Страница 10 из 45
“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 not-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.
“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 ma
“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 ca
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, tyra
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 begi
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 Wi
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.”