Gravel scrunched beneath wheels. A car pulled in, to stop beneath a great old chestnut tree which dominated the lawn. I didn’t recognize the vehicle and swore a bit while I rose; it’s never pleasant getting rid of salesmen. Then they stepped out, and I knew him and guessed who she must be.
“Doc!” Havig ran to hug me. “God, I’m glad to see you!”
I was not vastly surprised. In the months since last he was here, I had been expecting him back if he lived. But at this minute I realized how much I’d fretted about him.
“How’s your wife?” I asked.
The joy died out of his face. “She didn’t live. I’ll tell you about it … later.”
“Oh, Jack, I’m sorry—”
“Well, for me it happened a year and a half ago.” When he turned to the rangy redhead approaching us, he could again smile. “Doc, Leonce, you’ve both heard plenty about each other. Now meet.”
Like him, she was careless of my muddy handclasp. I found it at first an unsettling encounter. Never before had I seen someone from out of time; Havig didn’t quite count. And, while he hadn’t told me much concerning her, enough of the otherness had come through in his narrative. She did not think or act or exist remotely like any woman, any human creature, born into my epoch. Did she?
Yet the huntress, tribal councilor, she-shaman, casual lover and unrepentant killer of — how many? — men, wore an ordinary dress and, yes, nylon stockings and high-heeled shoes, carried a purse, smiled with a deftly lipsticked mouth, and said in English not too different from my own: “How do you do, Dr. Anderson? I have looked forward to this pleasure.”
“Come on inside,” I said weakly. “Let’s get washed and, and I’ll make a pot of tea.”
Leonce tried hard to stay demure, and failed. While Havig talked she kept leaving her chair, prowling to the windows and peering out at my quiet residential street. “Calm down,” he told her at length. “We checked uptime, remember? No Eyrie agents.”
“We couldn’t check every minute,” she answered.
“No, but — well, Doc, about a week hence I’ll phone you and ask if we had any trouble, and you’ll tell me no.”
“They could be readyin’ somethin’,” Leonce said.
“Unlikely.” Havig’s manner was a bit exasperated; obviously they’d been over this ground before. “We’re written off. I’m certain of it.”
“I s’pose I got nervous habits when I was a girl.”
Havig hesitated before he said, “If they are after us, and onto Doc’s being our contact, wouldn’t they strike through him? Well, they haven’t.” To me: “Hard to admit I’ve knowingly exposed you to a hazard. It’s why I avoid my mother.”
“That’s okay, Jack.” I attempted a laugh. “Gives me an interesting hobby in my retirement.”
“Well, you will be all right,” he insisted. “I made sure.”
Leonce drew a sharp breath. For a time nothing spoke except the soughing in the branches outside. A cloud shadow came and went.
“You mean,” I said at last, “you verified I’ll live quietly till I die.”
He nodded.
“You know the date of that,” I said.
He sat unmoving.
“Well, don’t tell me,” I finished. “Not that I’m scared. However, I’d just as soon keep on enjoying myself in the old-fashioned mortal style. I don’t envy you — that you can lose a friend twice.”
My teakettle whistled.
“And so,” I said after hours had gone by, “you don’t propose to stay passive? You mean to do something about the Eyrie?”
“If we can,” Havig said low.
Leonce, seated beside him, gripped his arm. “What, though?” she almost cried. “I been uptime myself-quick-like, but the place is bigger’n ever, an’ I saw Cal Wallis step from an aircraft — they got robotic factories built by then — an’ he was gettin’ old but he was there.” Fingers crooked into talons. “Nobody’d killed the bastard, not in that whole while.”
I lumped my pipe. We had eaten, and sat among my books and pictures, and I’d declared the sun sufficiently near a nonexistent yardarm that whiskey might be poured. But in those two remained no simple enjoyment of a call paid on an old acquaintance, or for her a new one; this had faded, the underlying grief and anger stood forth like stones.
“You have no complete account of the Eyrie’s future career,” I said.
“Well, we’ve read Wallis’s book and listened to his words,” Havig answered. “We don’t believe he’s lying. His kind of egotist wouldn’t, not on such a topic.”
“You miss my point.” I wagged my pipestem at them. “The question is, Have you personally made a year-by-year inspection?”
“No,” Leonce replied. “Originally no reason to, an’ now too dangerous.” Her gaze steadied on me. She was a bright lass. “You aimin’ at somethin’, Doctor?”
“Maybe.” I scratched a match and got my tobacco lit. The small hearthfire would be a comfort in my hand. “Jack, I’ve spent a lot of thought on what you told me on your previous visit. That’s natural. I have the leisure to think and study and — You’ve come back in the hope I might have an idea. True?”
He nodded. Beneath his shirt he quivered.
“I have no grand solution to your problems,” I warned them. “What I have done is ponder a remark you made: that our freedom lies in the unknown.”
“Go on!” Leonce urged. She sat with fists clenched.
“Well,” I said between puffs, “your latest account kind of reinforces my notion. That is, Wallis believes his organization, modified but basically the thing he founded, he believes it will be in essential charge of the post-Maurai world. What you’ve discovered there doesn’t make this seem any too plausible, hey? Ergo, somewhere, somewhen is an inconsistency. And… for what happened in between, you do merely have the word of Caleb Wallis, who is vainglorious and was born more than a hundred years ago.”
“What’s his birth got to do with the matter?” Havig demanded.
“Quite a bit,” I said. “Ours has been a bitter century. Hard lessons have been learned which Wallis’s generation never needed, never imagined. He may have heard about concepts like operations analysis, but he doesn’t use them, they aren’t in his marrow.”
Havig tensed.
“Your chronolog gadget is an example of twentieth-century thinking,” I continued. “By the way, what became of it?”
“The one I had got left in Pera when… when I was captured,” he replied. “I imagine whoever acquired the house later threw it out or broke it apart for junk. Or maybe feared it might be magical and heaved it in the Horn. I’ve had new ones made.”
A thrill passed through me, and I began to understand Leonce the huntress a little. “The men who took you, even a fairly sophisticated man like that Krasicki, did not think to bring it along for examination,” he said. “Which illustrates my point nicely. Look, Jack, every time traveler hits the bloody nuisance of targeting on a desired moment. To you, it was a matter of course to consider the problem, decide what would solve it — an instrument — and find a company which was able to accept your commission to invent the thing for you.”
I exhaled a blue plume. “It never occurred to Wallis,” I finished. “To any of his gang. That approach doesn’t come natural to them.”
Silence descended anew.
“Well,” Havig said, “I am the latest-born traveler they found prior to the Judgment.”
“Uh-huh,” I nodded. “Take advantage of that. You’ve made a beginning, in your research beyond the Maurai period. It may seem incredible to you that Wallis’s people haven’t done the same kind of in-depth study. Remember, though, he’s from a time when foresight was at a minimum — a time when everybody assumed logging and strip-mining could go on forever. It was the century of Clerk Maxwell, yes — I’m thinking mainly of his work on what we call cybernetics — and Babbage and Peirce and Ricardo and Clausewitz and a slew of other thinkers whom we’re still living off of. But the seeds those minds were planting hadn’t begun to sprout and flower. Anyhow, like many time travelers, it seems, Wallis didn’t stay around to share the experiences of his birth era. No, he had to skite off and become the almighty superman.