STEALING TIME

by

Christopher Stasheff

Copyright 2010

 

CHAPTER 6

 

                 Hugo sat cross-legged in a stable loft halfway home from the Wash.  Rain poured down outside; surely no one would blame a traveler for seeking shelter.  To while away the time, he took the wooden model of a Klein bottle out of his pack and set it on the planks before him.  The trance came easily with long practice.  He sat patiently, mind open and receptive, waiting for a fellow time traveler's mind to speak to his own, another glowing spot on the string of lights stretching from past to future.

                 Another presence, another personality stirred within his own mind—and one he recognized as he would recognize a familiar face.  "Angus!"

                 "Well met, Hugo," Angus's voice said.

                 Hugo remembered the self-picture Angus had presented in his mind once—an old white-haired man.  He knew that Angus wasn’t really any older than he himself, but that wasn't how it felt.  "The treasure wagons overturned even as you said they would, Angus.  When the knights righted them, there wasn't a groat left in them."

                 "The Wash seems to have deserved its name.  How did the king take it?"

                 "It was sad to see, Angus." But vindictive glee colored Hugo's thoughts.  "He only sat there and stared until long after the tide flowed smoothly again.  Then he turned his face away and bade his knights take him to the nearest inn.  Not a word has he spoken since, they say.  Ah, Angus, if ever I saw a broken man, King John is it."

                 "And no one deserved it more, eh?  How did the country folk take it?"

                 "The local lads and lassies waited till the king and his folk were gone, then dived for treasure, but found only a few silver pennies, nothing more."

                 "No surprise for you, then."

                 "Not with the treasure, no.  The Wash is a mighty tide when it flows in."

                 But Angus caught the undertone.  "What was a surprise, Hugo?"

                 "The stranger knight who counseled the king, Angus.”

                 "Stranger knight?"  Angus's tone sharpened.  "What were his family arms?"

                 "A mailed fist azure on a field vert.  Do you know them?"

                 "Never heard of them, but I can check them in a book."

                 So in addition to all his other accomplishments, Angus was a herald, too!  "Sir Gorier, the king called him.”

                 "Was there a motto?" Angus asked.

                 "'Fini justi methodi.'  What does it mean, Angus?"

                 "'The ends justifies the means’,” Angus said grimly.

                 "Do you know the man, then?"

                 "No, but I know who his overlords are—definitely my enemies.  What was he counseling the king to do?"

                 "Not to cross the Wash that day, but to wait until the morning.  The treasure would still be his if he listened, would it not?"

                 "Scarcely a doubt," Angus said with a grim cast to his thoughts.  "He would have seen the tidal bore and realized what it would do to his wagons—so the next day, he would have waited until the tide was done ebbing, then crossed in safety."

                 "If he had, he'd have been as harsh a lord as ever!  His knight must have been farsighted as well as loyal, to counsel him thus."

                 "I think it more likely the knight has his own purposes," Angus said.  "They just happen to coincide with King John's."

                 "What purposes would those be?"

                 "Tyranny," Angus said, "but on a scale Europe has never known.  At least under John at his worst, people's thoughts have been their own.  The tyrants Sir Gorier serves have worked out ways to make the people believe what they want them to believe." 

                 Hugo sucked in his breath.

                 "Yes, horrible, isn't it?  These are the people I'm fighting, Hugo, and whom you’ve helped me fight."

                 "What would he have wanted with King John, though?”

                 "John was trying to become a tyrant, to have complete control over everyone in England.  That's why his barons rebelled and forced him to sign the Great Charter."

                 "Aye, so I've heard."  Hugo smiled.  "Slowed him for a while, but he was gathering an army to fight them one by one."

                 "Until now."

                 "Yes, until he lost his treasure,” Hugo said.  "He won't be so quick to strike at an errant baron now."

                 "Not without money to pay his troops, no.  Anything else you can tell me about Sir Gorier?  Anything he said or did?"

                 Hugo thought for a minute, then said, "When the first wagon rolled through the village, he pulled up the cuff of his gauntlet to look at a bracelet he was wearing, then pulled it back."

