The concluding sections of the text are extremely condensed. We are informed in less than a page that Jack Havig builds not just an organization but a community of several thousand time travellers with its main base in the middle Pleistocene. We realize that a series of stories could have been written about such a community.
The concluding chapter is nostalgic, elegiac and autumnal. (You will find the word, "autumnal," in the concluding sentence.) Havig and Leonce will be in the distant future on a planet of another sun but Robert Anderson will never see them again so that for him they are in the past. We reach the last page and look at it for a while as Robert Anderson stands:
"...under the high autumnal stars..." (p. 176)
It is past midnight here.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I also recall Havig brooding a bit about how a dying Caleb Wallis, shaking off the drugged haze he had been in and disappearing as he realized what had been done to him.
Ad astra! Sean
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