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frightening is the psychological aspect

of the matter. Such a mask as this would not have been a mere ornament,

but the object of pagan veneration, known to thousands of people in its

own time. It is not interference with things, or even with human beings,

but with the development of ideas which implies the greatest potential

alteration of history. You follow me?"

"I think so," Don Miguel muttered, feeling chilled to the marrow by the

calm unemotional words.

"Suppose we find its loss recorded, Father?" the Prince interjected. "Does

that mean we can keep it after all?"

The Jesuit shrugged. "As yet, I dare not say. We would then have to

determine whether history had in fact been changed by interference, and

if so whether truth demanded restitution of the former state of affairs."

The smile with which he accompanied the remark was actually quite pleasant,

but it was no more comforting to Don Miguel than the grin of a death's-head.

He said, "Father, I'm glad I'm involved on the practical side of the

Society. My mind boggles at the depth of these philosophical problems."

"You may not be so pleased tomorrow," rumbled the Prince. "We're charging

you with a problem which is deep enough in its own way." He swept the

others with an inquiring glance, and received confirmatory nods. "You

are to discover the origin in our time of this mask, and identify the

stranger Higgins bought it from. And you have two weeks in which to

complete the task."

Two weeks! Dismayed, Don Miguel said, "Sir, I -- I feel unworthy of such a

. . ."

The Prince snorted. "Worthy or unworthy, Navarro, you opened up the

case. We're telling you to close it as well!"

VI

In its way the assignment was a signal honour -- if the General Officers

were as concerned as Father Ramón had indicated about illicit

time-travellers and their perilous souvenirs, they would never charge

someone they didn't trust with carrying it out.

But it was also a terrifying burden, and the more Don Miguel reflected

on it, the more qualms he felt.

He was, as he had said, still under thirty; his time licence was little

more than four years old, and his experience of fieldwork had been

confined to a mere five trips, from the last of which he had returned

bearing the scar of the Macedonian battle which would mark his face

until he died, because an extratemporal infection had poisoned it and

the medicines of the Society's doctors had proved impotent to destroy

the germ. (They had found out how to cure the sufferers, but that was

after his own wound had cicatrised.)

Nonetheless, his sense of duty might have carried him to the task with

relative equanimity, had it not been for the fearful news Father Ramón

had imparted to him at the meeting. Thirty Licentiates of the Society

suspected of taking bribes? It was hardly believable! To Don Miguel

timework had something of the air of a sacred trust; one of his lifelong

heroes had always been the Society's founder, Borromeo, whose epochal

discovery in 1892 had filled him with such apprehension that he did not

rest easy until there was Papal supervision of all time apparatus and

organisations existed to control its use. In the Empire, he had founded

the Society of Time, while in the Confederacy of the East an analogous

body called the Temporal College had been established under the Treaty

of Prague.

No sane man, Don Miguel had always thought, would question the need to

regulate time-travel. But now he wondered how much of the rigorously

policed administration he was accustomed to derived from common sense,

and how much from crude raw fear, which familiarity could erode with

the passage of time.

There was no shortage of rational justifications for the Society's rule

confining time-travel to observation without interference; for example,

it had often been pointed out that if such a rule were not made and kept

time-travellers from the future, visiting what to them was the past,

would be noticed in the