FORGOTTEN BOOK: ATLANTIS ENDGAME

 Atlantis Endgame by Andre Norton and Sherwood Smith  (2002)

Last week I reviewed Key Out of Time, the fourth and supposedly final book in Andre Norton's Time Traders series.  That book ended ten thousand years in the past on an alien planet with 
Time Agents Ross Murdoch and Gordon Ashe, along with a Polynesian girl and her two telepathic dolphins abandoned with no way of getting home and with no way of knowing whether their actions have prevented the extinction of intelligent life on that planet.  Well, sometimes it's good to keep readers hanging, although every reader knows in their heart that good will prevail, even if the heroes have to forge new lives in the past.

Every reader also knows that you can't keep a good series down.  So...

Thirty-one years after the publication of Key Out of Time, Norton returned to the Time Traders franchise with Firehand, co-authored by P. M. Griffin.  (Many late-in-their-career authors resort to co-writers; it's any one's guess how much of these works were actually written by the original authors.)  Two other Time Traders novels followed:  Echoes in Time (1999) and Atlantis Endgame (2002(, both co-authored by Sherwood Smith (who had also continued Norton's popular Solar Queen series, which had ended in 1969).

Since I have not read either Firehand or Echoes in Time I have no idea how the hell Murdoch and Ashe managed to get off that ten-thousand-year-ago planet, but get off it they they did.  The two are older now.  Ashe is mostly stuck to an administrative desk job and longs for the action of the past.  (Play on words here, he-he-he.)  Murdock is married to a fellow Time Agent, the very capable Eveleen Riordan; their marriage looks like it's in for the long haul..  Decades ago, Ashe had studied with young archaeologist Linnea Edel.  Ashe effectively vanished after he was secretly recruited as a Time Agent.  Linnea married, quit work to raise a family, widowed, remained in occasional contact with her children who had moved to different areas of the country, and began working again in her chosen field.  She was never able to find out what had happened to Ashe until now.  Exactly how she found Ashe and how she knew (or at least gleaned) that Ashe was with the Time Traders is never explained.  (Things that are difficult to explain for an author are often best left unsaid.)

While working on a site at Thera, the very top of a massive undersea volcano volcano near Crete,   Linnea unearthed a gold earring under eighty feet of volcanic ash which dates back to approximately the 1620s B.C.  The earring had a modern jeweler's mark on it.  The earring was an exact match to a pair that Eveleen's father had given her on her 21st birthday --it was the same earring.  Thankfully, no bodies or remains were discovered near the earring, but there could be no denying that the Tame Agents had been on Thera some 3600 years before.

Sometime around 1620 B.C. there was a massive volcanic eruption, blowing thirty to fifty cubic miles of land into dust and causing a tsunami that took out all the ports along the Aegean; the black cloud from the explosion ruined crops in China and left traces in tree rings as far away as California.  Krakatoa was just a child's firecracker compared to this explosion.  There was no evidence of massive death; any population must have evacuated before the explosion.  A relics such as the Antikythera mechanism hints at an advanced civilization, but exactly how that civilization vanished is unknown..  This could have been the source of the legend of Atlantis.

Suspicion falls onto the Baldies, a mysterious intergalactic race that seems intent on eliminating all other races.  Could they have placed a large thermonuclear device to cause the volcanic eruption?  If the civilization of Thera had not been destroyed, it is possible that the Industrial Age could have come a thousand years earlier.  Who knows how advanced humanity might have been today?  It's time (another pun, he-he-he) for the Time traders go go back to just before the explosion to investigate.  Going on this mission are Murdoch, Eveleen, Ashe, Linnea (although not a Time Agent, she is the closest thing thay have to an expert on that era), and two Greek Time Agents (to do the heavy lifting).

The ancient island is called Kalliste.  It is a major port of a Minoan-based civilization.  Its language is un know, but because it is a major port, various other languages, including forms of ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek, can be used.  There is a single religion, accessed through an oracle and a group of priestesses who are devout believers and who show none of the hypocrisy that many other religions do.  The volcano has been showing some activity, occasionally scattering small rocks like rain, minor quakes move the earth, the air is cloudy and foul, poison gases leak from open chasms, and the populace is wondering what they might have done to offend the gods; a number of citizens have already left the area.  Yet many of the people go about their daily business, doing their best to ignore the danger around them. 

It doesn't take long to discover that the Baldies are there, but what their purpose and exact plan is remains unknown.  The Time Agents cannot prevent the explosion -- their one sacred duty is to maintain the time line, but perhaps they can help spur an evacuation.  But how?

But there's another spanner in the works:  a second alien race is present in Kalliste -- a race that Murdock -- who is the only human who has encountered one personally -- calls the Fur Faces.  It's a race that appears to be from the Time Agents' future.  What are they doing here?  Are they working with the Baldies?  Are they working against the Time Agents?

The Fur Faces offer to work with the Time Agents, claiming they are the enemies of the Baldies.  The Baldies, they claim, are trying to prevent the volcanic explosion because this will lead not to an age of progress as the Time Agents posited, but to a world of stagnation where mankind will never advanced far enough to reach the stars.  Who to believe and what to do?

And exactly when will the volcano blow (if it does)?  And will our heroes have enough time to get the heck out of Dodge?

In the meantime, there are also hints of a potential romance between Linnea and Ashe, just because...

An interesting book with perhaps just a bit too much historical background and detail to drag down the main plot.  Still worth a read but Norton had done better in her early days.