“This way!” Everard spun on his heel and dashed toward them. The leather in his cuirass creaked as he ran.

  They were close to the newcomers before they were seen. A Carthaginian face swung to them and called the warning. Everard saw how he grinned in his beard. One of the Neldorians scowled and aimed his blast-rifle.

  Everard went on his stomach, and the vicious blue-white beam sizzled where he had been. He snapped a shot and one of the African horses went over in a roar of metal. Van Sarawak stood his ground and fired steadily. Two, three, four—and there went a Neldorian, down in the mud!

  Men hewed at each other around the Scipios. The Neldorians’ escort yelled with terror. They must have had the blasters demonstrated, but these invisible blows were something else. They bolted. The second of the bandits got his horse under control and turned to follow.

  “Take care of the one you potted,” gasped Everard. “Haul him off the battlefield—we’ll want to question—” He himself scrambled to his feet and made for a riderless horse. He was in the saddle and after the remaining Neldorian before he was fully aware of it.

  They fled through chaos. Everard urged speed from his mount, but was content to pursue. Once they’d got out of sight, a scooter could swoop down and make short work of his quarry.

  The same thought must have occurred to the time rover. He reined in and took aim. Everard saw the blinding flash and felt his cheek sting with a near miss. He set his pistol to wide beam and rode in shooting.

  Another fire-bolt took his horse full in the breast. The animal toppled and Everard went out of the saddle. Trained reflexes softened the fall, he bounced dizzily to his feet and staggered toward his enemy. His stunner was gone, no time to look for it. Never mind, it could be salvaged later, if he lived. The widened beam had found its mark; it wasn’t strong enough to knock a man out, but the Neldorian had dropped his rifle and the horse stood swaying with closed eyes.

  Rain beat in Everard’s face. He slogged up to the mount. The Neldorian jumped to earth and drew a sword. Everard’s own blade rasped forth.

  “As you will,” he said in Latin. “One of us will not leave this field.”

  The moon rose over mountains and turned the snow to a sudden wan glitter. Far in the north, a glacier threw back the light in broken shards, and a wolf howled. The Cro-Magnons chanted in their cave, it drifted faintly through to the veranda.

  Deirdre stood in darkness, looking out. Moonlight dappled her face and caught a gleam of tears. She started as Everard and van Sarawak came up behind her.

  “Are you back so soon?” she asked. “You only came here and left me this morning.”

  “It didn’t take long,” said van Sarawak. He had gotten a hypno in Attic Greek.

  “I hope . . .” She tried to smile. “I hope you have finished your task and can rest from your labors.”

  “Yes,” said Everard. “Yes, we finished it.”

  They stood side by side for a while, looking out on a world of winter.

  “Is it true what you said, that I can never go home?” asked Deirdre.

  “I’m afraid so. The spells—” Everard shrugged and swapped a glance with van Sarawak.

  They had official permission to tell the girl as much as they wished and take her wherever they thought she could live best. Van Sarawak maintained that that would be Venus in his century, and Everard was too tired to argue.

  Deirdre drew a long breath. “So be it,” she said. “I’ll not waste a life weeping for it . . . but the Baal grant that they have it well, my people at home.”

  “I’m sure they will,” said Everard.

  Suddenly he could do no more. He only wanted to sleep. Let van Sarawak say what had to be said, and reap whatever rewards there might be.

  He nodded at his companion. “I’m turning in,” he declared. “Carry on, Van.”

  The Venusian took the girl’s arm. Everard went slowly back to his room.

  For any readers victimised by a modern anti-classical education, I might insert this footnote: that Mr. Anderson’s title stems, of course, from the political war-cry tittered by Manus Porcius Cato (“Cato the Elder”) in 157 B.C. and incessantly for a decade thereafter: Delenda est Carthago (Carthage must be destroyed), resulting in as insensate an act of barbarism (what we today would call genocide) as any military victor has ever perpetrated—and yet an act which laid the foundations for the world in which we exist.—A.B.

