The Fourth Rome (3 page)

You got used to Gerd wandering off. At least here Pauli was in a position to stop him. That hadn’t always been the case.

“I wanted to see if TC 712 was in one of the berths on the other side of us,” Gerd explained. “I like to keep track of the
movements of other capsules.”

“I talked to Metcalf yesterday in the canteen,” Pauli said. “712’s in the synchronous dock. She’s been losing eight minutes
every displacement, no big thing, but this past mission she started to gain instead. That’s got them looking for the problem.”

“Ah,” Gerd said, nodding in appreciation. Pauli didn’t bother wondering
why
he wanted the information. For all he knew, Gerd might chart the movement of clouds every time he was under an open sky.
The analyst did his job and then some. If he was weirder than the norm even for Anti-Revision Command, well, then he was weird.

“Pauli,” Gerd said, “do you ever wonder who we’re preserving the continuum for?”

Pauli blinked. The rest of the team was in the vehicle, but it’d take a few minutes for them to stow their kit and check on-board
gear like weapons and displacement suits. Besides, an ARC Rider had all the time in the world.

Grinning faintly at his unvoiced joke, Pauli said, “Well, for everybody, I guess. I mean, people in the past as well as the
folks Up The Line.”

“Sometimes I wonder if we work for human beings at all,” Gerd said. “Our century didn’t create the Anti-Revision Command,
you know. We just staff it. And there’s no reason that the persons who made ARC Central and the capsules and the suits—the
folks Up The Line, in the future we can’t reach with their equipment—”

He smiled. On anybody else it would have been a sad expression, but with Gerd you could never be sure.

“There’s no reason they have to be related to us,” the analyst went on. “Whoever succeeds man on Earth would have an equally
good reason for not wanting the continuum revised.”

Pauli felt his guts go cold for a moment, then he laughed.

“Gerd,” he said, “my job is to make sure that my parents get born the way they were supposed to, and all my friends’ parents
get bom, and all my nieces and nephews and everybody else. That’s a job I’m proud to do. I wish I were better at it, maybe,
but I’ll keep doing it as long as they let me. And if I’m working for cockroaches three million years Up The Line—well, that’s
all right. It’s still a job worth doing, and they’re welcome to the place after we’ve left it.”

“Pauli?” Rebecca Carnes called from the hatch. “I can’t carry you so you better come yourself. Gerd, you I can carry so you’d
damned
well better come.”

“Sorry, Beckie,” Pauli said. His arm shepherded the analyst forward. He didn’t actually touch the smaller man. “We’re having
a discussion about the human condition.”

“I don’t think cockroaches are the most probable successors,” Gerd murmured, “though it’s an interesting concept. And you’re
quite right, of course, that it doesn’t really matter.”

He stepped aboard TC 779. “Measured against the heat death of the universe, at any rate,” he added.

R
ebecca Carnes waited, feeling a little awkward. She was starting her first operational deployment as an ARC Rider and she
didn’t really have a job.

Nan was at the capsule’s console, though for the moment the software controlled their displacement. The main screen turned
the curving forward bulkhead into either a display or an apparently clear window to what was outside TC 779. While the capsule
displaced, the exterior was a gray blur.

Quo sat with her back to the team leader, watching her personal display with a short wand in either hand. She would take over
if something happened to Nan and the primary system.

The Riders’ ordinary uniform was a body stocking with multiple pockets and the ability to change color as the user desired.
The stocking and soft boots acted as undergarments for the rigid-walled displacement suits that Tim and Pauli wore as they
faced the hatchway with weapons ready. The suits had integral time travel capacity, but for the moment the two men used them
as armor against a possible threat outside the vehicle.

Tim held a fléchette gun with an electromagnetic pulse generator clipped beneath the barrel. The Anti-Revision Command didn’t
like its personnel to kill, but sometimes lethal force was the only practical option. High-velocity osmium fléchettes could
penetrate armor or a vehicle, while the EMP generator fried electronics without damaging people or structures.

