Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson Read online

  “I’m going to take us down, now.”

  The hopper began a gradual descent. Everard caught his breath. There was that strangeness in the air again that he had experienced when Ben-Eytan had brought him here, the bite of the unfamiliar oxy-nitro mix, and the utter absence, Everard realized, of most of the carbon dioxide and all the stuff that had gone into Earth’s atmosphere since the dinosaur days, the effluvia of rotting vegetation and decomposing animal flesh and belching furnaces and automobile exhaust and a myriad other products of combustion and respiration. There was no vegetation here to speak of, no animal life on shore at all, and not a single automobile on the entire planet.

  He had spent two-thirds of his elapsed lifespan roaming freely in time, but he had never felt as estranged from reality as he did right at this moment. The sight of medieval cities had not done it, nor the actual proximity of Alexander the Great or Ben Jonson or Galileo Galilei or Cyrus the Great, or, for that matter, a brontosaurus in the living, snorting flesh or a man who had been born in the year 11,500 A.D. Everard had adapted to all things of that sort, had, indeed, come to take them for granted in a way that he could not help but regret, for that meant that his long service in the Time Patrol had in some way impaired his capacity for wonder.

  But seeing this place was different: this seemingly lifeless, sterile place, this world before the world, this emptiness, this Gondwanaland. It was next to impossible to believe that from this bleak and hopeless shield of raw barren stone, this nothingness, would spring the turbulent, wonderful, miraculously complex globe that the succession of the ages would ultimately bring forth.

  And then, knowing that the Founders were just a few hundred yards away from him—

  Edgily he said, as Gonzalez nudged him and pointed toward the entrance to the camp, “What are we going to do? Walk right in there? We don’t belong there, Elio!”

  “How do they know? They’ve all been here only a few days. Nobody knows everybody yet. To them we’ll be just a couple of newly arrived Founders.”

  “But we weren’t there! We aren’t Founders! We’re setting up a causal loop!”

  “So? We have a job to do, man. Little things like causal loops are incidental consequences of the work.”

  Everard smiled grimly. He knew that Gonzalez was right. There were rules about causal loops, temporal vortices, interventions within interventions, all kinds of things like that, and one tried to keep within the rules as much as possible. But sometimes rules had to be broken. The Patrol was forbidden to tinker with the true and proper sequence of the time-stream unless, of course, circumstances made it necessary to do so. And as Gonzalez said, they had a job to do.

  They were inside the camp perimeter, now. He recognized some, not all, of the men and women he saw. Famous, quasi-legendary people, Leo Schmidt, Orris Greyl, Hian Gan-Sekkant, no less. Everyone in the Patrol encountered some of the Founders from time to time in the routine course of work—distant, remote figures, yes, but occasionally known to show up on the site of some difficult project—but, since the preponderance of them came from A.D. 25,000 and even farther uptime, early humans like Manson Emmert Everard were generally spared the sight of them. Humankind of the later eras did not look much like the Homo Sapiens that crowded the earth in Manse Everard’s own birth-era, and one had to be of an extraordinarily sturdy nature to withstand the shock. As for the Danellians, those beings of a million-plus years ahead, Everard had once or twice been in the presence of one, but never, to the best of his knowledge, had he seen one in its true form. Like Zeus appearing to Semele in his true form, they would be much too much to handle if seen as they were, and customarily they took on innocuous disguises when moving among their evolutionary predecessors on Earth. There might be Danellians among those he saw now in the courtyard of Alpha Point, but—that phrase again—not so far as he knew.

  As he and Gonzalez moved across the inner courtyard, sauntering in an exaggeratedly casual way and trying hard not to look like the interlopers that they were, Everard was startled to see a familiar figure coming the other way: Ben-Eytan, moving in that same excessively easy, all too phony manner. He saw them, too, and shot a fierce glare at them.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Gonzalez muttered, turning bright red. “I timed it wrong! We have to get out of here.”

  He seized Everard roughly by the elbow and spun him around, and, without trying to be casual at all, now, led him briskly out of the courtyard and back to the scooters they had parked outside.

