There Will Be Time

by Poul Anderson

  “What?” Havig started half out of his chair. It leaped inside him. “We can have children?”

  “With each other, yes. In the course of a hundred years we’ve proved that.” Wallis guffawed. “Not with non-travelers, no, not ever. We’ve proved that even oftener. How’d you like a nice little servant girl to warm your bed tonight, hm? Or we have slaves, taken on raids--and don’t go moralistic on me. Their gangs would’ve done the same to us, and if we didn’t bring prisoners back here and tame them, rather than cut their throats, they and their brats would go on making trouble along our borders.” His mood had reverted to serious. “Quite a shortage of traveler women here, as you’d expect, and not all of them willing or able to become mothers. But those who do--The kids are ordinary, Havig. The gift is not inherited.”

  Considering the hypothesis he had made (how far ago on his multiply twisted world line?), the younger man was unsur­prised. If two such sets of chromosomes could interact to make a life, it must be because the resonances (?) which otherwise barred fertility were canceled out.

  “Well, then, no use trying to breed a race from ourselves,” Wallis continued wistfully. “Oh, we do give our kids educa­tions, preference, leadership jobs when they’re grown. I have to allow that, it being one thing which helps keep my agents loyal to me. But frankly, confidentially, I’m often hard put to find handsome-looking posts where somebody’s get can do no harm. Because the parents are time travelers, it doesn’t follow they’re not chuckle-heads fit only to bring forth more chuckle-heads. No, we’re a kind of aristocracy in these parts, I won’t deny, but we can’t keep it hereditary for very long. I wouldn’t want that anyway.”

  Havig asked softly: “What do you want, sir?”

  Wallis put aside his cigar and drink, as if his next words re­quired the piety of folded hands on the desk before him. “To restore civilization. Why else did God make our kind?”

  “But--in the future--I’ve glimpsed--”

  “The Maurai Federation?” Fury flushed the wide counte­nance. A fist thudded down. “How much of it have you seen? Damn little, right? I’ve explored that epoch, Havig. You’ll be taken to learn for yourself. I tell you, they’re a bunch of Kanaka-white-nigger-Chink-Jap mongrels who’ll come to power--are starting to come to power while we sit here--for no other reason than that they were less hard-hit. They’ll work, and fight, and bribe, and connive to dominate the world, only so they can put bridle and saddle on the human race in general, the white race in particular, and stop progress forever. You’ll see! You’ll see!”

  He leaned back, breathed hard, swallowed his whiskey, and stated: “Well, they won’t succeed. For three-four centuries, yes, I’m afraid men will have to bear their yoke. But afterward--That’s what the Eyrie is for, Havig. To prepare an afterward.”

  “I was born in 1853, upstate New York,” the Sachem re­lated. “My father was a poor storekeeper and a strict Baptist. My mother--that’s her picture.” He indicated the gentle, in­effectual face upon the wall, and for an instant a tenderness broke through. “I was the last of seven children who lived. So Father hadn’t a lot of time or energy to spare for me, espe­cially since the oldest boy was his favorite. Well, that taught me at an early age how to look out for myself and keep my mouth shut. Industry and thrift, too. I went to Pittsburgh when I was officially 17, knowing by then how much of the future was there. My older self had worked closer with me than I gather yours did. But then, I always knew I had a destiny.”

  “How did you make your fortune, sir?” Havig inquired. He was interested as well as diplomatic.

  “Well, my older self joined the Forty-niners in California. He didn’t try for more than a good stake, just enough to invest for a proper profit in sutlering when he skipped on to the War Be­tween the States. Next he had me run over his time track, and when I came back to Pittsburgh the rest was easy. You can’t call ‘em land speculations when you know what’s due to happen, right? I sold short at the proper point in ‘73, and after the panic was in a position to buy up distressed property that would be­come valuable for coal and oil. Bought into railroads and steel mills, too, in spite of trouble from strikers and anarchists and suchlike trash. By 1880, my real age about thirty-five, I figured I’d made my pile and could go on to the work for which God had created me.”

  Solemnly: “I’ve left my father’s faith. I guess most time trav­elers do. But I still believe in a God who every now and then calls a particular man to a destiny.”

