Two in Time

by Wilson Tucker

  “I, I don’t see--” I couldn’t help stammering.

  The big woman turned to me. She smiled in tenderness for her vulnerable man. What she said was, to her, a remark of no importance: “We been told, now an’ then as it’s dyin’ a brain throws off the effect o’ that drug an’ recalls what was real.”

  16

  IN 1971, October 31 fell on a Sunday. That meant school next day. The little spooks would come thick and fast to my door if they must be early abed. I laid in ample supplies. When I was a boy, Halloween gave license for limited hell-raising, but I’m glad the custom has softened. Seeing them in their costumes brings back my own children at that same age, and Kate. When my doorbell has rung for the last time, I usually make a fire, settle with my favorite pipe and a mug of hot cider, maybe put some music she liked on the record player, look into the flames and remember. In a quiet way I am happy.

  But this day called me forth. It was cool, noisy with wind, sunshine spilling through diamond-clear air, and the trees stood scarlet, yellow, bronze, in enormous tossing rustling masses against blueness where white clouds scudded, and from a V passing high overhead drifted down a trumpet song. I went for a hike.

  On the sidewalks of Senlac, leaves capered before me, mak­ing sounds like laughter at the householders who tried to rake them into neat piles. The fields outside of town stretched bare and dark and waiting; but flocks of crows still gleaned them, until rising in a whirl of wings and raucous merriment. I left the paved county road for an old dirt one which cars don’t use much, thanks be to whatever godling loves us enough to wage his rearguard fight against this kind of Progress. In its round­about fashion it also brought me to Morgan Woods.

  I went through that delirium of color till I reached the creek. There I stood a while on the bridge, watching water gurgle above stones, a squirrel assert his dominion over an oak which must be a century old, branches toss, leaves tear loose; I lis­tened to the rush and skirl and deeper tones around me, felt air slide by like chilly liquid, drew in odors of damp and fulfill­ment; I didn’t think about anything in particular, or contem­plate, or meditate, I just was there.

  At last my bones and thin flesh reminded me they had a goodly ways to go, and I started home. Tea and scones seemed an excellent idea. Afterward I should write Bill and Judy a let­ter, make specific proposals about my visit to them this winter in California.

  I didn’t notice the car parked under the chestnut tree before I was almost upon it. Then my pulse jumped inside me. Could this be--? Not the same machine as before, but of course he always rented--I forgot whatever ache was in my legs and trotted forward.

  Jack and Leonce Havig sprang forth to greet me. We em­braced, the three of us in a ring. “Welcome, welcome!” I bab­bled. “Why didn’t you call ahead? I’d not’ve kept you waiting.”

  “That’s okay, Doc,” he answered. “We’ve been sitting and enjoying the scene.” He was mute for a second or two. “We’re taking in as much of Earth as we’re able.”

  I stepped back and considered him. He was leaner than be­fore, deep furrows beside his mouth and between his eyes, the skin sun-touched but leather-dry, the blond hair fading toward gray. Middle forties, I judged; something like a decade had gone through him in the weeks of mine since last we met.

  I turned to his wife. Erect, lithe, more full-figured than earlier but carrying it well, she showed the passage of those years less than he did. To be sure, I thought, she was younger. Yet I marked crow’s-feet wrinkles and the tiny frost-flecks in that red mane.

  “You’re done?” I asked, and shivered with something else than the weather. “You beat the Eyrie?”

  “We did, we did,” Leonce jubilated. Havig merely nodded. A starkness had entered the alloy of him. He kept an arm around her waist, however, and I didn’t suppose she could stay happy if at heart he were not too.

  “Wonderful!” I cried. “Come on in.”

  “For tea?” she laughed.

  “Lord, no! I had that in mind, but--my dear, this calls for Aalborg akvavit and Carlsberg beer, followed by Glenlivet and--Well, I’ll phone Swanson’s and have ‘em deliver gour­met items and we’ll fix the right breed of supper and--How long can you stay?”

  “Not very long, I’m afraid,” Havig said. “A day or two at most. We’ve a lot to do in the rest of our lifespans.”

  Their tale was hours in the telling. Sunset flared gold and hot orange across a greenish western heaven, beyond trees and neighbor roofs, when I had been given the skeleton of it. The wind had dropped to a mumble at my threshold. Though the room was warm enough, I felt we could use a fire and bestirred myself to fill the hearth. But Leonce said, “Let me.” Her hands had not lost their woodcraft, and she remained a pleasure to watch. Pleasure it was, also, after the terrible things I had heard, to see how his gaze followed her around.

  “Too bad you can’t forestall the founding of the Eyrie,” I said.

  “We can’t, and that’s that,” Havig replied. Slowly: “I’m not sure it is too bad, either. Would a person like me ever have had the ... determination? I started out hoping for no more than to meet my fellows. Why should I have wanted to organize them for any special purpose, until--” His voice trailed off.

  “Xenia,” I murmured. “Yes.”

  Leonce glanced around at us. “Even Xenia doesn’t tip the balance,” she said in a gentle tone. “The Crusaders would not’ve spared her. As was, she got rescued and lived nine years onward.” She smiled. “Five of them were with Jack. Oh, she had far less than luck’s given me, but she did have that.”

  I thought how Leonce was outwardly changed less than her man, and inwardly more than I had guessed.

  While Havig made no remark, I knew his wound must have healed--scarred over, no doubt, but nonetheless healed--as wounds do in every healthy body and spirit.

  “Well,” I said, trying to break free of somberness, “you did get your kind together, you did overcome the wrong and es­tablish the right--Well, I hardly expected I’d entertain a king and queen!”

  “What?” Havig blinked in surprise. “We aren’t.”

