Two in Time

by Wilson Tucker

  “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 produc­tion. 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 sus­pect 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 digres­sion to me. Take Meg, for instance. I was in Elizabethan Lon­don. 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.” (An­other 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 what­ever 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 meaning­less 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 re­turn, as if out of night, and for hours I would again be dom­inated 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 in­tellect ranged widely, though it’s clear that history and anthro­pology 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 nat­ural 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 prac­tice the obstacles were too much. Besides language, custom, and law, the famous were hedged off by being busy, conspicu­ous, 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 lib­eralized 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 be­tween his acquiring the techniques and resources to make them effective, and his development of a search plan for fellow mu­tants. “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 al­ready 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 in­terested 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 peo­ple whom he said were more real than most of his own gen­eration, 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 over­much 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 trans­portation 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 un­ambiguous 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 Frank­lin Havig, collateral descendant, was contacted in 1954, every­thing 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 ac­tion, 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, with­out fuss, he rescued quite a few individuals; and it is a fact that he was a substantial contributor to the better conserva­tionist 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--watch­ing out for radioactivity and a lot else--and who in the immedi­ate 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, insecti­cide 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 pro­duce ... 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. Es­pecially 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. Hop­ing 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 dis­tressed minorities, and give them enough, to bring on revolt without really helping them; and the revolt will bring on re­action, 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 wel­come 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 shor­ing 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 lan­guage in the future; there/then he was also often a virtual deaf­mute.

  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 Pa­cific Ocean peoples dominate the world, speaking the damned­est 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.”