Time Loves a Hero Read Free

gloved hands and pulled off his hood, then grinned at the invisible wall.
    â€œDid you ever see someone run so fast?” he asked. “I bet he’s already halfway home.”
    â€œ That wasn’t a very nice thing to do ,” a woman’s voice said within his headset. “ You could have hurt him .”
    â€œOh, don’t worry so much. Just gave him a scare, that’s all.” Tucking the hood beneath his arm, Donal Bartel wiped sweat off his shaved head as he walked to the edge of the mesa and peered over the side. Although he could see the top of the trail, the boy was nowhere in sight. “All right, he’s gone. Let’s finish up here.”
    He turned to watch as the spectral wall began to materialize, taking the form and substance of a saucer-shaped craft. Perched above the rocky ground on five petal-like flanges, its electrochromatic outer skin resumed its natural appearance until the vessel’s silver hull dully reflected the hot sun overhead. Hemispherical pods beneath its lower fuselage emitted an amber glow which pulsated within the craft’s shadow.
    â€œ You’ve got everything you need? ” From within the single porthole on the Miranda ’s low turret, the timeship’s pilot peered out at him. “ We could stay a little longer, if you think we’re not going to be bothered anymore .”
    Donal pondered Hans’s question as he unzipped the stealth suit and shrugged out of it. The suit was useful for hiding from contemporaries, but in the desert heat it threatened to suffocate him. “He’s not coming back, but once he tells his folks what he’s seen up here, someone might come up to investigate.”
    â€œI agree.” The woman who had spoken earlier was climbing down a ladder set within one of the landing flanges. “The Anasazi are a very wary people. Someone down there might think the boy saw a scout from an enemy tribe.”
    Donal nodded. For the last two days, he and Joelle had studied this isolated settlement of pre-Pueblo native Americans. Seven hundred years from now, this place would be identified on maps as Burnt Mesa, overlooking Frijoles Canyon within the Bandelier National Monument, not far from the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico. By then, the village of Tyuonyi would be a collection of ancient ruins carefully preserved by the United States government. The site would have a gift shop and a museum, and thousands of tourists would visit this place every year to saunter among the crumbling remains of what had once been a thriving settlement.
    Yet their mission hadn’t been merely to record what Tyuonyi had looked like when it was inhabited. Twentieth-century archaeologists had already done that task, three hundred years before the Miranda had traveled back through chronospace. There was also the enduring controversy over the forces that had brought an end to the Anasazi civilization. Some CRC researchers, holding to theories first advanced during the late twentieth century, believed that some tribes had begun raiding others, committing atrocities that went beyond rape and slaughter to include ritualistic cannibalism. This was what had eventually forced many tribes to abandon their adobe homes and seek refuge in cliff dwellings; the Tyuonyi villagers had already built their own Long House within the talus walls of Burnt Mesa. Indeed, the very word Anasazi , given to the pre-Pueblo tribes by the nearby Navajos, meant “Ancient Enemy.”
    â€œWe might learn more if we stayed longer, but …” Joelle Deotado pushed back her long blond hair as she gazed at the distant village. “I don’t want to risk exposing ourselves, and we may have done that already.” She glanced over her shoulder at Donal. “You might have done the wrong thing, but it probably doesn’t matter. They would have found us sooner or later.”
    â€œI’m sorry it worked out that way, but …” He