There Will Be Time

6

HE TOLD ME of his plan in 1964. As far as practicable, his policy was to skip intervals of the twentieth century equal to those he spent elsewhen, so that his real and calendar ages wouldn’t get too much out of step. I hadn’t seen him for a while. He no longer dwelt in Senlac, but made his headquarters in New York — a post office box in the present, a sumptuous apartment in the 1890’s, financed by the sale of gold he bought after this was again made legal and carried downtime. He did come back for visits, though. Kate found that touching. I did too, but I knew besides what need he had of me, his only confidant.

“Why … you’re right!” I exclaimed. “The moment you’d expect every traveler, at least in Christendom, to head for. Why haven’t you done it before?”

“Less simple than you suppose, Doc,” he replied. “That’s a long haul, to a most thoroughly alien territory. And how certain is the date, anyway? Or even the fact?”

I blinked. “You mean you’ve never considered seeking the historical Christ? I know you’re not religious, but surely the mystery around him—”

“Doc, what he was, or if he was, makes only an academic difference. What counts is what people through the ages have believed. My life expectancy isn’t enough for me to do the pure research I’d like. In fact, I’m overdue to put fun and games aside. I’ve seen too much human misery. Time travel has got to have some real value; it’s got to be made to help.” He barely smiled. “You know I’m no saint. But I do have to live in my own head.”

He flew from New York to Israel in 1969, while the Jews were in firm control of Jerusalem and a visitor could move around freely. From his hotel he walked out Jericho Road, carrying a handbag, till he found an orange grove which offered concealment. There he sprang back to the previous midnight and made his preparations.

The Arab costume he had bought at a tourist shop would pass in Biblical times. A knife, more eating tool than weapon, was sheathed at his hip; being able to blink out of bad situations, he seldom took a firearm. A leather purse held phrase book (specially compiled, for pay, by an American graduate student), food, drinking cup, Halazone tablets, soap, flea repellent, antibiotic, and money. That last was several coins of the Roman period, plus a small ingot he could exchange if need be.

Having stowed his modern clothes in the bag, he drew forth his last item of equipment. He called it a chronolog. It was designed and built to his specifications in 1980, to take advantage of the superb solid-state electronics then available. The engineers who made it had perhaps required less ingenuity than Havig had put into his cover story.

I have seen the apparatus. It’s contained in a green crackle-finish box with a carrying handle, about 24 by 12 by 6 inches. When the lid is opened, you can fold out an optical instrument vaguely suggestive of a sextant, and you can set the controls and read the meters. Beneath these lies a miniature but most sophisticated computer, running off a nickel-cadmium battery. The weight is about five pounds, which edges near half the limit of what a traveler can pack through time and helps explain Havig’s reluctance to carry a gun. Other items are generally more useful. But none approaches in value the chronolog.

Imagine. He projects himself backward or forward to a chosen moment. How does he know “when” he has arrived? On a short hop, he can count days, estimate the hour by sun or stars if a clock isn’t on the spot. But a thousand years hold a third of a million dawns; and the chances are that many of them won’t be identifiable, because of stormy weather or the temporary existence of a building or some similar accident.

Havig took his readings. The night was clear, sufficiently cold for his breath to smoke; Jerusalem’s lights hazed the sky northward, but elsewhere the country lay still and dark save for outlying houses and passing cars; constellations wheeled brilliant overhead. He placed the moon and two planets in relation to them, set the precise Greenwich time and geographical locations on appropriate dim-glowing dials, and worked a pair of verniers till he had numbers corresponding to that Passover week of Anno Domini 33.

(“The date does seem well established,” he’d remarked. “At least, it’s the one everybody would aim at.” He laughed. “Beats the Nativity. The only thing certain about that is it wasn’t at midwinter — not if shepherds were away from home watching their flocks!”)

He had been breathing in and out, deep slow breaths which oxygenated his blood to the fullest. Now he took a lungful — not straining, which would have spent energy, just storing a fair amount — and launched himself down the world lines.

