Poul Anderson - There Will Be Time

We’d taken my boat out on Lake Winnego. He’d come home, discharged, a few weeks earlier, but much remained to tell me. This was the more true because his mother needed his moral support in her divorce from Birkelund, her move away from scenes which were now painful. He’d matured further, not only in the flesh. Two of my years ago, a man had confronted me: but a very young man, still groping his way out of hurt and bewilderment. The Jack Havig who sat in the cockpit today was in full command of himself.

I shifted my pipe and put down the helm. We came about in a heel and swoosh and rattle of boom. Springtime glittered on blue water; sweetness breathed from the green across fields and trees, from apple blossoms and fresh-turned earth. The wind whooped. It was cool and a hawk rode upon it.

“Well, you had plenty to think about,” I answered.

“For openers,” he said, “how does time travel work?”

“Tell me, Mr. Bones, how does time travel work?”

He did not chuckle. “I learned a fair amount of basic physics in the course of becoming an electronics technician. And I read a lot on my own, including stuff I went uptime to consult — books, future issues of Scientific American and Nature, et cetera. All theory says that what I do is totally impossible. It starts by violating the conservation of energy and goes on from there.”

“E put si muove.”

“Huh?… Oh. Yeah. Doc, I studied the Italian Renaissance prior to visiting it, and discovered Galileo never did say that. Nor did he ever actually drop weights off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Well.” He sprawled back on the bench and opened another bottle of beer for each of us. “Okay. So there are hookers in the conservation of energy that official science doesn’t suspect. Mathematically speaking, world lines are allowed to have finite, if not infinite discontinuities, and to be multi-valued functions. In many ways, time travel is equivalent to faster-than-light travel, which the physicists also declare is impossible.”

I watched my tobacco smoke stream off on the breeze. Wave-lets smacked. “You’ve left me a few light-years behind,” I said. “I get nothing out of your lecture except an impression that you don’t believe anything, uh, supernatural is involved.”

He nodded. “Right. Whatever the process may be, it operates within natural law. It’s essentially physical. Matter-energy relationships are involved. Well, then, why can I do it, and nobody else? I’ve been forced to conclude it’s a peculiarity in my genes.”

“Oh?”

“They’ll find the molecular basis of heredity, approximately ten years from now.”

“What?” I sat bolt upright. “This you’ve got to tell me more about!”

“Later, later. I’ll give you as much information on DNA and the rest as I can, though that isn’t a whale of a lot. The point is, our genes are not simply a blueprint for building a fetus. They operate throughout life, by controlling enzyme production. You might well call them the very stuff of life… What besides enzymes can be involved? This civilization is going to destroy itself before they’ve answered that question. But I suspect there’s some kind of resonance — or something — in those enormous molecules; and if your gene structure chances to resonate precisely right, you’re a time traveler.”

“Well, an interesting hypothesis.” I had fallen into a habit of understatement in his presence.

“I’ve empirical evidence,” he replied. With an effort: “Doc, I’ve had quite a few women. Not in this decade; I’m too stiff and gauche. But uptime and downtime, periods when it’s fairly easy and I can use a certain glamour of mysteriousness.”

“Congratulations,” I said for lack of anything better.

He squinted across the lake. “I’m not callous about them,” he said. “I mean, well, if a romp is all she wants, like those Dakotan girls two-three centuries ago, okay, fine. But if the affair is anything more, I feel responsible. I may not plan to live out my life in her company — I wonder if I’ll ever marry — but I check on her future for the next several years, and try to make sure she does well.” His countenance twisted a bit. “Or as well as a mortal can. I’ve not got the moral courage to search out their deaths.”

After a pause: “I’m digressing, but it’s an important digression to me. Take Meg, for instance. I was in Elizabethan London. The problems caused by my ignorance were less than in most milieus, though I did need a while to learn the ropes and even the pronunciation of their English. A silver ingot I’d brought along converted more easily than usual to coin — people today don’t realize how much suspicion and regulation there was in the oh-so-swashbuckling past — even if I do think the dealer cheated me. Well, anyhow, I could lodge in a lovely half-timbered inn, and go to the Globe Theatre, and generally have a ball.

“One day I happened to be in a slum district. A woman plucked my sleeve and offered me her daughter’s maidenhead cheap. I was appalled, but thought I should at least meet the poor girl, maybe give her money, maybe try to get my landlord to take her on as a respectable servant… No way.” (Another of his anachronistic turns of speech.) “She was nervous but determined. And after she’d explained, I had to agree that an alley lass of independent spirit probably was better off as a whore than a servant, considering what servants had to put up with. Not that anyone was likely to take her in such a capacity, class distinctions and antagonisms being what they were.

“She was cocky, she was good-looking, she said she’d rather it was me than some nasty and probably poxy dotard. What could I do? Disinterested benevolence just plain was not in her mental universe. If she couldn’t see my selfish motive, she’d’ve decided it must be too deep and horrible for her, and fled.”

He glugged his beer. “All right,” he told me defiantly. “I moved into larger quarters and took her along. The idea of an age of consent didn’t exist either. Forget about our high school kids; I’d certainly never touch one of them. Meg was a woman, young but a woman. We lived together for four years of her life.

“Of course, for me that was a matter of paying the rent in advance, and now and then coming back from the twentieth century. Not very often, I being stationed in France. Sure, I could leave whenever I wanted, and return with no AWOL time passed, but the trip to England cost, and besides, there were all those other centuries… Nevertheless, I do believe Meg was faithful. You should’ve seen how she fended off her relatives who thought they could batten on me! I told her I was in the Dutch diplomatic service… ”

“Oh, skip the details. I’m talking all around my subject. In the end, a decent young journeyman fell in love with her. I gave them a wedding present and my blessings. And I checked ahead, dropping in occasionally through the next decade, to make sure everything was all right. It was, as close as could be expected.”

He sighed. “To get to the point, Doc, she bore him half a dozen children, starting inside a year of their marriage. She had never conceived by me. As far as I’ve determined, no woman ever has.”

He had gotten a fertility test, according to which he was normal.

Neither of us wanted to dwell on his personal confession. It suggested too strongly how shaped our psyches are by whatever happens to be around us. “You mean,” I said slowly, “you’re a mutant? So much a mutant that you count as, as a different species?”

“Yeah. I think my genes are that strange.”

“But a fellow time traveler — a female—”

“Right on, Doc.” Another futurism.”

He was still for a while, in the blowing sunlit day, before he said: “Not that that’s important in itself. What is important — maybe the most important thing in Earth’s whole existence — is to find those other travelers, if there are any, and see what we can do about the horrors uptime. I can’t believe I’m a meaningless accident!”