The Nest III

Poul Anderson, "The Nest" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 71-111.

We begin to get some discussion of time travel on the fourteenth page of "The Nest." Asked whether the Duke is away, Don Miguel replies:

"'He is. Off to survey the Danelaw. I fear me the poor English will be missing more than the Vikings ever took.'" (p. 84)

On first reading, I took this to mean that the Nest rules an outlying region named after the Danelaw and inhabited by a group of English time travelers or their descendants. No, Don Miguel means the real Danelaw, as becomes evident when Trebuen advocates a full expedition:

"'...there ought to be good pickings in Saxon England; the Romano-Britons certainly had some fine things.'" (ibid.)

Trebuen, Cro-Magnon though he is, understands that the Duke does not have to be "away" to visit the Danelaw:

"The Normans...could have brought the Rover back within a second of its leaving the Nest, no matter how long they stayed in the Danelaw but no, they were too superstitious for that, they had to be gone all day." (ibid.)

And that is why Don Miguel says that the Duke and his party should be back for dinner because they took Rover, the time machine, out that morning. Trebuen adds, to himself and to us, not to Don Miguel, that the Normans have used the Rover only for transport and not for any of the other things that they could have done with it. No doubt, if their superstition compels them to match a day elapsed in the Danelaw with a day elapsed in the Nest, then it will forbid them to experiment: to return before their departure or to attempt any alteration of known events.

We may start to guess that they have stolen the machine from its inventors or owners, because how else could they have acquired it? If they use the machine only to enrich themselves, then it makes sense that they do not draw attention to themselves. They base themselves, build their Nest, in the prehuman past and enter history only to loot in periods when looting is the norm. As in There Will Be Time, wealth can safely be extracted from buildings that are about to be destroyed in any case. Thus, the civilization that produced the Rover might want to recover it but might also be unable to locate the needle of a single temporal vehicle in the haystack of past and future history.

In Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, some barbarians acquire faster than light spaceships and nuclear weapons. Normans with the Rover are time traveling equivalents of those barbarians.