Everyone swarmed up on the deck, waiting in silence as he pulled his breathing mask off. He blinked away sweat, then said, "It's gone."
Eveleen, stunned, said, "The globe ship?"
Kosta glanced her way. "I shifted the rest of that debris we found. It's gone."
Ross let out an expletive that seemed to sum up everyone's feelings.
"Gone like taken?" Ashe asked.
Kosta shook his head, dropping down wearily onto a bench. "It's buried, so deep it's impossible to get to." He looked up at Eveleen. "I believe there was not just a massive landslide, but a fissure of some sort opened, the ship fell into it, and a slide occurred. The landscape down there changed, some of it shifting about twenty yards west, and then dropping."
Everyone looked stunned, considering what that meant.
"Well," said Ross, "at least that means the Baldies can't get to it, either. I hope."
"We'll have to make certain," Ashe said. "But not yet. Everyone get ready: we'll meet back here in ten minutes. First we search, and then we'll plan further."
Eveleen went down to the sweatbox. As she untangled the sweaty mass of her hair, she yanked impatiently at one of her earrings, as usual caught in a mat. The other wasn't, for once; she felt, and then jerked her face up to the tiny mirror.
The other earring wasn't caught; it was gone.
She touched the hole, saw a tiny scab, and vaguely remembered a sting there during the fight the night before. So she
had
lost an earring in Akrotiri! She'd lost the earring— but was still alive. So far ... She grimaced, knowing that up the line in the future, she and her remaining earring might still be buried elsewhere.
"It's not a good sign, or a bad," she whispered to the shower. But would anyone else, such as Ross, take it badly?
She hustled through a quick semblance of a cleanup and dressed, her mind racing. When she stepped out, she quietly removed the other earring and stowed it with her gear. There. Either it, and she, made it back, or they . . . didn't.
Then she straightened up, refusing to think about it anymore. But that was no comfort. Her mind promptly reverted to Ashe and that look of resolve, of a decision having been reached. Whatever Ashe's decision had been, he hadn't shared.
Or was she just imagining things?
She got one of the dried-looking sandwiches that Stav had put out and sat down to wait for the others.
——————————
A STRONG QUAKE sent the surf crashing out and then in again in strong waves, nearly sinking their rowboat.
Once again the entire team was there.
No one quite wanted to say it, but this was their last search for Linnea. The silent testimony to the north lit the sky like a vision of hell: the plume of smoke from the pre— Kameni Island had widened gradually into a wide, glowing red. Between wind-torn flaws in the smoke they could see veins of lava shooting up into the sky.
They were far too close to the point of no return, and they still did not know for certain that the main controls to the devices were on the globe ship. Ugly as the sky looked,
the constant quakes might still bleed off just enough energy to prevent the great eruption if the Baldies could reactivate their devices.
One more search for Linnea, then, and after that, they had to put all their effort into finding out if the Baldies' tech was elsewhere besides the missing globe ship.
Meanwhile, their boat floated, unguarded, at anchor, its only protection a crumbling cliff.
They rode a mini-tsunami that deposited their rowboat high on the beach. They landed with a jarring smack. At least it was above the fly-covered sea wrack. Ross could smell the rotting fish and seaweed, and he could hear the buzzing of great clouds of flies, but at least he didn't have to see the revolting mess.
He helped the others drag the rowboat up farther, and then they did their best to camouflage it with a reed mat.
After that came the grueling climb to where Ashe had seen the light. This time, the last time, they would all look.
Ross bided his time as the others began walking. When his wife fell into low-voiced conversation with Kosta about the scavengers' ship, Ross took a long step and fetched up next to Ashe.
In the dim red glow from the north, Ashe looked grim but amused. "And your objection is ... ?"
"I haven't known you all these years not to smell a dead rat when the stink hits me," Ross said.
Ashe breathed a soft laugh.
"You're going to find those damned Baldies and offer to trade yourself for that woman, aren't you?"
"What makes you think that?"
"The fact that you didn't outline it as a possible plan— one that you know we'd all veto. I'll bet you Linnea Edel would, too, if she were listening in."
Ashe shook his head. "I should not have let her come. This mission was not the right one for a beginner, and—" He paused, looked north, then said only, "I owe it to her children to send their mother back alive."
They're grown up, Ross wanted to say, but he knew it would sound wrong. Just because he'd been abandoned at an early age, had never had a family bond, didn't mean it didn't exist for other people. He'd learned that much from marriage.
So he said, "You don't know that she's alive, or that they have her."
"No. But it makes sense that they'd take hostages, if she were alive. After all, we got their ship—we had it—and time is running out."
"But we still don't really know that the globe ship vanished. They could possibly have gotten it back. We still don't know if there's another ship, or not. Maybe there is, with high-tech recovery equipment. Or maybe they've solved the exclusion principle and can slip back in time, get it, and then move it somehow."
"Or maybe they don't have it," Ashe retorted. "It could be so buried they can't get at it. All I know is, if I find them and we can't break her out any other way, then I have to try."
There's going to be another way,
Ross resolved, tightening his hand on his weapon.
Watch me find it.
——————————
WHEN AT LAST they came for Linnea, it was almost an anticlimax.
The seer had returned, peaceful in her conviction that she spoke with spirits through the blue priests. They had said that when they finished talking to the women, they would send them on their way.
