Toktai sat down across the fire. He watched Everard pour a shot into the canteen cap and toss it off. “Smells odd,” he said.

  “Try.” The Patrolman handed over the canteen.

  It was an impulse of sheer loneliness. Toktai wasn’t such a bad sort. Not on his own terms. And when you sit by your dying partner, you’d bouse with the devil himself, just to keep from thinking. The Mongol sniffed dubiously, looked back at Everard, paused, and then raised the bottle to his lips with a bravura gesture.

  “Whoo-oo-oo!”

  Everard scrambled to catch the flask before too much was spilled. Toktai gasped and spat. One guardsman nocked an arrow, the other sprang to lay a hard hand on Everard’s shoulder. A sword gleamed high. “It’s not poison!” the Patrolman exclaimed. “It’s only too strong for him. See, I’ll drink some more myself.”

  Toktai waved the guards back and glared from watery eyes. “What do you make that of?” he choked. “Dragon’s blood?”

  “Barley.” Everard didn’t feel like explaining distillation.

  He poured himself another slug. “Go ahead, drink your mare’s milk.”

  Toktai smacked his lips. “It does warm you up, doesn’t it? Like pepper.” He reached out a grimy hand. “Give me some more.”

  Everard sat still for a few seconds. “Well?” growled Toktai.

  The Patrolman shook his head. “I told you, it’s too strong for Mongols.” “What? See here, you whey-faced son of a Turk—”

  “On your head be it, then. I warn you fairly, with your men here as witnesses, you will be sick tomorrow.”

  Toktai guzzled heartily, belched, and passed the canteen back. “Nonsense. I simply wasn’t prepared for it, the first time. Drink up!”

  Everard took his time. Toktai grew impatient. “Hurry along there. No, give me the other flask.”

  “Very well. You are the chief. But I beg you, don’t try to match me draught for draught. You can’t do it.”

  “What do you mean, I can’t do it? Why, I’ve drunk twenty men senseless in Karakorum. None of your gutless Chinks, either: they were all Mongols.” Toktai poured down a couple of ounces more.

  Everard sipped with care. But he hardly felt the effect anyway, save as a burning along his gullet. He was too tightly strung. Suddenly he was glimpsing what might be a way out.

  “Here, it’s a cold night,” he said, and offered his canteen to the nearest guardsman. “You lads have one to keep you warm.”

  Toktai looked up, a trifle muzzily. “Good stuff, this,” he objected. “Too good for…” He remembered himself and snapped his words off short. Cruel and absolute the Mongol Empire might be, but officers shared equally with the humblest of their men.

  The warrior grabbed the jug, giving his chief a resentful look, and slanted it to his mouth. “Easy, there,” said Everard. “It’s heady.”

  “Nothin’s heady to me.” Toktai poured a further dose into himself. “Sober as a bonze.” He wagged his finger. “That’s the trouble bein’ a Mongol. You’re so hardy you can’t get drunk.”

  “Are you bragging or complaining?” said Everard. The first warrior fanned his tongue, resumed a stance of alertness, and passed the bottle to his companion. Toktai hoisted the other canteen again.

  “Ahhh!” He stared, owlish. “That was fine. Well, better get to sleep now. Give him back his liquor, men.”

  Everard’s throat tightened. But he managed to leer. “Yes, thanks, I’ll want some more,” he said. “I’m glad you realize you can’t take it.”

  “Wha’ d’you mean?” Toktai glared at him. “No such thing as too much. Not for a Mongol!” He glugged afresh. The first guardsman received the other flask and took a hasty snort before it should be too late.

  Everard sucked in a shaken breath. It might work out after all. It might.

  Toktai was used to carousing. There was no doubt that he or his men could handle kumiss, wine, ale, mead, kvass, that thin beer miscalled rice wine—any beverage of this era. They’d know when they’d had enough, say good night, and walk a straight line to their bedrolls. The trouble was, no substance merely fermented can get over about twenty-four proof—the process is stopped by its waste product—and most of what they brewed in the thirteenth century ran well under five percent alcohol, with a high foodstuff content to boot.

