How A Time Traveler Gets Rich

While in Europe with the US Army, Jack Havig buys gold and silver which he exchanges for cash in the nineteenth and late eighteenth centuries although he can carry only a few pounds through time, including clothes, and also does not want to draw too much attention to himself. He takes valuable stamps and coins uptime and aluminum vessels downtime. He does not rely on compound interest from investments made that far back because too much can go wrong over that long a time. In 1929, he finds two agents and a sound bank as trustee and gives them his "economic analyses." Thus, he establishes a fund to be paid over to a collateral male descendant who meets certain standards at the age of twenty one. John Franklin Havig is contacted and becomes a millionaire in 1964 - although he would have been twenty one in 1954?

I mentioned the appropriateness of time travelers meeting in anachronistic surroundings. See Anachronisms. Havig has found a similarly appropriate bank:

"As related, the bank was one of those eastern ones, with Roman pillars and cathedral dimness and, I suspect, a piece of Plymouth Rock in a reliquary."
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), V, p. 52.

As ever, our informant is Robert Anderson.

Robert Anson Heinlein wrote, of his Future History chart:

"By now I hardly need the chart; the fictional future history embodied in it is at least as real to me as Plymouth Rock."
-Robert Heinlein, The Man Who Sold The Moon (London, 1963), PREFACE, PP. 9-10 AT p. 9.

Although I can see that Plymouth Rock is important to Americans, I had come across it only in Heinlein's Preface. Now it also appears in There Will Be Time. Thus, Plymouth Rock is a foundation stone of the United States, the Future History and Jack Havig's time travel group.