“I collected some dust and char when nobody was looking, and sent it uptime for analysis,” Zorach said. “The lab reported the explosive had been chemical – fulgurite-B, the name is.”
Everard nodded. “I know that stuff. In common use for a rather long period, starting a while after the origin span of us three. Therefore easy to obtain in quantity, untraceably – a hell of a lot easier than nuke isotopes. Wouldn’t need a large amount to do this much damage, either….I suppose you’ve had no luck intercepting the machine?”
Zorach shook his head. “No. Or rather, the Patrol officers haven’t. They went downtime of the event, planted instruments of every kind that could be concealed, but – Everything happens too fast.”
Everard rubbed his chin. The stubble felt almost silky; a bronze razor and a lack of soap didn’t make for a close shave. He thought vaguely that he would have welcomed some scratchiness, ‘or anything else familiar.
What had happened was plain enough. The vehicle had been unmanned, autopiloted, sent from some unknown point of space-time. Startoff had activated the detonator, so that the bomb arrived exploding. Though Patrol agents could pinpoint the instant, they could do nothing to head off the occurrence.
Could a technology advanced beyond theirs do so – Danellian, even? Everard imagined a device planted in advance of the moment, generating a forcefield which contained the violence when it smote. Well, this had not happened, therefore it might be a physical impossibility. Likelier, though, the Danellians stayed their hand because the harm had been done – the saboteurs could try again – all by itself, such a cat-and-mouse game might warp the continuum beyond healing – He shivered and asked roughly: “What explanation will the Tyrians themselves come up with?”
“Nothing dogmatic,” Yael Zorach replied. “They don’t have our kind of Weltanschauung, remember. To them, the world isn’t entirely governed by laws of nature, it’s capricious, changeable, magical.”
And they’re fundamentally right, aren’t they? The chill struck deeper into Everard.
“When nothing else of the kind occurs, excitement will die down,” she went on. “The chronicles that record the incident will be lost; besides, Phoenicians aren’t especially given to writing chronicles. They’ll think that somebody did something wrong that provoked a thunderbolt from heaven. Not necessarily any human; it could have been a quarrel among the gods. Therefore nobody will become a scapegoat. After a generation or two, the incident will be forgotten, except perhaps as a bit of folklore.”
Chaim Zorach fairly snarled: “That’s if the extortionists don’t do more and worse.”
“Yeah, let’s see their ransom note,” Everard requested.
“I have a copy only. The original went uptime for study.”
“Oh, sure, I know. I’ve read the lab report. Sepia ink on a papyrus scroll, no clue there. Found at your door, probably dropped from another unmanned hopper that just flitted through.”
“Certainly dropped in that way,” Zorach reminded him. “The agents who came in set up instruments for that night, and detected the machine. It was present for about a millisecond. They might have tried to capture it, but what would have been the use? It was bound to be devoid of clues. And in any case, the effort would have entailed making a racket that could have brought the neighbors out to see what was going on.”
He fetched the document for Everard to examine. The Patrolman had pored over a transcript as part of his briefing, but hoped that sight of the actual hand would suggest something, anything to him.
The words had been formed with a contemporary reed pen, rather skillfully used. (This implied that the writer was well versed in the milieu, but that was obvious already.) They were printed, not cursive, though certain flamboyant flourishes appeared. The language was Temporal.
“To the Time Patrol from the Committee for Aggrandizement, greeting.” At least there was none of the cant about being a people’s army of national liberation, such as nauseated Everard in the later part of his home century. These fellows were frank bandits. Unless, of course, they pretended to be, in order to cover their tracks the more thoroughly….
“Having witnessed the consequences when one small bomb was delivered to a carefully chosen location in Tyre, you are invited to contemplate the results of a barrage throughout the city.”