Times Without Number

by John Brunner

  "You have an excessively cynical attitude towards Europeans," Don Miguel objected mildly.

  "I contest that. Reverting for a moment to the role you've enforced on me, and thinking in Mohawk terms: was it not a cynical action to single out one small tribe among so many and equip it to embark on a grand crusade clear to the Pacific? That's how we learned to be cynical, if there's any truth in your charge! Not that I'm admitting the term is justified. It's more that being allied with the Empire is like being brother to a hot-headed adventurer. Any day a feud in which he's embroiled himself may explode in the face of his family without their knowledge or desire."

  Thinking of the currently strained relations between the Empire and its coeval super-power the Confederacy of the East -- and, still more alarming, of the recent rumours that westernised scientists in Cathay were on the track of time apparatus of their own, which might lead to who could guess what consequences in view of the widespread Oriental belief that the material world was maya , illusory! -- Don MigueI was compelled to give a nod of acquiescence.

  "It is mainly because of that," Two Dogs added after a pause, "that I'm infringing our code of good manners. It's disquieting to learn that a supposedly innocent tourist, here to rest and relax in the California sunlight, ts actually a time-traveller. Particularly in view of . . ."

  "What?" Don Miguel, alerted by he could not say what reaction of his subconscious, made the word crackle like a firearrow.

  For a long moment Two Dogs seemed to be struggling towards a decision. Suddenly he drained his wine-glass and slammed it down hard on the table.

  "I'll show you! Because -- though it shames me to admit it to a foreigner -- what I'm talking about is too much for one man to endure knowledge of by himself!"

  Without further explanation he jumped to his feet and strode down the hillside shouting at the top of his lungs for Tomás, his dour chief overseer. Some of the labourers on the far side of the valley heard, paused in their work and looked to see what madness had come upon their master. More slowly, Don Miguel followed him, screwing up his eyes with the shock of the strong sunlight. By the time he caught up with Two Dogs he had located Tomás and was giving him orders in the incomprehensible local Indian language. He ventured to ask what the sudden fuss was all about, but the only answer he got was, "Wait and see!"

  Much puzzled, indeed greatly disturbed, Don Miguel was forced to contain himself while Tomás went in search of two burros with saddles fit for gentlefolk. The sketchy outline of a pattern was forming in his mind, and the ingredients that made it up were alarming. Clearly it had been his admission that he was a member of the Society of Time which triggered the Mohawk's outburst -- but what possible connection could there be between the arrival of a Licentiate of the Society in this back-of-beyond community, and the sudden transformation of a mine manager into a man apparently struck into a frenzy of panic?

  After a wait of only a few minutes -- which felt to Don Miguel like a miniature foretaste of eternity -- Tomás returned with their mounts. Then, wrapping his old but bright scrape around him, he set forth ahead of them along a narrow dusty trail, walking steadily with the aid of a staff.

  Don Miguel decided after the first twenty yards that he too would rather be on foot. The jogging of the burro was so unlike the motion of a horse as to make him uncomfortable. Besides, it was nearing the middle of the day and the flies were troublesome; he would have preferred to have both hands free to swat at them. But a glance at Two Dogs persuaded him not to mention these facts. The Mohawk wore the expression of a man driven by demons.

  The trail wound over the shoulder of the hill, becoming in places a mere footpath, but the burros were at least sure-footed and Tomás marched ahead stolidly. Once past the hillcrest, beyond the limit of the land that the miners had so far attacked, a smaller valley lay baking in the sun. Only the trail winding across it suggested that men had ever disturbed it. That apart, it might have lain as it was since Creation Day.

  "There!" Two Dogs said, causing his burro to fall back alongside Don Miguel's. He raised his arm and pointed to a rocky slope ahead.

  After careful scrutiny, Don Miguel said, "I'm afraid I see nothing out of the ordinary."

  "Well, then, come and look more closely," Two Dogs grunted, and kicked his mount into a reluctant trot.

  What in the world could have so shattered the man's normal Mohawk imperturbability?

  It appeared that Tomás also knew what they were heading for; he turned aside and scrambled straight up a steep rocky incline, while Two Dogs on his burro had to take a more roundabout route. Abandoning the animal to wander, he jumped down at the overseer's side and the two of them together leaned against a large round boulder, nearly man-high, about which at first glance Don Miguel saw nothing remarkable.

  Then, as they strained against it, it rocked back and forth. Suddenly it gave, rolling through half a circle and coming to rest in a cup of ground which fitted it so accurately it could scarcely have been accidental. Its displacement revealed an opening in the slope behind. A dark, roughly square opening. The mouth of a tunnel.

  The mouth of the gallery of a mine!

  Don Miguel felt horrified understanding dawn. Hastening to join the others, he stared down the black tunnel -- seeing nothing because of the contrast with the bright sun -- and demanded, "What is this? I didn't think you'd begun to mine this valley!"

