He frowned. “You’re right. The trouble is, I can’t think what to tell you.”
“The truth, maybe?”
“Doc, you don’t want that. Believe me, you don’t.”
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty-” Why did Keats hand the world that particular piece of BS? He’d studied medicine; he knew better. “Jack, I’ll bet you ten dollars I can relate a dozen true stories which’ll shock you worse than you could ever shock me.”
“I won’t bet,” he said harshly. “It wouldn’t be fair to you.”
I waited.
He tossed off his drink and held out the glass. In the yellow lamplight, gaunt against the winter window, his face congealed with resolution. “Give me a refill, please,” he said, “and I will tell you.”
“Great.” The bottle shook a bit in my grasp as the liquor clucked forth. “I swear to respect any confidentiality.”
He laughed, a rattling noise. “No need for oaths, Doc. You’ll keep quiet.”
I waited.
He sipped, stared past me, and murmured: “I’m glad. It’s been such a burden, through my whole life, never to share the the fact of what I am.”
I streamed smoke from my lips and waited.
He said in a rush, “For the most part I was in the San Francisco area, especially Berkeley. For more than a year.”
My fingers clenched on the pipe bowl.
“Uh-huh.” He nodded. “I came home after a month’s absence. But I’d spent about eighteen months away. From the fall of 1969 to the end of 1970.”
After a moment, he added: “That’s not a whole year and a half. But you’ve got to count my visits to the further future.”
Steam hissed in the radiator. I saw a sheen of sweat on the forehead of my all but adopted son. He gripped his tumbler as tightly as I my pipe. Yet in spite of the tension in him, his voice remained level.
“You have a time machine?” I breathed.
He shook his head. “No. I move around in time by myself. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know.”
His smile jerked forth. “Sure, Doc,” he said. “Paranoia. The delusion that I’m something special in the cosmos. Okay, I’ll give you a demonstration.” He waved about. “Come here, please. Check. Make certain I’ve put no mirrors, trapdoors, gimmickry in your own familiar office.”
Numbly, I felt around him, though it was obvious he’d had no chance to bring along, or rig, any apparatus.
“Satisfied?” he asked. “Well, I’ll project myself into the future. How far? Half an hour? No, too long for you to sit here gnawing your pipe. Fifteen minutes, then.” He checked his watch against my wall clock. “It’s 4:17, agreed? I’ll reappear at 4:30, plus or minus a few seconds.” Word by word: “Just make sure nobody or nothing occupies this chair at that period. I can’t emerge in the same space as another solid body.”
I stood back and trembled. “Go ahead, Jack,” I said through the thuttering in my veins.
Tenderness touched him. He reached to squeeze my hand. “Good old Doc. So long.”
And he was gone. I heard a muted whoosh of air rushing in where he had sat, and nothing else. The chair stood empty. I felt, and no form occupied it.
I sat down once more at my desk, and stared for a quarter of an hour which I don’t quite remember.
Abruptly, there he was, seated as he had been.
I struggled not to faint. He hurried to me. “Doc, here, take it easy, everything’s okay, here, have a drink--”
Later he gave me a one-minute show, stepping back from that near a future to stand beside himself, until the first body vanished.
Night gathered.
“No, I don’t know how it works,” he said. “But then, I don’t know how my muscles work, not in the way you know--and you’ll agree your scientific information is only a glimmer on the surface of a mystery.”
“How does it feel?” I asked, and noticed in surprise the calm which had come upon me. I’d been stunned longer on Hiroshima Day. Well, maybe the bottom of my mind had already guessed what Jack Havig was.
“Hard to describe.” He frowned into darkness. “I . . . will myself backward or forward in time . . . the way I will to, oh, pick my glass off your desk. In other words, I order whatever-it-is to move me, the same as we order our fingers to do something, and it happens.”
He searched for words before he went on: “I’m in a shadow world while I time-travel. Lighting varies from zero to gray. If I’m crossing more than one day-and-night period, it flickers. Objects look dim, foggy, flat. Then I decide to stop, and I stop, and I’m back in normal time and solidness. . . . No air reaches me on my way. I have to hold my breath, and emerge occasionally for a lungful if the trip takes that long in my personal time.”
“Wait,” I said. “If you can’t breathe en route, can’t touch anything or be touched, can’t be seen-how come you have the feeble vision you do? How can light affect you?”
“I don’t know either, Doc. I’ve read physics texts, however, trying to get a notion about that as well as everything else. And, oh, it must be some kind of force which moves me. A force operating in at least four dimensions, nevertheless a force. If it has an electromagnetic component, I can imagine how a few photons might get caught in the field of it and carried along. Matter, even ionized matter, has rest mass and therefore can’t be affected in this fashion. . . . That’s a layman’s guess. I wish I dared bring a real scientist in on this.”
“Your guess is too deep for me already, friend. Uh, you said a crossing isn’t instantaneous, as far as you yourself are concerned. How long does it take? How many minutes per year, or whatever?”
“No particular relationship. Depends on me. I feel the effort I’m exerting, and can gauge it roughly. By, well, straining, I can move . . . faster . . . than otherwise. That leaves me exhausted, which seems to me to prove that time traveling uses body energy to generate and apply the thrusting force. . . . It’s never taken more than a few minutes, according to my watch; and that was a trip through several centuries.”
“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 y
ou,” 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 registered 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 no
t-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.
There Will Be Time Page 4
