There Will Be Time

13

A PENCIL FLASHLIGHT came to life. Its beam probed until the iron sheened on Havig’s ankle. “Ah,” she breathed. “That’s how they bottle you? Like I reckoned. Hold this.” She thrust the tube at him. Dizzy, rocked by his heartbeat, scarcely believing, he could not keep it steady. She said a bad word, snatched it back, took it between her teeth, and crouched over him. A hacksaw began to grate.

“Leonce — my dear, you shouldn’t—” he stammered.

She uttered an angry grunt. He swallowed and went silent. Stars glistened in the window.

When the cable parted, leaving him with only the circlet, he tottered erect. She snapped off the light, stuck the tube in her shirt pocket-otherwise, he had glimpsed, she wore jeans and hiking shoes, gun and knife-and grasped him by the upper arms. “Listen,” she hissed. “You skip ahead to sunrise. Let ’em bring you breakfast before you return to now. Got me? We want ’em to think you escaped at a later hour. Can you carry it off? If not, you’re dead.”

“I’ll try,” he said faintly.

“Good.” Her kiss was brief and hard. “Be gone.”

Havig moved uptime at a cautious pace. When the window turned gray he emerged, arranged his tether to look uncut to a casual glance, and waited. He had never spent a longer hour.

A commoner guard brought in a tray of food and coffee. “Hello,” Havig said inanely.

He got a surly look and a warning: “Eat fast. They want to talk to you soon.”

For a sick instant, Havig thought the man would stay and watch. But he retired. After the door had slammed, Havig must sit down for a minute; his knees would not upbear him.

Leonce — He gulped the coffee. Will and strength resurged. He rose to travel back nightward.

The light-gleam alerted him to his moment. As he entered normal time, he heard a hoarse murmur across the room:

“—Can you carry it off? If not, you’re dead.”

“I’ll try.”

“Good.” Pause. “Be gone.”

He heard the little rush of air filling a vacuum where his body had been, and knew he had departed. “Here I am,” he called low.

“Huh? Ah!” She must see better in the dark than he, because she came directly to him. “All ’kay?”

“Yes. Maybe.”

“No chatter,” she commanded. “They may decide to check these hours, ’spite of our stunt. Here, hold my hand an’ slip downtime. Don’t hurry yourself. I know we’ll make it. I just don’t want ’em to find out how.”

Part of the Eyrie’s training was in such simultaneous travel. Each felt a resistance if starting to move “faster” or “slower” than the partner, and adjusted the chronokinetic rate accordingly.

A few nights earlier, the chamber was unoccupied, the door unlocked. They walked down shadow stairs, across shadow courtyard, through gates which, in this period of unchallenged reign, were usually left open. At intervals they must emerge for breath, but that could be in the dark. Beyond the lowered drawbridge, Leonce lengthened her stride. Havig wondered why she didn’t simply go to a day before the castle existed, until he realized the risk was too great of encountering others in the vicinity. A lot of men went hunting in the primeval forest which once grew here.

Dazed with fatigue and grief, he would do best to follow her lead. She’d gotten him free, hadn’t she?

She really had. He needed a while to conceive of that.

They sat in the woods, one summer before Columbus was born. The trees, oak and elm and birch mingled together, were gigantic; their fragrance filled the air, their leaves cast green shadows upon the nearly solid underbrush around them. Somewhere a woodpecker drummed and a bluejay scolded. The fire glowed low which Leonce had built. On an improvised spit roasted a grouse she had brought down out of a thousandfold flock which they startled when they arrived.

“I can never get over it,” she said, “what a wonderful world this is before machine man screws things up. I don’t think a lot o’ the High Years any more. I’ve been then too often.”

Havig, leaned against a bole, had a brief eerie sense of déjà vu. The cause came to him: this setting was not unlike that almost a millennium hence, when he and she — He regarded her more closely than hitherto. Mahogany hair in a kind of Dutch bob, suntan faded, the Skula’s weasel skull left behind and the big body in boyish garb, she might have come straight from his home era. Her English had lost most of the Glacier accent, too. Of course, she still went armed, and her feline gait and haughty bearing hadn’t changed.

“How long for you?” he inquired.

“Since you left me in Paris? ’Bout three years.” She frowned at the bird, reached and turned it above the coals.

“I’m sorry. That was a shabby way to treat you. Why did you want to spring me?”

Her scowl deepened. “S’pose you tell me what happened.”

“You don’t know?” he exclaimed in amazement. “For heaven’s sake, if you weren’t sure why I was under arrest, how could you be sure I didn’t deserve—”

“Talk, will you?”

