The Enchanter Completed

"Time travelers, right?" he said. After all, I know time travel is possible. I've had going on fifty years to get used to the concept.

One man-young man-gave a satisfied smile. "Instant comprehension! Just as you'd expect from a superior individual. I told you that the Great Man theory-"

He seemed to be talking upper-class sixth-century Latin, until you noticed that his lip movements weren't quite synchronized with the words and there was a murmur of something else beneath it.

Fascinating, Padway thought. And that's an academic riding a hobbyhorse, or I was never an archaeologist. Evidently some things were eternal.

Some of the others started arguing. Padway raised a hand:

"Please! Thank you very much for saving my life, but if you wouldn't mind a little information…»

"Yes, excellent sir," another man said-he was in a plain coverall, albeit of eerily mobile material. "From four hundred years in your future. We are-well, mostly-a study team investigating a crucial point in history… your lifetime, in fact, excellent sir."

"Four centuries in which future?" Padway said. "Gothic Rome, or my original twentieth? Twentieth century A.D.," he went on, to their growing bewilderment.

There was a long moment of silence. Padway broke it. "You mean, you didn't know?" he said.

The argument started up again, fast enough that Padway caught snatches of the language it was actually in, rather than the who-knew-how translation. His mind identified it as a Romance-derived language; something like twentieth-century Italian, but more archaic, and with a lot of Germanic loan words and other vocabulary he couldn't identify.

A slow, enormous grin split the ancient American's face. "Fifty years," he murmured.

Fifty years of politics and administration and warfare and engineering. None of them his chosen profession, just the things he had to do to survive and keep the darkness from falling. If this bunch were from only four centuries ahead in the future Padway had made, he'd done that, with a vengence; they were from the date that in Padway's original history had seen the height of the Vikings.

He'd kept the darkness at bay, and now… now he could go back to being a research specialist. The grin grew wider.

Better than that, he'd actually get to know how things turned out! Making history was all very well, but he'd always wanted to read it more.