Times Without Number (17 page)

"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, his 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?"
"As I said, sir, the mouth of the cave -- of the mine gallery, rather --
was closed by this balanced boulder. Earth and grass-roots had made an
almost perfect seal around it, and the interior of the cave was dry. In
any case the climate there is equable."
For some moments the Prince was silent. His dark eyes searched Don Miguel's
face. At length he said heavily, "I wish it were not so, Navarro, but in
my judgment you've made out a case. We'll get time apparatus to California
as quickly as we can, and see if we can secure objective evidence." He
rose to his feet. "Meantime, we'll also notify Londres, and bring out our
most highly trained investigators. I'm not questioning your analysis of
the situation, but you must appreciate that an unfounded charge concerning
a breach of the Treaty of Prague could ruin the precarious trust we've
managed to nurture between ourselves and the Temporal College."
"Sir," Don Miguel said with feeling. "I pray that I am wrong! For how
much more disastrous it will be if I'm right!"
IV
Before the discovery Of humane drugs to unlock the gates of truth in the
human mind, there had been a torture -- used even by the Holy Office --
consisting in the placing upon the subject of a large wooden board, and in
turn upon the board a succession of stones of increasing weight, so that
in the end a stubborn man would be crushed like an insect beneath a boot.
For Don Miguel the next several weeks were like a session of such torture.
And he was not the only one to suffer.
The first of the stones was a light one, and added nothing more to his
burden of anxiety than simple confirmation of what he had already suspected.
It had been rumoured for some while that more gold and silver were
circulating in the Confederacy than their known resources could account
for. The logical deduction was that new and so far secret lodes had been
located, perhaps in the inhospitable unexplored wastes of Siberia.
Present information made it seem likelier that for "Siberia" should be
substituted "California" . . .
The second stone was header and more painful. A metallurgical expert
compared the mysterious drill-bit with samples of other steels, and
reported unequivocally: made in Augsburg! It was of a type commonly used
in the Confederacy, but hardly ever encountered elsewhere -- certainly
not in California, where a number of the trace constituents, notably
cobalt, were unavailable.
The third, and heaviest, was a report from a team of men whom Two Dogs --
at Don Miguel's urgent request -- had set to searching the route between
the site of the poachers' mine and the nearest convenient harbour on the
coast. One of the earliest questions to have arisen, naturally, had been
this: how did the poachers reach the site where their traces had been
discovered? It was of course possible to operate a time apparatus to
transmit its occupant spatially as well as temporally -- all that was
required was an adjustment of the dimensional relationships dictated
by the power-carrying bars in its frame. So long as the gravitational
potential at the arrival point was roughly the same as that at base,
no harm would come to the traveller . . . although transmitting from a
hilltop to a valley resulted in the messy dispersal of surplus potential
energy and the death or injury of the victim.
Yet it seemed improbable that one should voyage blind across a thousand
years and also displace oneself by several thousand miles; it would be
a fearful leap into the dark, and there was the risk of the shape of
the landscape having been changed by erosion or earthquake, so that one
might arrive inside a hill, or in mid-air. It seemed more likely that the
poachers must first have gone back in time at some place whose topography
they could establish beyond doubt, and then at least a scouting party
would have proceeded to the mining site by more conventional means.
And the men dispatched by Two Dogs, following the most obvious route to
the sea, came across a shlp's timber buried in the sand, of a form not
commonly employed by the aboriginal inhabitants and in a condition to
suggest it had been lying where they found it for some such period as
a thousand years . . .
Driven almost to a frenzy by the cumulative pressure of this news,
the experts sent out from New Madrid and Londres by the Society of Time
redoubled the pace of their preparations. Transportable time apparatus
was brought to the lonely Californian valley under habitual conditions
of secrecy -- few people outside the Society ever saw an actual time
apparatus, because it was so dangerously simple, being composed only of
bars of silver and magnetised iron in precisely determined relationships.
It might have entered someone's head to make a model of what he had seen,
with the disturbing consequence that the model might
work
.
Accordingly, a small town of canvas marquees bloomed in the sunlight,
and the labourers and their families went by incuriously for the most
part, occasionally pausing to watch, but not often, as yet one more
manifestation of the madness of these Europeans intruded into their
quiet private world.