Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson Read online

  So that shrinkage didn’t happen. This city has something like two and a quarter, two and a half million people; and it’s growing fast at the edges, flourishing, new factories and apartment buildings and suburbs. And there are five or six big dirigbles within detector range and that huge airport-hanger thingie there with a tramcar line running out to it. That’s more airships than were ever in operation at the same time. Count Zeppelin would be over the moon. Something . . . I’d say something prevented the First World War. Either that or the Central Powers won it, and fast.

  She remembered a picture she’d seen once, of a mule belly-deep in the mud of the Western Front, its eyes full of the same weary terror and despair as the man who tried to haul it forward. A rotting body lay not far away in a shell-hole, and the cratered, corpse-saturated mud stretched away on every side, broken only by the occasional skeleton of a tree. And another picture, of a noisy crowd in Munich celebrating the outbreak of war, with a blurred but unmistakable Adolf Hitler waving his straw boater and cheering.

  But that’s the history that produced my parents and sister and me, and Manse, and our daughter. And the Danellians and the Patrol and everyone I’ve ever known and loved or liked or even detested.

  She couldn’t just scan and find where Manse was, though there were instruments that could. This was a scooter like countless thousands that plied the timelanes, not a special-operations reconnaissance vehicle. She had nothing but the modest sensors on it and another sonic stunner in the compartment that held the emergency medical kit and field rations.

  But . . .

  Yes. If they store his gear in the same location he’s in . . . that’s a big if but the impulse of whoever got their hands on him would be to keep everything safe and secret . . .

  IV:

  Vienna

  Austro-Hungarian Empire

  June 3rd, 1926 AD

  “Come with us!”

  A voice speaking German, but with a melodic Magyar accent.

  The guards were sweating-nervous, and they clutched ugly bulky machine pistols with side-mounted drums. The muzzles in their perforated barrel-shrouds never wavered. Rumors about him must be circulating, but these were brave men and well-trained. More waited in the corridor outside, carefully not getting in each other’s line of fire. Those weapons could chew him into hamburger in seconds and there were a couple of rifles with fixed bayonets just in case.

  Manse Everard felt like groaning as he came to his feet. His neatly bandaged hand was still throbbing, but he could use it if he had to. They’d locked him in this cell that was like a room in a not-too-bad 20’s hotel, and he’d seen nobody but a doctor who ignored everything but his injury, and silent orderlies who brought in good if rather heavy meals.

  Now they went down corridors that were either unoccupied or cleared so that nobody would see him pass, and into an interrogation room that had the dingy beige ambience that bureaucracies seemed to prefer. Only one barred window showed, small and overlooking a paved courtyard; the lights were electric and harsh. One of them shone in his eyes as he approached the table where the officers sat, probably by no coincidence whatsoever.

  “We will keep two of the guards,” the man sitting in the center seat across the table said. “That is a dangerous man, if I’ve ever seen one. Agád, Lajos, guard.”

  He was about Manse’s age, in an Austrian colonel’s undress uniform; not quite the same as Manse knew from past missions in the early twentieth century, but still elaborate with braid and medals; all three of the officers had sword and pistol at their belts. Tall and slim, hazel eyes, a small brown mustache, sleek hair, an air of ironic detachment.

  “They might hear things they shouldn’t,” the one to his left said, with a Mecklenberger rasp to his German.

  Plain feldgrau Imperial German uniform with General Staff tabs, a captain by rank; massive pear-shaped head shaved bald above a bull neck, hands that could probably bend horseshoes, a monocle, an old saber-scar and one more recent that looked like the result of a shell-fragment. Those gorilla hands fondled a riding crop that had a steel core from the way it flexed.

  The Austrian shrugged. “They speak only Magyar, apart from the words of command,” he said. “As useful as mutes, in their way.”

  “We are wasting time,” the third man said, his German fluent but with a harsh choppy accent that said it wasn’t his native language. “This matter will be taken out of our hands soon. And probably lost for months if not years in quarrels over jurisdiction, and the incredulity of idiots who will try to fit this . . . extraordinary occurrence . . . into something they can understand. We have waited days as it is.”

