"It's a long and generally tedious story. Believe me, my friends, ninety-nine percent of an operation in the field amounts to patient collection of dull and usually irrelevant facts, in between interminable periods of hurry-up-and-wait. Let's say that, aided by a good deal of luck, I managed to infiltrate, make my connections, pass out my bribes, gather my informers and my evidence. At last there was no reasonable doubt. This obscurely originating Blasco López had to be from the future.
"I called in our troops and we raided the house where he was staying in Bogotá. Most of those we collared were harmless local people, hired as servants, though what they had to tell proved useful. Lopez's mistress, accompanying him, turned out to be his associate. She told us a lot more, in exchange for comfortable accommodations when she'd go to the exile planet. But the ringleader himself had broken free and escaped.
"One man on horseback, headed for the Cordillera Oriental that rises beyond the town—one man like ten thousand genuine Creoles—we couldn't go after him on time hoppers. The search could too damn easily get too damn noticeable. Who knew what effect that might have? The conspirators had already made the time stream unstable. . . .
"I grabbed a horse, a couple of remounts, some jerky and vitamin pills for myself, and set off in pursuit."
* * *
Wind boomed hollowly down the mountainside. Grass and low, scattered shrubs trembled beneath its chill. Up ahead, they gave way to naked rock. Right, left, behind, peaks reared into a blue bleakness. A condor wheeled huge, on watch for any death. Snowfields on the heights above glowed beneath a declining sun.
A musket cracked. At its distance, the noise it made was tiny, though echoes flew. Everard heard the bullet buzz. Close! He hunched down in the saddle and spurred his steed onward.
Varagan can't really expect to drop me at this range, passed through him. What, then? Does he hope I'll slow down? If so, if he gains a little on me, what use is that to him? What goal has he got?
His enemy still led him by half a mile, but Everard could see how yonder animal lurched along, exhausted. To get on Varagan's trail had taken some while, going from this peon to that sheepherder and asking if a man of the given description had ridden by. However, Varagan had only the single horse, which he must spare if it was not to collapse under him. After Everard found the traces, a wilderness-trained eye had readily been able to follow them, and the pace of the hunt picked up.
It was also known that Varagan had fled bearing no more than a muzzle-loader. He'd been spending powder and balls pretty freely ever since the Patrolman hove in view. Since he was a fast recharger and an excellent shot, it did have its delaying effect. But what refuge was in these wastes? Varagan appeared to be making for a particular crag. It was conspicuous, not only high but its shape suggestive of a castle tower. It was no fortress, though. If Varagan took shelter behind it, Everard could use the blaster he carried to bring the rock molten down upon his head.
Maybe Varagan wasn't aware the agent had such a weapon. Impossible. Varagan was a monster, yes, but not a fool.
Everard pulled down his hat brim and drew his poncho tight against the wind. He didn't reach for the blaster, no point in that yet, but as if by instinct, his left hand dropped to the flintlock pistol and saber at his hip. They were mainly part of his costume, intended to make him an authority figure to the inhabitants, but there was an odd comfort in their massiveness.
Having reined in to shoot, Varagan continued straight on uphill, this time without lingering to reload. Everard brought his own horse from trot to canter and closed the gap further. He kept alert—not tensed, but alert against contingencies, ready to swing aside or even jump down behind the beast. Nothing happened, just that lonesome trek on through the cold. Could Varagan have fired his last ammunition? Have a care. Manse, old son. The sparse alpine grass ended, save for tufts between boulders, and rock rang beneath hoofs.
Varagan halted near the crag and sat waiting. The musket was sheathed and his hands rested empty on the saddlebow. His horse quivered and swayed, neck a-droop, utterly blown, lather swept freezingly off its hide and out of its mane.
Everard took forth his energy gun and clattered nigh. Behind him, a remount whickered. Still Varagan waited.
Everard stopped three yards off. "Merau Varagan, you are under arrest by the Time Patrol," he called in Temporal.
The other smiled. "You have the advantage of me," he replied in a soft tone that, somehow, carried. "May I request the honor of learning your name and provenance?"
"Uh . . . Manson Everard, Unattached, born in the United States of America about a hundred years uptime. No matter. You're coming back with me. Hold on while I call a hopper. I warn you, at the least suspicion you're about to try something, I'll shoot. You're too dangerous for me to be squeamish."
Varagan made a gentle gesture. "Really? How much do you know about me, Agent Everard, or think you know, to justify this violent an attitude?"
"Well, when a man takes potshots at me, I reckon he's not a very nice person."
"Might I perhaps have believed you were a bandit, of the sort who haunt these uplands? What crime am I alleged to have committed?"
Everard's free hand paused on its way to get out the little communicator in his pocket. For a moment, eerily fascinated, he stared through the wind at his prisoner.
Merau Varagan seemed taller than he actually was, as straight as he held his athletic frame. Black hair tossed around a skin whose whiteness the sun and the weather had not tinged at all. There was no sign of beard. The face might have been a young Caesar's, were it not too finely chiseled. The eyes were large and green, the smiling lips cherry-red. His clothes, down to the boots, were silver-trimmed black, like the cape that flapped about his shoulders. Seen against the turreted crag, he made Everard remember Dracula.
Yet his voice remained mild: "Evidently your colleagues have extracted information from mine. I daresay you have been in touch with them as you fared. Thus you know our names and somewhat of our origin—"
Thirty-first millennium. Outlaws after the failure of the Exaltationists to cast off the weight of a civilization grown older than the Old Stone Age was to me. During their moment of power, they possessed themselves of time machines. Their genetic heritage—
Nietzsche might have understood them. I never will.
"—But what do you truly know of our purpose here?"
"You were going to change events," Everard retorted. "We barely forestalled you. At that, our corps has a lot of tricky restoration work ahead. Why did you do it? How could you be so . . . so selfish?"
"I think 'egoistic' might be a better word," Varagan gibed. "The ascendancy of the ego, the unconfined will—But think. Would it have been altogether bad if Simón Bolívar had founded a true empire in Hispanic America, rather than a gaggle of quarrelsome successor states? It would have been enlightened, progressive. Imagine how much suffering and death would have been averted."
"Come off that!" Everard felt anger rise and rise within himself. "You must know better. It's impossible. Bolivar hasn't the cadre, the communications, the support. If he's a hero to many, he's at least got many others furious with him: like the Peruvians, after he detached Bolivia. He'll cry on his deathbed that he 'plowed the sea' in all his efforts to build a stable society.
"If you meant it about unifying even part of the continent, you'd have tried earlier and elsewhere."
"Indeed?"
"Yes. The only chance. I've studied the situation. In 1821 San Martin was negotiating with the Spanish in Peru, and playing with the idea of setting up a monarchy under somebody like Don Carlos, King Ferdinand's brother. It could have included the territories of Bolivia and Ecuador, maybe later Chile and Argentina, because it would have had the advantages Bolivar's inner sphere lacks. But why am I telling you this, you bastard, except to prove I know you're lying? You must have done your own homework."