“How’s your wife?” I asked.
The joy died out of his face. “She didn’t live. I’ll tell you about it ... later.”
“Oh, Jack, I’m sorry--”
“Well, for me it happened a year and a half ago.” When he turned to the rangy redhead approaching us, he could again smile. “Doc, Leonce, you’ve both heard plenty about each other. Now meet.”
Like him, she was careless of my muddy handclasp. I found it at first an unsettling encounter. Never before had I seen someone from out of time; Havig didn’t quite count. And, while he hadn’t told me much concerning her, enough of the otherness had come through in his narrative. She did not think or act or exist remotely like any woman, any human creature, born into my epoch. Did she?
Yet the huntress, tribal councilor, she-shaman, casual lover and unrepentant killer of--how many?--men, wore an ordinary dress and, yes, nylon stockings and high-heeled shoes, carried a purse, smiled with a deftly lipsticked mouth, and said in English not too different from my own: “How do you do, Dr. Anderson? I have looked forward to this pleasure.”
“Come on inside,” I said weakly. “Let’s get washed and, and I’ll make a pot of tea.”
Leonce tried hard to stay demure, and failed. While Havig talked she kept leaving her chair, prowling to the windows and peering out at my quiet residential street. “Calm down,” he told her at length. “We checked uptime, remember? No Eyrie agents.”
“We couldn’t check every minute,” she answered.
“No, but--well, Doc, about a week hence I’ll phone you and ask if we had any trouble, and you’ll tell me no.”
“They could be readyin’ somethin’,” Leonce said.
“Unlikely.” Havig’s manner was a bit exasperated; obviously they’d been over this ground before. “We’re written off. I’m certain of it.”
“I s’pose I got nervous habits when I was a girl.”
Havig hesitated before he said, “If they are after us, and onto Doc’s being our contact, wouldn’t they strike through him? Well, they haven’t.” To me: “Hard to admit I’ve knowingly exposed you to a hazard. It’s why I avoid my mother.”
“That’s okay, Jack.” I attempted a laugh. “Gives me an interesting hobby in my retirement.”
“Well, you will be all right,” he insisted. “I made sure.”
Leonce drew a sharp breath. For a time nothing spoke except the soughing in the branches outside. A cloud shadow came and went.
“You mean,” I said at last, “you verified I’ll live quietly till I die.”
He nodded.
“You know the date of that,” I said.
He sat unmoving.
“Well, don’t tell me,” I finished. “Not that I’m scared. However, I’d just as soon keep on enjoying myself in the old-fashioned mortal style. I don’t envy you--that you can lose a friend twice.”
My teakettle whistled.
“And so,” I said after hours had gone by, “you don’t propose to stay passive? You mean to do something about the Eyrie?”
“If we can,” Havig said low.
Leonce, seated beside him, gripped his arm. “What, though?” she almost cried. “I been uptime myself-quick-like, but the place is bigger’n ever, an’ I saw Cal Wallis step from an aircraft--they got robotic factories built by then--an’ he was gettin’ old but he was there.” Fingers crooked into talons. “Nobody’d killed the bastard, not in that whole while.”
I lumped my pipe. We had eaten, and sat among my books and pictures, and I’d declared the sun sufficiently near a nonexistent yardarm that whiskey might be poured. But in those two remained no simple enjoyment of a call paid on an old acquaintance, or for her a new one; this had faded, the underlying grief and anger stood forth like stones.
“You have no complete account of the Eyrie’s future career,” I said.
“Well, we’ve read Wallis’s book and listened to his words,” Havig answered. “We don’t believe he’s lying. His kind of egotist wouldn’t, not on such a topic.”
“You miss my point.” I wagged my pipestem at them. “The question is, Have you personally made a year-by-year inspection?”
“No,” Leonce replied. “Originally no reason to, an’ now too dangerous.” Her gaze steadied on me. She was a bright lass. “You aimin’ at somethin’, Doctor?”
