There Will Be Time

“At first Americans will go on an orgy of guilt. Later they’ll feel inadequate. Finally they’ll turn apathetic. After all, they’ll be able to buy any anodyne, any pseudo-existence they want.

“I wonder if at the end, down underneath, they don’t welcome their own multi-millionfold deaths.”

Thus in February of 1964, Havig came into the inheritance he had made for himself. Shortly thereafter he set about shoring up his private past, and spent months of his lifespan being “Uncle Jack.” I asked him what the hurry was, and he said, “Among other things, I want to get as much foreknowledge as possible behind me.” I considered that for a while, and choked off my last impulse to ask him about the tomorrows of me and mine. I did not understand how rich a harvest this would bear until the day when they buried Kate.

I never asked Havig if he had seen her gravestone earlier. He may have, and kept silent. As a physician, I think I know how it is possible to possess such information and yet smile.

He didn’t go straight from one episode with his childhood self to the next. That would have been monotonous. Instead, he made his pastward visits vacations from his studies at our state university. He didn’t intend to be frustrated when again he sought a non-English-speaking milieu. Furthermore, he needed a baseline from which to extrapolate changes of language in the future; there/then he was also often a virtual deafmute.

His concentration was on Latin and Greek — the latter that koine which in its various forms had wider currency through both space and time than Classical Attic — plus French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (and English), with emphasis on their evolution-plus some Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic — plus quite a bit of the numerous Polynesian tongues.

“They do have a civilization on the other side of the dark centuries,” he told me. “I’ve barely glimpsed that, and can’t make head or tail of what’s going on. But it does look as if Pacific Ocean peoples dominate the world, speaking the damnedest lingua franca you can imagine.”

“So there is hope!” gusted from me.

“I still have to find out for sure.” His glance speared mine. “Look, suppose you were a time traveler from, well, Egypt of the Pharaohs. Suppose you came to today’s world and touristed around, trying to stay anonymous. How much sense would anything make? Would the question ‘Is this development good or bad?’ even be meaningful to you? I haven’t tried to explore beyond the early stages of the Maurai Federation. It’ll be the work of years to understand that much.”

He was actually more interested in bygone eras, which to him were every bit as alive as today or tomorrow. Those he could study beforehand-in more detail than you might think, unless you’re a professional historiographer-and thus prepare himself to move around with considerable freedom. Besides, while the past had ghastlinesses enough, nothing, not the Black Death or the burning of heretics or the Middle Passage or the Albigensian Crusade, nothing in his mind matched the Judgment. “That’s when the whole planet almost goes under,” he said. “I imagine my fellow time travelers generally avoid it. I’m likeliest to find them in happier, or less unhappy, eras.”

Given these activities, he was biologically about thirty when at last he succeeded. This was in Jerusalem, on the day of the Crucifixion.

6

HE TOLD ME of his plan in 1964. As far as practicable, his policy was to skip intervals of the twentieth century equal to those he spent elsewhen, so that his real and calendar ages wouldn’t get too much out of step. I hadn’t seen him for a while. He no longer dwelt in Senlac, but made his headquarters in New York — a post office box in the present, a sumptuous apartment in the 1890’s, financed by the sale of gold he bought after this was again made legal and carried downtime. He did come back for visits, though. Kate found that touching. I did too, but I knew besides what need he had of me, his only confidant.

“Why … you’re right!” I exclaimed. “The moment you’d expect every traveler, at least in Christendom, to head for. Why haven’t you done it before?”

“Less simple than you suppose, Doc,” he replied. “That’s a long haul, to a most thoroughly alien territory. And how certain is the date, anyway? Or even the fact?”

I blinked. “You mean you’ve never considered seeking the historical Christ? I know you’re not religious, but surely the mystery around him—”

“Doc, what he was, or if he was, makes only an academic difference. What counts is what people through the ages have believed. My life expectancy isn’t enough for me to do the pure research I’d like. In fact, I’m overdue to put fun and games aside. I’ve seen too much human misery. Time travel has got to have some real value; it’s got to be made to help.” He barely smiled. “You know I’m no saint. But I do have to live in my own head.”

He flew from New York to Israel in 1969, while the Jews were in firm control of Jerusalem and a visitor could move around freely. From his hotel he walked out Jericho Road, carrying a handbag, till he found an orange grove which offered concealment. There he sprang back to the previous midnight and made his preparations.

The Arab costume he had bought at a tourist shop would pass in Biblical times. A knife, more eating tool than weapon, was sheathed at his hip; being able to blink out of bad situations, he seldom took a firearm. A leather purse held phrase book (specially compiled, for pay, by an American graduate student), food, drinking cup, Halazone tablets, soap, flea repellent, antibiotic, and money. That last was several coins of the Roman period, plus a small ingot he could exchange if need be.

Having stowed his modern clothes in the bag, he drew forth his last item of equipment. He called it a chronolog. It was designed and built to his specifications in 1980, to take advantage of the superb solid-state electronics then available. The engineers who made it had perhaps required less ingenuity than Havig had put into his cover story.

I have seen the apparatus. It’s contained in a green crackle-finish box with a carrying handle, about 24 by 12 by 6 inches. When the lid is opened, you can fold out an optical instrument vaguely suggestive of a sextant, and you can set the controls and read the meters. Beneath these lies a miniature but most sophisticated computer, ru

Imagine. He projects himself backward or forward to a chosen moment. How does he know “when” he has arrived? On a short hop, he can count days, estimate the hour by sun or stars if a clock isn’t on the spot. But a thousand years hold a third of a million dawns; and the chances are that many of them won’t be identifiable, because of stormy weather or the temporary existence of a building or some similar accident.

Havig took his readings. The night was clear, sufficiently cold for his breath to smoke; Jerusalem’s lights hazed the sky northward, but elsewhere the country lay still and dark save for outlying houses and passing cars; constellations wheeled brilliant overhead. He placed the moon and two planets in relation to them, set the precise Greenwich time and geographical locations on appropriate dim-glowing dials, and worked a pair of verniers till he had numbers corresponding to that Passover week of A

(“The date does seem well established,” he’d remarked. “At least, it’s the one everybody would aim at.” He laughed. “Beats the Nativity. The only thing certain about that is it wasn’t at midwinter — not if shepherds were away from home watching their flocks!”)