Two in Time

by Wilson Tucker

  Havig tensed.

  “Your chronolog gadget is an example of twentieth-century thinking,” I continued. “By the way, what became of it?”

  “The one I had got left in Pera when . . . when I was cap­tured,” he replied. “I imagine whoever acquired the house later threw it out or broke it apart for junk. Or maybe feared it might be magical and heaved it in the Horn. I’ve had new ones made.”

  A thrill passed through me, and I began to understand Le­once the huntress a little. “The men who took you, even a fairly sophisticated man like that Krasicki, did not think to bring it along for examination,” he said. “Which illustrates my point nicely. Look, Jack, every time traveler hits the bloody nuisance of targeting on a desired moment. To you, it was a matter of course to consider the problem, decide what would solve it--an instrument--and find a company which was able to accept your commission to invent the thing for you.”

  I exhaled a blue plume. “It never occurred to Wallis,” I finished. “To any of his gang. That approach doesn’t come natural to them.”

  Silence descended anew.

  “Well,” Havig said, “I am the latest-born traveler they found prior to the Judgment.”

  “Uh-huh,” I nodded. “Take advantage of that. You’ve made a beginning, in your research beyond the Maurai period. It may seem incredible to you that Wallis’s people haven’t done the same kind of in-depth study. Remember, though, he’s from a time when foresight was at a minimum--a time when every­body assumed logging and strip-mining could go on forever. It was the century of Clerk Maxwell, yes--I’m thinking mainly of his work on what we call cybernetics--and Babbage and Peirce and Ricardo and Clausewitz and a slew of other thinkers whom we’re still living off of. But the seeds those minds were plant­ing hadn’t begun to sprout and flower. Anyhow, like many time travelers, it seems, Wallis didn’t stay around to share the ex­periences of his birth era. No, he had to skite off and become the almighty superman.

  “Jack, from the painfully gathered learning of the race, you can profit.”

  Leonce seemed puzzled. Well, my philosophy was new to her too. The man had grown altogether absorbed. “What do you propose?” he asked low.

  “Nothing specifically,” I answered. “Everything generally. Concentrate more on strategy than tactics. Don’t try to cam­paign by your lone selves against an organization; no, start a better outfit.”

  “Where are the members coming from?”

  “Everywhere and everywhen. Walls showed a degree of imagination in his recruiting efforts, but his methods were crude, his outlook parochial. For instance, surely more trav­elers are present that day in Jerusalem. His agents latched onto those who were obvious, and quit. There must be ways to at­tract the notice of the rest.”

  “Well ... m-m-m ... I had been giving thought to that myself.” Havig cupped his chin. “Like maybe passing through the streets, singing lines from the Greek mass-”

  “And the Latin. You can’t afford grudges.” I gripped rny pipe hard. “Another point. Why must you stay this secretive? Oh, yes, your ‘uncle’ self was right, as far as he went. A child revealed to be a time traveler would’ve been in a fairly horrible bind. But you’re not a child any longer.

  “Moreover, I gather, Wallis considers ordinary persons a lesser breed. He’s labeled them ‘commoners,’ hasn’t he? He keeps them in subordinate positions. All he’s accomplished by that has been to wall their brains off from him.

  “I’ve done a little quiet sounding out, at places like Holberg College and Berkeley. There are good, responsible scholars at Berkeley! I can name you men and women who’ll accept the fact of what you are, and respect your confidence, and help you, same as me.”

  “For why?” Leonce wondered.

  Havig sprang from his chair and stormed back and forth across the room as he gave her the blazing answer which had broken upon him: “To open the world, darlya! Our kind can’t be born only in the West. That doesn’t make sense. China, Ja­pan, India, Africa, America before the white man came--we’ve got the whole of humanity to draw on! And we”--he stuttered in his eagerness--”we can leave the bad, take the good, find the young and, dammit, bring them up right. My God! Who cares about a wretched gang of bullies uptime? We can make the future!”

