"That's not quite correct," he said awkwardly. Sometimes his status—assigned to no particular milieu, but free to go anywhere and anywhen there was need and act on his own judgment—embarrassed him. He was by nature unpretentious, a meat-and-potatoes kind of man.
"Good of you to agree," she said, and blinked hard against tears. "Do please be seated. Smoke if you wish. Are you quite sure you wouldn't care for tea and biscuits or perhaps a spot of brandy?"
"Maybe later, thanks. But I will avail myself of my pipe." He waited till she sat down by the hearth to take the armchair opposite, which must be Steve Tamberly's. The fire quivered blue between them.
"I've been in on a few cases like this in the past—my lifeline past, that is," he began cautiously. "It's desirable to start by learning as much as possible about the person concerned. That means talking with those close to him or her. So I've come a tad early today, hoping we could get acquainted. An agent who's been on the spot will be along in a while to tell us what he discovered. I assumed you wouldn't mind."
"Oh, no." She drew breath. "But tell me, please. I've always had difficulty understanding, even when I think in Temporal. My father was a physics don, and it's hard to set aside the strict logic of cause and effect he drilled into me. Stephen . . . encountered trouble somehow, in sixteenth-century Peru. Maybe the Patrol can save him, maybe it can't. Whatever, though, whatever the result is . . . the Patrol will know. There'll be a report in the files. Can't you go at once and read it? Or, or skip ahead in time and ask your future self? Why must we go through this?"
Upbringing or no, she must be hideously shaken to raise such a question, she who had also been trained at that academy back in the Oligocene period—back before there was any human history for its existence to upset. Everard didn't think the less of her. Rather, it made him appreciate the courage that maintained calmness. And, after all, her work did not expose her to the paradoxes and hazards of mutable time. Nor had Tamberly experienced them—he had been a straightforward, if disguised, observer—till suddenly they laid hold on him.
"You know that's forbidden." He kept his tone soft. "Causal loops can too easily turn into temporal vortices. Annulment of the whole effort would be the least of the disasters we'd risk. And it'd be futile, anyway. Those records, those memories could be of something that never happened. Just think how our actions would be influenced by what we believed was foreknowledge. No, we've got to go through with our jobs in as nearly causational a way as we possibly can, in order to make our successes or failures real."
For reality is conditional. It is like a wave pattern on a sea. Let the waves—the probability-waves of ultimate underlying quantum chaos—change their rhythm, and abruptly that tracery of ripples and foam-swirls will be gone, transformed into another. Already in the twentieth century, physicists had a dim glimmering of this. But not until time travel came to be did the fact of it stab into human lives.
If you have gone into the past, you have made it your present. You have the same free will as always. You have laid no special constraints on yourself. Inevitably, you influence what happens.
Ordinarily the effects are slight. It's as if the space-time continuum were like a mesh of tough rubber bands, restoring its configuration after it's felt some disturbing force. Indeed, ordinarily you are a part of that past. There really was a man who traveled with Pizarro and called himself Brother Tanaquil. That was "always" true, and the fact that he wasn't born in that century, but long afterward, is incidental. If he does minor anachronistic things, they don't matter; they may excite comment, but memory of them will die out. It's a philosophical question whether or not reality keeps flickering through such insignificant changes.
Some acts, though, do make a difference. What if a lunatic went back to the fifth century and provided Attila the Hun with machine guns? That kind of thing is so obvious it's fairly easy to guard against. But subtler changes—The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 came near failing. Only the energy and genius of Lenin pulled it through. What if you traveled to the nineteenth century and quietly, harmlessly prevented Lenin's parents from ever meeting each other? Whatever else the Russian Empire later became, it would not be the Soviet Union, and the consequences of that would pervade all history afterward. You, pastward of the change, would still be there; but returning futureward, you'd find a totally different world, a world in which you yourself were probably never born. You'd exist, but as an effect without a cause, thrown up into existence by that anarchy which is at its foundation.
When the first time machine had been built, the Danellians appeared, the superhumans who inhabit the remote future. They ordained the rules of time traffic and established the Patrol to enforce these. Like other police, we mostly assist people on their lawful occasions; we get them out of tight spots when we can; we give what help and kindness we dare to the victims of history. But always our basic mission is to protect and preserve that history, because it is what shall finally bring forth the glorious Danellians.
"I'm sorry," Helen Tamberly said. "That was idiotic of me. But I've been . . . so worried. Stephen was only supposed to be gone three days. Six years for him, three days for me. He wanted that much time merely to reaccustom himself to this milieu. He meant to wander about incognito, getting back into Victorian habits, so he wouldn't absent-mindedly do something that would surprise the servants or our local friends. It's been a week!" She bit her lip. "Forgive me. I'm still babbling, am I not?"
"Far from it." Everard took forth pipe and tobacco pouch. He wanted that small comfort in the face of this anguish. "Loving couples like you make a bachelor like me feel wistful. But let's get down to business. Best for us both. You're native to England of this century, aren't you?"
She nodded. "Born in Cambridge, 1856. I was orphaned at seventeen, left with modest independent means, studied classics, became rather a bluestocking, eventually was recruited into the Patrol. Stephen and I met at the Academy. In spite of the age difference—which doesn't matter for us, thank God—we . . . hit it off, and married after we graduated. He didn't think I would like his birthtime." She grimaced. "I visited it, and he was right. For his part, he felt—feels happy here and now. His persona is that of an American employee of the import firm. When I go off to my own work, or bring some home with me, well, it is unusual for a woman to have scholarly interests, but not extraordinary. Marie Sklodowska—Madame Curie—will enroll in the Sorbonne just a few years hence."
"And people in this milieu are better at minding their own affairs than they are in mine." Everard occupied himself with tamping his briar full. "Uh, I daresay you two do more things together than is common for man and wife these days."
"Oh, yes." Her eagerness was pathetic to hear. "Beginning with our holidays, in this era and that. We fell quite in love with archaic Japan, and have been back several times." Everard concluded that that was a country isolated enough, with a population small and unsophisticated enough, illiterate, that the Patrol allowed occasional visits by blatant outsiders. "We've taken up handicrafts; pottery, for example; that ashtray beside you is his work—" Her voice died away.
Hastily, he queried onward. "Your field is ancient Greece?" The man who met him at the base hadn't been sure.
"The Ionian colonies, chiefly in the seventh and sixth centuries before Christ." She sighed. "It's ironic that there the Patrol cannot admit me, a Nordic woman." She tried to rally. "But as I said, we've seen much else that is wonderful." Suitably outfitted, carefully guided. "No, I mustn't complain." The stoicism cracked. "If Stephen—if you do bring him back—do you think he can be persuaded to settle down and do research in place, like me?"