  He was a square-faced blond with very cold light eyes, older than the other two and looking as much like a Balkan Slav as anything; the unadorned brown Ottoman uniform said Turkish, and a brimless Astrakhan hat was on the table before him. The face had a teasing familiarity.

  “Very acute, my dear Mustafa,” the Austrian said. “Das is ein Murks, aber gottseidank sind wir ja net in Berlin.”

  Which meant It’s a screwup, but we’re not in Berlin, thank God.

  From the way the Mecklenberger snorted he was thinking the same thing, in a fashion much less complementary to his hosts. His lips formed something like Schlamperei silently.

  The Austrian went on to Manse: “I can just see trying to explain this to the All-Highest . . . Do sit, Herr Everard. I understand you speak German?”

  “Yes, I do,” Manse said.

  Absolutely no percentage in backing down before this bunch, he thought. Central European heavies straight from Central Casting. But the genuine article off the Ruritanian Express, the thing all the books and movies were imitating or mocking.

  A slight eeriness gripped him as he looked at the hard, intelligent faces. If what he suspected . . . was virtually certain of . . . had happened, he was looking at men who had no right to be alive.

  The German would probably have died sometime in 1916, hammered into the mud of the Somme or vanished without trace in Falkenhayn’s corpse-factory around Verdun, where two whole nations had bled to death; the Austrian would have led his hussars into machine-gun fire trying to break the siege of Przemyśl or sweated and shivered to death with typhus in the mountains of Serbia; the Turk would have taken an Australian bayonet in the gut in the hills above Suba Bay or frozen rock-hard in the Caucasus snows or been bombed into bleeding fragments in the retreat from Meddigo.

  I’m talking to ghosts that haven’t died.

  “Why have you detained me in this lawless manner?” he went on, doing his best to register starchy indignation.

  The Austrian smiled. “Not only good German, but excellent Viennese!” he said, flicking a monogrammed lighter and extending a slim gold cigarette case to either side and then—surprisingly—to Everard. The Patrol agent took it; Turkish tobacco, and very high quality, soothing as he dragged the smoke in. Plus the Danellian-era longevity treatment made you immune to cancer, heart disease, and pretty well everything else.

  Then the Austrian gave a little tuck of the head that was the seated equivalent of a bow and heel-click before he blew a cloud of fragrant smoke:

  “Permit me; I am Colonel Freiherr—” Baron, roughly “—Rudolf von Starnberg of the Imperial and Royal Army. My colleagues are Hauptman Ritter Horst von Stumm of the German Reich, and Binbaşı Mustafa Kemal of the Ottoman Empire. All from the Intelligence sections of our respective services, of course, and here for the Three Emperors conference to keep watch for foreign agents, domestic anarchists, Serbs, and similar vermin.”

  “Why have I been detained?” Everard demanded again.

  I should have taken the hypno for standard German, he thought; complete fluency in the idiosyncratic local version looked suspicious now. But this was supposed to be a vacation, not a mission!

  “Sie brauchen mi echt net für an Trottel halten, Herr Everard,” Von Starnberg said, and held up a hand.

  “Please don’t insult my intelligence. Before we waste time with a
tiresome protestation of how you are an innocent tourist from . . . Wisconsin, is it called? Please examine these.”

  He slid a folder across the table with one finger. Manse opened it and sighed. The stills were a little blurred, taken from the reel of a movie camera, doubtless the one on the flatbed. They were clear enough to show him and Wanda: him using the stunner, Wanda leaning forward and her hand streaking towards the controls; the timecycle there and then not there.

  Girl, get back to the Academy soonest, he thought, in what he knew was probably a futile hope.

  That made his heart race until he used Patrol technique to calm it. Either a Patrol rescue team would arrive to break him out in a flourish of energy guns, able to be as blatant as they pleased since this wasn’t a history they had any desire to preserve . . . or he’d vanish when this world was cancelled.

