males were condemned to a lifetime of incessant labor that ended only when work or sickness killed them.
This shambles of a civilization was totally dependent on the system of slavery brought into being and maintained by the Honsun Len. But where had the Honsun Len come from? Egarn returned to his studies and eventually pieced isolated scraps of information into a staggering discovery. The Honsun Len had been invented at the end of the twentieth century by a man named Johnson, who had lived in Rochester, New York. Probably he had been a specialist in optics who worked in the photographic industry there. During his lifetime, the peculiar properties of his len made it an innocent curiosity, and only a few uses were found for it in children’s toys or household gadgets. It was not a subject of serious scientific research until certain military applications were discovered.
When that happened, civilization was doomed. The Honsun Len, adapted to war, unleashed the primal energy of the universe on the planet Earth. It devastated a world and annihilated much of its population. Mounted in artificial satellites, huge Honsun Lens wiped out armies, destroyed cities, cut enormous chasms across plains, leveled hills, piled up new mountains. Coastlines and the courses of rivers were altered. The Honsun Len changed the face of the planet and almost obliterated it.
Now it was about to destroy civilization a second time—thanks, in part, to Egarn, who rediscovered the military potential of the len and unthinkingly gave a few copies of a weapon to the Peer of Lant when she convinced him her peerdom was threatened by its neighbors. In between, it had destroyed the minds of two thirds of the surviving human race.
“A great pity,” Egarn mused, “that the Johnson who inflicted this curse on humanity didn’t die young.”
It was then that the great idea took possession of him: He could save humanity by destroying it. He had once read a story that posed a similar problem: Is it possible to change the present by journeying through time and altering the past? In the story, the quest failed. Egarn went over his plan again and again, trying to analyze it with cold logic, and he convinced himself it could succeed.
If the Honsun Len had never been invented, the destruction of Earth in the twenty-first century could not have happened, and the hideous aftermath that produced this civilization of brain-damaged slaves would not have occurred. If Egarn could retroactively eliminate the len, what would replace it? Something better, surely. He couldn’t imagine anything worse. He had only to return to his own time, seek out this Johnson, and prevent him from inventing his insidious len or at least from giving it to the world. If it took murder to do that, so be it. It was the one way this barbaric future could be prevented: by destroying it before it happened.
He was the only person in the world who had the requisite knowledge to do that—to travel through time to a past where he knew the language, knew how to behave and function effectively, knew exactly how to commit a murder if there had to be one. He alone had sufficient knowledge, and he couldn’t use it. The mere attempt to return to the past would kill him.
He would have to train someone else to do it.
The technical problems were mind-twisting in their complexity. It was one thing to speak of sending someone into the past; it was quite another thing to send that someone to a precise year, month, day, and time of day, and even that would not be sufficient. He also would have to be sent to a precise place. If the emissary landed in New York’s Times Square at noon, his effectiveness would be severely impaired.
Egarn dedicated the remainder of his life to solving these problems. Metals were so scarce and so difficult to work that he had to fashion gears of wood, and for a long time no carver could make them with sufficient precision to produce the fine adjustments he required. He had been close to success, or so he thought, when the Peer of Lant came to him with her panicky story about Lant being invaded. Probably he had given her the weapon as much to keep his work from being interrupted as to save Lant. That error in judgment destroyed more than Lant’s neighbors. It also destroyed his last chance to save Earth—or so he had thought when he heard the Lantiff’s dogs on his trail.
Thanks to Bernal, fate had spun the wheel one more time, but where in this ghastly future could he find another time traveler, a martyr willing to immolate himself to save humanity? Because a trip through time was a one-way trip. Egarn’s own experience proved that. Not only would the emissary be marooned in what would seem like an appallingly complex civilization, but he might be imprisoned or executed for murder.
As Egarn’s delirium lessened, and the scouts came and went and worriedly discussed the intense search that was going on over their heads, he lay quietly on his bed of branches and thought about his great idea.
He not only had to find an emissary, but he had to give him a comprehensive survival course. He had to teach him what to say and do in every circumstance: instruct him about automobiles—driving one, buying one, insuring one, renting one; instruct him about auto repairs, anti-freeze, oil, lubricants; instruct him about traffic lights, pedestrian walkways, drivers’ licences; instruct him about IDs and credit cards; about tall buildings and elevators; about airplanes, trains, busses, and taxis; about fast food, motels, and self-service gas stations; about money, tipping, shopping, and supermarket checkouts; about newspapers, radio and TV; about libraries, city directories, and telephones; about advertising, shopping malls, salesmen, sizes of clothing and shoes. The emissary would have to know the rudiments of investigation—how to track down one Johnson among the hundreds to be found in any major city—and he had to know how to survive while he did it, perhaps for months. Merely understanding money wouldn’t be enough. He had to be able to acquire money when he needed it. He had to know about law and the police. He would even need coaching in breaking and entering.
The task of teaching someone from a primitive society about the complex wonders of the Twentieth Century was so enormous that Egarn hesitated even to make a beginning. He was much too old and much too tired. He had waited too long.
But he was the only man alive who could do it, and so he had to try. He would work while there was any life in him, and do his best, and pray that for once in his life he would be lucky.
“No,” he muttered. “I will need a lot more than that. Luck wouldn’t be enough. It will take a miracle.”
CHAPTER 4
EGARN (3)
The Peerdom of Lant was at war, but its campaigns had been little more than organized pillage. The peer began her invasions with a tiny force. Opposing generals invariably reacted to this insolent gesture by flinging every available lasher into a massive counterattack in the hope of overwhelming the Lantiff and ending the war quickly.
Strokes of lightning tore that counterattack to shreds, and claps of thunder routed the terrified survivors. Formal resistance in a newly invaded peerdom ended before battle was joined. The defending forces had neither the bravery nor the fanaticism to stand and fight against a foe that could invoke the terror of the elements. The peer’s army, which had been waiting in concealment, then moved forward to rape and loot and vandalize at leisure.
The moment it became known that Egarn had escaped, the peer called off two of her wars to turn long ranks of Lantiff toward the western mountains. She had begun her southern invasion only recently, and she was reluctant to interfere with it; but she snatched entire armies from the north and east, leaving token forces to occupy the conquered peerdoms there. By the time Egarn’s fever abated, the opportunity for flight that had existed during the first days of his escape had vanished.
His conscience-stricken gesture of destroying his weapons may have come too late—as Bernal pointed out, Lant’s swollen armies no longer needed them for their conquests—but that fact did nothing to mitigate the peer’s rage. She reacted with mindless fury and threw every available force into her search for the traitor.