  Brave to Be a King

  Keith Denison, on a routine Time Patrol mission to Iran in in 558 B.C., failed to return on schedule. That, of course, meant he would never return—unless Manse Everard also went back to the time of the great Cyrus and perfmmed a rather more successful miracle than the fabled one of Croesus.

  I

  ON AN EVENING IN THE MID-TWENTIETHCentury New York, Manse Everard had changed into a threadbare lounging outfit and was mixing himself a drink. The doorbell interrupted. He swore at it. A tiring several days lay behind him and he wanted no other company than the lost narratives of Dr. Watson.

  Well, maybe this character could be gotten rid of. He slippered across his apartment and opened the door, his expression mutinous. “Hello,” he said coldly.

  And then, all at once, it was as if he were aboard some early spaceship which had just entered free fall; he stood weightless and helpless in a blaze of stars.

  “Oh,” he said. “I didn’t know . . . Come in.”

  Cynthia Denison paused a moment, looking past him to the bar. He had hung two crossed spears and a horse-plumed helmet from the Achaean Bronze Age over it. They were dark and shining and incredibly beautiful. She tried to speak with steadiness, but failed. “Could I have a drink, Manse? Right away?”

  “Of course.” He clamped his mouth shut and helped her off with her coat. She closed the door and sat down on a Swedish modern couch as clean and functional as the Homeric weapons. Her hands fumbled with her purse, getting out cigarettes. For a time she did not look at him, nor he at her.

  “Do you still drink Irish on the rocks?” he asked. His words seemed to come from far away, and his body was awkward among bottles and glasses, forgetting how the Time Patrol had trained it.

  “Yes,” she said. “So you do remember.” Her lighter snapped, unexpectedly loud in the room.

  “It’s been just a few months,” he said, for lack of other phrases.

  “Entropic time. Regular, untampered-with, twenty-four-hours-to-the-day time.” She blew a cloud of smoke and stared at it. “Not much more than that for me. I’ve been in now almost continuously since my, my wedding. Just eight and a half months of my personal, biological, lifeline time since Keith and I . . . But how long has it been for you, Manse? How many years have you rung up, in how many different epochs, since you were Keith’s best man?”

  She had always had a rather high and thin voice. It was the only flaw he had ever found in her, unless you counted her being so small—barely five feet. So she could never put much expression into her tones. But he could hear that she was staving off a scream.

  He gave her a drink. “Down the hatch,” he said. “All of it.” She obeyed, strangling a little. He got her a refill and completed his own Scotch and soda. Then he drew up a chair and took pipe and tobacco from the depths of his moth-eaten smoking jacket. His hands still shook, but so faintly he didn’t think she would notice. It had been wise of her not to blurt whatever news she carried; they both needed a chance to get back their control.

  Now he even dared to look straight at her. She hadn’t changed. Her figure was almost perfect in a delicate way, as the black dress emphasized. Sunlight-colored hair fell to her shoulders; the eyes were blue and enormous, under arched brows, in a tip-tilted face with the lips always just a little parted. She hadn’t enough makeup for him to tell for sure if she had cried lately. But she looked very near to it.

  Everard became busy filling his pipe. “Okay, Cyn,” he said. “Want to tell me?”

  She shivered. Finally she got out: “Keith. He’s disappeared.”

  “Huh?” Everard sat up straight. “On a mission?”

  “Yes. Where else? Ancient Iran. He went back there and never returned. That was a week ago.” She set her glass down on the couch arm and twisted her fingers together. “The Patrol searched, of course. I just heard the results today. They can’t find him. They can’t even find out what happened to him.”

  “Judas,” whispered Everard.

  “Keith always . . . always thought of you as his best friend,” she said frantically. “You wouldn’t believe how often he spoke of you. Honestly, Manse, I know we’ve neglected you, but you never seemed to be in any . . .”

  “Of course,” he said. “How childish do you think I am? I was busy. And after all, you two were newly married.”

