THERE WILL BE TIME

by Poul Anderson

BE AT EASE. I’m not about to pretend this story is true. First, that claim is a literary convention which went out with Theo-dore Roosevelt of happy memory. Second, you wouldn’t be-lieve it. Third, any tale signed with my name must stand or fall as entertainment; I am a writer, not a cultist. Fourth, it is my own composition. Where doubts or gaps occur in that mass of notes, clippings, photographs, and recollections of words spoken which was bequeathed me, I have supplied conjectures. Names, places, and incidents have been changed as seemed needful. Throughout, my narrative uses the techniques of fiction.

Finally, I don’t believe a line of it myself. Oh, we could get together, you and I, and ransack official files, old newspapers, yearbooks, journals, and so on forever. But the effort and ex-pense would be large; the results, even if positive, would prove little; we have more urgent jobs at hand; our discoveries could conceivably endanger us.

These pages are merely for the purpose of saying a little about Dr. Robert Anderson. I do owe the book to him. Many of the sentences are his, and my aim throughout has been to capture something of his style and spirit, in memoriam.

You see, I already owed him much more. In what follows, you may recognize certain things from earlier stories of mine. He gave me those ideas, those backgrounds and people, in hour after hour while we sat with sherry and Mozart before a drift-wood fire, which is the best kind. I greatly modified them, in part for literary purposes, in part to make the tales my own work. But the core remained his. He would accept no share of payment. “If you sell it,” he laughed, “take Karen out to an extravagant dinner in San Francisco, and empty a pony of akvavit for me.”

Of course, we talked about everything else too. My memo-ries are rich with our conversations. He had a pawky sense of humor. The chances are overwhelming that, in leaving me a boxful of material in the form he did, he was turning his pri-vate fantasies into a final, gentle joke.

On the other hand, parts of it are uncharacteristically bleak.

Or are they? A few times, when I chanced to be present with one or two of his smaller grandchildren, I’d notice his pleasure in their company interrupted by moments of what looked like pain. And when last I saw him, our talk turned on the probable shape of the future, and suddenly he exclaimed, “Oh, God, the young, the poor young! Poul, my generation and yours have had it outrageously easy. All we ever had to do was be white Americans in reasonable health, and we got our place in the sun. But now history’s returning to its normal climate here also, and the norm is an ice age.” He tossed off his glass and poured a refill more quickly than was his wont. “The tough and lucky will survive,” he said. “The rest . . . will have had what happiness was granted them. A medical man ought to be used to that kind of truth, right?” And he changed the subject.

In his latter years Robert Anderson was tall and spare, a bit stoop-shouldered but in excellent shape, which he attributed to hiking and bicycling. His face was likewise lean, eyes blue be-hind heavy glasses, clothes and white hair equally rumpled. His speech was slow, punctuated by gestures of a pipe if he was en-joying his twice-a-day smoke. His manner was relaxed and ami-able. Nevertheless, he was as independent as his cat. “At my stage of life,” he observed, “what was earlier called oddness or orneriness counts as lovable eccentricity. I take full advantage of the fact.” He grinned. “Come your turn, remember what I’ve said.”

On the surface, his life had been calm. He was born in Phila-delphia in 1895, a distant relative of my father. Though our family is of Scandinavian origin, a branch has been in the States since the Civil War.

But he and I never heard of each other till one of his sons, who happened to be interested in genealogy, happened to settle down near me and got in touch. When the old man came visiting, my wife and I were invited over and at once hit it off with him.

His own father was a journalist, who in 1910 got the edi-torship of the newspaper in a small upper-Midwestern town (current population 10,000; less then) which I choose to call Senlac. He later described the household as nominally Episco-palian and principally Democratic. He had just finished his pre-medical studies when America entered the First World War and he found himself in the Army; but he never got overseas. Discharged, he went on to his doctorate and internship. My impression is that meanwhile he exploded a bit, in those hip-flask days. It cannot have been too violent. Eventually he returned to Senlac, hung out his shingle, and married his long-time fiancée.

I think he was always restless. However, the work of gen-eral practitioners was far from dull-before progress con-demned them to do little more than man referral desks-and his marriage was happy. Of four children, three boys lived to adulthood and are still flourishing.

In 1955 he retired to travel with his wife. I met him soon afterward. She died in 1958 and he sold their house but bought a cottage nearby. Now his journeys were less extensive; he re-marked quietly that without Kate they were less fun. Yet he kept a lively interest in life.

He told me of those folk whom I, not he, have called the Maurai, as if it were a fable which he had invented but lacked the skill to make into a story. Some ten years later he seemed worried about me, for no reason I could see, and I in my turn worried about what time might be doing to him. But presently he came out of this. Though now and then an underlying grim-ness showed through, he was mostly himself again. There is no doubt that he knew what he was doing, for good or ill, when he wrote the clause into his will concerning me.

I was to use what he left me as I saw fit.

Late last year, unexpectedly and asleep, Robert Anderson took his death. We miss him.

-P. A.

1

THE BEGINNING shapes the end, but I can say almost nothing of Jack Havig’s origins, despite the fact that I brought him into the world. On a cold February morning, 1933, who thought of ge-netic codes, or of Einstein’s work as anything that could ever descend from its mathematical Olympus to dwell among men, or of the strength in lands we supposed were safely conquered? I do remember what a slow and difficult birth he had. It was Eleanor Havig’s first, and she quite young and small. I felt re-luctant to do a Caesarian; maybe it’s my fault that she never conceived again by the same husband. Finally the red wrinkled animal dangled safe in my grasp. I slapped his bottom to make him draw his indignant breath, he let the air back out in a wail, and everything proceeded as usual.

Delivery was on the top floor, the third, of our county hos-pital, which stood at what was then the edge of town. Removing my surgical garb, I had a broad view out a window. To my right, Senlac clustered along a frozen river, red brick at the middle, frame homes on tree-lined streets, grain elevator and water tank rearing ghostly in dawnlight near the railway sta-tion. Ahead and to my left, hills rolled wide and white under a low gray sky, here and there roughened by leafless woodlots, fence lines, and a couple of farmsteads. On the edge of sight loomed a darkness which was Morgan Woods. My breath misted the pane, whose chill made my sweaty body shiver a bit.

“Well,” I said half aloud, “welcome to Earth, John Franklin Havig.” His father had insisted on having names ready for ei-ther sex. “Hope you enjoy yourself.”

Hell of a time to arrive, I thought. A worldwide depression hanging heavy as winter heaven. Last year noteworthy for the Japanese conquest of Manchuria, bonus march on Washing-ton, Lindbergh kidnapping. This year begun in the same style:

Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany. . . . Well, a new President was due to enter the White House, the end of Prohibition looked certain, and springtime in these parts is as lovely as our autumn.

I sought the waiting room. Thomas Havig climbed to his feet. He was not a demonstrative man, but the question trem-bled on his lips. I took his hand and beamed. “Congratulations, Tom,” I said. “You’re the father of a bouncing baby boy. I know-I just dribbled him all the way down the hall to the nursery.”

My attempt at a joke came back to me several months after-ward.

Senlac is a commercial center for an agricultural area; it maintains some light industry, and that’s about the list. Having no real choice in the matter, I was a Rotarian, but found ex-cuses to minimize my activity and stay out of the lodges. Don’t get me wrong. These people are mine. I like and in many ways admire them. They’re the salt of the earth. It’s simply that I want other condiments too.

Under such circumstances, Kate’s and my friends tended to be few but close. There was her banker father, who’d staked me; I used to kid him that he’d done so because he wanted a Democrat to argue with. There was the lady who ran our public library. There were three or four professors and their wives at Holberg College, though the forty miles between us and them was considered rather an obstacle in those days. And there were the Havigs.

These were transplanted New Englanders, always a bit homesick; but in the ‘30’s you took what jobs were to be had. He taught physics and chemistry at our high school. In addi-tion, he must coach for track. Slim, sharp-featured, the shy-ness of youth upon him as well as an inborn reserve, Tom got through his secondary chore mainly on student tolerance. They were fond of him; besides, we had a good football team. Elea-nor was darker, vivacious, an avid tennis player and active in her church’s poor-relief work. “It’s fascinating, and I think it’s useful,” she told me early in our acquaintance. With a shrug:

“At least it lets Tom and me feel we aren’t altogether hypo-crites. You may’ve guessed we only belong because the school board would never keep on a teacher who didn’t.”

I was surprised at the near hysteria in her voice when she phoned my office and begged me to come.

A doctor’s headquarters were different then from today, es-pecially in a provincial town. I’d converted two front rooms of the big old house where we lived, one for interviews, one for examination and treatments, including minor surgery. I was my own receptionist and secretary. Kate helped with paper-work-looking back from now, it seems impossibly little, but perhaps she never let on-and, what few times patients must wait their turns, she entertained them in the parlor. I’d made my morning rounds, and nobody was due for a while; I could jump straight into the Marmon and drive down Union Street to Elm.

I remember the day was furnace hot, never a cloud above or a breath below, the trees along my way standing like cast green iron. Dogs and children panted in their shade. No birdsong broke the growl of my car engine. Dread closed on me. Eleanor had cried her Johnny’s name, and this was polio weather.

But when I entered the fan-whirring venetian-blinded dim-ness of her home, she embraced me and shivered. “Am I going crazy, Bob?” she gasped, over and over. “Tell me I’m not go-ing crazy!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I murmured. “Have you called Tom?” He eked out his meager pay with a summer job, quality control at the creamery.

“No, I. . . I thought--”

“Sit down, Ellie.” I disengaged us. “You look sane enough to me. Maybe you’ve let the heat get you.

Relax--flop loose--unclench your teeth, roll your head around. Feel better? Okay, now tell me what you think happened.”

“Johnny. Two of him. Then one again.” She choked. “The other one!”

“Huh? Whoa, I said, Ellie. Let’s take this a piece at a time.” Her eyes pleaded while she stumbled through the story. “I, I, I was bathing him when I heard a baby scream. I thought that must be from a buggy or something, outside. But it sounded as if it came from the . . . the bedroom. At last I wrapped Johnny in a towel--couldn’t leave him in the water--and carried him along for a, a look. And there was another tiny boy, there in his crib, naked and wet, kicking and yelling. I was so astonished I. . . dropped mine. I was bent over the crib, he should’ve landed on the mattress, but, oh, Bob, he didn’t. He vanished. In midair. I’d made a, an instinctive grab for him. All I caught was the towel. Johnny was gone!

I think I must’ve passed out for a few seconds. And when I hunted I--found—nothing--”

“What about the strange baby?” I demanded.

“He’s. . . not gone. . . I think.”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go see.”

And in the room, immensely relieved, I crowed: “Why, no-body here but good ol’ John.”

She clutched my arm. “He looks the same.” The infant had calmed and was gurgling. “He sounds the same. Except he can’t be!”

“The dickens he can’t. Ellie, you had a hallucination. No great surprise in this weather, when you’re still weak.” Actually, I’d never encountered such a case before, certainly not in a woman as levelheaded as she. But my words were not too im-plausible. Besides, half a GP’s medical kit is his confident tone of voice.

She wasn’t fully reassured till we got the birth certificate and compared the prints of fingers and feet thereon with the child’s. I prescribed a tonic, jollied her over a cup of coffee, and returned to work.

When nothing similar happened for a while, I pretty well forgot the incident. That was the year when the only daughter Kate and I would ever have caught pneumonia and died, soon after her second birthday.

Johnny Havig was bright, imaginative, and a loner. The more he came into command of limbs and language, the less he was inclined to join his peers. He seemed happiest at his minia-ture desk drawing pictures, or in the yard modeling clay ani-mals, or sailing a toy boat along the riverbank when an adult took him there. Eleanor worried about him. Tom didn’t. “I was the same,” he would say. “It makes for an odd childhood and a terrible adolescence, but I wonder if it doesn’t pay off when you’re grown.”

“We’ve got to keep a closer eye on him,” she declared. “You don’t realize how often he disappears.

Oh, sure, a game for him, hide-and-seek in the shrubbery or the basement or wherever. Grand sport, listening to Mommy hunt up the close and down the stair, hollering. Someday, though, he’ll find his way past the picket fence and--” Her fingers drew into fists. “He could get run over.”

The crisis came when he was four. By then he understood that vanishings meant spankings, and had stopped (as far as his parents knew. They didn’t see what went on in his room). But one summer morning he was not in his bed, and he was not to be found, and every policeman and most of the neighbor-hood were out in search.

At midnight the doorbell rang. Eleanor was asleep, after I had commanded her to take a pill. Tom sat awake, alone. He dropped his cigarette-the scorch mark in the rug would long remind him of his agony-and knocked over a chair on his way to the front entrance.

A man stood on the porch. He wore a topcoat and shadow-ing hat which turned him featureless. Not that that made any difference. Tom’s whole being torrented over the boy who held the man by the hand.

“Good evening, sir,” said a pleasant voice. “I believe you’re looking for this young gentleman?”

And, when Tom knelt to seize his son, hold him, weep and try to babble thanks, the man departed.

“Funny,” Tom said to me afterward. “I couldn’t have been focusing entirely on Johnny for more than a minute. You know Elm Street has good lamps and no cover. Even in a sprint, nobody could get out of sight fast. Besides, running feet would’ve set a dozen dogs barking. But the pavement was empty.”

The child would say nothing except that he had been “around,” and was sorry, and wouldn’t wander again.

Nor did he. In fact, he emerged from his solitariness to the extent of acquiring one inseparable friend, the Dunbar boy. Pete fairly hulked over his slight, quiet companion. He was no fool; today he manages the local A & P. But John, as he now wanted to be called, altogether dominated the relationship. They played his games, went to his favorite vacant lots and, later, his chosen parts of Morgan Woods, enacted the histories of his visionary worlds.

His mother sighed, in my cluttered carbolic-and-leather-smelling office: “I suppose John’s so good at daydreaming that even for Pete, the real world seems pale by contrast. That’s the trouble. He’s too good at it.”

This was in the second year following. I’d seen him through a couple of the usual ailments, but otherwise had no cause to suspect problems and was startled when Eleanor requested an appointment to discuss him. She’d laughed over the phone:

“Well, you know Tom’s Yankee conscience. He’d never let me ask you professional questions on a social occasion.” The sound had been forlorn.

I settled back in my creaky swivel chair, bridged my fingers, and said, “Do you mean he tells you things that can’t be true, but which he seems to believe are? Quite common. Always out-grown.”

“I wonder, Bob.” She frowned at her lap. “Isn’t he kind of old for that?”

“Perhaps. Especially in view of his remarkably fast physical and mental development, these past months.

However, prac-ticing medicine has driven into my bones the fact that ‘average’ and ‘normal’ do not mean the same. . . . Okay. John has imaginary playmates?”

She tried to smile. “Well, an imaginary uncle.”

I lifted my brows. “Indeed? Just what has he said to you?”

“Hardly anything. What do children ever tell their parents?

But I’ve overheard him talking to Pete, often, about his Uncle Jack who comes and takes him on all sorts of marvelous trips.”

“Uncle Jack, eh? What kind of trips? To this kingdom you once mentioned he’s invented, which Leo the Lion rules over?”

“N-no. That’s another weird part. He’ll describe Animal Land to Tom and me; he knows perfectly well it’s pure fan-tasy. But these journeys with his ‘uncle’ . . . they’re different. What snatches I’ve caught are, well, realistic. A visit to an In-dian camp, for instance. They weren’t storybook or movie In-dians. He described work they had to do, and the smell of drying hides and dung fires. Or, another time, he claimed he’d been taken on an airplane ride. I can see how he might dream up an airplane bigger than a house.

