Title: Underappreciated
Fandom: The Fantastic Journey
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Jonathan Willaway, Varian.
Rating: PG
Spoilers/Setting: After the series.
Summary: Jonathan Willaway is a brilliant scientist, but was underappreciated in his own time.
Word Count: 688
Content Notes: Nada.
Written For: Challenge 494: Brilliant.
Disclaimer: I don’t own The Fantastic Journey, or the characters. They belong to their creators.





Brilliant but underappreciated, that was how Jonathan Willaway thought of himself. A scientist ahead of his time, misunderstood, dismissed by his peers as eccentric, out of touch with reality… Some even considered him a fool because he had no interest in weapons research, refused to be involved in anything that would enable mankind to kill each other more efficiently.

He was a man of principle, and of peace; war and killing disgusted him, and so did anyone who made their money by developing weapons. Science should be used to improve people’s lives, to produce clean energy, to educate and enrich, to explore the universe. That was why he’d worked for NASA, on the cutting edge of space exploration, working towards putting a man on the moon. That endeavour had still been a work in progress back in 1963, when Willaway’s plane had lost power and crashed on this island, but he’d been confident it could be achieved within a decade.

He'd never had much patience with his fellow scientists back in his own time, supposedly the greatest minds of their various nations. Most of them had been so obsessed with arming their country with sufficient firepower to ‘defend’ their borders that they’d scoffed at his own ambitions, his desire for peace and a permanent end to war.

And now here he was, among a thoroughly mismatched group of people, confronted with the knowledge that the moon landings had, in fact, been achieved in 1969. More importantly, he knew now that by the twenty-third century, war no longer existed, and in a roundabout way, he’d had a hand in making that happen.

He wished he could see for himself the world he’d helped to create, but all he could do was listen as Varian described the world he came from, the earth of 2230, where cities stood miles high, and countries no longer existed, where the people were peaceful, where famine was a thing of the past. It sounded idyllic, the kind of world Jonathan had always dreamed of, and he could well understand why Varian would want to get back to his own time.

For Jonathan himself, though, there was little he missed about the sixties. Perhaps the occasional vintage wine, but certainly not the people, with their seemingly incessant desire for war and conquest. Unlike his travelling companions, he didn’t want to return to his own time, but he went with them anyway, because they were far better company than most people he’d known before.

Perhaps, as they travelled across the island, he might find a zone where a brilliant man such as himself would be free to reach his full potential, to explore avenues of science that had yet to even be theorised about back in his own time. They had, after all, already encountered several groups whose science was even more advanced than that of Varian’s time, and most of those were from worlds other than earth. The things he could discover! It was an exciting prospect.

Unfortunately, so far, those more advanced civilisations had proven as warlike in their own ways as his own, and he had no interest in exchanging one set of warmongers for another, no matter how much he might learn from them.

Besides, there was a lot to be said for travelling in the company of another man of peace, someone without an aggressive bone in his body, someone who was, if not quite Jonathan’s intellectual equal, at least shared a similar moral code, as well as an intense interest in history. He and Varian had plenty to talk about, which was… refreshing.

And it was rather flattering knowing that he had been appreciated in his own time after all, even if no one had ever said as much to him, too busy berating him for refusing to allow his own discoveries to be used for purposes he didn’t approve of. A posthumous memorial, an award named after him… He hadn’t simply been forgotten after he vanished, was still remembered two and a half centuries later! What more could one of the greatest scientific geniuses of his time ask for?


The End