Time Patrol

3

It was a peculiar feeling to read the headlines and know, more or less, what was coming next. It took the edge off, but added a sadness, for this was a tragic era. He could sympathize with Whitcomb’s desire to go back and change history.

Only, of course, one man was too limited. He could not change it for the better, except by some freak; most likely he would bungle everything. Go back and kill Hitler and the Japanese and Soviet leaders—maybe someone shrewder would take their place. Maybe atomic energy would lie fallow, and the glorious flowering of the Venusian Renaissance never happen. The devil we know…

He looked out of his window. Lights flamed against a hectic sky; the street crawled with automobiles and a hurrying, faceless crowd; he could not see the towers of Manhattan from here, but he knew they reared arrogant toward the clouds. And it was all one swirl on a river that swept from the peaceful prehuman landscape where he had been to the unimaginable Danellian future. How many billions and trillions of human creatures lived, laughed, wept, worked, hoped, and died in its currents!

Well… He sighed, stoked his pipe, and turned back. A long walk had not made him less restless; his mind and body were impatient for something to do. But it was late and… He went over to the bookshelf, picked out a volume more or less at random, and started to read. It was a collection of Victorian and Edwardian stories.

A passing reference struck him. Something about a tragedy at Addleton and the singular contents of an ancient British barrow. Nothing more. Hm. Time travel? He smiled to himself.

Still…

No, he thought. This is crazy.

It wouldn’t do any harm to check up, though. The incident was mentioned as occurring in the year 1894, in England. He could get out back files of the London Times. Nothing else to do… Probably that was why he was stuck with his dull newspaper assignment: so that his mind, grown nervous from boredom, would prowl into every conceivable corner.

He was on the steps of the public library as it opened.

The account was there, dated June 25, 1894, and several days following. Addleton was a village in Kent, distinguished chiefly by a Jacobean estate belonging to Lord Wyndham and a barrow of unknown age. The nobleman, an enthusiastic amateur archeologist, had been excavating it, together with one James Rotherhithe, an expert from the British Museum who happened to be a relative. Lord Wyndham had uncovered a rather meager burial chamber: a few artifacts nearly rusted and rotted away, bones of men and horses. There was also a chest in surprisingly good condition, containing ingots of an unknown metal presumed to be a lead or silver alloy. He fell deathly ill, with symptoms of a peculiarly lethal poisoning; Rotherhithe, who had barely looked into the casket, was not affected, and circumstantial evidence suggested that he had slipped the nobleman a dose of some obscure Asiatic concoction. Scotland Yard arrested the man when Lord Wyndham died, on the twenty-fifth. Rotherhithe’s family engaged the services of a well-known private detective, who was able to show, by most ingenious reasoning, followed by tests on animals, that the accused was innocent and that a “deadly emanation” from the chest was responsible. Box and contents had been thrown into the English Channel. Congratulations all around. Fadeout to happy ending.

Everard sat quietly in the long, hushed room. The story didn’t tell enough. But it was highly suggestive, to say the least.

Then why hadn’t the Victorian office of the Patrol investigated? Or had they? Probably. They wouldn’t advertise their results, of course.

Still, he’d better send a memorandum.

Returning to his apartment, he took one of the little message shuttles given him, laid a report in it, and set the control studs for the London office, June 25, 1894. When he pushed the final button the box vanished with a small whoosh of air rushing in where it had been.

It returned in a few minutes. Everard opened it and took out a sheet of foolscap covered with neat typing—yes, the typewriter had been invented by then, of course. He scanned it with the swiftness he had learned.

There followed a note of the spatio-temporal coordinates, incongruous under all that floridness.

Everard called up Gordon, got an okay, and arranged to pick up a time hopper at the “company’s” warehouse. Then he shot a note to Charlie Whitcomb in 1947, got a one-word reply—“Surely”—and went off to get his machine.

It was reminiscent of a motorcycle without wheels or handlebars. There were two saddles and an antigravity propulsion unit. Everard set the dials for Whitcomb’s era, touched the main button, and found himself in another warehouse.

