Knowing The Future

In Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), when Jack Havig joins the Eyrie, he reads Sachem Caleb Wallis' history of the future. Wallis describes the implementation over several centuries of a three phase plan.

He has met himself, very old, two centuries later at the end of Phase One and has visited the very different Phase Two once. Beyond that, he knows only that there will be "...fabulous engines..." (p. 91) on a pastoralized Earth and hopes that the Eyrie will rule from within those engines.

Later, Wallis visits the end of Phase One again and learns that he and some of his chief lieutenants will disappear at the end of that Phase. He himself will never be seen again apart from that one brief visit that he has already made to Phase Two. He hopes that he and his lieutenants will be taken into the further future and made immortal.

Much here is unknown and freedom lies in the unknown. The very old Wallis at the end of Phase One has been drugged and is entirely controlled by Havig's rival group. That group builds Phase Two and uses it to prepare for Phase Three. Thus, when the younger Wallis visited Phase Two, he was shown what Havig wanted him to see and told what Havig wanted him to hear.

The old Wallis eventually wakes, screams and disappears into time possibly because the effect of the Maurai drug has worn off and he has remembered the truth.