  “Eh? You rule the roost uptime, don’t you?”

  “No. For a while we did, because somebody had to. But we worked together with the wisest people we could find--not ex­clusively travelers by any means--to end this as soon as might be, and turn the military society into a free republic ... and at last into nothing more than a sort of loose guild.”

  Fire, springing aloft when she worked the bellows, cast gleams from Leonce’s eyes. “Into nothin’ less than a dream,” she said.

  “I don’t understand,” I told them, as frequently this day.

  Havig sought words. “Doc,” he said after a bit, “once we’ve left here, you won’t see us again.”

  I sat quite quietly. Sunset in the windows was giving way to dusk.

  Leonce sped to me, cast arms around my shoulders, kissed my cheek. Her hair was fragrant, with a touch of smokiness from the little chuckling flames. “No, Doc,” she said. “Not ‘cause you’ll die soon.”

  “I don’t want--” I began.

  “Ay-yeh.” Barbarian bluntness spoke. “You said you don’t want to know the date on your tombstone. An’ we’re not about to tell you, either. But damn, I will say you’re good for a fair while yet!”

  “The thing is,” Havig explained in his awkward fashion, “we, Leonce and I, we’ll be leaving Earth. I doubt we’ll come back.”

  “What was the good of time travel, ever?” he demanded when we could discourse of fundamentals.

  “Why, well, uh--” I floundered.

  “To control history? You can’t believe a handful of travelers would be able to do that. Walls believed it, but you can’t, I’m certain. Nor do you believe they should.”

  “Well ... history, archeology, science--”

  “Agreed, almost, that there’s no such thing as too much knowledge. Except that fate ought not to be foreknown. That’s the death of hope. And learning is an esthetic experien
ce--or ecstatic--but if we stop there, aren’t we being flat-out selfish? Don’t you feel knowledge should be used?”

  “Depends on the end, Jack.”

  Leonce, seated beside him, stirred in the yellow glow of a single shaded lamp, the shadow-restless many-hued sparkle from my fireplace. “For us,” she said, “the end is goin’ to the stars. That’s what time travel is good for.”

  Havig smiled. His manner was restrained, but the same eager­ness vibrated: “Why did you imagine we went on to build the--Phase Two complex--what we ourselves call Polaris House? I told you we don’t care to rule the world. No, Polaris House is for research and development. Its work will be done when the first ships are ready.”

  “An’ they will be,” Leonce lilted. “We’ve seen.”

  Passion mounted in Havig. He leaned forward, fingers clenched around the glass he had forgotten he grasped, and said:

  “I haven’t yet mastered the scientific or engineering details. That’s one reason we must go back uptime. Physicists talk about a mathematical equivalence between traveling into the past and flying faster than light. They hope to develop a theory which’ll show them a method. Maybe they’ll succeed, maybe they won’t. I know they won’t in Polaris House, but maybe at last, in Earth’s distant future or on a planet circling another sun. But it doesn’t ultimately matter. A ship can go slower than light if people like us are the crew. You follow me? Her voyage might last cen­turies. But to us, moving uptime while she moves across space, it’s hours or minutes.

  “Our children can’t do the same. But they’ll be there. We’ll have started man on his way to infinity.”

  I stared past him. In the windows, the constellations were hidden by flamelight. “I see,” I answered softly. “A tremendous vision for sure.”

  “A necessary one,” Havig replied. “And without us--and thus, in the long view, without our great enemy--the thing would never have been done. The Maurai might’ve gathered the re­sources to revive space exploration, at the height of their power. But they did not. Their ban on enormous energy outlays was good at first, yes, vital to saving this planet. At last, though, like most good things, it became a fetish. ... Undoubtedly the culture which followed them would not have gone to space.”

  “We did,” Leonce exulted. “The Star Masters are our people.”

  “And a lifebringer to Earth,” Havig added. “I mean, a civili­zation which just sat down and stared at its own inwardness--how soon would it become stagnant, caste-ridden, poor, and nasty? You can’t think unless you have something to think about. And this has to come from outside. doesn’t it? The uni­verse is immeasurably larger than any mind.”

  “I’ve gathered,” I said, my words covering awe, “that that future society welcomes the starfarers.”

  “Oh, yes, oh, yes. More for their ideas than for material goods. Ideas, arts, experience, insights born on a thousand dif­ferent worlds, out of a thousand different kinds of being--and Earth gives a fair return. It is well to have those mystics and philosophers. They think and feel, they search out meanings, they ask disturbing questions--” Havig’s voice lifted. “I don’t know where the communion between them and us will lead. Maybe to a higher state of the soul? I do believe the end will be good, and this is the purpose we time travelers are born for.”

  Leonce brought us partway back to our bodies. “Mainly,” she laughed, “we ‘spec’ to have a hooraw o’ fun. Climb down off your prophetic broomstick, Jack, honeybee, an’ pay atten­tion to your drink.”

  “You two intend, then, to be among the early explorers?” I asked redundantly.

  “We’ve earned the right,” she said.

  “Uh-pardon me, none of my business, but if your children cannot inherit your gift--”

  Wistfulness touched her. “Maybe we’ll find a New Earth to raise them on. We’re not too old.” She regarded her man’s sharp-edged profile. “Or maybe we’ll wander the universe till we die. That’d be enough.”

  Silence fell. The clock on my mantel ticked aloud and the wind outside flowed past like a river.

  The doorbell pealed. I left my chair to open up for a glimpse of Aquila. Three small figures were on the stoop, a clown, a bear, an astronaut. They held out paper bags. “Trick or treat!” they chanted. “Trick or treat!”

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

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

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

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

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

  How did the race of time travelers come to be?

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

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

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

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

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