“We’ll want the first – ” the agent had begun to say, when the door to which he was about to direct Calvus opened.
“Hey,” called Gaius, natty in a fresh tunic and polished brass, “I’d about given up on – ” He paused when he realized that the men ahead of his friend were actually accompanying him. “Blazes, Aulus,” he said as he stepped back, “you started the party without me?”
“It was a party I’d have liked to have you at, buddy,” Perennius said grimly as he shut the door behind him. “See if we’ve got any field rations in there, will you … ? Because I’m starved, and we’re not going anywhere until Lucius Calvus here has explained a few things.”
The tall man arranged Sestius carefully on one of the beds. “Give me your cloaks,” he said, stripping off the woolen formality of his own toga. Calvus’s skin was the same old-ivory shade wherever it was visible, legs, arms, and face. In the same matter of fact tone, he continued, “The creature you killed is from another world. There are very few adults on Earth at present – six, only five now, we are quite sure. There are millions of eggs, and the creatures can breed in their larval forms. They dissolve rock and crawl through it. When they all become adults simultaneously, there will be more billions by a factor of ten then the Earth ever held of humans. They will sweep us into oblivion unless we stop them now.” With neither haste nor waste motion, Calvus tucked his own garment around the shivering centurion. He reached for the cloak of the dumbfounded Gaius.
“Aulus, what on earth – ” the younger man blurted.
Perennius stopped him with a raised hand and a frown of concentration. He was trying to blank his mind of preconceptions so that he could really hear what the tall stranger was saying. The words did, after all, make internal sense. It was the way they fit – failed to fit – into the world that made them absurd.
And a tripedal creature four feet tall, with tools and a voice that could have come from a millstone … that did not fit Perennius’s world either. He was professional enough to believe that it might be his world that was wrong.
“Who are you, Lucius Calvus?” the agent asked softly.
The tall man sat on the edge of the bed. His fingers massaged Sestius’s forehead. The contact seemed to reduce the centurion’s spasmodic trembling far more than it should have done. “I’m a traveller,” Calvus said, his calm eyes on the older Illyrian. “An agent like yourself, Aulus Perennius.”
Perennius slammed the heel of his hand against the closed door. It crashed like a catapult releasing. “Do you think I don’t see that?” he shouted. “Whose agent, damn you?”
“Mankind’s,” said the man who called himself by a Latin name. “But I came from another sort of distance, Aulus Perennius. I come from a place fifteen thousand years into the time that has yet to come.”
Gaius threw up his hands. “Blazes,” he cried to the
ceiling. “Aulus, are you all drunk? Him babbling nonsense and you sitting there serious as an owl like you were listening!”
“How are you going to stop them if you didn’t bring any weapons?” asked the agent. He did not raise his voice again, but the taut malevolence in it sent a shiver up Gaius’s back. Perennius had not liked the world that Fate had shown him, but it drove him to helpless fury to feel all the certainties draining away from even that. There were few things that Aulus Perennius would surrender without a fight. Reality was not one of those things.
“We knew we could find a weapon here, Aulus Perennius,” said the calm, seated figure. His hands continued to stroke the injured centurion. “We knew that I could find someone like you.”
Gaius seized Calvus by the shoulder. The young courier was a good-sized man, but his attempt to shake the seated figure was as vain as if he had tried to shake an oak. “My friend isn’t a weapon!” Gaius shouted. “He’s a man, and men aren’t just things!”