But why did he dwell on its having no propellers? I thought boys loved to go eee-yowww like a diving plane. No, his flew smooth and nearly noiseless. A movie was shown aboard. In Technicolor. He actually had a name for the machine. Jet? Yes, I think he said ‘jet.’”

“You’re afraid his imagination may overcome him?” I asked needlessly. When she nodded, swallowing, I leaned forward, patted her hand, and told her:

“Ellie, imagination is the most precious thing childhood has got. The ability to imagine in detail, like those Indians, is be-yond valuation. Your boy is more than sane; he may be a gen-ius. Whatever you do, never try to kill that in him.”

I still believe I was right-totally mistaken, but right.

On this warm day, I chuckled and finished, “As for his, uh, jet airplane, I’ll bet you a dozen doughnut holes Pete Dunbar has a few Buck Rogers Big Little Books.”

All small boys were required to loathe school, and John went through the motions. No doubt much of it did bore him, as must be true of any kid who can think and is forced into lockstep. However, his grades were excellent, and he was genuinely gripped by what science and history were offered. (“A star passed near our sun and pulled out a ribbon of flaming gas that became the planets. . . . The periods of world civilization are Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and modern time, which began in 1492.”) His circle of friends, if not intimates, widened. Both sets of parents regretted that my Billy was four years older, Jimmy two and Stuart three years younger, than Johnny. At their stage of life, those gaps dwarfed the Grand Canyon. John shunned or-ganized games, and by and large existed on the fringes of the tribe.

For instance, Eleanor had to do the entire organizing of his birthday parties. Nevertheless, between his gentle manner and his remarkable fund of conversation--when someone else took the initiative and stimulated him--he was fairly well liked.

In his eighth year he caused a new sensation. A couple of older boys from the tough side of the tracks decided it would be fun to lie in wait for individuals on their way back from school and pummel them.

Buses only carried farm children, and Senlac wasn’t yet built solid; most walking routes had lonely spots.

Naturally, the victims could never bring them-selves to complain.

The sportsmen did, after they jumped John Havig. They blubbered that he’d called an army to his aid.

And beyond doubt, they had taken a systematic drubbing.

The tale earned them an extra punishment. “Bullies are al-ways cowards,” said fathers to their sons.

“Look what hap-pened when that nice Havig boy stood up and fought.” For a while he was regarded with awe, though he blushed and stam-mered and refused to give details; and thereafter we called him Jack.

Otherwise the incident soon dropped into obscurity. That was the year when France fell.

“Any news of the phantom uncle?” I asked Eleanor. Some families had gotten together for a party, but I wanted a respite from political talk.

“What?” She blinked, there where we stood on the Stocktons’ screened porch. Lighted windows and buzzing conversa-tion at our backs didn’t blot out a full moon above the chapel of Holberg College, or the sound of crickets through a warm and green-odorous dark. “Oh.” She dimpled. “You mean my son’s. No, not for quite a while. You were right, that was only a phase.”

“Or else he’s learned discretion.” I wouldn’t have uttered my thought aloud if I’d been thinking.

Stricken, she said, “You mean he may have clammed up completely? He is reserved, he does tell us nothing important, or anybody else as far as I can learn--”

“I.E.,” I said in haste, “he takes after his dad. Well, Ellie, you got yourself a good man, and your daughter-in-law will too. Come on, let’s go in and refresh our drinks.”

My records tell me the exact day when, for a while, Jack Havig’s control broke apart.

Tuesday, April 14, 1942. The day before, Tom had made the proud announcement to his son. He had not mentioned his hope earlier, save to his wife, because he wasn’t sure what would happen. But now he had the notice. The school had ac-cepted his resignation, and the Army his enlistment, as of term’s end.

Doubtless he could have gotten a deferment. He was over thirty, and a teacher, of science at that. In truth, he would have served his country better by staying. But the crusade had been preached, the wild geese were flying, the widowmaker whis-tled beyond the safe dull thresholds of Senlac. I also, middle-aged, looked into the possibility of uniform, but they talked me out of trying.

Eleanor’s call drew me from bed before sunrise. “Bob, you’ve got to come, right away, please, please.

Johnny. He’s hysterical. Worse than hysterical. I’m afraid . . . brain fever or-Bob, come!”

I hurried to hold the thin body in my arms, try to make sense of his ravings, eventually give him an injection. Before then Jack had shrieked, vomited, clung to his father like a second skin, clawed himself till blood ran and beaten his head against the wall. “Daddy, Daddy, don’t go, they’ll kill you, I know, I know, I saw, I was there an’ I saw, I looked in that window right there an’ Mother was crying, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”

I kept him under graduated sedation for the better part of a week. That long was needed to quiet him down. He was a list-less invalid until well into May.

This was absolutely no normal reaction. Other boys whose fathers were off to war gloried, or claimed they did. Well, I thought, Jack wasn’t any of them.

He recovered and buckled down to his schoolwork. He was in Tom’s company at every imaginable opportunity, and some that nobody would have imagined beforehand. This included furloughs, spent at home. Between times, he wrote almost daily letters to his father—

--who was killed in Italy, August 6, 1943.

2

A DOCTOR cannot endure having made his inevitable grisly blun-ders unless he recalls enough rescues to offset them. I count Jack Havig among those who redeemed me. Yet I helped less as a physician than as a man.

My special knowledge did let me see that, beneath a tight-held face, the boy was seriously disturbed.

Outside the eastern states, gasoline was not rationed in 1942. I arranged for a col-league to take over my practice, and when school closed, Bill and I went on a trip. . . and we took Jack along.

In Minnesota’s Arrowhead we rented a canoe and entered that wilderness of lakes, bogs, and splendid timber which reaches on into Canada. For an entire month we were myself, my thirteen-year-old son, and my all but adopted son whom I believed to be nine years of age.

It’s rain and mosquito country; paddling against a headwind is stiff work; so is portaging; to make camp required more effort than if we’d had today’s ingenious gear and freeze-dried rations. Jack needed those obstacles, that nightly exhaustion. After fewer days than might have been awaited, the land could begin to heal him.

Hushed sunrises, light gold in the uppermost leaves and ashiver across broad waters; birdsong, rustle of wind, scent of evergreen; a squirrel coaxed to take food from a hand; the soar-ing departure of deer; blueberries in a bright warm opening of forest, till a bear arrived and we most respectfully turned the place over to him; moose, gigantic and unafraid, watching us glide by; sunsets which shone through the translucent wings of bats; dusk, fire and stories and Bill’s young wonderings about things, which showed Jack better than I could have told him how big a world lies beyond our sorrows; a sleeping bag, and stars uncountable.

It was the foundation of a cure.

Back home again, I made a mistake. “I hope you’re over this notion about your father, Jack. There’s no such thing as fore-knowing the future.” He whitened, whirled, and ran from me. I needed weeks to regain his confidence.

His trust, at any rate. He confided nothing to me except the thoughts, hopes, problems of an ordinary boy. I spoke no fur-ther of his obsession, nor did he. But as much as time and circumstance allowed, I tried to be a little of what he so desper-ately lacked, his father.

We could take no more long excursions while the war lasted. However, we had country roads to tramp, Morgan Woods to roam and picnic in, the river for fishing and swim-ming, Lake Winnego and my small sailboat not far off. He could come around to my garage workshop and make a bird feeder for himself or a broom rack for his mother. We could talk.

I do believe he won to a measure of calm about Tom’s death by the time it happened. Everybody assumed his premonition was coincidental.

Eleanor had already taken a job in the library, plus giving quite a few hours per week to the hospital.

Widowhood struck her hard. She rallied gamely, but for a long while was subdued and unsocial. Kate and I tried to get her out, but she declined invitations more often than not.

When at last she began to leave her shell, it was mostly in the company of others than her old circle. I couldn’t keep from remarking: “You know, Ellie, I’m damn glad to see you back in circulation.

Still--forgive me--your new friends are kind of a surprise.”

She reddened and looked away. “True,” she said low.

“Perfectly good people, of course. But, uh, not what you’d call intellectual types, are they?”

“N-no. . . . All right.” She straightened in her chair. “Bob, let’s be frank. I don’t want to leave here, if only because of what you are to Jack. Nor do I want to be buried alive, the way I was that first couple of years. Tom influenced me; I don’t really have an academic turn of mind like his. And . . . you who we went with. . . you’re all married.”

I abandoned as useless my intention in raising the matter--to tell her how alien her son was to those practical-minded, loud-laughing men who squired her around, how deeply he was coming to detest them.

He was twelve when the nuclear thunderbolts slew two cities and man’s last innocence. Though the astonishing growth rate I had noted in him earlier had slowed down to average since 1942, its effects remained to make him precocious. That rein-forced the extreme solitariness which had set in. No longer was Pete Dunbar, or any schoolmate, more than a casual associate. Politely but unshakably, Jack refused everything extracurricu-lar. He did his lessons, and did them well, but his free time was his and nobody else’s: his to read enormously, with emphasis on history books; to take miles-long hikes by himself; to draw pictures or to shape things with the tools I’d helped him collect.

I don’t mean he was morbid. Lonely boys are not uncom-mon, and generally become reasonably sociable adults. Jack was fond of the Amos ‘n’ Andy program, for instance, though he preferred Fred Allen; and he had a dry wit of his own. I re-member various of his cartoons he showed me, one in particu-lar suggested by a copy of The Outsider and Others which I lent him. In a dark, dank forest were two human figures. The first, cowering and pointing, was unmistakably H. P. Love-craft. His companion was a tweedy woman who snapped: “Of course they’re pallid and mushroomlike, Howard.

They are mushrooms.”

While he no longer depended on me, we saw a good bit of each other; and the age difference between him and Bill was less important now, so that they two sometimes went together for a walk or a swim or a boat ride-even, in 1948, a return to northern Minnesota with Jim and Stuart.

Soon after he came back from this, my second son asked me: “Dad, what’s a good book on, uh, philosophy?”

“Eh?” I laid down my newspaper. “Philosophy, at thirteen?”

“Why not?” Kate said across her embroidery. “In Athens he’d have started younger.”

“Well, m-m, philosophy’s a mighty wide field, Jim,” I stalled. “What’s your immediate question?”

“Oh,” he mumbled, “free will and time and all that jazz. Jack Havig and Bill talked a lot about it on our trip.”

I learned that Bill, being in college, had begun by posing as an authority, but soon found himself entangled in problems--was the history of the universe written before its beginning? if so, why do we know we make free choices? if not, how can we affect the course of the future . . . or the past?--which it didn’t seem a high school kid could have pondered as thor-oughly as Jack had done.

When I asked my protégé what he wanted for Christmas, he answered: “Something I can understand that explains rel-ativity.”

In 1949, Eleanor remarried. Her choice was catastrophic.

Sven Birkelund meant well. His parents had brought him from Norway when he was three; he was now forty, a success-ful farmer in possession of a large estate and fine house ten miles outside town, a combat veteran, and a recent widower who had two boys to raise: Sven, Jr., sixteen, and Harold, nine. Huge, red-haired, gusty, he blazed forth maleness--ad-mitted Kate to me, though she couldn’t stand him--and he was not unlettered either; he subscribed to magazines (Reader’s Digest, National Geographic, Country Gentleman), read an oc-casional book, like travel, and was a shrewd businessman.

And . . . Eleanor, always full of life, had been celibate for six years.

You can’t warn someone who’s tumbled into love. Neither Kate nor I tried. We attended the wedding and reception and offered our best wishes. Mostly I was conscious of Jack. The boy had grown haggard; he moved and talked like a robot.

In his new home, he rarely got a chance to see us. After-ward he would not go into detail about the months which fol-lowed. Nor shall I. But consider: Where Eleanor was a dropout from the Episcopal Church, and Jack a born agnostic, Birke-lund was a Bible-believing Lutheran. Where Eleanor enjoyed gourmet cooking and Jack the eating, Birkelund and his sons wanted meat and potatoes. Tom spent his typical evening first with a book, later talking with her. If Birkelund wasn’t doing the accounts, he was glued to the radio or, presently, the tele-vision screen. Tom had made a political liberal of her. Birke-lund was an ardent and active American Legionnaire--he never missed a convention, and if you draw the obvious inference, you’re right--who became an outspoken supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

And on and on. I don’t mean that she was disillusioned over-night. I’m sure Birkelund tried to please her, and gradually dropped the effort only because it was failing. The fact that she was soon pregnant must have forged a bond between them which lasted a while. (She told me, however, I being the family doctor, that in the later stages his nightly attentions became dis-tasteful but he wouldn’t stop. I called him in for a Dutch uncle lecture and he made a sulky compromise.)

For Jack the situation was hell from the word go. His step-brothers, duplicates of their father, resented his invasion. Jun-ior, whose current interests were hunting and girls, called him a sissy because he didn’t like to kill and a queer because he never dated. Harold found the numberless ways to torment him which a small boy can use on a bigger one whose fists may not defend.

More withdrawn than ever, he endured. I wondered how.

In the fall of 1950, Ingeborg was born. Birkelund named her after an aunt because his mother happened to be called Olga. He expressed disappointment that she was a girl, but threw a large and drunken party anyway, at which he repeatedly de-clared, amidst general laughter, his intention of trying for a son the minute the doctor allowed.

The doctor and his wife had been invited, but discovered a prior commitment. Thus I didn’t see, I heard how Jack walked out on the celebration and how indignant Birkelund was. Long afterward, Jack told:

“He cornered me in the barn when the last guest had left who wasn’t asleep on the floor, and said he was going to beat the shit out of me. I told him if he tried, I’d kill him. I meant that. He saw it, and went off growling. From then on, we spoke no more than we couldn’t avoid. I did my chores, my share of work come harvest or whatever, and when I’d eaten dinner I went to my room.”

And elsewhere.

The balance held till early December. What tipped it doesn’t matter-something was bound to-but was, in fact, Eleanor’s asking Jack if he’d given thought to the college he would like to attend, and Birkelund shouting, “He can damn well get the lead out and go serve his country like I did and take his GI if they haven’t cashiered him,” and a quarrel which sent her up-stairs fleeing and in tears.

Next day Jack was not there.

He returned at the end of January, would say no word about where he had been or what he had done, and stated that he would leave for good if his stepfather took the affair to the juvenile authorities as threatened. I’m certain he dominated that scene, and won himself the right to be left in peace. Both his appearance and his demeanor were shockingly changed.

Again the household knew a shaky equilibrium. But six weeks later, upon a Sunday when Jack had gone for his usual long walk after returning from church, he forgot to lock the door to his room. Little Harold noticed, entered, and rum-maged through the desk. His find, which he promptly brought to his father, blew apart the whole miserable works.

Snow fell, a slow thick whiteness filling the windows. What daylight seeped through was silver-gray.

Outdoors the air felt almost warm-and how utterly silent.

Eleanor sat on our living-room couch and wept. “Bob, you’ve got to talk to him, you, you, you’ve got to help him . . . again.

What happened when he ran away? What did he do?”

Kate laid arms around her and drew the weary head down to her own shoulder. “Nothing wrong, my dear,” she mur-mured. “Oh, be very sure. Always remember, Jack is Tom’s son.”

I paced the rug, in the dull twilight against which we had turned on no lights. “Let’s spell out the facts,” I said, speaking bolder than I felt. “Jack had this mimeographed pamphlet that Sven describes as Communist propaganda. Sven wants to call the sheriff, the district attorney, anybody who can force Jack to tell who he fell in with while he was gone. You slipped out to the shed, drove off in the pickup, met the boy on the road, and brought him here.”

“Y-y-yes. Bob, I can’t stay. Ingeborg’s at home. . . . Sven will call me an, an unnatural mother--”

“I might have a few words to say about privacy,” I answered, “not to mention freedom of speech, press, and opinion.” After a pause: “Uh, you told me you snatched the pamphlet?”