  It was not that simple, of course. In fact, they spent more than ten years of their lifespans in preparing. True, these in­cluded their private concerns. When I saw them next (after his one telephone call), briefly in March, they behaved toward each other like any happily long-married couple. Nonetheless, that was a strenuous, perilous decade.

  Even more was it a period which demanded the hardest thought and the subtlest realism. The gathering of Havig’s host would have used every year that remained in his body, and still been incomplete, had he not gone about it along the lines I suggested. Through me he met those members of think tanks and faculties I had bespoken. After he convinced them, they in turn introduced him to chosen colleagues, until he had an exceedingly high-powered advisory team. (Several have later quit their careers, to go into different work or retirement. It puzzles their associates.) At intervals I heard about their prog­ress. The methods they developed for making contact--through much of the history of much of the world--would fill a book. Most failed; but enough succeeded.

  For example, a searcher looked around, inquired discreetly around, after people who seemed to have whatever kind of unusualness was logical for a traveler residing in the given mi­lieu. A shaman, village witch, local monk with a record of help­ing those who appealed to him or her by especially practical miracles. A peasant who flourished because somehow he never planted or harvested so as to get caught by bad weather. A merchant who made correspondingly lucky investments in ships, when storms and pirates caused heavy attrition. A war­rior who was an uncatchable spy or scout. A boy who was said to counsel his father. Once in a while, persons like these would turn out to be the real thing ... Then there were ways of attracting their heed, such as being a wandering fortuneteller of a peculiar sort …

  To the greatest extent possible, the earliest traveler recruits were trained into a cadre of recruiters, who wasted no energy in being uptime overlords. Thus the finding of folk could snow­ball. Here, too, methods were available beyond the purview of a nineteenth-century American who regarded the twentieth as decadent and every other culture as inferior. There are mod­ern ways to get a new language into a mind fast. There are an­cient ways, which the West has neglected, for developing body and senses. Under the lash of wars, revolutions, invasions, and occupations, we have learned how to form, discipline, protect, and use a band of brothers--systematically.

  Above everything else, perhaps, was today’s concept of work­ing together. I don’t mean its totalitarian version, for which Jack Havig had total loathing, or that “togetherness,” be it in a corporation or a commune, which he despised. I mean an enlightened pragmatism that rejects self-appointed aristocrats, does not believe received doctrine is necessarily true, stands ready to hear and weigh what anyone has to offer, and main­tains well-developed channels to carry all ideas to the leader­ship and back again.

  Our age will go down in fire. But it will leave gifts for which a later mankind will be grateful.

  Now finding time travelers was a barebones beginning. They had to be organized. How? Why should they want to leave home, accept restrictions, put their lives on the line? What would keep them when they grew tired or bored or fearful or lonesome for remembered loves?

  The hope of fellowship with their own kind would draw many, of course. Havig could gain by that, as Walls had done. It was insufficient, though. Wallis had a variety of further ap­peals. Given the resources of his group, a man saw the world brought in reach and hardly a limit put on atavistic forms of self-indulgence. To the intelligent, Wallis offered power, gran­deur, a chance--a duty, if you let yourself be convinced, which is gruesomely easy to do--to become part of destiny.

  Then there were those who wanted to learn, or be at the high­
est moments of mankind’s achievement, or simply and hon­orably enjoy adventuring. To them Havig could promise a better deal.

  But this would still not give motive to wage war on the Eyrie. Monstrous it might be, the average traveler would concede; yet most governments, most institutions have in their own ways been monstrous. What threat was the Sachem?

  “Setting up indoctrination courses--” Havig sighed to me. “A nasty word, that, isn’t it? Suggests browbeating and inces­sant propaganda. But honest, we just want to explain. We try to make the facts clear, so our recruits can see for themselves how the Eyrie is by its nature unable to leave them be. It’s not easy. You got any ideas on how to show a samurai of the Kamakura Period that the will of anybody to rule the world, anybody whatsoever, is a direct menace to him? I’m here mainly to see what my anthropologists and semanticists have come up with. Meanwhile, well, okay, we’ve got other pitches too, like primitive loyalty to chief and comrades, or the fun of a good scrap, or ... well, yes, the chance to get rich, in permissible ways. And, for the few, a particular dream--”

  At that, I envied him the challenge of his task. Imagine: finding, and afterward forging mutuality between a Confucian teacher, a boomerang-wielding kangaroo hunter, a Polish schoolboy, a medieval Mesopotamian peasant, a West African ironsmith, a Mexican vaquero, an Eskimo girl ... The very effort to assemble that kaleidoscope may have been his greatest strength. Such people did not need to learn much about the Eyrie before they realized that, for most of them as time trav­elers, Havig’s was the only game in town.

