TIME TRADERS II

Reviewed 3/20/2012

Time Traders II, by Andre Norton
Cover by Stephen Hickman
TIME TRADERS II
Andre Norton
New York: Baen Books, 1963?

Rating:

4.5

High

ISBN-13 978-0-671-31968-?
ISBN-10 0-671-31968-X 370pp. HC $?

Andre Norton is best known for her Witch World series of fantasy novels. But she began by writing science fiction, like her first novel Star Man's Son and the original Time Traders, both of which I read and enjoyed while I was in junior high school.

This volume contains two separate stories derived from the Time Traders universe in which an alliance of western nations fights to catch up to Greater Russia in a Cold War across time, the Russian empire having first discovered and used spaceships and other artifacts left by an alien race in Earth's prehistory. In the original novel, Time Traders, Western Alliance time agents Gordon Ashe, Ross Murdock, and Travis Fox, working in Earth's past, were involuntarily taken on an alien spaceship to three other worlds. There they fought members of the alien race, known as "Baldies", and became familiar with some of their powerful technology. Abandoning time travel, with its risk of altering their present, both nations brought alien technology to the war in their own era. Time agents became space agents.

The plots of these stories are broadly similar: Time agents from the Western Alliance trapped on two different planets must survive and defeat hostile forces.

In the first, The Defiant Agents, the Western Alliance has suffered a major security breach. It is decided that agents must be sent to the world of Topaz soonest, their training incomplete, in order to prevent it falling into enemy hands. The training consists of implanting knowledge of the agents' Apache forebears directly into their brains — in effect, turning them into Apaches. The process is risky; they may lose the awareness of their true mission. But the situation is too urgent for proper preparation.

So a ship is sent to Topaz bearing a team of agents. But Greater Russia already has the planet, and automated defenses attack the ship, causing it to crash. The only survivors are two coyotes with augmented intelligence, agent Travis Fox who remembers his real identity, and fifteen other men and women from the ship who do not. Together they must scout the land, which their Apache training makes them superb at doing, and also their own memories. Over days, they begin to remember. Then they locate the enemy headquarters and find it protected by a troop of agents imprinted with Mongol traits. The great challenge is to convince these people of the truth, join forces, and capture or destroy the Russian base.

The tale is well-wrought, with convincing action and a satisfactory climax. However, it is not one of Norton's finest efforts. The events leading up to the crash of the Western ship seem contrived. Consider:

There were an even dozen of the air-borne guardians. Each swung in its own orbit just beyond the atmosphere of a bronze-gold planet in the four-world system of a yellow star. The globes had been launched to form a protective web around Topaz six months earlier. Just as contact mines sown in a harbor could close that landfall to ships not knowing the secret channel, so was this world supposedly closed to any spaceship lacking the signal to ward off the missiles the spheres could summon. This system for protecting the new human settlers had been tested as well as possible, but not yet put to the ultimate proof. Still, the small bright globes spun undisturbed across a two-mooned sky at night and made reassuring blips on an installation screen by day.

Then a thirteenth object winked into being and began the encircling, closing spiral of descent. A sphere resembling the warden-globes, it was a hundred times their size, and its orbit was controlled by instruments under the eye and hand of a human pilot.

Four men were strapped down on cushion sling-seats in the control cabin of the Western Alliance ship, two hanging where their fingers might reach buttons and levers. The two others were merely passengers, their labor waiting for the time when they would set down on the alien soil of Topaz. The planet hung there in their viewscreen, richly beautiful in its amber gold, growing larger, nearer, so that they could pick out features of seas, continents, mountain ranges, which had been studied on tape until they were familiar—or as familiar as a world not Earth could be.

One of the warden-globes came alert and oscillated in its set path. It whirled faster as its delicate interior mechanisms responded to the signal that would send it on its mission of destruction. A relay clicked, but imperceptibly slow in setting up the proper course. On the instrument, far below, which checked the globe's new course, the mistake was not noted.

The screen of the ship spiraling toward Topaz registered a path which would bring it into violent conflict with the globe. They were still some hundreds of miles apart when the alarm rang. The pilot's hand clawed out at the bank of controls; under the almost intolerable pressure of their descent, there was so little he could do. His crooked fingers fell back powerlessly from the buttons and levers; his mouth was a twisted grimace of bleak acceptance as the beat of the signals increased.

