Poul Anderson - There Will Be Time

He took a swallow of brandy. “My ability grew as I grew. I probably have no limit now, if I can stop at need, along the way, to rest. But I am limited in the mass I can carry along. That’s only a few pounds, including clothes. More, and I can’t move; it’s like being weighted down. If you grabbed me, for instance, I’d be stuck in normal time till you let go, because you’re too much for me to haul. I couldn’t just leave you behind; the force acts, or tries to act, on everything in direct contact with me.” A faint smile. “Except Earth itself, if I happen to be barefoot. I suppose that much mass, bound together not only by gravitation but by other, even stronger forces, has a — what? — a cohesion? — of its own.”

“You warned me against putting a solid object where you planned to, uh, materialize,” I said.

“Right,” he answered. “I can’t, in that case. I’ve experimented. Traveling through time, I can move around meanwhile in space if I want. That’s how I managed to appear next to myself. By the way, the surface I’m on may rise or sink, but I rise or sink likewise, same as when a person stands somewhere in normal time. And, aside from whatever walking I do, I stay on the same geographical spot. Never mind that this planet is spinning on its axis, and whirling around a sun which is rushing through a galaxy… I stay here. Gravitation again, I suppose.”

“Yes, about solid matter. I tried entering a hill, when I was a child and thoughtless. I could go inside, all right, easy as stepping into a bank of fog. But then I was cut off from light, and I couldn’t emerge into normal time, it was like being in concrete, and my breath ran out—” He shivered. “I barely made it back to the open air.”

“I guess matter resists displacement by you,” I ventured. “Fluids aren’t too hard to shove aside when you emerge, but solids are.”

“Uh-huh, that’s what I figured. If I’d passed out and died inside that rock and dirt, I guess my body would’ve — well, been carried along into the future at the ordinary rate, and fallen back into normal existence when at last the hill eroded away from around it.”

“Amazing how you, a mere lad, kept the secret.”

“Well, I gather I gave my mother a lot of worries. I don’t actually remember. Who does recall his first few years? Probably I needed a while to realize I was unique, and the realization scared me — maybe time traveling was a Bad Thing to do. Or perhaps I gloated. Anyway, Uncle Jack straightened me out.”

“Was he the unknown who brought you back when you’d been lost?”

“Yes. I do remember that. I’d embarked on a long expedition into the past, looking for Indians. But I only found a forest. He showed up — having searched the area through a number of years — and we had it nice together. Finally he took my hand and showed me how to come home with him. He could’ve delivered me within a few minutes of my departure and spared my parents those dreadful hours. But I believe he wanted me to see how I’d hurt them, so the need for discretion would really get driven into me. It was.”

His tone grew reminiscent: “We had some fine excursions later. Uncle Jack was the ideal guide and mentor. I’d no reason to disobey his commands about secrecy, aside from some disguised bragging to my friend Pete. Uncle Jack led me to better things than I’d ever have discovered for myself.”

“You did hop around on your own,” I reminded him.

“Occasionally. Like when a couple of bullies attacked me. I doubled back several times and outnumbered them.”

“No wonder you showed such a growth rate… When you learned your father was going into the service, you hoped to assure yourself he’d return safe, right?”

Jack Havig winced. “Yes. I headed futureward and took quick peeks at intervals. Until I looked in the window and saw Mother crying. Then I went pastward till I found a chance to read that telegram — oh, God. I didn’t travel in time again for years. I didn’t think I’d ever want to.”

The silence of the snow lapped about us.

At length I asked: “When did you most recently meet this mentor?”

“In 1969. But the previous time had been… shortly before I took off and learned about my father. Uncle Jack was particularly good to me, then. We went to the old and truly kind of circus, sometime in the late nineteenth century. I wondered why he seemed so sad, and why he re-explained in such detail the necessity of keeping our secret. Now I know.”

“Do you know who he is?”

His mouth lifted on the left side only. “Who do you suppose?”

“I resumed time traveling last year,” he said after a while. “I had to have a refuge from that, that situation on the farm. They were jaunts into the past, at first. You’ve no idea how beautiful this country was before the settlers arrived. And the Indians — well, I have friends among them. I haven’t acquired more than a few words of their language, but they welcome me and, uh, the girls are always ready, able, and eager.”

I could not but laugh. “Sven the Younger makes a lot of your having no dates!”

He grinned back. “You can guess how those trips relieved me.”

Serious again: “But you can guess, too, how more and more the whole thing at home — what Birkelund is pleased to call my home — got to feel silly, futile, and stuffing. Even the outside world. Like, what the devil was I doing in high school? ”

There I was, full-grown, full of these marvels I’d seen, hearing teen-agers giggle and teachers drone!”

“I imagine the family flareup was what sent you into the future?”

“Right. I was half out of my mind with rage. Mainly I hoped to see Sven Birkelund’s tombstone. Twenty years forward seemed like a good round number. But knowing I’d have a lot to catch up on, I made for late 1969, so as to be prepared to get the most out of 1970… The house was still in existence. Is. Will be.”

“Sven?” I asked softly.

“I suppose he’ll have survived.” His tone was savage. “I don’t care enough to check on that. In two more years, my mother will divorce him.”

“And — ?”

“She’ll take the babies, both of them, back to Massachusetts. Her third marriage will be good. I mustn’t add to her worries in this time, though. That’s why I returned; I made my absence a month long to show Birkelund I mean business; but I couldn’t make it longer than that, I couldn’t do it to her.”

I saw in him what I have seen in others, when those they care about are sick or dying. So I was hasty to say: “You told me you met your Uncle Jack, your other self.”

“Yeah.” He was glad to continue with practicalities. “He was waiting when I appeared in 1969. That was out in the woodlot, at night — I didn’t want to risk a stray spectator — but the lot had been logged off and planted in corn. He’d taken a double room in the hotel — that is, the one they’ll build after the Senlac Arms is razed — and put me up for a few days. He told me about my mother, and encouraged me to verify it by newspaper files in the library, plus showing me a couple of letters she’d recently written to him… to me. Afterward he gave me a thousand dollars — Doc, the prices in twenty years! — and he suggested I look around the country.

“News magazines indicated Berkeley was where it was at — uh, a future idiom. Anyway, San Francisco’s right across the Bay and I’d always wanted to see it.”

“How was Berkeley?” I asked, remembering visits to a staid university town.

He told me, as well as he was able. But no words, in 1951, could have conveyed what I have since experienced, that wild, eerie, hilarious, terrifying, grotesque, mind-bending assault upon every sense and common sense which is Telegraph Avenue at the close of the seventh decade of the twentieth century.