  They got this preliminary training in scattered places and eras. Afterward they were screened for trustworthiness; the means were a weird and wonderful potpourri. The dubious cases--a minor percentage--were brought to their home loca­tions, guided to their home years, paid off, and bidden farewell. They had not received enough information about the enemy to contact it; generally they lived thousands of miles away.

  The majority were led to the main base, for further training and for the work of building it and its strength.

  This was near where the Eyrie would be, but immensely far downtime, in the middle Pleistocene. That precaution created problems of its own. The temporal passage was lengthy for the traveler, requiring special equipment as well as intermediate resting places. Caches must be established en route, and every­thing ferried piece by piece, stage by slow stage. But the se­curity was worth this, as was the stronghold itself. It stood on a wooded hill, and through the valley below ran a mighty river which Leonce told me shone in the sunlight like bronze.

  The search methods had discovered members of both sexes in roughly equal numbers. Thus a community developed-kept childless, except for its youngest members, nevertheless a com­munity which found an identity, laws and precedences and ceremonies and stories and mysteries, in a mere few years, and was bound together by its squabbles as well as its loves. And this was Havig’s real triumph. The Sachem had created an army; the man sworn to cast him down created a tribe.

  I heard these things when Havig and Leonce paid me that March visit. They were then in the midst of the work. Not till All Hallows’ Eve did I learn the next part of their story.

  15

  THE SHADOWS which were time reeled past. They had form and color, weight and distances, only when one emerged for food or sleep or a hurried gulp of air. Season after season blew across the hills; glaciers from the north ground heights to plains and withdrew in a fury of snowstorms, leaving lakes where masto­don drank; the lakes thickened to swamps and finally to soil on whose grass fed horses and camels, whose treetops were grazed by giant sloths, until the glaciers returned; mild weather re­newed saw those earlier beasts no more, but instead herds of bison which darkened the prairie and filled it with an earth­quake drumroll of hoofs; the pioneers entered, coppery-skinned men who wielded flint-tipped spears; again was a Great Winter, again a Great Springtime, and now the hunters had bows, and in this cycle forest claimed the moraines, first willow and larch and scrub oak, later an endless cathedral magnificence--and suddenly that was gone, in a blink, the conquerors were there, grubbing out a million stumps which the axes had left, plowing and sowing, reaping and threshing, laying down trails of iron from which at night could be heard a rush and a long-drawn wail strangely like mastodon passing by.

  Havig’s group stopped for a last rest in the house of a young farmer who was no traveler but could be trusted. They needed it for a depot, too. It would have been impossible to go this far through time on this point of Earth’s surface without miniature oxygen tanks. Otherwise, they’d more than once have had to stop for air when the country lay drowned, or been unable to because they were under a mile of ice. Those were strong barriers which guarded the secret of their main base from the Eyrie.

  The equipment absorbed most of their mass-carrying ability. Here was a chance to get weapons.

  Lantern light glowed mellow on an oilcloth-covered kitchen table, polished iron and copper, stove where wood crackled to keep warm a giant pot of coffee. Though the nearest neigh­bors were half an hour’s horseback ride straight across the fields, and screened off by trees, Olav Torstad must always receive his visitors after dark. At that, he was considered odd for the occasional midnight gleam in his windows. But he was otherwise a steady fellow; most likely, the neighbors decided, now and then a bachelor would have trouble sleeping.

  “You’re already fixing to go again?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Havig said. “We’ve ground to cover before dawn, remember.”

  Torstad stared at Leonce. “Sure don’t seem right, a lady bound for war.”