The story stumbled forth, in bare outline. Now and then, during it, the tilted eyes sought him, but her countenance remained expressionless. At the end she said: “Well, seems my hunch was right. I haven’t thrown away much. Was gettin’ more an’ more puked at that outfit, as I saw how it works.”

She might have offered a word for Xenia, he thought, and therefore he matched her brusqueness: “I didn’t believe you’d object to a spot of fighting and robbery.”

“Not if they’re honest, strength ’gainst strength, wits ’gainst wits. But those… jackals… they pick on the helpless. An’ for sport more’n for gain.” In a kind of leashed savagery, she probed the fowl with her knife point. A drop of fat hit the coals; yellow flame sputtered and flared. “‘Sides, what’s the sense o’ the whole business? Why should we try to fasten machines back on the world? So Cal Wallis can be promoted to God j.g.?”

“When you learned I’d been located and was being held, that touched off the rebellion which had been gathering in you?” Havig asked.

She didn’t reply directly. “I went downtime, like you’d guess, found when the room was empty, went uptime to you. First, though, I’d spent some days future o’ that, not to seem involved in your escape. Ha, ever’body was runnin’ ’round like guillotined chickens! I planted the notion you must’ve co-opted a traveler while you were in the past.” The broad shoulders lifted and dropped. “Well, the hooraw blew over. Evidently it didn’t seem worth mentionin’ to the earlier Wallis, on his inspection tour. Why admit a failure? His next appearance beyond your vanishment was years ahead, an’ nothin’ awful had happened meanwhile. You didn’t matter. Nor will I, when I never return from my furlough. I s’pose they’ll reckon I died in an accident.” She chuckled. “I do like sports cars, an’ drive like a bat out o’ Chicago.”

“In spite of, uh, opposing a restoration of machine society?” Havig wondered.

“Well, we can enjoy it while we got it, can’t we, whether or not it’ll last or ought to?” She observed him steadily, and her tone bleakened. “That’s ’bout all we can do, you an’ me. Find ourselves some nice hidey-holes, here an’ there in space-time. Because we’re sure not goin’ to upset the Eyrie.”

“I’m not certain its victory is predestined,” Havig said. “Maybe wishful thinking on my part. After what I’ve seen, however—” His earnestness helped cover the emptiness in him where Xenia had been. “Leonce, you do wrong to put down science and technology. They can be misused, but so can everything. Nature never has been in perfect balance — there are many more extinct species than live — and primitive man was quite as destructive as modern. He simply took longer to use up his environment. Probably Stone Age hunters exterminated the giant mammals of the Pleistocene. Certainly farmers with sickles and digging sticks wore out what started as the Fertile Crescent. And nearly all mankind died young, from causes that are preventable when you know how … The Maurai will do more than rebuild the foundation of Earth’s life. They’ll make the first attempt ever to create a balanced environment. And that’ll only be possible because they do have the scientific knowledge and means.”

“Don’t seem like they’ll succeed.”

“I can’t tell. That mysterious farther future … it’s got to be studied.” Havig rubbed his eyes. “Later, later. Right now I’m too tired. Let me borrow your Bowie after lunch and cut some boughs to sleep on for a week or three.”

She moved, then, to come kneel before him and lay one hand on his neck, run fingers of the other through his hair. “Poor Jack,” she murmured. “I been kind o’ short with you, haven’t I? Forgive. Was a strain on me also, this gettin’ away an’ — Sure, sleep. We have peace. Today we have peace.”

“I haven’t thanked you for what you did,” he said awkwardly. “I’ll never be able to thank you.”

“You bugbrain!” She cast arms around him. “Why do you think I hauled you out o’ there?”

“But-but-Leonce, I’ve seen my wife die—”

“Sure,” she sobbed. “How I… I’d like to go back … an’ meet that girl. If she made you happy — Can’t be, I know. Well, I’ll wait, Jack. As long as needful, I’ll wait.”

They weren’t equipped to stay more than a short while in ancient America. They could have gone uptime, bought gear, ferried it back. But after what they had suffered, no idle idyll was possible for them.

More important was the state of Havig’s being. The wound in him healed slowly, but it healed, and left a hard scar: the resolve to make war upon the Eyrie.

