There Will Be Time

by Poul Anderson

  The gates of Jerusalem stood open. His pulse beat high.

  And then he was found.

  It happened all at once. Fingers touched his back. He turned and saw a stocky, wide-faced person, not tall, clad similarly to him but also beardless, short-haired, and fair-skinned.

  Perspiration sheened upon the stranger’s countenance. He braced himself against the streaming and shoving of the crowd and said through its racket: “Es tu peregrinator temporis?”

  The accent was thick-eighteenth-century Polish, it would turn out--but Havig had a considerable mastery of classical as well as later Latin, and understood.

  “Are you a time traveler?”

  For a moment he could not reply. Reality whirled about him. Here was the end of his search.

  Or theirs.

  His height was unusual in this place, and he had left his head bare to show the barbering and the Nordic features. Unlike the majority of communities in history, Herodian Jerusalem was sufficiently cosmopolitan to let foreigners in; but his hope had been that others like him would guess he was a stranger in time as well as in space, or he might spy one of them. And now his hope was fulfilled.

  His first thought, before the joy began, was an uneasy idea that this man looked far too tough.

  They sat in the tavern which was their rendezvous and talked: Waclaw Krasicki who left Warsaw in 1738, Juan Men­doza who left Tijuana in 1924, and the pilgrims they had found.

  These were Jack Havig. And Coenraad van Leuven, a man-­at-arms from thirteenth-century Brabant, who had drawn his sword and tried to rescue the Savior as the cross was being carried toward Golgotha, and was urged back by Krasicki one second before a Roman blade would have spilled his guts, and now sat stunned by the question: “How do you know that per­son really was your Lord?” And a gray-bearded Orthodox monk who spoke only Croatian (?) but seemed to be named Boris and from the seventeenth century. And a thin, stringy-haired, pockmarked woman who hunched glaze-eyed in her robe and cowl and muttered in a language that nobody could identify.

  “This is all?” Havig asked unbelieving.

  “Well, we have several more agents in town,” Krasicki an­swered. Their conversation was in English, when the Ameri­can’s origin was known. “We’re to meet Monday evening, and then again right after, hm, Pentecost. I suppose they’ll turn up a few more travelers. But on the whole, yes, it seems like we’ll make less of a haul than we expected.”

  Havig looked around. The shop was open-fronted. Cus­tomers sat crosslegged on shabby rugs, the street and its traffic before them, while they drank out of clay cups which a boy filled from a wineskin. Jerusalem clamored past. On Good Friday!

  Krasicki wasn’t bothered. He had mentioned leaving his backward city, country, and time for the French Enlightenment; in a whisper, he had labeled his partner Mendoza as a gangster. (“Mercenary” was what he said, but the connotation was plain.) “It’s nothing to me if a Jewish carpenter who suffers from delirium is executed,” he told Havig. With a nudge: “Nor to you, eh? We seem to have gotten one reasonable recruit, at any rate.”

  In fact, that was not the American’s attitude. He avoided argument by asking: “Are time travelers really so few?”

  Krasicki shrugged. “Who knows? At least they can’t easily come here. It makes sense. You boarded a flying machine and arrived in hours. But think of the difficulties, the downright impossibility of the trip, in most eras. We read about medieval pilgrims. But how many were they, really, in proportion to popu­lation? How many died on the way? Also, I suppose, we’ll fall to find some time travelers because they don’t want to be found--or, maybe, it’s never occurred to them that others of their kind are in search-and their disguises will be too good for us.”

  Havig stared at him, and at imperturbable Juan Mendoza, three-quarters-drunk Coenraad, filthy rosary-clicking Boris, un­known crazy woman, and thought: Sure. Why should the gift fall exclusively on my type? Why didn’t I expect it’s given at random, to a complete cross-section of humanity? And I’ve seen what most humanity is like. And what makes me imagine I’m anything special?

  “We can’t spend too many man-hours hunting, either,” Krasicki said. “We are so few in the Eyrie.” He patted Havig’s knee. “Mother of God, how glad the Sachem will be that at least we found you!”

