Men came and went. Hodaki and his partner disappeared, as did Jansen and his. One lost track of time within that underground warren which was the base. Ross gradually discovered that the whole establishment covered a large area under an external crust of
ice and snow. There were laboratories, a well-appointed hospital, armories which stocked weapons usually seen only in museums, but which here were free of any signs of age, and ready for use. There were libraries with mile upon mile of tape recordings as well as
films. Ross could not understand everything he heard and saw, but he soaked up all he could so that once or twice, when drifting off
to sleep at night, he thought of himself as a sponge which had nearly reached its total limit of absorption.
He learned to wear naturally the clumsy kilt-tunic he had seen on the wolf slayer, to shave with practiced assurance, using a leaf-shaped bronze razor, to eat strange food until he relished the taste. Making lesson time serve a double duty, he lay under sunlamps while listening to tape recordings, until his skin darkened to a weathered hue resembling Ashe's. There was always talk to listen to, important talk which he was afraid to miss.
"Bronze." Ashe weighed a dagger in his hand one day. Its hilt, made of dark horn studded with an intricate pattern of tiny golden nail heads, had a gleam not unlike that of the blade. "Do you know, Murdock, that bronze can be tougher than steel? If it wasn't
that iron is so much more plentiful and easier to work, we might never have come out of the Bronze Age? Iron is cheaper and easier
found, and when the first smith learned to work it, an end came to one way of life, a beginning to another.
"Yes, bronze is important to us here, and so are the men who worked it. Smiths were sacred in the old days. We know that they made a secret of their trade which overrode the bounds of district, tribe, and race. A smith was welcome in any village, his person safe on the road. In fact, the roads themselves were under the protection of the gods; there was peace on them for all wayfarers. The land was wide then, and it was empty. The tribes were few and small, and there was plenty of room for the hunter, the farmer, the trader. Life was not such a scramble of man against man, but rather of man against nature----"
"No wars?" asked Ross. "Then why the bow-and-dagger drill?"
"Wars were small affairs, disputes between family clans or tribes. As for the bow, there were formidable things in the forests--giant animals, wolves, wild boars----"
"Cave bears?"
Ashe sighed with weary patience. "Get it through your head, Murdock, that history is much longer than you seem to think. Cave bears and the use of bronze weapons do not overlap. No, you will have to go back maybe several thousand years earlier and then hunt your bear with a flint-tipped spear in your hand if you are fool enough to try it."
"Or take a rifle with you." Ross made a suggestion he had longed to voice for some time.
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Ashe rounded on him swiftly, and Ross knew him well enough now to realize that he was seriously displeased.
"That is just what you don't do, Murdock, not from this base, as you well know by now. You take no weapon from here which is not designed for the period in which your run lies. Just as you do not become embroiled while on that run in any action which might influence the course of history."
Ross went on polishing the blade he held. "What would happen if someone did break that rule?"
Ashe put down the dagger he had been playing with. "We don't know--we just don't know. So far we have operated in the fringe territory, keeping away from any district with a history which we can trace accurately. Maybe some day--" his eyes were on a wall of weapon racks he plainly did not see--"maybe some day we can stand and watch the rise of the pyramids, witness the march of
Alexander's armies.... But not yet. We stay away from history, and we are sure that the Reds are doing the same. It has become the old
problem once presented by the atom bomb. Nobody wants to upset the balance and take the consequences. Let us find their outpost
and we'll withdraw our men from all the other runs at once."
"What makes everyone so sure that they have an outpost somewhere? Couldn't they be working right at the main source, sir?" "They could, but for some reason they are not. As for how we know that much, it's information received." Ashe smiled thinly. "No,
the source is much farther back in time than their halfway post. But if we find that, then we can trail them. So we plant men in suit-
able eras and hope for the best. That's a good weapon you have there, Murdock. Are you willing to wear it in earnest?"
The inflection in that question caught Ross's full attention. His gray eyes met those blue ones. This was it--at long last.
"Right away?"
Ashe picked up a belt of bronze plates strung together with chains, a twin to that Ross had seen worn by the wolf slayer. He held it out to the younger man. "You can take your trial run any time--tomorrow."
Ross drew a deeper breath. "Where--to when?"
"An island which will later be Britain. When? About two thousand b.c. Beaker traders were beginning to open their stations there. This is your graduation exercise, Murdock."
Ross fitted the blade he had been polishing into the wooden sheath on the belt. "If you say I can do it, I'm willing to try."
He caught that glance Ashe shot at him, but he could not read its meaning. Annoyance? Impatience? He was still puzzling over it when the other turned abruptly and left him alone.
CHAPTER 5
He might have said yes, but that didn't mean, Ross discovered, that he was to be shipped off at once to early Britain. Ashe's "tomorrow" proved to be several days later. The cover was that of a Beaker trader, and Ross's impersonation was checked again and again by experts, making sure that the last detail was correct and that no suspicion of a tribesman, no mistake on Ross's part would betray him.
The Beaker people were an excellent choice for infiltration. They were not a closely knit clan, suspicious of strangers and alert to any deviation from the norm, as more race-conscious tribes might be. For they lived by trade, leaving to Ross's own time the mark of their far-flung "empire" in the beakers found in graves scattered in clusters of a handful or so from the Rhineland to Spain, and from the Balkans to Britain.
They did not depend only upon the taboo of the trade road for their safety, for the Beakermen were master bowmen. A roving people, they pushed into new territory to establish posts, living amicably among peoples with far different customs--the Downs farmers, horse herders, shore-side fisherfolk.
With Ashe, Ross passed a last inspection. Their hair had not grown long enough to require braiding, but they did have enough to hold it back from their faces with hide headbands. The kilt-tunics of coarse material, duplicating samples brought from the past,
were harsh to the skin and poorly fitting. But the workmanship of their link-and-plate bronze belts, the sleek bow guards strapped to
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their wrists, and the bows themselves approached fine art. Ashe's round cloak was the blue of a master trader, and he wore wealth in a necklace of polished wolf 's teeth alternating with amber beads. Ross's more modest position in the tribe was indicated not only by his red-brown cloak, but by the fact that his personal jewelry consisted only of a copper bracelet and a cloak pin with a jet head.
He had no idea how the time transition was to be made, nor how one might step from the polar regions of the Western Hemisphere to the island of Britain lying off the Eastern. And it was a complicated business as he discovered.
The transition itself was a fairly simple, though disturbing, process. One walked a short corridor and stood for an instant on a plate