Current hypersonic suborbital transports didn't use any form of reaction engines, of course. But the term "jet lag" was still in use . . . and altogether too damned appropriate, Jason thought, after their three-hour flight from Greece to Australia.
Rutherford gave them little time to recover. He had their schedule planned out to his usual degree of regimentation. After landing at the town-sized installation in the Great Sandy Desert not far northwest of Lake Mackay—about as close to the middle of nowhere as it was possible to get on today's Earth, as Jason had intimated—they barely had time to get settled into their quarters. Deirdre and Nagel were pleasantly surprised, for as viewed from the outside, the facilities looked almost as bleak as their surroundings. Inside, the accommodations were as comfortable as late-twenty-fourth-century technology and fairly lavish funding could make them. Their biological clocks told them it was time to retire to those luxury-hotellike quarters . . . but it was still business hours for the laboratories to which Rutherford took them.
He had decided the implantation of their temporal retrieval devices should take place at once. This way, the two novices wouldn't have time to brood about it and let their cultural prejudices simmer. For it was as Jason had told them: a very trivial in/out surgery, after which it was a fait accompli. Since any part of the body would do as well as any other, the out-of-the-way and easy-to-forget inner side of the left arm, not far below the armpit, was used. Jason himself had had so many of the tiny TRDs put into and taken out of himself that he'd long ago stopped worrying about it, if indeed he ever had.
After that, Rutherford let them rest. But soon it was back to the labs for a procedure that was more elaborate and time-consuming . . . and which came as a surprise to Deirdre and Nagel. Deirdre in particular was taken aback. "They never mentioned this problem in any of the old fictional treatments of time travel I've read," she remarked.
"No," Rutherford smiled at her. "I've sampled some of those works myself. They were full of unscrupulous people doing things like selling automatic rifles to the Confederate States of America. But those authors never seem to have considered the real threat that even the most well-meaning of time travelers would pose to the people of the past, without ever intending to do so."
"I've often wondered why they didn't think of it," said Jason. "Their own history told them all about the impact Europeans, with their millennia of exposure to the Old World disease pool, had had on isolated societies in Polynesia and the Americas."
"True. But you must remember that those writers lived during the early part of the Age of Antibiotics, before the consequences of that period's irresponsibility were appreciated. Today, of course, we know that excessive dispensing and inept use of penicillin and the other 'wonder drugs' over a period of generations put disease microorganisms through an extraordinary course of forced-draft evolution. Only the most resistant strains survived . . . and proceeded to give rise to super-resistant ones. During the twenty-first century, it became a race between those strains and ever more highly developed antibiotics."
"But," Nagel protested, "nowadays we all get broad spectrum immunization as a matter of routine public health."
"You're forgetting the Immunity Gap, Sidney."
Nagel fell silent. Actually, no one could forget that nightmare time when humanity had seemed on the verge of losing its race with the microbes, for those years' social chaos and apocalyptic panic had provided the soil from which the poisonous growth of the Transhuman movement had sprouted.
"During that period," Rutherford continued, "the human immune system had to undergo a bit of forced-draft evolution itself. So now we all harbor organisms against which the humans of earlier eras have no defenses. The further back one goes, the worse the problem becomes—and you are going very much further back than anyone ever has. Each of you would be a veritable 'Typhoid Mary' in the Bronze Age. Fortunately, we are aware of the danger, and can prevent it."
"But," said Nagel, his face a shade paler, "what if the discoverers of time travel hadn't thought of this problem, and simply gone blundering ahead into the past?"
"But they didn't, Sidney," Rutherford told him soothingly. "That's the whole point of what Commander Thanou was explaining to you about time travel back in Athens. There are no paradoxes."
Nagel didn't look altogether satisfied. But like his companions, he proceeded to submit to a series of treatments involving injections alternating with spells of lying down strapped into vaguely alarming-looking and -sounding machinery. The technicians who processed them were far too busy to explain it all. But Rutherford assured them that their bodies were being cleansed of all microorganisms that would endanger the population of the seventeenth century b.c., by processes which spared those organisms that served a purpose. They had little choice but to accept his word.
After that it was time for a three-week orientation period, which gave Jason and Nagel more time to grow the beards whose lack would have been conspicuous where they were going. Rutherford's brief tour in Greece had given them a basic familiarity with the region. Now they were force-fed detailed information about it, and about the material culture in which they would find themselves. For most of the curriculum, relatively traditional teaching techniques, reinforced by neuro-electronic stimulation of the appropriate brain centers while sleeping or in a state of induced unconsciousness, sufficed. But in the matter of language . . .