  Everard knew better to ask for explanations. Only when they were safely aloft did he give Gonzalez a quizzical look.

  “I should get docked a week’s pay for that, Manse. The timer got set for an hour too soon and we did an overlap. Dan has already made the reconnaissance for that time of day—at least four days ago, Prague time.” He looked flustered as he fiddled with the controls of the hopper. They began to descend again, and, so far as it was possible to tell the time of day at all in this constantly veiled sky, Everard figured they were coming in an hour or so later than on their first try.

  Small wonder that Gonzalez looked chagrined. The last thing they wanted to be doing, or close to it, was to be causing overlap paradoxes, with one agent running into another on different tracks that converged on the same point in space and time. If they did that, they might as well be putting up blazing markers to tell the agents of Patrol II that some kind of counter-intervention was in progress.

  But no harm seemed to have been done. They entered the courtyard again. Someone who might have been Itikarm Staykan—who surely was him, Everard decided—crossed diagonally in front of them, paying no heed to them at all. Everard tried to pretend that he did not feel like a ten-year-old boy in the presence of one of the stars of his favorite baseball team. Itikarm Staykan! Thirty feet away from him!

  He told himself to shape up and get over this unseemly attack of hero-worship. He reminded himself that he was a grown man, an Unattached agent of the Time Patrol—the true and proper Time Patrol—and that he was involved in the most important mission of his career.

  “What we’re looking for,” said Gonzalez, “is a blur. The kind of blur that tells us that one of the terrorists has just popped in to plant one of the devices.”

  “And what kind of blur is that?” Everard asked.

  “You’ll know when you see one.”

  They didn’t see one there—nor on their next visit to this day, an hour and twenty minutes previous to this one. Gonzalez consulted the schedule that he was carrying, set the timer very carefully indeed, and they jumped again, uptime by six hours. Nothing there either.

  Another jump.

  “Bingo,” Everard said.

  A blur, all right: a quick oval white blip, the merest smearing of the atmosphere, a ghostly emanation that was briefly and dizzyingly visible against the curving greenish wall of the administration building. Gonzalez failed to see it; but when Everard described it to him, he nodded, pulled out a scanner, recorded the precise spot. Then they left, made yet another jump, emerged into the courtyard ten minutes before their previous arrival. They took up their post about fifty feet from where they had been standing before. A few minutes later, Everard watched himself and Gonzalez arrive as before and take up positions at right angles to where he and Gonzalez had been standing.

  Why didn’t we see ourselves before? he found himself wondering.

  Because we weren’t there before, he answered himself.

  And then, angrily: Stop it, Manse. You know better than this.

  Don’t load your head up with nonsense.

  He worked hard at not looking at them. Filling the continuum with paradoxes on this level gave him a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  This time Gonzalez was ready. His scanner was out and cocked twenty-seconds before the blur appeared. Everard heard the familiar tiny buzz as the recording of location in time and space was made.

  He also heard the other Manse Everard calling out, right on cue, “Bingo!”

  “Okay
,” Gonzalez muttered. “Let’s get out of here. The more time we spend here, the better chance Patrol II surveillance teams will have to detect our presence.”

  “Right.”

  They cleared out fast, heading across the continuum to the twentieth century A.D., the Austro-Hungrian Empire, the city of Prague, October 4, 1910, Wenceslas Square, the Grand Hotel Europa.

  The reconnaissance part of the mission was complete, Everard discovered, when the five of them were once again assembled in their suite. Ben-Eytan flipped on a simulator and a scale model of Alpha Point sprang to life in the sitting room, with five piercingly bright red dots blazing forth on the simulated walls. Each was marked with a chronological indicator pinpointing one moment on Christmas Day, Gondwanaland time.

  The Israeli looked around the room. He was all business now, no smartypants sarcasm, no irritating mannerisms of any sort.

