It was cool and dim; a window opening on a small cloister garden had been curtained against the heat of the day.
“Why don’t we relax a while and get acquainted before we buckle down to duty?” Everard suggested.
Zorach scowled. “You can do that right after you almost got killed?”
His wife smiled. “I think he might need to all the more, dear,” she murmured. “We too. The menace can wait a little longer. It’s been waiting, hasn’t it?”
From the pouch at his belt, Everard drew anachronisms he had permitted himself, hitherto used only in solitude: pipe, tobacco, lighter. Zorach’s tension eased a trifle, he chuckled and fetched cigarettes out of a locked coffer which held various such comforts. His language changed to Brooklyn-accented English: “You’re American, aren’t you, Agent Everard?”
“Yes. Recruited in 1954.” How many years of his lifespan had passed “since” he answered an ad, took certain tests, and learned of an organization that guarded a traffic through the epochs? He hadn’t added them up lately. It didn’t matter much, when he and his fellows were the beneficiaries of a treatment that kept them unaging. “Uh, I thought you two were Israelis.”
“We are,” Zorach explained. “In fact, Yael’s a sabra. Me, though, I didn’t immigrate till I’d been doing archaeology there for a spell and had met her. That was in 1971. We got recruited into the Patrol four years later.”
“How’d that happen, if I may ask?”
“We were approached, sounded out, finally told the truth. Naturally, we jumped at the chance. The work’s often hard and lonesome – twice as lonesome, in a way, when we’re home on furlough and can’t tell our old friends and colleagues what we’ve been up to – but it’s totally fascinating.” Zorach winced. His words became a near mumble. “Also, well, this post is special for us. We don’t just maintain a base and its cover business, we manage to help local people now and then. Or we try to, as much as we can without causing anybody to suspect there’s anything peculiar about us. That makes up, somehow, a little bit, for… for what our countrymen will do hereabouts, far uptime.”
Everard nodded. The pattern was familiar to him. Most field agents were specialists like these, passing their careers in a single milieu. They had to be, if they were to learn it thoroughly enough to serve the Patrol’s purposes. What a help it would be to have native-born personnel! But such were very rare before the eighteenth century A.D., or still later in most parts of the world. How could a person who hadn’t grown up in a scientific-industrial society even grasp the idea of automatic machinery, let alone vehicles that jumped in a blink from place to place and year to year? An occasional genius, of course; however, most identifiable geniuses carved niches for themselves in history, and you didn’t dare tell them the facts for fear of making changes….
“Yeah,” Everard said. “In a way, a free operative like me has it easier. Husband-and-wife teams, or women generally – Not to pry, but what do you do about children?”
“Oh, we have two at home in Tel Aviv,” Yael Zorach answered. “We time our returns so we’ve never been gone from them for more than a few days of their lives.” She sighed. “It is strange, of course, when to us months have passed.” Brightening: “Well, when they’re of age, they’re going to join the outfit too. Our regional recruiter has examined them already and decided they’ll be fine material.”
If not, Everard thought, could you stand it, watching them grow old, suffer the horrors that will come, finally die, while you are still young of body? Such a prospect had made him shy away from marriage, more than once.
“I think Agent Everard means children here in Tyre,” Chaim Zorach said. “Before traveling from Sidon – we took ship, like you, because we were going to become moderately conspicuous – we quietly bought a couple of infants from a slave dealer, took them along, and have been passing them off as ours. They’ll have lives as good as we can arrange.” Unspoken was the likelihood that servants had the actual raising of those two; their foster parents would not dare invest much love in them. “That keeps us from appearing somehow unnatural. If my wife’s womb has since closed, why, it’s a common misfortune. I do get twitted about not taking a second wife or at least a concubine, but on the whole, Phoenicians mind their own business pretty well.”