“I--” Eleanor drew back from Kate’s embrace. Through tears and hiccoughs, a strength spoke that I remembered: “No use for him to call copper if the evidence is gone.”

“May I see it?” I asked.

She hesitated. “It’s . . . a prank, Bob. Nothing s-s-signifi-cant. Jack’s waiting--”

--in my office, by request, while we conferred. He had shown me a self-possession which chilled this winter day.

“He and I will have a talk,” I said, “while Kate gets some coffee, and I expect some food, into you. But I’ve got to have something to talk about.”

She gulped, nodded, fumbled in her purse, and handed me several sheets stapled together. I settled into my favorite arm-chair, left shank on right knee, a good head of steam in my pipe, and read the document.

I read it twice. And thrice. I quite forgot the women.

Here it is. You won’t find any riddles.

But hark back. The date was the eleventh of March, in the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and fifty-one.

Harry S. Truman was President of the United States, having defeated Thomas E. Dewey for election, plus a former Vice President who would later have the manhood to admit that his party had been a glove on the hand of Moscow. This was the capital of a Soviet Union which my adored FDR had assured me was a town-meeting democracy, our gallant ally in a holy war to bring perpetual peace. Eastern Europe and China were down the gullet. Citizens in the news included Alger Hiss, Owen Lattimore, Judith Coplon, Morton Sobell, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Somehow, to my friends and myself, they did not make Joseph McCarthy less of an abomination. But under the UN flag, American young men were dying in battle--five and a half years after our V-days!--and their killers were North Korean and Chinese. Less than two years ago, the first Russian atomic bombs had roared. NATO, hardly older, was a piece of string in the path of hundreds of divisions. Most of us, in an emotional paralysis which let us continue our daily lives, expected World War III to break out at any instant.

I could not altogether blame Sven Birkelund for jumping to conclusions.

But as I read, and read, my puzzlement deepened.

Whoever wrote this thing knew Communist language--I’d been through some books on that subject--but was emphati-cally not a Communist himself. What, then, was he?

Hark back, I say. Try to understand your world of 1951.

Apart from a few extremists, America had never thought to question her own rightness, let alone her right to exist. We knew we had problems, but assumed we could solve them, given time and good will, and eventually everybody of every race, color, and creed would live side by side in the suburbs and sing folk songs together. Brown vs. Board of Education was years in the future; student riots happened in foreign countries, while ours worried about student apathy; Indochina was a place where the French were experiencing vaguely noticed difficulties.

Television was hustling in, and we discussed its possible ef-fects. Nuclear-armed intercontinental missiles were on their way, but nobody imagined they could be used for anything ex-cept the crudest exchange of destructions. Overpopulation was in the news but would soon be forgotten. Penicillin and DDT were unqualified friends to man. Conservation meant preserv-ing certain areas in their natural states and, if you were sophis-ticated about such matters, contour plowing on hillsides. Smog was in Los Angeles and occasionally London. The ocean, im-mortal mother of all, would forever receive and cleanse our wastes.

Space flight was for the next century, when an eccentric millionaire might finance a project. Computers were few, large, expensive, and covered with blinking lights. If you followed the science news, you knew a little about transistors, and per-haps looked forward to seeing cheap, pocket-sized radios in the hands of Americans; they could make no difference to a peasant in India or Africa. All contraceptives were essentially mechanical. The gene was a locus on the chromosome. Unless he blasted himself back to the Stone Age, man was committed to the machine.

Put yourself in 1951, if you can, if you dare, and read as I did that jape on the first page of which appeared the notice “Copyright © 1970 by John F. Havig.”

3

WITHIT’S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY

Activist: A person employing tactics in the cause of liberation which, when used by a fascist, are known as McCarthyism and repression.

Aggression: Any foreign policy advocated by a fascist.

Black: Of whole or partial sub-Saharan African descent; from the skin color, which ranges from brown to ivory. Not to be confused with Brown, Red, White, or Yellow. This word replaces the former “Negro,”

which today is considered in-sulting since it means “Black.”

Bombing: A method of warfare which delivers high explosives from the air, condemned because of its effects upon women, children, the aged, the sick, and other noncombatants, unless these happen to have resided in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Osaka, etc., though not Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Cf.

missile.

Brown: Of Mexican descent; from the skin color, which ranges from brown to ivory. Not to be confused with Black, Red, White, or Yellow.

Brutality: Any action taken by a policeman. Cf. pig.

Chauvinism: Belief of any Western White man that there is anything to be said for his country, civilization, race, sex, or self. Chauvinist: Any such man; hence, by extension, a fascist of any nationality, race, or sex.

Colonialist: Anyone who believes that any European- or North American-descended person has any right to remain in any territory outside Europe or North America where his an-cestors happened to settle, unless these were Russian. Cf. native.

Concentration camp: An enclosed area into which people sus-pect to their government or to an occupying power are herded. No progressive country or liberation movement can operate a concentration camp, since by definition these have full support of the people. NB: Liberals consider it impolite to mention Nisei in this connection.

Conformist: One who accepts establishment values without asking troublesome questions. Cf.

nonconformist.

Conservative: See aggression, bombing, brutality, chauvinism, colonialist, concentration camp, conformist, establishment, fascist, imperialist, McCarthyism, mercenary, military--industrial complex, missile, napalm, pig, plutocrat, preju-dice, property rights, racist, reactionary, repression, storm trooper, xenophobia.

Criminal: A fascist, especially when apprehended and pun-ished. Cf. martyr.

Democracy: A nation in which the government, freely elected, remains responsive to the popular will, e.g., Czechoslovakia.

Development: (1) In fascist countries, the bulldozing of trees and hillsides, erection of sleazy row houses, etc., or in gen-eral, the exploitation of the environment. (2) In progressive countries, the provision of housing for the masses, or in gen-eral, the utilization of natural resources to satisfy human needs.

Ecology: (1) Obsolete: The study of the interrelationships of living things with each other and with the general environ-ment. (2) Everything nonhuman which is being harmed by the establishment, such as trees and falcons but not including rats, sparrows, algae, etc. Thus progressive countries have no ecology.

Establishment: The powers that be, when these are conserva-tive.

Fallout: Radioactive material from a nuclear weapon, widely distributed if this is tested in the atmosphere, universally condemned for its deleterious effect upon public health and heredity, unless the test is conducted by a progressive country.

Fascist: A person who favors measures possibly conducive to the survival of the West.

Freedom: Instant gratification.

Glory: An outworn shibboleth, except when applied to a hero or martyr.

Hero:A person who sacrifices and takes risks in a progressive cause. Cf. pig and storm trooper.

Honor: See glory.

Human rights: All rights of the people to freedom, when held to take infinite precedence over property rights, since the latter are not human rights.

Imperialist: A person who advocates that any Western country retain any of its overseas territory.

Liberation: Foreign expulsion and domestic overthrow of Western governments, influences, and institutions. Sacred liberation: Liberation intended to result in a (People’s) Re-public. Love: An emotion which, if universally felt, would automatically solve all human problems, but which some (see conservative) are by definition incapable of feeling.

Martyr: A person who suffers or dies in the cause of liberation. Not to be confused with a criminal or, collectively, with enemy personnel.

McCarthyism: Character assassination for political purposes, by asserting that some person is a member of the Communist conspiracy, especially when this is done by an admirer of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Not to be confused with asserting that some person is a member of the fascist conspiracy, es-pecially when this is done by an admirer of Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

Mercenary: A soldier who, for pay, serves a government not his own. Cf. United Nations.

Military-industrial complex: An interlocking directorate of military and industrial leaders, held to be in effective control of the USA. Not to be confused with military and industrial leaders of the USSR or the various (People’s) Republics.

Missile: A self-contained device which delivers high explosives from the air, condemned for its effects upon women, chil-dren, the aged, the sick, and other noncombatants, unless these happen to have resided in Saigon, Da Nang, Hue, etc. Cf. bombing.

Napalm: Jellied gasoline, ignited and propelled against enemy personnel, condemned by all true liberals except when used by Israelis upon Arabs.

Native: A non-White inhabitant of a region whose ancestors dispossessed the previous lot.

Nonconformist: One who accepts progressive values without asking troublesome questions. Cf.

conformist.

Nuclear weapon: A weapon employing some form of atomic energy, used by fascist governments for purposes of aggres-sion and by progressive governments to further the cause of peace.

One man, one vote: A legal doctrine requiring that, from time to time, old gerrymanders be replaced with new ones. The object of this is the achievement of genuine democracy.

Organic: Of foods, grown only with natural manures, etc., and with no chemical sprays, etc., hence free of harmful residues and of earthborne diseases or serious insect infestation, since surrounding lands have been artificially fertilized and chemi-cally sprayed.

Peace: The final solution of the fascist problem. Peaceful coexistence: A stage preliminary to peace, in which aggres-sion is phased out and sacred liberation proceeds.

People: (Always used with the definite article and often capitalized.) Those who support liberation.

Hence every-one not a fascist is counted among them, whether he wants to be or not.

Personnel: Members of a military or police organization, whether hostile or useful. Not to be confused with human beings.

Pig: (1) An animal known for its value, intelligence, courage, self-reliance, kindly disposition, loyalty, and (if allowed to follow its natural bent) cleanliness. (2) A policeman. Cf. activist.

Plutocrat: A citizen of a republic who, because of enormous wealth which he refuses to share with the poor, wields undue political power. Not to be confused with a Kennedy.

Poor: (Always used with the definite article and often capital-ized.) That class of persons who are defined by someone as possessing less than their rightful wealth and privilege. The progressive definition includes all non-fascist Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow persons, regardless of income.

Pot: Marijuana. Must we go through that alcohol-tobacco-tranquilizers-are-legal routine again?

Prejudice: Hostility or contempt for a person or group, on a purely class basis and regardless of facts.

Not to be confused with judgment passed on enemies of the people (see con-servative).

Progressive: Conducive to liberation.

Property rights: The alleged rights of persons who have earned or otherwise lawfully obtained property, or of taxpayers who have similarly acquired property which is then designated public, to be secure in the enjoyment thereof, irrespective of human rights.

Racist: A White person who, when any Black person rings a bell, fails to salivate.

Reactionary: Not progressive.

Red: (1) Of American Indian descent; from the skin color, which ranges from brown to ivory. Not to be confused with Black, Brown, White, or Yellow, nor with “Mexican,” even though most Mexicans are of American Indian stock. (2) Struggling for liberation or struggling in its aftermath.

Repression: Denial of the right of free speech, e.g., by refusal to provide a free rostrum for an activist, or the right of a free press, e.g., by refusing to print, televise, or stock in libraries every word of an activist, or the right to be heard, e.g., by mob action against an activist. Not to be confused with pro-tection of the people from reactionary infection.

Republic: A country whose government is chosen not on a basis of heredity or riches but by the electorate, from whom political power grows. People’s Republic: One in which the electorate consists of a gun barrel.

Self-determination: The right of a culturally or ethnically dis-tinct group to govern themselves, as in Biafra, East Pakistan, Goa, Katanga, the Sinai, Tibet, the Ukraine, etc.

Storm trooper: A person who sacrifices and takes risks in a fascist cause. Cf. hero.

United Nations: An international organization which employs Swedish, Indian, Irish, Canadian, etc.

troops in other parts of the world than these so as to further self-determination.

White: Of Caucasoid descent; from the skin color, which ranges from brown to ivory. Not to be confused with Black, Brown, Red, or Yellow.

Winds of change: Poetic metaphor for the defeat of reactionary forces. Not applicable to any advance or restoration of these.

Women’s Liberation: A movement which opposes male chauvinism.

Xenophobia: Distrust of the ability of strangers to run your life for you.

Yellow: Of Mongoloid descent; from the skin color, which ranges from brown to ivory. Not to be confused with Black, Brown, Red, or White.

4

FOR A MOMENT, as I entered, my office was foreign to me. That rolltop desk, gooseneck reading lamp, worn leather-upholstered swivel chair and horsehair-stuffed seat for visitors, shelf of ref-erence books, framed diploma, door ajar on the surgery to give a glimpse of cabinets wherein lay instruments and drugs that Koch would mostly have recognized--all was out of place, a tiny island in time which the ocean was swiftly eroding away; and I knew that inside of ten years I’d do best to retire.

The snowfall had thickened, making the windows a pale dusk. Jack had turned the lamp on so he could read a magazine. Beyond its puddle of light, shadows lay enormous. The steam radiator grumbled. It turned the air dry as well as warm.

He rose. “Sorry to give you this bother, Dr. Anderson,” he said.

I waved him back into the armchair, settled myself down, reached for a fresh pipe off the rack. That much smoking was hard on the mouth, but my fingers needed something to do.

Jack nodded at the pamphlet I’d tossed on the desk. “How do you like it?” he asked tonelessly.

I peered through the upper half of my bifocals. This was not the boy who knew he would lose his father, nor the youth who tried and failed to hide his wretchedness when his mother took unto him a stepfather-only last year. A young man confronted me, whose eyes were old.

They were gray, those eyes, in a narrow straight-nosed face upon a long head. The dark-blond hair, the slim, middle-sized, slightly awkward body were Tom’s; the mouth, its fullness and mobility out of place in that ascetic countenance, was Eleanor’s; the whole was entirely Jack Havig, whom I had never fathomed.

Always a careless dresser, he wore the plaid wool shirt and blue denims in which he had gone for that tramp across the hills. His attitude seemed alert rather than uneasy, and his gaze did not waver from mine.

“Well,” I said, “it’s original. But you must admit it’s sort of confusing.” I loaded the pipe.

“Yeah, I suppose. A souvenir. I probably shouldn’t have brought anything back.”

“From your, uh, trip away from home? Where were you, Jack?”

“Around.”

I remembered a small stubborn person who gave the same reply, after an unknown had returned him to his father. It led me to recall much else.

My wooden match made a scrit and flare which seemed un-naturally strong. I got the tobacco burning, took a good taste and smell of it, before I had my speech put together.

“Listen, Jack. You’re in trouble. Worse, your mother is.” That jarred him. “I’m the friend of you both, I want to help, but damnation, you’ll have to cooperate.”

“Doc, I wish I could,” he whispered.

I tapped the pamphlet. “Okay,” I said, “tell me you’re work-ing on a science-fiction story or something, laid in 1970, and this is background material. Fine. I’d think you’re needlessly obscure, but never mind; your business.” Gesturing with the pipestem: “What is not your business is the fact it’s mimeo-graphed.

Nobody mimeographs anything for strictly personal use. Organizations do. What organization is this?”

“None. A few friends.” His neck stiffened. “Mighty few, among all those Gadarene swine happily squealing their slogans.”

I stood. “How about a drink?”

Now he smiled. “Thanks. The exact prescription I want.”

Pouring from a brandy bottle--sometimes it was needful for both a patient and myself, when I must pronounce sentence--I wondered what had triggered my impulse. Kids don’t booze, except a little beer on the sly. Do they? It came to me afresh, here was no longer a kid.

He drank in the way of an experienced if not heavy drinker. How had he learned? He’d been gone barely a month.

I sat again and said: “I don’t ask for secrets, Jack, though you know I hear a lot in my line of work, and keep them. I de-mand your help in constructing a story, and laying out a pro-gram of future behavior, which will get your mother off the hook.”

He frowned. “You’re right. The trouble is, I can’t think what to tell you.”

“The truth, maybe?”

“Doc, you don’t want that. Believe me, you don’t.”

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty-” Why did Keats hand the world that particular piece of BS? He’d studied medicine; he knew better. “Jack, I’ll bet you ten dollars I can relate a dozen true stories which’ll shock you worse than you could ever shock me.”

“I won’t bet,” he said harshly. “It wouldn’t be fair to you.”

I waited.