Pauli had an EMP generator also, but his was attached to a shoulder-stocked gas gun that could also fire acoustic grenades.
A gas bomb paralyzed everyone in an area of two hundred square meters for up to three hours, while the sudden pulse of an
acoustic grenade stunned people instantly over a similar area. Between them the two shooters could expect to handle any problem
that arose.

Gerd Barthuli sat beside Nan at the bow controls, but his eyes were on an air-formed holographic display that from any other
angle quivered like a heat refraction. The analyst’s job was to browse the datastream TC 779’s sensors would encounter as
soon as the capsule reached a temporal location. Until then he was probably reviewing background materials downloaded for
this mission.

Rebecca was backup for all the other team members. She sat before a flip-down console from which she could pilot TC 779 or
direct its sensors. In her lap was a light plastic microwave pistol that would knock a man flat at fifty paces or give him
a headache at twice that distance. Its twin barrels projected pulses of high-frequency energy that converged on the target
to produce an 8-Hertz difference tone of very high amplitude. The effect was much like the kick of a mule.

There was almost no chance Rebecca would be called on to use any of those capabilities, but she noticed with some inner amusement
she wasn’t concerned that she’d screw up if she had to act. She’d had lots of experience dealing with extremely complex devices—human
beings—in circumstances where there were a lot more ways to go fatally wrong than be right and there wasn’t any time to think
about it. That’s what nurses do.

“Ten seconds,” Quo murmured. Displacement—in time or space—took a perceived eighty-nine seconds irrespective of the distance
involved. From inside, the only indication that a transportation capsule was displacing was the unnatural silence and the
gray emptiness of the main screen.

Displacement suits supposedly had the same temporal engines as a capsule did, but Rebecca had never been able to believe the
process was identical. Displacing in a suit was a taste of purgatory that missed being hell only because it ended. She was
never sure the enveloping limbo
would
end.

Nan was as still as a wax image at the console. Her hands were spread above the keyboard controls. The pilot of a capsule
on preset commands had nothing to do unless something went wrong. In that case she’d better do it right.

“Engagement,” Quo said. The cabin brightened as if TC 779’s hull had vanished and the crew stood in a marshy clearing. The
main screen could again display the sidereal universe. There was no human being in sight. A long-eared squirrel chattered
angrily at something in the branches above it.

“I have the controls,” Nan said. Her hands now rested on the keyboard. Light shimmered before her, displays projected for
her eyes alone instead of as sidebars to the main screen.

“Accuracy to within one meter and three minutes,” Quo reported. She tried to keep the statement neutral, but there was obvious
pleasure in her voice. Everything was going as smoothly as a training exercise.

“There are no revisionists on this time horizon,” Gerd announced without emphasis.

Time travel affected the continuum the same way a tossed pebble affects the ocean. Even ARC transportation capsules left wakes,
and the cruder techniques of revisionists experimenting with techniques new to them were more disruptive by orders of magnitude.

Instruments in ARC Central registered the disturbances, plotted them, and vectored a field team to readjust space-time to
its original pattern. A capsule’s own sensors were only marginally less capable than those at the base. Gerd had used them
to cross-check the original tasking. This time the check contradicted Central.

Rebecca stood up for a better look at the main screen. To keep the pistol out of the way she thrust it into the cargo pocket
on her right thigh. The problem wasn’t one that she could help by shooting something.

“Temporal parameters check,” Nan said. Her voice was calm but sounded thin.

“Sensors check!” said Quo.

Gerd Barthuli’s fingers moved on the flat surface before him. Rather than a keyboard, the analyst used an unmarked plate to
achieve greater flexibility of control. His face was still and he didn’t speak: he’d said all he had to say at this moment.

Tim Grainger looked toward the bow. It was easier to switch the display within a suit’s featureless helmet than it was to
turn since the helmet was rigidly locked to the shoulder piece, but in a crisis Tim was likely to fall back on old reflexes.
He preferred the speed and flexibility of the bodysock and wore armor only when he was ordered to.

“It’s the phase lock!” he said, his voice booming through the suit’s external speaker. “Drop us straight in. We’ll be all
right!”