London, 1947. He sat for a moment, reflecting that at this instant he himself, seven years younger, was attending college back in the States. Then Whitcomb shouldered past the watchman and took his hand. “Good to see you again, old chap,” he said. His haggard face lit up in the curiously charming smile which Everard had come to know. “And so Victoria, eh?”

“Reckon so. Jump on.” Everard reset. This time he would emerge in an office. A very private inner office.

It blinked into existence around him. There was an unexpectedly heavy effect to the oak furniture, the thick carpet, the flaring gas mantles. Electric lights were available, but Dalhousie Roberts was a solid, conservative import house. Mainwethering himself got out of a chair and came to greet them: a large and pompous man with bushy side whiskers and a monocle. But he had also an air of strength, and an Oxford accent so cultivated that Everard could hardly understand it.

“Good evening, gentlemen. Pleasant journey, I trust? Oh, yes… sorry… you gentlemen are new to the business, eh, what? Always a bit disconcerting at first. I remember how shocked I was on a visit to the twenty-first century. Not British at all… Only a res naturae, though, only another facet of an always surprising universe, eh? You must excuse my lack of hospitality, but we really are frightfully busy. Fanatic German up in 1917 learned the time-travel secret from an unwary anthropologist, stole a machine, has come to London to assassinate Her Majesty. We’re having the devil’s own time finding him.”

“Will you?” asked Whitcomb.

“Oh, yes. But deuced hard work, gentlemen, especially when we must operate secretly. I’d like to engage a private inquiry agent, but the only worthwhile one is entirely too clever. He operates on the principle that when one has eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. And time trafficking may not be too improbable for him.”

“I’ll bet he’s the same man who’s working on the Addleton case, or will be tomorrow,” said Everard. “That isn’t important; we know he’ll prove Rotherhithe’s innocence. What matters is the strong probability that there’s been hanky-panky going on back in ancient British times.”

“Saxon, you mean,” corrected Whitcomb, who had checked on the data himself. “Good many people confuse British and Saxons.”

“Almost as many as confuse Saxons and Jutes,” said Mainwethering blandly. “Kent was invaded from Jutland, I understand… Ah. Hm. Clothes here, gentlemen. And funds. And papers, all prepared for you. I sometimes think you field agents don’t appreciate how much work we have to do in the offices for even the smallest operation. Haw! Pardon. Have you a plan of campaign?”

“Yes.” Everard began stripping off his twentieth-century garments. “I think so. We both know enough about the Victorian era to get by. I’ll have to remain American, though… yes, I see you put that in my papers.”

Mainwethering looked mournful. “If the barrow incident has gotten into a famous piece of literature as you say, we will be getting a hundred memoranda about it. Yours happened to come first. Two others have arrived since, from 1923 and 1960. Dear me, how I wish I were allowed a robot secretary!”

Everard struggled with the awkward suit. It fitted him well enough, his measurements were on file in this office, but he hadn’t appreciated the relative comfort of his own fashions before. Damn that waistcoat! “Look here,” he said, “this business may be quite harmless. In fact, since we’re here now, it must have been harmless. Eh?”

“As of now,” said Mainwethering. “But consider. You two gentlemen go back to Jutish times and find the marauder. But you fail. Perhaps he shoots you before you can shoot him; perhaps he waylays those we send after you. Then he goes on to establish an industrial revolution or whatever he’s after. History changes. You, being back there before the change-point, still exist… if only as cadavers… but we up here have never been. This conversation never took place. As Horace puts it—”

“Never mind!” laughed Whitcomb. “We’ll investigate the barrow first, in this year, then pop back here and decide what’s next.” He bent over and began transferring equipment from a twentieth-century suitcase to a Gladstonian monstrosity of flowered cloth. A couple of guns, some physical and chemical apparatus which his own age had not invented, a tiny radio with which to call up the office in case of trouble.

Mainwethering consulted his Bradshaw. “You can get the 8:23 out of Charing Cross tomorrow morning,” he said. “Allow half an hour to get from here to the station.”

“Okay.” Everard and Whitcomb remounted their hopper and vanished. Mainwethering sighed, yawned, left instructions with his clerk, and went home. At 7:45 a.m. the clerk was there when the hopper materialized.