He tossed off his drink and held out the glass. In the yellow lamplight, gaunt against the winter window, his face congealed with resolution. “Give me a refill, please,” he said, “and I will tell you.”

“Great.” The bottle shook a bit in my grasp as the liquor clucked forth. “I swear to respect any confidentiality.”

He laughed, a rattling noise. “No need for oaths, Doc. You’ll keep quiet.”

I waited.

He sipped, stared past me, and murmured: “I’m glad. It’s been such a burden, through my whole life, never to share the the fact of what I am.”

I streamed smoke from my lips and waited.

He said in a rush, “For the most part I was in the San Fran-cisco area, especially Berkeley. For more than a year.”

My fingers clenched on the pipe bowl.

“Uh-huh.” He nodded. “I came home after a month’s ab-sence. But I’d spent about eighteen months away. From the fall of 1969 to the end of 1970.”

After a moment, he added: “That’s not a whole year and a half. But you’ve got to count my visits to the further future.”

Steam hissed in the radiator. I saw a sheen of sweat on the forehead of my all but adopted son. He gripped his tumbler as tightly as I my pipe. Yet in spite of the tension in him, his voice remained level.

“Youhave a time machine?” I breathed.

He shook his head. “No. I move around in time by myself. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know.”

His smile jerked forth. “Sure, Doc,” he said. “Paranoia. The delusion that I’m something special in the cosmos. Okay, I’ll give you a demonstration.” He waved about. “Come here, please. Check. Make certain I’ve put no mirrors, trapdoors, gimmickry in your own familiar office.”

Numbly, I felt around him, though it was obvious he’d had no chance to bring along, or rig, any apparatus.

“Satisfied?” he asked. “Well, I’ll project myself into the fu-ture. How far? Half an hour? No, too long for you to sit here gnawing your pipe. Fifteen minutes, then.” He checked his watch against my wall clock.

“It’s 4:17, agreed? I’ll reappear at 4:30, plus or minus a few seconds.” Word by word: “Just make sure nobody or nothing occupies this chair at that period. I can’t emerge in the same space as another solid body.”

I stood back and trembled. “Go ahead, Jack,” I said through the thuttering in my veins.

Tenderness touched him. He reached to squeeze my hand. “Good old Doc. So long.”

And he was gone. I heard a muted whoosh of air rushing in where he had sat, and nothing else. The chair stood empty. I felt, and no form occupied it.

I sat down once more at my desk, and stared for a quarter of an hour which I don’t quite remember.

Abruptly, there he was, seated as he had been.

I struggled not to faint. He hurried to me. “Doc, here, take it easy, everything’s okay, here, have a drink--”

Later he gave me a one-minute show, stepping back from that near a future to stand beside himself, until the first body vanished.

Night gathered.

“No, I don’t know how it works,” he said. “But then, I don’t know how my muscles work, not in the way you know--and you’ll agree your scientific information is only a glimmer on the surface of a mystery.”

“How does it feel?” I asked, and noticed in surprise the calm which had come upon me. I’d been stunned longer on Hiro-shima Day. Well, maybe the bottom of my mind had already guessed what Jack Havig was.

“Hard to describe.” He frowned into darkness. “I . . . will myself backward or forward in time . . . the way I will to, oh, pick my glass off your desk. In other words, I order whatever-it-is to move me, the same as we order our fingers to do some-thing, and it happens.”

He searched for words before he went on: “I’m in a shadow world while I time-travel. Lighting varies from zero to gray. If I’m crossing more than one day-and-night period, it flickers. Objects look dim, foggy, flat. Then I decide to stop, and I stop, and I’m back in normal time and solidness. . . . No air reaches me on my way. I have to hold my breath, and emerge occa-sionally for a lungful if the trip takes that long in my personal time.”

“Wait,” I said. “If you can’t breathe en route, can’t touch anything or be touched, can’t be seen-how come you have the feeble vision you do? How can light affect you?”

“I don’t know either, Doc. I’ve read physics texts, however, trying to get a notion about that as well as everything else. And, oh, it must be some kind of force which moves me. A force op-erating in at least four dimensions, nevertheless a force. If it has an electromagnetic component, I can imagine how a few photons might get caught in the field of it and carried along. Matter, even ionized matter, has rest mass and therefore can’t be affected in this fashion. . . . That’s a layman’s guess. I wish I dared bring a real scientist in on this.”

“Your guess is too deep for me already, friend. Uh, you said a crossing isn’t instantaneous, as far as you yourself are con-cerned. How long does it take? How many minutes per year, or whatever?”

“No particular relationship. Depends on me. I feel the effort I’m exerting, and can gauge it roughly. By, well, straining, I can move . . . faster . . . than otherwise. That leaves me ex-hausted, which seems to me to prove that time traveling uses body energy to generate and apply the thrusting force. . . . It’s never taken more than a few minutes, according to my watch; and that was a trip through several centuries.”

“When you were a baby--” My voice halted.

He nodded anew. “Yeah, I’ve heard about the incident. Fear of falling’s an instinct, isn’t it? I suppose when my mother dropped me, I threw myself into the past by sheer reflex and thereby caused her to drop me.”

He took a swallow of brandy. “My ability grew as I grew. I probably have no limit now, if I can stop at need, along the way, to rest. But I am limited in the mass I can carry along. That’s only a few pounds, including clothes. More, and I can’t move; it’s like being weighted down. If you grabbed me, for instance, I’d be stuck in normal time till you let go, because you’re too much for me to haul. I couldn’t just leave you be-hind; the force acts, or tries to act, on everything in direct con-tact with me.” A faint smile. “Except Earth itself, if I happen to be barefoot. I suppose that much mass, bound together not only by gravitation but by other, even stronger forces, has a--what?--a cohesion?--of its own.”

“You warned me against putting a solid object where you planned to, uh, materialize,” I said.

“Right,” he answered. “I can’t, in that case. I’ve experi-mented. Traveling through time, I can move around meanwhile in space if I want. That’s how I managed to appear next to my-self. By the way, the surface I’m on may rise or sink, but I rise or sink likewise, same as when a person stands somewhere in normal time. And, aside from whatever walking I do, I stay on the same geographical spot. Never mind that this planet is spinning on its axis, and whirling around a sun which is rushing through a galaxy. . . I stay here. Gravitation again, I suppose.”

“Yes, about solid matter. I tried entering a hill, when I was a child and thoughtless. I could go inside, all right, easy as step-ping into a bank of fog. But then I was cut off from light, and I couldn’t emerge into normal time, it was like being in con-crete, and my breath ran out--” He shivered. “I barely made it back to the open air.”

“I guess matter resists displacement by you,” I ventured. “Fluids aren’t too hard to shove aside when you emerge, but solids are.”

“Uh-huh, that’s what I figured. If I’d passed out and died inside that rock and dirt, I guess my body would’ve--well, been carried along into the future at the ordinary rate, and fallen back into normal existence when at last the hill eroded away from around it.”

“Amazing how you, a mere lad, kept the secret.”

“Well, I gather I gave my mother a lot of worries. I don’t actually remember. Who does recall his first few years? Prob-ably I needed a while to realize I was unique, and the realiza-tion scared me--maybe time traveling was a Bad Thing to do. Or perhaps I gloated. Anyway, Uncle Jack straightened me out.”

“Was he the unknown who brought you back when you’d been lost?”

“Yes. I do remember that. I’d embarked on a long expedition into the past, looking for Indians. But I only found a forest. He showed up--having searched the area through a number of years--and we had it nice together. Finally he took my hand and showed me how to come home with him. He could’ve delivered me within a few minutes of my departure and spared my parents those dreadful hours. But I believe he wanted me to see how I’d hurt them, so the need for discretion would really get driven into me. It was.”

His tone grew reminiscent: “We had some fine excursions later. Uncle Jack was the ideal guide and mentor. I’d no reason to disobey his commands about secrecy, aside from some dis-guised bragging to my friend Pete. Uncle Jack led me to better things than I’d ever have discovered for myself.”

“You did hop around on your own,” I reminded him.

“Occasionally. Like when a couple of bullies attacked me. I doubled back several times and outnumbered them.”

“No wonder you showed such a growth rate. . . . When you learned your father was going into the service, you hoped to assure yourself he’d return safe, right?”

Jack Havig winced. “Yes. I headed futureward and took quick peeks at intervals. Until I looked in the window and saw Mother crying. Then I went pastward till I found a chance to read that telegram--oh, God. I didn’t travel in time again for years. I didn’t think I’d ever want to.”

The silence of the snow lapped about us.

At length I asked: “When did you most recently meet this mentor?”

“In 1969. But the previous time had been. . . shortly before I took off and learned about my father.

Uncle Jack was par-ticularly good to me, then. We went to the old and truly kind of circus, sometime in the late nineteenth century. I wondered why he seemed so sad, and why he re-explained in such detail the necessity of keeping our secret. Now I know.”

“Do you know who he is?”

His mouth lifted on the left side only. “Who do you sup-pose?”

“I resumed time traveling last year,” he said after a while. “I had to have a refuge from that, that situation on the farm. They were jaunts into the past, at first. You’ve no idea how beautiful this country was before the settlers arrived. And the Indians--well, I have friends among them. I haven’t acquired more than a few words of their language, but they welcome me and, uh, the girls are always ready, able, and eager.”

I could not but laugh. “Sven the Younger makes a lot of your having no dates!”

He grinned back. “You can guess how those trips relieved me.”

Serious again: “But you can guess, too, how more and more the whole thing at home--what Birkelund is pleased to call my home--got to feel silly, futile, and stuffing. Even the out-side world. Like, what the devil was I doing in high school? ”

There I was, full-grown, full of these marvels I’d seen, hearing teen-agers giggle and teachers drone!”

“I imagine the family flareup was what sent you into the fu-ture?”

“Right. I was half out of my mind with rage. Mainly I hoped to see Sven Birkelund’s tombstone. Twenty years forward seemed like a good round number. But knowing I’d have a lot to catch up on, I made for late 1969, so as to be prepared to get the most out of 1970. . . . The house was still in existence. Is. Will be.”

“Sven?” I asked softly.

“I suppose he’ll have survived.” His tone was savage. “I don’t care enough to check on that. In two more years, my mother will divorce him.”

“And--?”

“She’ll take the babies, both of them, back to Massachusetts. Her third marriage will be good. I mustn’t add to her worries in this time, though. That’s why I returned; I made my ab-sence a month long to show Birkelund I mean business; but I couldn’t make it longer than that, I couldn’t do it to her.”

I saw in him what I have seen in others, when those they care about are sick or dying. So I was hasty to say: “You told me you met your Uncle Jack, your other self.”

“Yeah.” He was glad to continue with practicalities. “He was waiting when I appeared in 1969. That was out in the woodlot, at night--I didn’t want to risk a stray spectator--but the lot had been logged off and planted in corn. He’d taken a double room in the hotel--that is, the one they’ll build after the Senlac Arms is razed--and put me up for a few days. He told me about my mother, and encouraged me to verify it by newspaper files in the library, plus showing me a couple of letters she’d recently written to him . . .

to me. Afterward he gave me a thousand dollars--Doc, the prices in twenty years!--and he suggested I look around the country.

“News magazines indicated Berkeley was where it was at--uh, a future idiom. Anyway, San Francisco’s right across the Bay and I’d always wanted to see it.”

“How was Berkeley?” I asked, remembering visits to a staid university town.

He told me, as well as he was able. But no words, in 1951, could have conveyed what I have since experienced, that wild, eerie, hilarious, terrifying, grotesque, mind-bending assault upon every sense and common sense which is Telegraph Ave-nue at the close of the seventh decade of the twentieth century.

“Didn’t you risk trouble with the police?” I inquired.

“No. I stopped off in 1966 and registered under a fake name for the draft, which gave me a card saying I was twenty-one in 1969. . . . The Street People hooked me. I came to them, an old-fashioned bumpkin, heard their version of what’d been go-ing on, and nobody else’s. For months I was among the radi-cals. Hand-to-mouth odd-job existence, demonstrations, pot, dirty pad, unbathed girls, the works.”

“Your writing here doesn’t seem favorable to that,” I ob-served.

“No. I’m sure Uncle Jack wanted me to have an inside knowledge, how it feels to be somebody who’s foresworn the civilization that bred him. But I changed.”

“M-m-m, I’d say you rebounded. Way out into right field. But go on. What happened?”

“I took a trip to the further future.”

“And?”

“Doc,” he said most quietly, “consider yourself fortunate. You’re already getting old.”

“I’ll be dead, then?” My heart stumbled.

“By the time of the blowup and breakdown, no doubt. I haven’t checked, except I did establish you’re alive and healthy in 1970.” I wondered why he did not smile, as he should have done when giving me good news. Today I know; he said noth-ing about Kate.

“The war-the war-and its consequences come later,” he went on in the same iron voice. “But everything follows straight from that witches’ sabbath I saw part of in Berkeley.”

He sighed and rubbed his tired eyes. “I returned to 1970 with some notion of stemming the tide. There were a few people around, even young people, who could see a little reality. This broadside . . . they helped me publish and distribute it, think-ing me a stray Republican.”

“Were you?”

“Lord, no. You. don’t imagine any political party has been any use whatsoever for the past three or four generations, do you? They’ll get worse.”

He had emptied his glass anew, but declined my offer of more. “I’d better keep a clear head, Doc. We do have to work out a cover yarn. I know we will, because my not-so-much-older self gave me to understand I’d handle my present troubles all right. However, it doesn’t let us off going through the mo-tions.”

“Time is unchangeable?” I wondered. “We--our lives--are caught and held in the continuum--like flies in amber?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he groaned. “I do know that my efforts were wasted. My former associates called me a fink, my new friends were an insignificant minority, and, hell, we could hardly give away our literature.”

“You mustn’t expect miracles in politics,” I said. “Beware of the man who promises them.”

“True. I realized as much, after the shock of what I’d seen uptime had faded a bit. In fact, I decided my duty was to come back and stand by my mother. At least this way I can make the world a tiny bit less horrible.”

His tone softened: “No doubt I was foolish to keep a copy of my flyer. But the dearest girl helped me put it together ... Well. In a way, I’ve lucked out. Now one other human being shares my life. I’ve barely started to feel how lonely I was.”

“You are absolutely unique?” I whispered.

“I don’t know. I’d guess not. They’re doubtless very rare, but surely more time travelers than me exist.

How can I find them?” he cried. “And if we should join together, what can we do?”

5

BIRKELUND PROVED less of a problem than expected. I saw him in private, told him the writing was a leftover script from an amateur show, and pointed out that it was actually sarcastic--after which I gave him holy hell about his treatment of his step-son and his wife. He took it with ill grace, but he took it. As remarked earlier, he was by no means an evil man.

Still, the situation remained explosive. Jack contributed, be-ing daily more short-tempered and self-willed. “He’s changed so much,” Eleanor told me in grief. “His very appearance. And I can’t blame all the friction on Sven and his boys. Jack’s often downright arrogant.”

Of course he was, in his resentment of home, his boredom in school, his burden of foreknowledge. But I couldn’t tell his mother that. Nor, for her sake, could he make more than over-night escapes for the next two or three years.

“I think,” I said, “it’d be best if he took off on his own.”

“Bob, he’s barely eighteen,” she protested.

He was at least twenty-one, probably more, I knew. “Old enough to join the service.” He’d registered in the lawful man-ner on his birthday. “That’ll give him a chance to find himself. It’s possible to be drafted by request, so as to be in for the mini-mum period. The board will oblige if I speak to ‘em.”

“Not before he’s graduated!”

I understood her dismay and disappointment. “He can take correspondence courses, Ellie. Or the services offer classes, which a bright lad like Jack can surely get into. I’m afraid this is our best bet.”

