Worlds of Maybe Page 17

  Everard stood at the door, looking out. All he could see was a narrow concrete hall and the cell across it. The map of Ireland stared cheerfully through those bars and called something unintelligible.

  “What’s happened?” Van Sarawak’s slim body shuddered.

  “I don’t know,” said Everard very slowly. “I just don’t know. That machine was supposed to be foolproof, but maybe were bigger fools than they allowed for.”

  “There’s no such place as this,” said van Sarawak desperately. “A dream?” He pinched himself and lifted a rueful smile. His lip was cut and swelling, and he had the start of a gorgeous shiner. “Logically, my friend, a pinch is no test of reality, but it has a certain reassuring effect.”

  “I wish it didn’t,” said Everard.

  He grabbed the rails, and the chain between his wrists rattled thinly. “Could the controls have been off, in spite of everything? Is there any city, anywhen on Earth—because I’m damned sure this is Earth, at least—any city, however obscure, which was ever like this?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” whispered van Sarawak.

  Everard hung onto his sanity and rallied all the mental training the Patrol had ever given him. That included total recall . . . and he had studied history, even the history of ages he had never seen, with a thoroughness that should have earned him several Ph.D.’s.

  “No,” he said at last. “Kilted brachycephalic whites, mixed up with Indians and using steam-driven automobiles, haven’t happened.”

  “Coordinator Stantel V,” said van Sarawak faintly. “Thirty-eighth century. The Great Experimenter—colonies reproducing past societies—”

  “Not any like this,” said Everard.

  The truth was growing in him like a cancer, and he would have traded his soul to know otherwise. It took all the will and strength he had to keep from screaming and bashing his brains out against the wall.

  “We’ll have to see,” he said in a flat tone.

  A policeman—Everard supposed they were in the hands of the law—brought them a meal and tried to talk to them. Van Sarawak said the language sounded Celtic, but he couldn’t make out more than a few words. The meal wasn’t bad.

  Toward evening, they were led off to a washroom and got cleaned up under official guns. Everard studied the weapons: eight-shot revolvers and long-barreled rifles. The facilities and the firearms, as well as the smell, suggested a technology roughly equivalent to the 19th century. There were gas lights, and Everard noticed that the brackets were cast in an elaborate intertwined pattern of vines and snakes.

  On the way back, he spied a couple of signs on the walls. The script was obviously Semitic, but though van Sarawak had some knowledge of Hebrew through dealing with the Jewish colonies on Venus, he couldn’t read it.

  Locked in again, they saw the other prisoners led off to do their own washing—a surprisingly merry crowd of bums, toughs, and drunks. “Seems we get special treatment,” remarked van Sarawak.

  “Hardly astonishing,” said Everard. “What would you do with total strangers who appeared out of nowhere and used unheard-of weapons?”

  Van Sarawak’s face turned to him with an unaccustomed grimness. “Are you thinking what I am thinking?” he asked.

  “Probably.”

  The Venusian’s mouth twisted, and horror rode his voice: “Another time line. Somebody has managed to change history.”

  Everard nodded. There was nothing else to do.

  They spent an unhappy night. It would have been a boon to sleep, but the other cells were too noisy. Discipline seemed to be lax here. Also, there were bedbugs.

  After a bleary breakfast, Everard and van Sarawak were allowed to wash again and shave. Then a ten-man guard marched them into an office and planted itself around the walls.

  They sat down before a desk and waited. It was some time till the big wheels showed up. There were two: a white-haired, ruddy-cheeked man in cuirass and green tunic, presumably the chief of police; and a lean, hard-faced half-breed, gray-haired but black-mustached, wearing a blue tunic, a tarn o’shanter, and insignia of rank—a golden bull’s head. He would have had a certain hawklike dignity had it not been for the skinny hairy legs beneath his kilt. He was followed by younger men, armed and uniformed, who took up their places behind him as he sat down.

  Everard leaned over and whispered: “The military, I’ll bet. We seem to be of interest.”

  Van Sarawak nodded sickly.

