There was a search; that much I could see from my window. At times a close search, at other times superficial. But there was one part of the routine that never varied.
Every person entering the city had to put his hand into a hole in the wall of the guardhouse. That was all, just put it in. Not touch anything at all, just in up to the elbow and out.
Over this I brooded, sipping my wine and ignoring the roars of masculine cheer around me. What could they detect from this? Fingerprints perhaps, but I always wore false fingerprint covers as a matter of routine and had changed these three times since the last operation. Temperature? Skin alkalinity? Pulse or blood pressure? Could these residents of, what to me was, the dim past differ in some bodily composition? It was not unreasonable to expect some changes over a period of more than 30,000 years. I had to find out the present norms.
This was done easily enough. I constructed a detector that could record all these factors and hung it inside my clothing. The pickup was disguised as a ring that I wore on my right hand. The next evening I shook hands with everyone I could, finished my wine, and retired to my chamber. The recordings were precise, accurate to 0. 006 percent and very revealing. Of the fact that my personal readings fell well inside all the normal variations.
“You are not thinking, Jim,” I accused myself in the warped mirror. “There has to be a reason for that hole in the wall. And the reason is a detection instrument of some kind. Now what does it detect?” I turned away from the accusing stare. “Come, come, don’t evade the question. If you cannot answer it that way, turn it on its head. What is it possible to detect?”
This was more like it. I pulled out a piece of paper and began to list all the things that can be observed and measured, going right down the frequencies. Light, heat, radio waves, etc., then off into vibration and noise, radar reflections, anything and everything, not attempting to apply the things detected to the human body. Not yet. I did this after I had made the list as complete as possible. When I had covered the paper, I shook hands with my self triumphantly and reread it for human applications.
Nothing. I was depressed again. I threw it away—then grabbed it back. Something, what was it, something relating to something I had heard about Earth. What? Where. There! Destroyed by atomic bombs Coypu had said.
Radioactivity. The atomic age was still in the future, the only radioactivity in this world was natural background radiation. This did not take long to check.
Me, creature of the future, denison of a galaxy full of harnessed radiation. My body was twice as radioactive as the background count in the room, twice as radioactive as the hot bodies of my friends in the bar when I slipped down to check them out.
Now that I knew what to guard against I could find a way to circumvent it. The old brain turned over, and soon I had a plan, and well before dawn I was ready to attack. All the devices secreted about my person were of plastic, undetectable by a metal detector if they had one working. The items that were made of metal were all in a plastic tube less than a meter long and no thicker than my finger, which I coiled up in one pocket. In the darkest hour before the dawn I slipped out and stalked the damp streets looking for my prey.
And found him soon enough, a French sentry guarding one of the entrances to the nearby docks. A quick scuffle, a bit of gas, a limp figure, a dark passageway. Within two minutes I emerged at the opposite end wearing his uniform with his gun on my shoulder carried in the correct French manner. With my tube of devices down its barrel. Let them find that metal with a detector. My timing was precise, and when, at the first light, the straggling members of the night guard returned to London, I was marching in the last row. I would enter, undetected, in the ranks of the enemy. A foolproof scheme. They wouldn’t examine their own soldiers.
More fool I. As we marched through the gate at the far end of the bridge I saw an interesting thing that I could not see with my telescope from my window.
As each soldier marched around the corner of the guardhouse he stopped for a moment, under the cold eyes of a sergeant, and thrust his hand into a dark opening in the wall.
Chapter 12
“Mayerd!” I said as I tripped over the uneven footing on the bridge. I did not know what it meant, but it was the most common word the French soldiers used and seemed to fit the occasion. With this I stumbled into the soldier next to me, and my musket caught him a painful blow on the side of the head. He yelped with pain and pushed me away. I staggered backward, hit my legs against the low railing—and fell over into the river.
Very neatly done. The current was swift, and I went beneath the surface and clamped the musket between my knees so I wouldn’t lose it. After that I surfaced just once, splashing at the water and screaming wordlessly. The soldiers on the bridge milled about, shouting and pointing, and when I was sure I had made the desired impression, I let my wet clothes and the weight of the gun pull me under again. The oxygen mask was in an inside pocket, and it took only seconds to work it out and pull the strap over my head. Then I cleared the water from it by exhaling strongly and breathed in pure oxygen. After that it was just a matter of a slow, easy swim across the river. The tide was on the ebb so the current would carry me well downstream from the bridge before I landed. So I had escaped detection, lived to regather my forces and fight again, and was totally depressed by my complete failure to get past the wall. I swam in the murky twilight and tried to think of another plan, but it was not exactly the best place for cogitation. Nor was the water that warm. Thoughts of a roaring fire in my room and a mug of hot rum drove me on for what seemed an exceedingly long time. Eventually I saw a dark form in the water ahead which resolved into the hull of a small ship tied up at a dock; I could see the pilings beyond. I stopped under the keel and worked my tube of instruments out of the musket and also took everything out of my coat. The gun stuffed into the jacket sleeve made a good weight, and both vanished toward the river bottom. After some deep breathing I took off the oxygen mask and stowed that away as well, then surfaced as quietly as I could next to the ship.
To look up at the coattails and patched trousers of a French soldier sitting on the rail above me. He was industriously involved polishing the blue-black barrel of a singularly deadly looking cannon that projected next to him. It was far more efficient looking than any of the nineteenth-century weapons I had seen, which was undoubtedly caused by the fact that it did not belong to this period at all. Out of more than casual interest I had made a study of weapons available in the era I had recently left, so I recognized this as a 75-millimeter recoilless cannon. An ideal weapon to mount on a light wooden ship, since it could be fired without jarring the vessel to pieces. It could also accurately blow any other wooden ship out of the water long before the other’s muzzle-loading cannon were within range. Not to mention destroying armies in the field. A few hundred of these weapons brought back through time could alter history. And they had. The soldier above turned and spat into the river, and I sank beneath the surface again and vanished among the pilings.
There were boat steps farther downriver out of sight of the French ship, and I surfaced there; no one was in sight. Dripping, cold, depressed, I climbed out of the water and hurried toward the dark mouth of the lane between the buildings. There was someone standing there, and I scuttled by—but then decided to stop.