Steiger threw his nysteel feather overboard. "I'm fresh out of ideas. There's no rational pattern to any of this."
"Land!" shouted Orpheus, pointing to a fog enshrouded coast off the starboard bow. They could barely make out the peaks of a large mountain in the distance, looming up out of the mist.
"Caucasus," said Jason, excitedly. "The peak where Prometheus was chained. We have reached Colchis at last."
They sailed along the coast, looking for a place to anchor. As the sun went down, they discovered a small, marshy inlet. They pulled the ship in close to shore, took down the mast, lashed it to its crutch and covered the Argo with tall reeds that grew in profusion along the banks. Jason poured wine upon the ground, an offering to the earth and the gods of the land, then they buried Mopsus.
"Your vision proved prophetic, Idmon," Jason said. "The astrologer was indeed felled by a feather."
"I only wish I had been wrong," said Idmon, gravely. "Mine is, at times, a most unwelcome gift. I sometimes see things I wish I had not seen."
"Can you look into the future now?" asked Orpheus. "Can you see if we shall find the golden fleece in Colchis?"
Idmon closed his eyes and remained silent for a long time.
"I have the intuition that more of us will die here," he said at last. He opened his eyes. "Ask me no more. The gods are watching us, gods who kill and gods who create life and it frightens me to be so close to them."
They camped in a thick grove of birch trees so their fires would not be seen from a distance. After the Argonauts bedded down, the temporal agents took advantage of the opportunity to hold a conference during their watch. They sat around the embers of their campfire, speaking in low voices.
"We still don't have much more of a handle on this scenario than when we started," said Steiger. "We're going to have to take what we know and improvise a plan of action. The trouble is we don't know very much."
"We know there's a temporal mission being conducted here by people from the future of this timeline," Andre said. "We know events aren't following our myth exactly. Maybe their version is different. According to our version, Hercules left the voyage at Arganthus when Hylas was pulled into a lake by water nymphs and drowned, but we never stopped at Arganthus, Hylas is still alive and Hercules is still with us. There were a number of other events mentioned in the story that haven't occurred. In fact, if you eliminate everything the opposition has done to alter this scenario, what you're left with is a perfectly ordinary sea voyage. Ordinary except for the episode of the Clashing Rocks, which was undoubtedly the result of an earthquake or volcanic action, just the sort of incident that could give rise to a legend.
"We know from historical records that Theseus actually lived in our timeline. If we assume the same about the others, then we have a logical explanation for the origins of our myth. A sea voyage was made during which certain events occurred, such as the earthquake which resulted in the story of the Clashing Rocks. We saw how the story about Athena pushing the rocks out of the way so the ship could get through must have started. The figurehead broke off, struck against the rock at the same moment that it settled backwards in the water and Jason assumed that Hera moved the rock. So the name got changed. Or maybe in this universe, it was Hera who moved the rock instead of Athena. When they returned, the Argonauts told the story of the Clashing Rocks and added some other exaggerations or they were added later as the story was passed on in the oral tradition. Eventually, the myth was recorded according to that tradition. That tells us the Argonauts returned safely from their voyage, otherwise the story would not have been started in the first place. What we've experienced so far supports that. It's like Forrester said, a mirror-image universe, but the image is slightly distorted."
"That still doesn't tell us what the opposition is up to," Steiger said. "They're restaging the events according to the myth, or their version of it. The question is, what happens when you're confronted with a temporal scenario in which the actual historical details aren't known? If there's no known historical account of the voyage, you can clock back and gather intelligence so you can verify what actually happened, separating the facts from the legend. Once y
ou have those facts, you could then stage a temporal scenario in which the mythical elements of the story are made into the historical elements, but that brings us back to the one question we can't answer. What reason would there be for doing it? It would have to affect the original historical outcome."
"Perhaps," Delaney said. "It's possible that it would only have a minimal effect, not significant enough to disrupt temporal continuity."
"How do you figure that?" asked Steiger.
"When I was studying zen physics in RCS, we worked with some hypothetical problem modules designed to break down our notions of common sense," Delaney said. "One problem module postulated an imaginary court case involving a murder. The defendant was innocent, but was mistakenly convicted on circumstantial evidence and executed. Now suppose you clocked back and restaged the temporal scenario so that the defendant was actually guilty and the evidence was incontrovertible. You've changed the facts, but you haven't changed the outcome. History remains unchanged."
"That's hardly the same situation we have here," said Steiger. "People have died on this voyage, people who wouldn't have died if the restaging elements hadn't been present. That amounts to temporal interference."
"We don't know that for a fact," said Delaney. "It's possible they might have died in some other manner during the course of this voyage. What we're part of is no longer the original scenario. It's also possible that their deaths weren't significant enough to affect temporal continuity. It wouldn't have been difficult to assess the historical impact of the Argonauts. In some cases, it would have been fairly simple. Take Mopsus. He was getting on in years and had no children. All they'd have to do is evaluate his individual actions in terms of temporal significance. And don't forget that these men are all warriors. Some of them might have died in battle not long after this voyage took place. There are any number of variables that could result in a break of ancestral continuity. It's even possible the scenario was designed to control which people died. You can program robots and androids to recognize certain individuals and differentiate between them."
"So you still think they're conducting some sort of war game in preparation for an invasion of our timeline?" Steiger asked.
"I think it's a possibility," Delaney said. "It's the best explanation I've been able to come up with."
"There's only one thing wrong with it," said Steiger. "Us. If they've gone to all that trouble to verify the original scenario and conduct a controlled disruption, then they must have known from the beginning that we were never part of it."
"What if they didn't?" said Andre. "We've become one of the variable elements in this scenario. If we hadn't met Jason at the Anaurus River, he would have arrived in Iolchos alone. We don't have a record of the entire crew for this voyage. Even in the myth, not all of the Argonauts were named."
"That's right!" Delaney said. "We've been so concerned with the anomalous elements of this mission, we overlooked one of the most obvious ones. We must have displaced three of the original crew members! The hooded man might be among the Argonauts, but if he isn't, then he must be clocking ahead to all the significant points along their route. If that's the case, then they may not have realized that there were three people on the crew who weren't supposed to be there."
"At least not at the beginning of the voyage,'' Andre said.
Delaney glanced at Steiger. "I think we're onto something. It was the middle of the night when you were knocked out at Iolchos. In the dark, you might have been taken for Jason or one of the original crew members we displaced. During their secret meeting on Mount Pelion, the hooded man asked Chiron about the Argonauts who weren't among his pupils, the ones the centaur didn't know before. He asked Chiron to name and describe them all. That must have been when they first suspected something was out of sync with the original scenario. It was confirmed for them at Lemnos, but they had to check it out. We would have done the same. If we introduced variables into a temporal scenario and something popped up that didn't seem to fit the historical events, we'd try to make sure we knew exactly what the variable was and how it might affect the outcome."
Steiger nodded. "It makes sense. They must have scrambled to check us out against any possible historical variables. Were there any people like us around originally who might have been part of the crew? When they didn't turn up anything, they had to look for another explanation. They must have been as baffled as we've been. They couldn't learn anything from the centaur, because the centaur was one of their variables that they inserted into the scenario; and when the hooded man saw me at Lemnos, it must have tipped him off that I was from the future."
"Only which future?" Andre said. "There wasn't supposed to be anyone from their future on the scene they didn't know about."
"They had to check it out," said Steiger, nodding. "And they would have wanted another, closer look."