5
BIRKELUND PROVED less of a problem than expected. I saw him in private, told him the writing was a leftover script from an amateur show, and pointed out that it was actually sarcastic–after which I gave him holy hell about his treatment of his stepson and his wife. He took it with ill grace, but he took it. As remarked earlier, he was by no means an evil man.
Still, the situation remained explosive. Jack contributed, being daily more short-tempered and self-willed. “He’s changed so much,” Eleanor told me in grief. “His very appearance. And I can’t blame all the friction on Sven and his boys. Jack’s often downright arrogant.”
Of course he was, in his resentment of home, his boredom in school, his burden of foreknowledge. But I couldn’t tell his mother that. Nor, for her sake, could he make more than overnight escapes for the next two or three years.
“I think,” I said, “it’d be best if he took off on his own.”
“Bob, he’s barely eighteen,” she protested.
He was at least twenty-one, probably more, I knew. “Old enough to join the service.” He’d registered in the lawful manner on his birthday. “That’ll give him a chance to find himself. It’s possible to be drafted by request, so as to be in for the minimum period. The board will oblige if I speak to ‘em.”
“Not before he’s graduated!”
I understood her dismay and disappointment. “He can take correspondence courses, Ellie. Or the services offer classes, which a bright lad like Jack can surely get into. I’m afraid this is our best bet.”
He had already agreed to the idea. A quick uptime hop showed him he would be posted to Europe. “I can explore a lot of history,” he said; then, chill: “Besides, I’d better learn about weapons and combat techniques. I damn near got killed in the twenty-first century. Couple members of a cannibal band took me by surprise, and if I hadn’t managed to wrench free for an instant–”
The Army was ill-suited to his temperament, but he stuck out basic training, proceeded into electronics, and on the whole gained by the occasion. To be sure, much of that was due to his excursions downtime. They totaled a pair of extra years.
His letters to me could only hint at this, since Kate would read them too. It was a hard thing for me, not to open for her the tremendous fact, not to have her beside me when at last he came home and through hour upon hour showed me his notes, photographs, memories.
(Details were apt to be unglamorous–problems of vaccination, language, transportation, money, law, custom–filth, vermin, disease, cruelty, tyranny, violence–“Doc, I’d never dreamed how different medieval man was. Huge variations from place to place and era to era, yeah, but always the … Orientalness? … no, probably it’s just that the Orient has changed less.” However, he had watched Caesar’s legions in triumph through Rome, and the greyhound shapes of Viking craft dancing over Oslo Fjord, and Leonardo da Vinci at work.
He’d not been able to observe in depth. In fact, he was maddened by the superficial quality of almost all his experiences. How much can you learn in a totally strange environment, when you can barely speak a word and are liable to be arrested on suspicion before you can swap for a suit of contemporary clothes? Yet what would I not have given to be there too?)
How it felt like a betrayal of Kate, not telling her! But if Jack could keep silence toward his mother, I must toward my wife. His older persona had been, was, would be right in stamping upon the child a reflex of secrecy.
Consider the consequences, had it become known that one man–or one little boy–can swim through time. To be the sensation of the age is no fit fate for any human. In this case, imagine as well the demands, appeals, frantic attempts by the greedy, the power-hungry, the ideology-besotted, the bereaved, the frightened to use him, the race between governments to sequester or destroy him who could be the ultimate spy or unstoppable assassin. If he survived, and his sanity did, he would soon have no choice but to flee into another era and there keep his talent hidden.