  Scotch whisky is in quite a different class. If you try to drink that like beer, or even like wine, you are in trouble. Your judgment will be gone before you’ve noticed its absence, and consciousness follows soon after.

  Everard reached for the canteen held by one of the guards. “Give me that!” he said. “You’ll drink it all up!”

  The warrior grinned and took another long gulp, before passing it on to his fellow. Everard stood up and made an undignified scrabble for it. A guard poked him in the stomach. He went over on his backside. The Mongols bawled laughter, leaning on each other. So good a joke called for another drink.

  When Toktai folded, Everard alone noticed. The Noyon slid from a cross-legged to a recumbent position. The fire sputtered up long enough to show a silly smile on his face. Everard squatted wire-tense.

  The end of one sentry came a few minutes later. He reeled, went on all fours, and began to jettison his dinner. The other one turned, blinking, fumbling after a sword. “Wha’s mattuh?” he groaned. “Wha’ yuh done? Poison?”

  Everard moved.

  He had hopped over the fire and fallen on Toktai before the last guard realized it. The Mongol stumbled forward, crying out. Everard found Toktai’s sword. It flashed from the scabbard as he bounded up. The warrior got his own blade aloft. Everard didn’t like to kill a nearly helpless man. He stepped close, knocked the other weapon aside, and his fist clopped. The Mongol sank to his knees, retched, and slept.

  Everard bounded away. Men stirred in the dark, calling. He heard hoofs drum, one of the mounted sentries racing to investigate. Somebody took a brand from an almost extinct fire and whirled it till it flared. Everard went flat on his belly.

  A warrior pelted by, not seeing him in the brush. He glided toward deeper darknesses. A yell behind him, a machine-gun volley of curses, told that someone had found the Noyon.

  Everard stood up and began to run.

  The horses had been hobbled and turned out under guard as usual. They were a dark mass on the plain, which lay gray-white beneath a sky crowded with sharp stars. Everard saw one of the Mongol watchers gallop to meet him. A voice barked: “What’s happening?”

  He pitched his answer high. “Attack on camp!” It was only to gain time, lest the horseman recognize him and fire an arrow. He crouched, visible as a hunched and cloaked shape. The Mongol reined in with a spurt of dust. Everard sprang.

  He got hold of the pony’s bridle before he was recognized. Then the sentry yelled and drew sword. He hewed downward. But Everard was on the left side. The blow from above came awkwardly, easily parried. Everard chopped in return and felt his edge go into meat. The horse reared in alarm. Its rider fell from the saddle. He rolled over and staggered up again, bellowing. Everard already had one foot in a pan-shaped stirrup. The Mongol limped toward him, blood running black in that light from a wounded leg. Everard mounted and laid the flat of his own blade on the horse’s crupper.

  He got going toward the herd. Another rider pounded to intercept him. Everard ducked. An arrow buzzed where he had been. The stolen pony plunged, fighting its unfamiliar burden. Everard needed a minute to get it under control again. The archer might have taken him then, by coming up and going at it hand to hand. But habit sent the man past at a gallop, shooting. He missed in the dimness. Before he could turn, Everard was out of night view.

  The Patrolman uncoiled a lariat at the saddlebow and broke into the skittish herd. He roped the nearest animal, which accepted it with blessed meekness. Leaning over, he slashed the hobbles with his sword and rode off, leading the remount. They came out the other side of the herd and started north.

  A stern chase is a long chase, Everard told himself inappropriately. But they’re bound to overhaul me if I don’t lose ’em. Let’s see, if I remember my geography, the lava beds lie northwest of here.

  He cast a glance behind. No one pursued yet. They’d need a while to organize themselves. However…

  Thin lightnings winked from above. The cloven air boomed behind them. He felt a chill, deeper than the night cold. But he eased his pace. There was no more reason for hurry. That must be Manse Everard—

  —who had returned to the Patrol vehicle and ridden it south in space and backward in time to this same instant.

  That was cutting it fine, he thought. Patrol doctrine frowned on helping oneself thus. Too much danger of a close causal loop, or of tangling past and future.