He didn’t think it was merely a desire for vengeance upon Xenia’s murderers. Leonce assumed this, and leagued herself with him because a Glacier woman stood by her man. He admitted that to a degree she was correct. (Is the impulse always evil? It can take the form of exacting justice.) Mainly, he believed that he believed, a brigand gang must be done away with. The ghastlinesses it had already made, and would make, were unchangeable; but could not the sum of that hurt be stopped from mounting, could not the remoter future be spared?

“A thing to puzzle over,” he told Leonce, “is that no time travelers seem to be born in the Maurai era or afterward. They might stay incognito, sure, same as the majority of them probably do in earlier history — too frightened or too crafty to reveal their uniqueness. Nevertheless … every single one? Hardly sounds plausible, does it?”

“Did you investigate?” she asked.

They were in a mid-twentieth-century hotel. Kansas City banged and winked around them, early at night. He was avoiding his former resorts until he could be sure that Wallis’s men would not discover these. The lamplight glowed soft over Leonce where she sat, knees drawn close to chin, in bed. She wore a translucent peignoir. Otherwise she gave him no sign that she was anything more in her heart than his sisterlike companion. A huntress learns patience, a Skula learns to read souls.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve told you about Carelo Keajimu. He has connections across the globe. If he can’t turn up a traveler, nobody can. And he drew blank.”

“What does this mean?”

“I don’t know, except — Leonce, we’ve got to take the risk. We’ve got to make an expedition uptime of the Maurai.”

Again practical problems consumed lifespan.

Think. One epoch does not suddenly and entirely replace another. Every trend is blurred by numberless counter-currents. Thus, Martin Luther was not the first Protestant in the true sense — doctrinal as well as political — of that word. He was simply the first who made it stick. And his success was built on the failures of centuries, Hussites, Lollards, Albigensians, on and on to the heresies of Christendom’s dawn; and those had origins more ancient yet. Likewise, the thermonuclear reactor and associated machines were introduced, and spread widely, while mysticism out of Asia was denying, in millions of minds, that science could answer the questions that mattered.

If you want to study an epoch, in what year do you begin? You can move through time, but once at your goal, what have you besides your feet for crossing space? Where do you shelter? How do you eat?

It took a number of quick trips futureward to find the start of a plan.

Details are unimportant. On the west coast of thirty-first-century North America, a hybrid Ingliss-Maurai-Spanyol had not evolved too far for Havig to grope his way along in it. He took back a grammar, a dictionary, and assorted reading material. By individual concentration and mutual practice, he and Leonce acquired some fluency.

Enough atomic-powered robot-crewed commerce brought enough visitors from overseas that two more obvious foreigners would attract no undue attention. This was the more true because Sancisco was a favorite goal of pilgrimages; there the guru Duago Samito had had his revelation. Nobody believed in miracles. People did believe that, if you stood on the man-sculptured hills and looked down into the chalice which was the Bay, and let yourself become one with heaven and earth and water, you could hope for insight.

Pilgrims needed no credit account in the financial world-machine. The age was, in its austere fashion, prosperous. A wayside householder could easily spare the food and sleeping room that would earn virtue for him and travelers’ tales for his children.

“If you seek the Star Masters—” said the dark, gentle man who housed them one night. “Yes, they keep an outpost nigh. But surely some are in your land.”

“We are curious to see if the Star Masters here are like those we know at home,” Havig replied. “I have heard they number many kinds.”

“Correct. Correct.”

“It does not add undue kilometers to our journey.”

“You need not walk there. A call will do.” Havig’s host indicated the holographic communicator which stood in a corner of a room whose proportions were as alien — and as satisfying — to his guests as a Japanese temple would have been to a medieval European or a Gothic church to a Japanese.

“Though I doubt their station is manned at present,” he continued. “They do not come often, you know.”

“At least we can touch it,” Havig said.

The dark man nodded. “Aye. A full-sense savoring … aye, you do well. Go in God, then, and be God, happily.”

In the morning, after an hour’s chanting and meditation, the family returned to their daily round. Father hand-cultivated his vegetable garden; the reason for that seemed more likely depth-psychological than economic. Mother continued her work upon a paramathematical theorem too esoteric for Havig to grasp. Children immersed themselves in an electronic educational network which might be planetwide and might involve a kind of artificial telepathy. Yet the house was small, unpretentious except for the usual scrimshaw and Oriental sweep of roof, nearly alone in a great tawny hillscape.

Trudging down a dirt road, where dust whoofed around her boots while a many-armed automaton whispered through the sky overhead, Leonce sighed: “You’re right. I do not understand these people.”

“That could take a lifetime,” Havig agreed. “Something new has entered history. It needn’t be bad, but it’s surely new.”

