Once more, heavily, Everard nodded. His opponents were shrewd. A threat to kill or kidnap individuals – say, King Hiram himself – would have been nugatory, if not empty. The Patrol would mount guard on any such person. If somehow an attack succeeded, the Patrol would go back in time and arrange for the victim to be elsewhere at the moment of the assault; it would make the event “unhappen.” Granted, that involved risks which the outfit hated to take, and at best would require a lot of work to make sure that the future did not get altered by the rescue operation itself. Nevertheless, the Patrol could and would act.
But how did you move a whole islandful of buildings to safety? You could, perhaps, evacuate the population. The town would remain. It wasn’t physically large, after all, no matter how large it loomed in history – about 25,000 people crowded into about 140 acres. A few tons of high explosive would leave it in ruins. The devastation needn’t even be total. After such a terrifying manifestation of supernatural fury, no one would come back here. Tyre would crumble away, a ghost town, while all the centuries and millennia, all the human beings and their lives and civilizations, which it had helped bring into existence… those would be less than ghosts.
Everard shivered anew. Don’t tell me there is no such thing as absolute evil, he thought. These creatures – He forced himself to read on:
” – The price of our forbearance is quite reasonable, merely a little information. We desire the data necessary for the construction of a Trazon matter transmuter – ”
When that device was being developed, during the Third Technological Renaissance, the Patrol had covertly manifested itself to the creators, though they lived downtime of its own founding. Forever afterward, its use – the very knowledge of its existence, let alone the manner of its making – had been severely restricted. True, the ability to convert any material object, be it just a heap of dirt, into any other, be it a jewel or a machine or a living body, could have spelled unlimited wealth for the entire species. The trouble was, you could as easily produce unlimited amounts of weapons, or poisons, or radioactive atoms….
“- You will broadcast the data in digital form from Palo Alto, California, United States of America, throughout the 24 hours of Friday 13 June 1980. The waveband to employ… the digital code…. Your receipt will be the continued reality of your time line. -”
That was smart, too. The message wasn’t one that would be picked up accidentally by some native, yet electronic activity in the Silicon Valley area was so great as to rule out any possibility of tracking down a receiver.
“- We will not use the device upon the planet Earth. Therefore the Time Patrol need not fear that it is compromising its Prime Directive by this helpfulness to us. On the contrary, you have no other way to preserve yourselves, do you?
“Our compliments, and our expectations.”
No signature.
“The broadcast won’t be made, will it?” Yael asked low. In the shadows of the room, her eyes glimmered enormous. She has children uptime, Everard remembered. They would vanish with their world.
“No,” he said.
“And yet our reality remains!” burst from Chaim. “You came here, out of it, starting uptime of 1980. So we must have caught the criminals.”
Everard’s sigh seemed to leave a track of pain through his breast. “You know better than that,” he said tonelessly. “The quantum nature of the continuum – If Tyre explodes, why, here we’ll be, but our ancestors, your kids, everything we knew, they won’t. It’ll be a whole different history. Whether whatever is left of the Patrol can restore it – somehow head off the disaster – that’s problematical. I’d call it unlikely.”
“But what would the criminals have gained, then?” The question was raw, almost a screech.
Everard shrugged. “A certain wild satisfaction, I guess. The temptation to play God slinks around in the best of us, doesn’t it? And the temptation to play Satan isn’t unrelated. Besides, they’d be careful to lurk downtime of the destruction; they’d stay existent. They’d have a good chance of making themselves overlords of a future where nothing but bits and pieces of the Patrol were left to oppose them. Or at a minimum, they’d have a lot of fun trying.”