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“Jack, from the painfully gathered learning of the race, you can profit.”
Leonce seemed puzzled. Well, my philosophy was new to her too. The man had grown altogether absorbed. “What do you propose?” he asked low.
“Nothing specifically,” I answered. “Everything generally. Concentrate more on strategy than tactics. Don’t try to campaign by your lone selves against an organization; no, start a better outfit.”
“Where are the members coming from?”
“Everywhere and everywhen. Walls showed a degree of imagination in his recruiting efforts, but his methods were crude, his outlook parochial. For instance, surely more travelers are present that day in Jerusalem. His agents latched onto those who were obvious, and quit. There must be ways to attract the notice of the rest.”
“Well … m-m-m … I had been giving thought to that myself.” Havig cupped his chin. “Like maybe passing through the streets, singing lines from the Greek mass-”
“And the Latin. You can’t afford grudges.” I gripped rny pipe hard. “Another point. Why must you stay this secretive? Oh, yes, your ‘uncle’ self was right, as far as he went. A child revealed to be a time traveler would’ve been in a fairly horrible bind. But you’re not a child any longer.
“Moreover, I gather, Wallis considers ordinary persons a lesser breed. He’s labeled them ‘commoners,’ hasn’t he? He keeps them in subordinate positions. All he’s accomplished by that has been to wall their brains off from him.
“I’ve done a little quiet sounding out, at places like Holberg College and Berkeley. There are good, responsible scholars at Berkeley! I can name you men and women who’ll accept the fact of what you are, and respect your confidence, and help you, same as me.”
“For why?” Leonce wondered.
Havig sprang from his chair and stormed back and forth across the room as he gave her the blazing answer which had broken upon him: “To open the world, darlya! Our kind can’t be born only in the West. That doesn’t make sense. China, Japan, India, Africa, America before the white man came — we’ve got the whole of humanity to draw on! And we” — he stuttered in his eagerness—”we can leave the bad, take the good, find the young and, dammit, bring them up right. My God! Who cares about a wretched gang of bullies uptime? We can make the future!”
It was not that simple, of course. In fact, they spent more than ten years of their lifespans in preparing. True, these included their private concerns. When I saw them next (after his one telephone call), briefly in March, they behaved toward each other like any happily long-married couple. Nonetheless, that was a strenuous, perilous decade.
Even more was it a period which demanded the hardest thought and the subtlest realism. The gathering of Havig’s host would have used every year that remained in his body, and still been incomplete, had he not gone about it along the lines I suggested. Through me he met those members of think tanks and faculties I had bespoken. After he convinced them, they in turn introduced him to chosen colleagues, until he had an exceedingly high-powered advisory team. (Several have later quit their careers, to go into different work or retirement. It puzzles their associates.) At intervals I heard about their progress. The methods they developed for making contact — through much of the history of much of the world — would fill a book. Most failed; but enough succeeded.
For example, a searcher looked around, inquired discreetly around, after people who seemed to have whatever kind of unusualness was logical for a traveler residing in the given milieu. A shaman, village witch, local monk with a record of helping those who appealed to him or her by especially practical miracles. A peasant who flourished because somehow he never planted or harvested so as to get caught by bad weather. A merchant who made correspondingly lucky investments in ships, when storms and pirates caused heavy attrition. A warrior who was an uncatchable spy or scout. A boy who was said to counsel his father. Once in a while, persons like these would turn out to be the real thing … Then there were ways of attracting their heed, such as being a wandering fortuneteller of a peculiar sort …
To the greatest extent possible, the earliest traveler recruits were trained into a cadre of recruiters, who wasted no energy in being uptime overlords. Thus the finding of folk could snowball. Here, too, methods were available beyond the purview of a nineteenth-century American who regarded the twentieth as decadent and every other culture as inferior. There are modern ways to get a new language into a mind fast. There are ancient ways, which the West has neglected, for developing body and senses. Under the lash of wars, revolutions, invasions, and occupations, we have learned how to form, discipline, protect, and use a band of brothers — systematically.
Above everything else, perhaps, was today’s concept of working together. I don’t mean its totalitarian version, for which Jack Havig had total loathing, or that “togetherness,” be it in a corporation or a commune, which he despised. I mean an enlightened pragmatism that rejects self-appointed aristocrats, does not believe received doctrine is necessarily true, stands ready to hear and weigh what anyone has to offer, and maintains well-developed cha
Our age will go down in fire. But it will leave gifts for which a later mankind will be grateful.
Now finding time travelers was a barebones begi
The hope of fellowship with their own kind would draw many, of course. Havig could gain by that, as Walls had done. It was insufficient, though. Wallis had a variety of further appeals. Given the resources of his group, a man saw the world brought in reach and hardly a limit put on atavistic forms of self-indulgence. To the intelligent, Wallis offered power, grandeur, a chance — a duty, if you let yourself be convinced, which is gruesomely easy to do — to become part of destiny.
Then there were those who wanted to learn, or be at the highest moments of mankind’s achievement, or simply and honorably enjoy adventuring. To them Havig could promise a better deal.
But this would still not give motive to wage war on the Eyrie. Monstrous it might be, the average traveler would concede; yet most governments, most institutions have in their own ways been monstrous. What threat was the Sachem?
“Setting up indoctrination courses—” Havig sighed to me. “A nasty word, that, isn’t it? Suggests browbeating and incessant propaganda. But honest, we just want to explain. We try to make the facts clear, so our recruits can see for themselves how the Eyrie is by its nature unable to leave them be. It’s not easy. You got any ideas on how to show a samurai of the Kamakura Period that the will of anybody to rule the world, anybody whatsoever, is a direct menace to him? I’m here mainly to see what my anthropologists and semanticists have come up with. Meanwhile, well, okay, we’ve got other pitches too, like primitive loyalty to chief and comrades, or the fun of a good scrap, or … well, yes, the chance to get rich, in permissible ways. And, for the few, a particular dream—”
At that, I envied him the challenge of his task. Imagine: finding, and afterward forging mutuality between a Confucian teacher, a boomerang-wielding kangaroo hunter, a Polish schoolboy, a medieval Mesopotamian peasant, a West African ironsmith, a Mexican vaquero, an Eskimo girl … The very effort to assemble that kaleidoscope may have been his greatest strength. Such people did not need to learn much about the Eyrie before they realized that, for most of them as time travelers, Havig’s was the only game in town.