  But in this case, I’ll get away with it. No reprimands, even. Because it’s to rescue Jack Sandoval, not myself. I’ve already gotten free. I could shake pursuit in the mountains, which I know and the Mongols don’t. The time-hopping is only to save my friend’s life.

  Besides, (an upsurging bitterness), what’s this whole mission been, except the future doubling back to create its own past? Without us, the Mongols might well have taken over America; and then there’d never have been any us.

  The sky was enormous, crystalline black; you rarely saw that many stars. The Great Bear flashed above hoar earth; hoofbeats rang through silence. Everard had not felt so alone before now.

  “And what am I doing back there?” he asked aloud. The answer came to him, and he eased a little, fell into the rhythm of his horses and started eating miles. He wanted to get this over with. But what he must do turned out to be less bad than he had feared.

  Toktai and Li Tai-Tsung never came home. But that was not because they perished at sea or in the forests. It was because a sorcerer rode down from heaven and killed all their horses with thunderbolts, and smashed and burned their ships in the river mouth. No Chinese sailor would venture onto those tricky seas in whatever clumsy vessel could be built here; no Mongol would think it possible to go home on foot. Indeed, it probably wasn’t. The expedition would stay, marry into the Indians, live out their days. Chinook, Tlingit, Nootka, all the potlatch tribes, with their big seagoing canoes, lodges and copperworking, furs and cloths and haughtiness…well, a Mongol Noyon, even a Confucian scholar might live less happily and usefully than in creating such a life for such a race.

  Everard nodded to himself. So much for that. What was harder to take than the thwarting of Toktai’s bloodthirsty ambitions was the truth about his own corps, which was his own family and nation and reason for living. The distant supermen turned out to be not quite such idealists after all. They weren’t merely safeguarding a perhaps divinely ordained history which led to them. Here and there they, too, meddled, to create their own past…Don’t ask if there ever was any “original” scheme of things. Keep your mind shut. Regard the rutted road mankind had to travel, and tell yourself that if it could be better in places, in other places it could be worse.

  “It may be a crooked game,” said Everard, “but it’s the only one in town.”

  His voice came so loud, in that huge rime-white land, that he didn’t speak any more. He clucked at his horse and rode a little faster northward.

  UNTITLED SONG

  (Melody obvious)

  Black bodies give off radiation,

  and ought to continuously.

  Black bodies give off radiation,

  but do it by Planck’s theory.

  (Chorus)

  Bring back, bring back,

  oh, bring back that old continuity!

  Bring back, bring back,

  oh, bring back Clerk Maxwell to me!

  Though now we have Schrodinger functions,

  dividing up h by 2π,

  that damn differential equation

  still has no solution for ψ.

  (Chorus)

  SUPERNOVA

  For who knows how long, the star had orbited quietly in the wilderness between Betelgeuse and Rigel. It was rather more massive than average—about half again as much as Sol—and shone with corresponding intensity, white-hot, corona and prominences a terrible glory. But there are no few like it. A ship of the first Grand Survey noted its existence. However, the crew were more interested in a neighbor sun which had planets, and could not linger long in that system either. The galaxy is too big; their purpose was to get some hint about this spiral arm which we inhabit. Thus certain spectroscopic omens escaped their notice.

  No one returned thither for a pair of centuries. Technic civilization had more than it could handle, let alone comprehend, in the millions of stars closer to home. So the fact remained unsuspected that this one was older than normal for its type in its region, must indeed have wandered in from other parts. Not that it was very ancient, astronomically speaking. But the great childless suns evolve fast and strangely.

  By chance, though, a scout from the Polesotechnic League, exploring far in search of new markets, was passing within a light-year when the star exploded.

  Say instead—insofar as simultaneity has any meaning across interstellar distances—that the death agony had occurred some months before. Even more fierce, thermonuclear reaction had burned up the last hydrogen at the center. Unbalanced by radiation pressure, the outer layers collapsed beneath their own weight. Forces were released which triggered a wholly different order of atomic fusions. New elements came into being, not only those which may be found in the planets but also the short-lived transuranics; for a while, technetium itself dominated that anarchy. Neutrons and neutrinos flooded forth, carrying with them the last balancing energy. Compression turned into catastrophe. At the brief peak, the supernova was as radiant as its entire galaxy.

