Andre Norton - [Time Traders (Ross Murdock) 07]

by Atlantis Endgame (epub)

  "No one knows," Milliard said, pointing to a sheaf of printouts. "We've pulled up as much research as we can, and most of it is speculation."

  Eveleen looked around. Anomalies—events that could have been caused by outside agency—existed all through the human past, of course. She and the other Time Agents had certainly experienced enough outside interference from the hairless, humanoid aliens they called Baldies to make every incident that did not have clear cause and effect appear suspicious.

  Ross frowned. "What we might be looking at here is some kind of dirty work, then? Someone deliberately setting back the development of our civilization a couple thousand years?"

  Ashe pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets. "It is one hypothesis, isn't it? Marilyn and her team have been up all night running sims on this, and correlating it with what we know. The most accepted hypothesis in my field posits that if the Minoans had survived, we might have had our industrial revolution at least a thousand years ago—if not more. We might be immortal by now. Colonies on other planets. But, though theories are neat, as is usual when dealing with human psychology, it might not be that simple."

  Kelgarries said, "There's apparently even a computer analog in Athens, made some two thousand years ago." And he looked over at the gray-haired woman. "Mrs.Edel? What was that you were telling me about earlier?"

  The woman spoke for the first time. "It's called the Antikythera mechanism. It was pulled off a shipwreck. Layers of interlocking gears, with readouts to calculate and display astronomical positions." As she spoke her eyes widened with just that sort of wonder that sometimes characterized Gordon Ashe when he talked about the mysteries of the past. The eternal curiosity of the scholar, Eveleen thought.

  And Milliard said, "Mrs. Edel is our authority on the time and culture."

  The woman gave them a tentative smile. Eveleen met her dark gaze, with its expression of inquiry, and smiled back.

  Ross also gave the woman a nod and smile, but it was a distracted smile. He was back tapping his pencil again, his scarred fingers tense. "A computer, eh? So, what, we're going back to see if the Baldies dropped a couple of their equivalent of nuclear bombs down the shaft of that volcano?" He sat back and sighed. "But if they caused the volcano to blow, then it doesn't really matter if it was them or Mother Nature, does it? It already happened. That means if we were there we lost the battle, and it happened. If we'd been successful—if we were to be successful in stopping 'em—then we might destroy ourselves up at this end of time."

  "Yes, and no," Ashe said, leaning forward. "As usual, it's not that simple; it's not clear that the Baldies touched off the volcanic explosion by some arcane means." He turned to the computer expert. "Marilyn?"

  "There is another hypothesis that projects an unexpected version of what our modern times might have been like if the Minoans had lived," she said, tapping at her computer console.

  The light under Ashe's display blinked out, and the power shifted.

  Once again the screen came to life, this time with a picture of the Mediterranean world. "This hypothesis, less popular, begins with the obvious statement that our present-day civilization is a direct result of that disaster."

  Eveleen frowned, staring at the map.

  "The key word, now, is peaceful," Marilyn went on. "The Minoans were peaceful and stable. If they had continued to build their remarkable ships and carry goods and ideas around the world, there is a chance we would have developed along more peaceful lines. Most of our technological development has been a side effect of inventions for warfare. Or defense.

  This second model gives us this picture—" The image shifted. "Had the Minoans continued to influence our development, Earth's population would have grown slowly, engaged more in trade than warfare, giving us—today—a largely pastoral civilization of maybe half a billion people."

  The images showed humans in small towns amid great forests and swathes of undisturbed land.

  "Our state of technological advance might be the equivalent of the early steam age."

  Kelgarries said, "Which would leave Earth open for invasion."

  Eveleen sat back in surprise. "So what you're saying is that the Baldies—if they were there at all—might have gone back, or might go back, toprevent the volcano from going off?"

  "It's possible," Ashe said. "In which case none of us would exist."

  Eveleen shut her eyes, struggling—as she always did— with the idea of time and what the higher-math experts termed super-positions. After all I've been through, you'd think I could get used to thinking in the conditional, non-relativistic tenses, she thought wryly. And she noticed Ross rubbing his forehead; he was having just the same trouble.

