“That is the least of the arms used here,” he said. “A soul so torn from the body would not find its way home.”

  He turned on his heel. Sandoval followed him. Their horses had been staked out, the gear piled close by. They saddled, unspeaking, mounted and rode off into the forest.

  4

  The fire blazed up in a gust of wind. Sparingly laid by a woodsman, in that moment it barely brought the two out of shadow—a glimpse of brow, nose, and cheekbones, a gleam of eyes. It sank down again to red and blue sputtering above white coals, and darkness took the men.

  Everard wasn’t sorry. He fumbled his pipe in his hands, bit hard on it and drank smoke, but found little comfort. When he spoke, the vast soughing of trees, high up in the night, almost buried his voice, and he did not regret that either.

  Nearby were their sleeping bags, their horses, the scooter—antigravity sled cum space-time hopper—which had brought them. Otherwise the land was empty; mile upon mile, human fires like their own were as small and lonely as stars in the universe. Somewhere a wolf howled.

  “I suppose,” Everard said, “every cop feels like a bastard occasionally. You’ve just been an observer so far, Jack. Active assignments, such as I get, are often hard to accept.”

  “Yeh.” Sandoval had been even more quiet than his friend. He had scarcely stirred since supper.

  “And now this. Whatever you have to do to cancel a temporal interference, you can at least think you’re restoring the original line of development.” Everard fumed on his pipe. “Don’t remind me that ‘original’ is meaningless in this context. It’s a consoling word.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But when our bosses, our dead Danellian supermen, tell us to interfere… We know Toktai’s people never came back to Cathay. Why should you or I have to take a hand? If they ran into hostile Indians or something and were wiped-out, I wouldn’t mind. At least, no more than I mind any similar incident in that Goddamned slaughter-house they call human history.”

  “We don’t have to kill them, you know. Just make them turn back. Your demonstration this afternoon may be enough.”

  “Yeah. Turn back… and what? Probably perish at sea. They won’t have an easy trip home—storm, fog, contrary currents, rocks—in those primitive ships meant mostly for rivers. And we’ll have set them on that trip at precisely that time! If we didn’t interfere, they’d start home later, the circumstances of the voyage would be different… Why should we take the guilt?”

  “They could even make it home,” murmured Sandoval.

  “What?” Everard started.

  “The way Toktai was talking. I’m sure he plans to go back on a horse, not on those ships. As he’s guessed, Bering Strait is easy to cross; the Aleuts do it all the time. Manse, I’m afraid it isn’t enough simply to spare them.”

  “But they aren’t going to get home! We know that!”

  “Suppose they do make it.” Sandoval began to talk a bit louder and much faster. The night wind roared around his words. “Let’s play with ideas awhile. Suppose Toktai pushes on southeastward. It’s hard to see what could stop him. His men can live off the country, even the deserts, far more handily than Coronado or any of those boys. He hasn’t terribly far to go before he reaches a high-grade neolithic people, the agricultural Pueblo tribes. That will encourage him all the more. He’ll be in Mexico before August. Mexico’s just as dazzling now as it was—will be—in Cortez’s day. And even more tempting: the Aztecs and Toltecs are still settling who’s to be master, with any number of other tribes hanging around ready to help a newcomer against both. The Spanish guns made, will make, no real difference, as you’ll recall if you’ve read Diaz. The Mongols are as superior, man for man, as any Spaniard… Not that I imagine Toktai would wade right in. He’d doubtless be very polite, spend the winter, learn everything he could. Next year he’d go back north, proceed home, and report to Kublai that some of the richest, most gold-stuffed territory on earth was wide open for conquest!”

  “How about the other Indians?” put in Everard. “I’m vague on them.”

  “The Mayan New Empire is at its height. A tough nut to crack, but a correspondingly rewarding one. I should think, once the Mongols got established in Mexico, there’d be no stopping them. Peru has an even higher culture at this moment, and much less organization than Pizarro faced; the Quechua-Aymar, the so-called Inca race, are still only one power down there among several.

