Time Patrol

2

The Academy was in the American West. It was also in the Oligocene period, a warm age of forests and grasslands when man’s ratty ancestors scuttled away from the tread of giant mammals. It had been built a thousand years ago; it would be maintained for half a million—long enough to graduate as many as the Time Patrol would require—and then be carefully demolished so that no trace would remain. Later the glaciers would come, and there would be men, and in the year 19352 A.D. (the 7841st year of the Morennian Triumph), these men would find a way to travel through time and return to the Oligocene to establish the Academy.

It was a complex of long, low buildings, smooth curves and shifting colors, spreading over a greensward between enormous ancient trees. Beyond it, hills and woods rolled off to a great brown river, and at night you could sometimes hear the bellowing of titanotheres or the distant squall of a sabertooth.

Everard stepped out of the time shuttle—a big, featureless metal box—with a dryness in his throat. It felt like his first day in the Army, twelve years ago—or fifteen to twenty million years in the future, if you preferred—lonely and helpless, and wishing desperately for some honorable way to go home. It was a small comfort to see the other shuttles, discharging a total of fifty-odd young men and women. The recruits moved slowly together, forming an awkward clump. They didn’t speak at first, but stood staring at each other. Everard recognized a Hoover collar and a bowler; the styles of dress and hairdo moved up through 1954 and on. Where was she from, the girl with the iridescent, close-fitting culottes and the green lipstick and the fantastically waved yellow hair? No… when?

A man of about twenty-five happened to stand beside him: obviously British, from the threadbare tweeds and the long, thin face. He seemed to be hiding a truculent bitterness under his mannered exterior. “Hello,” said Everard. “Might as well get acquainted.” He gave his name and origin.

“Charles Whitcomb, London, 1947,” said the other shyly. “I was just demobbed—R.A.F.—and this looked like a good chance. Now I wonder.”

“It may be,” said Everard, thinking of the salary. Fifteen thousand a year to start with! How did they figure years, though? Must be in terms of one’s actual duration-sense.

A man strolled in their direction. He was a slender young fellow in a skin-tight gray uniform with a deep-blue cloak which seemed to twinkle, as if it had stars sewn in. His face was pleasant, smiling, and he spoke genially with a neutral accent: “Hello, there! Welcome to the Academy. I take it you all know English?” Everard noticed a man in the shabby remnants of a German uniform, and a Hindu, and others who were probably from several foreign countries.

“We’ll use English, then, till you’ve all learned Temporal.” The man lounged easily, hands on his hips. “My name is Dard Kelm. I was born in—let me see—9573 Christian reckoning, but I’ve made a specialty of your period. Which, by the way, extends from 1850 to 2000, though you’re all from some in-between years. I’m your official wailing wall, if something goes wrong.

“This place is run along different lines from what you’ve probably been expecting. We don’t turn out men en masse, so the elaborate discipline of a classroom or an army is not required. Each of you will have individual as well as general instruction. We don’t need to punish failure in studies, because the preliminary tests have guaranteed there won’t be any and made the chance of failure on the job small. Each of you has a high maturity rating in terms of your particular cultures. However, the variation in aptitudes means that if we’re to develop each individual to the fullest, there must be personal guidance.

“There’s little formality here beyond normal courtesy. You’ll have chances for recreation as well as study. We never expect more of you than you can give. I might add that the hunting and fishing are still pretty good even in this neighborhood, and if you fly just a few hundred miles they’re fantastic.

“Now, if there aren’t any questions, please follow me and I’ll get you settled.”

Dard Kelm demonstrated the gadgets in a typical room. They were the sort you would have expected by, say, 2000 A.D.: unobtrusive furniture readily adjusted to a perfect fit, refresher cabinets, screens which could draw on a huge library of recorded sight and sound for entertainment. Nothing too advanced, as yet. Each cadet had his own room in the “dormitory” building; meals were in a central refectory, but arrangements could be made for private parties. Everard felt the tension easing within him.

A welcoming banquet was held. The courses were familiar but the silent machines which rolled up to serve them were not. There was wine, beer, an ample supply of tobacco. Maybe something had been slipped into the food, for Everard felt as euphoric as the others. He ended up beating out boogie on a piano while half a dozen people made the air hideous with attempts at song.

Only Charles Whitcomb held back. Sipping a moody glass over in a corner by himself, Dard Kelm was tactful and did not try to force him into joining.

Everard decided he was going to like it. But the work and the organization and the purpose were still shadows.

“Time travel was discovered at a period when the Chorite Heresiarchy was breaking up,” said Kelm, in the lecture hall. “You’ll study the details later; for now, take my word that it was a turbulent age, when commercial and genetic rivalry was a tooth-and-claw matter between giant combines; anything went, and the various governments were pawns in a galactic game. The time effect was the by-product of a search for a means of instantaneous transportation, which some of you will realize requires infinitely discontinuous functions for its mathematical description… as does travel into the past. I won’t go into the theory of it—you’ll get some of that in the physics classes—but merely state that it involves the concept of infinite-valued relationships in a continuum of 4N dimensions, where N is the total number of particles in the universe.