“Maybe.” I scratched a match and got my tobacco lit. The small hearthfire would be a comfort in my hand. “Jack, I’ve spent a lot of thought on what you told me on your previous visit. That’s natural. I have the leisure to think and study and--You’ve come back in the hope I might have an idea. True?”
He nodded. Beneath his shirt he quivered.
“I have no grand solution to your problems,” I warned them. “What I have done is ponder a remark you made: that our freedom lies in the unknown.”
“Go on!” Leonce urged. She sat with fists clenched.
“Well,” I said between puffs, “your latest account kind of reinforces my notion. That is, Wallis believes his organization, modified but basically the thing he founded, he believes it will be in essential charge of the post-Maurai world. What you’ve discovered there doesn’t make this seem any too plausible, hey? Ergo, somewhere, somewhen is an inconsistency. And. . . for what happened in between, you do merely have the word of Caleb Wallis, who is vainglorious and was born more than a hundred years ago.”
“What’s his birth got to do with the matter?” Havig demanded.
“Quite a bit,” I said. “Ours has been a bitter century. Hard lessons have been learned which Wallis’s generation never needed, never imagined. He may have heard about concepts like operations analysis, but he doesn’t use them, they aren’t in his marrow.”
Havig tensed.
“Your chronolog gadget is an example of twentieth-century thinking,” I continued. “By the way, what became of it?”
“The one I had got left in Pera when . . . when I was captured,” he replied. “I imagine whoever acquired the house later threw it out or broke it apart for junk. Or maybe feared it might be magical and heaved it in the Horn. I’ve had new ones made.”
A thrill passed through me, and I began to understand Leonce the huntress a little. “The men who took you, even a fairly sophisticated man like that Krasicki, did not think to bring it along for examination,” he said. “Which illustrates my point nicely. Look, Jack, every time traveler hits the bloody nuisance of targeting on a desired moment. To you, it was a matter of course to consider the problem, decide what would solve it--an instrument--and find a company which was able to accept your commission to invent the thing for you.”
I exhaled a blue plume. “It never occurred to Wallis,” I finished. “To any of his gang. That approach doesn’t come natural to them.”
Silence descended anew.
“Well,” Havig said, “I am the latest-born traveler they found prior to the Judgment.”
“Uh-huh,” I nodded. “Take advantage of that. You’ve made a beginning, in your research beyond the Maurai period. It may seem incredible to you that Wallis’s people haven’t done the same kind of in-depth study. Remember, though, he’s from a time when foresight was at a minimum--a time when everybody assumed logging and strip-mining could go on forever. It was the century of Clerk Maxwell, yes--I’m thinking mainly of his work on what we call cybernetics--and Babbage and Peirce and Ricardo and Clausewitz and a slew of other thinkers whom we’re still living off of. But the seeds those minds were planting hadn’t begun to sprout and flower. Anyhow, like many time travelers, it seems, Wallis didn’t stay around to share the experiences of his birth era. No, he had to skite off and become the almighty superman.
“Jack, from the painfully gathered learning of the race, you can profit.”
Leonce seemed puzzled. Well, my philosophy was new to her too. The man had grown altogether absorbed. “What do you propose?” he asked low.
“Nothing specifically,” I answered. “Everything generally. Concentra
te more on strategy than tactics. Don’t try to campaign by your lone selves against an organization; no, start a better outfit.”
“Where are the members coming from?”
“Everywhere and everywhen. Walls showed a degree of imagination in his recruiting efforts, but his methods were crude, his outlook parochial. For instance, surely more travelers are present that day in Jerusalem. His agents latched onto those who were obvious, and quit. There must be ways to attract the notice of the rest.”
“Well ... m-m-m ... I had been giving thought to that myself.” Havig cupped his chin. “Like maybe passing through the streets, singing lines from the Greek mass-”
“And the Latin. You can’t afford grudges.” I gripped rny pipe hard. “Another point. Why must you stay this secretive? Oh, yes, your ‘uncle’ self was right, as far as he went. A child revealed to be a time traveler would’ve been in a fairly horrible bind. But you’re not a child any longer.