  After I introduced you, that night beneath Mauna Loa and the moon. The Time Patrol doesn’t bother with snobbishness. A youngster like Cynthia Cunningham, a mere clerk fresh out of the Academy and Attached to her own century, is quite free to see a ranking veteran . . . like myself, for instance . . . as often as they both wish, off duty. There is no reason why he should not use his skill at disguise to take her waltzing in Strauss’s Vienna or to the theater in Shakespeare’s London—as well as exploring funny little bars in Tom Lehrer’s New York or playing tag in the sun and surf of Hawaii a thousand years before the canoe men arrived. And a fellow member of the Patrol is equally free to join them both. And later to marry her. Sure.

  Everard got his pipe going. When his face was screened with smoke, he said: “Begin at the beginning. I’ve been out of touch with you for—two or three years of my own lifeline time—so I’m not certain precisely what Keith was working on.”

  “That long?” she asked wonderingly. “You never even spent your furloughs in this decade? We did want you to come visit us.”

  “Quit apologizing!” he snapped. “I could have dropped in if I’d wished.” The elfin face looked as if he had slapped it. He backed up, appalled. “I’m sorry. Naturally I wanted to. But as I said . . . we Unattached agents are so damned busy, hopping around in all space-time like fleas on a griddle . . . Oh, hell.” He tried to smile. “You know me, Cyn, tactless, but it doesn’t mean anything. I originated a chimaera legend all by myself, back in Classic Greece. I was known as the dilaiopod, a curious monster with two left feet, both in its mouth.”

  She returned a dutiful quirk of lips and picked up her cigarette from the ashtray. “I’m still just a clerk in Engineering Studies,” she said. “But it puts me in close contact with all the other offices in this entire milieu, including headquarters. So I know exactly what’s been done about Keith . . . and it isn’t enough! They’re just abandoning him! Manse, if you won’t help Keith is dead!”

  She stopped, shakily. To give them both a little more time, Everard reviewed the career of Keith Denison.

  Born Cambridge, Mass., 1927, to a moderately wealthy family, Ph.D. in archaeology with a distinguished thesis at the age of twenty-three, after having also taken a collegiate boxing championship and crossed the Atlantic in a thirty-foot ketch. Drafted in 1950, served in Korea with a bravery which would have earned him some fame in a more popular war. Yet you had to know him quite a while before you learned any of this. He spoke, with a gift of dry humor, about impersonal things, until there was work to be done. Then, without needless fuss, he did it. Sure, thought Everard, the best man got the girl. Keith could’ve made Unattached easily, if he’d cared to. But he had roots here that I didn’t. More stable, I guess.

  Discharged and at loose ends in 1952, Denison was contacted by a Patrol agent and recruited. He had accepted the fact of time travel more readily than most. His mind was supple and, after all, he was an archaeologist. Once trained, he found a happy coincidence of his own interests and the needs of the Patrol; he became a Specialist, East Indo-European Protohistory, and in many ways a more important man than Everard.

  For the Unattached officer might rove up and down the time lanes, rescuing the distressed and arresting the lawbreaker and keeping the fabric of human destiny secure. But how could he tell what he was doing without a record? Ages before the first hieroglyphics there had been wars and wanderings, discoveries and achievements, whose consequences reached through all the continuum. The Patrol had to know them. Charting their course was a job for the Specialist ratings.

  Besides all of which, Keith was a friend of mine.

  Everard took the pipe from his mouth. “Okay, Cynthia,” he said. “Tell me what did happen.”

  II

  The little voice was almost dry now, so rigidly had she harnessed herself. “He was tracing the migrations of the different Aryan clans. They’re very obscure, you know. You have to start at a point when the history is known for certain, and work backward. So on this last job, Keith was going to Iran in the year 558 B.C. That was near the close of the Median period, he said. He’d make inquiries among the people, learn their own traditions, and then afterward check back at a still earlier point, and so on . . . But you must know all about this, Manse. You helped him once, before we met. He often spoke about that.”

  “Oh, I just went along in case of trouble,” shrugged Everard. “He was studying the prehistoric trek of a certain band from the Don over the Hindu Kush. We told their chief we were passing hunters, claimed hospitality, and accompanied the wagon train for a few weeks. It was fun.”