  "We haven't," Two Dogs continued. He seemed to have recovered his habitual self-possession, and his tone was sardonic. "But there doesn't seem to be much doubt that someone has. Over the past few years, we've frequently been puzzled by the fact that what ought to have been rich lodes of ore running for a considerable distance have stopped short, contrary to the predictions of our geologists. And now, a matter of a month or two ago, we stumbled across this concealed mine gallery. And inside we found . . ."

  He stepped for a moment into the low opening, having to stoop to avoid the roof, fumbled on the ground and turned back to Don Miguel, holding out something on his palm. Don Miguel took it, stared at it, and felt the world tremble around him.

  III

  His Highness the Prince of New Castile, Commander of the Society of Time, ran his fingers through his short black beard. He stared for a long while at the object on the table in from of him, and at last spoke.

  "Well, since you seem to have a gift for turning up uncomfortable odds and ends, Navarro, I suppose I'll have to inquire what you make of this -- this bit of scrap metal. I know you take it seriously enough to have abandoned your furlough in California, but I must say it seems to me an innocuous enough object . . . All right: why the song and dance?"

  Don Miguel drew a deep breath and held it for the space of three heartbeats. He didn't need anyone to tell him he was going out on a limb; he would have been far happier if he had been able to consult with one of the Society's theoreticians -- ideally, with Father Ramón himself -- before making his suspicions public. But Father Ramón was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and the Commander was here in New Madrid. And the discovery which Two Dogs had made was already two months in the past . . .

  He licked his lips, very conscious of the piercing eyes of the many notables assembled in this, the Prince's audience chamber, and above all of the stare of the other Licentiates who were present. On his brief stopover at New Madrid en route to California he had made the unpleasant discovery that the members of the Society based here tended to resent his being awarded the Order of the Scythe and Hourglass at such an early age and attributed it not to anything he had done to merit the honour but to undue influence at the Headquarters Office of the Society in Londres.

  If this gamble of his were to prove unwarranted . . .

  But he shut away that possibility from his mind. Far too much was at stake for him to consider the risk of later personal disadvantage. And, anyway, was it not worse to be a prince than a commoner in so many ways? Imagine living in the public eye twenty-four hours a day, so that one could not rise from bed, conduct one's t
oilet, eat a meal, without scores of hangers-on in attendance! One could barely even enjoy a love-affair, come to that, without the crudest details filtering down in garbled form to the palace kitcheners!

  Accordingly he set his shoulders back, looked his Commander straight in the eye, and spoke out boldly.

  "What I make of it, sir, is this-- though I'm open to correction. I think it's a breach of the Treaty of Prague."

  Well . . . there was the bombshell. And it certainly went off to great effect. The Prince himself blanched and jerked back in his chair, while everyone else without exception paled and voiced wordless exclamations.

  "By whom?" the Prince demanded sternly.

  "By the other party to the Treaty -- I assume. Either that, or else we have here the first recorded case of temporal interference by a time-traveller from some place not bound by treaty obligations."

  There was a terrible silence in the audience chamber.

  "You realise," the Prince said at length, "that this is the most serious allegation you could possibly make?"

  Would I did not! But Don Miguel kept that thought to himsell, and merely nodded.

  "You have grounds?"

  "I believe so, sir. Having conducted such on-the-spot investigations as were possible to me without time apparatus, I could come to no other conclusion."

  The Prince put out one hairy-backed hand towards the harmless-looking chip of metal on the table before him. At the last moment before completing the gesture, he drew back as though from a sleeping snake. He said, "Clear the hall! At once! And if anyone breathes a word of this I'll have his head off his shouders before nightfall -- is that clear? Executioner! I know there are at least three incurable gossips whose tongues rattle day and night like dry peas in a bladder -- have three stakes ready by this afternoon to mount their heads on!"

  The man who stood by the door, black-masked and anonymous, bowed to acknowledge the order, and not a few of the courtiers shivered.

  "Now get out!" barked the Prince. "All of you except Don Miguel, and make it fast!"

  The Treaty of Prague, Don Miguel had often thought, was the most fragile bulwark ever interposed between man and the forces of primal chaos. It was like a plug of wet paper in the mouth of a volcano -- yet it was the best they could contrive.

  At the first moment when Don Carlos Borromeo discovered how time might be converted into a direction like other directions so that men might make voyages along it, he -- whom some called very wise, others incurably bitter and disillusioned -- had clearly foreseen the uses to which selfish and greedy men might put this miracle. Allegedly he had considered trying to suppress the knowledge altogether, but in the end, after consultation with his confessor, he had been compelled to accept that someone else might stumble on the same principle who was less sceptical about the ability of mankind to cope with powers beyond their previous dreams.

  But, looking at the contemporary world around him, he had been faced with those intransigents who wished to reconquer Spain, the old beartland from which Christian civilisation had been driven by its virile Islamic rival, and who would not have been above sending back an army to ensure that alteration of history. Similarly there were those in the fretful, unstable Confederacy of the East who resented being part of a heterogeneous political alliance, and who would rather have seen Lithuania, or Poland, or Prussia, or even Russ, become an unquestionably dominant national power free from the need to consider the wishes of competing local interests.

