The Only Game in Town

5

The scooter had jumped two days futureward and now hovered invisibly far above to the naked eye. Around it, the air was thin and sharply cold. Everard shivered as he adjusted the electronic telescope. Even at full magnification, the caravan was little more than specks toiling across green immensity. But no one else in the Western Hemisphere could have been riding horses.

He twisted in the saddle to face his companion. “So now what?”

Sandoval’s broad countenance was unreadable. “Well, if our demonstration didn’t work—”

“It sure as hell didn’t! I swear they’re moving south twice as fast as before. Why?”

“I’d have to know all of them a lot better than I do, as individuals, to give you a real answer, Manse. But essentially it must be that we challenged their courage. A warlike culture, nerve and hardihood its only absolute virtues… what choice have they got but to go on? If they retreated before a mere threat, they’d never be able to live with themselves.”

“But Mongols aren’t idiots! They didn’t conquer everybody in sight by bull strength, but by jolly well understanding military principles better. Toktai should retreat, report to the Emperor what he saw, and organize a bigger expedition.”

“The men at the ships can do that,” Sandoval reminded. “Now that I think about it, I see how grossly we underestimated Toktai. He must have set a date, presumably next year, for the ships to try and go home if he doesn’t return. When he finds something interesting along the way, like us, he can dispatch an Indian with a letter to the base camp.”

Everard nodded. It occurred to him that he had been rushed into this job, all the way down the line, with never a pause to plan it as he should have done. Hence this botch. But how much blame must fall on the subconscious reluctance of John Sandoval? After a minute Everard said: “They may even have smelled something fishy about us. The Mongols were always good at psychological warfare.”

“Could be. But what’s our next move?”

Swoop down from above, fire a few blasts from the forty-first-century energy gun mounted in this timecycle, and that’s the end…No, by God, they can send me to the exile planet before I’ll do any such thing. There are decent limits.

“We’ll rig up a more impressive demonstration,” said Everard.

“And if it flops too?”

“Shut up! Give it a chance!”

“I was just wondering.” The wind harried under Sandoval’s words. “Why not cancel the expedition instead? Go back in time a couple of years and persuade Kublai Khan it isn’t worthwhile sending explorers eastward. Then all this would never have happened.”

“You know Patrol regs forbid us to make historical changes.”

“What do you call this we’re doing?”

“Something specifically ordered by supreme HQ. Perhaps to correct some interference elsewhere, elsewhen. How should I know? I’m only a step on the evolutionary ladder. They have abilities a million years hence that I can’t even guess at.”

“Father knows best,” murmured Sandoval.

Everard set his jaws. “The fact remains,” he said, “the court of Kublai, the most powerful man on earth, is more important and crucial than anything here in America. No, you rang me in on this miserable job, and now I’ll pull rank on you if I must. Our orders are to make these people give up their exploration. What happens afterward is none of our business. So they don’t make it home. We won’t be the proximate cause, any more than you’re a murderer if you invite a man to dinner and he has a fatal accident on the way.”

“Stop quacking and let’s get to work,” rapped Sandoval.

Everard sent the scooter gliding forward. “See that hill?” he pointed after a while. “It’s on Toktai’s line of march, but I think he’ll camp a few miles short of it tonight, down in that little meadow by the stream. The hill will be in his plain view, though. Let’s set up shop on it.”

“And make fireworks? It’ll have to be pretty fancy. Those Cathayans know about gunpowder. They even have military rockets.”

“Small ones. I know. But when I assembled my gear for this trip, I packed away some fairly versatile gadgetry, in case my first attempt failed.”

The hill bore a sparse crown of pine trees. Everard landed the scooter among them and began to unload boxes from its sizeable baggage compartments. Sandoval helped, wordless. The horses, Patrol trained, stepped calmly off the framework stalls which had borne them and started grazing along the slope.

After a while the Indian broke his silence. “This isn’t my line of work. What are you rigging?”

Everard patted the small machine he had half assembled. “It’s adapted from a weather-control system used in the Cold Centuries era upstairs. A potential distributor. It can make some of the damnedest lightning you ever saw, with thunder to match.”

“Mmm… the great Mongol weakness.” Suddenly Sandoval grinned. “You win. We might as well relax and enjoy this.”

“Fix us a supper, will you, while I put the gimmick together? No fire, naturally. We don’t want any mundane smoke.… Oh, yes, I also have a mirage projector. If you’ll change clothes and put on a hood or something at the appropriate moment, so you can’t be recognized, I’ll paint a mile-high picture of you, half as ugly as life.”

“How about a p.a. system? Navajo chants can be fairly alarming, if you don’t know it’s just a yeibichai or whatever.”

