«Saxon, you mean,» corrected Whitcomb, who had checked on the data himself. «Good many people confuse British and Saxons.»
«Almost as many as confuse Saxons and Jutes,» said Mainwethering blandly. «Kent was invaded from Jutland, I understand… Ah. Hm. Clothes here, gentlemen. And funds. And papers, all prepared for you. I sometimes think you field agents don’t appreciate how much work we have to do in the offices for even the smallest operation. Haw! Pardon. Have you a plan of campaign?»
«Yes.» Everard began stripping off his twentieth-century garments. «I think so. We both know enough about the Victorian era to get by. I’ll have to remain American, though… yes, I see you put that in my papers.»
Mainwethering looked mournful. «If the barrow incident has gotten into a famous piece of literature as you say, we will be getting a hundred memoranda about it. Yours happened to come first. Two others have arrived since, from 1923 and 1960. Dear me, how I wish I were allowed a robot secretary!»
Everard struggled with the awkward suit. It fitted him well enough, his measurements were on file in this office, but he hadn’t appreciated the relative comfort of his own fashions before. Damn that waistcoat! «Look here,» he said, «this business may be quite harmless. In fact, since we’re here now, it must have been harmless. Eh?»
«As of now,» said Mainwethering. «But consider. You two gentlemen go back to Jutish times and find the marauder. But you fail. Perhaps he shoots you before you can shoot him; perhaps he waylays those we send after you. Then he goes on to establish an industrial revolution or whatever he’s after. History changes. You, being back there before the change-point, still exist… if only as cadavers… but we up here have never been. This conversation never took place. As Horace puts it—»
«Never mind!» Whitcomb laughed. «We’ll investigate the barrow first, in this year, then pop back here and decide what’s next.» He bent over and began transferring equipment from a twentieth-century suitcase to a Gladstonian monstrosity of flowered cloth. A couple of guns, some physical and chemical apparatus which his own age had not invented, a tiny radio with which to call up the office in case of trouble.
Mainwethering consulted his Bradshaw. «You can get the 8:23 out of Charing Cross tomorrow morning,» he said. «Allow half an hour to get from here to the station.»
«Okay.» Everard and Whitcomb remounted their hopper and vanished. Mainwethering sighed, yawned, left instructions with his clerk, and went home. At 7:45 A.M. the clerk was there when the hopper materialized.
This was the first moment that the reality of time travel struck home to Everard. He had known it with the top of his mind, been duly impressed, but it was, for his emotions, merely exotic. Now, clopping through a London he did not know in a hansom cab (not a tourist-trap anachronism, but a working machine, dusty and battered), smelling an air which held more smoke than a twentieth-century city but no gasoline fumes, seeing the crowds which milled past—gentlemen in bowlers and top hats, sooty navvies, long-skirted women, and not actors but real, talking, perspiring, laughing and somber human beings off on real business—it hit him with full force that he was here. At this moment his mother had not been born, his grandparents were young couples just getting settled to harness, Grover Cleveland was President of the United States and Victoria was Queen of England, Kipling was writing and the last Indian uprisings in America yet to come… It was like a blow on the head.
Whitcomb took it more calmly, but his eyes were never still as he watched this day of England’s glory. «I begin to understand,» he murmured. «They never have agreed whether this was a period of unnatural, stuffy convention and thinly veneered brutality, or the last flower of Western civilization before it started going to seed. Just seeing these people makes me realize; it was everything they have said about it, good and bad, because it wasn’t a simple thing happening to everyone, but millions of individual lives.»
«Sure,» said Everard. «That must be true of every age.»
The train was almost familiar, not very different from the carriages of British railways anno 1954, which gave Whitcomb occasion for sardonic remarks about inviolable traditions. In a couple of hours it let them off at a sleepy village station among carefully tended flower gardens, where they engaged a buggy to drive them to the Wyndham estate.
A polite constable admitted them after a few questions. They were passing themselves off as archaeologists, Everard from America and Whitcomb from Australia, who had been quite anxious to meet Lord Wyndham and were shocked by his tragic end. Mainwethering, who seemed to have tentacles everywhere, had supplied them with letters of introduction from a well-known authority at the British Museum. The inspector from Scotland Yard agreed to let them look at the barrow—«The case is solved, gentlemen, there are no more clues, even if my colleague does not agree, hah, hah!» The private agent smiled sourly and watched them with a narrow eye as they approached the mound; he was tall, thin, hawk-faced, and accompanied by a burly, mustached fellow with a limp who seemed a kind of amanuensis.
The barrow was long and high, covered with grass save where a raw scar showed excavation to the funeral chamber. This had been lined with rough-hewn timbers but had long ago collapsed; fragments of what had been wood still lay on the dirt. «The newspapers mentioned something about a metal casket,» said Everard. «I wonder if we might have a look at it too?»
The inspector nodded agreeably and led them off to an outbuilding where the major finds were laid forth on a table. Except for the box, they were only fragments of corroded metal and crumbled bone.
«Hm,» said Whitcomb. His gaze was thoughtful on the sleek, bare face of the small chest. It shimmered bluely, some time-proof alloy yet to be discovered. «Most unusual. Not primitive at all. You’d almost think it had been machined, eh?»
Everard approached it warily. He had a pretty good idea of what was inside, and all the caution about such matters natural to a citizen of the soi-disant Atomic Age. Pulling a counter out of his bag, he aimed it at the box. Its needle wavered, not much but…
«Interesting item there,» said the inspector. «May I ask what it is?»
«An experimental electroscope,» lied Everard. Carefully, he threw back the lid and held the counter above the box.
God! There was enough radioactivity inside to kill a man in a day! He had just a glimpse of heavy, dull-shining ingots before he slammed the lid down again. «Be careful with that stuff,» he said shakily. Praise heaven, whoever carried that devil’s load had come from an age when they knew how to block off radiation!
The private detective had come up behind them, noiselessly. A hunter’s look grew on his keen face. «So you recognized the contents, sir?» he asked, quietly.
«Yes. I think so.» Everard remembered that Becquerel would not discover radioactivity for almost two years; even X rays were still more than a year in the future. He had to be cautious. «That is… in Indian territory I’ve heard stories about an ore like this which is poisonous—»
«Most interesting.» The detective began to stuff a big-bowled pipe. «Like mercury vapor, what?»
«So Rotherhithe placed that box in the grave, did he?» muttered the inspector.
«Don’t be ridiculous!» snapped the detective. «I have three lines of conclusive proof that Rotherhithe is entirely innocent. What puzzled me was the actual cause of his lordship’s death. But if, as this gentleman says, there happened to be a deadly poison buried in that mound… to discourage grave-robbers? I wonder, though, how the old Saxons came by an American mineral. Perhaps there is something to these theories about early Phoenician voyages across the Atlantic. I have done a little research on a notion of mine that there are Chaldean elements in the Cornish language, and this seems to bear me out.»