  "The key thing to remember is that we seem to have gone back," Ashe said. He added with a faint, sardonic smile, "I say 'we' even though all we have is Eveleen's earring. But I know Ross won't be kept from going on this mission—"

  "Damn straight."

  "And I confess I would pull any strings I had to pull to be there as well."

  Ross flipped his pencil into the air. "All right, so what we're looking at is a trip to the past. See if we find any Baldies. If we don't, we come back. If we do, then what?"

  "Circumvent them, of course," Eveleen said.

  Ashe nodded at her. "If they did tamper with Thera's volcano, we have to find out what they intend. We might also be the ones who caused the evacuation—"

  "Oh, yes," Eveleen exclaimed. "I was just thinking of that. Those people have no other way of knowing, do they? So do you think we are the ones who got them safely away?"

  "We won't know anything until we get there," Ashe said. "And well begin training at once; we will have to assume that time is pressing."

  "Why?" Linnea Edel asked, leaning forward. "If we can truly travel back to any time—a concept I still have trouble grasping, even with the evidence before my eyes—why can't we just take a few months—years, even—to prepare and go back at our leisure?"

  Gordon Ashe indicated the three earrings. "To put it simply, the anomaly of this earring being here twice might be something the Baldies can vector in on. We don't want to find out if your discovering that earring, and our bringing it here to its original self, has triggered some kind of detector; the sooner we go back to 1628b.c. the better."

  "So who is going?" Ross asked, hands on his knees.

  Kelgarries said, "You, and our top two Greek Time Agents. Stavros Lemkis is down in the labs experimenting with some of the technology you brought back from your previous mission." He nodded at Ross. "Konstantin Skrumbos, our maritime expert on that time, is flying back from the Aegean right now, so he can join the briefing sessions."

  Eveleen felt a surge of excitement. Few women agents went into human prehistory because so few cultures had permitted women to move about. But the Minoans had been different.

  Milliard got to his feet. "Jonathan?"

  A youngish man stepped forward. He looked tired. Eveleen felt a surge of compassion; had he been up for days and nights? But tiredness wouldn't explain that painful quirk to his underlids, the lines beside his mouth. This man was deeply unhappy.

  "As yet," Jonathan said, "no one has established what language the people of Kalliste spoke. Linear B has proved to be an Ancient Greek form, but those tablets date from a later time. The few written artifacts from our time are written in hieroglyphs we call Linear A, which have recently been recorded. They, too, proved to be a kind of proto-Greek, but we have very few words in that language—not enough for your communication needs."

  He paused to look around. "There are many archaeologists who still feel that the Kallistans first came over from Anatolia, that they are Hittites or Luvians, or even Amorites, bringing the bull worship with them, though it developed into a much more peaceful form. We've put together a core vocabulary that might enable you to understand some words, or at least to begin to form a vocabulary. You will pose as traders, say from Egypt, and we'll give you some Ancient Egyptian language training as well as some
Ancient Greek, since traders in that area did get all around the eastern Mediterranean."

  Milliard frowned. "The thing to keep in mind—never lose sight of—is the fact that in this situation, we know, or think we know, the year the volcano exploded, but we don't know the day. So we'll put you where we think you're safe, but you'll have to act fast. There's no time to be digging in and doing linguistic studies, no matter how tempting they might be." He cast a meaningful glance Ashe's way, but Eveleen wondered if the warning was actually for Mrs. Edel, who had been listening with intense focus.

  "Yes," Ross said, his wary expression back. "Fast. I like fast."

  "Marilyn can show you the sim on what happens when the volcano goes off, based on evidence from St. Pierre early in the twentieth century, and Krakatoa, and St. Helens. It's fairly grim," he said.

  No one spoke; Eveleen saw Linnea Edel looking down at tightly gripped hands.

  Kelgarries spoke up, looking tense and tired and very serious, "What we can be sure of is that nothing within a hundred miles of the blast—whatever day it occurred on—could have lived through it."

