There Will Be Time

by Poul Anderson

  A year has fled since Jack Havig and Leonce of Wahorn bade me farewell. I often think about them. Mostly, of course, daili­ness fills my days. But I often find an hour to think about them.

  At any moment they may be somewhere on our planet, des­perate or triumphant in that saga I already know. But we will not meet. The end of their lives reaches untellably far beyond mine.

  Well, so does the life of man. Of Earth and the cosmos.

  I wish ... I wish many things. That they’d felt free to spend part of their stay in this summer which is past. We could have gone sailing. However, they naturally wanted to see Elea­nor, his mother, in one of the few intervals they had been able to make sure were safe, and tell her--what? She has not told me.

  I wish they or I had thought to raise a question which has lately haunted me.

  How did the race of time travelers come to be?

  We supposed, the three of us, that we knew the “why.” But we did not ask who, or what, felt the need and responded.

  Meaningless accidental mutation? Then curious that none like Havig seem to have been born futureward of the Eyrie--of, anyhow, Polaris House. In truth it would probably not be good to have them and their foreknowledge about, once the purpose has been served of freeing man to roam and discover forever. But who decided this? Who shaped the reality?

  I have been reading about recent work in experimental ge­netics. Apparently a virus can be made to carry genes from one host to the next; and the hosts need not be of the same species. Nature may have done this already, may always be doing it. Quite likely we bear in our cells and bequeath to our children bits of heritage from animals which were never among our forebears. That is well, if true. I am glad to think we may be so close to the whole living world.

  But could a virus have been made which carried a very strange thing; and could it have been sown through a chosen part of the past by travelers created anew in some unimaginably remote tomorrow?

  I walk beyond town, many of these nights, to stand under the high autumnal stars, look upward and wonder.