Sickly: “You mean—it’s impossible?”

“Ih do’ know.” Belgotai’s grin was wolfish. “Who’d visit dis era fro’ de future, if dey could? But wha’s yuh story?”

Saunders bristled. The whiskey was coursing hot in his veins now. ‘‘I’ll trade information,” he said coldly. “I won’t give it.”

“Faiah enawff. Blast away, Mahtin Saundahs.”

Saunders told his story in a few words. At the end, Belgotai nodded gravely. “Yuh ran into de Fanatics, five hundred yeahs ago,” he said. “Dey was deat’ on time travelers. Or on most people, for dat matter.”

“But what’s happened? What sort of world is this, anyway?”

Belgotai’s slurring accents were getting easier to follow. Pronunciation had changed a little, vowels sounded different, the “r” had shifted to something like that in twentieth-century French or Danish, other consonants were modified. Foreign words, especially Spanish, had crept in. But it was still intelligible. Saunders listened. Belgotai was not too well versed in history, but his shrewd brain had a grasp of the more important facts.

The time of troubles had begun in the twenty-third century with the revolt of the Martian colonists against the increasingly corrupt and tyrannical Terrestrial Directorate. A century later the folk of Earth were on the move, driven by famine, pestilence and civil war, a chaos out of which rose the religious enthusiasm of the Armageddonists—the Fanatics, as they were called later. Fifty years after the massacres on Luna, Huntry was the military dictator of Earth, and the rule of the Armageddonists endured for nearly three hundred years. It was a nominal sort of rule, vast territories were always in revolt and the planetary colonists were building up a power which kept the Fanatics out of space, but wherever they did have control they ruled with utter ruthlessness.

Among other things they forbade was time travel. But it had never been popular with anyone since the Time War, when a defeated Directorate army had leaped from the twenty-third to the twenty-fourth century and wrought havoc before their attempt at conquest was smashed. Time travelers were few anyway, the future was too precarious—they were apt to be killed or enslaved in one of the more turbulent periods.

In the late twenty-seventh century, the Planetary League and the African Dissenters had finally ended Fanatic rule. Out of the postwar confusion rose the Pax Africana, and for two hundred years man had enjoyed an era of comparative peace and progress which was wistfully looked back on as a golden age; indeed, modern chronology dated from the ascension of John Mteza I. Breakdown came through internal decay and the onslaughts of barbarians from the outer planets, the Solar System split into a multitude of small states and even independent cities. It was a hard, brawling period, not without a brilliance of its own, but it was drawing to a close now.

“Dis is one of de city-states,” said Belgotai. “Liung-Wei, it’s named—founded by Sinese invaders about tree centuries ago. It’s under de dictatorship of Krausmann now, a stubborn old buzzard who’ll no surrender dough de armies of de Atlantic Master’re at ouah very gates now. Yuh see de red glow? Dat’s deir projectors working on our energy screen. When dey break it down, day’ll take de city and punish it for holding out so long. Nobody looks happily to dat day.”