There was the sensation, indescribable, but which he had told me was not quite unlike swimming against a high tide. The sun rose in the west and skidded eastward; then, as he “accelerated,” light became a vague pulsation of grayness, and everywhere around him reached shadow. It was altogether silent.

He glimpsed a shellburst — soundless, misty — but was at once past the Six Day War, or had that been the War of Independence or the First World War? Wan unshapes drifted past. On a cloudy night in the late nineteenth century he must reenter normal time for air. The chronolog could have given him the exact date, had he wanted to shoot the stars again; its detectors included sensitivities to those radiations which pierce an overcast. But no point in that. A couple of mounted men, probably Turkish soldiers, happened to be near. Their presence had been too brief for him to detect while traveling, even were it daylight. They didn’t notice him in the dark. Horseshoes thumped by and away.

He continued.

Dim though it was, the landscape began noticeably changing. Contours remained about the same, but now there were many trees, now few, now there was desert, now planted fields. Fleetingly, he glimpsed what he guessed was a great wooden stadium wherein the Crusaders held tourneys before Saladin threw them out of their blood-smeared kingdom, and he was tempted to pause but held to his purpose. Stops for breath grew more frequent as he neared his goal. The journey drained strength; and, too, the idea that he might within hours achieve his dream made the heart hammer in his breast.

A warning light blinked upon the chronolog.

It could follow sun, moon, planets, and stars with a speed and precision denied to flesh. It could allow for precession, perturbation, proper motion, even continental drift; and when it identified an aspect of heaven corresponding to the destination, that could be nothing except the hour which was sought.

A light flashed red, and Havig stopped.

Thursday night was ending. If the Bible spoke truly, the Last Supper had been held, the agony in the garden was past, and Jesus lay in bonds, soon to be brought before Pilate, condemned, scourged, lashed to the cross, pierced, pronounced dead, and laid in the tomb.

(“They tie them in place,” Havig told me. “Nails wouldn’t support the weight; the hands would tear apart. Sometimes nails are driven in for special revenge, so the tradition could be right as far as it goes.” He covered his face. “Doc, I’ve seen them hanging, tongues black from thirst, bellies bloated — after a while they don’t cry out any longer, they croak, and no mind is left behind their eyes. The stink, the stink! They often take days to die. I wonder if Jesus wasn’t physically frail, he won to his death so soon … A few friends and kinfolk, maybe, hover on the fringes of the crowd, hardly ever daring to speak or even weep. The rest crack jokes, gamble, drink, eat picnic lunches, hold the kiddies up for a better view. What kind of a thing is man, anyway?”

(Put down your pride. Ours is the century of Buchenwald and Vorkuta — and Havig reminded me of what had gone on in the nostalgically remembered Edwardian part of it, in places like the Belgian Congo and the southern United States — and he told me of what has yet to happen. Maybe I don’t envy him his time travel after all.)

Morning made an eastward whiteness. Now he had an olive orchard at his back, beyond which he glimpsed a huddle of adobe buildings. The road was a rutted dirt track. Afar, half hidden in lingering twilight, Jerusalem of the Herodian kings and the Roman proconsulate crouched on its hills. It was smaller and more compact than the city he remembered two millennia hence, mainly within walls though homesteads did spread beyond. Booths and felt tents crowded near the gates, erected by provincials come to the holy place for the holy days. The air was cold and smelled of earth. Birds twittered. “Beyond one or two hundred years back,” Havig once said to me, “the daytime sky is always full of wings.”

He sat panting while light quickened and vigor returned. Hungry, he broke off chunks of goat cheese and tortilla-like bread, and was surprised to realize that he was taking a perfectly ordinary meal on the first Good Friday in the world.

If it was. The scholars might have gotten the date wrong, or Jesus might be nothing more than an Osirian-Essene-Mithraic myth. Suppose he wasn’t, though? Suppose he was, well, maybe not the literal incarnation of the Creator of these acres, those wildfowl, yonder universe … but at least the prophet from whose vision stemmed most of what was decent in all time to come. Could a life be better spent than following him on his ministry?

Well, Havig would have to become fluent in Aramaic, plus a million details of living, and he would have to forget his quest.

