But it was not until he left Second Dynasty Egypt that he noticed
another pip on the screen. He was following Laniq, but so was someone
else. Another saucer-shaped craft plied the time streams in their
wake, making all the stops they made, starting up again when they
did. Experimentally, Tedor thrust his own conveyor forward in time
until he'd passed the girl and left her decades behind him. The second
conveyor became a frenzied pip on the screen, plummeting through the
years with him.
The second conveyor did not follow Laniq Hadrien. It followed Tedor.
He considered it and got nowhere. It failed to make sense. In the
first place, privately owned time-craft were rare, belonging only
to the few rich people who could afford them, to members of Laniq
Hadrien's organization or to Time Agents. The century coaches carried
most traffic through time, and no century coach would go off the
well-traveled trails to follow Tedor.
One of the Hadrien woman's people? Perhaps, but he wouldn't have
immediately accelerated through time to chase Tedor, not if he were
trailing the woman for protection. A rich man on a pleasure jaunt?
Hardly likely. Certainly not another Time Agent! Tedor scowled and
turned his attention back to the girl. Laniq was landing.
Quickly, Tedor checked the time-charts, plugged in a hypnosleep spool,
fastened the electrodes to his temples, drugged himself, and within
an hour learned thoroughly the Attic Greek spoken by the denizens of
the Fifth Century who had rubbed shoulders in the Agora with Socrates,
Alcibiades and Pericles, five hundred years before Christ was born and
some generations before Attica and its Athens were to feel the grim
tread of the Macedonian phalanxes then of the Roman legions. Tedor ran
the microfilm projector, found the pictures he sought, fed them into
the slot of the matter duplicator and soon donned the mantle and tunic,
the sandals and head band of an Athenian gentleman.
He stepped outside into a grove of plane trees, found Laniq Hadrien's
craft a hundred yards away but saw nothing of the third conveyor.
Shrugging, he set out upon the road to Athens, wondering how many
minutes he was behind the girl. Other citizens walked the road with
Tedor, some chatting aimlessly with him, others strolling by in polite
silence because he had selected the garment of a high-ranking citizen
and they were beneath his station.
The slave at the gate, an immense bronze man, skin and hair slick with
olive oil, looked up from where he'd been resting his chin on the haft
of his spear when Tedor asked, "Did you see an unescorted woman come
through this gate?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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