"It would make no sense to send people into a past milieu without giving them the means of communicating there," Jason explained when they met to discuss the subject. He ignored Nagel's fidgeting. "Now, it doesn't have to be exact. You don't have to pass for a native of the locality where you find yourself; you can always claim to be from somewhere else where everybody knows the people talk funny. But accent or not, you have to be reasonably fluent in the language."
"And," Rutherford put in, "it would take too long to acquire such fluency by conventional means. Therefore, the Authority was able to successfully make a case for another exemption from the Human Integrity Act. We are permitted to use direct neural induction to impose a language's patterns on the speech centers. It is somewhat disorienting, and requires a period of rest under antidepressant drugs afterwards. In fact, you may have noted a waiver clause in the Articles of Agreement concerning long-term effects. I should emphasize, however, that this is strictly precautionary. Be assured that we have never had an actual incidence of such problems."
Nagel was clearly uninterested in any possible side effects. In fact, he could no longer contain himself. "Blast it, Kyle, I know all this! But how can you possibly have these 'language patterns' for the Aegean Bronze Age?"
Rutherford evidently decided that Nagel had suffered enough. "We have been planning this expedition for some time, Sidney. It is, after all, by far the most ambitious temporal displacement we have ever undertaken—involving humans. The risks involved justified the expense of preceding it with an unmanned probe."
"An unmanned probe?" Deirdre echoed, too intrigued to take offense at the phraseology.
"Yes—using a unique approach." Rutherford's look of sublime self-satisfaction left no doubt in anyone's mind as to the identity of that approach's originator. "The probe was encased in a synthetic material which—to any low-technology tools of analysis, at any rate—appeared to be rough-hewn stone, in a crudely anthropomorphic shape. It was sent back to 1710 B.C., in the Inachos valley—which we visited on our outing from Athens, as you may recall."
"Why there?" Jason asked.
"The entire operation was somewhat controversial. After all, we were flinging an instrumentality into the past without any on-the-scene human oversight. In order to get approval, we had to agree to use an out-of-the-way locale where the risk of impacting observed history was minimized. But it was still within the same cultural—and, almost certainly, ethnolinguistic—zone as the more important centers."
Nagel, Jason thought, must have sensed where this was headed. He was practically panting.
"The experiment succeeded," Rutherford resumed. "The local people did precisely as we'd hoped: they found the probe, and made a god of it—or, if not a god, at least an object of worship. There are instances from recorded Greek history of objects that the immortals were believed to have flung to Earth—the Omphalos at the Oracle of Delphi, or the Palladium that the Greeks were supposed to have stolen from Troy. We counted on this particular kind of susceptibility already existing in protohistorical times."
Deirdre spoke with uncharacteristic hesitancy, as though frightened of what she was saying. "Is it possible that, by your experiment, you created this 'susceptibility'?"
"I suppose that is within the realm of possibility," Rutherford allowed with chilling casualness. "At any rate, the locals took it to their village—which was later to grow into the town of Argos—and set it up in a shrine . . . and did a great deal of talking in its presence. Now, the probe was designed for ruggedness and durability above all else, for obvious reasons. It had no sophisticated cybernetic features—just basic audio and video pickups, which ran continuously for the entire duration of the mission, since we were able to give it a far higher recording capacity than Commander Thanou will have."
Yes, Jason thought. I have other things taking up space. A heart, lungs, kidneys, a GI tract . . . and, whatever Nagel thinks, a brain.
"The probe's TRD was set to activate at a local time in the small hours of the morning, when we hoped no one would be present to see it vanish. After we had retrieved it, we were able to study its recorded pictures and sound. We subjected them to computer analysis using universal translation programs."
Deirdre and Nagel didn't look as though this meant anything in particular to them. It did to Jason. He was familiar with the devices that were used in establishing communication with newly discovered alien races. With only a few minutes' exposure, it was possible to begin analyzing an entirely unknown language.
"But," Rutherford continued, "that turned out to be unnecessary in this case. The language proved to be an early form of Achaean Greek—essentially, the language of the Linear B tablets."
"Yes!" Nagel leaped to his feet with an enthusiasm of which Jason would never have dreamed him capable. "I knew it! That for Markova and her introduction of proto-Greek by the charioteers of the Grave Circle dynasties at Mycenae! Ha! And villagers wouldn't have been addressing their gods in the language of a caste of recent conquerors. The ancestral Graeco-Thracian speech must have entered the region as far back as the twenty-third century B.C. as I have theorized—probably just before the Centum-Satem rift started to occur within East Indo-European." He turned to Rutherford, voice charged with urgency. "Kyle, you must postpone our expedition! As soon as I have had a chance to examine these findings, it is important that I prepare a monograph immediately."