  CHAPTER 4

  THE AEGEAN SKY was mild as milk, a pale, hazy blue with gauzy brush strokes of high cirrus that reminded Ross of southern California. The cargo vessel now plowing its way through the choppy seas could have been heading for Catalina Island. Strange, how you expect the cradle of civilization to be exotic, to strike the senses with profound or dramatic impact. Not like familiar territory.

  "Look there. Just off to the northwest," Gordon Ashe said, coming down one of the steel ladders and pointing off the starboard bow.

  Ross turned his attention briefly seaward. Just past a smaller craft, equally nondescript, he saw bumps on the horizon. He heard clunking and clanging on the steel ladder from the bridge. Down came Eveleen and Linnea Edel, the latter with more care. All of them had field glasses. Ross pulled up his own pair and shaded the sun with one hand while he focused with the other.

  Thera, at this distance, even looked a little like Catalina. He envisioned yesterday's flyover: an island cluster looking like a half-submerged donut. The center, now a peaceful lagoon, with brilliant clear water and a couple of islands dotting it, was the sleeping caldera of the mighty volcano that had blasted fifty cubic miles of matter into the sky.

  Everyone studied it in silence as the cargo ship made its way in a slow circle all round the island cluster. Behind them, glimpsed earlier that morning, lay Crete, a long, thin blade of an island. Way off to the northwest, behind Thera, lay more of the Greek islands, and finally Greece itself. To the northeast lay what was once ancient Anatolia, Turkey now.

  Getting a basic familiarity with the island and its surroundings now would save them a lot of time when the beautiful little craft lying shrouded in the cargo vessel's hold was launched through the great time-gate two nights hence. They wouldn't, of course, limit themselves to seventeenth-century B.C.E. technology: the ship had a small, virtually silent engine concealed in its stern, but it was only for emergencies. And there'd certainly be no GPS satellites to lock onto, so they'd be navigating using techniques that differed very little from those of the mariners of that period. Best, as always, to go in with as much information as possible, even though there was no way of knowing just how much the surrounding sea and islands had been changed by the volcanic explosion.

  It was hard to imagine this peaceful, sunny scene vanishing under a fireball of steam and vaporized rock, then choking under a pall of volcanic ash as glowing volcanic rock fell like hellish hail. Ross shook his head. He knew the reality was the huge magma dome deep underneath the island, just welling up, shouldering aside the rock around it. ... Somehow going up against a volcano seemed tougher than facing aliens with laser weapons. You can't even pretend to negotiate with a volcano.

  He felt a nudge against his arm, and saw Eveleen at his shoulder, silently studying the biggest island. They were close enough to see striated rock, compressed levels of pumice and ash angling up, indicating tectonic activity no less powerful— only slower.

  "I don't care what that lady finds," Ross muttered, glancing over at Linnea Edel. "In and out."

  Eveleen grunted in agreement. "What bothers me is that they don't have dates for the Big Blow. It's educated guesswork, but still guesswork."

  "I don't mind being put in there a year in advance," Ross said. "I don't want to jet through the gate to find ourselves in the middle of the eruption."

  "No." Ashe appeared on Ross's other side, silent of step. "None of us does." He looked amused.

  Ross figured he'd complained enough, so he didn't respond. The truth was, he flat-out did not like this mission. There were too many variables. On the surface it looked easy: go in, see if the Baldies are around, and if they are, find out what they're up to. But in Ross's experience, the "easy ones" were the ones that always went screwy. Usually that just meant they had to use their wits, and maybe their fists. But how do you use either against a volcanic eruption?

  He said nothing, though, as the cargo ship angled round the western portion of the island and steamed north.

  When they had completed their circuit, the team descended aft to the wardroom, which had been made over into a command post. Maps had been pinned up against bulkheads, with labels in English and Cyrillic: the Russians in the other ship were due to come over for the last planning session, over dinner. Stavros and Konstantin were already there.