“Moreover, I gather, Wallis considers ordinary persons a lesser breed. He’s labeled them ‘commoners,’ hasn’t he? He keeps them in subordinate positions. All he’s accomplished by that has been to wall their brains off from him.
“I’ve done a little quiet sounding out, at places like Holberg College and Berkeley. There are good, responsible scholars at Berkeley! I can name you men and women who’ll accept the fact of what you are, and respect your confidence, and help you, same as me.”
“For why?” Leonce wondered.
Havig sprang from his chair and stormed back and forth across the room as he gave her the blazing answer which had broken upon him: “To open the world, darlya! Our kind can’t be born only in the West. That doesn’t make sense. China, Japan, India, Africa, America before the white man came--we’ve got the whole of humanity to draw on! And we”--he stuttered in his eagerness--”we can leave the bad, take the good, find the young and, dammit, bring them up right. My God! Who cares about a wretched gang of bullies uptime? We can make the future!”
It was not that simple, of course. In fact, they spent more than ten years of their lifespans in preparing. True, these included their private concerns. When I saw them next (after his one telephone call), briefly in March, they behaved toward each other like any happily long-married couple. Nonetheless, that was a strenuous, perilous decade.
Even more was it a period which demanded the hardest thought and the subtlest realism. The gathering of Havig’s host would have used every year that remained in his body, and still been incomplete, had he not gone about it along the lines I suggested. Through me he met those members of think tanks and faculties I had bespoken. After he convinced them, they in turn introduced him to chosen colleagues, until he had an exceedingly high-powered advisory team. (Several have later quit their careers, to go into different work or retirement. It puzzles their associates.) At intervals I heard about their progress. The methods they developed for making contact--through much of the history of much of the world--would fill a book. Most failed; but enough succeeded.
For example, a searcher looked around, inquired discreetly around, after people who seemed to have whatever kind of unusualness was logical for a traveler residing in the given milieu. A shaman, village witch, local monk with a record of helping those who appealed to him or her by especially practical miracles. A peasant who flourished because somehow he never planted or harvested so as to get caught by bad weather. A merchant who made correspondingly lucky investments in ships, when storms and pirates caused heavy attrition. A warrior who was an uncatchable spy or scout. A boy who was said to counsel his father. Once in a while, persons like these would turn out to be the real thing ... Then there were ways of attracting their heed, such as being a wandering fortuneteller of a peculiar sort …
To the greatest extent possible, the earliest traveler recruits were trained into a cadre of recruiters, who wasted no energy in being uptime overlords. Thus the finding of folk could snowball. Here, too, methods were available beyond the purview of a nineteenth-century American who regarded the twentieth as decadent and every other culture as inferior. There are modern ways to get a new language into a mind fast. There are ancient ways, which the West has neglected, for developing body and senses. Under the lash of wars, revolutions, invasions, and occupations, we have learned how to form, discipline, protect, and use a band of brothers--systematically.
Above everything else, perhaps, was today’s concept of working together. I don’t mean its totalitarian version, for which Jack Havig had total loathing, or that “togetherness,” be it in a corporation or a commune, which he despised. I mean an enlightened pragmatism that rejects self-appointed aristocrats, does not believe received doctrine is necessarily true, stands ready to hear and weigh what anyone has to offer, and maintains well-developed channels to carry all ideas to the leadership and back again.
Our age will go down in fire. But it will leave gifts for which a later mankind will be grateful.
Now finding time travelers was a barebones beginning. They had to be organized. How? Why should they want to leave home, accept restrictions, put their lives on the line? What would keep them when they grew tired or bored or fearful or lonesome for remembered loves?
The hope of fellowship with their own kind would draw many, of course. Havig could gain by that, as Walls had done. It was insufficient, though. Wallis had a variety of further appeals. Given the resources of his group, a man saw the world brought in reach and hardly a limit put on atavistic forms of self-indulgence. To the intelligent, Wallis offered power, grandeur, a chance--a duty, if you let yourself be convinced, which is gruesomely easy to do--to become part of destiny.
