by Chad Oliver
“Not at all.”
“Fine, fine. We’ll be ready to go in thirty minutes, gentlemen. I wish you a pleasant journey.”
One hour later, Fitz-James, the Advisor, and four crewmen stood in the mountains of Mexico, fifty years before the birth of Christ.
“There it is,” said Fitz-James, pointing.
Below them and to their right, an Indian village sweltered in the humid sun of high noon. It stood on a terrace overlooking a green plain that sloped to a clean, glistening stream. It was built in five units, each unit consisting of a walled courtyard of stone and mud, rectangular in shape, within each of which were three small boxlike houses. In firepits between the houses, women were cooking in large clay pots. Naked Indian children played on the roof-tops, and in the distance men could be seen working in the maize fields. There were no animals to be seen. A woman’s voice chanted softly, far away, and a hawk slanted on lazy wings across the sultry blue of the sky.
“I really prefer our friends as they are now,” the Advisor mused. “So uncluttered and simple, and content to leave the atom alone.”
“Don’t forget, though,” Fitz-James pointed out, “that they weren’t supporting us here then—or, rather, now. Our people in America were individualists, independent livers. Quite foolish, of course, and all this land was nonfunctional from the point of view of the mainstream of our development in Europe. It took us long enough to get Cortes over here, you’ll remember.”
“Let’s get to work, my friends,” said the Advisor.
The six of them activated their screens and began to walk slowly down a mountain trail toward the village. They picked their way with infinite care, and they touched nothing at all. Time travel was a tricky business, Fitz-James reflected, and it always made him feel vaguely uncomfortable. Since he was a man who valued his comfort, he did not relish what he was doing. Even with all their experience and controls, unexpected things happened. So long as they knew for certain exactly what it was they had changed, they could channel and predict it. But if they inadvertently got in the wrong place at the wrong time, or dropped a steel knife …
The Indians saw them coming when they were half-way to the village, and life stopped with an abruptness that was startling. The Indians disappeared as if by magic into their tiny houses and silence was loud in the air. One child still played aimlessly on a hot roof, and a mother materialized out of nowhere and snatched him below. The men in the fields dropped their digging sticks and picked up their bows. Overhead, high in a lazy sky, the hawk still circled on stationary wings.
The tall men did not hesitate. They simply walked into the deserted village, spread out with trained precision, and went to work. Fitz-James, who had kept up with the progress of the excavation that was to take place two thousand years later, selected the most likely house structure, bent low to avoid hitting his head, and walked inside.
It was gloomy at first, but he knew that he was not alone. He waited patiently, and in a moment it came. An arrow whistled out of the corner and hit him solidly in the chest. It fell away harmlessly from his protective field, of course, and he laughed softly. There was a second of suspended time, and then three shadows, one large and two small, swished by him and out of the house, as an Indian woman and her two children fled from a monster.
Fitz-James chuckled again, and switched on his light. The little room was quite barren by modern standards, with only a few clay pottery vessels, a bow, and two rude brush mats in evidence on the hard-packed dirt floor. There were two rooms, the inner one being very dark, with a rock-paved floor and stacks of corn and squash. Fitz-James concentrated on the outer room.
With his electronic-analyzer probe, he swept the floor. The instrument blinked repeatedly, and he read off the spectrum with a practiced eye. Pottery, flint, basketry, wood, bone—and there it was. He smiled, ignoring another arrow that whistled in from outside and hit him in the back. Plastic; this was really too easy. It was no wonder that his people were becoming complacent; he even had to watch himself.
Carefully, Fitz-James took a tiny cutter and drilled his way into the earth floor. He did not have far to go, and quite soon he reached into the hole, picked out the cogged plastic disc, and put it into his pocket. Then he filled in the hole again, smoothed down the dirt, and left. Another arrow hit him in the chest as he walked outside, and he threw it away with a smile.
An Indian confronted him in the courtyard—a small man, nearly naked, with a single feather in his hair and a bow in his hand. Fitz-James walked toward him steadily, glowing slightly from his force field. The Indian stood his ground until the strange thing almost touched him, then he turned and fled from the unknown and the horrible. The village was very quiet.
“I’ve got it,” Fitz-James called out. “Let’s go back.”
The others emerged from houses, quietly and without fuss, and together they walked back up the trail to where their Tracer waited. When they were half-way to their destination, one of the crewmen took a bit of worked flint out of his shirt pocket and placed it carefully along the trail.
“The Substitution boys decided to kill two birds with one stone,” he explained.
Fitz-James glanced at the flint and raised an eyebrow. It was a rather large spear point, beautifully made, fat, and with a distinctive channel groove sliced out of each side. It nestled among the rocks where it had been placed, looking quite natural despite the fact that it had been specially treated to give the proper radiocarbon reading when it was found two thousand years later.
“A Folsom point?” he questioned.
The crewman nodded. “They’ve decided to extend the complex into Mexico,” he said. “Silly, of course, but it ties in with their current theories, and it will keep them from looking for anything else for a while.”
“Substitution knows best, naturally,” Fitz-James said.