  And then Walls laughed till his belly jiggled and exclaimed:

  “But my, oh, my, ain’t them highfalutin words for a plain old American! It’s not glamour and glory, Havig, except in the his­tory books. It’s hard, grubby detail work, it’s patience and self-denial and being willing to learn from the mistakes more than the successes. You see how I’m not young any more, and my plans barely started to blossom, let alone bear fruit. The doing, though, the doing, that’s the thing, that’s to be alive!”

  He held out his empty glass. “Refill this,” he said. “I don’t ordinarily drink much, but Lord, how I’ve wanted to talk to somebody both new and bright! We have several shrewd boys, like Krasicki, but they’re foreigners, except a couple of Amer­icans who I’ve gotten so used to I can tell you beforehand what they’ll say to any remark of mine. Go on, pour for me, and yourself, and let’s chat awhile.”

  Presently Havig could ask: “How did you make your first contacts, sir?”

  “Why, I hired me a lot of agents, throughout most of the nineteenth century, and had them go around placing advertise­ments in papers and magazines and almanacs, or spreading a word of mouth. They didn’t say ‘time traveler,’ of course, nor know what I really wanted. That wording was very careful. Not that I made it myself. I’m no writer. Brains are what a man of action hires. I hunted around and found me a young English­man in the ‘90’s, starting out as an author, a gifted fellow even if he was kind of a socialist. I wanted somebody late in the pe­riod, to avoid, um-m, anticipations, you see? He got interested in my, ha, ‘hypothetical proposition,’ and for a few guineas wrote me some clever things. I offered him more money but he said he’d rather have the free use of that time travel idea instead.”

  Havig nodded; a tingle went along his nerves. “Some such thought occurred to me, sir. But, well, I hadn’t your single-mindedness. I definitely don’t seem to have accumulated any­thing like your fortune. And besides, in my period, time travel was so common a fictional theme, I was afraid of publicity. At best, it seemed I’d merely attract cranks.”

  “I got those!” Wallis admitted. “A few genuine, even: I mean travelers whose gift had made them a little tetched, or more than a little. Remember, a dimwit or a yokel, if he isn’t scared green of what’s happened to him and never does it again--or doesn’t want to travel outside the horizon he knows--or doesn’t get taken by surprise and murdered for a witch--he’ll hide what he is, and that’ll turn him strange. Or say he’s a street urchin, why shouldn’t he make himself rich as a burglar or a bookmaker, something like that, then retire to the life of Riley? Or say he’s an Injun on the reservation, he can impress the devil out of his tribe and make them support him, but they aren’t about to tell the palefaces, are they? And so on and so on. Hopeless cases. As for one like me, who is smart and am­bitious, why, he’ll lay low same as you and I did, won’t he? Of­ten, I’m afraid, too low for any of us to find.”

  “How. . . how many did you gather?”

  “Sir.”

  “I’m sorry. Sir.”

  Wallis gusted a breath. “Eleven. Out of a whole blooming century, eleven in that original effort.” He ticked them off. “Austin Caldwell the best of the lot. A fuzzy-cheeked frontier scout when he came to my office; but he’s turned into quite a man, quite a man. He it was who nicknamed me the Sachem. I kind of liked that, and let it stick.”

  “Then a magician and fortuneteller in a carnival; a profes­sional gambler; a poor white Southern girl. That was the Amer­icans. Abroad, we found a Bavar
ian soldier; an investigator for the Inquisition, which was still going in Spain, you may know; a female Jew cultist in Hungary; a student in Edinburgh, work­ing his heart out trying to learn from books what he might be; a lady milliner in Paris, who went off into time for her de­signs; a young peasant couple in Austria. We were lucky with those last, by the way. They’d found each other--maybe the only pair of travelers who were ever born neighbors--and had their first child, and wouldn’t have left if the baby weren’t small enough to carry.

  “What a crew! You can imagine the problems of language and transportation and persuading and everything.”

  “No more than those?” Havig felt appalled.

  “Yes, about as many, but unusable. Cracked, like I told you, or too dull, or crippled, or scared to join us, or whatever. One strapping housewife who refused to leave her husband. I thought of abducting her--the cause is bigger than her damn comfort--but what’s the good of an unwilling traveler? A man, maybe you could threaten his kin and get service out of him. Women are too cowardly.”