  Ross and Eveleen had just gotten fresh coffee and were sitting down when the ship gave a lurch and muffled clanks and metallic groans announced the skiff grappled alongside.

  A short time later three Russians ducked through the hatchway. Without a word the ship's steward handed out the dark Russian tea they all favored, in the little glass cups held in wire frames.

  The Russians, two men and a woman, sat down, and Ashe took over to run again through the familiar drill. Too familiar. Ross knew he should pay attention. This launch through the biggest time-gate ever made—stretched between two ships— was a first for both the Russians and Americans. There were too many firsts here, but none of them concerned Ross. Stavros and Konstantin, who would remain aboard their craft, would masquerade as Kallistan sailors. They were actually in charge of the time-gates. Ross couldn't do anything about that, so he scowled down at his coffee. The mission wasn't really real yet, in a sense. Wouldn't be until he and Eveleen went to their cabin for the last time, and pulled on those costumes waiting there.

  And she put on those earrings, one of which was lost for over three thousand years.

  ——————————

  EVELEEN STOOD WITH her feet apart, rolling unconsciously with the ship, as she stared down at the earrings in her hand. She had never been much of a philosophic type. Action was what she liked and understood. But you can't help picking up ideas as you go through life, and she remembered someone or other talking once about the single flap of a butterfly's wings causing a forest halfway around the world to fall a hundred years later.

  How can one ever know for certain which of our movements causes disaster? Well, she wasn't about to test that theory now. She knew that one of these earrings would, somehow, end up on that island. Where its mate would go— where she would go—was what she had to discover.

  But she wouldn't risk doing damage to history by leaving those earrings behind. Or leaving one behind, and tossing the other one onto a road in Akrotiri on their arrival.

  She sighed and put the earrings in her ears, then turned around to find Ross watching her. His gray eyes were wide, and wary, but he didn't say anything other than "Let's get it over with."

  Together they exited the cabin, leaving behind all their obvious twenty-first-century trappings: watches, rings, running shoes, machine-stitched synthetic fabrics. Their equipment had all been cleverly disguised.

  Eveleen wore a flouncy three-tiered skirt and a short jacket with embroidery along the outer arms and down the sides. Under it she wore a thin cotton garment. Ross wore a brightly colo
red kilt of mostly red and black cloth, his skin dyed a deep brown with a long-term sunscreen worked into the chemical makeup of the dye. His black hair, which he had been growing, had been crimped and permed into tight curls, which he held back from his face with a thin gold headband. Both of them wore sandals that tied up their calves.

  They met Ashe and Linnea Edel down in the hold. Eveleen was startled to see how different they both looked. Of course Ashe was good at taking on attributes of whatever culture he chose to adopt, and now he appeared to be a trader, his blue eyes hidden behind brown contact lenses.

  Linnea Edel, however, had loosened her curly hair, and dressed in the flowing garments of a Kallistan. She looked so like a Greek woman she could have stepped from one of the beautiful painted pots or wall frescoes.

  Their two Greek agents, Stavros and Konstantin, had donned the plain linen kilts and sandals of sailors of the time. Konstantin looked like a Greek pirate. Stavros, though superficially resembling Konstantin in his brown skin, dark eyes, and curling hair, was thinner, wirier, and he wore the indefinable air of the engineer.

  Both of them were waiting beside the beautifully crafted little boat that would be their trading vessel. Its simple lines concealed an amazing concentration of equipment, including, fastened along the bottom, a small undersea sled for scuba exploration.

  "Everyone in," Ashe said, waving his hand.

  They climbed in, Stavros and Konstantin going down into the hold where the electronics that would synchronize them with the time-gate were hidden.

  Linnea Edel looked around, ran her hands up her arms. With a pang of compassion, Eveleen saw that the skin along her arms was rough with goose bumps. She was frightened; that was easy enough to see.

  "I think I'll ride this one out below," Linnea said with a faint smile.

  Ashe nodded once, and the older woman vanished below as well, to seat herself among the carefully aged wooden barrels that would, if the mission were extraordinarily lucky, return full of volcanic test materials and various Theran goods—