John Sandoval did not belong to his name. Nor did it seem right that he should stand in slacks and aloha shirt before an apartment window opening on midtwentieth-century Manhattan. Everard was used to anachronism, but the dark hooked face confronting him always seemed to want warpaint, a horse, and a gun sighted on some pale thief.

“Okay,” he said. “The Chinese discovered America. Interesting, but why does the fact need my services?”

“I wish to hell I knew,” Sandoval answered.

His rangy form turned about on the polar-bear rug, which Bjarni Herjulfsson had once given to Everard, until he was staring outward. Towers were sharp against a clear sky; the noise of traffic was muted by height. His hands clasped and unclasped behind his back.

“I was ordered to co-opt an Unattached agent, go back with him and take whatever measures seemed indicated,” he went on after a while. “I knew you best, so…” His voice trailed off.

“But shouldn’t you get an Indian like yourself?” asked Everard. “I’d seem rather out of place in thirteenth-century America.”

“So much the better. Make it impressive, mysterious.… It won’t be too tough a job, really.”

“Of course not,” said Everard. “Whatever the job actually is.”

He took pipe and tobacco pouch from his disreputable smoking jacket and stuffed the bowl in quick, nervous jabs. One of the hardest lessons he had had to learn, when first recruited into the Time Patrol, was that every important task does not require a vast organization. That was the characteristic twentieth-century approach; but earlier cultures, like Athenian Hellas and Kamakura Japan—and later civilizations too, here and there in history—had concentrated on the development of individual excellence. A single graduate of the Patrol Academy (equipped, to be sure, with tools and weapons of the future) could be the equivalent of a brigade.