  You’ve done that twice, he told himself. Uncounted billions of human beings wiped out as you restored the real history, which in a sense makes you a mass murderer on a scale even Hitler or Stalin or Stantel V couldn’t imagine. Perhaps there’s a certain ironic justice to it . . . but that future that needs restoring contains Wanda and Monica. So to hell with it.

  The Austrian went on, with a gesture towards a neat pile of Manse’s folded clothing and the contents of his pockets and wallet:

  “Plus, of course, there are your clothes and documents.”

  And my communicator in that watch, dammit. Aren’t Austrians supposed to be a bit sloppy? You certainly aren’t, Freiherr von Starnberg, even if you’re a dead ringer for Graf Bobby’s sidekick. You had me stripped right down to the skin and separated from everything I carried down to belly-button lint.

  As if to prove Everard’s judgment of his capacity, the baron went on: “None of them quite what they should be, even the American passport. Money in a denomination which doesn’t exist, printed with the name of the Austrian Republic . . . which, almighty Lord God be thanked, does not exist either. You were accompanied by a most attractive young lady showing enough leg that she would have been arrested in any city in Europe, except possibly Paris or Bucharest, who then disappeared into thin air on that remarkable vehicle. And the pièce de résistance, this.”

  He lifted a cloth and Manse’s stunner lay beneath it. The smooth, neutral-brown curved shape was splashed with lead from the bullet that had smashed it out of his hand, but still fully functional; you could drive a tank over it, and it would still look like a minimalist sketch of a pistol with a pointed projection cone where the muzzle should be.

  “Whatever this is, it knocks men or horses or dogs unconscious for a quarter hour at up to a hundred meters, and renders them helpless at twice that distance. It is uncannily accurate, soundless, has no recoil, weighs less than a pound and is made from something that cannot be scratched by diamonds or penetrated by X-rays. According to Privatdozent Herzfeld at the university here—”

  “Damned Jew,” the German muttered.

  “Yes, but a very, very clever Jew, Horst. They are often extremely useful that way. And he says this—” he prodded the stunner with a finger “—is an absurdity, but that if it did exist it would function by some impossible focusing of high-frequency sounds, probably. He was quite angry with us until he realized it wasn’t a joke, and even angrier when we took it away again before he could study it further. So, Herr Everard. You tell us . . . what are you, exactly? Where are you from? The world of the future, perhaps, in the manner of the Englishman Wells?”

  A jolt of alarm; the Austrian wasn’t joking, and he thought the Turk at least was taking the possibility seriously as well. He wouldn’t have bet against the German either, but the man seemed to have only one expression, a snarl.

  “Or Mars? No, not Mars, I have checked and current thought is that Mars is uninhabitable.”

  The German grinned unpleasantly. “Wherever he’s from, he arrived in a manner he didn’t anticipate. Or he wouldn’t be here now. Something went wrong for him.”

  Manse looked him in the eye. “I am someone who can turn a minor nation into a Great Power,” he said . . . in Turkish.

  Existence focused down to a needlepoint. The pale blue eyes of the taciturn Ottoman flared, the pupils opening until they almost swallowed the iris; the other two gave sudden sharp glances at him and at Manse.

  Scar-face there didn’t get any of that. I don’t think von Starnberg understood it either, or not all of it. And Mustafa got it perfectly and is thinking hard. This can’t be a happy alliance.

  “German, Herr Everard,” the Austrian said. “Or English, or French. What was that . . . something about power?”

  “The American said that his country was also a Great Power,” Mustafa said in a neutral tone.

  “If he is an American,” the German growled. “When I was in German South-West Africa and Tanganyika and Tsingtao, I learned how to make lying pigdogs eager to speak the truth.”

  “Horst, Horst, perhaps you should go to America, to Hollywood.”

  “What?” the German said, puzzled.

  “To act in their movies, playing the stereotypical Prussian Brute,” the Austrian said, and waved a placating hand when the man sputtered. “Please. To business. Herr Everard?”