  Putting time-travel into the hands of men with such a background would be like smoking a tobacco-pipe in a powder-factory.

  The best that could be hoped for, he decided, was that the technique of time-travel should be administered by men with proper scruples, aware of the responsibility their knowledge imposed on them and bound by oaths to obey the instructions of the wisest and most far-seeing officers who could be found to lead them.

  Accordingly, having appealed to the Pope for a commission that empowered him to dictate to princes, kings and emperors under pain of instant excommunication, he set up the Society of Time and pledged its founding members to employ time-travel solely for the benefit of mankind, to increase the sum of human howledge and not to interfere with the past.

  Nonetheless, what he was afraid of happened: almost at once a party of lunatics began to agitate for the reconquest of Spain. For a while it looked as though madness would overcome sense. Then, however, the balance was tipped back in favour of rationality. The Confederacy let it be known discreetly, delicately --- that they too had gained the secret of travelling in time. If an Imperial army went back to oppose the Moorish invasion of Spain, it would be met by corresponding forces determined to keep the status quo --- for the Confederacy regarded the Empire as quite strong enough already without the retrospective addition of the Iberian peninsula to its territory.

  It was whispered, but never proved, that Borromeo himself had given his secret to the Confederacy. At any rate, it was for the best; the Empire came to its senses, proposed Papal arbitration, and with the assistance of the Vatican's finest legal experts drafted the agreement which was ultimately signed in 1897 in the handsome and ancient city of Prague. The Treaty was Borromeo's last legacy. Three weeks after it was signed he died of a chill caught in the mists of Poland, for it was a bitter winter that year.

  Perhaps, thought Don Miguel, he had died content. But it seemed unlikely. He must have suspected that sooner or later the Treaty by itself would prove inadequate, even though it plugged the dyke for a little while. He might not have foreseen that greed would so rapidly corrupt the very Licentiates who were supposed to be chosen for their honesty and integrity -- yet Don Miguel knew, better than any of his colleagues bar Father Ramón, how near ordinary greed had already come to oversetting the fabric of history. Over and above that, though, there was the even more significant point that Borromeo must have been aware of: time apparatus was intrinsically so simple that eventually other scientists whose governments were not signatories to the Treaty would chance on the principle involved . . . or be sold the information by someone venal, someone with a grudge, someone mentally unstable.

  Was the discovery which Two Dogs had made the first evidence in the twentieth century that some other power was due to develop time-travel? Would it prove to be an expedition from the Mediterranean Caliphate that was involved, or -- more likely, considering the geographical location -- temporal explorers from the Middle Kingdom of Cathay? Or intruders from Çipangu, those islands off the eastern coast of Asia whose people so greatly admired the Empire and who sought to turn their geographically analogous location into a politically analogous independence from the mainland culture of Cathay which had dominated virtually their entire recorded history?

  Don Miguel doubted these latter possibilities. He was a great believer in the principle enunciated by William of Occam, the "razor" which advised one not to multiply assumptions more than necessary. And here one did not have to assume.

  One merely had to deduce . . .

  "It's good steel," he said, pointing to the object on the table between himself and the Prince. "It's the bit of a rock-drill, cracked in half. I've established beyond doubt that we've never mined that valley. And history shows us no one who knew how to make good steel and who passed through that part of California prior to our discovery of the New World. In company with Two Dogs, the mine manager, I searched the locality for several miles around. We discovered the traces of at least nine mine galleries, all bar the first caved in. Two Dogs has extensive grounding in mineralogy; he was able to estimate that these mines were worked approximately a thousand years ago. I spoke to several of his foremen and overseers, and they took me to see abandoned galleries of their own where what should have been extensive veins of ore had turned out to stop short instead of continuing for the predicted distances. It was that which finally drove me to the inescapable conclusion that we're here faced with an illegal intrusion into the past."

  The Prince gave a slow nod of comprehension, h
is face bleaker than winter in Norroway. He said, "By whom and for what purpose, Navarro? What's your view?"

  "Sir, I can only interpret what I've seen for myself." Don Miguel licked his lips. "I read the situation like this. It's notorious that these hills are among the richest mineral deposits in the world. I think the intruders decided to exploit them -- perhaps for some metal, such as silver, which is essential to time-travel. In the present this was impossible, since we're already at work there, but in the past, of course, the area was empty, bar a few naked Indians with no interest in mining. Perhaps they were, or are, not very experienced in geology, and took it for granted that when they had finished their work it would suffice to rely on natural causes to wipe away the traces of what they'd done. After all, California is earthquake country, and in a thousand years you'd expect mine galleries to cave in of their own accord. It must have been sheer chance that preserved the one in which Two Dogs discovered the drill-bit."

  "So this thing" -- the Prince picked up the scrap of steel -- "has been lying in the ground for a thousand years! Yet it's barely marked with rust, isn't it?"