Sunset of the Gods - By Steve White Page 0,33

say.

It was much like the others, little more than a rough indentation in the hillside. Inside and to the left was one of the crude sculptures, in a roughly hewn-out niche with an opening to the sky. It got no direct sunlight, here on the north side of the Acropolis, but there was enough illumination to make out the statue’s outlines. With a little imagination, it was possible to see a goat-legged man.

“He’s gone,” said Mondrago.

“Gone from where?” Jason demanded irritably, waving his hand at the little cavern, which hardly deserved the name; it was barely deep enough for a man to stand up inside. “Are you sure this is the right shrine?”

“Of course I’m sure!”

“But he could barely have squeezed in here, much less remained for a long time.”

“I tell you, this is where I left him!” Mondrago angrily slammed the rocky rear wall of the cavern with his fist for emphasis.

With a very faint humming sound, a segment of the rough stone surface, seemingly indistinguishable from the rest, slowly swung inward as though on hinges.

For a moment the two men simply stared at each other, speechless in the face of the impossibly out-of-place.

“I must have hit exactly the right spot,” Mondrago finally said, in an uncharacteristically small voice.

Jason shook his head slowly. No one in the twenty-fourth century had any inkling of anything like this under the Acropolis. “This has to be the work of the Teloi.”

“Why? Chantal said she saw high-tech equipment on a human.”

“I know what Chantal said. But she had to be mistaken. The Authority doesn’t allow it. Ever.”

Mondrago’s brown face screwed itself into a look of intense concentration. “Look, ours is the only expedition that’s ever been sent to this era, right? So if there are other time travelers around here, they must have come from our future.”

Jason shook his head. “The Authority has a fixed policy against sending multiple expeditions to the same time and place, where they could run into each other. God knows what paradoxes that could lead to!”

“But you told us—”

“—That there are no paradoxes. Right. But I also told you that we don’t go out of our way to invite paradoxes, because the harder we push, the harder reality is apt to push back—maybe so hard as to be lethal.”

“Yes, I know, that’s another fixed policy. But think about it: maybe sometime in our future, the Authority’s policies will change. Maybe the Authority itself will change . . . or even cease to exist.”

Jason was silent. This had of course been considered, for it was obviously not impossible that it could happen in the unforeseeable scope of the twenty-fourth century’s future. But while no one had ever denied the possibility, no one ever seemed to think about it very much either. Its implications didn’t bear thinking about; the mind reeled from the potential consequences of unregulated laissez-faire time travel. And as more and more expeditions had returned from the past and reported no indication of other time travellers from further in the future, the thought had receded to the back of people’s minds. Everyone had settled into the comfortable assumption that, for whatever reason, the restrictions imposed by the Temporal Regulatory Authority and the Temporal Precautionary Act under which it operated must be forever immutable.

“Anyway,” said Mondrago, interrupting his thoughts, “why are we standing here speculating? Let’s investigate this.”

Jason eyed the opening dubiously. “We’re unarmed.”

“No, we’re not.” Mondrago lifted his himation, which he was wearing hanging from his left shoulder and draped around despite the late-July heat, and the chiton under it. He had contrived a heavy cloth sheath with leather strings, by which his short Spanish falcata was strapped tightly to his left thigh.

Jason frowned. Going armed was not customary in Athens, and the sword would have taken some explaining if anyone had spotted it. But this was no time to raise the issue. He peered through the doorway, which admitted enough light to reveal a flight of shallow steps carved in the stone, leading downward into the gloom.

“We’ll see how far we can get before the light gives out,” said Jason. As they passed through the doorway, he looked for whatever machinery had opened it, but it was concealed beyond his ability to find it in the dimness.

They descended the steps, and as their eyes accustomed themselves, they saw they were in what appeared to be a small, natural cave from whose opposite side a tunnel had been dug. At the tunnel’s far end was a faint