He had already agreed to the idea. A quick uptime hop showed him he would be posted to Europe. “I can explore a lot of history,” he said; then, chill: “Besides, I’d better learn about weapons and combat techniques. I damn near got killed in the twenty-first century. Couple members of a cannibal band took me by surprise, and if I hadn’t managed to wrench free for an instant--”

The Army was ill-suited to his temperament, but he stuck out basic training, proceeded into electronics, and on the whole gained by the occasion. To be sure, much of that was due to his excursions downtime.

They totaled a pair of extra years.

His letters to me could only hint at this, since Kate would read them too. It was a hard thing for me, not to open for her the tremendous fact, not to have her beside me when at last he came home and through hour upon hour showed me his notes, photographs, memories.

(Details were apt to be unglamorous--problems of vaccina-tion, language, transportation, money, law, custom--filth, ver-min, disease, cruelty, tyranny, violence--“Doc, I’d never dreamed how different medieval man was. Huge variations from place to place and era to era, yeah, but always the …

Orientalness? ... no, probably it’s just that the Orient has changed less.” However, he had watched Caesar’s legions in triumph through Rome, and the greyhound shapes of Viking craft dancing over Oslo Fjord, and Leonardo da Vinci at work.

He’d not been able to observe in depth. In fact, he was maddened by the superficial quality of almost all his experi-ences. How much can you learn in a totally strange environ-ment, when you can barely speak a word and are liable to be arrested on suspicion before you can swap for a suit of con-temporary clothes? Yet what would I not have given to be there too?)

How it felt like a betrayal of Kate, not telling her! But if Jack could keep silence toward his mother, I must toward my wife. His older persona had been, was, would be right in stamping upon the child a reflex of secrecy.

Consider the consequences, had it become known that one man--or one little boy--can swim through time. To be the sen-sation of the age is no fit fate for any human. In this case, imag-ine as well the demands, appeals, frantic attempts by the greedy, the power-hungry, the ideology-besotted, the bereaved, the frightened to use him, the race between governments to sequester or destroy him who could be the ultimate spy or un-stoppable assassin. If he survived, and his sanity did, he would soon have no choice but to flee into another era and there keep his talent hidden.

No, best wear a mask from the beginning.

But then what use was the fantastic gift?

“Toward the end of my hitch, I spent more timethinking than roving,” he said.

We’d taken my boat out on Lake Winnego. He’d come home, discharged, a few weeks earlier, but much remained to tell me. This was the more true because his mother needed his moral support in her divorce from Birkelund, her move away from scenes which were now painful. He’d matured further, not only in the flesh. Two of my years ago, a man had confronted me: but a very young man, still groping his way out of hurt and be-wilderment. The Jack Havig who sat in the cockpit today was in full command of himself.

I shifted my pipe and put down the helm. We came about in a heel and swoosh and rattle of boom.

Springtime glittered on blue water; sweetness breathed from the green across fields and trees, from apple blossoms and fresh-turned earth. The wind whooped. It was cool and a hawk rode upon it.

“Well, you had plenty to think about,” I answered.

“For openers,” he said, “how does time travel work?”

“Tell me, Mr. Bones, how does time travel work?”

He did not chuckle. “I learned a fair amount of basic physics in the course of becoming an electronics technician. And I read a lot on my own, including stuff I went uptime to consult- books, future issues of Scientific American and Nature, et cetera. All theory says that what I do is totally impossible. It starts by violating the conservation of energy and goes on from there.”

“E put si muove.”

“Huh? . . . Oh. Yeah. Doc, I studied the Italian Renais-sance prior to visiting it, and discovered Galileo never did say that. Nor did he ever actually drop weights off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Well.” He sprawled back on the bench and opened another bottle of beer for each of us. “Okay. So there are hookers in the conservation of energy that official science doesn’t suspect. Mathematically speaking, world lines are al-lowed to have finite, if not infinite discontinuities, and to be multi-valued functions. In many ways, time travel is equivalent to faster-than-light travel, which the physicists also declare is impossible.”

I watched my tobacco smoke stream off on the breeze. Wave-lets smacked. “You’ve left me a few light-years behind,” I said. “I get nothing out of your lecture except an impression that you don’t believe anything, uh, supernatural is involved.”

He nodded. “Right. Whatever the process may be, it op-erates within natural law. It’s essentially physical. Matter-energy relationships are involved. Well, then, why can I do it, and nobody else? I’ve been forced to conclude it’s a peculiarity in my genes.”

“Oh?”

“They’ll find the molecular basis of heredity, approximately ten years from now.”

“What?” I sat bolt upright. “This you’ve got to tell me more about!”

“Later, later. I’ll give you as much information on DNA and the rest as I can, though that isn’t a whale of a lot. The point is, our genes are not simply a blueprint for building a fetus. They operate throughout life, by controlling enzyme produc-tion. You might well call them the very stuff of life. . . . What besides enzymes can be involved? This civilization is going to destroy itself before they’ve answered that question. But I sus-pect there’s some kind of resonance--or something--in those enormous molecules; and if your gene structure chances to resonate precisely right, you’re a time traveler.”

“Well, an interesting hypothesis.” I had fallen into a habit of understatement in his presence.

“I’ve empirical evidence,” he replied. With an effort: “Doc, I’ve had quite a few women. Not in this decade; I’m too stiff and gauche. But uptime and downtime, periods when it’s fairly easy and I can use a certain glamour of mysteriousness.”

“Congratulations,” I said for lack of anything better.

He squinted across the lake. “I’m not callous about them,” he said. “I mean, well, if a romp is all she wants, like those Dakotan girls two-three centuries ago, okay, fine. But if the affair is anything more, I feel responsible. I may not plan to live out my life in her company--I wonder if I’ll ever marry--but I check on her future for the next several years, and try to make sure she does well.” His countenance twisted a bit. “Or as well as a mortal can. I’ve not got the moral courage to search out their deaths.”

After a pause: “I’m digressing, but it’s an important digres-sion to me. Take Meg, for instance. I was in Elizabethan Lon-don. The problems caused by my ignorance were less than in most milieus, though I did need a while to learn the ropes and even the pronunciation of their English. A silver ingot I’d brought along converted more easily than usual to coin--people today don’t realize how much suspicion and regulation there was in the oh-so-swashbuckling past--even if I do think the dealer cheated me. Well, anyhow, I could lodge in a lovely half-timbered inn, and go to the Globe Theatre, and generally have a ball.

“One day I happened to be in a slum district. A woman plucked my sleeve and offered me her daughter’s maidenhead cheap. I was appalled, but thought I should at least meet the poor girl, maybe give her money, maybe try to get my landlord to take her on as a respectable servant. . . . No way.”

(An-other of his anachronistic turns of speech.) “She was nervous but determined. And after she’d explained, I had to agree that an alley lass of independent spirit probably was better off as a whore than a servant, considering what servants had to put up with. Not that anyone was likely to take her in such a capacity, class distinctions and antagonisms being what they were.

“She was cocky, she was good-looking, she said she’d rather it was me than some nasty and probably poxy dotard. What could I do? Disinterested benevolence just plain was not in her mental universe. If she couldn’t see my selfish motive, she’d’ve decided it must be too deep and horrible for her, and fled.”

He glugged his beer. “All right,” he told me defiantly. “I moved into larger quarters and took her along.

The idea of an age of consent didn’t exist either. Forget about our high school kids; I’d certainly never touch one of them. Meg was a woman, young but a woman. We lived together for four years of her life.

“Of course, for me that was a matter of paying the rent in advance, and now and then coming back from the twentieth century. Not very often, I being stationed in France. Sure, I could leave whenever I wanted, and return with no AWOL time passed, but the trip to England cost, and besides, there were all those other centuries. . . . Nevertheless, I do believe Meg was faithful. You should’ve seen how she fended off her relatives who thought they could batten on me! I told her I was in the Dutch diplomatic service... ”

“Oh, skip the details. I’m talking all around my subject. In the end, a decent young journeyman fell in love with her. I gave them a wedding present and my blessings. And I checked ahead, dropping in occasionally through the next decade, to make sure everything was all right. It was, as close as could be expected.”

He sighed. “To get to the point, Doc, she bore him half a dozen children, starting inside a year of their marriage. She had never conceived by me. As far as I’ve determined, no woman ever has.”

He had gotten a fertility test, according to which he was normal.

Neither of us wanted to dwell on his personal confession. It suggested too strongly how shaped our psyches are by what-ever happens to be around us. “You mean,” I said slowly, “you’re a mutant? So much a mutant that you count as, as a different species?”

“Yeah. I think my genes are that strange.”

“But a fellow time traveler--a female--”

“Right on, Doc.” Another futurism.”

He was still for a while, in the blowing sunlit day, before he said: “Not that that’s important in itself. What is important--maybe the most important thing in Earth’s whole existence--is to find those other travelers, if there are any, and see what we can do about the horrors uptime. I can’t believe I’m a meaning-less accident!”

“How do you propose to go about it?”

His gaze was cat-cool. “I start by becoming rich.”

For years which followed, I am barely on the edge of his story.

He’d see me at intervals, I think more to keep our friendship alive than to bring me up to date-since he obviously wanted Kate’s company as much as mine. But I have only indirect news of his career. Often, in absence, he would become a dream in my mind, so foreign was he to our day-by-day faster-and-faster-aging small-town life, the growing up of our sons, the adventure of daughters-in-law and grandchildren. But then he would re-turn, as if out of night, and for hours I would again be dom-inated by that lonely, driven man.

I don’t mean he was fanatical. In fact, he continued to gain in perspective and in the skill of savoring this world. His in-tellect ranged widely, though it’s clear that history and anthro-pology must be his chief concerns. As a drop of fortune, he had a talent for learning languages. (He and I wondered how many time travelers were wing-clipped by the mere lack of that.) Sardonic humor and traditional Midwestern courtesy combined to make his presence pleasant. He became quite a gourmet, while staying able to live on stockfish and hardtack without complaint. He kept a schooner in Boston, whereon he took Kate and me to the West Indies in celebration of our retirement. While the usages of his boyhood made him reticent about it, I learned he was deeply sensitive to beauty both nat-ural and manmade; of the latter, he had special fondness for Baroque, Classical, and Chinese music, for fine ships and weapons, and for Hellenic architecture. (God, if You exist, I do thank You from my inmost heart that I have seen Jack Havig’s photographs of the unruined Acropolis.)

I was the single sharer of his secret, but not his single friend. Theoretically he could have been intimate with everyone great, Moses, Pericles, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Einstein. But in prac-tice the obstacles were too much. Besides language, custom, and law, the famous were hedged off by being busy, conspicu-ous, sought-after. No, Havig--I called him “Jack” to his face, but now it seems more natural to write his surname--Havig told me about people like his lively little Meg (three hundred years dust), or a mountain man who accompanied Lewis and Clark, or a profane old moustache who had marched with Napoleon.

(“History does not tend to the better, Doc, it does not, it does not. We imagine so because events have produced our glorious selves. Think, however. Put aside the romantic legends and look at the facts. The average Frenchman in 1800 was no more unfree than the average Englishman. The French Empire could have brought Europe together, and could have been lib-eralized from within, and there might have been no World War I in which Western civilization cut its own throat. Because that’s what happened, you know. We’re still busy bleeding to death, but we haven’t far to go now.”) Mainly his time excursions were for fun, in that period be-tween his acquiring the techniques and resources to make them effective, and his development of a search plan for fellow mu-tants. “To be honest,” he grinned, “I find myself more and more fond of low-down life.”

“Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris?” I asked at random. He had al-ready told me that earlier decadences were overrated, or at least consisted of tight-knit upper classes which didn’t welcome strangers.

“Well, I haven’t tried there,” he admitted. “An idea, maybe. On the other hand, Storyville in its flowering--” He wasn’t in-terested in the prostitutes; if nothing else, he had by now seen enough of the human condition to know how gruesome theirs usually was. He went for the jazz, and for the company of peo-ple whom he said were more real than most of his own gen-eration, not to speak of 1970.

Meanwhile he made his fortune.

You suppose that was easy. Let him look up the stock market quotations--1929 is an obvious year--and go surf on the tides of Wall Street.

The fact was different. For instance, what might he use for money?

While in Europe, he bought gold or silver out of his pay, which he exchanged for cash in various parts of the nineteenth and later eighteenth centuries. With that small stake, he could begin trading. He would take certain stamps and coins uptime and sell them to dealers; he would go downtime with a few aluminum vessels, which were worth more than gold before the Hall process was invented. But these and similar dealings were necessarily on a minute scale, both because the mass he could carry was limited and because he dared not draw over-much attention to himself.

He considered investing and growing wealthy in that period, but rejected the idea. The rules and mores were too peculiar, too intricate for him to master in as much of his lifespan as he cared to spend. Besides, he wanted to be based in his own original era; if nothing else, he would need swift spatial trans-portation when he began his search. Thus he couldn’t simply leave money in the semi-distant past at compound interest. The intervening years gave too many chances for something to go wrong.

As for a more manageable point like 1929, what gold he brought would represent a comparatively truing sum. Shuttling back and forth across those frantic days, he could parlay it--but within strict limits, if he wasn’t to be unduly noticed. Also, he must take assorted federal agencies into account, which in the years ahead would become ever better equipped to be nosy.

He never gave me the details of his operations. “Frankly,” he said, “finance bores me like an auger. I found me a couple of sharp partners who’d front, and an ultra-solid bank for a trustee, and let both make more off my ‘economic analyses’ than was strictly necessary.”

In effect, John Franklin Havig established a fund, including an arrangement for taxes and the like, which was to be paid over to “any collateral male descendant” who met certain un-ambiguous standards, upon the twenty-first birthday of this person. As related, the bank was one of those Eastern ones, with Roman pillars and cathedral dimness and, I suspect, a piece of Plymouth Rock in a reliquary. Thus when John Frank-lin Havig, collateral descendant, was contacted in 1954, every-thing was so discreet that he entered his millionaire condition with scarcely a ripple. The Senlac Trumpet did announce that he had received a substantial inheritance from a distant relative.

“I let the bank keep on managing the bucks,” he told me. “What I do is write checks.”

After all, riches were merely his means to an end.

No, several ends. I’ve mentioned his pleasures. I should add the help he gave his mother and, quietly, others. On the whole, he disdained recognized charities. “They’re big businesses,” he said. “Their executives draw down more money than you do, Doc. Besides, to be swinishly blunt, we have too many people. When you’ve seen the Black Death, you can’t get excited about Mississippi sharecroppers.” I scolded him amicably for being such a right-winger when he had witnessed laissez-faire in ac-tion, and he retorted amicably that in this day and age liberals like me were the ones who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, and we had us a drink. . . . But I believe that, with-out fuss, he rescued quite a few individuals; and it is a fact that he was a substantial contributor to the better conserva-tionist organizations.

“We need a reserve of life, every kind of life,” he explained. “Today for the spirit-a glimpse of space and green. Tomorrow for survival, flat-out survival.”

The War of Judgment, he said, would by no means be the simple capitalist-versus-Communist slugfest which most of us imagined in the 1950’s.

“I’ve only the vaguest idea yet of what actually will go on. Not surprising. I’ve had to make fugitive appearances--watch-ing out for radioactivity and a lot else--and who in the immedi-ate sequel is in any condition to give me a reasoned analysis? Hell, Doc, scholars argue today about what went wrong in 1914 to ‘18, and they aren’t scrambling for a leftover can of dogfood, or arming against the Mong who’ll pour across a Bering Straits that all the dust kicked into the atmosphere will cause to be frozen.”

His impression was that, like World War I, it was a conflict which everybody anticipated, nobody wanted, and men would have recoiled from had they foreseen the consequences. He thought it was less ideological than ecological.