  He remembered steppes and enormous skies, a windy gallop after antelope and a feast by campfires and a certain girl whose hair had held the bittersweet of woodsmoke. For a while he wished he could have lived and died as one of those tribesmen.

  “Keith went back alone this time,” continued Cynthia. “They’re always so shorthanded in his branch, in the entire Patrol, I suppose. So many thousands of years to watch and so few man-lifetimes to do it with. He’d gone alone before. I was always afraid to let him, but he said . . . dressed as a wandering shepherd with nothing worth stealing . . . he’d be safer in the Iranian highlands than crossing Broadway. Only this time he wasn’t!”

  “I take it, then,” said Everard quickly, “he left—a week ago, did you say?—intending to get his information, report it to the clearinghouse of his specialty, and come back to the same day here as he’d left you.” Because only a blind buckethead would let more of your lifespan pass without being there himself. “But he didn’t.”

  “Yes.” She lit another cigarette from the butt of the first. “I got worried right away. I asked the boss about it. He obliged me by querying himself a week ahead—today—and got the answer that Keith had not returned. The information clearinghouse said he never came to them. So we checked with Records in milieu headquarters. Their answer was . . . was . . . Keith never did come back and no trace of him was ever found.”

  Everard nodded with great care. “Then, of course, the search was ordered which MHQ has a record of.”

  Mutable time made for a lot of paradoxes, he reflected for the thousandth occasion.

  In the case of a missing man, you were not required to search for him just because a record somewhere said you had done so. But how else would you stand a chance of finding him? You might possibly go back and thereby change events so that you did find him after all—in which case the report you filed would “always” have recorded your success, and you alone would know the “former” truth.

  It could get very messed up. No wonder the Patrol was fussy, even about small changes which would not affect the main pattern.

  “Our office notified the boys in the Old Iranian milieu, who sent a party to investigate the spot,” foretold Everard. “They only knew the approximate site at which Keith had intended to materialize, didn’t they? I mean, since he couldn’t know exactly where he’d be able to hide the scooter, he didn’t file precise coordinates.” Cynthia nodded. “But what I don’t understand is, why didn’t they find the machine afterward? Whatever happened to Keith, the scooter would still be somewhere around, in some cave or whatever. The Patrol has detectors. They should have been able to track down the scooter, at least, and then work backwards from it to locate Keith.”

  She drew on her cigarette with a violence that caved in her cheeks. “They tried,” she said. “But I’m told it’s a wild, rugged country, hard to search. Nothing turned up. They couldn’t find a trace. They might have, if they’d looked very, very hard—made a mile-by-mile, hour-by-hour search. But they didn’t dare. You see, that particular milieu is critical. Mr. Gordon showed me the analysis. I couldn’t follow all those symbols, but he said it was a very dangerous century to tamper with.”

  Everard closed one large hand on the bowl of his pipe. Its warmth was somehow comforting. Critical eras gave him the willies.

  “I see,” he said. “They couldn’t search as thoroughly as they wanted, because it might disturb too many of the local yokels, which might make them act differently when the big crisis came. Uh-huh. But how about making inquiries in disguise, among the people?”

  “Several Patrol experts did. They tried that for weeks, Persian time. And the natives never even gave them a hint. Those tribes are so wild and suspicious . . . maybe they feared our agents were spies from the Median king, I understand they didn’t like his rule . . . No. The Patrol couldn’t find a trace. And anyhow, there’s no reason to think the pattern was affected. They believe Keith was murdered and his scooter vanished somehow. And what difference—” Cynthia sprang to her feet. Suddenly she yelled—“What difference does one more skeleton in one more gully make?”

  Everard rose too, she came into his arms, and he let her have it out. For himself, he had never thought it would be this bad. He had stopped remembering her, except maybe ten times a day, but now she came to him and the forgetting would have to be done all over again.

  “Can’t they go back locally?” she pleaded. “Can’t somebody hop back a week from now, just to tell him not to go, is that so much to ask? What kind of monsters made that law against it?”