They walked on to the Tracer and stepped inside. Behind them, Fitz-James knew, the Indians were sneaking back into their village, terror-stricken over something that was beyond their comprehension. There would be whispered conferences and strange chants under the cold full moon. There would be dreams and stories of the giants who had come from the skies. There would be ceremonials and dances, and perhaps labored pictographs scrawled on the smoke-blackened walls of a mountain rock shelter. Weird, unearthly drawings, distorted and unreal, that would one day be collected and explained blithely away in a thesis that no one would read….
The Tracer hummed, shimmered and vanished.
The hot sun burned in the humid air, and the hawk still circled with utter unconcern on splendid wings.
“I’m terribly sorry you can’t stay, Fitz,” said the woman at the desk. “We see so little of you these days.”
“I am sorry, Anne. But I really must get back to the ranch. You must come and visit me soon.”
Fitz-James turned away and shook hands with the Advisor. “Good of you to help out,” he said. “I’ll keep you posted on any new developments.”
“Not at all,” the Advisor said. “Feel free to call on me at any time.”
Thomas Fitz-James waved to his friends around the room, patted the plastic disc in his pocket, set the controls, and stepped into an Arch. Five minutes later he was home in Mexico. He locked the disc in his safe, turned out all the lights, and went to bed to sleep the dreamless sleep of the well-content. The crisis was past.
At that very moment, a few miles away, Bill Shackelford lay restlessly awake in his tent, smoking a cigarette, with an empty box under his cot.
III
When Bill Shackelford awakened, he still had his memory intact and unaltered. It had once been assumed, by those concerned with such speculative mental exercise, that the effects of time travel, however confusing and paradoxical, would be essentially direct-line cause-and-effect relationships. Either something happened one way or it happened another, it being obviously impossible for, say, the United States to both exist and not exist at the same time and in the same dimension. Following this eith
er-or line of reasoning, the theorists were much interested in the concept of alternate patterns of development, and it was asserted that it was possible, granting the existence of time travel, to go back into the past in order to radically change the present.
However logical and comfortable this idea may have been—and even accurate to some extent—it offered a source of considerable amusement to those who had empirical experience in working in the time stream. Reality, with a characteristically stubborn disregard for logic, failed to conform. Time travel turned out to be far more tricky and subtle than it had seemed to the earlier experimenters. After three hundred years of work, the future remained a blank—utterly inaccessible. All peoples, whatever their differences, were of necessity time travelers, moving ever forward into the future. This proceeded at a constant rate, evidently, and could not be altered. In a very real sense, the future did not yet exist at any given time, and therefore one could not venture into it.
The past did exist—and so did the present. The really vital point was that the so-called present was actually little more than a concept; it came and went with such rapidity that it could not be pinned down. It was not static, but ever-changing. It was a tiny, chaotic bubble of activity, rushed along into the future at the very tips of rigid, telescoping pencils of past development. It was fluid in the bubble, but it solidified instantly in the fractional part of a microsecond required for the present to turn into the past.
Change took place, from moment to moment, in the swirling bubble; the bubble, however, was still there at the end of its developmental column, right where it “had” been. In other words, in its practical aspects, if a man picked up a rock in that portion of past time designated as “yesterday,” then he did have the rock yesterday, and it was “there.” If another man in the bubble of the present went back to what might be described as the day before yesterday and removed the rock, a logical paradox resulted. There was after all, only the one rock—and it couldn’t be in two different places at the same time.
Working through laws almost unimaginably complex and inflexible, nature came up with quite a simple, workable resolution of the paradox. There was only one place in which change could occur, and that was in the fluid bubble of the rushing present. Therefore, inexorably, that was where the change did occur. In the instant of the total present, the rock changed locations. Its original owner no longer had it; it simply was not in his possession, because it was somewhere else. However, his finding of the rock on the previous day had been a “real” experience—he had found it, and he had picked it up. Yesterday, it had been “there.” Today, it was elsewhere. He of course remembered having the rock—he knew he had it.
Just the same, the rock had changed hands in the present. It could not with accuracy be termed a simple game, but it was not a game without rules. The rules were complex and difficult, but they worked.
There was nothing mysterious about it. It was all quite “natural” and understandable. The game could be played and won—
If you knew the rules …
Bill Shackelford knew only that the plastic disc had vanished.
He was no fool. In any case, he told himself, it took no genius to figure out what had happened. The disc had been in the box under his cot the night before, because he had put it there. It was not there now. Therefore, someone had taken it.
None of the students would have taken the disc, of course, and only one other person knew about it. Astonishing and unreasonable as it seemed, Thomas Fitz-James was the only person who could possibly have stolen the plastic disc. It didn’t make sense, but there it was.