“I have this nightmare notion that it came not just as a result of huge areas turning into deserts, but came barely in time. Do you know the oceans supply half our oxygen? By 1970, insecti-cide was in the plankton. By 1990, every ocean was scummy, and stank, and you didn’t dare swim in it.”

“But this must have been predicted,” I said.

He leered. “Yeah. ‘Environment’ was very big for a while. Ecology Now stickers on the windshields of cars belonging to hairy young men-cars which dripped oil wherever they parked and took off in clouds of smoke thicker than your pipe can pro-duce ... Before long, the fashionable cause was something else, I forget what. Anyhow, that whole phase-the wave after wave of causes-passed away. People completely stopped caring.

“You see, that was the logical conclusion of the whole trend. I know it’s stupid to assign a single blame for something as vast as the War of Judgment, its forerunners and aftermaths. Es-pecially when I’m still in dark about what the events were. But Doc, I feel a moral certainty that a large part of the disaster grew from this particular country, the world’s most powerful, the vanguard country for things both good and ill

. . . never really trying to meet the responsibilities of power.

“We’ll make halfhearted attempts to stop some enemies in Asia, and because the attempts are halfhearted we’ll piss away human lives--on both sides--and treasure--to no purpose. Hop-ing to placate the implacable, we’ll estrange our last few friends. Men elected to national office will solemnly identify inflation with rising prices, which is like identifying red spots with the measles virus, and slap on wage and price controls, which is like papering the cracks in a house whose foundations are sliding away. So economic collapse brings international impotence. The well-off whites will grow enough aware that we have dis-tressed minorities, and give them enough, to bring on revolt without really helping them; and the revolt will bring on re-action, which will stamp on every remnant of progress. As for our foolish little attempts to balance what we drain from the environment against what we put back-well, I mentioned that car carrying the ecology sticker.

“At first Americans will go on an orgy of guilt. Later they’ll feel inadequate. Finally they’ll turn apathetic.

After all, they’ll be able to buy any anodyne, any pseudo-existence they want.

“I wonder if at the end, down underneath, they don’t wel-come their own multi-millionfold deaths.”

Thus in February of 1964, Havig came into the inheritance he had made for himself. Shortly thereafter he set about shor-ing up his private past, and spent months of his lifespan being “Uncle Jack.” I asked him what the hurry was, and he said, “Among other things, I want to get as much foreknowledge as possible behind me.” I considered that for a while, and choked off my last impulse to ask him about the tomorrows of me and mine. I did not understand how rich a harvest this would bear until the day when they buried Kate.

I never asked Havig if he had seen her gravestone earlier. He may have, and kept silent. As a physician, I think I know how it is possible to possess such information and yet smile.

He didn’t go straight from one episode with his childhood self to the next. That would have been monotonous. Instead, he made his pastward visits vacations from his studies at our state university. He didn’t intend to be frustrated when again he sought a non-English-speaking milieu. Furthermore, he needed a baseline from which to extrapolate changes of lan-guage in the future; there/then he was also often a virtual deaf-mute.

His concentration was on Latin and Greek--the latter that koine which in its various forms had wider currency through both space and time than Classical Attic--plus French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (and English), with emphasis on their evolution-plus some Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic--plus quite a bit of the numerous Polynesian tongues.

“They do have a civilization on the other side of the dark centuries,” he told me. “I’ve barely glimpsed that, and can’t make head or tail of what’s going on. But it does look as if Pa-cific Ocean peoples dominate the world, speaking the damned-est lingua franca you can imagine.”

“So there is hope!” gusted from me.

“I still have to find out for sure.” His glance speared mine. “Look, suppose you were a time traveler from, well, Egypt of the Pharaohs. Suppose you came to today’s world and touristed around, trying to stay anonymous. How much sense would anything make? Would the question ‘Is this development good or bad?’ even be meaningful to you? I haven’t tried to explore beyond the early stages of the Maurai Federation. It’ll be the work of years to understand that much.”

He was actually more interested in bygone eras, which to him were every bit as alive as today or tomorrow. Those he could study beforehand-in more detail than you might think, unless you’re a professional historiographer-and thus prepare himself to move around with considerable freedom.

Besides, while the past had ghastlinesses enough, nothing, not the Black Death or the burning of heretics or the Middle Passage or the Albigensian Crusade, nothing in his mind matched the Judg-ment. “That’s when the whole planet almost goes under,” he said. “I imagine my fellow time travelers generally avoid it.

I’m likeliest to find them in happier, or less unhappy, eras.”

Given these activities, he was biologically about thirty when at last he succeeded. This was in Jerusalem, on the day of the Crucifixion.

6

HE TOLD ME of his plan in 1964. As far as practicable, his pol-icy was to skip intervals of the twentieth century equal to those he spent elsewhen, so that his real and calendar ages wouldn’t get too much out of step. I hadn’t seen him for a while. He no longer dwelt in Senlac, but made his headquarters in New York--a post office box in the present, a sumptuous apartment in the 1890’s, financed by the sale of gold he bought after this was again made legal and carried downtime. He did come back for visits, though. Kate found that touching. I did too, but I knew besides what need he had of me, his only confidant.

“Why ... you’re right!” I exclaimed. “The moment you’d expect every traveler, at least in Christendom, to head for. Why haven’t you done it before?”

“Less simple than you suppose, Doc,” he replied. “That’s a long haul, to a most thoroughly alien territory. And how certain is the date, anyway? Or even the fact?”

I blinked. “You mean you’ve never considered seeking the historical Christ? I know you’re not religious, but surely the mystery around him--”

“Doc, what he was, or if he was, makes only an academic difference. What counts is what people through the ages have believed. My life expectancy isn’t enough for me to do the pure research I’d like.

In fact, I’m overdue to put fun and games aside. I’ve seen too much human misery. Time travel has got to have some real value; it’s got to be made to help.” He barely smiled. “You know I’m no saint. But I do have to live in my own head.”

He flew from New York to Israel in 1969, while the Jews were in firm control of Jerusalem and a visitor could move around freely. From his hotel he walked out Jericho Road, carrying a handbag, till he found an orange grove which offered concealment. There he sprang back to the previous midnight and made his preparations.

The Arab costume he had bought at a tourist shop would pass in Biblical times. A knife, more eating tool than weapon, was sheathed at his hip; being able to blink out of bad situa-tions, he seldom took a firearm. A leather purse held phrase book (specially compiled, for pay, by an American graduate student), food, drinking cup, Halazone tablets, soap, flea re-pellent, antibiotic, and money. That last was several coins of the Roman period, plus a small ingot he could exchange if need be.

Having stowed his modern clothes in the bag, he drew forth his last item of equipment. He called it a chronolog. It was designed and built to his specifications in 1980, to take ad-vantage of the superb solid-state electronics then available. The engineers who made it had perhaps required less ingenuity than Havig had put into his cover story.

I have seen the apparatus. It’s contained in a green crackle-finish box with a carrying handle, about 24

by 12 by 6 inches. When the lid is opened, you can fold out an optical instrument vaguely suggestive of a sextant, and you can set the controls and read the meters. Beneath these lies a miniature but most sophisticated computer, running off a nickel-cadmium battery. The weight is about five pounds, which edges near half the limit of what a traveler can pack through time and helps ex-plain Havig’s reluctance to carry a gun. Other items are gen-erally more useful. But none approaches in value the chronolog.

Imagine. He projects himself backward or forward to a chosen moment. How does he know “when” he has arrived? On a short hop, he can count days, estimate the hour by sun or stars if a clock isn’t on the spot. But a thousand years hold a third of a million dawns; and the chances are that many of them won’t be identifiable, because of stormy weather or the temporary existence of a building or some similar accident.

Havig took his readings. The night was clear, sufficiently cold for his breath to smoke; Jerusalem’s lights hazed the sky northward, but elsewhere the country lay still and dark save for outlying houses and passing cars; constellations wheeled bril-liant overhead. He placed the moon and two planets in relation to them, set the precise Greenwich time and geographical lo-cations on appropriate dim-glowing dials, and worked a pair of verniers till he had numbers corresponding to that Passover week of Anno Domini 33.

(“The date does seem well established,” he’d remarked. “At least, it’s the one everybody would aim at.”

He laughed. “Beats the Nativity. The only thing certain about that is it wasn’t at midwinter--not if shepherds were away from home watching their flocks!”)

He had been breathing in and out, deep slow breaths which oxygenated his blood to the fullest. Now he took a lungful--not straining, which would have spent energy, just storing a fair amount--and launched himself down the world lines.

There was the sensation, indescribable, but which he had told me was not quite unlike swimming against a high tide. The sun rose in the west and skidded eastward; then, as he “accel-erated,” light became a vague pulsation of grayness, and every-where around him reached shadow. It was altogether silent.

He glimpsed a shellburst--soundless, misty--but was at once past the Six Day War, or had that been the War of Independ-ence or the First World War? Wan unshapes drifted past. On a cloudy night in the late nineteenth century he must reenter normal time for air. The chronolog could have given him the exact date, had he wanted to shoot the stars again; its detectors included sensitivities to those radiations which pierce an over-cast. But no point in that. A couple of mounted men, probably Turkish soldiers, happened to be near. Their presence had been too brief for him to detect while traveling, even were it daylight.

They didn’t notice him in the dark. Horseshoes thumped by and away.

He continued.

Dim though it was, the landscape began noticeably changing. Contours remained about the same, but now there were many trees, now few, now there was desert, now planted fields. Fleet-ingly, he glimpsed what he guessed was a great wooden stadium wherein the Crusaders held tourneys before Saladin threw them out of their blood-smeared kingdom, and he was tempted to pause but held to his purpose. Stops for breath grew more fre-quent as he neared his goal. The journey drained strength; and, too, the idea that he might within hours achieve his dream made the heart hammer in his breast.

A warning light blinked upon the chronolog.

It could follow sun, moon, planets, and stars with a speed and precision denied to flesh. It could allow for precession, perturbation, proper motion, even continental drift; and when it identified an aspect of heaven corresponding to the destina-tion, that could be nothing except the hour which was sought.

A light flashed red, and Havig stopped.

Thursday night was ending. If the Bible spoke truly, the Last Supper had been held, the agony in the garden was past, and Jesus lay in bonds, soon to be brought before Pilate, con-demned, scourged, lashed to the cross, pierced, pronounced dead, and laid in the tomb.

(“They tie them in place,” Havig told me. “Nails wouldn’t support the weight; the hands would tear apart. Sometimes nails are driven in for special revenge, so the tradition could be right as far as it goes.”

He covered his face. “Doc, I’ve seen them hanging, tongues black from thirst, bellies bloated--after a while they don’t cry out any longer, they croak, and no mind is left behind their eyes. The stink, the stink!

They often take days to die. I wonder if Jesus wasn’t physically frail, he won to his death so soon ... A few friends and kinfolk, maybe, hover on the fringes of the crowd, hardly ever daring to speak or even weep. The rest crack jokes, gamble, drink, eat picnic lunches, hold the kiddies up for a better view.

What kind of a thing is man, anyway?”

(Put down your pride. Ours is the century of Buchenwald and Vorkuta--and Havig reminded me of what had gone on in the nostalgically remembered Edwardian part of it, in places like the Belgian Congo and the southern United States—and he told me of what has yet to happen. Maybe I don’t envy him his time travel after all.)

Morning made an eastward whiteness. Now he had an olive orchard at his back, beyond which he glimpsed a huddle of adobe buildings. The road was a rutted dirt track. Afar, half hidden in lingering twilight, Jerusalem of the Herodian kings and the Roman proconsulate crouched on its hills. It was smaller and more compact than the city he remembered two millennia hence, mainly within walls though homesteads did spread beyond. Booths and felt tents crowded near the gates, erected by provincials come to the holy place for the holy days. The air was cold and smelled of earth. Birds twittered. “Beyond one or two hundred years back,” Havig once said to me, “the daytime sky is always full of wings.”

He sat panting while light quickened and vigor returned. Hungry, he broke off chunks of goat cheese and tortilla-like bread, and was surprised to realize that he was taking a per-fectly ordinary meal on the first Good Friday in the world.

If it was. The scholars might have gotten the date wrong, or Jesus might be nothing more than an Osirian-Essene-Mithraic myth. Suppose he wasn’t, though? Suppose he was, well, maybe not the literal incarnation of the Creator of these acres, those wildfowl, yonder universe ... but at least the prophet from whose vision stemmed most of what was decent in all time to come. Could a life be better spent than following him on his ministry?

Well, Havig would have to become fluent in Aramaic, plus a million details of living, and he would have to forget his quest.

He sighed and rose. The sun broke over the land.

He soon had company. Nevertheless he walked as an out-sider.

(“If anything does change man,” he said, “it’s science and technology. Just think about the fact--while it lasts--that par-ents need not take for granted some of their babies will die. You get a completely different concept of what a child is.” He must have seen the memory of Nora flit across my face, for he laid a hand on my shoulder and said: “I’m sorry, Doc. Shouldn’t have mentioned that. And never ask me to take a camera back to her, or a shot of penicillin, because I’ve tried altering the known past and something always happens to stop me ...

Think of electric bulbs, or even candles. When the best you’ve got is a flickering wick in a bowl of oil, you’re pretty well tied to daylight. The simple freedom to stay awake late isn’t really that simple. It has all sorts of subtle but far-reaching effects on the psyche.”)

Folk were up at dawn, tending livestock, hoeing weeds, stok-ing fires, cooking and cleaning, against the Sabbath tomorrow. Bearded men in ragged gowns whipped starveling donkeys, overloaded with merchandise, toward the city. Children, hardly begun to walk, scattered grain for poultry; a little older, they shooed gaunt stray dogs from the lambs. When he reached pavement, Havig was jostled: by caravaneers from afar, sheikhs, priests, hideous beggars, farmers, artisans, a belated and very drunken harlot, a couple of Anatolian traders, or what-ever they were, in cylindrical hats, accompanying a man in a Grecian tunic, and then the harsh cry to make way and tramp--tramp-tramp, quickstep and metal, a Roman squad returning from night patrol.

I’ve seen photographs which he took on different occasions, and can well imagine this scene. It was less gaudy than you may suppose, who live in an age of aniline dyes and fluores-cents. Fabrics were subdued brown, gray, blue, cinnabar, and dusty. But the sound was enormous--shrill voices, laughter, oaths, extravagant lies and boasts, plang of a harp, fragments of a song; shuffling feet, clopping unshod hoofs, creaking wooden wheels, yelping dogs, bleating sheep, grunting camels, always and always the birds of springtime. These people were not stiff Englishmen or Americans; no, they windmilled their arms, they shaped the air with their palms, backslapped, jigged, clapped hand to dagger in affront and almost instantly were good-humored again. And the smells! The sweet sweat of horses, the sour sweat of men; smoke, fragrant from cedar or pungent from dried dung; new-baked bread; leeks and garlic and rancid grease; everywhere the droppings and passings of animals, often the ammonia of a compost heap; a breath of musk and attar of roses, as a veiled woman went by borne in a litter; a wagonload of fresh lumber; saddle leather warming beneath the sun--Havig never praised this day when nails were beaten through living bodies; but nothing of what he inhaled made him choke, or hurt his eyes, or gave him emphysema or cancer.

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 Men-doza 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 per-son 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 an-swered. Their conversation was in English, when the Ameri-can’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. Cus-tomers 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 popu-lation? 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, un-known 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 Chris-tian--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 re-mained 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. “Head-quarters 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 prob-ably 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 in-dicator was set daily to the correct date.

