Two in Time

by Wilson Tucker

  A wire rope, welded at the ends, stretched five feet from a ring locked around his ankle to a staple in the wall. That suf­ficed. A time traveler bore along whatever was in direct con­tact with him, such as clothing. In effect, Havig would have had to carry away the entire keep. He did not try.

  “Sit down, do sit down,” Caleb Wallis urged.

  He had planted his broad bottom in one of the chairs, beyond reach of his prisoner. Black, epauletted uniform, neatly combed gingery whiskers, bare pate were an assertion of lordship over Havig’s grimed archaic clothes, stubbly jaws, bloodshot and murk-encircled eyes.

  Wallis waved his cigar. “I’m not necessarily mad at you,” he said. “In fact, I kind of admire your energy, your cleverness. I’d like to recall them to my side. That’s how come I ordered the boys to let you rest before this interview. I hope the chow was good? Do sit down.”

  Havig obeyed. He had not ceased to feel numb. During the night he had dreamed about Xenia. They were bound some­where on a great trimaran whose sails turned into wings and lifted them up among stars.

  “We’re private here,” Wallis said. An escort waited be­yond the door, which stood thick and shut. “You can talk free.”

  “Supposing I don’t?” Havig replied.

  The eyes which confronted him were like bullets. “You will. I’m a patient man, but I don’t aim to let you monkey any further with my destiny. You’re alive because I think maybe you can give us some compensation for the harm you’ve done, the trouble you’ve caused. For instance, you know your way around in the later twentieth century. And you have money there. That could be mighty helpful. It better be.”

  Havig reached inside his tunic. He thought dully: How un­dramatic that a new-made widower, captive and threatened with torture, should be unbathed, and on that account should stink and itch. He’d remarked once to Xenia that her beloved classi­cal poets left out those touches of animal reality; and she’d shown him passages in Homer, the playwrights, the hymners, oh, any number of them to prove him wrong; her forefinger danced across the lines, and bees hummed among her roses ...

  “I gather you were keeping a wench in Constantinople, and she fell sick and had to be let go,” Wallis said. “Too bad. I sympathize, kind of. Still, you know, lad, in a way you brought it on yourself. And on her.” The big bald head swayed. “Yes, you did. I’m not telling you God has punished you. That could be, but nature does give people what they deserve, and it is not fitting for a proper white man to bind himself to a female like that. She was Levantine, you know. Which means mongrel-Ar­menian, Asiatic, hunky, spig, Jew, probably a touch of nigger--” Again Wallis’s cigar moved expansively. “Mind, I’ve noth­ing against you boys having your fun,” he said with a jovial wink. “No, no. Part of your pay, I guess, sampling damn near anyone you want, when you want her, and no nonsense after­ward out of her or anybody else.” He scowled. “But you, Jack, you married this’n.”

  Havig tried not to listen. He failed. The voice boomed in on him:

  “There’s more wrongness in that than meets the eye. It’s what I call a symbolic thing to do. You bring yourself down, because a mixed-breed can’t possibly be raised to your level. And so you bring down your whole race.” The tone harshened. “Don’t you understand? It’s always been the curse of the white man. Because he is more intelligent and sensitive, he opens himself to those who hate him. They divide him against him­self, they feed him lies, they slide their slimy way into control of his own homelands, till he finds he’s gotten allied with his natural enemy against his brother. Oh, yes, yes, I’ve studied your century, Jack. That’s when the conspiracy flowered into action, wrecked the world, unlocked the gates for Mong and Maurai ... You know what I think is one of the most awful tragedies of all time? When two of the greatest geniuses the white race ever produced, its two possible saviors from the Slav and the Chinaman, were lured into war on different sides. Douglas MacArthur and Adolf Hitler.”

  Havig knew--an instant later, first with slight surprise, next with a hot satisfaction--that he had spat on the floor and snapped: “If the General ever heard you say that, I wouldn’t give this for your life, Wallis! Not that it’s worth it anyway.”

  Surprisingly, or maybe not, he provoked no anger. “You prove exactly what I was talking about.” The Sachem’s manner verged on sorrow. “Jack, I’ve got to make you see the plain truth. I know you have sound instincts. They’ve only been buried under a stack of cunning lies. You’ve seen that nigger empire in the future, and yet you can’t see what ought to be done, what must be done, to put mankind back on the right evolutionary road.”

