Numbly, they obeyed. In the street he stopped to don the surcoat off a dead Crusader. His pack he gave a man to carry. From another corpse he took a sword. He didn’t waste time unbuckling the scabbard belt. That weapon indicated a high enough rank that his party wasn’t likely to meet interference.
Several streets down, dizziness overwhelmed him. He must sit, head between knees, till strength returned. Xenia knelt before him, hands anxiously trying to help. “Hauk,” went her raw whisper. “Wh-wh-what’s wrong, dearest Hauk?”
“We’re safe,” he finally said.
From the immediate threat, at least. He didn’t suppose the Eyrie would spend man-years scouring Constantinople for him and these, once they had vanished into the multitudes. But he had still to safeguard their tomorrows, and his own. The knowledge gave him a glacial kind of resolution. He rose and led them further on their stumbling way.
“I left them at a certain monastery,” he told me (long afterward on his own world line). “The place was jammed with refugees, but I foreknew it’d escape attention. In the course of the next several days, local time, I made better arrangements. A simple task—” he grimaced—”distasteful but simple, to hijack unidentifiable loot from ordinary Franks. I made presents to that monastery, and to the nunnery where I later took the women. This won favor for the people I’d brought, special favor out of the hordes, because with my donations the monks and nuns could buy bread to feed their poor.”
“What about the hordes?” I asked softly.
He covered his face. “What could I do? They were too many.”
I gripped his shoulder. “They are always too many, Jack.”
He sighed and smiled a little. “Thanks, Doc.”
I had exceeded my day’s tobacco ration, but the hour was far into night and my nerves required some help. Drawing out my pipe, I made an evil-smelling ceremony of cleaning it. “What’d you do next?”
“Went back to the twentieth century — a different hotel — and slept a lot,” he said. “Afterward … well, as for my Byzantines, I could do nothing in their immediate futures. I’d cautioned them against talking, told them to say they’d just fled from a raid. After a ‘saint’ had rescued them from ‘demons,’ it was a safe bet they’d obey. But as fail-safe, I did not tell the men where I led the women.
“Further than that, no transportation being available, and me not wanting to do anything which might make them noticeable, my best tactic was to leave them alone. The organized institutions where they were could care for them better than I’d know how.
“Besides, I had to provide for my own survival.”
I reamed the pipe with needless force. “Yes, indeed,” I said. “What did you do?”
He sipped his drink. While he dared not blur mind or senses, the occasional taste of Scotch was soothing. “I knew the last date on which I had publicly been J. F. Havig,” he told me. “At the start of my furlough, in 1965, in conference with a broker of mine. True, there had been later appearances in normal time, like my 1969 trip to Israel, but those were brief. Nineteen sixty-five marked the end of what real continuity there was in my official persona. Everything was in order, the broker told me. I didn’t see how so complicated a financial and identity setup could be faked. Thus my existence was safe up to that point.”
“The Eyrie couldn’t strike at you earlier? Why not?”
“Oh, they could appear at a previous moment and lay a trap of some kind, no doubt. But it couldn’t be sprung till later. On the whole, I doubted they’d even try that. None of them really know their way around the twentieth century, its upper echelons in particular, as I do.”
“You mean, an event once recorded is unalterable?”
Now his smile chilled me. “I suspect all events are,” he said. “I do know a traveler cannot generate contradictions. I’ve tried. So have others, including Wallis himself. Let me give you a single, personal example. Once in young manhood I thought I’d go back downtime, break my ‘uncle’s’ prohibition, reveal to my father what I was and warn him against enlisting.”
“And?” I breathed.
“Doc, remember that broken leg of mine you treated?”
“Yes. Wait! That was—”
“Uh-huh. I tripped on an electric cord somebody had carelessly left at the top of some stairs, the personal-time day before I planned to set out… When I was well and ready to start afresh, I got an urgent call from my trust company and had to argue over assorted tedious details. Returning to Senlac, I found my mother had made her final break with Birkelund and needed my presence. I looked at those two innocent babies he and she had brought into this world, and got the message.”
“does God intervene, do you think?”
“No, no, no. I suppose it’s simply a logical impossibility to change the past, same as it’s logically impossible for a uniformly colored spot to be both red and green. And every instant in time is the past of infinitely many other instants. That figures.
“The pattern is. Our occasional attempts to break it, and our failures, are part of it.”
“Then we’re nothing except puppets?”
“I didn’t say that, Doc. In fact, I can’t believe we are. Seems to me, our free wills must be a part of the grand design too. But we’d better take care to stay within the area of unknownness, which is where our freedom lies.”
“Could this be analogous to, well, drugs?” I wondered. “A man might deliberately, freely take a chemical which grabbed hold of his mind. But then, while its effects lasted, he would not be free.”
“Maybe, maybe.” Havig stirred in his chair, peered out into night, took another small swallow of whiskey. “Look, we may not have time for these philosophical musings. Wallis’s hounds are after me. If not in full cry, surely at any rate alert for any spoor of me. They know something of my biography. They can find out more, and make spot checks if nothing else.”
“Is that why you avoided me, these past years of my life?” I asked.
“Yes.” Now he laid a comforting hand on me. “While Kate lived — You understand?”
I nodded dumbly.
“What I did,” he said, hastening on to dry detail, “was return to that selfsame date of 1965, in New York, the last one I could be reasonably sure of. From there I backtracked, laying a groundwork. It took a while. I had to make sure that what I did would be so hard to trace that Wallis wouldn’t assign the necessary man-years to the task. I worked through Swiss banks, several series of dummies, et cetera. The upshot was that John Havig’s fortune got widely distributed, in the names of a number of people and corporations who in effect are me. John Havig himself, publicity-shy playboy, explained to his hired financiers that this was because — never mind. A song and dance which sounded enough like a tax-fraud scheme, though actually it wasn’t, that they were glad to wash their hands of me and to know nothing important.
“John Havig, you recall, thereupon quietly dropped out of circulation. Since he had no intimates in the twentieth century, apart from his mother and his old hometown doctor, only these would ever miss him or wonder much; and it was easy to drop them an occasional reassuring letter.”
“Postcards to me, mainly,” I said. “You had me wondering, all right.” After a pause: “Where were you?”
“Having covered my tracks as well as might be,” he answered, “I went back to Constantinople.”
In the burnt-out husk of New Rome, order was presently restored. At first, if nothing else, troops needed water and food, for which labor and some kind of civil government were needed, which meant that the dwellers could no longer be harried like vermin. Later, Baldwin of Flanders, lord over that fragment of the Empire which became his portion and included the city, desired to get more use than that out of his subjects. He was soon captured in war against the Bulgarians and died a prisoner, but the attitude of his brother and successor Henry I was the same. A Latin king could oppress the Greeks, squeeze them, humiliate them, tax them to poverty, dragoon them into his corvées or his armies. But for this he must allow them a measure of security in their work and their lives.