(by courtesy so called) and certain other items, while keeping their presence a secret lest the displeasure of certain baleful deities be called down on the whole region. Jason and Mondrago had certain skills—first aid, for example—that enabled them to repay the favors and in the process acquire even more prestige. And they were both experts in wilderness survival, who quickly improvised bows with which to hunt the wild goats. They passed late August and early September with no great difficulty.
As September 18 approached, Jason programmed a fairly complex navigational command into the autopilot of the Transhumanists’ aircar. He sent it looping, pilotless, in a circle that brought it around to the opposite side of Mount Ida . . . and then, with all the acceleration it could pile on, directly into the mountainside. After his return, any investigators the Authority might find it worthwhile to send to that mountainside might find a few bits of wreckage that hadn’t been there before.
Through it all, Mondrago remained stoically silent on the subject Jason had ruled off limits.
Finally the time came when they stood (it seemed undignified to arrive on the displacer stage sitting on one’s butt) awaiting retrieval. Jason held the little jar stolen from Themistocles’ house tightly in his hand. The digital countdown projected onto Jason’s optic nerve wound down. It was nearing zero when Mondrago finally blurted, “Sir, I just don’t get it!”
“What don’t you get?”
“You know what I mean. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about you, it’s that you’re a man of your word. And you told me that you meant what you said to Pan. But all the things you said you were going to prevent—the performances on Mount Kotroni and under the Acropolis—happened over a month ago, back in Attica. So you didn’t keep your promise.”
“Didn’t I?” Jason grinned. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What, sir?”
“We’re time travellers!”
Mondrago’s bug-eyed stare of realization was the last thing Jason saw before the indescribable unreality of temporal transition took them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
As always, the glare of electric lighting in the great dome was blinding after instantaneous transition from a relatively dim setting—and practically all settings in past ages were relatively dim. It made the disorientation of temporal displacement even worse, affecting even an old hand like Jason. Between the blindness and the dizziness, it was a moment before he became aware of the hubbub among the people behind the ranks of control panels. They had been expecting four people to appear on the stage, not two.
Blinking the stroboscopic stars out of his eyes, Jason saw Mondrago shamefacedly getting to his feet. “Don’t worry,” he assured him. “Everybody loses his balance the first time.” Looking around the floor of the stage, he spotted Landry’s TRD, covered with the ashes of the crematory furnace. Then he saw Kyle Rutherford advancing toward the stage, his face a question mark.
“Dr. Landry was killed,” said Jason, pointing at the tiny, ashy sphere on the floor. He offered no further explanation. Rutherford restrained himself from demanding one.
“And Dr. Frey . . . ?”
“She remained in the target milieu. Her TRD is in here.” Jason held out the ceramic vase.
Rutherford stared wide-eyed. Jason had a pretty good idea what he was thinking, after his own last extratemporal expedition. He recalled the words of a probably mythical twentieth century figure with the unlikely name of Yogi Berra: “Déjà vu all over again.”
“Yes, it was cut out of her,” he said, answering Rutherford’s unspoken question.
Rutherford went pale. “The Teloi?”
“No . . . or at least not principally. There are a lot of things you need to know—things that can’t be made public. Can we go somewhere for an informal preliminary debriefing?”
“Yes . . . yes, of course.” Rutherford started to lead them away, then paused. “But from your choice of words, do I gather that Dr. Frey was alive when you last saw her?”
“Yes. I left her in the fifth century b.c. still alive. And. . . .” Jason paused, and his face took on a look that caused Rutherford to flinch backwards. “And this time I’m going to get her back!”
Reducing Rutherford to a state of inarticulate shock had long been an ambition of Jason’s. Now he had achieved it . . . and the circumstances made it impossible for him to enjoy it.
They sat in Rutherford’s private office. It was more austerely furnished than the one in Athens that he preferred whenever he didn’t need to be in Australia, but like that one it held a display case