Then there were those who wanted to learn, or be at the highest moments of mankind’s achievement, or simply and honorably enjoy adventuring. To them Havig could promise a better deal.
But this would still not give motive to wage war on the Eyrie. Monstrous it might be, the average traveler would concede; yet most governments, most institutions have in their own ways been monstrous. What threat was the Sachem?
“Setting up indoctrination courses--” Havig sighed to me. “A nasty word, that, isn’t it? Suggests browbeating and incessant propaganda. But honest, we just want to explain. We try to make the facts clear, so our recruits can see for themselves how the Eyrie is by its nature unable to leave them be. It’s not easy. You got any ideas on how to show a samurai of the Kamakura Period that the will of anybody to rule the world, anybody whatsoever, is a direct menace to him? I’m here mainly to see what my anthropologists and semanticists have come up with. Meanwhile, well, okay, we’ve got other pitches too, like primitive loyalty to chief and comrades, or the fun of a good scrap, or ... well, yes, the chance to get rich, in permissible ways. And, for the few, a particular dream--”
At that, I envied him the challenge of his task. Imagine: finding, and afterward forging mutuality between a Confucian teacher, a boomerang-wielding kangaroo hunter, a Polish schoolboy, a medieval Mesopotamian peasant, a West African ironsmith, a Mexican vaquero, an Eskimo girl ... The very effort to assemble that kaleidoscope may have been his greatest strength. Such people did not need to learn much about the Eyrie before they realized that, for most of them as time travelers, Havig’s was the only game in town.
They got this preliminary training in scattered places and eras. Afterward they were screened for trustworthiness; the means were a weird and wonderful potpourri. The dubious cases--a minor percentage--were brought to their home locations, guided to their home years, paid off, and bidden farewell. They had not received enough information about the enemy to contact it; generally they lived thousands of miles away.
The majority were led to the main base, for further training and for the work of building it and its strength.
This was near where the Eyrie would be, but immensely far downtime, in the middle Pleistocene. That precaution created problems of its own. The temporal passage was lengthy for the traveler, requiring special equipment as well a
s intermediate resting places. Caches must be established en route, and everything ferried piece by piece, stage by slow stage. But the security was worth this, as was the stronghold itself. It stood on a wooded hill, and through the valley below ran a mighty river which Leonce told me shone in the sunlight like bronze.
The search methods had discovered members of both sexes in roughly equal numbers. Thus a community developed-kept childless, except for its youngest members, nevertheless a community which found an identity, laws and precedences and ceremonies and stories and mysteries, in a mere few years, and was bound together by its squabbles as well as its loves. And this was Havig’s real triumph. The Sachem had created an army; the man sworn to cast him down created a tribe.
I heard these things when Havig and Leonce paid me that March visit. They were then in the midst of the work. Not till All Hallows’ Eve did I learn the next part of their story.
15
THE SHADOWS which were time reeled past. They had form and color, weight and distances, only when one emerged for food or sleep or a hurried gulp of air. Season after season blew across the hills; glaciers from the north ground heights to plains and withdrew in a fury of snowstorms, leaving lakes where mastodon drank; the lakes thickened to swamps and finally to soil on whose grass fed horses and camels, whose treetops were grazed by giant sloths, until the glaciers returned; mild weather renewed saw those earlier beasts no more, but instead herds of bison which darkened the prairie and filled it with an earthquake drumroll of hoofs; the pioneers entered, coppery-skinned men who wielded flint-tipped spears; again was a Great Winter, again a Great Springtime, and now the hunters had bows, and in this cycle forest claimed the moraines, first willow and larch and scrub oak, later an endless cathedral magnificence--and suddenly that was gone, in a blink, the conquerors were there, grubbing out a million stumps which the axes had left, plowing and sowing, reaping and threshing, laying down trails of iron from which at night could be heard a rush and a long-drawn wail strangely like mastodon passing by.
There Will Be Time Page 17