  A third-century Syrian hermit and a second-century B.C. Ionian adventurer were gathered by two more teams. Report was given of another woman--she seemed to be a Coptic Chris­tian--who vanished when approached.

  “A rotten harvest,” Krasicki grumbled. “However--” And he led the way, first to the stop after Pentecost, which yielded naught, then to the twenty-first century.

  Dust drifted across desert. in Jerusalem nothing human re­mained except bones and shaped stones. But an aircraft waited, needle-nosed, stubby-winged, nuclear-powered, taken by Eyrie men from a hangar whose guardians had had no chance to throw this war vessel into action before the death was upon them.

  “We flew across the Atlantic,” Havig would tell me. “Head­quarters was in ... what had been ... Wisconsin. Yes, they let me fetch my chronolog from where I’d hidden it, though I pleaded language difficulties to avoid telling them what it was. They themselves had had to cast about to zero in on the target date. That’s a clumsy, lifespan-consuming process, which prob­ably helps account for the dearth of travelers they found, and certainly explains their own organization’s reluctance to make long temporal journeys. Return was easier, because they’d erected a kind of big billboard in the ruins, on which an in­dicator was set daily to the correct date.

  “In late twenty-first-century America, things were barely get­ting started, The camp and sheds were inside a stockade and had been attacked more than once by, uh, natives or ma­rauders. From then we moved on uptime to when the Sachem had sent his expedition out to that Easter.”

  I do not know if my friend ever looked upon Jesus.

  7

  AFTER A HUNDRED-ODD YEARS, the establishment was consid­erable. Fertility was increasing in formerly tainted soil, thus letting population build up. Grainfields ripened across low hills, beneath a mild sky where summer clouds walked. Cultivation of timber had produced stands which made cupolas of darker green where birds nested and wind murmured. Roads were dirt, but laid out in a grid. Folk were about, busy. They had nothing except hand tools and animal-drawn machines; however, these were well-made. They looked much alike in their mostly home­spun blue trousers and jackets--both sexes--and their floppy straw hats and clumsy shoes: weather-beaten and work-gnarled like any pre-industrial peasants, hair hacked off below the ears, men bearded; they were small by the standards of our time, and many had poor teeth or none. Yet they were infinitely bet­ter off than their ancestors of the Judgment.

  They paused to salute the travelers, who rode on horseback from the airfield site, then immediately resumed their toil. An occasional pair of mounted soldiers, going by, drew sabers in a deferential but less servile gesture. They were uniformed in blue, wore steel helmets and breastplates, bore dagger at belt, bow and quiver and ax at croup, lance in rest with red pennon aflutter from the shaft, besides those swords.

  “You seem to keep tight control,” Havig said uneasily.

  “What else?” Krasicki snapped. “Most of the world, includ­ing most of this continent, is still in a state of barbarism or savagery, where man survives at all. We can’t manufacture what we can’t get the materials and machinery for. The Mong are on the plains west and south of us. They would come in like a tor­nado, did we let down our defenses. Our troopers aren’t over­seeing the workers, they’re guarding them against bandits. No, those people can thank the Eyrie for everything they do have.”

  The medieval-like pattern was repeated in town. Families did not occupy separate homes, they lived together near the strong­hold and worked the land collectively. But while it looked rea­sonably clean, which was a welcome difference from the Middle Ages, the place had none of the medieval charm. Brick rows flanking asphalted streets w
ere as monotonous as anything in the Victorian Midlands. Havig supposed that was because the need for quick though stout construction had taken priority over individual choice, and the economic surplus remained too small to allow replacing these barracks with real houses. If not--But he ought to give the Sachem the benefit of the doubt, till he knew more ... He saw one picturesque feature, a wooden building in a style which seemed half Asian, gaudily painted. Krasicki told him it was a temple, where prayers were said to Yasu and sacrifices made to that Oktai whom the Mong had brought.

  “Give them their religion, make the priests cooperate, and you have them,” he added.

  Havig grimaced. “Where’s the gallows?”

  Krasicki gave him a startled glance. “We don’t hold public hangings. What do you think we are?” After a moment: “What milksop measures do you imagine can pull anybody through years like these?”

