Everard felt guilty about what he was doing to the science of archaeology. Oh, well, this box was going to be dumped in the Channel and forgotten. He and Whitcomb made an excuse to leave as soon as possible.
On the way back to London, when they were safely alone in their compartment, the Englishman took out a moldering fragment of wood. «Slipped this into my pocket at the barrow,» he said. «It’ll help us date the thing. Hand me that radiocarbon counter, will you?» He popped the wood into the device, turned some knobs, and read off the answer. «One thousand, four hundred and thirty years, plus or minus about ten. The mound went up around… um… A.D. 464, then, when the Jutes were just getting established in Kent.»
«If those ingots are still that hellish after so long,» murmured Everard, «I wonder what they were like originally? Hard to see how you could have that much activity with such a long half-life, but then, up in the future they can do things with the atom my period hasn’t dreamed of.»
Turning in their report to Mainwethering, they spent a day sight-seeing while he sent messages across time and activated the great machine of the Patrol. Everard was interested in Victorian London, almost captivated in spite of the grime and poverty. Whitcomb got a faraway look in his eyes. «I’d like to have lived here,» he said.
«Yeah? With their medicine and dentistry?»
«And no bombs falling.» Whitcomb’s answer held a defiance.
Mainwethering had arrangements made when they returned to his office. Puffing a cigar, he strode up and down, pudgy hands clasped behind his tailcoat, and rattled off the story.
«Metal been identified with high probability. Isotopic fuel from around the thirtieth century. Checkup reveals that a merchant from the Ing Empire was visiting year 2987 to barter his raw materials for their synthrope, secret of which had been lost in the Interregnum. Naturally, he took precautions, tried to pass himself off as a trader from the Saturnian System, but nevertheless disappeared. So did his time shuttle. Presumably someone in 2987 found out what he was and murdered him for his machine. Patrol notified, but no trace of machine. Finally recovered from fifth-century England by two Patrolmen named, haw! Everard and Whitcomb.»
«If we’ve already succeeded, why bother?» The American grinned.
Mainwethering looked shocked. «But my dear fellow! You have not already succeeded. The job is yet to do, in terms of your and my duration-sense. And please do not take success for granted merely because history records it. Time is not rigid; man has free will. If you fail, history will change and will not ever have recorded your success; I will not have told you about it. That is undoubtedly what happened, if I may use the term ‘happened,’ in the few cases where the Patrol has a record of failure. Those cases are still being worked on, and if success is achieved at last, history will be changed and there will ‘always’ have been success. Tempus non nascitur, fit, if I may indulge in a slight parody.»
«All right, all right, I was only joking,» said Everard. «Let’s get going. Tempus fugit.» He added an extra «g» with malice aforethought, and Mainwethering winced.
It turned out that even the Patrol knew little about the dark period when the Romans had left Britain, the Romano-British civilization was crumbling, and the English were moving in. It had never seemed an important one. The office at London, A.D. 1000, sent up what material it had, together with suits of clothes that would get by. Everard and Whitcomb spent an hour unconscious under the hypnotic educators, to emerge with fluency in Latin and in several Saxon and Jutish dialects, and with a fair knowledge of the mores.
The clothes were awkward: trousers, shirts, and coats of rough wool, leather cloaks, an interminable collection of thongs and laces. Long flaxen wigs covered modern haircuts; a clean shave would pass unnoticed, even in the fifth century. Whitcomb carried an ax, Everard a sword, both made to measure of high-carbon steel, but put more reliance on the little twenty-sixth-century sonic stun guns stuck under their coats. Armor had not been included, but the time hopper had a pair of motorcycle crash helmets in one saddlebag: these would not attract much attention in an age of homemade equipment, and were a good deal stronger and more comfortable than the real thing. They also stowed away a picnic lunch and some earthenware jugs full of good Victorian ale.
«Excellent.» Mainwethering pulled a watch out of his pocket and consulted it. «I shall expect you back here at… shall we say four o’clock? I will have some armed guards on hand, in case you have a prisoner along, and we can go out to tea afterward.» He shook their hands. «Good hunting!»
Everard swung onto the time hopper, set the controls for A.D. 464 at Addleton Barrow, a summer midnight, and threw the switch.
There was a full moon. Under it, the land lay big and lonely, with a darkness of forest blocking out the horizon. Somewhere a wolf howled. The mound was there yet; they had come late.
Rising on the antigravity unit, they peered across a dense, shadowy wood. A thorp lay about a mile from the barrow, one hall of hewn timber and a cluster of smaller buildings around a courtyard. In the drenching moonlight, it was very quiet.
«Cultivated fields,» observed Whitcomb. His voice was hushed in the stillness. «The Jutes and Saxons were mostly yeomen, you know, who came here looking for land. Imagine the Britons were pretty well cleared out of this area some years ago.»
«We’ve got to find out about that burial,» said Everard. «Shall we go back and locate the moment the grave was made? No, it might be safer to inquire now, at a later date when whatever excitement there was has died down. Say tomorrow morning.»
Whitcomb nodded, and Everard brought the hopper down into the concealment of a thicket and jumped up five hours. The sun was blinding in the northeast, dew glistened on the long grass, and the birds were making an unholy racket. Dismounting, the agents sent the hopper shooting up at fantastic velocity, to hover ten miles aboveground and come to them when called on a midget radio unit built into their helmets.
They approached the thorp openly, whacking off the savage-looking dogs which came snarling at them with the flat of sword and ax. Entering the courtyard, they found it unpaved but richly carpeted with mud and manure. A couple of naked, tow-headed children gaped at them from a hut of earth and wattles. A girl who was sitting outside milking a scrubby little cow let out a small shriek; a thick-built, low-browed farmhand swilling the pigs grabbed for a spear. Wrinkling his nose, Everard wished that some of the «Noble Nordic» enthusiasts of his century could visit this one.
A gray-bearded man with an ax in his hand appeared in the hall entrance. Like everyone else of this period, he was several inches shorter than the twentieth-century average. He studied them warily before wishing them good morning.
Everard smiled politely. «I hight Uffa Hundingsson, and my brother is Knubbi,» he said. «We are merchants from Jutland, come hither to trade at Canterbury.» (He gave it the present name, Cant-wara-byrig.) «Wandering from the place where our ship is beached, we lost our way, and after fumbling about all night found your home.»
«I hight Wulfnoth, son of Aelfred,» said the yeoman. «Enter and break your fast with us.»
The hall was big and dim and smoky, full of a chattering crowd: Wulfnoth’s children, their spouses and children, dependent carls and their wives and children and grandchildren. Breakfast consisted of great wooden trenchers of half-cooked pork, washed down by horns of thin sour beer. It was not hard to get a conversation going; these people were as gossipy as isolated yokels anywhere. The trouble was with inventing plausible accounts of what was going on in Jutland. Once or twice, Wulfnoth, who was no fool, caught them in some mistake, but Everard said firmly: «You have heard a falsehood. News takes strange forms when it crosses the sea.» He was surprised to learn how much contact there still was with the old countries. But the talk of weather and crops was not very different from the kind he knew in the twentieth-century Middle West.