There Will Be Time

by Poul Anderson

  THERE WILL BE TIME

  Poul Anderson

  [19 aug 2001 - proofread and re-released for #bookz - v1]

  BE AT EASE. I’m not about to pretend this story is true. First, that claim is a literary convention which went out with Theo­dore Roosevelt of happy memory. Second, you wouldn’t be­lieve 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 ex­pense 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 drift­wood 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 memo­ries 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 pri­vate 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 be­hind heavy glasses, clothes and white hair equally rumpled. His speech was slow, punctuated by gestures of a pipe if he was en­joying his twice-a-day smoke. His manner was relaxed and ami­able. 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 Phila­delphia 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 edi­torship 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 Episco­palian and principally Democratic. He had just finished his pre­medical 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 long­time fiancée.

  I think he was always restless. However, the work of gen­eral practitioners was far from dull-before progress con­demned 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 re­marked 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 grim­ness 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 ge­netic 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 re­luctant 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 hos­pital, 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 sta­tion. 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 ei­ther 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 Washing­ton, 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 climbe
d to his feet. He was not a demonstrative man, but the question trem­bled 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 after­ward.

  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 ex­cuses 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 addi­tion, he must coach for track. Slim, sharp-featured, the shy­ness 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. Elea­nor 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 hypo­crites. 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, es­pecially 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 paper­work-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 dim­ness of her home, she embraced me and shivered. “Am I going crazy, Bob?” she gasped, over and over. “Tell me I’m not go­ing 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, no­body 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 im­plausible. 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 minia­ture desk drawing pictures, or in the yard modeling clay ani­mals, 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 neighbor­hood 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 shadow­ing 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 hist
ories 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 out­grown.”

  “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, prac­ticing 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 fan­tasy. But these journeys with his ‘uncle’ . . . they’re different. What snatches I’ve caught are, well, realistic. A visit to an In­dian camp, for instance. They weren’t storybook or movie In­dians. 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.’”