  The fortress loomed ahead. High, turreted brick walls en­closed several acres; a moat surrounded them in turn, fed by the river which watered this area. The architecture had the same stem functionality as that of the town. Flanking the gates, and up among the battlements, were heavy machine guns, doubtless salvaged from wreckage or brought piece by piece out of the past. Stuttering noises told Havig that a number of motor-driven generators were busy inside.

  Sentries presented arms. A trumpet blew. Drawbridge planks clattered, courtyard flagstones resounded beneath horsehoofs.

  Krasicki’s group reined in. A medley of people hastened from every direction, babbling their excitement. Most, livened, must be castle servants. Havig scarcely noticed. His attention was on one who thrust her way past them until she stood be­fore him.

  Enthusiasm blazed from her. He could barely follow the husky, accented voice: “Oktai’s tail! You did find ‘m!”

  She was nearly as tall as him, sturdily built, with broad shoul­ders and hips, comparatively small bust, long smooth limbs. Her face bore high cheekbones, blunt nose, large mouth, good teeth save that two were missing. (He would learn they had been knocked out in a fight.) Her hair, thick and mahogany, was not worn in today’s style, but waist-length, though now coiled in braids above barbarically large brass earrings. Her eyes were brown and slightly almond-some Indian or Asian blood-under the heavy brows; her skin, sun-tanned, was in a few places crossed by old scars. She wore a loose red tunic and kilt, laced boots, a Bowie knife, a revolver, a loaded car­tridge belt, and, on a chain around her neck, the articulated skull of a weasel.

  “Where ‘ey from? You, yon!” Her forefinger stabbed at Havig. “‘E High Years, no?” A whoop of laughter. “You got aplen’y for tell me, trailmate!”

  “The Sachem is waiting,” Krasicki reminded her.

  “‘Kay, I’ll wait alike, but not ‘e whole jokin’ day, you hear?” And when Havig had dismounted, she flung arms around him and kissed him full on the lips. She smelled of sunshine, leather, sweat, smoke, and woman. Thus did he meet Leonce of the Glacier Folk, the Skula of Wahorn.

  The office was the antechamber of a suite whose size and luxury it reflected. Oak paneling rose above a deep-gray, thick-piled carpet. Drapes by the windows were likewise furry and feelable: mink. Because of their massiveness, desk, chairs, and couch had been fashioned in this section of time; but the care lavished on them was in contrast to the austerity Havig had observed in other rooms opening on the hallways which took him here. Silver frames held some photographs. One was a period piece, a daguerreotype of a faded-looking woman in the dress of the middle nineteenth century. The rest were candid shots taken with an advanced camera, doubtless a miniature using a telescopic lens like his own. He recognized Cecil Rhodes, Bismarck, and a youthful Napoleon; he could not place the yellow-bearded man in a robe.

  From this fifth floor of the main keep, the view showed wide across that complex of lesser buildings, that bustle of activity, which was the Eyrie, and across the land it ruled. Afternoon light slanted in long hot bars. The generator noise was a muted pecking.

  “Let’s have music, eh?” Caleb Wallis flipped the switches of a molecular recorder from shortly before the Judgment. Notes boomed forth. He lowered the volume but said: “That’s right, a triumphal piece. Lord, I’m glad to have you, Havig!” The newcomer recognized the Entry of the Gods from Das Rhein­gold.

  The rest of his group, including their guides, had been dis­missed, not altogether untactfully, after a short interview had demonstrated what they were. “You’re different,” the Sachem said. “You’re the one in a hundred we need worst. Here, want a cigar?”

  “No, thanks, I don’t smoke.”

  Wallis stood for a moment before he said, emphatically rather than loudly, “I am the founder and master of this nation. We must have discipline, forms of respect. I’m called ‘sir.’”

  Havig regarded him. Wallis was of medium height, blocky and powerful despite the paunch of middle life. His face was ruddy, somewhat flat-nosed, tufty-browed; gingery-gray mutton-chop whiskers crossed upper lip and cheeks to join the hair which fringed his baldness. He wore a black uniform, silver buttons and insignia, goldwork on the collar, epaulets, ornate dagger, automatic pistol. But there was nothing ridiculous about him. He radiated assurance. His voice rolled deep and com­pelling, well-nigh hypnotic when he chose. His small pale eyes never wavered.