  Wallis drew upon his cigar till its end glowed beacon-red, exhaled pungent smoke, and added benign-voiced: “Of course, you’re not yourself today. You’ve lost this girl you cared about, and like I told you, I do sympathize.” Pause. “However, she’d be long dead by now regardless, wouldn’t she?”

  He grew utterly intense. “Everybody dies,” he said. “Except us. I don’t believe we travelers need to. You can be among us. You can live forever.”

  Havig resisted the wish to reply, “I don’t want to, if you’re included in the deal.” He waited.

  “They’re bound to find immortality, far off in the world we’re building,” Wallis said. “I’m convinced. I’ll tell you some­thing. This is confidential, but either I can trust you eventually or you die. I’ve been back to the close of Phase One, more thoroughly than I’d been when I wrote the manual. You re­member I’ll be old then. Sagging cheeks, rheumy eyes, shaky liver-spotted hands . . . not pleasant to see yourself old, no, not pleasant.” He stiffened. “This trip I learned something new. At the end, I am going to disappear. I will never be seen any more, aside from my one short visit I’ve already paid to Phase Two. Never. And likewise a number of my chief lieutenants. I didn’t get every name of theirs--no use spending lifespan on that--but I wouldn’t be bowled over if you turned out to be among them.”

  Faintly, the words pricked Havig’s returning apathy. “What do you suppose will have happened?” he asked.

  “Why, the thing I wrote about,” Wallis exulted. “The reward. Our work done, we were called to the far future and made young forever. Like unto gods.”

  In the sky outside, a crow cawed.

  The trumpet note died from Wallis’s words. “I hope you’ll be included, Jack,” he said. “I do. You’re a go-getter. I don’t mind admitting your talk about your experiences on your own hook in Constantinople was what gave Krasicki the idea of our raid. And you did valuable work there, too, before you went crazy. That was our best haul to date. It’s given us what we need to expand into the period. Believe me, Caleb Wallis is not ungrateful.

  “Sure,” he purred, “you were shocked. You came new to the hard necessities of our mission. But what about Hiroshima, hey? What about some poor homesick Hessian lad, sold into service, dying of lead in his belly for the sake of American in­dependence? Come to that, Jack, what about the men, your comrades in arms, who you killed?

  “Let’s set them against this girl you happened to get infatu­ated with. Let’s chalk off your services to us against the harm you’ve done. Even-Steven, right? Okay. You must’ve been busy in the years that followed. You must’ve collected a lot of in­formation. How about sharing it? And leading us to your money, signing it over? Earning your way back into our brotherhood?”

  Sternness: “Or do you want the hot irons, the pincers, the dental drills, the skilled attentions of professionals you know we got--till what’s left of you obliges me in the hope I’ll let it die?”

  Night entered first the room, then the window. Havig gazed stupidly at the recorder and the supper which had been brought him, until he could no longer see them.

  He ought to yield, he thought. Walls could scarcely be lying about the future of the Eyrie. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em, and hope to be an influence for mercy, in the name of Xenia’s timid ghost.

  Yet if--for example--Walls learned about the Maurai psy­chodrugs, which t
he Maurai themselves dreaded, and sent men uptime--Well, Julius Caesar butchered and subjugated to further his political career. In the process he laid the keel of Western civilization, which in its turn gave the world Chartres Cathedral, St. Francis of Assisi, penicillin, Bach, the Bill of Rights, Rem­brandt, astronomy, Shakespeare, an end to chattel slavery, Goethe, genetics, Einstein, woman suffrage, Jane Addams, man’s footprints on the moon and man’s vision turned to the stars ... yes, also the nuclear warhead and totalitarianism, the automobile and the Fourth Crusade, but on the whole, on balance, in an aspect of eternity--Dared he, mere Jack Havig, stand against an entire tomorrow for the sake of a little beloved dust?

  Could he? An executioner would be coming to see if he had put something on tape.

  He had better keep in mind that Jack Havig counted for no more in eternity than Doukas Manasses, or Xenia, or anybody.