He sighed and rose. The sun broke over the land.

He soon had company. Nevertheless he walked as an outsider.

(“If anything does change man,” he said, “it’s science and technology. Just think about the fact — while it lasts — that parents need not take for granted some of their babies will die. You get a completely different concept of what a child is.” He must have seen the memory of Nora flit across my face, for he laid a hand on my shoulder and said: “I’m sorry, Doc. Shouldn’t have mentioned that. And never ask me to take a camera back to her, or a shot of penicillin, because I’ve tried altering the known past and something always happens to stop me …

Think of electric bulbs, or even candles. When the best you’ve got is a flickering wick in a bowl of oil, you’re pretty well tied to daylight. The simple freedom to stay awake late isn’t really that simple. It has all sorts of subtle but far-reaching effects on the psyche.”)

Folk were up at dawn, tending livestock, hoeing weeds, stoking fires, cooking and cleaning, against the Sabbath tomorrow. Bearded men in ragged gowns whipped starveling donkeys, overloaded with merchandise, toward the city. Children, hardly begun to walk, scattered grain for poultry; a little older, they shooed gaunt stray dogs from the lambs. When he reached pavement, Havig was jostled: by caravaneers from afar, sheikhs, priests, hideous beggars, farmers, artisans, a belated and very drunken harlot, a couple of Anatolian traders, or whatever they were, in cylindrical hats, accompanying a man in a Grecian tunic, and then the harsh cry to make way and tramp-tramp-tramp, quickstep and metal, a Roman squad returning from night patrol.

I’ve seen photographs which he took on different occasions, and can well imagine this scene. It was less gaudy than you may suppose, who live in an age of aniline dyes and fluorescents. Fabrics were subdued brown, gray, blue, cinnabar, and dusty. But the sound was enormous — shrill voices, laughter, oaths, extravagant lies and boasts, plang of a harp, fragments of a song; shuffling feet, clopping unshod hoofs, creaking wooden wheels, yelping dogs, bleating sheep, grunting camels, always and always the birds of springtime. These people were not stiff Englishmen or Americans; no, they windmilled their arms, they shaped the air with their palms, backslapped, jigged, clapped hand to dagger in affront and almost instantly were good-humored again. And the smells! The sweet sweat of horses, the sour sweat of men; smoke, fragrant from cedar or pungent from dried dung; new-baked bread; leeks and garlic and rancid grease; everywhere the droppings and passings of animals, often the ammonia of a compost heap; a breath of musk and attar of roses, as a veiled woman went by borne in a litter; a wagonload of fresh lumber; saddle leather warming beneath the sun — Havig never praised this day when nails were beaten through living bodies; but nothing of what he inhaled made him choke, or hurt his eyes, or gave him emphysema or cancer.

The gates of Jerusalem stood open. His pulse beat high.

And then he was found.

It happened all at once. Fingers touched his back. He turned and saw a stocky, wide-faced person, not tall, clad similarly to him but also beardless, short-haired, and fair-skinned.

Perspiration sheened upon the stranger’s countenance. He braced himself against the streaming and shoving of the crowd and said through its racket: “Es tu peregrinator temporis?”

The accent was thick-eighteenth-century Polish, it would turn out — but Havig had a considerable mastery of classical as well as later Latin, and understood.

“Are you a time traveler?”

For a moment he could not reply. Reality whirled about him. Here was the end of his search.

Or theirs.

His height was unusual in this place, and he had left his head bare to show the barbering and the Nordic features. Unlike the majority of communities in history, Herodian Jerusalem was sufficiently cosmopolitan to let foreigners in; but his hope had been that others like him would guess he was a stranger in time as well as in space, or he might spy one of them. And now his hope was fulfilled.

His first thought, before the joy began, was an uneasy idea that this man looked far too tough.

They sat in the tavern which was their rendezvous and talked: Waclaw Krasicki who left Warsaw in 1738, Juan Mendoza who left Tijuana in 1924, and the pilgrims they had found.