  “And then, the land! Can you visualize what a Mongol tribe would make of the Great Plains?”

  “I can’t see them emigrating in hordes,” said Everard. There was that about Sandoval’s voice which made him uneasy and defensive. “Too much Siberia and Alaska in the way.”

  “Worse obstacles have been overcome. I don’t mean they’d pour in all at once. It might take them a few centuries to start mass immigration, as it will take the Europeans. I can imagine a string of clans and tribes being established in the course of some years, all down western North America. Mexico and Yucatan get gobbled up—or, more likely, become khanates. The herding tribes move eastward as their own population grows and as new immigrants arrive. Remember, the Yuan dynasty is due to be overthrown in less than a century. That’ll put additional pressure on the Mongols in Asia to go elsewhere. And Chinese will come here too, to farm and to share in the gold.”

  “I should think, if you don’t mind my saying so,” Everard broke in softly, “that you of all people wouldn’t want to hasten the conquest of America.”

  “It’d be a different conquest,” said Sandoval. “I don’t care about the Aztecs; if you study them, you’ll agree that Cortez did Mexico a favor. It’d be rough on other, more harmless tribes too—for a while. And yet, the Mongols aren’t such devils. Are they? A Western background prejudices us. We forget how much torture and massacre the Europeans were enjoying at the same time.

  “The Mongols are quite a bit like the old Romans, really. Same practice of depopulating areas that resist, but respecting the rights of those who make submission. Same armed protection and competent government. Same unimaginative, uncreative national character; but the same vague awe and envy of true civilization. The Pax Mongolica, right now, unites a bigger area, and brings more different peoples into stimulating contact, than that piddling Roman Empire ever imagined.

  “As for the Indians—remember, the Mongols are herdsmen. There won’t be anything like the unsolvable conflict between hunter and farmer that made the white man destroy the Indian. The Mongol hasn’t got race prejudices, either. And after a little fighting, the average Navajo, Cherokee, Seminole, Algonquin, Chippewa, Dakota, will be glad to submit and become allied. Why not? He’ll get horses, sheep, cattle, textiles, metallurgy. He’ll outnumber the invaders, and be on much more nearly equal terms with them than with white farmers and machine-age industry. And there’ll be the Chinese, I repeat, leavening the whole mixture, teaching civilization and sharpening wits…

  “Good God, Manse! When Columbus gets here, he’ll find his Grand Cham all right! The Sachem Khan of the strongest nation on earth!”

  Sandoval stopped. Everard listened to the gallows creak of branches in the wind. He looked into the night for a long while before he said, “It could be. Of course, we’d have to stay in this century till the crucial point was past. Our own world wouldn’t exist. Wouldn’t ever have existed.”

  “It wasn’t such a hell of a good world anyway,” said Sandoval, as if in dream.

  “You might think about your… oh… parents. They’d never have been born either.”

  “They lived in a tumbledown hogan. I saw my father crying once, because he couldn’t buy shoes for us in winter. My mother died of t.b.”

  Everard sat unstirring. It was Sandoval who shook himself and jumped to his feet with a rattling kind of laugh. “What have I been mumbling? It was just a yarn, Manse. Let’s turn in. Shall I take first watch?”

  Everard agreed, but lay long awake.

  5

  The scooter had jumped two days futureward and now hovered invisibly far above to the naked eye. Around it, the air was thin and sharply cold. Everard shivered as he adjusted the electronic telescope. Even at full magnification, the caravan was little more than specks toiling across green immensity. But no one else in the Western Hemisphere could have been riding horses.

  He twisted in the saddle to face his companion. “So now what?”

  Sandoval’s broad countenance was unreadable. “Well, if our demonstration didn’t work—”

  “It sure as hell didn’t! I swear they’re moving south twice as fast as before. Why?”

  “I’d have to know all of them a lot better than I do, as individuals, to give you a real answer, Manse. But essentially it must be that we challenged their courage. A warlike culture, nerve and hardihood its only absolute virtues… what choice have they got but to go on? If they retreated before a mere threat, they’d never be able to live with themselves.”