“Naturally, the group which discovered this, the Nine, were aware of the possibilities. Not only commercial—trading, mining, and other enterprises you can readily imagine—but the chance of striking a death-blow at their enemies. You see, time is variable; the past can be changed—”

“Question!” It was the girl from 1972, Elizabeth Gray, who was a rising young physicist in her own period.

“Yes?” said Kelm politely.

“I think you’re describing a logically impossible situation. I’ll grant the possibility of time travel, seeing that we’re here, but an event cannot both have happened and not happened. That’s self-contradictory.”

“Only if you insist on a logic which is not Aleph-sub-Aleph-valued,” said Kelm. “What happens is like this: suppose I went back in time and prevented your father from meeting your mother. You would never have been born. That portion of universal history would read differently; it would always have been different, though I would retain memory of the ‘original’ state of affairs.”

“Well, how about doing the same to yourself?” asked Elizabeth. “Would you cease existing?”

“No, because I would belong to the section of history prior to my own intervention. Let’s apply it to you. If you went back to, I would guess, 1946, and worked to prevent your parents’ marriage in 1947, you would still have existed in that year; you would not go out of existence just because you had influenced events. The same would apply even if you had only been in 1946 one microsecond before shooting the man who would otherwise have become your father.”

“But then I’d exist without—without an origin!” she protested. “I’d have life, and memories, and… everything… though nothing had produced them.”

Kelm shrugged. “What of it? You insist that the causal law, or strictly speaking the conservation-of-energy law, involve only continuous functions. Actually, discontinuity is entirely possible.”

He laughed and leaned on the lectern. “Of course, there are impossibilities,” he said. “You could not be your own mother, for instance, because of sheer genetics. If you went back and married your former father, the children would be different, none of them you, because each would have only half your chromosomes.”

Clearing his throat: “Let’s not stray from the subject. You’ll learn the details in other classes. I’m only giving you a general background. To continue: the Nine saw the possibility of going back in time and preventing their enemies from ever having gotten started, even from ever being born. But then the Danellians appeared.”

For the first time, his casual, half-humorous air dropped, and he stood there as a man in the presence of the unknowable. He spoke quietly: “The Danellians are part of the future—our future, more than a million years ahead of me. Man has evolved into something… impossible to describe. You’ll probably never meet a Danellian. If you ever should, it will be… rather a shock. They aren’t malignant—nor benevolent—they are as far beyond anything we can know or feel as we are beyond those insectivores who are going to be our ancestors. It isn’t good to meet that sort of thing face to face.

“They were simply concerned with protecting their own existence. Time travel was old when they emerged, there had been uncountable opportunities for the foolish and the greedy and the mad to go back and turn history inside out. They did not wish to forbid the travel—it was part of the complex which had led to them—but they had to regulate it. The Nine were prevented from carrying out their schemes. And the Patrol was set up to police the time lanes.

“Your work will be mostly within your own eras, unless you graduate to unattached status. You will live, on the whole, ordinary lives, family and friends as usual; the secret part of those lives will have the satisfactions of good pay, protection, occasional vacations in some very interesting places, supremely worthwhile work. But you will always be on call. Sometimes you will help time travelers who have gotten into difficulties, one way or another. Sometimes you will work on missions, the apprehension of would-be political or military or economic conquistadors. Sometimes the Patrol will accept damage as done, and work instead to set up counteracting influences in later periods which will swing history back to the desired track.

“I wish all of you luck.”

The first part of instruction was physical and psychological. Everard had never realized how his own life had crippled him, in body and mind; he was only half the man he could be. It came hard, but in the end it was a joy to feel the utterly controlled power of muscles, the emotions which had grown deeper for being disciplined, the swiftness and precision of conscious thought.

Somewhere along the line he was thoroughly conditioned against revealing anything about the Patrol, even hinting at its existence, to any unauthorized person. It was simply impossible for him to do so, under any influence; as impossible as jumping to the moon. He also learned the ins and outs of his twentieth-century public persona.

Temporal, the artificial language with which Patrolmen from all ages could communicate without being understood by strangers, was a miracle of logically organized expressiveness.

He thought he knew something about combat, but he had to learn the tricks and the weapons of fifty thousand years, all the way from a Bronze Age rapier to a cyclic blast which could annihilate a continent. Returned to his own era, he would be given a limited arsenal, but he might be called into other periods and overt anachronism was rarely permissible.

There was the study of history, science, arts and philosophies, fine details of dialect and mannerism. These last were only for the 1850–1975 period; if he had occasion to go elsewhere he would pick up special instruction from a hypnotic conditioner. It was such machines that made it possible to complete his training in three months.

He learned the organization of the Patrol. Up “ahead” lay the mystery which was Danellian civilization, but there was little direct contact with it. The Patrol was set up in semimilitary fashion, with ranks, though without special formalities. History was divided into milieus, with a head office located in a major city for a selected twenty-year period (disguised by some ostensible activity such as commerce) and various branch offices. For his time, there were three milieus: the Western world, headquarters in London; Russia, in Moscow; Asia, in Peiping; each in the easygoing years 1890-1910, when concealment was less difficult than in later decades, when there were smaller offices such as Gordon’s. An ordinary attached agent lived as usual in his own time, often with an authentic job. Communication between years was by tiny robot shuttles or by courier, with automatic shunts to keep such messages from piling up at one instant.

