“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 forerunners and aftermaths. Especially when I’m still in dark about what the events were. But Doc, I feel a moral certainty that a large part of the disaster grew from this particular country, the world’s most powerful, the vanguard country for things both good and ill… never really trying to meet the responsibilities of power.
“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.
“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.