  The police chief cleared his throat with conscious importance and said something to the—general? The latter turned impatiently and addressed himself to the prisoners. He barked his words out with a clarity that helped Everard get the phonemes, but with a manner that was not exactly reassuring.

  Somewhere along the line, communication would have to be established. Everard pointed to himself. “Manse Everard,” he said. Van Sarawak followed the lead and introduced himself similarly.

  The general started and went into a huddle with the chief. Turning back, he snapped: “Yrn Cimberland?

  “No spikka da Inglees,” said Everard.

  “Gothland? Sveal Nairobi Teutonach?"

  “Those names—if they are names—they sound a little Germanic, don’t they?” muttered van Sarawak.

  “So do our names, come to think of it,” answered Everard tautly. “Maybe they think were Germans.” To the general: “Sprechen Sie deutsch?” Blankness rewarded him. “Taler ni svensk? Niederlands? Dönsk tunga? Parlez-vous français? Goddammit, ¿habla usted español?”

  The police chief cleared his throat again and pointed to himself. “Cadwallader Mac Barca,” he said. The general hight Cynyth ap Ceorn.

  “Celtic, all right,” said Everard. Sweat prickled under his arms. “But just to make sure—” He pointed inquiringly at a few other men, being rewarded with monickers like Hamilcar ap Angus, Asshur yr Cathlann, and Finn O’Carthia. “No . . . there’s a distinct Semitic element here too. That fits in with their alphabet—”

  Van Sarawak’s mouth was dry. “Try Classical languages,” he urged harshly. “Maybe we can find out where this time went awry.”

  "Loquerisne latine?" That drew a blank. “Ελλενιξυσ?"

  Everard shook his head. “They’ve at least heard of Greek,” he said slowly. He tried a few more words, but no one knew the tongue.

  Ap Ceorn growled something and spoke to one of his men, who bowed and went out. There was a long silence.

  Everard found himself losing personal fear. He was in a bad spot, yes, and might not live very long; but anything that happened to him was ridiculously insignificant compared to what had been done to the entire world.

  God in Heaven! To the universe!

  He couldn’t grasp it. Sharp in his mind rose the land he knew, broad plains and tall mountains and prideful cities. There was the grave image of his father, and yet he remembered being a small child and lifted up skyward while his father laughed beneath him. And his mother—they had a good life together, those two.

  There had been a girl he knew in college, the sweetest little wench a man could ever have been privileged to walk in the rain with; and there was Bernie Aaron-son, the long nights of beer and smoke and talk; Phil Brackney, who had picked him out of the mud in France when machine guns were raking a ruined field; Charlie and Mary Whitcomb, high tea and a low little fire in Victoria’s London; a dog he had once had; the austere cantos of Dante and the ringing thunder of Shakespeare; the glory which was York Minster and the Golden Gate Bridge—Christ, a man’s life, and the lives of who knew how many billions of human creatures, toiling and suffering and laughing and going down into dust to leave their sons behind them—It had never been!

  He shook his head, dazed with grief, and sat devoid of real understanding.

  The soldier came back with a map and spread it out on the desk. Ap Ceorn gestured curtly, and Everard and van Sarawak bent over it.

  Yes . . . Earth, a Mercator projection, though eidetic memory showed that the mapping was rather crude. The continents a
nd islands were there in bright colors, but the nations were something else.

  “Can you read those names, Van?”

  “I can make a guess, on the basis of the Hebraic alphabet,” said the Venusian. He read out the alien words, filling in the gaps of his knowledge with what sounded logical.

  North America down to about Colombia was Ynys yr Afallon, seemingly one country divided into states. South America was a big realm, Huy Braseal, with some smaller countries whose names looked Indian. Australasia, Indonesia, Borneo, Burma, eastern India, and a good deal of the Pacific belonged to Hinduraj. Afghanistan and the rest of India were Punjab. Han included China, Korea, Japan, and eastern Siberia. Littorn owned the rest of Russia and reached well into Europe. The British Isles were Brittys, France and the Low Countries Gallis, the Iberian peninsula Celtan. Central Europe and the Balkans were divided into many small states, some of which had Hunnish-looking names. Switzerland and Austria made up Helve ti; Italy was Cimberland; the Scandinavian peninsula was split down the middle, Svea in the north and Gothland in the south. North Africa looked like a confederacy, reaching from Senegal to Suez and nearly to the equator under the name of Carthagalann; the southern continent was partitioned among small countries, many of which had purely African titles. The Near East held Parthia and Arabia.

