Herries, the leader of 500 men drilling for oil in the Jurassic, wonders about free will and the eventual fate of twentieth century America and its nuclear-armed adversaries.

The story was a nice forerunner to Silverberg’s “Hawksbill Station.”
But we are mortal men. And we have free will. The fixed-time concept need not, logically, produce fatalism; after all, Herries, man’s will is itself one of the links in teh causal chain. I suspect that this irrational fatalism is an important reason why twentieth-century civilization is approaching suicide. If we think we know our future is unchangeable, if our every action is foreordained, if we are doomed already, what’s the use of trying? Why go through all the pain of thought, of seeking an answer and struggling to make others accept it? But if we really believed in ourselves, we woiuld look for a solution, and find one.

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  1. “Wildcat” by Poul Anderson, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1958.
    2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Poul Anderson