A year has fled since Jack Havig and Leonce of Wahorn bade me farewell. I often think about them. Mostly, of course, dailiness fills my days. But I often find an hour to think about them.
At any moment they may be somewhere on our planet, desperate or triumphant in that saga I already know. But we will not meet. The end of their lives reaches untellably far beyond mine.
Well, so does the life of man. Of Earth and the cosmos.
I wish ... I wish many things. That they’d felt free to spend part of their stay in this summer which is past. We could have gone sailing. However, they naturally wanted to see Eleanor, his mother, in one of the few intervals they had been able to make sure were safe, and tell her--what? She has not told me.
How did the race of time travelers come to be?
We supposed, the three of us, that we knew the “why.” But we did not ask who, or what, felt the need and responded.
Meaningless accidental mutation? Then curious that none like Havig seem to have been born futureward of the Eyrie--of, anyhow, Polaris House. In truth it would probably not be good to have them and their foreknowledge about, once the purpose has been served of freeing man to roam and discover forever. But who decided this? Who shaped the reality?
But could a virus have been made which carried a very strange thing; and could it have been sown through a chosen part of the past by travelers created anew in some unimaginably remote tomorrow?
I walk beyond town, many of these nights, to stand under the high autumnal stars, look upward and wonder.