"Now wait just a damned minute—!" Deirdre began.
Rutherford laughed. "Do calm down, everyone! Sidney, the schedule for the expedition is set in stone, as these things tend to be. Remember Commander Thanou's remarks about 'traffic control'? There'll be plenty of time to demolish Markova after you return, armed with the unique prestige of having seen the era personally."
"Hmm . . . there is that." Nagel subsided with, for him, fairly good grace. "You won't allow this to become general knowledge until my return, will you?"
"Of course not. The probe's data is included in the overall body of the expedition's findings, for which you and Dr. Sadaka-Ramirez have exclusive publication rights, as specified in the Articles of Agreement. So put your mind at ease while we proceed to transfer some of that data to your brain."
Nagel immediately perked up at the reminder that he was going to actually learn the language whose identity was a question over which oceans of ink had been spilled for half a millennium. They went back to the labs, and a new set of machines.
For Jason, it was fairly old hat. He had acquired other tongues in the same way—including his own ancestral Demotic Greek. His initial impression was that you probably had to be a linguist to recognize this harsh language as related to it. On reflection, though, as the newly acquired patterns settled into his mind, he could glimpse occasional haunting similarities and recognize structural analogs.
He had ample opportunity to make such connections, for Rutherford drilled them in the language mercilessly, making sure their voice boxes could implement the speech patterns their brains now held. They also spent much time studying the video record the probe had brought back. It was difficult to know how to react to those images; their gritty, grubby, unscripted reality was hard to reconcile with the realization that these entirely natural-looking people's bones had been dust for over four thousand years.
Most of the footage was of minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour ordinariness. But the sense of peering through a window into the distant past gave those recordings a mesmerizing quality which Rutherford—had they only known—was counting on. It kept them staring at those images, and soaking up useful impressions of how the people of that era moved, gestured and even wore their clothes. The last became relevant when they got issued their own.
Those outfits were of a woolen fabric that was only moderately rough, and dyed in the bright colors they had seen in the recordings. Deirdre had expressed a certain surprise at that, having assumed that people impoverished, by modern standards, would dress drably. Jason knew from experience the fallacy of this common assumption; primitive people love bright primary colors. Naturally, these clothes had been left out in the weather long enough to acquire an authentic faded look. They consisted of tunics and cloaks for the men and something not too different, though longer, for Deirdre. Again, she expressed surprise, having expected something like the himation of Classical Greek times, or perhaps like the breast-exposing ankle-length flounced dresses of the Minoan ladies of the frescoes. Rutherford explained that the former was a mark of a domestic seclusion, while the latter was the particular fashion statement of a narrow class—quite possibly a class of priestesses, although this wasn't certain. Either way, Deirdre was clearly relieved. She was less happy about the footwear; hers consisted of light sandals, while the men both had openwork high-quarter shoes with curled toes.
They also received their equipment. With it came a lecture from Rutherford.
"There is a fixed policy against sending back anachronistically advanced items," he explained. "First of all, the time travelers would be put in an awkward position, having to explain such things. Secondly, there is the danger of contaminating the local culture, and thus altering observed history."
"But Kyle," said Nagel, "I thought that couldn't be done in any case. Didn't you and Mr. Thanou say that something would prevent it?"
"To the best of our knowledge, that is true," said Rutherford judiciously. "But one never knows just what is going to happen to prevent it. You might not want to be standing nearby when whatever it is occurs. So it's best if the problem never arises at all."
"But surely," Nagel wheedled, "in such a primitive era, we'll need—"
"Remember the Articles of Agreement, Sidney," Rutherford told him sternly. "You are going to be living on the local technological level. That is precisely why we were obligated to satisfy ourselves of your ability to endure it. And as a general rule you're not going to be expected to practice wilderness survival. Your real survival tools are these." He indicated their rough hempen traveling sacks, compatible with what the probe had observed . . . but with false bottoms into which those "survival tools" were woven for safekeeping. He withdrew a few of them: bronze and gold ornaments, copied from archaeological finds. "You're going to be in relatively well-populated areas where you can use these trade goods to purchase food and shelter. Pity that money hadn't been invented then; it would be far more convenient to carry . . . which, come to think of it, is precisely why money did eventually get invented."