  “You realize,” Havig said at last, “this is all new and be­wildering to me ... sir.”

  “Sure! Sure!” Wallis beamed and slapped him on the back.

  “You’ll catch on fast. You’ll go far, my boy. No limit here, for a man who knows what he wants and has the backbone to go after it. And you’re an American, too. An honest-to-God Amer­ican, from when our country was herself. Mighty few like that among us.”

  He lowered himself behind the desk. “Sit down. No, wait a minute, see my liquor cabinet? I’ll take two fingers of the bour­bon. You help yourself to what you like.”

  Havig wondered why no provision for ice and soda and the rest had been made. It should have been possible. He de­cided Wallis didn’t use such additions and didn’t care that others might.

  Seated in an armchair, a shot of rum between his fingers, he gazed at the Sachem and ventured: “I can go into detail about my biography, sir, but I think that could more usefully wait till I know what the Eyrie ... is.”

  “Right, right.” Wallis nodded his big head and puffed on the stogie. Its smoke was acrid. “However, let’s just get a few facts straight about you. Born in--1933, did you say? Ever let on to anybody what you are?” Havig checked the impulse to mention me. The knowledgeable questions snapped: “Went back as a young man to guide your childhood? Went on to improve your station in life, and then to search for other travelers?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What do you think of your era?”

  “Huh? Why, uh, well ... we’re in trouble. I’ve gone ahead and glimpsed what’s in store. Sir.”

  “Because of decay, Havig. You understand that, don’t you?” Intensity gathered like a thunderhead. “Civilized man turning against himself, first in war, later in moral sickness. The white man’s empires crumbling faster than Rome’s; the work of Clive, Bismarck, Rhodes, McKinley, Lyautey, all Indian fighters and Boers, everything that’d been won, cast out in a single genera­tion; pride of race and heritage gone; traitors-Bolsheviks and international Jews-in the seats of power, preaching to the or­dinary white man that the wave of the future was black. I’ve seen that, studying your century. You, living in it, have you seen?”

  Havig bristled. “I’ve seen what prejudice, callousness, and stupidity bring about. The sins of the fathers are very truly visited on the Sons.”

  Walls chose to ignore the absence of an honorific. Indeed, he smiled and grew soothing: “I know. I know. Don’t get me wrong. Plenty of colored men are fine, brave fellows-Zulus, for instance, or Apache Indians to take a different race, or Japs to take still another. Any travelers we may find among them will get their chance to occupy the same honored position as all our proven time agents do, as
you will yourself, I’m sure. Shucks, I admire your Israelis, what I’ve heard about them. A mongrel people, racially no relation to the Hebrews of the Bible, but tough fighters and clever. No, I’m just talking about the need for everybody to keep his own identity and pride. And I’m only mad at those classes it’s fair to call niggers, red­skins, Chinks, kikes, wops, you know what I mean. Plenty of pure-blooded whites among them, I’m sorry to say, who’ve either lost heart or have outright sold themselves to the enemy.”

  Havig forced himself to remember that that basic attitude was common, even respectable in the Sachem’s birth-century. Why, Abraham Lincoln had spoken of the inborn inferiority of the Negro ... He didn’t suppose Wallis ordered cruci­fixions.

  “Sir,” he said with much care, “I suggest we avoid argument till we’ve made the terms of our thinking clear to each other. That may take a lot of effort. Meanwhile we can better discuss practical matters.”

  “Right, right,” Wallis rumbled. “You’re a brain, Havig. A man of action, too, though maybe within limits. But I’ll be frank, brains are what we need most at this stage, especially if they have scientific training, realistic philosophies.” He waved the cigar. “Take that haul today from Jerusalem. Typical! The Brabanter and the Greek we can probably train up to be useful fighting men, scouts, auxiliaries on time expeditions, that sort of thing. But the rest--” He clicked his tongue. “I don’t know. Maybe, at most, ferrymen, fetching stuff from the past. And I can only hope the woman'll be a breeder.”