These were Jack Havig. And Coenraad van Leuven, a man-at-arms from thirteenth-century Brabant, who had drawn his sword and tried to rescue the Savior as the cross was being carried toward Golgotha, and was urged back by Krasicki one second before a Roman blade would have spilled his guts, and now sat stunned by the question: “How do you know that person really was your Lord?” And a gray-bearded Orthodox monk who spoke only Croatian (?) but seemed to be named Boris and from the seventeenth century. And a thin, stringy-haired, pockmarked woman who hunched glaze-eyed in her robe and cowl and muttered in a language that nobody could identify.

“This is all?” Havig asked unbelieving.

“Well, we have several more agents in town,” Krasicki answered. Their conversation was in English, when the American’s origin was known. “We’re to meet Monday evening, and then again right after, hm, Pentecost. I suppose they’ll turn up a few more travelers. But on the whole, yes, it seems like we’ll make less of a haul than we expected.”

Havig looked around. The shop was open-fronted. Customers sat crosslegged on shabby rugs, the street and its traffic before them, while they drank out of clay cups which a boy filled from a wineskin. Jerusalem clamored past. On Good Friday!

Krasicki wasn’t bothered. He had mentioned leaving his backward city, country, and time for the French Enlightenment; in a whisper, he had labeled his partner Mendoza as a gangster. (“Mercenary” was what he said, but the connotation was plain.) “It’s nothing to me if a Jewish carpenter who suffers from delirium is executed,” he told Havig. With a nudge: “Nor to you, eh? We seem to have gotten one reasonable recruit, at any rate.”

In fact, that was not the American’s attitude. He avoided argument by asking: “Are time travelers really so few?”

Krasicki shrugged. “Who knows? At least they can’t easily come here. It makes sense. You boarded a flying machine and arrived in hours. But think of the difficulties, the downright impossibility of the trip, in most eras. We read about medieval pilgrims. But how many were they, really, in proportion to population? How many died on the way? Also, I suppose, we’ll fall to find some time travelers because they don’t want to be found — or, maybe, it’s never occurred to them that others of their kind are in search-and their disguises will be too good for us.”

Havig stared at him, and at imperturbable Juan Mendoza, three-quarters-drunk Coenraad, filthy rosary-clicking Boris, unknown crazy woman, and thought: Sure. Why should the gift fall exclusively on my type? Why didn’t I expect it’s given at random, to a complete cross-section of humanity? And I’ve seen what most humanity is like. And what makes me imagine I’m anything special?

“We can’t spend too many man-hours hunting, either,” Krasicki said. “We are so few in the Eyrie.” He patted Havig’s knee. “Mother of God, how glad the Sachem will be that at least we found you!”

A third-century Syrian hermit and a second-century B.C. Ionian adventurer were gathered by two more teams. Report was given of another woman — she seemed to be a Coptic Christian — who vanished when approached.

“A rotten harvest,” Krasicki grumbled. “However—” And he led the way, first to the stop after Pentecost, which yielded naught, then to the twenty-first century.

Dust drifted across desert. in Jerusalem nothing human remained except bones and shaped stones. But an aircraft waited, needle-nosed, stubby-winged, nuclear-powered, taken by Eyrie men from a hangar whose guardians had had no chance to throw this war vessel into action before the death was upon them.

“We flew across the Atlantic,” Havig would tell me. “Headquarters was in … what had been … Wisconsin. Yes, they let me fetch my chronolog from where I’d hidden it, though I pleaded language difficulties to avoid telling them what it was. They themselves had had to cast about to zero in on the target date. That’s a clumsy, lifespan-consuming process, which probably helps account for the dearth of travelers they found, and certainly explains their own organization’s reluctance to make long temporal journeys. Return was easier, because they’d erected a kind of big billboard in the ruins, on which an indicator was set daily to the correct date.

“In late twenty-first-century America, things were barely getting started, The camp and sheds were inside a stockade and had been attacked more than once by, uh, natives or marauders. From then we moved on uptime to when the Sachem had sent his expedition out to that Easter.”

I do not know if my friend ever looked upon Jesus.