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  Okay, now you can forget all that. The Kriths say it works, and you can take their word for it if you like. I once did.

  So, the Indus Line people built this station on the Moon, drove all this power into it and sat back and let it operate for the next half million years, if that's what it would take to get a message coming the wrong way in time.

  Well, even before the station had gotten up to full power, a message came in. From the future!

  Translated into local English the message read something like this:

  FROM THE YEAR 7093 [which is about two thousand years from now by the

  reckoning of time in that Indus Line]. GREETINGS. WE HAVE WAITED UNTIL

  THE LAST POSSIBLE MOMENT TO SEND THIS BACK TO YOU. BUT WE KNOW THAT

  WE CAN WAIT NO LONGER. WE ARE DOOMED. WHILE THERE IS STILL TIME LET

  US TELL YOU WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO US ALL.

  THERE IS A CIVILIZATION OP BEINGS ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE GALAXY. THEY

  ARE TOTALLY ALIEN, INIMICAL TO ALL THAT IS HUMAN AND KRITH. THEY

  HAVE BEEN BIDING THEIR TIME, AWARE OF US, BUILDING A GREAT ARMADA

  OF INTERSTELLAR WARSHIPS TO COME AND DESTROY US ALL.

  WHY THEY HATE US WE DO NOT KNOW. NOR DO WE KNOW HOW TO FIGHT THEM.

  HUMANITY AND KIRTH STAND ALONE AGAINST THE ALIEN HORDES THAT ARE

  COMING TO DESTROY US. AND WE ARE ALL BUT DEFENSELESS AGAINST THEIR

  WEAPONS.

  ALL THE WORKS OF OUR GREAT MUTUAL CIVILIZATIONS SHALL PERISH UNLESS

  . . .

  And there the message ended. That was all there was of it. And it was the only message ever received.

  The station is still in operation to this day -- assuming it's all true -- beaming its power into the Moon, and I suppose that it will continue to operate until the day two thousand years from now when it is destroyed -- if the future is not changed.

  But that one message came through. The aliens are coming to destroy us, mankind and Kriths together.

  Across the Lines six more stations were built, beaming their power into the future. And each one received substantially the same message, asking for help from the past.

  Crazy, isn't it?

  The first time I was told the story I went out and got myself senseless drunk and got laid by the ugliest old whore in North New Ardhea.

  But, to go on -- the final analysis was this: All across the Lines there exists this same menace two thousand years away. A menace that will totally destroy everything human and Krithian unless something is done to stop it. That's when the Kriths really got started. They decided to do something about it. They decided to change the future, to change the message being beamed backward in time.

  Using the sociodynamics of the Haldian Lines, they be- gan to move across the Timelines, mostly to the West where men could, perhaps, someday be strong enough to fight the invaders, and began to build worlds that could meet and withstand the aliens.

  They would move into a Line, the Kriths and the Haldian sociodynamicists, and analyze where the current trends would lead in two thousand years, what kind of world would be there to meet the invaders. Then they set about making the necessary changes to meet the countless invasions of the future.

  Guided by their own strange logic and the sociodynamics of the Haldian Timelines, the Kriths would bring in what forces were necessary to make the changes, aiming the Lines in the direction of maximum strength in the distant future. They used sociologists, anthropologists, scientists of a hundred kinds to add, to subtract, to build, and to change, and they used mercenary soldiers where necessary.

  Mercenary soldiers like me.

  Now the world in which the British and the Holy Roman Empires battled was a fair example of how they worked. Haldian sociodynamicists said that without outside help the Holy Roman Empire would defeat the British within a decade. Before the century was out, it would consolidate its hold on the Western Hemisphere and then turn to face the growing Nipponese Empire. The twenty-first century, by local reckoning, would be devoted to another war between the Holy Romans and the Nippons, which would ultimately lead to nuclear warfare that would destroy both empires and most of the rest of civilization.

  It would take a thousand years for even a primitive agricultural society to redevelop and at the end of the two-thousand-year span allotted to us the inhabitants of this Line would probably have barely reached the level of ancient Rome, local history. Hardly a match for the invaders.

  On the other hand Haldian sociodynamics indicated that a victory by the British would ultimately lead to a mutual coexistence with the Nipponese, the eventual rise of republican forms of government within the next three hundred years, a falling apart of the old empires, and the gradual rise of a peaceful, united world with a high degree of technology.

  By the end of the two thousand years this culture would have colonized a good chunk of the galaxy and be in position to more than take care of itself against the invaders.

  So there Tracy and I and a few hundred other Timeliners were, with a handful of Kriths, helping the British defeat the Holy Romans and create this better world.

  That's the sort of thing I believed then, and that's what I thought about as I waited for the sun to set and for Kar-hinter to return and prepare us for our mission -- the kidnapping of Count Albert von Heinen and his wife.