  Havig remembered a flamboyant greeting in the courtyard, but held his peace.

  “Once I had my first disciples, I could expand,” Wallis told him. “We could explore wider and in more detail, learning bet­ter what needed to be done and how. We could establish funds and bases at key points of ... m-m ... yes, space-time. We could begin to recruit more, mainly from different centuries but a few additional from our own. Finally we could pick our spot for the Eyrie, and take command of the local people for a labor supply. Poor starved harried wretches, they welcomed warlords who brought proper guns and seed corn!”

  Havig tugged his chin. “May I ask why you chose that par­ticular place and year to start your nation, sir?”

  “Sure, ask what you want,” Wallis said genially. “Chances are I’ll answer ... I thought of the past. You can see from yonder picture I’ve been clear back to Charlemagne, testing my destiny. It’s too long a haul, though. And even in an un­explored section like pre-Columbian America, we’d risk leav­ing traces for archeologists to discover. Remember, there could be Maurai time travelers, and what we’ve got to have is sur­prise. Right now, these centuries, feudalisms like ours are springing up everywhere, recovery is being made, and we take care not to look unique. Our subjects know we have powers, of course, but they call us magicians and children of the Those--gods and spirits. By the time that story’s filtered past the wild people, it’s only a vague rumor of still another superstitious cult.”

  Havig appreciated the strategy. “As far as I’ve been able to find out, sir, which isn’t much,” he said, “the, uh, the Maurai culture is right now forming in the Pacific basin. Anybody from its later stages, coming downtime, would doubtless be more interested in that genesis than in the politics of obscure, impoverished barbarians.”

  “You do your Americans an injustice,” Wallis reproved him. “You’re right, of course, from the Maurai standpoint. But ac­tually, our people have had a run of bad luck.”

  There was some truth in that, Havig must agree. Parts of Oceania had been too unimportant for overdevelopment or for strikes by the superweapons; and those enormous waters were less corrupted than seas elsewhere, more quickly self-cleansed after man became again a rare species. Yet the inhabitants were no simple and simpering dwellers in Eden. Books had been printed in quantities too huge, distributed over regions too wide, for utter loss of any significant information. To a lesser degree, the same was true of much technological apparatus.

  North America, Europe, parts of Asia and South America, fewer parts of Africa, hit bottom because they were overex­tended. Let the industrial-agricultural-medical complexes they had built be paralyzed for the shortest of whiles, and people would begin dying by millions. The scramble of survivors for survival would bring everything else down in wreck.

  Now even in such territories, knowledge was preserved: by an oasis of order here, a half-religiously venerated community there. At last, theoretically, it could diffuse to the new bar­barians, who would pass it on to the new savages ... theoreti­cally. Practice said otherwise. The old civilization had stripped the world too bare.

  You could, for example, log a virgin forest, mine a virgin Mesabi, pump a virgin oil field, by primitive methods. Using your gains from this, you could go on to build a larger and more sophisticated plant capable of more intricate operations. As re­sources dwindled, it could replace lumber with plastics, squeeze iron out of taconite, scour the entire planet for petroleum.

  But by the time of the Judgment, this had been done. That combination of machines, trained personnel, well-heeled con­sumers and taxpayers, went under and was not to be recon­structed.

  The data needed for an industrial restoration could be found. The natural materials could not.

  “Don’t you think, sir,” Havig dared say, “by their develop­ment of technological alternatives, the Maurai and their allies will do a service?”

  “Up to a point, yes. I have to give the bastards that,” Wallis growled. His cigar jabbed the air. “But that’s as far as it goes. Far enough to put them hard in the saddle, and not an inch more. We’re learning about their actual suppression of new de­velopments. You will likewise.”

  He seemed to want to change the subject, for he continued:

  “Anyhow, as to our organization here. My key men haven’t stuck around in uninterrupted normal time, and I less. We skip ahead-overlapping-to keep leadership continuous. And we’re doing well. Things snowball for us, in past, present, and future alike.