The entire organization was so vast that he could not really appreciate the fact. He had entered something new and exciting, that was all he truly grasped with all layers of consciousness… as yet.

He found his instructors friendly, ready to gab. The grizzled veteran who taught him to handle spaceships had fought in the Martian war of 3890. “You boys catch on fairly quick,” he said. “It’s hell, though, teaching pre-industrial people. We’ve quit even trying to give them more than the rudiments. Had a Roman here once—Caesar’s time—fairly bright boy, too, but he never got it through his head that a machine can’t be treated like a horse. As for the Babylonians, time travel just wasn’t in their world-picture. We had to give them a battle-of-the-gods routine.”

“What routine are you giving us?” asked Whitcomb.

The spaceman regarded him narrowly. “The truth,” he said at last. “As much of it as you can take.”

“How did you get into this job?”

“Oh… I was shot up off Jupiter. Not much left of me. They picked me up, built me a new body—since none of my people were alive, and I was presumed dead, there didn’t seem much point in going back home. No fun living under the Guidance Corps. So I took this position here. Good company, easy living, and furloughs in a lot of eras.” The spaceman grinned. “Wait till you’ve been to the decadent stage of the Third Matriarchy! You don’t know what fun is.”

Everard said nothing. He was too captured by the spectacle of Earth, rolling enormous against the stars.

He made friends with his fellow cadets. They were a congenial bunch—naturally, with the same type being picked for Patrollers, bold and intelligent minds. There were a couple of romances. No Portrait of Jenny stuff; marriage was entirely possible, with the couple picking some year in which to set up housekeeping. He himself liked the girls, but kept his head.

Oddly, it was the silent and morose Whitcomb with whom he struck up the closest friendship. There was something appealing about the Englishman; he was so cultured, such a thoroughly good fellow, and still somehow lost.

They were out riding one day, on horses whose remote ancestors scampered before their gigantic descendants. Everard had a rifle, in the hope of bagging a shovel-tusker he had seen. Both wore Academy uniform, light grays which were cool and silky under the hot yellow sun.

“I wonder we’re allowed to hunt,” remarked the American. “Suppose I shoot a sabertooth—in Asia, I suppose—which was originally slated to eat one of those prehuman insectivores. Won’t that change the whole future?”

“No,” said Whitcomb. He had progressed faster in studying the theory of time travel. “You see, it’s rather as if the continuum were a mesh of tough rubber bands. It isn’t easy to distort it; the tendency is always for it to snap back to its, uh, ‘former’ shape. One individual insectivore doesn’t matter, it’s the total genetic pool of their species which led to man.

“Likewise, if I killed a sheep in the Middle Ages, I wouldn’t wipe out all its later descendants, maybe all the sheep there were by 1940. Rather, those would still be there, unchanged down to their very genes in spite of a different ancestry, because over so long a period of time all the sheep, or men, are descendants of all the earlier sheep or men. Compensation don’t you see; somewhere along the line, some other ancestor supplies the genes you thought you had eliminated.

“In the same way… oh, suppose I went back and prevented Booth from killing Lincoln. Unless I took very elaborate precautions, it would probably happen that someone else did the shooting and Booth got blamed anyway.

“That resilience of time is the reason travel is permitted at all. If you want to change things, you have to go about it just right and work very hard, usually.”

His mouth twisted. “Indoctrination! We’re told again and again that if we interfere, there’s going to be punishment for us. I’m not allowed to go back and shoot that ruddy bastard Hitler in his cradle. I’m supposed to let him grow up as he did, and start the war, and kill my girl.”

Everard rode quietly for a while. The only noise was the squeak of saddle leather and the rustle of long grass. “Oh,” he said at last. “I’m sorry. Want to talk about it?”

“Yes. I do. But there isn’t much. She was in the W.A.A.F.—Mary Nelson—we were going to get married after the war. She was in London in ’44. November seventeenth, I’ll never forget that date. The V-bombs got her. She’d gone over to a neighbor’s house in Streatham—was on furlough you see, staying with her mother. That house was blown up; her own home wasn’t scratched.”

Whitcomb’s cheeks were bloodless. He stared emptily before him. “It’s going to be jolly hard not to… not to go back, just a few years, and see her at the very least. Only see her again… No! I don’t dare.”

Everard laid a hand on the man’s shoulder, awkwardly, and they rode on in silence.

The class moved ahead, each at his own pace, but there was enough compensation so that all graduated together: a brief ceremony followed by a huge party and many maudlin arrangements for later reunions. Then each went back to the same year he had come from: the same hour.

Everard accepted Gordon’s congratulations, got a list of contemporary agents (several of them holding jobs in places like military intelligence), and returned to his apartment. Later he might find work arranged for him in some sensitive listening post, but his present assignment—for income-tax purposes, “special consultant to Engineering Studies Co.”—was only to read a dozen papers a day for the indications of time travel he had been taught to spot, and hold himself ready for a call. As it happened, he made his own first job.