Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen: Paratime Police Saga. H. Beam Piper

trying to give some explanation of what made it explode. The meeting then broke up into small groups, everybody having his own job explained to him. He was kept running back and forth, explaining to the explainers.

      In the evening they had a feast. By that time he and Rylla had gotten a rough table of organization charcoaled onto the wall of his headquarters.

      Of the next four days, he spent eighteen hours each in that room, talking to six or eight hundred people. Some of them he suffered patiently if not gladly; they were trying to do their best at something they’d never been expected to do before. Some he had trouble with. The artisans’ guilds bickered with one another about jurisdiction, and they all complained about peasants invading their crafts. The masters complained that the journeymen and apprentices were becoming intractable, meaning that they’d started thinking for themselves. The peasants objected to having their byres invaded and their dunghills forked down, and to being put to unfamiliar work. The landlords objected to having their peasants taken out of the fields, predicting that the year’s crop would be lost.

      “Don’t worry about that,” he told them. “If we win, we’ll eat Gormoth’s crops. If we lose, we’ll all be too dead to eat.”

      And the Iron Curtain went down. Within a few days, indignant pack-traders and wagoners were being collected in Hostigos Town, trapped for the duration, protesting vehemently but unavailingly. Sooner or later, Gormoth and Sarrask would begin to wonder why nobody was coming out of Hostigos, and would send spies slipping through the woods to find out. Counter-espionage; organize soonest. And a few of his own spies in Sask and Nostor. And an anti-Styphon fifth column in both princedoms. Discuss with Xentos.

      By the fifth day, the Wolf Valley sulfur-evaporation plant was ready to go into operation, and saltpeter production was up to some ten pounds a day. He put Mytron in charge at Tarr-Hostigos, hoping for something better than the worst, and got into his new armor. He and Rylla and a half dozen of Harmakros’ cavalrymen trotted out the gate and down the road from the castle into Hostigos Gap. It was the first time he’d been outside the castle since he had been brought there unconscious, tied onto a horse-litter.

      It was not until they were out of the gap and riding toward the town, spread around the low hill above the big spring, that he turned in his saddle to look back at the castle. For a moment he couldn’t be certain what was wrong, but he knew something was. Then it struck him.

      There was no trace whatever of the great stone-quarries.

      There should have been. No matter how many thousands of years had passed since he had been in and out of that dome of shifting light that had carried him out of his normal time, there would have been some evidence of quarrying there. Normal erosion would have taken, not thousands, but hundreds of thousands, of years to obliterate those stark manmade cliffs, and enough erosion to have done that would have reduced the whole mountain by half. He remembered how unchanged the little cliff, under which he and Larry and Jack and Steve had parked the car, had been when he had . . . emerged. No. That mountain had never been quarried, at any time in the past.

      So he wasn’t in the future; that was sure. And he wasn’t in the past, unless every scrap of history everybody had ever written or taught was an organized lie, and that he couldn’t swallow.

      Then when the hell was he?

      Rylla had reined in her horse and stopped beside him. The six troopers came to an unquestioning halt.

      “What is it, Kalvan?”

      “I was just . . . just thinking of the last time I saw this place.”

      “You mustn’t think about that, any more.” Then, after a moment: “Was there somebody . . . somebody you didn’t want to leave?”

      He laughed. “No, Rylla. The only somebody like that is right beside me, now.”

      They shook their reins and started off again, the six troopers clattering behind them.