The Year of the Ransom

23 May 1987

She came in from the hallway wearing a bathrobe over her pajamas. Its snugness brought forth a lithe figure, its blueness the hue of her eyes. Sunlight through the west window made gold of her hair.

She blinked. “Oh, my. Afternoon,” she murmured. “How long have I slept?”

Everard had risen from the sofa where he’d sat with one of her books. “About fourteen hours, I guess,” he said. “You needed it. Welcome back.”

She stared around. There was no timecycle, nor any bloodstains. “After my partner tucked you in bed, she and I fetched supplies and cleaned up the mess as best we could,” Everard explained. “She took off. No point in cluttering your place. A guard was necessary, of course, as a precaution. Better check around at your convenience and make sure everything is in order. Wouldn’t do for your earlier self to return and find traces of the ruckus. You didn’t, after all.”

Wanda sighed. “No, never a hint.”

“We’ve got to prevent paradoxes like that. The situation is tangled enough as is.” And dangerous, Everard thought. More than deadly dangerous. I should hearten her. “Hey, I’ll bet you’re starved.”

He liked the way she laughed. “Could eat the proverbial horse with a side of French fries, and apple pie for dessert.”

“Well, I took the liberty of laying in some groceries, and could use lunch myself, if you don’t mind my joining you.”

“Mind? Try not to!”

In the kitchen he urged that she be seated while he put the meal together. “I’m a pretty competent man with a steak and a salad. You’ve been through the meat grinder. Most people would be in a daze.”

“Thanks.” She accepted. For a minute, only the sounds of him at work broke the silence. Then, her look steady upon him, she said, “You belong to the Time Guard, don’t you?”

“Huh?” He glanced about. “Yes. In English, it’s usually the Time Patrol.” He paused. “Outsiders aren’t supposed to know that time travel goes on. We can’t tell them unless authorized, and that’s just when circumstances warrant. Clearly they do in this case; you’ve crashed into the fact. And I have authority to make the decision. I’ll level with you, Miss Tamberly.”

“Great. How did you find me? When I got your answering machine, I was in despair.”

“You’re new to the concept. Think. After I’d played your message, what’d you expect me to do but mount an expedition? We hovered outside the window, saw that man threatening you, hopped inside. Unfortunately, I was too crowded to get a shot at him before he vamoosed.”

“Why didn’t you jump back in time?”

“And save you some unpleasant hours? Sorry. I’ll tell you later about the hazards of changing the past.”

She frowned. “I know a bit already.”

“Hm, I suppose you do. Look, we needn’t discuss this till you feel recovered. Take a couple of days and get over the shock.”

She lifted her head pridefully. “Thanks, but no need. I’m unhurt, hungry, and eaten alive by curiosity. Concern, too. My uncle—No, really, please, I’d much rather not wait.”

“Wow, you’re a tough cookie. Okay. Let’s start by you telling me your experiences. Take it slow. I’ll interrupt you a lot with questions. The Patrol needs to know everything. Needs it more than you’re aware.”

“And the world is?” She shivered, swallowed, clenched fingers on the tabletop edge, launched into her story. They were halfway through their meal before he had exhausted it of detail.

Starkly, he said, “Yes, this is very bad. Be a lot worse if you hadn’t proved so courageous and resourceful, Miss Tamberly.”

She flushed. “Please, I’m Wanda.”

He forced a smile. “All right, I’m Manse. Spent my boyhood in Middle America of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. The manners they installed have stuck. But if you prefer first names, that’s fine by me.”

She gave him a long look. “Yes, you would stay a polite country boy, wouldn’t you? Roving through history, you’d miss out on the social changes in your homeland.”

Intelligent, he thought. And beautiful, in a strong-boned fashion.

Anxiety touched her. “What about my uncle?”

He winced. “I’m sorry. The Don told you nothing more than that he left Steve Tamberly on the same continent but in the far past. No location, no date.”

“You have-time to search for him.”

He shook his head. “I wish we did, but we don’t. We could use up thousands of man-years. And we haven’t got them. The Patrol’s stretched too thin. We’re barely enough to carry out our normal missions and try to cope with emergencies like this. Only so many man-years available, you see, because sooner or later every agent is bound to die or be disabled. Here events have gotten out of hand. We’ll need every resource we can spare to set matters right—if we can.”

“Might Luis go back for him?”

“Maybe. I suspect not. He’ll have more important things in mind. Hide out till his injury heals, and then—” Everard stared past her. “A hard, smart, unmerciful, reckless man, loose on a machine. He could appear anywhere, any when. The harm he can do is unlimited.”

“Uncle Steve—”

“He might be able to help himself. I’m not sure how, but he may hit on a plan, if he survives. He’s bright and strong. I see now why you’ve been his favorite relative.”

She dabbed at a tear. “Damn it, I will not bawl! Maybe later—maybe later we’ll find a clue. Meanwhile, m-my steak’s getting cold.” She attacked it as if it were an enemy.

He resumed his own eating. In an odd way, the silence between them changed from strained to companionable. After a while she asked quietly, “How about telling me the whole truth?”

“An outline of it,” he agreed. “That alone will take a couple of hours.”

—In the end she sat wide-eyed on the sofa while he paced before her, to and fro. His fist hammered his palm. “A Ragnarok situation,” he said. “But not hopeless. Wanda, whatever has become or will become of Stephen Tamberly, he did not live in vain. Through Castelar, he passed two names on to you, ‘Exaltationists’ and ‘Machu Picchu.’ Not that I imagine Castelar would have done it if you hadn’t had the wits—under those conditions, at that—to lead him on, get him to tell what he knew.”

“That was very little,” she demurred.

“A bomb can be small too, till it explodes. Look, the Exaltationists—I’ll tell you more in due course, but briefly, they’re a gang of desperados from the rather far future. Outlaws in their milieu; snatched several vehicles and escaped into space-time tracklessness. We’ve had to cope with results of their doings before now—‘before now’ in terms of my life, that is—but they’ve always avoided capture. Well, you’ve told me they were in Machu Picchu. We know the natives didn’t abandon that city entirely till the last resistance to the Spaniards was crushed. So from the descriptions you got out of Castelar, the date the Exaltationists were there must be soon after. That’s a sufficient lead for our scouts to locate the scene exactly.

“An agent of ours had ‘already’ reported outsiders active in the court of the Inca, some years before Pizarro arrived. It seems they tried and failed to head off an apportionment of power that led to civil war and paved the way for that corporal’s guard of invaders. In the light of what you’ve told me, I’m sure they were the Exaltationists, attempting to change history. When it didn’t work, they decided they’d at least hijack Atahualpa’s ransom. That’d be disruptive enough, and could well enable them to do still more mischief.”

“Why?” she whispered.

“Why, to abort the whole future. Make themselves overlords, first in America, eventually throughout the world. There’d never have been a you or a me, a United States, a Danellian destiny, a Time Patrol . . . unless they organized one of their own to protect the misshapen history they brought into being. Not that I think they could long have stayed in charge. Selfishness like that generally turns on itself. Battles through time, a chaos of changes—I wonder how much flux the space-time fabric could survive.”

She whitened, then whistled. “Ye gods, Manse!”

He stopped his prowling, leaned over, touched her below the chin to bring her face upward toward his, and asked with a crooked smile. “How does it feel knowing you may have saved the universe?”