Wallis In The Future

Some of Poul Anderson's characters live indefinitely prolonged lifespans, some time travel and one group, the Time Patrol, does both. Caleb Wallis is a time traveler who wants to live forever. His history of the future concludes:

"Let us be satisfied to be God's agents of redemption. However, those who wish may cherish a private hope. Is it not possible that at last science will find a way to make the old young again, to make the body immortal? And by then, I have no doubt, time travel will be understood, may even be commonplace. Will not that wonderful future return and seek us out, who brought it into being, and give us our reward?'"

-There Will Be Time, p. 91.

For all his knowledge of the future, this is mere hope. He must spend a limited part of his lifespan checking the future, then the rest of his lifespan living through a small part of that future. All that he knows of his own life is that he will time jump through the two hundred years of the Eyrie, Phase One, and that he will be an old man at the end of it. He knows a little of later developments but not much and must merely believe that his organization will control the further future. Later, it is discovered that, near the end of Phase One, he will disappear - but where or when to?

Of course, Wallis cannot merely check the two hundred year history of Phase One and meet his elderly self at the end of it. He must check the future, meet himself, then return to the beginning of Phase One and live through that Phase, prolonging his rule by time hopping, to become that elderly self who will be visited by his younger self. What he does not know is that his elderly self will be drugged and controlled by Jack Havig's group. The future is not what it seems.