There were other items, of course. They would carry sturdy five-foot walking sticks, an essential in an age when almost all traveling was by foot. There were horses in Greece, but they were seldom ridden, and chariots were only for the nobility. In addition, Jason was issued a bronze sword-dagger. Its blade was a beautifully tapering thing, designed for thrusting although it had a double edge and a fuller to strengthen it. Its tang flared out and back and then forward again to form a guard for the hand that grasped the ivory-encased hilt. The longer thrusting swords of the period would have been inappropriate—like chariots, they were for the aristocratic warriors, and Jason wasn't going to be posing as a member of that social set. Anyway, he decided while practicing with it, he liked this blade better.
Nagel watched him with a hint of nervousness "I say, do you know how to use that thing?"
"I think I can probably get by with it, Dr. Nagel." In fact, he was an expert with a number of similar weapons, using fighting styles millennia in advance of what they were doing in the Aegean Bronze Age. He didn't plan to start any fights, but he was confident he could finish any.
Along with the rest of their gear, they received names. Rutherford was puckishly pleased to let Jason keep his own. ("Even if it isn't a commonly used name at the time, it at least won't sound outlandish.") For the others, he'd come as close as possible to their actual given names: Deianeira for Deirdre and Synon for Nagel. Both were names that had been recorded on the probe's sound track.
At last, the time came for their final briefing by Rutherford. "You will arrive in the Inachos valley, a couple of miles north of Argos, on August 15, 1628 B.C.—not that they were using our dating system then, of course. That date was chosen to allow you time to position yourselves in a locale from which you can observe the effects of the volcano at reasonably close range, though at a safe remove. One of the Cyclades, or northern Crete, would be best; in either case, you should stay in the higher elevations."
"Can't we go to Santorini itself—or Kalliste, as it was originally called—first?" Deirdre asked. "Study it as it was before?"
"I leave that to Commander Thanou's discretion. It will depend on how promptly you can make your way there. The problem is, we have no way of knowing the exact date. It could be early or late in the autumn. If the latter, you should have time for a visit."
"I hope so," she said earnestly, with a meaningful glance at Jason. "We could settle the question of the original size and shape of the island, and I could make some important geological observations even without advanced equipment."
"No doubt. But safety comes first. I cannot overemphasize that if you are on the island at the time of the explosion, you will assuredly die." Rutherford paused for effect, then resumed. "Your TRDs will activate on November 15. This will give you time to observe the aftereffects of the event. The extent to which it crippled the Minoan economy and created the conditions for the later conquest of Crete by mainland Greeks is a subject of unending controversy—which is one of the reasons we were able to get funding for this expedition. So you will be in the Bronze Age for three months. For the last part of that period, you will need to have established yourself in a secure locale, for the sailing season ends in mid-October, before the autumn gales begin. Commander Thanou, do you have anything to add?"
"I'd just like to reemphasize something that both of you have already been told. After the temporal displacement, there will be a moment of disorientation. It's worse if you arrive in darkness—in fact, it has been known to cause emotional collapse under those conditions. So we don't time our arrivals for midnight, as much as we would like to in the interest of minimizing the chance of anyone actually seeing time travelers appear out of nowhere. Instead, we compromise by arriving just after daybreak. Still, it's disconcerting—and it will almost certainly affect you more than me, since this is your first time. Don't be alarmed; the effect is only temporary."
They proceeded to the great central dome which held the displacer stage: a circular platform about thirty feet in diameter, surrounded by masses of supporting equipment and ranks of control panels whose personnel ignored them in their Bronze Age clothing. Even odder-looking outfits were common here—like those of a passing group who were obviously returning from the Elizabethan era. Deirdre and Nagel tried not to stare, since no one else in the dome was. Jason glanced at the sacks those returnees were carrying and wondered how many first editions of Shakespeare they held, in addition to copious notes on the paper that was so fortuitously available in that age.
They swung their own sacks over the edge as they climbed onto the stage with the aid of their walking sticks. Rutherford solemnly shook hands with each of them, then withdrew to the glassed-in control center that overlooked the stage. They waited, watching a large digital clock count down.
When the moment came, it was as Jason remembered so well. There were no flashy visual effects. As viewed by outside observers like Rutherford, they simply vanished. They themselves felt a sensation outside normal human experience. It could only be compared to coming out of a deep and very convincing dream. But the comparison was not close, for there was a wavering of reality, leaving in its wake no sense of transition and no impression of time having passed. Afterwards, the displacer stage and everything around it were gone, though their minds held no recollection of it disappearing.
They were standing on a narrow, rutted road, with the morning sun peeking over the hills of Argolis to the east.