“Coming up!”

The day waned. It grew murky under the pines; the air was chill and pungent. At last Everard devoured a sandwich and watched through his binoculars as the Mongol vanguard checked that campsite he had predicted. Others came riding in with their day’s catch of game and went to work cooking. The main body showed up at sundown, posted itself efficiently, and ate. Toktai was indeed pushing hard, using every daylight moment. As darkness closed down, Everard glimpsed outposts mounted and with strung bows. He could not keep up his own spirits, however hard he tried. He was bucking men who had shaken the earth.

Early stars glittered above snowpeaks. It was time to begin work.

“Got our horses tethered, Jack? They might panic. I’m fairly sure the Mongol horses will! Okay, here goes.” Everard flipped a main switch and squatted by the dimly lit control dials of his apparatus.

First there was the palest blue flicker between earth and sky. Then the lightnings began, tongue after forked tongue leaping, trees smashed at a blow, the mountainsides rocking under their noise. Everard threw out ball lightning, spheres of flame which whirled and curvetted, trailing sparks, shooting across to the camp and exploding above it till the sky seemed white hot.

Deafened and half blinded, he managed to project a sheet of fluorescing ionization. Like northern lights the great banners curled, bloody red and bone white, hissing under the repeated thunder cracks. Sandoval trod forth. He had stripped to his pants, daubed clay on his body in archaic patterns; his face was not veiled after all, but smeared with earth and twisted into something Everard would not have known. The machine scanned him and altered its output. That which stood forth against the aurora was taller than a mountain. It moved in a shuffling dance, from horizon to horizon and back to the sky, and it wailed and barked in a falsetto louder than thunder.

Everard crouched beneath the lurid light, his fingers stiff on the control board. He knew a primitive fear of his own; the dance woke things in him that he had forgotten.

Judas priest! If this doesn’t make them quit…

His mind returned to him. He even looked at his watch. Half an hour… give them another fifteen minutes, in which the display tapered off… They’d surely stay in camp till dawn rather than blunder wildly out in the dark, they had that much discipline. So keep everything under wraps for several hours more, then administer the last stroke to their nerves by a single electric bolt smiting a tree right next to them… Everard waved Sandoval back. The Indian sat down, panting harder than his exertions seemed to warrant.

When the noise was gone, Everard said, “Nice show, Jack.” His voice sounded tinny and strange in his ears.

“I hadn’t done anything like that for years,” muttered Sandoval. He struck a match, startling noise in the quietness. The brief flame showed his lips gone thin. Then he shook out the match and only his cigarette-end glowed.

“Nobody I knew, on the reservation, took that stuff seriously,” he went on after a moment. “A few of the older men wanted us boys to learn it to keep the custom alive, to remind us we were still a people. But mostly our idea was to pick up some change by dancing for tourists.”

There was a longer pause. Everard doused the projector completely. In the murk that followed, Sandoval’s cigarette waxed and waned, a tiny red Algol.

“Tourists!” he said at last.

After more minutes: “Tonight I was dancing for a purpose. It meant something. I never felt that way before.”

Everard was silent.

Until one of the horses, which had plunged at its halter’s end during the performance and was still nervous, whinnied.

Everard looked up. Night met his eyes. “Did you hear anything, Jack?”

The flashlight beam speared him.

For an instant he stared blinded at it. Then he sprang erect, cursing and snatching for his stun pistol. A shadow ran from behind one of the trees. It struck him in the ribs. He lurched back. The beam gun flew to his hand. He shot at random.

The flashlight swept about once more. Everard glimpsed Sandoval. The Navajo had not donned his weapons again. Unarmed, he dodged the sweep of a Mongol blade. The swordsman ran after him. Sandoval reverted to Patrol judo. He went to one knee. Clumsy afoot, the Mongol slashed, missed, and ran straight into a shoulder block to the belly. Sandoval rose with the blow. The heel of his hand jolted upward to the Mongol’s chin. The helmeted head snapped back. Sandoval chopped a hand at the Adam’s apple, yanked the sword from its owner’s grasp, turned and parried a cut from behind.

A voice yammered above the Mongol yipping, giving orders. Everard backed away. He had knocked one attacker out with a bolt from his pistol. There were others between him and the scooter. He circled to face them. A lariat curled around his shoulders. It tightened with one expert heave. He went over. Four men piled on him. He saw half a dozen lance butts crack down oh Sandoval’s head, then there wasn’t time for anything but fighting. Twice he got to his feet, but his gun was gone by now, the Mauser was plucked from its holster—the little men were pretty good at yawara-style combat themselves. They dragged him down and hit him with fists, boots, dagger pommels. He never quite lost consciousness, but he finally stopped caring.