There Will Be Time

They got this preliminary training in scattered places and eras. Afterward they were screened for trustworthiness; the means were a weird and wonderful potpourri. The dubious cases — a minor percentage — were brought to their home locations, guided to their home years, paid off, and bidden farewell. They had not received enough information about the enemy to contact it; generally they lived thousands of miles away.

The majority were led to the main base, for further training and for the work of building it and its strength.

This was near where the Eyrie would be, but immensely far downtime, in the middle Pleistocene. That precaution created problems of its own. The temporal passage was lengthy for the traveler, requiring special equipment as well as intermediate resting places. Caches must be established en route, and everything ferried piece by piece, stage by slow stage. But the security was worth this, as was the stronghold itself. It stood on a wooded hill, and through the valley below ran a mighty river which Leonce told me shone in the sunlight like bronze.

The search methods had discovered members of both sexes in roughly equal numbers. Thus a community developed-kept childless, except for its youngest members, nevertheless a community which found an identity, laws and precedences and ceremonies and stories and mysteries, in a mere few years, and was bound together by its squabbles as well as its loves. And this was Havig’s real triumph. The Sachem had created an army; the man sworn to cast him down created a tribe.

I heard these things when Havig and Leonce paid me that March visit. They were then in the midst of the work. Not till All Hallows’ Eve did I learn the next part of their story.

15

THE SHADOWS which were time reeled past. They had form and color, weight and distances, only when one emerged for food or sleep or a hurried gulp of air. Season after season blew across the hills; glaciers from the north ground heights to plains and withdrew in a fury of snowstorms, leaving lakes where mastodon drank; the lakes thickened to swamps and finally to soil on whose grass fed horses and camels, whose treetops were grazed by giant sloths, until the glaciers returned; mild weather renewed saw those earlier beasts no more, but instead herds of bison which darkened the prairie and filled it with an earthquake drumroll of hoofs; the pioneers entered, coppery-ski

Havig’s group stopped for a last rest in the house of a young farmer who was no traveler but could be trusted. They needed it for a depot, too. It would have been impossible to go this far through time on this point of Earth’s surface without miniature oxygen tanks. Otherwise, they’d more than once have had to stop for air when the country lay drowned, or been unable to because they were under a mile of ice. Those were strong barriers which guarded the secret of their main base from the Eyrie.

The equipment absorbed most of their mass-carrying ability. Here was a chance to get weapons.

Lantern light glowed mellow on an oilcloth-covered kitchen table, polished iron and copper, stove where wood crackled to keep warm a giant pot of coffee. Though the nearest neighbors were half an hour’s horseback ride straight across the fields, and screened off by trees, Olav Torstad must always receive his visitors after dark. At that, he was considered odd for the occasional midnight gleam in his windows. But he was otherwise a steady fellow; most likely, the neighbors decided, now and then a bachelor would have trouble sleeping.

“You’re already fixing to go again?” he asked.

“Yes,” Havig said. “We’ve ground to cover before dawn, remember.”

Torstad stared at Leonce. “Sure don’t seem right, a lady bound for war.”

“Where else but by her man?” she retorted. With a grin:

“Jack couldn’t talk me out of it either. Spare your breath.”

“Well, different times, different ways,” Torstad said, “but I’m glad I was born in 1850.” In haste: “Not that I don’t appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

“You’ve done more for us,” Havig answered. “We grub-staked you to this place strictly because we needed something of the kind close to where the Eyrie will be. You assumed the ongoing risk, and the burden of keeping things hidden, and — No matter. Tonight it ends.” He constructed a smile. “You can get rid of what stuff we leave behind, marry that girl you’re engaged to, and live the rest of your days at peace.”

For a few seconds, behind Torstad’s eyes, something rattled its chains. “At peace?” Abruptly: “You will come back, won’t you? Tell me what happened? Please!”

“If we win,” Havig said, and thought how many such promises he had left, how many more his followers must have left, across the breadth and throughout the duration of the spacetime they had roved. He jumped from his chair. “Come on, let’s get the military gear for our men. If you’ll hitch up a team, we’d like a wagon ride to the site. Let’s move!”

Others were moving. They are. They will be.

It was no enormous host; it totaled perhaps three thousand. Some two-thirds were women, the very young, the old, the handicapped: time porters, nurses, whatever kind of noncombatants were required. But this was still too many to gather at one intermediate station, making rumors and traces which an enemy might come upon. Simply bringing them all to America had been an endlessly complex problem in logistics and secrecy.

Beneath huge trees, in a year before Columbus, some took a deer path. The Dakotan who guided them would have become the next medicine man of his tribe, had a patient wanderer not found him. The chronolog he carried, like other leaders elsewhere and elsewhen, would identify an exact place before he set it for an equally precise instant.

Once during the eighteenth century, certain coureurs de bois made rendezvous and struck off into the wilderness.

Not quite a hundred years after, the captain of a group explained to what few white people he met that the government in Washington wished a detailed survey prior to establishing a territory.

Later it became common if unofficial knowledge that you saw Negroes hereabouts — briefly — because this was a station on the Underground Railway.

In the 1920’s one did not question furtive movements and gatherings. It was common if unofficial knowledge that this was a favorite route for importers of Canadian whiskey.

Later an occasional bus marked CHARTERED passed through the area, setting off passengers and baggage in the middle of the night, then proceeding with its sign changed to NOT IN SERVICE.

Toward the close of the century, a jumbo jet lumbered aloft. The motley lot of humans aboard drew no special attention. “International Friendship Tours” were an almost everyday thing, as private organizations and subdivisions of practically every government snatched at any imaginable means to help halt the dream-dance down to catastrophe.

Well afterward, a fair-sized band of horsemen trotted through the region. Their faces and accouterments said they were Mong. The invaders never did establish themselves in these parts, so their early scouts were of no importance.

Havig and his half dozen flashed back into normal time.