“A Patrol agent must become case-hardened, like a physician or a policeman. Otherwise what he witnesses will eventually break him.” Corwin leaned forward. He put a hand over the fist that lay knotted in her lap. “But, yes, I care. I am more than interested. My duty lies with the Paleo-Indians. They bear the future. But I do want to learn everything you know about the old folk, and everything I can discover for myself. I want to love them too.”
Tamberly gulped and straightened. She drew back from his touch, then said hastily, not wishing to seem as if she spurned his consolation: “Thanks. Thanks. What happens … at first … to the people I’ve known, the, the individuals … that doesn’t have to be terrible. Does it?”
“Why, no. The newcomers you met probably belonged to a very small tribe. I rather imagine it was far in advance of the rest, and no more arrived for a generation or two. Besides, I’ve gathered your Tulat lived on or near the coast, and didn’t go after big game. Hence no rivalry.”
“If only that’s true. If there is c-conflict, can’t you help?”
“I’m sorry. The Patrol may not intervene.”
Energy kindled anew. “Look,” Tamberly argued, “time travelers are bound to intervene, interfere. I affected people in all sorts of ways, didn’t I? Among other things, I saved several lives with antibiotics, shot a dangerous animal—and just my presence, the questions I asked and answered, everything I did had some effect. Nobody objected. I was up front about it, reported every incident, and nobody objected.”
“You know why.” Perhaps he realized that playing the professor had been a mistake, for now he spoke neither angrily nor patronizingly but mildly, as to a young person bewildered by pain. “The continuum does tend to maintain its structure. A radical change is only possible at certain critical points in history. Elsewhen, compensations occur. From that standpoint, what you did was unimportant. In a sense, it was ‘always’ part of the past.”
“Yes, yes, yes.” She curbed the resentment she had felt in spite of his effort. “Sorry, sir. I keep sounding stupid and ignorant, don’t I?”
“No. You are under stress. You are trying hard to make your intent clear.” Corwin smiled. “You needn’t. Relax.”
“What I’m getting at,” she persisted, “is why can’t you take a hand? Nothing big, nothing that’ll get into folk memory or anything like that. Just, oh, those hunters were … arrogant. If they start leaning too hard on the We, why can’t you tell them to lay off, and back it up with a harmless demonstration, fireworks or something?”
“Because this is a different situation from yours,” he replied. “Beringia is, was, no longer populated exclusively by a static society barely past the eolithic stage—if people that thinly scattered can even be called a society. An advanced, dynamic, progressive culture, or set of cultures, invaded. Let me remind you that in the course of mere generations they swept down the corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice, into the plains, where taiga was becoming fertile grassland as the glaciers dwindled. Their numbers exploded. Within two thousand years of the day you met them, they were making the superb flint points of the Clovis. Soon after, they finished off the mammoth, horse, camel, most of the large American beasts. They developed into the distinctive Amerindian races—but you know that story too, I’m sure.
“What it means is an unstable situation. True, the time is long ago. There will be no written record by which the dead can speak to the living. Nevertheless, the possibility of starting a causal vortex is no longer insignificant. We field researchers must henceforward keep our influence to an absolute minimum. No one less than an Unattached agent has competence to take decisive action; and such a man would only do it in extreme emergency.”
Or woman, Tamberly thought. But I should remember when he was born and raised, and make allowances. He means well. Though he does love to hear himself talk, doesn’t he?
Irritation somehow countered anxiety. When he added, “Remember, quite likely you are borrowing trouble and in fact nothing dreadful ever happened to your friends,” she could accept it. Why had her moods been seesawing like this, anyway? Well, she was newly back from wilderness, tossed into a period whose likeness and unlikeness to home were equally disturbing. She was rebellious at having her work stopped uncompleted, concerned about the We, grieved that she might never see them again, skittish at meeting a man who had decades of Patrol experience under his belt against her paltry four. High time you calmed down, gal
“Your coffee’s gone cold,” Corwin said. “Here, I’ll see to that.” He took her cup away, brought it back empty, gave it a partial refill from the pot, and held a flask of brandy above. “I prescribe a spot of additive for both of us.”
“M-m, a … a microspot,” she yielded.
It helped, more as a gesture and a taste than through the minute alcohol content. He didn’t press more on her. Instead, he got to business. Intelligent queries and comments were the real medicine for strained nerves.
He fetched books, opened them to maps, showed her the geological ages of the land where she had camped. She had studied the history before, of course, but he recalled the larger context to her, vividly and with fresh details.
In the era she knew, Beringia had shrunk from its greatest extent. However, it was still a big territory, joining Siberia to Alaska, and its disappearance would take a long while if you reckoned in human lives. Finally the sea, rising as the ice melted, would drown it; but by then America would be well peopled from the Arctic Ocean to the Land of Fire.
She had much to tell about the wildlife, less about the wild folk, yet she had inevitably and happily come to know those in some degree. Already implanted in him was the knowledge acquired by the first expedition, the Tula language, something of the customs and beliefs. She found he had pondered it, compared it to what he knew of savages elsewhere and elsewhen, extrapolated from his own experience.
That had been among the Paleo-Indians as they drifted southward through Canada. His aim was to trace their migrations back to the sources. Only by knowing what had happened could the Patrol hope to know what the nexus points were over which it should keep special watch. Though skeletal at best, the data would be better than nothing. Besides, others uptime were intensely interested as well, anthropologists, folklorists, artists of every kind seeking fresh inspiration.
Under Corwin’s guidance, Tamberly felt her recollections grow more fully fleshed than before—family groups dwelling apart, periodically gathering together, oftener linked by individual travelers, among whom young men in search of mates were commonest—simple rites, frequently grisly legends, pervasive fear of demons and ghosts, of storm and predator, of sickness and starvation—withal, merriment, much loving kindness, childlike joy whenever life offered pleasure—a special reverence for the bear, which might be older than the race itself—
“My goodness!” she exclaimed. Shadows stretched across the street outside. “I’d no idea we’d been at it this long.”
“Nor I,” Corwin said. “Time goes fast in company like yours. Best we call it a day, eh?”
“For sure. I can do horrid things to a hamburger and a beer.”
“You are staying in San Francisco?”
“Yes, at a small hotel near HQ till I’ve finished this debriefing. No sense in commuting between now and 1990.”
“Look here, you deserve better than a café meal. May I invite you to dinner? I know the worthwhile places in these years.”