“I think,” I said, “it’d be best if he took off on his own.”
“Bob, he’s barely eighteen,” she protested.
He was at least twenty-one, probably more, I knew. “Old enough to join the service.” He’d registered in the lawful manner on his birthday. “That’ll give him a chance to find himself. It’s possible to be drafted by request, so as to be in for the minimum period. The board will oblige if I speak to ‘em.”
“Not before he’s graduated!”
I understood her dismay and disappointment. “He can take correspondence courses, Ellie. Or the services offer classes, which a bright lad like Jack can surely get into. I’m afraid this is our best bet.”
He had already agreed to the idea. A quick uptime hop showed him he would be posted to Europe. “I can explore a lot of history,” he said; then, chill: “Besides, I’d better learn about weapons and combat techniques. I damn near got killed in the twenty-first century. Couple members of a cannibal band took me by surprise, and if I hadn’t managed to wrench free for an instant--”
The Army was ill-suited to his temperament, but he stuck out basic training, proceeded into electronics, and on the whole gained by the occasion. To be sure, much of that was due to his excursions downtime. They totaled a pair of extra years.
His letters to me could only hint at this, since Kate would read them too. It was a hard thing for me, not to open for her the tremendous fact, not to have her beside me when at last he came home and through hour upon hour showed me his notes, photographs, memories.
(Details were apt to be unglamorous--problems of vaccination, language, transportation, money, law, custom--filth, vermin, disease, cruelty, tyranny, violence--“Doc, I’d never dreamed how different medieval man was. Huge variations from place to place and era to era, yeah, but always the … Orientalness? ... no, probably it’s just that the Orient has changed less.” However, he had watched Caesar’s legions in triumph through Rome, and the greyhound shapes of Viking craft dancing over Oslo Fjord, and Leonardo da Vinci at work.
He’d not been able to observe in depth. In fact, he was maddened by the superficial quality of almost all his experiences. How much can you learn in a totally strange environment, when you can barely speak a word and are liable to be arrested on suspicion before you can swap for a suit of contemporary clothes? Yet what would I not have given to be there too?)
How it felt like a betrayal of Kate, not telling her! But if Jack could keep silence toward his mother, I must toward my wife. His older persona had been, was, would be right in stamping upon the child a reflex of secrecy.
Consider the consequences, had it become known that one man--or one little boy--can swim through time. To be the sensation of the age is no fit fate for any human. In this case, imagine as well the demands, appeals, frantic attempts by the greedy, the power-hungry, the ideology-besotted, the bereaved, the frightened to use him, the race between governments to sequester or destroy him who could be the ultimate spy or unstoppable assassin. If he survived, and his sanity did, he would soon have no choice but to flee into another era and there keep his talent hidden.
No, best wear a mask from the beginning.
But then what use was the fantastic gift?
“Toward the end of my hitch, I spent more time thinking than roving,” he said.
We’d taken my boat out on Lake Winnego. He’d come home, discharged, a few weeks earlier, but much remained to tell me. This was the more true because his mother needed his moral support in her divorce from Birkelund, her move away from scenes which were now painful. He’d matured further, not only in the flesh. Two of my years ago, a man had confronted me: but a very young man, still groping his way out of hurt and bewilderment. The Jack Havig who sat in the cockpit today was in full command of himself.
I shifted my pipe and put down the helm. We came about in a heel and swoosh and rattle of boom. Springtime glittered on blue water; sweetness breathed from the green across fields and trees, from apple blossoms and fresh-turned earth. The wind whooped. It was cool and a hawk rode upon it.
“Well, you had plenty to think about,” I answered.
“For openers,” he said, “how does time travel work?”
“Tell me, Mr. Bones, how does time travel work?”
He did not chuckle. “I learned a fair amount of basic physics in the course of becoming an electronics technician. And I read a lot on my own, including stuff I went uptime to consult- books, future issues of Scientific American and Nature, et cetera. All theory says that what I do is totally impossible. It starts by violating the conservation of energy and goes on from there.”
“E put si muove.”
“Huh? . . . Oh. Yeah. Doc, I studied the Italian Renaissance prior to visiting it, and discovered Galileo never did say that. Nor did he ever actually drop weights off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Well.” He sprawled back on the bench and opened another bottle of beer for each of us. “Okay. So there are hookers in the conservation of energy that official science doesn’t suspect. Mathematically speaking, world lines are allowed to have finite, if not infinite discontinuities, and to be multi-valued functions. In many ways, time travel is equivalent to faster-than-light travel, which the physicists also declare is impossible.”
I watched my tobacco smoke stream off on the breeze. Wave-lets smacked. “You’ve left me a few light-years behind,” I said. “I get nothing out of your lecture except an impression that you don’t believe anything, uh, supernatural is involved.”
He nodded. “Right. Whatever the process may be, it operates within natural law. It’s essentially physical. Matter-energy relationships are involved. Well, then, why can I do it, and nobody else? I’ve been forced to conclude it’s a peculiarity in my genes.”
“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 poin
t 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.
There Will Be Time Page 5