  I had no idea what else was going to happen before that mission was over.

  6

  Up the Loire

  The moon had set early that night, and had it not been for the flashing of cannon along the British right and the answering flashes of Imperial German artillery and the red glow in the east where the city had already begun to burn, it would have been a night of pitch blackness, unbroken even by stars, for a low cloud covering had moved in shortly before nightfall, forewarning us of the rainstorms that the meteorologists had predicted for tomorrow's dawn.

  At times we could see airships moving in and out of the clouds to the east, their bellies lighted by the glow of the city burning under them, by the flames of their own bombs exploding, and by the fainter flashes of Imperial cannon and antiairship weapons. And once or twice as we watched we saw an airship burst into flames, its catalyzed hydrogen, impervious to flame most of the time, but still unstable and liable to explode when the proper degree of heat was reached, bursting out, lighting the undersides of the clouds with a brilliant glow. Then the fireball would begin to fall apart as the hydrogen was consumed. And I wondered how soon the Kriths were going to help the British "invent" heavier-than-air craft.

  But we had little time to watch what was happening or to wonder about things. We were in the boats, in the dark river, in the shadows of the willows and the popiars, and we were quietly paddling toward the cables and chains that the Imperials had laid across the river to prevent just such a venture as ours.

  The lead boat held three British soldiers: a sergeant and two privates, dressed in rubber swimming garments, equipped with cutters and saws to hack a path for us through the cables and chains. Those three were really what they appeared to be -- simple British soldiers given an assignment that they didn't fully understand, but about which they asked no questions. Not of us, at least, we officers.

  I was in the second boat, sitting in the front position, a paddle in my hands dipping softly, quietly into the dark water, moving us forward, while we listened. My own senses, augmented by artificial electrobiological systems, were at their peak and more acute than those of other human beings who did not have the Timeliner modifications.

  Behind me sat General Sir Gerald Asbury, dressed now in the uniform of a common soldier, with only a glint of metal on his collar to betray his rank. He too held a paddle and alternately dipped it right and then left and then back to the right again. Behind him sat Ronald Kearns, our skudder pilot, showing no emotion at all. Though he was a Timeliner like myself, I could not fathom what was going on in his head, though that is not strange in itself, for Kearns or whatever his real name was was probably from a worl
d as different from mine as mine was from the one in which we both now found ourselves.

  The third boat held Tracy and the two corporals who had been guarding the house in which we had met with Kar-hinter.

  In the final boat there was another corporal and two privates, at least that is what their British uniforms said they were, though like the rest of us, save for the three in the leading, boat and Sir Gerald, they were men from worlds other than this, men who moved across the parallel branches of time fighting a war for the Kriths that would not end for two thousand years.

  We Timeliners have a lot of history in front of us.

  "How much farther do you think it is?" I heard Kearns ask.

  "A good distance," Sir Gerald answered. "We are still a mile or two short of the German lines, as best I can estimate, and the villa is a good five miles beyond that."

  "Several hours then?" Kearns asked.

  "At the rate we're going, yes," Sir Gerald whispered back. "We will be doing very well for ourselves to have the count in our hands by dawn."

  "We'll have him before dawn," I said over my shoulder.

  "I hope so, Mathers," said Sir Gerald.

  "I know damned well, sir," I replied. "We don't have any other choice."

  "It's your show," Sir Gerald whispered, bitterly. "I'm just an observer."

  I said nothing, for it was true. This wasn't a British patrol. It was strictly Krithian and Timeliner. The poor British were only causing a distraction for us, a bloody, nasty, costly distraction that Sir Gerald hated with all his guts. I can't say that I blamed him.

  It seemed like hours, though it could have been no more than a few minutes later, when the sergeant in the lead boat held up his arm and signaled for us to stop. Not that I could really see his arm even with my augmented retinas; it was only a shade of blackness somehow slightly distinguishable from the other shades of blackness along the river.

  We slowed in midstream and carefully turned our boats toward the shore, up to the marshy ground, in close to the trees that grew on the water's edge. And there we stopped and waited, silent, hardly breathing, listening to the distant sounds of war and the closer sounds of German sentries marching along the edge of the river.

  Then there were two soft, watery sounds, not quite splashes, more like the sound of two heavy bodies slowly lowering themselves into the river, down under the water. There was silence as the sergeant and one of the privates swam underwater up to where the first set of cables lay across the river.

  There was nothing to do but wait and wish for a cigarette and know that I couldn't smoke one and then chew on my lip and recite an old Greek poem my father had taught me and think about women and wonder what was going to happen when we finally did get to the villa -- though that sort of thing, long experience had taught me, was a complete waste of time. I'd do whatever I had to do when the time came, and that's all there was to it.

