Marooned in Realtime

waited to entertain and enlighten. Now, they lay in ambush.

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Wil cried and cried, but no sounds came and scarcely any tears. He was holding hands with someone, someone who didn't speak. Everything was shades of pale blue. Her face was Virginia's, and also Marta's. She smiled sadly, a smile that could not deny the truth they both knew. ... Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. His lungs were empty, yet still he cried, forcing out the last of his breath. He could see through her now, to blue beyond. She was gone, and what he might have saved was lost forever.

Wil woke with an abrupt gasp for breath. He had exhaled so far it hurt. He looked up at the gray ceiling and remembered an advertisement from his childhood. They'd been pushing medical monitors; something about 6:00 AM being a good time to die, that lots of people suffered sleep apnea and heart attacks just before waking-and wouldn't everyone be safer if everyone bought automatic monitors.

It couldn't happen with modern medical treatment. Besides, the autons Yelen and Della had floating above the house were monitoring him. And a second besides — Wil smiled sourly to himself — the clock said 10:00 AM. He had slept nearly nine hours. He swung his bulk out of bed, feeling as if he had slept less than half that.

He lumbered into the bathroom, washed away the strange wetness he found around his eyes. All through his career, he'd done his best to project an appearance of calm strength. It hadn't been hard: He was built like a tank, and he was naturally a low-blood-pressure type. There were a few cases that had made him nervous, but that had been reasonable, since bullets were flying. In police work, he'd seen a fair number of people crack up. For all the publicity given cases like the Kansas Incursion, most of the violence in his era was simple domestic stuff, folks driven around the bend by job or family pressures.

He smiled wryly at the face in the mirror. He had never imagined it could happen to him. The end of sleep was a walk down night paths now. He had a feeling things were going to get worse. Yet there was a part of him that was as analytical as always, that was following his morning dreams and daytime tension with surprised interest, taking notes at his own dismemberment.

Downstairs, Wil threw open the windows, let the morning sounds and smells drift in. He was damned if he'd let this funk paralyze him. Later in the day, Lu was coming over. They would talk about the weapons survey, and decide who to interview next. In the meantime, there was lots of work to do. Yelen was right about studying the high-techs' lives since the Extinction. In particular, he wanted to learn about Sanchez's aborted settlement.

He was barely started on this project when Juan Chanson dropped by. In person. 'Wil, my boy! I was hoping we might have a chat.'

Brierson let him in, wondering why the high-tech hadn't called ahead. Chanson strode quickly around the living room. As usual, he was energetic to the point of twitchiness. ''alas Spanol, Wil?' he said.

'Si,' Brierson replied without thinking; he could get by, anyway.

'Buen, ' the archeologist continued in Spanolnegro. 'I really get tired of English, you know. Never can get just the right word. I'll wager some people think me a fool because of it.'

Wil nodded at the rush of words. In Spanolnegro, Chanson talked even faster than in English. It was an impressive — and nearly unintelligible — achievement.

Chanson stopped his nervous tour of the living room. He jerked a thumb at the ceiling. 'I suppose our high-tech friends are taking in every word?'

'Uh, no. They're monitoring body function, but I would have to call for help before our words would be interpreted.' And I asked Lu to make sure Yelen did no eavesdropping.

Chanson smiled knowingly. 'So they tell you, no doubt.' He placed a gray oblong on the table; a red light blinked at one end. 'Now the promises are true. Whatever we say goes unrecorded.' He waved for Brierson to be seated.

'We've talked about the Extinction, have we not?'

'Si. ' Several times.

Chanson waved his hand. 'Of course. I talk to everybody about it. Yet how many believe? Fifty million years ago, the human race was murdered, Wil. Isn't that important to you?'

Brierson sat back. This would shoot the morning. 'Juan, the Extinction is very important to me.' Was it really? Wil had been shanghaied more than a century before it. To his heart, that was when Virginia and Anne and W. W. Jr. had died-even if the biographies said they lived into the twenty-third century. He had been shanghaied across a hundred thousand years; that was many times longer than all recorded history. Now he lived at fifty megayears. Even without the capital-e Extinction, this was so deep in the future that no one could expect the human race to still exist. 'But most high-techs don't think there was an alien invasion. Alice Robinson said the race died out over the whole twenty-third century, and that there weren't signs of violence until very late. Besides, if there were an invasion, you'd think we'd have all sorts of refugees from the twenty-third. Instead we have nobody-except the last of you high-techs from 2201 and 2202.'

Chanson sniffed, 'The Robinsons are fools. They fit the facts to their rosy preconceptions. I've spent thousands of years of my life piecing this together, Wil. I've mapped every square centimeter of Earth and Luna with every diagnostic known to man. Bil Sanchez did the same for the rest of the Solar System I've interviewed the rescued low-techs. Most of the high-tech think I'm a crank, I've so thoroughly abused their hospitality There's a lot I don't understand about the aliens-but there's a lot that I do. There are no refugees from the twenty-third because the invaders could jam bobble generators; they had some superpowerful version of the Wachendon suppressor The extermination was not like twentieth-century nuclear war over in a matter of weeks. I've dated the Norcross graffiti a 2230. Apparently, the aliens were using specifically antihuman weapons early in the war. On the other hand, the vanadium tape