“In late twenty-first-century America, things were barely get-ting started, The camp and sheds were inside a stockade and had been attacked more than once by, uh, natives or ma-rauders. 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 consid-erable. 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 home-spun 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 bet-ter 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, includ-ing 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 tor-nado, did we let down our defenses. Our troopers aren’t over-seeing 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 strong-hold and worked the land collectively. But while it looked rea-sonably clean, which was a welcome difference from the Middle Ages, the place had none of the medieval charm. Brick rows flanking asphalted streets were 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 en-closed 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 be-fore 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 shoul-ders 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 car-tridge 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 Rhein-gold.

The rest of his group, including their guides, had been dis-missed, 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 com-pelling, well-nigh hypnotic when he chose. His small pale eyes never wavered.

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

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

“You’llcatch 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 Amer-ican, 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 bour-bon. 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 de-cided 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 genera-tion; pride of race and heritage gone; traitors-Bolsheviks and international Jews-in the seats of power, preaching to the or-dinary 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, red-skins, 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 cruci-fixions.

“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.”

“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 unsur-prised. 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 educa-tions, 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 re-quired 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 counte-nance. 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 re-lated. “My father was a poor storekeeper and a strict Baptist. My mother--that’s her picture.” He indicated the gentle, in-effectual 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, espe-cially 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 Be-tween 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 be-come 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 trav-elers 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 his-tory 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 Amer-icans 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 advertise-ments 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 English-man 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 pe-riod, 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 any-thing 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 am-bitious, why, he’ll lay low same as you and I did, won’t he? Of-ten, 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 profes-sional gambler; a poor white Southern girl. That was the Amer-icans. Abroad, we found a Bavarian 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, work-ing his heart out trying to learn from books what he might be; a lady milliner in Paris, who went off into time for her de-signs; 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 bet-ter 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 par-ticular 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 un-explored section like pre-Columbian America, we’d risk leav-ing traces for archeologists to discover. Remember, there could be Maurai time travelers, and what we’ve got to have is sur-prise. 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 ac-tually, 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 overex-tended. 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 bar-barians, who would pass it on to the new savages ... theoreti-cally. 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 re-sources 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 con-sumers and taxpayers, went under and was not to be recon-structed.

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 develop-ment 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 de-velopments. 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 de-voted 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 biographi-cal 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 con-fessed 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 for-ward 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 cer-tainly loyal, among both his agents and his hand-reared com-moners. 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 com-moner 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 civ-ilization--”

“Why?” I wondered. “Surely the rest of history has possi-bilities in proportion.”

“Yeah, and Wallis said he did mean to extend the range of his recruiters. But the difficulties of long temporal trips, lan-guage 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 every-body’s required to learn. But even so, with most I could never communicate freely. Besides accents, our minds were too dif-ferent. 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 rou-tine, 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 con-genial, however,” I said.

“A few I did,” he replied. “Wallis himself could charm as well as domineer: in his fashion, a spellbinding conversation-alist, 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 delight-ful 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.

“Espe-cially Leonce.”

They rode forth upon a holiday, soon after his arrival. He had barely gotten moved into his two-room castle apartment, and as yet had few possessions. She presented him with a bear-skin rug and a bottle of Glenlivet from downtime. He wasn’t sure if it was mere cordiality, like that which some others showed, or what. Her manner baffled him more than her di-alect. A lusty kiss, within five minutes of first sight--then casual cheerfulness, and she sat by a different man practically every mess--But Havig found too much else to occupy his mind, those early days.

The proffered concubine was not among them. He didn’t like the idea of a woman being ordered to his couch. This was an extra reason to welcome Leonce’s invitation to a picnic, when they got their regular day off.

Bandits had been thoroughly suppressed in the vicinity, and mounted patrols assured they would not slip back. It was safe to go out unescorted. The pair carried pistols only as a badge which none but their kind were allowed.

Leonce chose the route, several miles through fields dreamy beneath the morning sun, until a trail left the road for a timber -lot big enough to gladden Havig with memories of Morgan Woods. A scent of new-cut hay yielded to odors of leaf and humus. It was warm, but a breeze ruffled foliage, stroked the skin, made sun-flecks dance in shadow. Squirrels streaked and chattered over branches. Hoofs beat slowly, muscles moved at leisure between human thighs.

On the way she had eagerly questioned him. He was glad to oblige, within the broad circle drawn by discretion. What nor-mal man does not like to tell an attractive woman about him-self? Especially when to her his background is fabulous! The language fence toppled. She had not been here long either, less than a year even if temporal trips were reckoned in. But she could speak his English fairly well by now when she wasn’t excited; and his talented ear began to pick up hers.

“From the High Years!” she breathed, leaned in her stirrups and squeezed his arm. Her hands bore calluses.

“Uh, what do you mean by that?” he asked. “Shortly before the Judgment?”

“Ay-yeh, when men reached for moon an’ stars an’-an’ ever’thing.” He realized that, despite her size and brashness, she was quite young. The tilted eyes shone upon him from beneath the ruddy hair, which today hung in pigtails tied with ribbons.

When we doomed ourselves to become our own execution-ers,he thought. But he didn’t want to croak about that. “You look as if you come from a hopeful period,” he said.

She made a moue, but at once grew pensive, cradled chin in fist and frowned at her horse’s ears, until:

“Well, yes an’ no. Same’s for you, I reckon.”

“Won’t you explain? I’ve heard you’re from uptime of here, but I don’t know more.”

When she nodded, red waves of light ran over her mane. “‘Bout ‘nother hun’erd ‘n’ fifty year. Glacier Folk.”

After they entered the woods they could not ride abreast. Guiding, she led the way. He admired her shape from behind, and her grace in the saddle; and often she turned her head to flash him a grin while she talked.

Her homeland he identified as that high and beautiful coun-try which he had known as Glacier and Waterton Parks and on across the Bitterroot Range. Today her ancestors were in its eastern part, having fled from Mong who conquered the plains for their own herds and ranches. Already they were hunters and trappers more than smallhold farmers, raiders of the low-land enemy, elsewhere traders who brought furs, hides, ores, slaves in exchange for foodstuffs and finished products. Not that they were united; feuds among families, clans, tribes would rage for generations.

But as their numbers and territory expanded, a measure of organization would evolve. Leonce tried to describe: “Look, you, I’m o’ the Ranyan kin, who belong in the Wahorn troop. A kin’s a. . . a gang o’

families who share the same blood. A troop meets four times a year, under its Sherf, who leads ‘em in killin’ cattle for Gawd an’ Oktai an’ the rest o’ what folk here-aroun’ call the Those. Then they talk about things, an’ judge quarrels, an’ maybe vote on laws-the grownups who could come, men an’

women both.” Merriment pealed. “Ha! So we per-ten’. Mainly it’s to meet, gossip, dicker, swap, gorge, booze, joke, show off. . . you know?”

“I think I do,” Havig answered. Some such institution was common in primitive societies.

“In later time,” she continued, “Sherfs, an’ whatever troop people can go ‘long, been meetin’ likewise once a year, in the Congers. The Jinral runs that show: first-born to the line o’ Injun Samal, in the Rover kin who belong to no troop. It’d be a blood-flood, that many diff’rent kin together, or would’ve been at the start, ‘cep’ it’s at Lake Pendoray, which is peace-holy.”

Havig nodded. The wild men became less wild as the ad-vantages of law and order grew in their minds--no doubt after Injun Samal had knocked the heads of their chieftains together.

“When I left, things were perty quiet,” Leonce said. “The Mong were gone, an’ we traded of’ner’n we fought with the new lowlanders, who’re strong an’ rich. More ‘n’ more we were copyin’ ‘em.” She sighed. “A hun’erd years after me, I’ve learned, the Glacier Folk are in the Nor’wes’ Union. I don’t want to go back.”

“You seem to have had a rough life just the same.”

“Ay-yeh. Could’a been worse. An’ what the jabber, I got plen’y life to go. . . . Here we are.”

They tied their horses in a small meadow which fronted on a brook. Trees behind it and across the swirling, bubbling brown water stood fair against heaven; grass grew thick and soft, starred with late wildflowers. Leonce unpacked the lunch she had commanded to be prepared, a hearty enough collection of sandwiches and fruit that Havig doubted he could get around his whole share. Well, they wanted a rest and a drink first any-way. He joined her, shoulder to shoulder; they leaned back against a bole and poured wine into silver cups.

“Go on,” he reminded. “I want to hear about you.”

Her lashes fluttered. He observed the tiny freckles across cheekbones and nose. “Aw, nothin’ nex’ to you, Jack.”

“Please. I’m interested.”

She laughed for delight. Yet the tale she gave him, in matter-of-fact phrases that begged no sympathy, had its grimness.

In most respects a Glacier family, which turned such fangs to the outer world, was affectionate and close-knit. An earlier tradition of equality between the sexes had never died there, or else had revived in an age when any woman might at any mo-ment have to hunt or do battle. Of course, some specialization existed. Thus men took the heaviest manual labor, women the work demanding most patience. Men always offered the sacri-fices; but what Leonce called skuling was a prerogative of the female only, if she showed a bent for it. “Foreknowin’,” she explained. “Unravehin’ dreams. Readin’ an’ writin’. Healin’

some kinds o’ sickness. Drivin’ black fogs out o’ heads. Sendin’ ghosts back where they belong. That kind o’ job. An’ … m-m-m ... ways to trick the eye, fool the mind-you know?” But hers was no sleight-of-hand or ritual performance. No older self came to warn that child about keeping secrecy.

Her father was (would be) Wolfskin-Jem, a warrior of note. He died fighting off an attack whipped up by the Dafy kin, os-tensibly to kill the “thing” which had been born to him, actually to end a long-smoldering feud. But his wife Onda escaped with their children, to find refuge among the Donnal troop. There followed years of guerrifia war and intrigue, before the Ranyans got allies and made their crushing comeback. Leonce, as a spy through time, played a key role. Inevitably, she became the new Skula.

Among friends she was regarded initially with respect, not dread. She learned and practiced the normal skills, the normal sports. But her gift marked her out, and awe grew around her as her ability did. From Onda she learned to be sparing of it. (Also, despite stoic fatalism, it hurt to foreknow the misfor-tunes of those she cared about.) Nevertheless, having such a Skula, Wahorn waxed mighty.

And Leonce, ever more, became lonely. Her siblings mar-ried and moved away, leaving her and Onda by themselves in Jem’s old lodge. Both took lovers, as was the custom of un-wedded women, but none of Leonce’s sought marriage, if only because she seemed to be barren, and gradually they stopped seeking her at all. Former playmates sought her for help and advice, never pleasure. Reaching after comradeship, she insisted on accompanying and fighting in raids on the lowlands. The kindred of those who fell shunned her and mumbled ques-tions about why the Skula had allowed deaths that surely one of her powers could have forbidden--or did she want them--? Then Onda died.

Not much later, Eyrie scouts tracked down a far-flung rumor to the source, herself. She welcomed them with tears and jubilation. Wahorn would never see her again.

“My God.” Havig laid an arm around her. “You have had it cruel.”

“Aw, was plen’y good huntin’, skim’, feastin’, singin’, lots o’ jokin’ once I’d gotten here.” She had downed a quantity of wine. It made her breath fragrant as she nuzzled him. “I don’t sing bad. Wanna hear?”

“Sure.”

She bounded to fetch an instrument like a dwarf guitar from a saddlebag, and was back in a second. “I play a bone flute too, but can’t sing ‘long o’ that, hm? Here’s a song I made myself. I used to pass a lot o’ lone-time makin’ songs.”

A little to his astonishment, she was excellent. “-Ride w’ere strides a rattle o’ rocks, / Thunder ‘e sun down t’ dance on your lance-” What he could follow raised gooseflesh on him.

“Wow,” he said low when she had finished. “What else do you do?”

“Well, I can read an’ write, sort o’. Play chess. Rules changed some from home to here, but I take mos’

games anyhow. An’ Austin taught me poker; I win a lot. An’ I joke.”

“Hm?”

She grinned and leaned into his embrace. “Figgered we’d joke after lunch, Jack, honeybee,” she murmured. “But w’y not ‘fore an’ after? Hm-m-m-m?”

He discovered, with glee which turned to glory, that one more word would in the course of generations change its meaning.

“Yeah,” he told me. “We moved in together. It lasted till I left. Several months. Mostly they were fine. I really liked that girl.”

“Not loved, evidently,” I observed.

“N-n-no. I suppose not. Though what is love, anyway? doesn’t it have so infinitely many kinds and degrees and muta-tions and quantum jumps that--Never mind.” He stared into the night which filled the windows of the room where we sat. “We had our fights, roof-shattering quarrels she’d end by strik-ing me and taunting me because I wouldn’t strike back, till she rushed out. Touchy as a fulminate cap, my Leonce. The reconciliations were every bit as wild.” He rubbed weary eyes. “Not suitable to my temperament, eh, Doc? And I’ll admit I was jealous, my jealousy brought on a lot of the trouble. She’d slept with many agents, and commoners for that matter, before I arrived, not to mention her highland lads earlier. She went on doing it too, not often, but if she particularly liked a man, this was her way to be kind and get closer to him. I had the same freedom, naturally, with other women, but ... I ... didn’t want it.”

“Why didn’t she get pregnant by an, uh, agent?”

His mouth twitched upward. “When she heard in the Eyrie what the situation was, she insisted on being taken to the last High Years, partly for a look around, like me going to Pericles’ Greece or Michelangelo’s Italy, but also to get a reversible -sterilization shot. She wanted children in due course, when she felt ready to settle down--Glacier wives are chaste, it seems--but that wasn’t yet and meanwhile she enjoyed sex, same as she enjoyed everything else in life. Judas priest, what a lay she was!”

“If she mainly stayed with you, however, there must have been a strong attraction on both sides,” I said.

“There was. I’ve tried, as near as my privacy fetish will let me, to tell you what held me to her. From Leonce’s side … hard to be sure. How well did we actually know each other? How well have any man and woman ever?--My learning and, yes, intelligence excited her. She had a fine mind, hit-or-miss educated but fine. And, I’ll be frank, I doubtless had the top job in the Eyrie. Then, too, I suppose we felt the attraction of opposites. She called me sweet and gentle--not patronizingly, because I did do pretty well in games and exercises, being from a better-nourished era than average--but I was no stark moun-taineer or roughneck Renaissance mercenary.”

Again ghosts dwelt in his smile. “On the whole,” he said, “she gave me the second best part of my life, so far and I think probably forever. I’ll always be grateful to her, for that and for what followed.”

Havig’s suspicions developed slowly. He fought them. But piece by piece, the evidence accumulated that something was being withheld from him. It lay in the evasion of certain topics, the brushoff of certain questions, whether with Austin Cald-well’s embarrassment, or Coenraad van Heuvel’s brusque “I may not say what I have been told,” or Reuel Orrick’s chang-ing the subject and proceeding to get weeping drunk, or the mild “In God’s good time all shall be revealed to you, my son” of Padre Diego the Inquisitor, or an obscene command to shut up from various warrior types.

He was not alone in this isolation. Of those others whom he approached about it, most were complaisant, whether from prudence or indifference. But young Jerry Jennings exclaimed, “By Jove, you’re right!”

So did Leonce, in more pungent words. Then after a mo-ment she said: “Well, they can’t give us new

‘uns ever’thing in a single chaw, can they?”

“Coenraad’s as new as I am,” he protested. “Newer than you …”

Her curiosity piqued, she found her own methods of investi-gation. They were not what you’d think. She could match a tough, woman-despising man-at-arms goblet for goblet till he was sodden and pliable, while her head remained ice-clear. She could trap a sober person by an adroit question; it helped hav-ing been a shaman. And she appalled Havig by whispering to him at night, amidst schoolgirl giggles, how she had done what was strictly forbidden without permission, slipped into different periods of the Eyrie’s existence to snoop, pry, and eavesdrop.

