The Time Traders
By Andre Norton
At the end of the twentieth century, petty criminal Ross Murdock was given the choice of facing a new psychiatric medical procedure called rehabilitation or volunteering to join a secret government project. Hoping for a chance to escape, Ross volunteers to join Operation Retrograde and is taken by Major John Kelgarries to a base built under the ice near the North Pole.
Teamed with archaeologist Gordon Ashe, he is trained to mimic a trader of the Beaker culture of Bronze-Age Europe. Sent back to southern Britain around 2000 B.C., Ross and Ashe (as Rossa and Assha) find that their outpost has been bombed, destroyed by the wrath of Lurgha, the local storm god, according to two of the natives. Discovering the direction whence the bomber came and other clues pointing to the general area occupied by the Soviet base, Ross, Ashe, and McNeil, the lone survivor of the bombing, go to that area. Somewhere near the Baltic Sea, Ross, Ashe, and McNeil begin building a Beaker trading post and learn from the locals that to their southeast lies a land populated by ghosts, whither no man of good sense would go. Ross gets separated from Ashe and McNeil in a night attack and must go into the taboo area alone to find them. Far inside the ghostland, he sees the Soviet base and is captured by the Reds.
To escape, Ross steps onto the base’s transporter plate and is transferred to a Soviet base even further back in time. The Reds recapture him and take him outside the base, abandoning him on a glacier to freeze to death. He climbs out of the crevice into which he was shoved and follows the trail leading away from the Soviet base, coming to a giant globe half-buried in the ice. Half dead from the abuse he has received, he enters the world and then falls through a panel and into a tub full of transparent red gel. When he regains consciousness, Ross discovers that his wounds are healed, he is no longer hungry or thirsty, and his Beaker-folk clothing is gone. A mechanism offers him a skin-tight suit made of iridescent dark blue fabric covering all but his head and hands. He explores what some ships are and is recaptured by the Reds, but not before he activates the ship’s communication system and faces a hostile-looking humanoid with a large bald head.
The Reds’ interrogation of Ross is interrupted by explosions that rock the base. Ross is reunited with Ashe and McNeil, and the three men escape to the time transporter, pausing only to steal some recording tapes. In the Soviet Bronze Age base, the men leave the time-travel building and escape from the village just as the alien Baldies attack. The men then go to the river that will take them to the Baltic Sea to be picked up by their submarine (disguised as a whale).
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Andre Norton
Andre Alice Norton (born Alice Mary Norton, February 17, 1912 – March 17, 2005) was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy who also wrote historical and contemporary fiction.
Biography
She wrote under the pen names Andre Norton, Andrew North, and Allen Weston. She was the first woman to be Gandalf’s Grand Master of Fantasy, to be SFWA Grand Master, and to be inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. Alice Mary Norton was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1912. Her parents were Adalbert Freely Norton, who owned a rug company, and Bertha Stemm Norton. Alice began writing at Collinwood High School in Cleveland under the tutelage of Sylvia Cochrane. She was the editor of a literary page in the school’s paper, The Collinwood Spotlight, for which she wrote short stories. She wrote her first book, Ralestone Luck, which was eventually published as her second novel in 1938.
After graduating from high school in 1930, Norton planned to become a teacher and began studying at Flora Stone Mather College of Western Reserve University. However, in 1932, she had to leave because of the Depression. She began working for the Cleveland Library System, where she remained for 18 years, and later in Cleveland’s children’s section of the Nottingham Branch Library. In a 1996 interview, she recalled defending the acquisition of The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien for the library. In 1934, she legally changed her name to Andre Alice Norton, a pen name she had adopted for her first book, published later that year, to increase her marketability since boys were the main audience for fantasy. During 1940–1941, she worked as a special librarian in the cataloging department of the Library of Congress.
She was involved in a project related to alien citizenship, which was abruptly terminated upon the American entry into World War II. In 1941, she bought a bookstore called Mystery House in Mount Rainier, Maryland, the eastern neighbor of Washington, D.C. The business failed, and she returned to the Cleveland Public Library in 1950, when she retired due to ill health. She then began working as a reader for publisher-editor Martin Greenberg at Gnome Press, a small press in New York City that focused on science fiction. She remained until 1958, when, with 21 novels published, she became a full-time professional writer. As Norton’s health became uncertain, she moved to Winter Park, Florida, in November 1966, remaining until 1997. She moved to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in 1997 and was under hospice care from February 21, 2005. She died at home on March 17, 2005, of congestive heart failure.
Andre Norton