  We were still a mile or two from Beaugency and the two bridges that spanned the Loire there, if they were still in,tact, and aerial photographs hadn't been too clear about one of them; it might be half lying in the water for all we knew.

  Beaugency was an old town, I understood, or rather the name was old. The present town was relatively new, for this part of France, having been built from the ground up around the turn of the nineteenth century. The earlier city by that name had been a few miles farther up the river but had been burned during the Peasants' Rebellion in the late 1700's that tried to overthrow the French monarchy and had very nearly succeeded before the British stepped in on the side of the royalist defenders of the crown and helped put down the rebellion with the same deadly Ferguson breechloaders that had stopped the American rebels two decades before.

  The old Beaugency had been a stronghold of the rebels during the last stages of the rebellion. When their main forces had been crushed by the royalists and their British allies, the shattered armies had somehow converged on the Touraine and finally retreated into Beaugency. It was the last major rebel fortress to fall and the angry, victorious king had ordered that the city, like Carthage nearly two thousand years before, be leveled and salt sown upon the earth where it had stood.

  The survivors of Beaugency, those who weren't beheaded or hanged under the king's eyes, were allowed to settle along the river a few miles from the spot where the old city had been. The new Beaugency had gradually grown up there -- and that is the city toward which we moved or had been moving before we had stopped to wait for the cutting of the cables.

  All this is of absolutely no importance, of course. It was just one of the bits of information I had picked up while we sat in the trenches during the long, cold winter.

  At last we heard the movement of water again, the soft splashing of careful, highly trained swimmers returning to their boat. Again I saw the sergeant, once he had got his dripping body back into the boat, give me a hand signal; this one for us to follow.

  Back out into the river we rowed, though not as far from the shore as we had been before. From here on we would have to do our best to avoid being seen, though I doubted that very many Germans were peering down into the river that night. There was too much going on to the east for them to worry much about the river.

  After a while we passed the trenches and the last of the cables that had lain across the river. Soon the Germans would discover that they had been cut, but it would not be soon enough for them to do very much about it. We hoped.

  Then we came to the parts of the city that lay along the river. The main sections of the city had grown up to the east, away from the river, and that is where Beaugency's industry had been and that is where the Imperial forces were camped most thickly and that is where the bombs fell.

  I had halfway expected to see refugees streaming toward the river, trying to cross the bridges or perhaps swimming the river itself, but there were none. Maybe there were no civilians left in Beaugency and the Germans who retreated from the battle -- that would only be the wounded now -- would be going north, not west. Kar-hinter had known pretty well what he was doing when he sent us up the river.

  The first bridge showed no sign of damage, though about all I could really see were the two guardhouses on either end of the bridge and the two sentries who paced back and forth between them and threw occasional, disinterested glances down into the water. I doubt that they could see a thing in the blackness that surrounded us.

  We passed the bridge without incident and came to the second about half a mile up the river, the one that the aerial photographs had indicated might be damaged. It was.

  At one time a blast had struck the bridge on its extreme right, blowing it completely apart. The spans of twisted, rusted metal drooped down to the water and rested on the river bottom. Half the river was blocked to navigation. We were forced to cross over to the left bank and proceed there along the side.

  There were no guards visible there. The Germans must have been fairly confident that no one would get this far up the river without being detected, I thought.

  Soon the center of the city was behind us and even the glare in the sky was falling off to our right rear. We were well behind the Imperial lines -- and without detection.

  Funny, I should have known by then that the time to be most careful in war is when you feel sure that you've accomplished something. That's when you get careless and when the enemy is most likely to do something deadly.

  It came suddenly, without warning.

  A light flashed above us from the riverbank. An instant later a second light came from the other bank. The two beams met on our lead boat. And a German machine gun opened up on it.

  For an instant I was tempted to switch my body to full combat augmentation, to speed up my actions and reflexes to five times their normal speed -- for that had been built into me too -- but I did not. Full combat augmentation, though it makes a man the most deadly fighting machine in all the known universes, also drains a man's metabolism at an astonishing rate. And I knew that I would need all my strength when we reache
d the villa. I did not will those electrobiological circuits into operation.

  One of the men in the lead boat came to his feet, a tommy gun in his hands, aimed toward the nearest of the spotlights. The tommy began to chatter within a second of the barking of the German gun, and its first slug must have hit the spotlight's lens. But even as the light was going out, the British soldier's body was cut in half by the machine gun's rain of bullets.

  Then the boat seemed to come apart, two more bodies tumbling out as rifles from both sides of the river began to fire.

  I grabbed up the rifle that lay in the boat beside me, swung it up, and pulled off a shot at the second spotlight. I heard another Enfield crack in unison with mine, off to my rear. Tracy had been just as quick as I.