  “As our preliminary search indicated, the terrorists planted exactly five capsules, which makes one for each of us. We’ve been over the data and over it and over it again, until we’ve got the whole damned place crisscrossed with paradoxes, and we’ll have to clean all that garbage out of the system later on, though of course that will create some paradoxes too, but to hell with that right now. The result of all the work we’ve done is that we know the time of the planting, over a seven-hour-long period on December 24, and we know the time of detonation, between four and five in the afternoon on December 25. The order of detonation seems to be important: the fifth capsule, we think, potentiates the first four, and therefore if we take them out in the same sequence no poison gas will be released into the atmosphere as we go about our work, or so we believe. We will try to neutralize the first four capsules and capture the terrorists as they try to activate them, but the key thing is to knock out that fifth capsule, just in case it’s capable of releasing toxicity even in the absence of the first four, and that will be your job, Manse, because there may be some physical violence involved and you are by a considerable distance the biggest and strongest of the group.”

  Everard smiled a curdled smile. How very flattering, he thought, that they had picked him for the part of the job that needed the most muscle. They must think he was about half an evolutionary notch up from Homo neandertalensis. Well, maybe so. Certainly he’d be better in any wrestling match than Lora Spallanzani or a lightweight like Gonzalez or a highly evolved post-human like Nakamura. And Ben-Eytan himself, who was short but seemed pretty sturdily built, probably preferred to remain above the fray and leave the rough stuff to others.

  “Let’s run through the order of action a couple of times, shall we?” said Ben-Eytan. “Hideko, you’ll go after the first capsule, and then—”

  He ran through it more than a couple of times. He ran through it until even the calm and austere-spirited eightieth-century Nakamura was starting to seem bothered by the repetition.

  “All right,” Ben-Eytan said at long last. “Here we go.”

  The job of rolling up the terrorist network would take all of Christmas Eve and on into Christmas Day, Gondwanaland time. And it wasn’t going to be easy. Let one member of the gang evade capture and the whole process could be undone if the one who remained at large struck back by creating a causal loop that would leave Ben-Eytan and his team hung up in some limbo of unreality. Time was a river, and rivers are, by definition, fluid things, ever changeable by those who know how to change their courses.

  Nakamura, the designated first jumper, made his jump to Gondwanaland in early afternoon, and returned to Prague, of course, almost instantly so far as those who had remained behind in the hotel were aware. But the Nakamura who had taken off was cool and crisp and poised in the usual Nakamura mode, and the one who made the return jump was sweaty and rumpled and unusually flustered-looking, and there was a bloody gouge down in the glossy skin of his left cheek. And he had a prisoner with him, a big man with an odd greenish cast to his skin. There was something nonspecifically but undeniably futuristic about the heavy features and prominent cheek-bones of his angular face that told Everard that this was no one of his own era, that some ten millennia of post-twentieth-century evolution had been at work on him. He was also unconscious and hog-tied.

  “Hard work,” Nakamura said. “They fight back.”

  Ben-Eytan nodded. “I bet they do. Nasty-looking character, too. Lora, make sure you get the jump on yours. Don’t try to be polite. Capito?”

  “Si,” Spallanzani said coolly, and made ready to depart.

  Ben-Eytan said to Nakamura, “When you’ve had a moment to catch your breath, Hideko, take this character to Patrol Command. They’ll find some appropriately unpleasant detention dimension to store him in.” And, to Spallanzani: “Buon viaggio, Lora.”

  She vanished and returned almost at once. She had a prisoner with her too, limp, sedated, ugly-looking. She seemed altogether unchanged from the woman who had set forth a Prague moment before, but there was something in her eyes that indicated to Everard that the task had involved some disagreeable maneuvers, very disagreeable indeed. But she offered no details.

  “That’s two,” said Ben-Eytan. “Off you go, Elio.”

  Ben-Eytan was next, after Gonzalez had gone and returned. Number three down, and number four. And then it was Everard’s turn.

  “You’re the key player, Manse,” Ben-Eytan told him, unhelpfully. “If your man gets away, he won’t have much trouble unhappening the capture of the first four, and we’re really cooked.”

  “Thank you,” said Everard. “I definitely needed to know that.”