                 "A wrist watch."  Angus's thoughts were angry.  "The fool!  Doesn't he realize that if he loses it, he could affect the whole time stream?"

              Hugo frowned.  “How so?”                                                                

“If it comes into the hands of a man who likes taking things apart and putting them back together, he’ll start inventing machines that do people’s work seven hundred years too early.”  Angus thought of the wars of the Reformation being fought with machine guns and artillery, and shuddered.

Hugo picked up the thoughts and stared in horror.  “Can we not take it from him?”

“We might find a way,” Angus said slowly.  “I’ll have to think it over.”

 

*               *               *

 

Yorick had showered, the agents had gone back to their base in the fully-developed headquarters of 1975, and he and Angus sat by an electric hearth admiring the fake flames and sipping hot buttered rum.  Angus had calmed down quickly as soon as Yorick had pointed out that Sir Gorier had failed in whatever long-term plan he’d been trying to help out. 

“So there’s nothing we can do but be wary of our enemies?” Angus asked.

“We can try to figure out what they’re going to try to do,” Yorick said, “or worse–what they’ve done and succeeded, then go back in time and sabotage them.”

“But they could have a hundred plots going at once!  More!”

“There are key points we can watch,” Yorick said.  “Henry II’s try at centralizing England’s government, Oliver Cromwell’s English Civil War and the triumph of Parliament over the king, the writing of the U.S. Constitution–the list goes on, and we can have agents stationed and ready at all of them.”

Angus reeled at the thought of hundreds of plots going on at the same time.  “Do you have any idea how much this is going to cost?”

“No, but I have some idea how many buried treasures are waiting to be found.”  Yorick lifted his glass and eyed the amber liquid.  "Yo ho ho!  What do we salvage next, Ang—Jean Lafitte's treasure chest?"

                 "Which one?" Angus grinned over the rim of his snifter.  "Legend has it that he left 'em lying all over the Caribbean."

                 "Okay, so that one will take some research."  Yorick held the snifter between himself and the fake fire, watching the play of light through the golden fluid.  "Of course, with all King John’s loot, I don't suppose we really need to go on another salvage operation."

                 "If it were just us wanting to live in luxury for the rest of our lives, no," Angus said, "but running a major organization is going to gobble up the gold—especially since the right way to do it is to invest this all and run GRIPE off the interest and dividends."

                 "Won't the banks be a little curious when you walk in with six dump trucks full of gold behind you and say, "'I'd like to make a deposit'?"

                 "Yes, we will have to feed it into dozens of different banks in smaller amounts," Angus agreed, "and persuading them to take medieval money could have problems of its own."      

"We might do better selling the individual pieces to collectors."

                 "Yeah, as long as we feed them in slowly.  Can you imagine what would happen to the coin-collectors' market if we dumped this stack on it all at once?"

                 "Good thing we're going to have a lawyer."

                 Angus nodded.  "Of course, our hard-won gains are perfectly safe here, until she gets back from law school."

                 Yorick didn't tell him that most of it would still be there forty years later.  "Okay, so we need more salvage jobs to tide us over.  We could hit the Chinese Summer Palace just before Lord Elgin's troops get there."

                 "Tons of priceless jewels and delicate porcelains?"  Angus shook his head with regret.  "They weren't lost, Yorick—they were looted by an army of English soldiers bent on revenge."

                 "Loot, lost—who's gonna miss a few million?"  Yorick gestured with his snifter but didn't quite spill it.  "History says it's gone—that's all that matters."

                 "Or pre-history," Angus noted.  "We could see how much of a hoard King Minos really had tucked away.”

                 "In the Cretan Labyrinth?"  Yorick shuddered.  "I'm not a superstitious man, Ang, but I have this thing about dark mazes without a map."

                 Angus frowned.  "I thought that was a lot of bull."

                 "No, he lived in the center of the Labyrinth."  Yorick took a thoughtful sip.  "Still, if we took a vacation there in the present day, copied down the floor plan, and brought along a heifer to placate anything sorta supernatural..."

                 "Thought you weren't superstitious," Angus said, grinning.  "Okay, a vacation sounds good, and I've always wanted to see the Aegean Sea.  We might try a few more rescue operations at that."

 

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