“Yes, about as many, but unusable. Cracked, like I told you, or too dull, or crippled, or scared to join us, or whatever. One strapping housewife who refused to leave her husband. I thought of abducting her — the cause is bigger than her damn comfort — but what’s the good of an unwilling traveler? A man, maybe you could threaten his kin and get service out of him. Women are too cowardly.”
Havig remembered a flamboyant greeting in the courtyard, but held his peace.
“Once I had my first disciples, I could expand,” Wallis told him. “We could explore wider and in more detail, learning better what needed to be done and how. We could establish funds and bases at key points of … m-m … yes, space-time. We could begin to recruit more, mainly from different centuries but a few additional from our own. Finally we could pick our spot for the Eyrie, and take command of the local people for a labor supply. Poor starved harried wretches, they welcomed warlords who brought proper guns and seed corn!”
Havig tugged his chin. “May I ask why you chose that particular place and year to start your nation, sir?”
“Sure, ask what you want,” Wallis said genially. “Chances are I’ll answer … I thought of the past. You can see from yonder picture I’ve been clear back to Charlemagne, testing my destiny. It’s too long a haul, though. And even in an unexplored section like pre-Columbian America, we’d risk leaving traces for archeologists to discover. Remember, there could be Maurai time travelers, and what we’ve got to have is surprise. Right now, these centuries, feudalisms like ours are springing up everywhere, recovery is being made, and we take care not to look unique. Our subjects know we have powers, of course, but they call us magicians and children of the Those — gods and spirits. By the time that story’s filtered past the wild people, it’s only a vague rumor of still another superstitious cult.”
Havig appreciated the strategy. “As far as I’ve been able to find out, sir, which isn’t much,” he said, “the, uh, the Maurai culture is right now forming in the Pacific basin. Anybody from its later stages, coming downtime, would doubtless be more interested in that genesis than in the politics of obscure, impoverished barbarians.”
“You do your Americans an injustice,” Wallis reproved him. “You’re right, of course, from the Maurai standpoint. But actually, our people have had a run of bad luck.”
There was some truth in that, Havig must agree. Parts of Oceania had been too unimportant for overdevelopment or for strikes by the superweapons; and those enormous waters were less corrupted than seas elsewhere, more quickly self-cleansed after man became again a rare species. Yet the inhabitants were no simple and simpering dwellers in Eden. Books had been printed in quantities too huge, distributed over regions too wide, for utter loss of any significant information. To a lesser degree, the same was true of much technological apparatus.
North America, Europe, parts of Asia and South America, fewer parts of Africa, hit bottom because they were overextended. Let the industrial-agricultural-medical complexes they had built be paralyzed for the shortest of whiles, and people would begin dying by millions. The scramble of survivors for survival would bring everything else down in wreck.
Now even in such territories, knowledge was preserved: by an oasis of order here, a half-religiously venerated community there. At last, theoretically, it could diffuse to the new barbarians, who would pass it on to the new savages … theoretically. Practice said otherwise. The old civilization had stripped the world too bare.
You could, for example, log a virgin forest, mine a virgin Mesabi, pump a virgin oil field, by primitive methods. Using your gains from this, you could go on to build a larger and more sophisticated plant capable of more intricate operations. As resources dwindled, it could replace lumber with plastics, squeeze iron out of taconite, scour the entire planet for petroleum.
But by the time of the Judgment, this had been done. That combination of machines, trained personnel, well-heeled consumers and taxpayers, went under and was not to be reconstructed.
The data needed for an industrial restoration could be found. The natural materials could not.
“Don’t you think, sir,” Havig dared say, “by their development of technological alternatives, the Maurai and their allies will do a service?”
“Up to a point, yes. I have to give the bastards that,” Wallis growled. His cigar jabbed the air. “But that’s as far as it goes. Far enough to put them hard in the saddle, and not an inch more. We’re learning about their actual suppression of new developments. You will likewise.”
He seemed to want to change the subject, for he continued:
“Anyhow, as to our organization here. My key men haven’t stuck around in uninterrupted normal time, and I less. We skip ahead-overlapping-to keep leadership continuous. And we’re doing well. Things snowball for us, in past, present, and future alike.
“By now we’ve hundreds of agents, plus thousands of devoted commoners. We ruled over what used to be a couple of whole states, though of course our traffic is more in time than space. Mainly we govern through common-born deputies. When you can travel along the lifespan of a promising boy, you can make a fine and trusty man out of him-especially when he knows he’ll never have any secrets from you, nor any safety.
“But don’t get me wrong. I repeat, we aren’t monsters or parasites. Sometimes we do have to get rough. But our aim is always to put the world back on the path God laid out for it.”
He leaned forward. “And we will,” he almost whispered.
“I’ve traveled beyond. A thousand years hence, I’ve seen — “Are you with us?”
8
“BY AND LARGE, the next several months were good,” Havig would relate (would have related) to me. “However, I stayed cautious. For instance, I hedged on giving out exact biographical data. And I passed the chronolog off as a radionic detector and transmitter, built in case visitors to the past had such gear in use. Wallis said he doubted they did and lost interest. I found a hiding place for it. If they were the kind of people in the Eyrie I hoped they were, they’d understand when I finally confessed my hesitation about giving them something this helpful.”
“What made you wary?” I asked.
His thin features drew into a scowl. “Oh… minor details at first. Like Wallis’s whole style. Though, true, I didn’t have a proper chance to get acquainted, because he soon hopped forward to the following year. Think how that lengthens and strengthens power!”
“Unless his subordinates conspire against him meanwhile,” I suggested.
He shook his head. “Not in this case. He knows who’s certainly loyal, among both his agents and his hand-reared commoners. A hard core of travelers shuttles in and out through time with him, on a complicated pattern which always has one of them clearly in charge.
“Besides, how’d you brew a conspiracy among meek commoner farmers and laborers, arrogant commoner soldiers and officials, or the travelers themselves? They’re a wildly diverse and polyglot band, those I met in the castle and those stationed in outlying areas. Nearly all from post-medieval Western civilization—”
“Why?” I wondered. “Surely the rest of history has possibilities in proportion.”
“Yeah, and Wallis said he did mean to extend the range of his recruiters. But the difficulties of long temporal trips, language and culture barriers, training whomever you brought back, seemed too great thus far. His Jerusalem search was an experiment, and aside from me had a disappointing result.”
Havig shrugged. “To return to the main question,” he said, “American English is the Eyrie’s official language, which everybody’s required to learn. But even so, with most I could never communicate freely. Besides accents, our minds were too different. From my angle, the majority of them were ruffians. From theirs, I was a sissy, or else too sly-acting for comfort. And they had, they have their mutual jealousies and suspicions. Simply being together doesn’t stop them regarding each other as Limeys, Frogs, Boches, Guineas, the hereditary enemy. How would you give them a common cause?