  There were no ambiguities about the instructions Ben-Eytan had given him. He was to arrive at Alpha Point at four minutes to five on the afternoon of what they called December 25, Alpha Point time, and station himself in front of the capsule that was planted precisely two feet two inches above ground level on the wall just to the left of the doorway to the main administration building. First thing to do, destroy the capsule. Then the terrorist would show up at five on the dot, intending to be there just enough of a fraction of a second to do whatever it was that activated the capsule. Except that the capsule would have been destroyed and the very large figure of Manse Everard was going to be standing in his way.

  It was a ticklish business for a lot of reasons, not the least of them being that he was going to have to wait right by the doorway, and Founders were likely to be going past him during those long four minutes. There was always the chance that one of them would stop and frown and say, “Wait a minute, here, do I know you?” and interfere with the fix just long enough to let the terrorist jump in and do his trick. Everard was prepared to filibuster his way through any such unwanted interaction, if possible, but palming himself off as a legitimate Founder right to the face of an actual member of that exalted group might not be so simple.

  And then—blocking the detonation—capturing the terrorist—returning with him to headquarters in Prague—First things first. Everard scrambled into his hopper and took off for Alpha Point.

  Calmly, calmly, calmly, he told himself, as he headed for his post at the doorway of the base that an ordinary human being would think of as lying half a billion years in the past. To a Patrolman, of course, “the past” was a very wobbly concept indeed. All that matters, Everard knew, is that this is Alpha Point, the start of everything for the Time Patrol, and, unless you do your work properly, the finish of it, too. For the moment you are one of the Founders of the Patrol and you have every right to be here. The messy paradoxes involved in that can be erased later, if those on high deem it proper to do so.

  Doorway? Yes. Check.

  Capsule? Yes. Check. Check.

  Barely visible, it was, two feet two inches from the ground, a tiny purplish speck, containing the Lord only knew what diabolically lethal substance that some far-future biochemists would dream up. Everard folded his arms. Leaned back. He saw Lora Spallanzani appear—not the current Lora Spallanzani, who was busy two or three hours before this eradicating the second of the five capsules and c
apturing the second terrorist, but some earlier Spallanzani who had been here to map the location of the capsule he himself had come to destroy. One more paradox, yes. They did not look at each other.

  He heard the faint buzz of her scanner as she recorded the capsule’s position. Then she was gone.

  He lifted his right leg and folded it back, pressed the sole of his boot against the wall, scrubbed up and down, back and forth. Take that, poison capsule! He did it again, back and forth, up and down, scrub scrub scrub. It had vaguely occurred to him that he might thereby be liberating the poison and bringing his own life to its end, though Ben-Eytan did not seem to think that was going to happen. Not impossible, he said, but not very likely. So far as we know, Ben-Eytan insisted—that murderous speculative phrase yet again!—the capsules could only be detonated in sequence: they were not dangerous each by each. So far as we know. Trusting Ben-Eytan might well be foolish, but, even so, fatal or not, the capsule had to be destroyed, and he did it, and apparently there would not be any unpleasant consequences.

  And now—to await the blur, and try to be quick enough—

  There. But not a blur, this time. His own presence here, blocking access to the capsule, had altered the whole gig. Suddenly there was a figure standing in front of him, a man, a man of some future era considerably far beyond his own, similar to the other four, pale greenish skin, wide shoulders and attenuated body, immensely long tapering fingers, and a look of excruciating bewilderment on his face. Everard had his stunner at the ready, but even before he could squeeze off a bolt, he felt a savage jolt of something in his ribs, swayed, nearly lost consciousness. His stunner fell to the ground. Bewildered the terrorist might be by finding Everard in his way, but his reflexes seemed to be super-reflexes, and he had struck out at the obstacle in his path with superhuman swiftness. Nobody had warned him about that.

  Everard tottered. Gulped wildly for breath. Felt another jolt, another. The pain was as sharp and as hot as a sword-thrust would be. He had felt plenty of those, but never at such close range, virtually nose to nose. Fire and thunder roared through his brain.