Poul Anderson - There Will Be Time
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- Название:There Will Be Time
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- Издательство:Doubleday
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- Год:1972
- ISBN:нет данных
- Рейтинг книги:5 / 5. Голосов: 1
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There Will Be Time: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация
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Nominated for Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1973.
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He leaned back, breathed hard, swallowed his whiskey, and stated: “Well, they won’t succeed. For three-four centuries, yes, I’m afraid men will have to bear their yoke. But afterward — That’s what the Eyrie is for, Havig. To prepare an afterward.”
“I was born in 1853, upstate New York,” the Sachem related. “My father was a poor storekeeper and a strict Baptist. My mother — that’s her picture.” He indicated the gentle, ineffectual face upon the wall, and for an instant a tenderness broke through. “I was the last of seven children who lived. So Father hadn’t a lot of time or energy to spare for me, especially since the oldest boy was his favorite. Well, that taught me at an early age how to look out for myself and keep my mouth shut. Industry and thrift, too. I went to Pittsburgh when I was officially 17, knowing by then how much of the future was there. My older self had worked closer with me than I gather yours did. But then, I always knew I had a destiny.”
“How did you make your fortune, sir?” Havig inquired. He was interested as well as diplomatic.
“Well, my older self joined the Forty-niners in California. He didn’t try for more than a good stake, just enough to invest for a proper profit in sutlering when he skipped on to the War Between the States. Next he had me run over his time track, and when I came back to Pittsburgh the rest was easy. You can’t call ’em land speculations when you know what’s due to happen, right? I sold short at the proper point in ’73, and after the panic was in a position to buy up distressed property that would become valuable for coal and oil. Bought into railroads and steel mills, too, in spite of trouble from strikers and anarchists and suchlike trash. By 1880, my real age about thirty-five, I figured I’d made my pile and could go on to the work for which God had created me.”
Solemnly: “I’ve left my father’s faith. I guess most time travelers do. But I still believe in a God who every now and then calls a particular man to a destiny.”
And then Walls laughed till his belly jiggled and exclaimed:
“But my, oh, my, ain’t them highfalutin words for a plain old American! It’s not glamour and glory, Havig, except in the history books. It’s hard, grubby detail work, it’s patience and self-denial and being willing to learn from the mistakes more than the successes. You see how I’m not young any more, and my plans barely started to blossom, let alone bear fruit. The doing, though, the doing, that’s the thing, that’s to be alive!”
He held out his empty glass. “Refill this,” he said. “I don’t ordinarily drink much, but Lord, how I’ve wanted to talk to somebody both new and bright! We have several shrewd boys, like Krasicki, but they’re foreigners, except a couple of Americans who I’ve gotten so used to I can tell you beforehand what they’ll say to any remark of mine. Go on, pour for me, and yourself, and let’s chat awhile.”
Presently Havig could ask: “How did you make your first contacts, sir?”
“Why, I hired me a lot of agents, throughout most of the nineteenth century, and had them go around placing advertisements in papers and magazines and almanacs, or spreading a word of mouth. They didn’t say ‘time traveler,’ of course, nor know what I really wanted. That wording was very careful. Not that I made it myself. I’m no writer. Brains are what a man of action hires. I hunted around and found me a young Englishman in the ’90’s, starting out as an author, a gifted fellow even if he was kind of a socialist. I wanted somebody late in the period, to avoid, um-m, anticipations, you see? He got interested in my, ha, ‘hypothetical proposition,’ and for a few guineas wrote me some clever things. I offered him more money but he said he’d rather have the free use of that time travel idea instead.”
Havig nodded; a tingle went along his nerves. “Some such thought occurred to me, sir. But, well, I hadn’t your single-mindedness. I definitely don’t seem to have accumulated anything like your fortune. And besides, in my period, time travel was so common a fictional theme, I was afraid of publicity. At best, it seemed I’d merely attract cranks.”
“I got those!” Wallis admitted. “A few genuine, even: I mean travelers whose gift had made them a little tetched, or more than a little. Remember, a dimwit or a yokel, if he isn’t scared green of what’s happened to him and never does it again — or doesn’t want to travel outside the horizon he knows — or doesn’t get taken by surprise and murdered for a witch — he’ll hide what he is, and that’ll turn him strange. Or say he’s a street urchin, why shouldn’t he make himself rich as a burglar or a bookmaker, something like that, then retire to the life of Riley? Or say he’s an Injun on the reservation, he can impress the devil out of his tribe and make them support him, but they aren’t about to tell the palefaces, are they? And so on and so on. Hopeless cases. As for one like me, who is smart and ambitious, why, he’ll lay low same as you and I did, won’t he? Often, I’m afraid, too low for any of us to find.”
“How… how many did you gather?”
“Sir.”
“I’m sorry. Sir.”
Wallis gusted a breath. “Eleven. Out of a whole blooming century, eleven in that original effort.” He ticked them off. “Austin Caldwell the best of the lot. A fuzzy-cheeked frontier scout when he came to my office; but he’s turned into quite a man, quite a man. He it was who nicknamed me the Sachem. I kind of liked that, and let it stick.”
“Then a magician and fortuneteller in a carnival; a professional gambler; a poor white Southern girl. That was the Americans. Abroad, we found a Bavarian soldier; an investigator for the Inquisition, which was still going in Spain, you may know; a female Jew cultist in Hungary; a student in Edinburgh, working his heart out trying to learn from books what he might be; a lady milliner in Paris, who went off into time for her designs; a young peasant couple in Austria. We were lucky with those last, by the way. They’d found each other — maybe the only pair of travelers who were ever born neighbors — and had their first child, and wouldn’t have left if the baby weren’t small enough to carry.
“What a crew! You can imagine the problems of language and transportation and persuading and everything.”
“No more than those?” Havig felt appalled.
“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.”
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