She concluded: “Near’s I can learn, ol’ Walls’s jus’ feared you an’ ‘em like you might get mad at what some o’ the agents do in some times an’ places. Anyhow, till you’re more used to the idear.”

“I was arriving at the same notion myself,” Havig said bleakly. “I’ve seen what earlier ages are like, what personalities they breed. The travelers who respond to his come-ons, or make themselves conspicuous enough for his searchers to hear about, are apt to be the bold--which in most cases means the ruthless.

Coming here doesn’t change them.”

“Seems like orders is, you got to be led slow to the truth. I s’pose I’m only kep’ from it ‘cause of bein’

by you.” She kissed him. “‘S ‘kay, darlya.”

“You mean you’d condone robbery and--”

“Hush. We got to use who we can get. Maybe they do be rough. Your folk, they never were?”

Sickly, he remembered how ... from Wounded Knee to My Lai, and before and after ... he never disowned his nation. For where and when--if it had not abdicated all responsibility for the future-existed a better society?

(Denmark, maybe? Well, the Danes boasted about Viking ancestors, who were comfortably distant in time, but stayed notably silent about what happened during the slave uprising in the Virgin Islands, 1848, or less directly in Greenland. By 1950 or so, of course, they were free to relax into a smugness shared by the Swedes, who had not only traded with Hitler but let his troop trains roll through their land. And yet these were countries which did much good in the world.)

“‘Sides,” Leonce said candidly, “the weak go down, ‘less they’re lucky an’ got somebody strong to guard ‘em. An’ in the end, come the 01’ Man, we’re all weak.” She thought for a min-ute. “Could be,”

she mused, “was I undyin’, I’d never kill more’n a spud, an’ it only for food. But I will die. I’m in the game too. So’re you, darlya. Let’s play for the best score we can make, hm?”

He pondered long upon that.

“But if nothing else,” he told me, and I heard his anguish, “I had to try and make certain the gold was worth more than the tailings.”

“Or the end could justify the means?” I responded. “Sure, I follow. To say it never does is a counsel of perfection. In the real world, you usually must choose the lesser evil. Speaking as an old doctor—no--well, yes, I’ll admit I’ve given my share of those shots which end the incurable pain; and sometimes the choice has been harder. Go on, please do.”

“I’d been promised a survey of the Maurai epoch,” he said, “so I could satisfy myself it was, at best, a transition period, whose leaders became tyrants and tried to freeze the world. So I could agree that, when the Maurai hegemony began to crum-ble-perhaps hastened by our subversion--we ought to inter-vene, seize power, help turn men back toward achievement and advancement.”

“Not openly, surely,” I objected. “That, the sudden mass ap-pearance of time travelers, would produce headlines nobody could mistake.”

“True, true. We were to spend centuries building our strength in secret, till we were ready to act in disguise. It wasn’t made clear exactly what disguise; but it was admitted that in-formation was still sparse, because of the usual difficulties. Be-sides, I heard long philosophical arguments from guys like Padre Diego, about free will and the rest. I thought the logic stank, but said nothing.”

“Had, urn, Leonce already been taken uptime?”

“Yes. That’s why she basically favored Wallis, in spite of her occasional naughtinesses. She told me about a world where progress had been made, more and more peaceful-looking for a long span of history. Except she could not agree this was necessarily progress. Granted, that world did have fleets of efficient sailing ships and electric-powered dirigibles, ocean ranches, solar energy screens charging accumulators, widescale use of bacterial fuel cells which ran off the wastes of living organisms, new developments in both theoretical and applied science, especially biology--”

He stopped for breath and I tried to inject a light note:

“Don’t tell me your pet Valkyrie used such terms!”

“No, no.” He continued earnest. “I’m anticipating what I saw or had explained to me. Her impressions were more gen-eral. But she had that huntress and sorceress knack of close observation. She was quite able to trace the basic course of events.”

“Which was?”

“Men did not go on to any fresh peak. Instead, what they reached was a plateau, where they stayed.

The bio-technological culture didn’t improve further, it merely spread further. ”

“That was scarcely her ideal of the High Years restored, or Wallis’s of unlimited growth and accomplishment.”

“The tour skimmed fast through a later phase of what ap-peared to be retrogression and general violence. Eyrie agents don’t dare explore it in detail till they have a larger and stronger organization. Nor can they understand what lies beyond. It seems peaceful once more, but it’s not comprehensible. From the glimpse I had, I’m prepared to believe that.”

“What was it like?” I asked. “Can you tell me?”

“Very little.” His tone fell rough. “I haven’t time. Sound strange, coming from me? Well, it’s true. I’m a fugitive, re-member.”

“I gather your trip uptime did not remove your skepticism about Wallis’s intentions,” I said, more calmly than I felt. “Why?”

He ran fingers through his blond, sweat-dankened hair. “I’m a child of this century,” he replied. “Think, Doc. Recall how intelligent men like, well, Bertrand Russell or Henry Wallace took extensive tours of Stalin’s Russia, and came home to report that it did have its problems but those had been exaggerated and were entirely due to extraneous factors and a benev-olent government was coping with everything.

Don’t forget, either, the chances are that most of their guides did think this, and were in full sincerity obeying instructions to shield a for-eign visitor from what he might misinterpret.” His grin was un-pleasant. “Maybe the curse of my life is that I’ve lost the will to believe.”

“You mean,” I said, “you wondered if the world really would benefit from the rule of the Eyrie? And if maybe the Maurai were being slandered, you being shown nothing except untypi-cal badness?”

“No, not exactly that, either. Depends on interpretation and--oh, here’s a prime example.”

Not every recruit was given as thorough a tour as Havig. Plainly Wallis deemed him to be both of particular potential value and in particular need of convincing.

By doubling back and forth through chronology, he got a look at documents in ultra-secret files. (He could puzzle them out, since Ingliss was an official second language of the Fed-eration and spelling had changed less than pronunciation.) One told how scientists in Hinduraj had clandestinely devel-oped a hydrogen-fusion generator which would end Earth’s fuel shortage, and the Maurai had as clandestinely learned of it, sabotaged it, and applied such politico-economic pressures that the truth never became public.

The motive given was that this revolutionary innovation would have upset the Pax. Worse, it would have made possible a rebirth of the ancient rapacious machine culture, which the planet could not endure.

And yet ... uptime of the Maurai dominion, Havig saw huge silent devices and energies ... and men, beasts, grass, trees, stars bright through crystalline air ...

“Were the Pacific sociologists and admirals sincere in their belief?” he said in a harsh whisper. “Or were they only preserv-ing their top-dog status? Or both, or neither, or what?

“And is that farther future good? It could be a smooth-running monstrosity, you know, or it could be undermining the basis of all life’s existence, or--How could I tell?”

“What did you ask your guides?” I responded.

“Those same questions. The leader was Austin Caldwell, by the way, an honest man, hard as the Indians who once hunted his scalp but nevertheless honest.”

“What did he tell you?”

“To stop my goddam quibbling and trust the Sachem. The Sachem had done grand thus far, hadn’t he?

The Sachem had studied and thought about these matters; he didn’t pretend to know everything himself, but we’d share the wisdom he was gathering as it became ready, and he would lead us onto the right paths.”

“As for me, Austin said, I’d better remember how slow and awkward it was, getting around like this, having to return across centuries whenever we needed transportation to a new area. I’d already had as much lifespan and trouble spent on me as I was worth, anyhow at my present stage of development. If I couldn’t accept the discipline that an outfit must have which is embarked on dangerous endeavors-well, I was free to re-sign, but I’d better never show my hide near the Eyrie again.”

“What could I do? I apologized and came back with them.”

9

HE WAS GWEN a couple of days off, which he spent regaining his spirits in Leonce’s company. The period of his training and indoctrination had brought winter’s chances for old-fashioned sports outdoors and indoors. Thereafter he was assigned to re-read Wallis’s history of the future, ponder it in the light of what he had witnessed, and discuss any questions with Waclaw Krasicki, who was the most scholarly of the garrison’s current directorate.

The Sachem admitted he was far from omniscient. But he had seen more than anyone else, on repeated expeditions with differing escorts. He had ranged more widely across Earth’s surface as well as through Earth’s duration than was feasible for subordinates, transport being as limited as it was. He had conducted interviews and interrogations, which others must not lest too many events of that sort arouse somebody’s suspicions.

He knew the Eyrie would be here, under his control, for the next two centuries. He had met himself then, who told him how satisfactorily Phase One of the plan had been carried out. At that date, the vastly augmented force he was shown must evac-uate this stronghold. Nuclei of renascent civilization were spreading across all America, the Maurai were everywhere, a realm like his could no longer stay isolated nor maintain the pretense its leaders were nothing extraordinary.

A new base had been (would be) constructed uptime. He visited it, and found it totally unlike the old.

Here were modern materials, sleek construction--mostly underground--housing ad-vanced machinery, automation, a thermonuclear powerplant.

This was in the era of revolt against the Maurai. They had in the end failed to convert to their philosophy the gigantically various whole of mankind. Doubts, discontents, rebelliousness among their own people led to vacillation in foreign policy. One defiant nation redeveloped the fusion energy generator; and it made no attempt at secrecy. Old countries and alliances were disintegrating, new being born in turmoil.

“Always we need patience as well as boldness and brisk-ness,” Wallis wrote. “We will have far more resources than we do in Phase One, and far more skill in employing them. That includes the use of time travel to multiply the size of a military force, each man doubling back again and again till the opposi-tion is overwhelmed. But I am well aware this sort of thing has its limits and hazards. In no case can we hope to take over the whole world quickly. An empire which is to last thousands of years is bound to be slow in the building.”

Wasthat how Phase Two would end: with a planet once more pastoralized, in order that the overlordship of the Eyrie men, in the fabulous engines they would have developed, be unchallengeable?

Wallis believed it. He believed Phase Three would consist of the benign remolding of that society by its new masters, the creation of a wholly new kind of man. Rang-ing very far uptime, he had glimpsed marvels he could not be-gin to describe.

But he seemed vague in this part of his book. Exact informa-tion was maddeningly hard to gather. He meant to continue doing so, though more and more by proxy. In general, he recog-nized, his lifespan would be spent on Phase One. The self he met at its end was an aged man.

“Let us be satisfied to be God’s agents of redemption,” he wrote. “However, those who wish may cherish a private hope. Is it not possible that at last science will find a way to make the old young again, to make the body immortal? And by then, I have no doubt, time travel will be understood, may even be commonplace. Will not that wonderful future return and seek us out, who brought it into being, and give us our reward?”

Havig’s mouth tightened. He thought: I’ve seen what hap-pens when you try to straitjacket man into an ideology.

But later he thought: There is a lot of flexibility here. We could conceivably end more as teachers than masters.

And finally: I’ll stick around awhile, at least. The alterna-tive to serving him seems to be to let my gift go for nothing, my life go down in futility.

Krasicki summoned him. It was a steely-cold day. Sunlight shattered into brilliance on icicles hanging from turrets. Havig shivered as he crossed the courtyard to the office.

Uniformed, Krasicki sat in a room as neat and functional as a cell. “Be seated,” he ordered. The chair was hard, and squeaked.

“Do you judge yourself ready for your work?” he asked.

A thrill went through Havig. His pulses hammered. “Y-yes. Anxious to start. I--” He straightened.

“Yes.”

Krasicki shuffled some papers on his desk. “I have been watching your progress,” he said, “and considering how we might best employ you. That includes minimum risk to your-self. You have had a good deal of extratemporal experience on your own, I know, which makes you already valuable. But you’ve not hitherto been on a mission for us.” He offered a stiff little smile. “The idea which came to me springs from your spe-cial background.”

Havig somehow maintained a cool exterior.

“We must expand our capabilities, particularly recruiting,” Krasicki said. “Well, you’ve declared yourself reasonably fluent in the Greek koine. You’ve described a visit you made to Byz-antine Constantinople.

That seems like a strategic place from which to begin a systematic search through the medieval period.”

“Brilliant!” Havig cried, suddenly happy and excited. It rushed from him: “Center of civilization, everything flowed through the Golden Horn, and, and what we could do as traders--”

Krasicki lifted a palm. “Hold. Perhaps later, when we have more manpower, a wider network, perhaps then that will be worthwhile. But at present we’re too sharply limited in the man-years available to us. We cannot squander them. Never forget, we must complete Phase One by a definite date. No, Havig, what is necessary is a quicker and more direct approach.”

“What--?”

“Given a large hoard of coin and treasure, we can finance ourselves in an era when this is currency. But you know your-self how cumbersome is the transportation of goods through time. Therefore we must acquire our capital on the ... on the spot? ... yes, on the spot. And, as I said, quickly.”

Havig’s suspicions exploded in dismay. “You can’t mean by robbery!”

“No, no, no.” Krasicki shook his head. “Think. Listen. A raid on a peaceful city, massive enough to reap a useful harvest, that would be dangerously conspicuous. Could get into the his-tory books, and that could wreck our cover. Besides, it would be dangerous in itself, too. Our men would have small numbers, not overly well supplied with firearms. They would not have powered vehicles. The Byzantine army and police were usually large and well-disciplined. No, I don’t propose madness.”

“What, then?”

“Taking advantage of chaos, in order to remove what would otherwise be stolen by merciless invaders for no good pur-pose.”

Havig stared.

“In 1204,” his superior went on, “Constantinople was cap-tured by the armies of the Fourth Crusade.

They plundered it from end to end; what remained was a broken shell.” He waved an arm. “Why should we not take a share? It’s lost to the own-ers anyway.” He peered at the other’s face before adding:

“And, to be sure, we arrange compensation, give them protec-tion from slaughter and rapine, help them rebuild their lives.”

“Judas priest!” Havig choked. “A hijacking!”

Having briefed himself in the Eyrie’s large microtape library, having had a costume made and similar details taken care of, he embarked.

An aircraft deposited him near the twenty-first-century ruins of Istanbul and took off again into the air as quickly as he into the past. A lot of radioactivity lingered in these ashes. He hadn’t yet revealed the fact of his chronolog and must find his target by the tedious process of counting sun-traverses, adding an estimate of days missed, making an initial emergence, and zeroing in by trial and error.

Leonce had been furious at being left behind. But she lacked the knowledge to be useful here, except as companion and con-soler. Indeed, she would have been a liability, her extreme for-eignness drawing stares. Havig meant to pass for a Scandinavian on pilgrimage--Catholic, true, but less to be detested than a Frenchman, Venetian, Aragonese, anyone from those western Mediterranean nations which pressed wolfishly in on the dying Empire. As a Russian he would have been more welcome. But Russians were common thereabouts, and their Orthodox faith made them well understood. He dared not risk a slip.

He didn’t start in the year of the conquest. That would be too turbulent, and every outsider too suspect, for the detailed study he must make. The Crusaders actually entered Constan-tinople in 1203, after a naval siege, to install a puppet on its throne. They hung around to collect their pay before proceed-ing to the Holy Land. The puppet found his coffers empty, and temporized. Friction between East Romans and

“Franks” swelled to terrifying proportions. In January 1204, Alexius, son-in-law of the deposed Emperor, got together sufficient force to seize palace and crown. For three months he and his people strove to drive the Crusaders off. Their hope that God would somehow come to their aid collapsed when Alexius, less gal-lant than they, despaired and fled. The Crusaders marched back through opened portals. They had worked themselves into hom-icidal self-righteousness about “Greek perfidy,” and the horror began almost at once.

Havig chose spring, because it was a beautiful season, in 1195, because that was amply far downtime, for his basic job of survey. He carried well-forged documents which got him past the city guards, and gold pieces to exchange for nomismae. Al-ter finding a room in a good inn-nothing like the pigsty he’d have had to endure in the West-he started exploring.