Guardianes del Tiempo. Nebulae La patrouille du temps. Bibliotheque Marabout - Geant Avontuur in het verleden. Het Spectrum Prisma Jugoslavija Kentaur. I guardiani del Tempo. Mondadori Classici Urania 3. Bibliotheque Marabout - Science Fiction The Guardians of Time. Annals of the Time Patrol. La pattuglia del tempo. Mondadori Urania Argento 5. Aeg teeb vingerpusse. Kasutajainfo Kasutaja.
Poul Anderson Molbeck The Only Game in Town jutt aastast Guardians of Time Daniellid olendid kaugest tulevikust , kes rajasid Ajapatrulli, annavad korralduse seeekspeditsioon nurjata. Hea lugu, 5. Seega neli. Teksti loeti inglise keeles.
Teksti loeti vene keeles. Ajaloost on teada, et Kui ka see neid loobuma ei sunni Teksti loeti eesti keeles. But not all peoples desired a Mongol overlord. Revolutionary secret societies germinated throughout those several conquered realms lumped together as Cathay. Japan, with the Hojo family an able power behind the throne, had already repelled one invasion. Nor were the Mongols unified, save in theory. Around him, the land burned green with April.
Even the highest and oldest beeches fluttered gay young leaves. Pines roared in the wind, which blew down off the mountains cold and swift and smelling of melted snow, through a sky where birds were homebound in such flocks that they could darken the sun. The peaks of the Cascade range seemed to float in the west, blue-white, distant, and holy. Eastward the foothills tumbled in clumps of forest and meadow to a valley, and so at last, beyond the horizon, to prairies thunderous under buffalo herds.
Everard focused on the expedition. It wound through the open areas, more or less f. Other author's books: The Sensitive Man. Toktai clamped his mouth shut. We felt it our duty to investigate this, as well as explore the country in between. We had not looked for the honor of being met by your eminent selves. It would grieve him to see you meet disaster. We come to warn you. Pleasant though this country seems, it lies under a curse. Tell him, my brother. Sandoval, who had a better speaking voice, took over.
His yarn had been concocted with an eye to exploiting that superstition which still lingered in the half-civilized Mongols, without generating too much Chinese skepticism. There were really two great southern kingdoms, he explained. Their own lay far away; its rival was somewhat north and east of it, with a citadel on the plains. Both states possessed immense powers, call them sorcery or subtle engineering, as you wished. The northerly empire, Badguys, considered all this territory as its own and would not tolerate a foreign expedition.
Its scouts were certain to discover the Mongols before long, and would annihilate them with thunderbolts. The benevolent southern land of Goodguys could offer no protection, could only send emissaries warning the Mongols to turn home again. Toktai considered. His visage might have been scarred stone, but sweat filmed it.
He clapped his hands and barked orders to the guard who looked in. Thereafter they made small talk against a silence that thickened. A warrior appeared after some endless part of an hour. He said that a couple of horsemen had lassoed a deer. It would. Toktai led the way out, shouldering through a thick and buzzing swarm of men. He slipped the rifle stock onto his Mauser. The deer, a doe, had been forced back to camp. She trembled by the river, the horsehair ropes about her neck.
The sun, just touching the western peaks, turned her to bronze. There was a blind sort of gentleness in her look at Everard. He waved back the men around her and took aim. The first slug killed her, but he kept the gun chattering till her carcass was gruesome. When he lowered his weapon, the air felt somehow rigid. He looked across all the thick bandy-legged bodies, the flat, grimly controlled faces; he could smell them with unnatural sharpness, a clean odor of sweat and horses and smoke.
He felt himself as nonhuman as they must see him. He turned on his heel. Sandoval followed him. Their horses had been staked out, the gear piled close by. They saddled, unspeaking, mounted and rode off into the forest.
The fire blazed up in a gust of wind. Sparingly laid by a woodsman, in that moment it barely brought the two out of shadow—a glimpse of brow, nose, and cheekbones, a gleam of eyes. It sank down again to red and blue sputtering above white coals, and darkness took the men. He fumbled his pipe in his hands, bit hard on it and drank smoke, but found little comfort. When he spoke, the vast soughing of trees, high up in the night, almost buried his voice, and he did not regret that either.
Nearby were their sleeping bags, their horses, the scooter—antigravity sled cum space-time hopper—which had brought them. Otherwise the land was empty; mile upon mile, human fires like their own were as small and lonely as stars in the universe. Somewhere a wolf howled.
Active assignments, such as I get, are often hard to accept. Why should you or I have to take a hand? At least, no more than I mind any similar incident in that Goddamned slaughter-house they call human history. Just make them turn back.
Your demonstration this afternoon may be enough. Turn back… and what? Probably perish at sea. The night wind roared around his words. Suppose Toktai pushes on southeastward. His men can live off the country, even the deserts, far more handily than Coronado or any of those boys. That will encourage him all the more. The Mongols are as superior, man for man, as any Spaniard… Not that I imagine Toktai would wade right in.
A tough nut to crack, but a correspondingly rewarding one. Peru has an even higher culture at this moment, and much less organization than Pizarro faced; the Quechua-Aymar, the so-called Inca race, are still only one power down there among several. It might take them a few centuries to start mass immigration, as it will take the Europeans. I can imagine a string of clans and tribes being established in the course of some years, all down western North America.
Mexico and Yucatan get gobbled up—or, more likely, become khanates. The herding tribes move eastward as their own population grows and as new immigrants arrive.
Remember, the Yuan dynasty is due to be overthrown in less than a century. And Chinese will come here too, to farm and to share in the gold. Are they? A Western background prejudices us. We forget how much torture and massacre the Europeans were enjoying at the same time. Same practice of depopulating areas that resist, but respecting the rights of those who make submission.
Same armed protection and competent government. Same unimaginative, uncreative national character; but the same vague awe and envy of true civilization.
The Pax Mongolica, right now, unites a bigger area, and brings more different peoples into stimulating contact, than that piddling Roman Empire ever imagined. And after a little fighting, the average Navajo, Cherokee, Seminole, Algonquin, Chippewa, Dakota, will be glad to submit and become allied. Why not? The Sachem Khan of the strongest nation on earth! Sandoval stopped. Everard listened to the gallows creak of branches in the wind. My mother died of t. Everard sat unstirring.
It was Sandoval who shook himself and jumped to his feet with a rattling kind of laugh. It was just a yarn, Manse. Shall I take first watch? 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. 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?
Toktai should retreat, report to the Emperor what he saw, and organize a bigger expedition. 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? The Mongols were always good at psychological warfare. There are decent limits. Then all this would never have happened. Perhaps to correct some interference elsewhere, elsewhen.
How should I know? Everard set his jaws. Our orders are to make these people give up their exploration.
What happens afterward is none of our business. Everard sent the scooter gliding forward. The hill will be in his plain view, though. Those Cathayans know about gunpowder. They even have military rockets. 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. Everard patted the small machine he had half assembled. A potential distributor.
It can make some of the damnedest lightning you ever saw, with thunder to match. We might as well relax and enjoy this. No fire, naturally. 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. 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. They might panic. Okay, here goes. 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.
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