  Van Sarawak looked up. There were tears in his eyes.

  Ap Ceorn snarled a question and waved his finger about. He wanted to know where they were from.

  Everard shrugged and pointed skyward. The one thing he could not admit was the truth. He and van Sarawak had agreed to claim they were from some other planet, since this world hardly had space travel.

  Ap Ceorn spoke to the chief, who nodded and replied. The prisoners were returned to their cell.

  “And now what?” Van Sarawak slumped on his cot and stared at the floor.

  “We play along,” said Everard grayly. “We do anything to get at our scooter and escape. Once were free, we can take stock.”

  “But what happened?”

  “I don’t know, I tell you! Offhand it looks as if something upset the Roman Empire and the Celts took over, but I couldn’t say what it was.” Everard prowled the room. There was a bitter determination growing in him.

  “Remember your basic theory,” he said. “Events are the result of a complex. That’s why it’s so hard to change history. If I went back to, say, the Middle Ages, and shot one of FDR’s Dutch forebears, he’d still be born in the Twentieth Century—because he and his genes resulted from the entire world of his ancestors, and there’d have been compensation. The first case I ever worked on was an attempt to alter things in the Fifth Century; we spotted evidence of it in the Twentieth, and went back and stopped the scheme.

  “But every so often, there must be a really key event. Only with hindsight can we tell what it was, but some one happening was a nexus of so many world lines that its outcome was decisive for the whole future.

  “Somehow, for some reason, somebody has ripped up one of those events back in the past.”

  “No more Hesperus City,” whispered van Sarawak. “No more sitting by the canals in the blue twilight, no more Aphrodite vintages, no more—did you know I had a sister on Venus?”

  “Shut up!” Everard almost shouted it. “I know. What counts is what to do.

  “Look,” he went on after a moment, “the Patrol and the Daneelians are wiped out. But such of the Patrol offices and resorts as antedate the switchpoint haven’t been affected. There must be a few hundred agents we can rally.”

  “If we can get out of here.”

  “We can find that key event and stop whatever interference there was with it. We’ve got to!”

  “A pleasant thought,” mumbled van Sarawak, “but—”

  Feet tramped outside, and a key clicked in the lock. The prisoners backed away. Then, all at once, van Sarawak was bowing and beaming and spilling gallantries. Even Everard had to gape.

  The girl who entered in front of three soldiers was a knockout. She was tall, with a sweep of rusty-red hair past her shoulders to the slim waist; her eyes were green and alight, her face came from all the Irish colleens who had ever lived, the long white dress was snug around a figure meant to stand on the walls of Troy. Everard noticed vaguely that this time line used cosmetics, but she had small need of them. He paid no attention to the gold and amber of her jewelry, or to the guns behind her.

  She smiled, a little timidly, and spoke: “Can you understand me? It was thought you might know Greek—”

  The language was classical rather than modern. Everard, who had once had a job in Alexandrine times, could follow it through her accent if he paid close heed—which was inevitable anyway.

  “Indeed I do,” he replied, his words stumbling over each other.

  “What are you snakkering?” demanded van Sarawak.

  “Ancient Greek,” said Everard.

  “It would be,” mourned van Sarawak. His despair seemed to have vanished, and his eyes bugged.

  Everard introduced himself and his companion. The girl said her name was Deirdre Mac Morn. “Oh, no,” groaned van Sarawak. “This is too much. Manse, you’ve got to teach me Greek, and fast.”

  “Shut up,” said Everard. “This is serious business.”

  “Well, but why should you have all the pleasure—”

  Everard ignored him and invited the girl to sit down. He joined her on a cot, while the other Patrolman hovered unhappily close. The guards kept their weapons ready.