– Pages 13-14

What's wrong with this word-picture? The ship might go into emergency maneuvers on detecting the threat, its thrust nearly immobilizing the pilot. But even so he should have been able to reach and operate the controls under those conditions. It's not implausible that the ship might suffer extensive damage; it is implausible that it should happen this way.

Selected Novels by Andre Norton

  1. The Prince Commands
    1934ISBN ?
  2. Huon of the Horn
    1951ISBN ?
  3. Star Man's Son 2250 A.D.
    1952ISBN ?
  4. The Time Traders
    1958ISBN ?
  5. The Beast Master
    1959ISBN ?
  6. Judgment on Janus
    1963ISBN ?
  7. Android at Arms
    1971ISBN ?
  8. The Hands of Lyr
    1994ISBN ?
  9. Return to Quag Keep
    2005ISBN ?

Click for full list

In the second tale, Key Out of Time, Gordon Ashe, Ross Murdock and others are exploring an ocean world, seeking to solve the mystery of why its terrain differs so markedly from what the alien tapes show. They use a peep-probe, but it shows them only greater mysteries: a castle on a cliff making war on seagoing ships with engines; 200 years later no castle, only the barren cliffs; and 300 years after that no cliff but a line of huge pylons. Finally, they set up a time gate, thinking to make a quick foray into the past. But, somehow, Ashe and Murdock, along with the woman Karara, two dolphins, and some supplies, are pulled through the time gate, which is wrecked in the process. Lost, stranded 10,000 years before their own present, they must find the key to the nature of this world that is now their home.

Beginning the search is not easy. Dumped into the sea during a raging storm, they must struggle to reach shore without being dashed against the cliffs they had seen in the peep-probe. Parties unknown are scouring the shore, collecting plunder from wrecked ships. From hiding, Ross watches them kill one survivor. Then a figure swathed in concealing clothing leading a party of ten guards approaches the first group, who stand at bay and shortly are driven off. The muffled figure then holds up a wand from which a burst of light erupts, incinerating the corpse of the survivor. Taking selected items from the gathered cache, this group departs.

Ross finds a cave in which to hide and regroup. Soon Karara shows up with the dolphins. There is no sign of Ashe. But Ross returns from a search for supplies to find a native watching Karara in their hideout. Captured, the boy proves to have a rapport with the dolphins, and he becomes their first source of knowledge about this world. He tells them of the Foanna, a powerful but secretive people, few in number, who legend says dwelt in their citadel since before his own kind learned to think and speak. It was one of these that Ross saw wielding the wand.

From this slim beginning, Ross and his companions learn of the seafaring people and win their help against the castle-lords who are holding Ashe. The castle-lords, it turns out, have like Greater Russia made use of certain tools of the Baldies. But here the Baldies plan to take over the world, and are feeding their technology to the natives in order to foment disruption among them. They are characteristically ruthless in their drive to do so, slaughtering entire villages with their superior weapons and leaving the suspicion that another native group did the foul deed. In the end, only the combined effort of the seafarers, Ashe and his group, and the ancient wizardry of the Foanna can hope to defeat their onslaught.

I found the resolution of this tale somewhat unsatisfying. It pits the Baldies, rapacious archetypes of the arrogant hypermale, against the powers of the last of the Foanna, three female aliens who strongly resemble the witches of Norton's better-known works of fantasy. Indeed, parts of the battle might have been drawn directly from one of those novels. But fortunately, the author brings in Ross Murdock to do some infiltratin' and kick some Baldy butt, resulting in the capture of their last spaceship and their expulsion from that world. Ashe and his team will never know whether they altered the future of that world, named after the Polynesian paradise Hawaika. But at least they have a chance to turn it into something approaching paradise.

I noted a few grammatical errors in the text: things like "man" when the plural "men" was needed, and a scene in which the Apaches watch until a Russian patrol and its weapons go "out of distance" (meaning that they are now out of range of those weapons.) I did not bother to record these as they are quite likely an editor's doing, and in any case do not detract from these two very enjoyable adventures. But one notch below full marks for the implausible setup of the crash in The Defiant Agents.

1 Stephen Hickman's cover art shows a man in an implausibly gimmicky mechanized suit with his right thumb bent back at a painful angle. He may well be trapped in that aggressive posture by the suit.
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