As initially calibrated, TC 779 hadn’t quite reentered the continuum. It hovered a fraction of a millisecond out of temporal
phase, invisible—nonexistent—to eyes in the sidereal universe but still able to observe that universe through its sensors.
Sound waves and the electro-optical spectrum were shifted a few angstroms, but the capsule’s AI could adjust that in the rare
instance it made any difference.

Tim was saying that the capsule’s being out of phase was causing the sensors to miss the presence of temporal anomalies. Rebecca
couldn’t imagine why that would be, but she didn’t have a better notion.

Apparently neither did Nan Roebeck. “We’re going in,” she said and touched a control. TC 779 wobbled minutely as it settled
into boggy soil.

The squirrel vanished to the other side of the trunk. Its furious chattering resumed a moment later.

“There are still no revisionists on this horizon,” Gerd said. “This isn’t a sensor failure. All the background readings show
proper variation. The indications that Central noted are not present
on
the horizon.”

“They spotted us and displaced,” Pauli said. He remained poised by the hatch; as good a place as any and the one he’d been
given before the problem occurred. Solid as a tree, Pauli was.

“If they had been here, there’d be traces in the continuum,” Quo said in a brittle tone. Her wands moved in short, sharp arcs
like the tapping of a bird’s beak. She scowled at whatever her display showed. “They’re not here!”

Rebecca had a sudden vision of TC 779’s presence buffeting naked figures aside like flotsam caught in a speedboat’s bow wave.
The revisionists’ displacement technique was radically different from the bubbles of separate space-time generated by ARC
transportation capsules. Different, and on the evidence incompatible.

“They didn’t run,” she said. “We pushed them away. They can’t exist where we do.”

“Right,” said Nan Roebeck without particular emphasis. “I’m going to displace us out of phase to the revisionists’ predicted
location.”

“I’ve set those parameters,” Quo said tightly.

“So have I,” Nan replied as her fingers moved on the controls. “So have I, Quo, but I’m going to take us in manually.”

Rebecca felt the capsule’s floor grow vaguely unstable. The display blurred as if they were driving through the trees and
occasionally the ground itself. Because the vehicle was again outside the sidereal universe, there could be no actual contact.

“Rebecca’s suggestion would explain the anomaly,” Gerd said. “I don’t believe that Central was completely in error.”

“Right or wrong,” Tim Grainger said, “how do we nail them if we can’t get into the same time horizon? They’re going to land
somewhere. The chances are they’ll do just as much harm in the year 10 as they would 9.”

The viewpoint feeding the display swept forward. Nan had programmed TC 779 to arrive at an uninhabited spot so that they could
check calibration without risk of being seen. The capsule was supposed to be out of phase, but no machine is perfect. Now
they were moving to the place where Central believed the revisionists had entered this time horizon.

“I can take a team forward in suits,” said Pauli Weigand without turning. “We can store them out of phase and go after the
revisionists with minimal equipment.”

“First,” said Nan from the controls, “we gather information so long as we’re here. We learn where here
is
.”

The terrain was wooded, rolling, and initially without any sign of human habitation. The capsule came out of the woods onto
a road built up slightly from the ground and paved with split logs laid flat side up. The forest had been cleared for a hundred
feet to either side of the roadway.

Three wagons, each drawn by a pair of mules, and a dozen soldiers under an officer on horseback proceeded east on the road.
The troops wore mail shirts and carried spears, but their helmets were slung from their right shoulders. Any other baggage
must be in the wagons. They were headed toward the walled encampment in the near distance.

“This is where the revisionists appeared,” Nan said softly. “Should have appeared. And there’s where they were going unless
I miss my bet.”

The capsule surged ahead under her direction. “Aliso,” Gerd said with satisfaction. “Varus’ summer camp on the Lippe River.
Three days before he decided to change base to the mouth of the Weser to bring the benefits of Roman justice to the barbarians
there …”

Nan adjusted the controls, lifting the capsule’s viewpoint a hundred feet in the air. Moments later she brought them to a
hovering halt above the fortress.