  “Where else but by her man?” she retorted. With a grin:

  “Jack couldn’t talk me out of it either. Spare your breath.”

  “Well, different times, different ways,” Torstad said, “but I’m glad I was born in 1850.” In haste: “Not that I don’t ap­preciate everything you’ve done for me.”

  “You’ve done more for us,” Havig answered. “We grub-staked you to this place strictly because we needed something of the kind close to where the Eyrie will be. You assumed the ongoing risk, and the burden of keeping things hidden, and--No matter. Tonight it ends.” He constructed a smile. “You can get rid of what stuff we leave behind, marry that girl you’re engaged to, and live the rest of your days at peace.”

  For a few seconds, behind Torstad’s eyes, something rattled its chains. “At peace?” Abruptly: “You will come back, won’t you? Tell me what happened? Please!”

  “If we win,” Havig said, and thought how many such prom­ises he had left, how many more his followers must have left, across the breadth and throughout the duration of the space­time they had roved. He jumped from his chair. “Come on, let’s get the military gear for our men. If you’ll hitch up a team, we’d like a wagon ride to the site. Let’s move!”

  Others were moving. They are. They will be.

  It was no enormous host; it totaled perhaps three thousand. Some two-thirds were women, the very young, the old, the handicapped: time porters, nurses, whatever kind of noncom­batants were required. But this was still too many to gather at one intermediate station, making rumors and traces which an enemy might come upon. Simply bringing them all to Amer­ica had been an endlessly complex problem in logistics and secrecy.

  Beneath huge trees, in a year before Columbus, some took a deer path. The Dakotan who guided them would have become the next medicine man of his tribe, had a patient wanderer not found him. The chronolog he carried, like other leaders else­where and elsewhen, would identify an exact place before he set it for an equally precise instant.

  Once during the eighteenth century, certain coureurs de bois made rendezvous and struck off into the wilderness.

  Not quite a hundred years after, the captain of a group ex­plained to what few white people he met that the government in Washington wished a detailed survey prior to establishing a territory.

  Later it became common if unofficial knowledge that you saw Negroes hereabouts
—briefly--because this was a station on the Underground Railway.

  In the 1920’s one did not question furtive movements and gatherings. It was common if unofficial knowledge that this was a favorite route for importers of Canadian whiskey.

  Later an occasional bus marked CHARTERED passed through the area, setting off passengers and baggage in the middle of the night, then proceeding with its sign changed to NOT IN SERVICE.

  Toward the close of the century, a jumbo jet lumbered aloft. The motley lot of humans aboard drew no special attention. “International Friendship Tours” were an almost everyday thing, as private organizations and subdivisions of practically every government snatched at any imaginable means to help halt the dream-dance down to catastrophe.

  Well afterward, a fair-sized band of horsemen trotted through the region. Their faces and accouterments said they were Mong. The invaders never did establish themselves in these parts, so their early scouts were of no importance.

  Havig and his half dozen flashed back into normal time.

  His chronolog had winked red an hour before sunrise, on New Year’s Day in the one hundred and seventy-seventh year of the Eyrie’s continuous existence. The sky loomed darkling to the west, where stars and planets stood yet aglow, but ice­gray in the east. Shadowless light brought forth every brick of walls and keep and towers; it glimmered off window glass and whitened frost upon courtyard paving. Enormous stillness en­closed the world, as if all sound had frozen in that cold which bit lungs and smoked from nostrils.

  This band had rehearsed what they must do often enough. Nonetheless his glance swept across them, these his troopers chosen for the heart of the mission.

  They were dressed alike, in drab-green parkas, padded trousers tucked into leather boots, helmets and weapons and equipment-loaded belts. He knew their faces better, their very gaits, after lifespan years of comradeship: Leonce, ablaze with eagerness, a stray ruddy lock crossing the brow he had kissed; Chao, Indhlovu, Gutierrez, Bielawski, Maatuk ibn Nahal. For a pulsebeat their hands remained clasped together. Then they let go. He set down his chronolog. They readied their guns ere the sentries at the battlements should spy them and cry out.