cope with.
Is this foolish, hanging in sight of God and radar? Well, nobody to see me, is there? Nobody at all, at all.
No San Francisco, no Treasure Island, no Golden Gate or Bay Bridge, no Eastbay cities, no ships or aircraft, nothing save the wind and the world. Across the strait, Marin County hills hulked summer-brown, as did the range behind an Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, Richmond that didn’t exist either. Ocean was slivers of silver to west and north on the far side of the shifting blue shadows in the fog. At the inland edge of mist she saw part of the sand dunes where Golden Gate Park ought to be.
Like before the white man came. A few Indian camps here and there, I suppose. Could the temporal part of this hopper have developed a collywobble, and I landed pastward of the twentieth century? Never heard of any such thing, but neither have I ever heard of any high tech that was not highly temperamental. Like a calming hand laid upon her, the knowledge came that the Time Patrol had operatives someplace at every moment of a million years or more.
She activated her communicator. The radio bands were silent. Wind shrilled, stronger at this altitude than below. She felt how cold she was. Her clothing was blouse, slacks, sandals. This vehicle wasn’t equipped for the fancier sorts of transmission, like neutrino modulation, but the Patrol used radio freely in eras before Marconi, or was it before Hertz or Clerk Maxwell or who? Maybe nobody happened to be sending. “Hello, hello, Specialist Wanda Tamberly calling…. Come in, please come in ….” Shouldn’t there be a set of beacons for her to home on? Could she be too distant from any to receive? That didn’t figure, when even the scientists of her milieu detected signals of a few watts across the Solar System. But she was no transistor tripper.
Jim Erskine was. He could make electrons dance a fandango. They’d gone together for a while, students at Stanford. If Jim were here—But she’d put such people behind her forever when she joined the Patrol. Her folks too, all blood kin except Uncle Steve; oh, she visited, she lied about her wonderful job that kept her so much on the go; nevertheless—Loneliness smote like the wind.
“Better get someplace warm and take stock,” she muttered. “Especially if the someplace serves hot buttered rum.” However feeble, the jape encouraged her. She sent the machine slanting downward across the Bay.
Pelican and cormorant winged in their thousands. Sea lions basked along island shores. On the eastern side she found shelter in a redwood grove, majesty through whose shade sunlight cast golden spatters, a brook purled, fish swam and leaped. Desolation is relative, she thought.
Dismounting, she kicked off her sandals and did a few minutes’ stationary jogging on the soft duff. Warmed, she opened the luggage carrier behind the buddy seat to check what her assets were.
Damn skimpy. Standard emergency stuff, helmet, stun pistol, isotopic battery, flashlight, glowlight, water bottle, food bars, small tool kit, small medical kit. A bag holding the few changes of clothes, toothbrush, comb, et cetera that she’d brought with her to the resort; generally she’d worn garments kept in stock for guests. A purse, with the usual late-twentieth-century American female clutter. A couple of books she’d read at odd moments. Like most of those agents who operated away from their birth milieus and didn’t maintain lodgings there, she had a locker at the local station where she kept necessary stuff, including money. Her plan had been to pick up what she wanted and taxi to her parents’ home, since it chanced they couldn’t conveniently meet her at the airport. Had they been able to, a more elaborate deception would have been required.
Oh, Dad, Mother, Susie. Yes, and the cats too.
Slowly, the serenity around her smoothed down despair. The thing to do, she decided, was not to try springing straight back to the Pleistocene—though God damn, wouldn’t it be good to see Manse there, big and solid and able?—or flicker blindly through time in this neighborhood. If she couldn’t trust the temporal drive, her best bet was to head spatially east. Maybe she’d find European colonies yonder, or maybe she’d have to continue overseas, but eventually she was bound to make a Patrol contact.
She donned her old jacket from backpacking trips that abruptly felt very remote, and laced stout shoes over socks on her feet. Helmet secured to head, pistol to hip, she was as ready for trouble as she’d ever be. Remounting, she steered her hopper out among the huge trunks and into the sky.
Green bordered the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers; elsewhere tawniness passed beneath her, no trace of irrigation, agriculture, highways, towns. Impatience prickled. This jet plane speed was too flinking slow. She could go supersonic, but that was still a crawl and would be extravagant of energy reserves she might need later. For several minutes she mustered nerve, then set the space controls and gingerly touched the button.
The Sierra peaks lay below her, the desert beyond, and the sun stood as much higher as she gauged it ought. So she could safely bypass distance. “Yippee!”
Proceed by jumps—An illimitable grassy plain shimmered under the wind. Thunderheads towered in the south. The radio remained mute.
Tamberly bit her lip. This wasn’t right. She spent a while skipping above the prairies. Bird life was rich, but the land reached strangely empty. She spied a herd of wild horses before at last she came above some buffalo. Their abundance should have darkened the ground for miles….
Smoke rose from the right bank of the Missouri. She hovered far up, activated her optical, and magnified. Yes, people, and they kept horses, yet this was a village of sod huts, tilled fields outside the stockade….
Shouldn’t be! Once they became riders, the plains Indians turned almost overnight into warriors and nomadic hunters, living off the buffalo till white men slaughtered those, also almost overnight. Had she chanced on some such moment of transition as, say, 1880? No, because then she’d have seen spoor of the whites everywhere, railroads, towns, ranches, farms laid out in homesteaders’ quarter sections….
Remembrance struck. The horse barbarians weren’t in any balance with nature either. If they’d been left alone, they’d have wiped out the buffalo themselves, slower but just as surely.
No. Please, no. Don’t let this be.
Tamberly fled on eastward.
1137 A. D.
Going from Ice Age France to medieval Sicily by way of Germany earlier that same year did not strike Everard as funny until he chanced to think about it. His chuckle clanked. Time travel was like that, including what it did to people’s minds, the stuff they came to take for granted.
The fact was that the contemporary base in Palermo was a one-man operation. Its front was a shop which, with the live-in family and staff, filled its only building. There was no subterranean addition. The likelihood of you and your vehicle popping out of thin air, being seen and exciting comment, was prohibitive. Patrol facilities were to be expanded later, starting in 1140, when Norman Sicily really began to gain importance. But this didn’t happen, because King Roger II died in battle and the future that led to the Patrol was aborted.