struck Jason in the arm.
'Down!' shouted Steiger. 'Down on the deck! Raise your shields, everyone!'
They all crouched down on the deck, grouped together with their shields raised over their heads as the steel feathers rained down on them, beating a metallic tattoo as they struck the shields and bounced off. The birds made a circle around the ship and came back again, loosing another deadly volley, firing their feathers like steel darts. Several of them found their way through gaps between the shields and struck a number of the Argonauts in their arms and shoulders. The birds made several more passes over the ship, then headed north, flying out to sea.
They remained beneath their shields until they were certain that the birds had gone, then they slowly lowered them. The entire deck of the ship looked like a bed of nails. Delaney pulled one of the feathers out of the wood and examined it closely.
'What strange manner of metal is this?' asked Jason, examining the feather he had pulled free from the deck. 'Silver?'
Argus plucked another feather from the mast. 'No, not silver,' he said, puzzled. 'I have never seen the like of it.'
'Birds with metal feathers,' Hylas said, with wonder. 'How can they fly?'
'How can they shoot them as if they were arrows?' Theseus said.
As the Argonauts plucked the metal feathers free from where they had stuck in the ship, marveling at them, Delaney handed his feather to Steiger. 'Take a look at this,' he said in a low voice.
Andre came up beside them, also holding a feather in her hand. 'It's nysteel,' she said.
'Robot drones?' said Steiger, looking out in the direction the birds had taken. 'Either preprogrammed or remote controlled.' He looked down at the feather thoughtfully. 'This could just as easily have contained an exploding warhead.'
'I don't get it,' said Delaney. 'Why throw this kind of stuff against the Argonauts without going all the way? Why go to all this trouble to kill a few people indiscriminately?'
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 you 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