  Except: he did not have to give the enemy a free ride. He could make them burn more of their lifespans. For whatever that might be worth.

  A hand shook him. He groped his way out of uneasy sleep. The palm clapped onto his mouth. In blackness: “Be quiet, you fool,” whispered Leonce.

  13

  A PENCIL FLASHLIGHT came to life. Its beam probed until the iron sheened on Havig’s ankle. “Ah,” she breathed. “That’s how they bottle you? Like I reckoned. Hold this.” She thrust the tube at him. Dizzy, rocked by his heartbeat, scarcely believ­ing, he could not keep it steady. She said a bad word, snatched it back, took it between her teeth, and crouched over him. A hacksaw began to grate.

  “Leonce--my dear, you shouldn’t--” he stammered.

  She uttered an angry grunt. He swallowed and went silent. Stars glistened in the window.

  When the cable parted, leaving him with only the circlet, he tottered erect. She snapped off the light, stuck the tube in her shirt pocket-otherwise, he had glimpsed, she wore jeans and hiking shoes, gun and knife-and grasped him by the upper arms. “Listen,” she hissed. “You skip ahead to sunrise. Let ‘em bring you breakfast before you return to now. Got me? We want ‘em to think you escaped at a later hour. Can you carry it off? If not, you’re dead.”

  “I’ll try,” he said faintly.

  “Good.” Her kiss was brief and hard. “Be gone.”

  Havig moved uptime at a cautious pace. When the window turned gray he emerged, arranged his tether to look uncut to a casual glance, and waited. He had never spent a longer hour.

  A commoner guard brought in a tray of food and coffee. “Hello,” Havig said inanely.

  He got a surly look and a warning: “Eat fast. They want to talk to you soon.”

  For a sick instant, Havig thought the man would stay and watch. But he retired. After the door had slammed, Havig must sit down for a minute; his knees would not upbear him.

  Leonce--He gulped the coffee. Will and strength resurged. He rose to travel back nightward.

  The light-gleam alerted him to his moment. As he entered normal time, he heard a hoarse murmur across the room:

  “--Can you carry it off? If not, you’re dead.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Good.” Pause. “Be gone.”

  He heard the little rush of air filling a vacuum where his body had been, and knew he had departed. “Here I am,” he called low.

  “Huh? Ah!” She must see better in the dark than he, because she came directly to him. “All ‘kay?”

  “Yes. Maybe.”

  “No chatter,” she commanded. “They may decide to check these hours, ‘spite of our stunt. Here, hold my hand an’ slip downtime. Don’t hurry yourself. I know we’ll make it. I just don’t want ‘em to find out how.”

  Part of the Eyrie’s training was in such simultaneous travel. Each felt a resistance if starting to move “faster” or “slower” than the partner, and adjusted the chronokinetic rate ac­cordingly.

  A few nights earlier, the chamber was unoccupied, the door unlocked. They walked down shadow stairs, across shadow courtyard, through gates which, in this period of unchallenged reign, were usually left open. At intervals they must emerge for breath, but that could be in the dark. Beyond the lowered drawbridge, Leonce lengthened her stride. Havig wondered why she didn’t simply go to a day before the castle existed, until he realized the risk was too great of encountering others in the vicinity. A lot of men went hunting in the primeval forest which once grew here.

  Dazed with fatigue and grief, he would do best to follow her lead. She’d gotten him free, hadn’t she?

  She really had. He needed a while to conceive of that.

  They sat in the woods, one summer before Columbus was born. The trees, oak and elm and birch mingled together, were gigantic; their fragrance filled the air, their leaves cast green shadows upon the nearly solid underbrush around them. Some­where a woodpecker drummed and a bluejay scolded. The fire glowed low which Leonce had built. On an improvised spit roasted a grouse she had brought down out of a thousandfold flock which they startled when they arrived.

  “I can never get over it,” she said, “what a wonderful world this is before machine man screws things up. I don’t think a lot o’ the High Years any more. I’ve been then too often.”

  Havig, leaned against a bole, had a brief eerie sense of déjà vu. The cause came to him: this setting was not unlike that almost a millennium hence, when he and she- He regarded her more closely than hitherto. Mahogany hair in a kind of Dutch bob, suntan faded, the Skula’s weasel skull left behind and the big body in boyish garb, she might have come straight from his home era. Her English had lost most of the Glacier accent, too. Of course, she still went armed, and her feline gait and haughty bearing hadn’t changed.