After a space he added: “Has happened before. Could your paleolithic hunter really understand your neolithic farmer? How much alike were a man who lived under the divine right of kings and a man who lived under the welfare state? I don’t always follow your mind, Leonce.”

“Nor I yours.” She caught his hand. “Let’s keep tryin’.”

“It seems—” Havig said, “I repeat, it seems — these Star Masters occupy the ultra-mechanized, energy-flashing bases and the enormous flying craft and everything else we’ve glimpsed which contrasts so sharply with the rest of Earth. They come irregularly. Otherwise their outposts lie empty; does sound like time travelers, hey?”

“But they’re kind o’, well, good. Aren’t they?”

“Therefore they can’t be Eyrie? Why not? In origin, anyhow. The grandson of a conquering pirate may be an enlightened king.” Havig marshaled his thoughts. “True, the Star Masters act differently from what one would expect. As near as I can make out — remember, I don’t follow this modern language any more closely than you do, and besides, there are a million taken-for-granted concepts behind it — as near as I can make out, they come to trade: ideas and knowledge more than material goods. Their influence on Earth is subtle but pervasive. My trips beyond this year suggest their influence will grow, till a new civilization — or post-civilization — has arisen which I cannot fathom.”

“Don’t the locals describe ’em as bein’ sometimes human an’ sometimes not?”

“I have that impression too. Maybe we’ve garbled a figure of speech.”

“You’ll make it out,” she said.

He glanced at her. The glance lingered. Sunlight lay on her hair and the tiny drops of sweat across her face. He caught the friendly odor of her flesh. The pilgrim’s robe molded itself to long limbs. Timeless above a cornfield, a red-winged blackbird whistled.

“We’ll see if we can,” he said.

She smiled.

Clustered spires and subtly curved domes were deserted when they arrived. An invisible barrier held them off. They moved uptime. When they glimpsed a ship among the shadows, they halted.

At that point, the vessel had made groundfall. The crew were coming down an immaterial ramp. Havig saw men and women in close-fitting garments which sparkled as if with constellations. And he saw shapes which Earth could never have brought forth, not in the age of the dinosaurs nor in the last age when a swollen red sun would burn her barren.

A shellbacked thing which bore claws and nothing identifiable as a head conversed with a man in notes of music. The man was laughing.

Leonce screamed. Havig barely grabbed her before she was gone, fleeing downtime.

“But don’t you see?” he told her, over and over. “Don’t you realize the marvel of it?”

And at last he got her to seek night. They stood on a high ridge. Uncountable stars gleamed from horizon to zenith to horizon. Often a meteor flashed. The air was cold, their breath smoked wan, she huddled in his embrace. Quietness enclosed them: “the eternal silence of yonder infinite spaces.”

“Look up,” he said. “Each of those lights is a sun. Did you think ours is the single living planet in the universe?”

She shuddered. “What we saw—”

“What we saw was different. Magnificently different.” He searched for words. His whole youth had borne a vision which hers had known only as a legend. The fact that it was not forever lost sang in his blood. “Where else can newness, adventure, rebirth of spirit, where else can they come from except difference? The age beyond the Maurai is not turned inward on itself. No, it’s begun to turn further outward than ever men did before!”

“Tell me,” she begged. “Help me.”

He found himself kissing her. And they sought a place of their own and were one.

But there are no happy endings. There are no endings of any kind. At most, we are given happy moments.

The morning came when Havig awakened beside Leonce. She slept, warm and silky and musky, an arm thrown across his breast. This time his body did not desert her. His thinking did.

“Doc,” he was to tell me, his voice harsh with desperation, “I could not stay where we were — in a kind of Renaissance Eden — I couldn’t stay there, or anywhere else, and let destiny happen.”

“I believe the future has taken a hopeful direction. But how can I be sure? Yes, yes, the name is Jack, not Jesus; my responsibility must end somewhere; but exactly where?”

“And even if that was a good eon to be alive in, by what route did men arrive there? Maybe you remember, I once gave you my opinion, Napoleon ought to have succeeded in bringing Europe together. This does not mean Hitler ought to have. The chimney stacks of Belsen say different. What about the Eyrie?”

He roused Leonce. She girded herself to fare beside her man.

They might have visited Carelo Keajimu. But he was, in a way, too innocent. Though he lived in a century of disintegration, the Maurai rule had always been mild, had never provoked our organized unpity. Furthermore, he was too prominent, his lifetime too likely to be watched.

It was insignificant me whom Jack Havig and Leonce of Wahorn sought out.