"Stella cannot take her turn," the seer said, looking down at the sick woman. "And yet the priests need to bring us all before their spirits. But there is still this problem, that time is short."
Moral suasion, then. The seer wouldn't tell Linnea to go, but it was clear that she, and all of them, except the sleeping Stella, expected her to go. Linnea looked at the expectant faces, the innocent trust there, and bit her lip hard.
She heard the step of the Baldy behind her.
She filed out behind the alien, knowing that she could do nothing else, as the seer stood looking down at the woman who slept peacefully for the first time since she'd broken her arm.
CHAPTER 26
HERE IT IS,
Linnea thought, trying to walk steadily on legs that trembled. She gripped her hands beneath her robe, sidling her eyes here and there.
Should I run? But then they will know I'm a ringer before anything else happens. The others did not run.
And besides, her knees were so watery she was afraid she wouldn't make it five steps.
Well,
she thought, trying to steel herself,
then I must think only in the old language, and
be
a priestess from Kemt, just as Gordon told me to be.
That conversation on the road to the oracle now seems a hundred years ago,
she thought sadly as she followed the silent Baldy up a rough rock corridor.
At least the walk was not long, just around a rough stone corridor into another room, a small one, with plain local furnishings and a jumble of unrecognizable objects on a central table made of olive wood.
Behind the table waited several Baldies, one holding an armful of shimmering blue-green cloth. "Baldies." Now that she was face to face with them, the old nickname seemed more inappropriate than ever. Not that they weren't bald; they were, indeed, hairless, at least in terms of what was visible, and the absence of eyebrows and even eyelashes made their faces very hard to read.
Yet she made out individual characteristics as one held out the cloth, shook it slightly, and then cast it over her head. One whose light-colored eyes were wider spaced than the others, another with a narrower jaw, one whose ears protruded, just a bit.
A hole had been slit into the fabric, through which her head emerged. As the cool weight settled on her shoulders, she held her breath, trying hard to think in complete sentences in Egyptian, but when the telepathic augmentation opened a sense she had never known she possessed, she gasped, staring around.
Wonder and delight and fear flashed like silver eels amid the stream of tumbled images and words that, she realized with an internal wail, were all in English.
Mentally she reached, trying to snatch it all back, but of course her thoughts were gone, as thoughts do vanish, only this time she felt the stream wash over her listeners, for their reactions in turn splashed back on her.
No anger, no leaps to kill, no growls of vengeance—that much was clear but little else. Outside of surprise, their reactions were too complex for her to comprehend.
A whisper of communication, too quick for her to catch, zapped among all the Baldies.
They, in turn, caught the word
Baldies
from her. Again, she knew this from their reaction and from the riffle of humor that streamed through her mind and vanished, but afterward she sensed recognition, the assembling of clues, and the name
Ross Murdoch.
To which she, inadvertently, responded with a vivid mental image.
Another exchange between the Baldies, even faster than the previous; all she perceived this time was relief, a sense of "at last!" and then resolve, as if an order had been given and received somewhere else.
And then one "spoke"—if shaping words into sentences and sending them by thought can be termed speaking. In English, of course.
You are another from the hidden Time.
The mental images with the words were fast flickers, well controlled: a very young Ross, wearing a dirty blue-green outfit, launching across a fire at someone; what looked like a laser battle around a great globe ship; men speaking Russian; and some other images that she could not identify, but which she guessed were other Time Agents, encountered in prehistory.
Linnea perceived the statement not as a question but as an interrogative, and she braced herself. They already had her identity, and probably her purpose, and of course they held her life: what had she to lose?
She frowned, trying to shape her emotions into clear sentences, when quick and facile as a swift in the sky came the thought:
Say it aloud, if you like.
"Why are you forcing your way into my mind? Why not just talk to me, since I'm already here as a prisoner?"
It is that your words and the motivations and meanings behind them so often contradict.
And with those words came the unsettling sense of being made dizzy, as if trying to listen to two conversations at once, or to watch two scenes at once.
"All right, then. As for my own time, let me say this, too, and you'll 'hear' it as truth: I resent being kept a prisoner," she stated. "On my own planet. I, and the others, came back to this time to save our civilization. Our actions are those of rescue, not destruction. Can you possibly say the same?"
Yes,
said the Baldy with the narrow jaw. He (she realized she chose "he" as a default, though there were no signs of gender that he could perceive, other than the slender shoulders being somewhat broader than slender hips; again, she felt a riffle of humor, but no information, from them) spoke aloud.
We must protect the galaxy's diversity of life. Only that way can it attain the full consciousness that is its goal and its flowering.
With the words came images, many of them incomprehensible to Linnea. But from them she identified a problem that was very real in her own time: the extinction of hundreds or thousands of species by a technological race.
What you do on your own world is not for us to decide. But we will not permit you to do it to other worlds.
Linnea was discovering that their mind voices were individual, too.
Another Baldy, somewhat taller than the others, mind-spoke in cooler terms:
We seek the minimum interference that will prevent you from developing space flight until you are mature enough not to want it, or not to misuse it,
the alien said.
We do not destroy worlds. As ours was.
And with the words came images of possibilities, what the Baldies could have done, such as destroying Australopithecus with a tailored plague, or sending asteroids to detonate in Earth's atmosphere.
But beneath the explanation—and they waited for her to perceive it—lay the specific memories of these specific individuals: arriving in their own time, not distant from the now of Kalliste and its volcano, to find that their own sun had been detonated.