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!”
“How do you propose to go about it?”
His gaze was cat-cool. “I start by becoming rich.”
For years which followed, I am barely on the edge of his story.
He’d see me at intervals, I think more to keep our friendship alive than to bring me up to date-since he obviously wanted Kate’s company as much as mine. But I have only indirect news of his career. Often, in absence, he would become a dream in my mind, so foreign was he to our day-by-day faster-and-faster-aging small-town life, the growing up of our sons, the adventure of daughters-in-law and grandchildren. But then he would return, as if out of night, and for hours I would again be dominated by that lonely, driven man.
I don’t mean he was fanatical. In fact, he continued to gain in perspective and in the skill of savoring this world. His intellect ranged widely, though it’s clear that history and anthropology must be his chief concerns. As a drop of fortune, he had a talent for learning languages. (He and I wondered how many time travelers were wing-clipped by the mere lack of that.) Sardonic humor and traditional Midwestern courtesy combined to make his presence pleasant. He became quite a gourmet, while staying able to live on stockfish and hardtack without complaint. He kept a schooner in Boston, whereon he took Kate and me to the West Indies in celebration of our retirement. While the usages of his boyhood made him reticent about it, I learned he was deeply sensitive to beauty both natural and manmade; of the latter, he had special fondness for Baroque, Classical, and Chinese music, for fine ships and weapons, and for Hellenic architecture. (God, if You exist, I do thank You from my inmost heart that I have seen Jack Havig’s photographs of the unruined Acropolis.)
I was the single sharer of his secret, but not his single friend. Theoretically he could have been intimate with everyone great, Moses, Pericles, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Einstein. But in practice the obstacles were too much. Besides language, custom, and law, the famous were hedged off by being busy, conspicuous, sought-after. No, Havig — I called him “Jack” to his face, but now it seems more natural to write his surname — Havig told me about people like his lively little Meg (three hundred years dust), or a mountain man who accompanied Lewis and Clark, or a profane old moustache who had marched with Napoleon.