Time Traders II:
The Defiant Agents & Key Out of Time
Andre Norton
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
BAEN BOOKS BY ANDRE NORTON:
Time Traders
Time Traders II
The Defiant Agents
1
No windows broke the four plain walls of the office; no sunlight shone on the desk there. Yet the five disks set out on its surface appeared to glow—perhaps the heat of the mischief they could cause . . . had caused . . . blazed in them.
But fanciful imaginings did not change cold, hard fact. Dr. Gordon Ashe, one of the four men peering unhappily at the display, shook his head slightly as if to free his mind of such cobwebs.
His neighbor to the right, Colonel Kelgarries, leaned forward to ask harshly: “No chance of a mistake?”
“You saw the detector.” The thin gray man behind the desk answered with chill precision. “No, no possible mistake. These five have definitely been snooped.”
“And two choices among them,” Ashe murmured. That was the important point now.
“I thought these were under maximum security,” Kelgarries challenged the gray man.
Florian Waldour’s remote expression did not change. “Every possible precaution was in force. There was a sleeper—a hidden agent—planted—”
“Who?” Kelgarries demanded.
Ashe glanced around at his three companions—Kelgarries, colonel in command of one sector of Project Star, Florian Waldour, the security head on the station, Dr. James Ruthven . . .
“Camdon!” he said, hardly able to believe this answer to which logic had led him.
Waldour nodded.
It was the first time since he had known and worked with Kelgarries that Ashe saw him display open astonishment.
“Camdon? But he was sent by—” The colonel’s eyes narrowed. “He must have been sent. . . . There were too many cross checks to fake that!”
“Oh, he was sent, all right.” For the first time there was a note of emotion in Waldour’s voice. “He was a sleeper, a very deep sleeper. They must have planted him a full twenty-five or thirty years ago. He’s been just what he claimed to be as long as that.”
“Well, he certainly was worth their time and trouble, wasn’t he?” James Ruthven’s voice was a growling rumble. He sucked in thick lips, continuing to stare at the disks. “How long ago were these snooped?”
Ashe’s thoughts turned swiftly from the enormity of the betrayal to that important point. The time element—that was the primary concern now that the damage was done, and they knew it.
“That’s one thing we don’t know.” Waldour’s reply came slowly as if he hated the admission.
“We’ll be safer, then, if we presume the very earliest period.” Ruthven’s statement was as ruthless in its implications as the shock they had had when Waldour announced the disaster.
“Eighteen months ago?” Ashe protested.
But Ruthven was nodding. “Camdon was in on this from the very first. We’ve had the tapes in and out for study all that time, and the new detector against snooping was not put in service until two weeks ago. This case came up on the first check, didn’t it?” he asked Waldour.
“First check,” the security man agreed. “Camdon left the base six days ago. But he has been in and out on his liaison duties from the first.”
“He had to go through those search points every time,” Kelgarries protested. “Thought nothing could get through those.” The colonel brightened. “Maybe he got his snooper films and then couldn’t take them off base. Have his quarters been turned out?”
Waldour’s lips lifted in a grimace of exasperation. “Please, Colonel,” he said wearily, “this is not a kindergarten exercise. In confirmation of his success, listen . . .” He touched a button on his desk and out of the air came the emotionless chant of a newscaster.
“Fears for the safety of Lassiter Camdon, space expeditor for the Western Alliance Space Council, have been confirmed by the discovery of burned wreckage in the mountains. Mr. Camdon was returning from a mission to the Star Laboratory when his plane lost contact with Ragnor Field. Reports of a storm in that vicinity immediately raised concern—” Waldour snapped off the voice.
“True—or a cover for his escape?” Kelgarries wondered aloud.
“Could be either. They may have deliberately written him off when they had all they wanted,” Waldour acknowledged. “But to get back to our troubles—Dr. Ruthven is right to assume the worst. I believe we can only insure the recovery of our project by thinking that these tapes were snooped anywhere from eighteen months ago to last week. And we must work accordingly!”
The room fell silent as they all considered that. Ashe slipped down in his chair, his thoughts enmeshed in memories. First there had been Operation Retrograde, when specially trained “time agents” had shuttled back and forth in history, striving to locate and track down the mysterious source of alien knowledge which Greater Russia had suddenly—and ominously—begun to use.
Ashe himself and a younger partner, Ross Murdock, had been part of the final action which had solved the mystery, having traced that source of knowledge not to an earlier and forgotten human civilization but to wrecked spaceships from an eon-old galactic empire—an empire which had flourished when glacial ice covered most of Europe and northern America and humans were cave-dwelling primitives. Murdock, trapped by the Russians in one of those wrecked ships, had inadvertently summoned its original owners. They had descended to trace—through the Russian time stations—the looters of their wrecks, destroying the whole Russian time-travel system.
But the aliens had not chanced on the parallel western system. And a year later that had been put into Project Folsom One. Again Ashe, Murdock, and a newcomer, the Apache Travis Fox, had gone back into time to the Arizona of the Folsom hunters, discovering what they wanted—two ships, one wrecked, the other intact. And when the project had attempted to bring the intact ship back into the present, chance had triggered controls set by the dead alien commander. A party of four, Ashe, Murdock, Fox, and a technician, had then made an involuntary space voyage, touching three worlds on which the galactic civilization of the far past had left ruins.
Voyage tape fed into the controls of the ship had taken the men, and, when rewound, it had almost miraculously returned them to Earth with a cargo of similar tapes found on a world which might have been the capital for a government comprised of whole solar systems. Tapes—each one was the key to another planet.
And that ancient galactic knowledge was treasure such as humans had never dreamed of possessing, though many rightly feared that such discoveries could be weapons in hostile hands. Tapes chosen at random had been shared with other nations at a great drawing. But each nation secretly remained convinced that, in spite of the untold riches it might hold as a result of chance, its rivals had done better. Right at this moment, Ashe knew there were Western agents trying to do at the Russian project just what Camdon had done there. However, that did not help in solving their present dilemma about Operation Cochise, now perhaps the most important part of their plan.
Some of the tapes were duds, either too damaged to be useful, or set for worlds hostile to humans lacking the special equipment the earlier star-traveling race had had at its command. Of the five tapes they now knew had been snooped, three would be useless to the enemy.
But one of the remaining two . . . Ashe frowned. One was the goal toward which they had been working feverishly for a full twelve months. Their assignment was to plant a colony across the gulf of space—a successful colony—later to be used as a steppingstone to other worlds . . .
“So we have to move faster.” Ruthven’s comment reached Ashe through his stream of memories.
“I thought you required at least three more months to conclude personnel training,” Waldour observed.
Ruthven lifted a fat hand, running the nail of a broad thumb back and forth across his lower lip in a habitual gesture Ashe had learned to mistrust. As the latter stiffened, bracing for a battle of wills, he saw Kelgarries come alert too. At least the colonel more often than not was able to counter Ruthven’s demands.
“We test and we test,” said the fat man. “Always we test. We move like turtles when it would be better to race like greyhounds. There is such a thing as overcaution, as I have said from the first. One would think”—his accusing glance included Ashe and Kelgarries—”that there had never been any improvising in this project, that all had always been done by the book. I say that this is the time we must take the big gamble, or else we may find we have been outbid for space entirely. Let those others discover even one alien installation they can master and—” his thumb shifted from his lip, grinding down on the desk top as if it were crushing some venturesome but entirely unimportant insect—”and we are finished before we really begin.”