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(“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 gri
“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 point 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 a
“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.
“We need a reserve of life, every kind of life,” he explained. “Today for the spirit-a glimpse of space and green. Tomorrow for survival, flat-out survival.”
The War of Judgment, he said, would by no means be the simple capitalist-versus-Communist slugfest which most of us imagined in the 1950’s.
“I’ve only the vaguest idea yet of what actually will go on. Not surprising. I’ve had to make fugitive appearances — watching out for radioactivity and a lot else — and who in the immediate sequel is in any condition to give me a reasoned analysis? Hell, Doc, scholars argue today about what went wrong in 1914 to ’18, and they aren’t scrambling for a leftover can of dogfood, or arming against the Mong who’ll pour across a Bering Straits that all the dust kicked into the atmosphere will cause to be frozen.”
His impression was that, like World War I, it was a conflict which everybody anticipated, nobody wanted, and men would have recoiled from had they foreseen the consequences. He thought it was less ideological than ecological.
“I have this nightmare notion that it came not just as a result of huge areas turning into deserts, but came barely in time. Do you know the oceans supply half our oxygen? By 1970, insecticide was in the plankton. By 1990, every ocean was scummy, and stank, and you didn’t dare swim in it.”
“But this must have been predicted,” I said.
He leered. “Yeah. ‘Environment’ was very big for a while. Ecology Now stickers on the windshields of cars belonging to hairy young men-cars which dripped oil wherever they parked and took off in clouds of smoke thicker than your pipe can produce … Before long, the fashionable cause was something else, I forget what. Anyhow, that whole phase-the wave after wave of causes-passed away. People completely stopped caring.
“You see, that was the logical conclusion of the whole trend. I know it’s stupid to assign a single blame for something as vast as the War of Judgment, its foreru
“We’ll make halfhearted attempts to stop some enemies in Asia, and because the attempts are halfhearted we’ll piss away human lives — on both sides — and treasure — to no purpose. Hoping to placate the implacable, we’ll estrange our last few friends. Men elected to national office will solemnly identify inflation with rising prices, which is like identifying red spots with the measles virus, and slap on wage and price controls, which is like papering the cracks in a house whose foundations are sliding away. So economic collapse brings international impotence. The well-off whites will grow enough aware that we have distressed minorities, and give them enough, to bring on revolt without really helping them; and the revolt will bring on reaction, which will stamp on every remnant of progress. As for our foolish little attempts to balance what we drain from the environment against what we put back-well, I mentioned that car carrying the ecology sticker.