  “But Mongols aren’t idiots! They didn’t conquer everybody in sight by bull strength, but by jolly well understanding military principles better. Toktai should retreat, report to the Emperor what he saw, and organize a bigger expedition.”

  “The men at the ships can do that,” Sandoval reminded. “Now that I think about it, I see how grossly we underestimated Toktai. He must have set a date, presumably next year, for the ships to try and go home if he doesn’t return. When he finds something interesting along the way, like us, he can dispatch an Indian with a letter to the base camp.”

  Everard nodded. It occurred to him that he had been rushed into this job, all the way down the line, with never a pause to plan it as he should have done. Hence this botch. But how much blame must fall on the subconscious reluctance of John Sandoval? After a minute Everard said: “They may even have smelled something fishy about us. The Mongols were always good at psychological warfare.”

  “Could be. But what’s our next move?”

  Swoop down from above, fire a few blasts from the forty-first-century energy gun mounted in this timecycle, and that’s the end…No, by God, they can send me to the exile planet before I’ll do any such thing. There are decent limits.

  “We’ll rig up a more impressive demonstration,” said Everard.

  “And if it flops too?”

  “Shut up! Give it a chance!”

  “I was just wondering.” The wind harried under Sandoval’s words. “Why not cancel the expedition instead? Go back in time a couple of years and persuade Kublai Khan it isn’t worthwhile sending explorers eastward. Then all this would never have happened.”

  “You know Patrol regs forbid us to make historical changes.”

  “What do you call this we’re doing?”

  “Something specifically ordered by supreme HQ. Perhaps to correct some interference elsewhere, elsewhen. How should I know? I’m only a step on the evolutionary ladder. They have abilities a million years hence that I can’t even guess at.”

  “Father knows best,” murmured Sandoval.

  Everard set his jaws. “The fact remains,” he said, “the court of Kublai, the most powerful man on earth, is more important and crucial than anything here in America. No, you rang me in on this miserable job, and now I’ll pull rank on you if I must. Our orders are to make these people give up their exploration. What happens afterward is none of our business. So they don’t make it home. We won’t be the proximate cause, any more than you’re a murderer if you invite a man to dinner and he has a fatal accident on the way.”

  “Stop quacking and let’s get to work,” rapped Sandoval.

  Everard sent the scooter gliding forward. “See that hill?” he pointed after a while. “It’s on Toktai’s line of march, but I think he’ll camp a few miles short of it tonight, down in that little meadow by the stream. The hill will be in his plain view, though. Let’s set up shop on it.”

  “And make fireworks? It’ll have to be pretty fancy. Those Cathayans know about gunpowder. They even have military rockets.”

  “Small ones. I know. But when I assembled my gear for this trip, I packed away some fairly versatile gadgetry, in case my first attempt failed.”

  The hill bore a sparse crown of pine trees. Everard landed the scooter among them and began to unload boxes from its sizeable baggage compartments. Sandoval helped, wordless. The horses, Patrol trained, stepped calmly off the framework stalls which had borne them and started grazing along the slope.

  After a while the Indian broke his silence. “This isn’t my line of work. What are you rigging?”

  Everard patted the small machine he had half assembled. “It’s adapted from a weather-control system used in the Cold Centuries era upstairs. A potential distributor. It can make some of the damnedest lightning you ever saw, with thunder to match.”

  “Mmm… the great Mongol weakness.” Suddenly Sandoval grinned. “You win. We might as well relax and enjoy this.”

  “Fix us a supper, will you, while I put the gimmick together? No fire, naturally. We don’t want any mundane smoke.… Oh, yes, I also have a mirage projector. If you’ll change clothes and put on a hood or something at the appropriate moment, so you can’t be recognized, I’ll paint a mile-high picture of you, half as ugly as life.”

  “How about a p.a. system? Navajo chants can be fairly alarming, if you don’t know it’s just a yeibichai or whatever.”

  “Coming up!”