  So close, the ship’s personnel would have died had she not been in hyperdrive. They did not remain there. A dangerous amount of radiation was still touching them between quantum microjumps. And they were not equipped to study the phenomenon. It is rare; this was the first chance in our history to observe a new supernova. Earth was too remote to help. But the scientific colony on Catawrayannis could be reached fairly soon. It could dispatch laboratory craft.

  Now to track in detail what was going to happen, considerable resources were demanded. Among these were a place where men could live and instruments be made to order as the need for them arose. Such things could not well be sent from the usual factories. By the time they arrived, the wave front carrying information about rapidly progressing events would have traveled so far that inverse-square enfeeblement would create maddening inaccuracies.

  But a little beyond one parsec from the star—an excellent distance for observation over a period of years—was a G-type sun. One of its planets was terrestroid to numerous points of classification, both physically and biochemically. Survey records showed that the most advanced culture on it was at the verge of an industrial-scientific revolution. Ideal!

  Except, to be sure, that Survey’s information was less than sketchy, and two centuries out of date.

  “No.”

  Master Merchant David Falkayn stepped backward in startlement. The four nearest guards clutched at their pistols. Peripherally and profanely, Falkayn wondered what canon he had violated now.

  “Beg, uh, beg pardon?” he said.

  Morruchan Long-Ax, the Hand of the Vach Dathyr, leaned forward on his dais. He was big even for a Merseian, which meant that he overtopped Falkayn’s rangy height by a good fifteen centimeters. Long, shoulder-flared orange robes and horned miter made his bulk almost overwhelming. Beneath them, he was approximately anthropoid, save for a slanting posture counterbalanced by the tail which, with his booted feet, made a tripod for him to sit on. The skin was green, faintly scaled, totally hairless. A spiky ridge ran from the top of his skull to the end of that tail. Instead of earflaps, he had deep convolutions in his head. But the face was manlike, in a heavy-boned fashion, and the physiology was essentially mammalian.

  How familiar the mind was, behind those jet eyes, Falkayn did not know.

  The harsh basso said: “You shall not take the rule of this world. If we surrendered the right and freehold they won, the God would cast back the souls of our ancestors to shriek at us.”

  Falkayn’s glance flickered around. He had seldom felt so alone. The audience chamber of Castle Afon stretched high and gaunt, proportioned like nothing men had ever built. Curiously woven tapestries on the stone walls, between windows arched at both top and bottom, and battle banners hung from the rafters, did little to stop echoes. The troopers lining the hall, down to a hearth whose fire could have roasted an elephant, wore armor and helmets with demon masks. The guns which they added to curved swords and barbed pikes did not seem out of place. Rather, what appeared unattainably far was a glimpse of ice-blue sky outside.

  The air was chill with winter. Gravity was little higher than Terrestrial, but Falkayn felt it dragging at him.

  He straightened. He had his own sidearm, no chemical slug-thrower but an energy weapon. Adzel, abroad in the city, and Chee Lan, aboard the ship, were listening in via the transceiver on his wrist. And the ship had power to level all Ardaig. Morruchan must realize as much.

  But he had to be made to cooperate.

  Falkayn picked his words with care: “I pray forgiveness, Hand, if perchance in mine ignorance I misuse thy…uh…your tongue. Naught was intended save friendliness. Hither bring I news of peril impending, for the which ye must busk yourselves betimes less ye lose everything ye possess. My folk would fain show your folk what to do. So vast is the striving needed, and so scant the time, that perforce ye must take our counsel. Else can we be of no avail. But never will we act as conquerors. ’Twere not simply an evil deed, but ’twould boot us naught, whose trafficking is with many worlds. Nay, we would be brothers, come to help in a day of sore need.”

  Morruchan scowled and rubbed his chin. “Say on, then,” he replied. “Frankly, I am dubious. You claim…Valenderay is about to become a supernova—”