That huge, dignified man had crept into their tent in the dead of night and taken something that was utterly worthless. Shackelford tried to imagine it, to bring the scene to life, and failed. That giant slipping through the pines in the blackness under the stars, crouching to come through the tent flap, hovering over him as he slept like a monstrous shadow, reaching down under his cot with that great strong hand …
Shackelford looked over at his wife. Her face was relaxed and very young as she slept, and her short brown hair curled in soft spirals on her pillow. The sun was spilling in through the tent flap, splashing warmly up on the green of her sleeping bag, and she was beginning to stir restlessly. And in the night, not a yard from her, had stood—
Bill Shackelford shuddered. There was just no explanation for such a thing, but it had happened. Why?
He was sure of one thing, surer than he had ever been of anything in his life; if he were smart, he would forget that he had ever seen or heard of that little disc that looked like a gear. It wasn’t really important to him, and it had led him into a situation for which there was no precedent at all. He had been given a strong hint, and any reasonable man would have to take it. What did it matter to him? He would simply push the disc out of his mind, go on with his work, and pretend that nothing had happened. That was the only possible course.
It would be quite easy and certainly intelligent, and he knew instantly that he wasn’t going to do it.
Bill Shackelford walked across the little tent and sat down on his wife’s cot. He took her face in his hands and kissed her lightly on the nose.
“Wake up, hon,” he said quietly. “I need some help.”
Two weeks later, just as the gray of evening was darkening into night, two horses picked their way down a faint trail out of the hills. They sniffed and snorted, sensing the nearness of home, and their riders held them back with difficulty. The air was crisp with the chill of night, and a swollen silver moon was already growing amorphously out of the dark crown of the hills. It was a peaceful scene, almost idyllic, like something out of a travel folder. But the man’s free hand kept straying to the cold handle of a .38 revolver at his side, and the woman was breathing hard and fast and shallow.
“There it is,” said Bill Shackelford quietly, shifting his weight in the saddle.
Ahead of them, and below them on the valley floor, the ranch buildings were little pin-points of light in the shadows. They looked like stars that had fallen to earth, there to twinkle warmly with sublime disregard for the laws of the universe. A faint hum drifted up to them from where several hands worked late in the little saw mill. There was nothing at all sinister about the ranch, and Shackelford wondered why his hand was trembling as he rode.
They went on at a steady pace, not talking now, and neither making themselves conspicuous nor being unduly secretive. There was, after all, no law against riding across their host’s ranch in the evening, and if they were seen they had merely to murmur a polite buenas noches, amigo, and pass on. The whole affair, as a matter of fact, struck Shackelford as a little unreal, a trifle artificial. He was not a melodramatic man by inclination, and he was thoroughly aware of how illogical his actions would have seemed to an impartial observer. He could hear himself explaining lamely, “Well, the guy gives me the creeps, and anyhow I had a plastic disc that has disappeared.”
He forced himself to relax, letting the horse follow his own lead down the familiar trail. There was more to it than just the disc, he knew, and more to it than a feeling of dislike for Fitz-James that he had felt from the beginning. He was dealing with intangibles, perhaps even being quite irrational in his actions, and yet what he was doing was inevitable, for him. Every man’s actions are bound up inexorably with what he is, and Bill Shackelford had all his life been driven by two impulses: he didn’t like to be a pawn in a game he didn’t understand, and when a question kicked him in the face he kept going until he found an answer that satisfied him.
He remembered, riding along in the moonlight with his wife at his side, another, younger Bill Shackelford, sitting in a classroom on a sleepy spring day….
“It’s really rather curious about the various Early Man points in the New World,” the lecturer was saying. “Ordinarily, you’d expect the earliest stone industry products to be the crudest, with the artifacts becoming more efficient and better made as subsequent improvements in technique were lea
rned. In the Sandia points, this is more or less the situation; they wouldn’t be of much interest if it were not for their great antiquity. But look at the other Early Man points! The later Eden points are beautiful things, certainly, and the Clovis fluteds are well-made artifacts, but your Folsom points really take the cake. There they are, almost the oldest known spear points in America, and better made than any that have ever been manufactured since! It isn’t much of a trick to chip out a crude projectile point once you know how, but try to make a fluted Folsom some time when you’ve got nothing to do for a year or two. It’s really remarkable, although, of course, there’s nothing really startling about it. Undoubtedly, they had a long developmental period behind them in Asia or somewhere….”
“Pardon me, sir,” Bill Shackelford interrupted, “but how do you KNOW?”
“Even in science we have to take some things for granted, Bill,” the professor said. “Perhaps we don’t actually know for certain …”
“No,” Shackelford had said to himself, “we don’t really know.”
Outside, the spring winds were soft and warm, and birds sang in the trees.
They left the horses outside the corral and walked through the night to the main ranch house. There were actually four houses on the ranch that were for the personal use of the Fitz-James clan—one for him and one for each of his three children, in case they should drop in some year for tea. There was yet another—a cozy, L-shaped affair—for the foreman, and a number of small but well-built cottages for the hands. It all added up to a picture that was not exactly the epitome of roughing it on the frontier, Shackelford reflected.
There were a lot of lights on in the main ranch house, and they could hear voices and the tinkle of glasses from within. There seemed to be a perpetual party going on at the ranch, which was a required stopover for all visiting dignitaries from Mexico City and elsewhere, so this was not in itself surprising.
