The Shield of Time by Poul Anderson Read Free Book Online

until the last of their breed was captured or slain. Still, there could be very few remaining at large, and today he had—finally, finally—nabbed the ringleader.
    Merau Varagan walked some yards off from the group, to a cliff edge, where he stood looking out over the sea. The Patrolmen on guard let him. They had snapped a neuroinduction collar around the neck of each prisoner. At the first sign of any suspicious move, a remote-control switch would activate it and the wearer would collapse paralyzed. On impulse. Everard went to join him.
    Water sparkled blue, flecked with white, dusted with radiance. Sunlight called pungencies out of dittany underfoot. A breeze ruffled Varagan’s hair, which sheened obsidian black. He had shed his drenched robe and stood like a marble statue newly from the hand of Phidias. His face might also have been the ideal of a Hellas not yet born, except that it was too fine-chiseled and nothing Apollonian dwelt in the great green eyes or on the blood-red mouth. Dionysian, perhaps….
    He nodded at Everard. “A lovely vista,” he said in American English, which his voice turned into music. The tone was calm, almost nonchalant. “May I savor it while we are here?”
    “Sure,” agreed the Patrolman, “though we’ll leave pretty soon.”
    “Does the exile planet offer anything comparable?”
    “I don’t know. They don’t tell us.”
    “To make it more feared, I daresay. That un-discover’d country from whose bourn No traveler returns.’” Sardonically: “You needn’t persuade me not to escape it by leaping off this verge, no matter how relieved some of your companions might feel.”
    “As a matter of fact, we’d cuss. It wouldn’t be nice of you, putting us to all the trouble of fishing out your carcass and reviving it.”
    “In order to subject me to the kyradex.”
    “Yeah. You’ve got a headful of information we want.”
    “I fear you will be disappointed. We have taken care that none of us shall know much about any other’s resources, capabilities, or contingency plans.”
    “Uh-huh. Natural-born loners, the bunch of you.”
    “And the genetic engineers of the thirty-first millennium set themselves to bring forth a race of supermen, bred to adventure on the cosmic frontier,” Shalten said once, “and lo, they found they had begotten Lucifer.” He sometimes talks in that vaguely Biblical style. Otherwise nothing about him is vague.
    “Well, I will preserve what dignity I can,” Varagan said. “Once on the planet”—he smiled—“who knows what may be possible?”
    Physical weariness and letdown after excitement leftEverard vulnerable to emotion. “Why do you do it?” he blurted. “You lived like gods—”
    Varagan nodded. “Very much like gods. Have you ever considered the fact that that includes changelessness, trapped in a myth, ultimate meaninglessness? Our civilization was older to us than the Stone Age was to yours. In the end, that made it unendurable.”
    So you tried to overthrow it, and failed, but some of you had managed to seize timecycles, and fled back into the past.
“You could have left it peacefully. The Patrol, for instance, would’ve been overjoyed to have people with your abilities as recruits; and for your part, I swear you’d never have been bored.”
    “We would have been what is worse, perverting our innermost natures. The Patrol exists to conserve one version of history.”
    “And you’ve kept trying to destroy it! In God’s name, why?”
    “So stupid a question is unworthy of you. You know quite well why. We have tried to remake time in order that we may rule it; and we have desired to rule in order that our wills may be wholly free. Enough.”
    Haughtiness departed, lightness returned. Varagan trilled a laugh. “The stodgy have triumphed again, it seems. Congratulations. You’ve done a remarkable piece of detective work, tracking us. Would you tell me how? I’ll be most interested.”
    “Ah, it’d take too long,”
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