Two in Time

by Wilson Tucker

  “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 be­hind; the force acts, or tries to act, on everything in direct con­tact 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 experi­mented. Traveling through time, I can move around meanwhile in space if I want. That’s how I managed to appear next to my­self. 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 step­ping 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 con­crete, 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? Prob­ably I needed a while to realize I was unique, and the realiza­tion 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 dis­guised 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 par­ticularly 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 sup­pose?”

  “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 out­side 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 fu­ture?”

  “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 ab­sence 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 Ave­nue 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 regis
tered 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 go­ing on, and nobody else’s. For months I was among the radi­cals. Hand-to-mouth odd-job existence, demonstrations, pot, dirty pad, unbathed girls, the works.”

  “Your writing here doesn’t seem favorable to that,” I ob­served.

  “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 noth­ing 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, think­ing 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 mo­tions.”

  “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 step­son 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, be­ing 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 over­night 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 man­ner 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 mini­mum 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 vaccina­tion, language, transportation, money, law, custom--filth, ver­min, 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 experi­ences. How much can you learn in a totally strange environ­ment, when you can barely speak a word and are liable to be arrested on suspicion before you can swap for a suit of con­temporary 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 sen­sation of the age is no fit fate for any human. In this case, imag­ine 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 un­stoppable 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 time thinking 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 be­wilderment. 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 Renais­sance 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 al­lowed 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 op­erates 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.”