  “How long for you?” he inquired.

  “Since you left me in Paris? ‘Bout three years.” She frowned at the bird, reached and turned it above the coals.

  “I’m sorry. That was a shabby way to treat you. Why did you want to spring me?”

  Her scowl deepened. “S’pose you tell me what happened.”

  “You don’t know?” he exclaimed in amazement. “For heav­en’s sake, if you weren’t sure why I was under arrest, how could you be sure I didn’t deserve--”

  “Talk, will you?”

  The story stumbled forth, in bare outline. Now and then, during it, the tilted eyes sought him, but her countenance re­mained expressionless. At the end she said: “Well, seems my hunch was right. I haven’t thrown away much. Was gettin’ more an’ more puked at that outfit, as I saw how it works.”

  She might have offered a word for Xenia, he thought, and therefore he matched her brusqueness: “I didn’t believe you’d object to a spot of fighting and robbery.”

  “Not if they’re honest, strength ‘gainst strength, wits ‘gainst wits. But those . . . jackals . . . they pick on the helpless. An’ for sport more’n for gain.” In a kind of leashed savagery, she probed the fowl with her knife point. A drop of fat hit the coals; yellow flame sputtered and flared. “‘Sides, what’s the sense o’ the whole business? Why should we try to fasten machines back on the world? So Cal Wallis can be promoted to God j.g.?”

  “When you learned I’d been located and was being held, that touched off the rebellion which had been gathering in you?” Havig asked.

  She didn’t reply directly. “I went downtime, like you’d guess, found when the room was empty, went uptime to you. First, though, I’d spent some days future o’ that, not to seem involved in your escape. Ha, ever’body was runnin’ ‘round like guillo­tined chickens! I planted the notion you must’ve co-opted a traveler while you were in the past.” The broad shoulders lifted and dropped. “Well, the hooraw blew over. Evidently it didn’t seem worth mentionin’ to the earlier Wallis, on his inspection tour. Why admit a failure? His next appearance beyond your vanishment was years ahead, an’ nothin’ awful had happened meanwhile. You didn’t matter. Nor will I, when I never return from my furlough. I s’pose they’ll reckon I died in an accident.” She chuckled. “I do like sports cars, an’ drive l
ike a bat out o’ Chicago.”

  “In spite of, uh, opposing a restoration of machine society?” Havig wondered.

  “Well, we can enjoy it while we got it, can’t we, whether or not it’ll last or ought to?” She observed him steadily, and her tone bleakened. “That’s ‘bout all we can do, you an’ me. Find ourselves some nice hidey-holes, here an’ there in space-time. Because we’re sure not goin’ to upset the Eyrie.”

  “I’m not certain its victory is predestined,” Havig said. “Maybe wishful thinking on my part. After what I’ve seen, however--” His earnestness helped cover the emptiness in him where Xenia had been. “Leonce, you do wrong to put down science and technology. They can be misused, but so can every­thing. Nature never has been in perfect balance--there are many more extinct species than live--and primitive man was quite as destructive as modern. He simply took longer to use up his environment. Probably Stone Age hunters exterminated the gi­ant mammals of the Pleistocene. Certainly farmers with sickles and digging sticks wore out what started as the Fertile Crescent. And nearly all mankind died young, from causes that are pre­ventable when you know how ... The Maurai will do more than rebuild the foundation of Earth’s life. They’ll make the first attempt ever to create a balanced environment. And that’ll only be possible because they do have the scientific knowledge and means.”

  “Don’t seem like they’ll succeed.”

  “I can’t tell. That mysterious farther future ... it’s got to be studied.” Havig rubbed his eyes. “Later, later. Right now I’m too tired. Let me borrow your Bowie after lunch and cut some boughs to sleep on for a week or three.”

  She moved, then, to come kneel before him and lay one hand on his neck, run fingers of the other through his hair. “Poor Jack,” she murmured. “I been kind o’ short with you, haven’t I? Forgive. Was a strain on me also, this gettin’ away an’--Sure, sleep. We have peace. Today we have peace.”