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1914 to 18, and they aren t scrambling for a leftover can of dogfood, or arming against the Mong who ll
pour across a Bering Straits that all the dust kicked into the atmosphere will cause to be frozen.
His impression was that, like World War I, it was a conflict which everybody anticipated, nobody
wanted, and men would have recoiled from had they foreseen the consequences. He thought it was less
ideological than ecological.
I have this nightmare notion that it came not just as a result of huge areas turning into deserts, but came
barely in time. Do you know the oceans supply half our oxygen? By 1970, insecti-cide was in the
plankton. By 1990, every ocean was scummy, and stank, and you didn t dare swim in it.
But this must have been predicted, I said.
He leered. Yeah. Environment was very big for a while. Ecology Now stickers on the windshields of
cars belonging to hairy young men-cars which dripped oil wherever they parked and took off in clouds of
smoke thicker than your pipe can pro-duce ... Before long, the fashionable cause was something else, I
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forget what. Anyhow, that whole phase-the wave after wave of causes-passed away. People completely
stopped caring.
You see, that was the logical conclusion of the whole trend. I know it s stupid to assign a single blame
for something as vast as the War of Judgment, its forerunners and aftermaths. Es-pecially when I m still in
dark about what the eventswere. But Doc, I feel a moral certainty that a large part of the disaster grew
from this particular country, the world s most powerful, the vanguard country for things both good and ill
. . . never really trying to meet the responsibilities of power.
We ll make halfhearted attempts to stop some enemies in Asia, and because the attempts are
halfhearted we ll piss away human lives--on both sides--and treasure--to no purpose. Hop-ing to placate
the implacable, we ll estrange our last few friends. Men elected to national office will solemnly identify
inflation with rising prices, which is like identifying red spots with the measles virus, and slap on wage and
price controls, which is like papering the cracks in a house whose foundations are sliding away. So
economic collapse brings international impotence. The well-off whites will grow enough aware that we
have dis-tressed minorities, and give them enough, to bring on revolt without really helping them; and the
revolt will bring on re-action, which will stamp on every remnant of progress. As for our foolish little
attempts to balance what we drain from the environment against what we put back-well, I mentioned that
car carrying the ecology sticker.
At first Americans will go on an orgy of guilt. Later they ll feel inadequate. Finally they ll turn apathetic.
After all, they ll be able to buy any anodyne, any pseudo-existence they want.
I wonder if at the end, down underneath, they don t wel-come their own multi-millionfold deaths.
Thus in February of 1964, Havig came into the inheritance he had made for himself. Shortly thereafter he
set about shor-ing up his private past, and spent months of his lifespan being Uncle Jack. I asked him
what the hurry was, and he said, Among other things, I want to get as much foreknowledge as possible
behind me. I considered that for a while, and choked off my last impulse to ask him about the
tomorrows of me and mine. I did not understand how rich a harvest this would bear until the day when
they buried Kate.
I never asked Havig if he had seen her gravestone earlier. He may have, and kept silent. As a physician,
I think I know how it is possible to possess such information and yet smile.
He didn t go straight from one episode with his childhood self to the next. That would have been
monotonous. Instead, he made his pastward visits vacations from his studies at our state university. He
didn t intend to be frustrated when again he sought a non-English-speaking milieu. Furthermore, he
needed a baseline from which to extrapolate changes of lan-guage in the future; there/then he was also
often a virtual deaf-mute.
His concentration was on Latin and Greek--the latter thatkoine which in its various forms had wider
currency through both space and time than Classical Attic--plus French, German, Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese (and English), with emphasis on their evolution-plus some Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic--plus
quite a bit of the numerous Polynesian tongues.
They do have a civilization on the other side of the dark centuries, he told me. I ve barely glimpsed
that, and can t make head or tail of what s going on. But it does look as if Pa-cific Ocean peoples
dominate the world, speaking the damned-estlingua franca you can imagine.
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So there is hope! gusted from me.
I still have to find out for sure. His glance speared mine. Look, suppose you were a time traveler
from, well, Egypt of the Pharaohs. Suppose you came to today s world and touristed around, trying to
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