  The day waned. It grew murky under the pines; the air was chill and pungent. At last Everard devoured a sandwich and watched through his binoculars as the Mongol vanguard checked that campsite he had predicted. Others came riding in with their day’s catch of game and went to work cooking. The main body showed up at sundown, posted itself efficiently, and ate. Toktai was indeed pushing hard, using every daylight moment. As darkness closed down, Everard glimpsed outposts mounted and with strung bows. He could not keep up his own spirits, however hard he tried. He was bucking men who had shaken the earth.

  Early stars glittered above snowpeaks. It was time to begin work.

  “Got our horses tethered, Jack? They might panic. I’m fairly sure the Mongol horses will! Okay, here goes.” Everard flipped a main switch and squatted by the dimly lit control dials of his apparatus.

  First there was the palest blue flicker between earth and sky. Then the lightnings began, tongue after forked tongue leaping, trees smashed at a blow, the mountainsides rocking under their noise. Everard threw out ball lightning, spheres of flame which whirled and curvetted, trailing sparks, shooting across to the camp and exploding above it till the sky seemed white hot.

  Deafened and half blinded, he managed to project a sheet of fluorescing ionization. Like northern lights the great banners curled, bloody red and bone white, hissing under the repeated thunder cracks. Sandoval trod forth. He had stripped to his pants, daubed clay on his body in archaic patterns; his face was not veiled after all, but smeared with earth and twisted into something Everard would not have known. The machine scanned him and altered its output. That which stood forth against the aurora was taller than a mountain. It moved in a shuffling dance, from horizon to horizon and back to the sky, and it wailed and barked in a falsetto louder than thunder.

  Everard crouched beneath the lurid light, his fingers stiff on the control board. He knew a primitive fear of his own; the dance woke things in him that he had forgotten.

  Judas priest! If this doesn’t make them quit…

  His mind returned to him. He even looked at his watch. Half an hour… give them another fifteen minutes, in which the display tapered off… They’d surely stay in camp till dawn rather than blunder wildly out in the dark, they had that much discipline. So keep everything under wraps for several hours more, then administer the last stroke to their nerves by a single electric bolt smiting a tree right next to them… Everard waved Sandoval back. The Indian sat down, panting harder than his exertions seemed to warrant.

  When the noise was gone, Everard said, “Nice show, Jack.” His voice sounded tinny and strange in his ears.

  “I hadn’t done anything like that for years,” muttered Sandoval. He struck a match, startling noise in the quietness. The brief flame showed his lips gone thin. Then he shook out the match and only his cigarette-end glowed.

  “Nobody I knew, on the reservation, took that stuff seriously,” he went on after a moment. “A few of the older men wanted us boys to learn it to keep the custom alive, to remind us we were still a people. But mostly our idea was to pick up some change by dancing for tourists.”

  There was a longer pause. Everard doused the projector completely. In the murk that followed, Sandoval’s cigarette waxed and waned, a tiny red Algol.

  “Tourists!” he said at last.

  After more minutes: “Tonight I was dancing for a purpose. It meant something. I never felt that way before.”

  Everard was silent.

  Until one of the horses, which had plunged at its halter’s end during the performance and was still nervous, whinnied.

  Everard looked up. Night met his eyes. “Did you hear anything, Jack?”

  The flashlight beam speared him.

  For an instant he stared blinded at it. Then he sprang erect, cursing and snatching for his stun pistol. A shadow ran from behind one of the trees. It struck him in the ribs. He lurched back. The beam gun flew to his hand. He shot at random.

  The flashlight swept about once more. Everard glimpsed Sandoval. The Navajo had not donned his weapons again. Unarmed, he dodged the sweep of a Mongol blade. The swordsman ran after him. Sandoval reverted to Patrol judo. He went to one knee. Clumsy afoot, the Mongol slashed, missed, and ran straight into a shoulder block to the belly. Sandoval rose with the blow. The heel of his hand jolted upward to the Mongol’s chin. The helmeted head snapped back. Sandoval chopped a hand at the Adam’s apple, yanked the sword from its owner’s grasp, turned and parried a cut from behind.