  “Is Greek still a living language?” asked Everard.

  “Only in Parthia, and there it is most corrupt,” said Deirdre. “I am a Classical scholar, among other things. Saorann ap Ceorn is my uncle, so he asked me to see if I could talk with you. There are not many in Afallon who know the Attic tongue.”

  “Well . . .” Everard suppressed a silly grin. “I am most grateful to your uncle.”

  Her eyes rested gravely on him. “Where are you from? And how does it happen that you speak only Greek, of all known languages?”

  “I speak Latin too.”

  “Latin?” she frowned briefly. “Oh, yes. The Roman speech, was it not? Im afraid you’ll find no one who knows much about it.”

  “Greek will do,” said Everard.

  “But you have not told me whence you came,” she insisted.

  Everard shrugged. “We’ve not been treated very courteously,” he hinted.

  “Oh . . . I’m sorry.” It seemed genuine. “But our people are so excitable—especially now, with the international situation what it is. And when you two appeared out of thin air—”

  Everard nodded grimly. The international situation? That had a familiar ring. “What do you mean?” he inquired.

  “Oh, surely ... of course you know. With Huy Bra-seal and Hinduraj about to go to war, and all of us wondering what will happen—It is not easy to be a small power.”

  “A small power? But I saw a map, and Afallon looked big enough to me.”

  “We wore ourselves out two hundred years ago, in the great war with Littorn. Now none of our confederated states can agree on a single policy.” Deirdre looked directly into his eyes. “What is this ignorance of yours?”

  Everard swallowed and said: “Were from another world.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. A . . . planet of Sirius.”

  “But Sirius is a star!”

  “Of course.”

  “How can a star have planets?”

  “How—But it does! A star is a sun like—”

  Deirdre shrank back and made a sign with her finger. “The Great Baal aid us,” she whispered. “Either you are mad, or—The stars are mounted in a crystal sphere.”

  Oh, no! Everard asked slowly : “What of the planets you can see—Mars and Venus and—”

  “I know not those names. If you mean Moloch, Ashtoreth, and the rest, of course they are worlds like ours. One holds the spirits of the dead, one is the home of witches, one—”

  All this and steam cars
too. Everard smiled shakily. “If you’ll not believe me, then what do you think?” Deirdre regarded him with large eyes. “I think you must be sorcerers,” she said.

  There was no answer to that. Everard asked a few weak questions, but learned little more than that this city was Catuvellaunan, a trading and manufacturing center; Deirdre estimated its population at two million, and that of all Afallon at fifty millions, but it was only a guess—they didn’t take censuses in this world.

  The prisoners’ fate was also indeterminate. Their machine and other possessions had been sequestrated by the military, but nobody dared to monkey with them, and treatment of the owners was being hotly debated. Everard got the impression that all government, including the leadership of the armed forces, was a sloppy process of individualistic wrangling. Afallon itself was the loosest of confederacies, built out of former nations—Brittic colonies and Indians who had adopted white culture—all jealous of their rights. The old Mayan Empire, destroyed in a war with Texas (Tehannach) and annexed, had not forgotten its time of glory, and sent the most rambunctious delegates of all to the Council of Suffetes.

  The Mayans wanted an alliance with Huy Braseal, perhaps out of friendship for fellow Indians. The West Coast states, fearful of Hinduraj, were toadies of the Southeast Asian empire. The Middle West—of course—was isolationist, and the Eastern states were torn every which way but inclined to follow the lead of Brittys.

  When he gathered that slavery existed here, though not on racial lines, Everard wondered briefly if the guilty time travelers might not have been Dixiecrats.

  Enough! He had his own and Van’s necks to think about. “We are from Sirius,” he declared loftily. “Your ideas about the stars are mistaken. We came as peaceful explorers, and if we are molested there will be others of our kind to take vengeance.”

  Deirdre looked so unhappy that he felt conscience-stricken. “Will you spare the children?” she whispered. “They had nothing to do with it.” Everard could imagine the frightful vision in her head, helpless captives led off in chains to the slave markets of a world of witches.