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Chapter 13

Back aboard the Quest Grimes went straight from the boat bay to his quarters, accompanied by Sonya and Mayhew. He sent for Williams and Clarisse. She, of course, did not need to be told all that had happened; she had been in telepathic communication with her husband throughout. And it did not take long to put Williams into the picture.

Then, "I intend to land tomorrow morning, at dawn," announced Grimes.

"Will it be wise?" queried Sonya. "As I've said before, and as I keep on saying, we must not tamper with history."

"Have we done so?" countered her husband. "Shall we do so? This last episode has established, I think, that we are already a part of history."

"Never mind history, Skipper," put in Williams. "You look after yourself, and let history look after itself. I'm tellin' you this; unless the boys an' girls get some sort o' break, you're goin' to have a mutiny on your hands."

"As bad as that, Billy?"

"As bad as that. For days now we've been hangin' over one little spot of empty ocean, with nothin' to look at but sea an' clouds. It's even worse than bein' in orbit. It's a case of so near an' yet so far."

"Ken?"

"I should have told you before, John, but I thought you knew. In any case, I've been keeping my prying to a minimum. And you don't have to be a telepath to be aware of the unhappy atmosphere that's permeating the ship. You don't have to be a mind reader to overhear remarks such as, 'He and his pets get down to the surface any time they want to. Why shouldn't we?' "

Grimes grinned humorlessly. "I know, I know. That's why I've decided to make a landing."

"I still say that it's risky," stated Sonya flatly.

"How so?"

"It's obvious. Or should be. There . . ." she made a down-sweeping gesture . . . "we have a world whose civilizations, such as they are, are very little advanced beyond the Stone Age. Here we have a ship packed almost to bursting with the technology of our time. What sort of impact shall we make?"

"A very light one," said Grimes, "if I set the old bitch down with my usual consummate skill."

She waited until the others had stopped laughing then said coldly, "You know very well what I meant."

"Yes. I know. And I still say, 'a very light one.' Only the very crudest technology would mean anything to those people down there. Anything beyond it will be, so far as they're concerned, magic . . ."

"And isn't that just as bad, if not worse?"

"No. Remember that Terran mythology is full of legends of gods who visited Earth from beyond the stars. Quite possibly some—or most—of those legends are based on fact. Quite possibly we are part of the mythology. Quite possibly? No. We are part of the mythology."

"Jonah . . ." said Mayhew.

"Yes."

"But how do you know," argued Sonya stubbornly, "that our Jonah was the Jonah? After all, it must be a very common name in this here and now. Perhaps the real Jonah was rescued from a watery grave a couple of centuries ago. Or perhaps it won't happen for another hundred years."

"Please don't stretch the long arm of coincidence to breaking point," the Commodore admonished her.

"But there is such a thing as coincidence. And I still think that by too-intimate contact with the people of this period we're liable to shunt the world onto a different Time Track."

"And so, to coin a phrase, what?" he demanded.

"Then quite possibly we shall never be born. Not only shall we find it impossible to return to our own Time but we must just . . . vanish. We shall never have been."

Grimes laughed. "And you can say that, quite seriously, after all the peculiar strife, timetrackwise, that we've been in already . . . Really. What about my carbon copy whom we met, not so long ago? Even though his ship wasn't a carbon copy of my ship . . ."

"And his wife far from being a carbon copy of yours. So you'd prefer Maggie Lazenby to me, is that it?"

"I never said anything of the kind. And what about that poor old Commander Grimes, passed over for promotion but still in the Survey Service, commanding that utterly unimportant base . . ."

"I seem to remember that Maggie was mixed up in that affair, too."

"And so were you." Grimes was playing with his battered pipe, wishing desperately that he had the wherewithal to fill it. (Had tobacco grown around the Mediterranean Basin in ancient times, as well as in North America? It would be worth finding out.) "Get this straight, Sonya. There's no possibility of our cancelling ourselves out. From every second of Time an infinitude of world lines stretches into the Future. Some, perhaps, are more 'real' than others. Or more probable. All will be real enough to the people living on them. And we were—or will be—born on at least one of those tracks. At least one? Now I'm talking nonsense. In any case, I'm pretty sure that we shall not influence the course of history. After all, you can't have steam engines until it's steam-engine time."

"And what fancy theory is that?"

"It's more than a theory. The steam engine is a very ancient invention. But it was hundreds of years before anybody thought of putting it to work. When Hero made his primitive steam turbine there was no demand for mechanical power. And there'll be no demand for our sophisticated machinery in this Time.

"We land tomorrow."

"That will be the wisest course of action, John," said Mayhew slowly. "So far, all hands are still with you, but there's considerable discontent. All hands? All hands, that is, with the exception of those bloody Pongoes. What they are thinking, I don't know. But they are a minority and quite incapable of taking over the ship."

"You say, 'so far.' "

"Yes. So far. As long as you let your people get away from this tin coffin for a while they'll remain loyal. If you don't, if you keep them cooped up, anything might happen."

"I still don't like the idea of landing," said Sonya stubbornly. "I think that it's asking for trouble."

"Whatever we do is asking for trouble," Grimes told her. "We could return to Mars—and get ourselves blown out of the sky. We could scour the Universe and die of old age before we found another habitable planet. Earth, after all, is Home—and we have come Home. Let's make the best of it."

"You're the boss," she said resignedly.

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Framed