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them. Please, boss, let me have one whack at
him. I may be a poor exile, but no little Greek catamite —"
     
                Padway refused permission.
Thomasus suggested swearing out a complaint and having Hannibal arrested;
Padway said no, he didn't want to get mixed up with the law. He did allow
Fritharik to send Hannibal, when the Sicilian came to, out the front door with
a mighty lack in the fundament. Exit villain, sneering, thought Padway as he
watched the ex-foreman slink off.
     
                Fritharik said: "I
think that was a mistake, Martinus. I could have sunk his body in the Tiber
without anybody's knowing. He'll make trouble for us."
     
                Padway suspected that the
last statement was correct. But he merely said: "We'd better bind your arm
up. Your whole sleeve is blood-soaked. Julia, get a strip of linen and boil it.
Yes, boil it!"
     
    -
     

CHAPTER IV
     
                PADWAY HAD RESOLVED not to
let anything distract him from the task of assuring himself a livelihood. Until
that was accomplished, he didn't intend to stick his neck out by springing
gunpowder or the law of gravitation on the unsuspecting Romans.
     
                But the banker's war talk
reminded him that he was, after all, living in a political and cultural as well
as an economic world. He had never, in his other life, paid more attention to
current events than he had to. And in post-Imperial Rome, with no newspapers or
electrical communication, it was even easier to forget about things outside
one's immediate orbit.
     
                He was living in the
twilight of western classical civilization. The Age of Faith, better known as
the Dark Ages, was closing down. Europe would be in darkness, from a scientific
and technological aspect, for nearly a thousand years. That aspect was, to
Padway's naturally prejudiced mind, the most, if not the only, important aspect
of a civilization. Of course, the people among whom he was living had no
conception of what was happening to them. The process was too slow to observe
directly, even over the span of a life-time. They took their environment for
granted, and even bragged about their modernity.
     
                So what? Could one man
change the course of history to the extent of preventing this interregnum? One
man had changed the course of history before. Maybe. A Carlylean would say yes.
A Tolstoyan or Marxian would say no; the environment fixes the pattern of a
man's accomplishments and throws up the man to fit that pattern. Tancredi had expressed
it differently by calling history a tough web, which would take a huge effort
to distort.
     
                How would one man go about
it? Invention was the mainspring of technological development. But even in his
own time, the lot of the professional inventor had been hard, without the
handicap of a powerful and suspicious ecclesiasticism. And how much could he
accomplish by simply "inventing," even if he escaped the unwelcome
attentions of the pious? The arts of distilling and metal rolling were launched,
no doubt, and so were Arabic numerals. But there was so much to be done, and
only one lifetime to do it in.
     
                What then? Business? He was
already in it; the upper classes were contemptuous of it; and he was not
naturally a businessman, though he could hold his own well enough in
competition with these sixth-century yaps. Politics? In an age when victory
went to the sharpest knife, and no moral rules of conduct were observable? Br-r-r-r!
     
                How to prevent darkness from
falling?
     
                The Empire might have held
together longer if it had had better means of communication. But the Empire, at
least in the west, was hopelessly smashed, with Italy, Gaul, and Spain under
the muscular thumbs of their barbarian "garrisons."
     
                The answer was Rapid
communication and the