  “I’m an engineer,” Manse said calmly.

  It was even true; at least, he’d been in the Army Engineers in the Second World War, and an engineering consultant after it . . . until he answered a very odd help wanted ad.

  “The pistol and dimensional motorcycle are inventions of mine,” he said calmly. “As Captain von Stumm noted, the motorcycle malfunctioned.”

  He didn’t really expect to be believed. Just having a story gave him somewhere to start, though. The questions hammered at him after that; he was drenched in sweat by the time they finished, not from inventing plausible lies but simply from making the ones he used consistent. Several times he thought the German was going to come around the table and use the riding crop on him, or his fists.

  And the good Baron von Starnberg is just as ruthless, under that veneer of Viennese good-humor, Manse thought, as the guards shoved him out at the point of their machine-pistols and marched him back to his cell. This time two of them came in and stood watching him, weapons ready. After a few hours they were replaced by Germans, though those stuck to the corridor outside, evidently on the theory that if any were in the room he could somehow jump them and get their guns. Time ticked by . . .

  But I’ve got to get out of here. The Turk understood me. The question is, can he do anything about it?

  V:

  Vienna/Colorado/Munich/Vienna

  He’s there. Or at least the sonic stunner and the communicator in his watch are, Wanda thought.

  She dialed the magnifying optic and it automatically stepped up the light. A medium-sized flat-roofed building currently being used as offices, with guards outside the entrances—military, not police, and in three different types of uniforms. The scanner couldn’t get a precise fix on the instruments, not at this range, and any lower and the timecycle could be seen from the ground. She’d had to dodge a couple of biplanes already.

  Time to take a closer look, on foot.

  The problem with that was her clothes; she couldn’t pass for a local, or anything acceptable, dressed as she was. A quick check had showed that nobody here was showing more than an inch of ankle, not even the hookers. What they were wearing during the daytime looked like a jacket or tunic, a long narrow tubular skirt, feathered hats and broad cloth belts slung at hip-height, with various accoutrements. Her shoes would definitely pass, but nothing else she was wearing—and her short hair was going to be conspicuous too. Evidently girls wore theirs long and down or braided, and women had it long and done up with pins and combs under the floppy-brimmed hats. She didn’t know whether that was because things had changed differently here, or because older fashions hadn’t changed as quickly as in her Jazz Age.

  Wanda sighed; there was nothing she could do about the hair but wait six months of time she didn’t have. The
re was a way to solve the clothes problem, but she didn’t like it. Her money was worthless here, but her stunner worked perfectly. Still . . .

  You’re going to wipe out this entire world, she told herself. Be realistic! A painless mugging is no huhu.

  A spin of the magnifying optical screen, and she picked a woman walking through the dusk down a fairly narrow street. Clothes not too shabby and not too new, height and build about like hers; that took a while, because she was a full three inches taller than the female average around here-and-now. Then an instant transition to an alley, and she was waiting.

  “Tut mir sehr leid, meine Liebe, ich brauch’ das jetzt dringender als du,” she called.

  “What?” the woman said, turning, her eyes going wide at the strange dress.

  Then she gave a little shriek at the sight of the stunner, so like a gun at first glance.

  My need is greater than thine, lady, Wanda thought, and pressed the stun.

  A quick bound and she caught the slumping figure of the young woman before she struck the ground, and a grunt of effort as she pulled her back into the alley and slung her across the rear seat of the timecycle. A touch of the controls, and they were in a meadow in the Rockies, in a stretch of summer high noon ten thousand years ago. A quick jump had shown the meadow wouldn’t be bothered by sabertooths, paleo-Indians, or grizzlies in the next few hours.

  Getting the clothes off a totally limp body was more difficult that she’d expected; dressing a totally limp body in her own outfit was even more of a struggle. When she had the new clothes on she walked around to accustom herself, and cursed the way the narrow skirt wrapped around her legs; if she had to run, she’d need to rip it off. A sudden thought struck her.