  “By now we’ve hundreds of agents, plus thousands of de­voted commoners. We ruled over what used to be a couple of whole states, though of course our traffic is more in time than space. Mainly we govern through common-born deputies. When you can travel along the lifespan of a promising boy, you can make a fine and trusty man out of him-especially when he knows he’ll never have any secrets from you, nor any safety.

  “But don’t get me wrong. I repeat, we aren’t monsters or parasites. Sometimes we do have to get rough. But our aim is always to put the world back on the path God laid out for it.”

  He leaned forward. “And we will,” he almost whispered.

  “I’ve traveled beyond. A thousand years hence, I’ve seen--“Are you with us?”

  8

  “BY AND LARGE, the next several months were good,” Havig would relate (would have related) to me. “However, I stayed cautious. For instance, I hedged on giving out exact biographi­cal data. And I passed the chronolog off as a radionic detector and transmitter, built in case visitors to the past had such gear in use. Wallis said he doubted they did and lost interest. I found a hiding place for it. If they were the kind of people in the Eyrie I hoped they were, they’d understand when I finally con­fessed my hesitation about giving them something this helpful.”

  “What made you wary?” I asked.

  His thin features drew into a scowl. “Oh . . . minor details at first. Like Wallis’s whole style. Though, true, I didn’t have a proper chance to get acquainted, because he soon hopped for­ward to the following year. Think how that lengthens and strengthens power!”

  “Unless his subordinates conspire against him meanwhile,” I suggested.

  He shook his head. “Not in this case. He knows who’s cer­tainly loyal, among both his agents and his hand-reared com­moners. A hard core of travelers shuttles in and out through time with him, on a complicated pattern which always has one of them clearly in charge.

  “Besides, how’d you brew a conspiracy among meek com­moner farmers and laborers, arrogant commoner soldiers and officials, or the travelers themselves? They’re a wildly diverse and polyglot band, those I met in the castle and those stationed in outlying areas. Nearly all from post-medieval Western civ­ilization--”

  “Why?” I wondered. “Surely the rest of history has possi­bilities in proportion.”

  “Yeah, and Wallis said he did mean to extend the range of his recruiters. But the difficulties of long temporal trips, lan­gu
age and culture barriers, training whomever you brought back, seemed too great thus far. His Jerusalem search was an experiment, and aside from me had a disappointing result.”

  Havig shrugged. “To return to the main question,” he said, “American English is the Eyrie’s official language, which every­body’s required to learn. But even so, with most I could never communicate freely. Besides accents, our minds were too dif­ferent. From my angle, the majority of them were ruffians. From theirs, I was a sissy, or else too sly-acting for comfort. And they had, they have their mutual jealousies and suspicions. Simply being together doesn’t stop them regarding each other as Limeys, Frogs, Boches, Guineas, the hereditary enemy. How would you give them a common cause?

  “And, finally, why on Earth should they mutiny? Only a few are idealists of any kind; that’s a rare quality, remember. But we lived--they live--like fighting cocks. The best of food, drink, time-imported luxuries, servants, bed partners, sports, liberal furloughs to the past, if reasonable precautions are observed, and ample pocket money provided. The work isn’t hard. Those who need it get training in what history and technology are appropriate to their talents. The able-bodied learn commando skills. The rest become clerks, temporal porters, administrators, or researchers if they have the brains for it. That was our rou­tine, by no means a dull one. The work itself was fascinating--or would be, I knew, as soon as my superiors decided I was properly trained. Think: a scout in time!

  “No, on the whole I had no serious complaints. At first.”

  “You don’t seem to have found your associates really con­genial, however,” I said.

  “A few I did,” he replied. “Wallis himself could charm as well as domineer: in his fashion, a spellbinding conversation­alist, what with everything he’d experienced. His top lieutenant, Austin Caldwell, gray now but whipcord-tough still, crack shot and horseman, epic whiskey drinker, he had the same size fund of stories to draw on, plus more humor; in addition, he was a friendly soul who went out of his way to make my beginnings easier. Reuel Orrick, that former carnival magician, a delight­ful old rogue. Jerry Jennings, hardly more than an English schoolboy, desperately trying to find a new dream after his old ones broke apart in the trenches, 1918. A few more. And then Leonce.” He smiled, though it was a haunted smile. “Espe­cially Leonce.”