“What’d she tell you?” asked Van Sarawak.
“A lot of detail,” said Everard. The whole story had required more than an hour. “The important thing is this: her knowledge of those times is good, but she never mentioned the Scipios.”
“The who’s?”
“Publius Cornelius Scipio commanded the Roman army at Ticinus. He was beaten there all right, in our world. But later he had the intelligence to turn westward and gnaw away the Carthaginian base in Spain. It ended with Hannibal being effectively cut off in Italy, and what little Iberian help could be sent him was annihilated. Scipio’s son of the same name also held a high command, and was the man who finally whipped Hannibal at Zama; that’s Scipio Africanus the Elder.
“Father and son were by far the best leaders Rome had. But Deirdre never heard of them.”
“So…” Van Sarawak stared eastward across the sea, where Gauls and Cimbri and Parthians were ramping through the shattered Classical world. “What happened to them in this time line?”
“My own total recall tells me that both the Scipios were at Ticinus, and very nearly killed. The son saved his father’s life during the retreat, which I imagine was more like a stampede. One gets you ten that in this history the Scipios died there.”
“Somebody must have knocked them off,” said Van Sarawak. His voice tightened. “Some time traveler. It could only have been that.”
“Well, it seems probable, anyhow. We’ll see.” Everard looked away from Deirdre’s slumbrous face. “We’ll see.”
8
At the Pleistocene resort—half an hour after having left it for New York—the Patrolmen put the girl in charge of a sympathetic Greek-speaking matron and summoned their colleagues. Then the message capsules began jumping through space-time.
All offices prior to 218 B.C.—the closest was Alexandria, 250–230—were “still” there, with 200 or so agents altogether. Written contact with the future was confirmed to be impossible, and a few short jaunts upstairs clinched the proof. A worried conference met at the Academy, back in the Oligocene Period. Unattached agents ranked those with steady assignments, but not each other; on the basis of his own experience, Everard found himself the chairman of a committee of top-bracket officers.
That was a frustrating job. These men and women had leaped centuries and wielded the weapons of gods. But they were still human, with all the ingrained orneriness of their race.
Everyone agreed that the damage would have to be repaired. But there was fear for those agents who had gone ahead into time before being warned, as Everard himself had done. If they weren’t back when history was re-altered, they would never be seen again. Everard deputized parties to attempt rescue, but doubted there’d be much success. He warned them sternly to return within a day, local time, or face the consequences.
A man from the Scientific Renaissance had another point to make. Granted, the survivors’ plain duty was to restore the “original” time track. But they had a duty to knowledge as well. Here was a unique chance to study a whole new phase of humankind. Several years’ anthropological work should be done before—Everard slapped him down with difficulty. There weren’t so many Patrolmen left that they could take the risk.
Study groups had to determine the exact moment and circumstances of the change. The wrangling over methods went on interminably. Everard glared out the window, into the pre-human night, and wondered if the sabertooths weren’t doing a better job after all than their simian successors.
When he had finally gotten his various gangs dispatched, he broke out a bottle and got drunk with Van Sarawak.
Reconvening next day, the steering committee heard from its deputies, who had run up a total of years in the future. A dozen Patrolmen had been rescued from more or less ignominious situations; another score would simply have to be written off. The spy group’s report was more interesting. It seemed that two Helvetian mercenaries had joined Hannibal in the Alps and won his confidence. After the war, they had risen to high positions in Carthage. Under the names of Phrontes and Himilco, they had practically run the government, engineered Hannibal’s murder, and set new records for luxurious living. One of the Patrolmen had seen their homes and the men themselves. “A lot of improvements that hadn’t been thought of in Classical times. The fellows looked to me like Neldorians, 205th millennium.”
Everard nodded. That was an age of bandits who had “already” given the Patrol a lot of work. “I think we’ve settled the matter,” he said. “It makes no difference whether they were with Hannibal before Ticinus or not. We’d have hell’s own time arresting them in the Alps without such a fuss that we’d change the future ourselves. What counts is that they seem to have rubbed out the Scipios, and that’s the point we’ll have to strike at.”
A nineteenth-century Britisher, competent but with elements of Colonel Blimp, unrolled a map and discoursed on his aerial observations of the battle. He’d used an infra-red telescope to look through low clouds. “And here the Romans stood—”
“I know,” said Everard. “A thin red line. The moment when they took flight is the critical one, but the confusion then also gives us our chance. Okay, we’ll want to surround the battlefield unobtrusively, but I don’t think we can get away with more than two agents actually on the scene. The baddies are going to be alert, you know, looking for possible counter-interference. The Alexandria office can supply Van and me with costumes.”
“I say,” exclaimed the Englishman, “I thought I’d have the privilege.”
“No. Sorry.” Everard smiled with one corner of his mouth. “No privilege, anyway. Just risking your neck, in order to negate a world full of people like yourself.”
“But dash it all—”
Everard rose. “I’ve got to go,” he said flatly. “I don’t know why, but I’ve got to.”
Van Sarawak nodded.
They left their scooter in a clump of trees and started across the field.
Around the horizon and up in the sky waited a hundred armed Patrolmen, but that was small consolation here among spears and arrows. Lowering clouds hurried before a cold whistling wind, there was a spatter of rain; sunny Italy was enjoying its late fall.
The cuirass was heavy on Everard’s shoulders as he trotted across blood-slippery mud. He had helmet, greaves, a Roman shield on his left arm and a sword at his waist; but his right hand gripped a stunner. Van Sarawak loped behind, similarly equipped, eyes shifting under the wind-ruffled officer’s plume.
Trumpets howled and drums stuttered. It was all but lost among the yells of men and tramp of feet, screaming, riderless horses and whining arrows. Only a few captains and scouts were still mounted; as often before stirrups were invented, what started to be a cavalry battle had become entirely a fight on foot after the lancers fell off their mounts. The Carthaginians were pressing in, hammering edged metal against the buckling Roman lines. Here and there the struggle was already breaking up into small knots, where men cursed and cut at strangers.
The combat had passed over this area already. Death lay around Everard. He hurried behind the Roman force, toward the distant gleam of the eagles. Across helmets and corpses, he made out a banner that fluttered triumphant red and purple. And there, looming monstrous against the gray sky, lifting their trunks and bawling, came a squad of elephants.
War was always the same: not a neat affair of lines across maps, nor a hallooing gallantry, but men who gasped and sweated and bled in bewilderment.
A slight, dark-faced youth squirmed nearby, trying feebly to pull out the javelin which had pierced his stomach. He was a slinger from Carthage, but the burly Italian peasant who sat next to him, staring without belief at the stump of an arm, paid no attention.