It had never been field-tested. In any case it was not for casual encounters. The pouch of corundum was too small.
Svetz heard a yell from below. He looked down in time to see the man in brown running like the wind, his staff forgotten, his fatigue likewise.
“Something scared him,” Svetz decided. But he could see nothing fearful. Something small but deadly, then.
The Institute estimated that man had exterminated more than a thousand species of mammal and bird and insect—some casually, some with malice—between now and the distant present. In this time and place there was no telling what might be a threat. Svetz shuddered. The brown man with the hairy face might well have run from a stinging thing destined to kill Hanville Svetz.
Impatiently Svetz upped the speed of his flight stick. The mission was taking far too long. Who would have guessed that centers of population would have been so far apart?
Half an hour later, shielded from the wind by a paraboloid force field, Svetz was streaking down the road at sixty miles per hour.
His luck had been incredibly bad. Wherever he had chanced across a human being, that person had been just leaving the vicinity. And he had found no centers of population.
Once he had noticed an unnatural stone outcropping high on a hill. No law of geology known to Svetz could have produced such an angular, flat-sided monstrosity. Curious, he had circled above it—and had abruptly realized that the thing was hollow, riddled with rectangular holes.
A dwelling for men? He didn’t want to believe it. Living within the hollows of such a thing would be like living underground. But men tend to build at right angles, and this thing was all right angles.
Below the hollowed stone structure were rounded, hairy-looking hummocks of dried grass, each with a man-sized door. Obviously they must be nests for very large insects. Svetz had left that place quickly.
The road rounded a swelling green hill ahead of him. Svetz followed, slowing.
A hilltop spring sent a stream bubbling downhill to break the road. Something large was drinking at the stream.
Svetz jerked to a stop in midair. Open water: deadly poison. He would have been hard put to say which had startled him more: the horse, or the fact that it had just committed suicide.
The horse looked up and saw him.
It was the same horse. White as milk, with a flowing abundance of snowy mane and tail, it almost had to be the horse that had laughed at Svetz and run. Svetz recognized the malignance in its eyes, in the moment before it turned its back.
But how could it have arrived so fast?
Svetz was reaching for the gun when the situation turned upside down.
The girl was young, surely no more than sixteen. Her hair was long and dark and plaited in complex fashion. Her dress, of strangely stiff blue fabric, reached from her neck to her ankles. She was seated in the shadow of a tree, on dark cloth spread over the dark earth. Svetz had not noticed her, might never have noticed her…
But the horse walked up to her, folded its legs in alternate pairs, and laid its ferocious head in her lap.
The girl had not yet seen Svetz.
The horse obviously belonged to the girl. He could not simply shoot it and take it. It would have to be purchased…somehow.
He needed time to think! And there was no time, for the girl might look up at any moment. Baleful brown eyes watched him as he dithered…
He dared waste no more time searching the countryside for a wild horse. There was an uncertainty, a Finagle factor in the math of time travel. It manifested itself as an uncertainty in the energy of a returning extension cage, and it increased with time. Let Svetz linger too long, and he could be roasted alive in the returning cage.
Moreover, the horse had drunk open water. It would die, and soon, unless Svetz could return it to 1100 PostAtomic. Thus the beast’s removal from this time could not change the history of Svetz’s own world. It was a good choice…if he could conquer his fear of the beast.
The horse was tame. Young and slight as she was, the girl had no trouble controlling it. What was there to fear?
But there was its natural weaponry…of which Ra Chen’s treacherous picture book had shown no sign. Svetz surmised that later generations routinely removed it before the animals were old enough to be dangerous. He should have come a few centuries