She seemed to sense his withdrawal. For a moment he feared a gathering anger. Then she relaxed, and with another smile, a puzzled but resigned smile, said, “This be part of not understanding you, I guess. Cosmos knows but you be so young, John, still so young . . .”
She must, Brent thought with sudden surprise, have been a very pretty girl.
The door opened. The man who entered was as tall as the Stapper, but wore the civilian’s iridescent robes. His long beard seemed to have caught a little of their rainbow influence; it was predominantly red, but brown and black and white glinted in it. The hair on his head was graying. He might have been anywhere from fortyfive to a vigorous and well-preserved seventy.
“We have a guest, sister?” he asked politely.
The Roman matron made a despairing gesture. “You don’t recognize him? And John—you don’t know Stephen?”
Stephen slapped his thigh and barked—a sound that seemed to represent a laugh of pleasure. “Cosmos!” he cried. “John Brent! I told you, Martha. I knew he wouldn’t fail us.”
“Stephen!” she exclaimed in shocked tones.
“Hang the irregularities! Can’t I greet John with the old words that corned—no, by Cosmos—came from the same past he came from? See, John—don’t I talk the old language well? I even use article—pardon me, the article.”
Brent’s automatic mental notebook recorded the fact, which he had already suspected, that an article was as taboo as an irregular verb. But around this self-governing notation system swirled utter confusion. It might possibly have been just his luck to run into a madwoman. But two mad brains in succession with identical delusions were too much. And Stephen had known he was from the past.
“I’m afraid,” he said simply, “this is too much for me. Suppose we all sit down and have a drink of something and talk this over.”
Stephen smiled. “You remember our bond, eh? And not many places in State you’ll find it. Even fewer than before.” He crossed to a cabinet and returned with three glasses of colorless liquid.
Brent seized his eagerly and downed it. A drink might help the swirling. It might—
The drink had gone down smoothly and tastelessly. Now, however, some imp began dissecting atoms in his stomach and shooting off a bombardment stream of particles that zoomed up through his throat into his brain, where they set off a charge of explosive of hitherto unknown power. Brent let out a strangled yelp.
Stephen barked again. “Good bond, eh, John?”
Brent managed to focus his host through the blurring lens of his tears. “Sure,” he nodded feebly. “Swell. And now let me try to explain—”
The woman looked sadly at her brother. “He denies us, Stephen. He sayes that he haves never seed me before. He forgets all that he ever sweared about Barrier.”
A curious look of speculation came into Stephen’s brown eyes. “Bees this true, John? You have never seed us before in your life?”
“But, Stephen, you know—”
“Hush, Martha. I sayed in his life. Bees it true, John?”
“It bees. God knows it bees. I have never seen . . . seed either of you in my life.”
“But Stephen—”
“I understand now, Martha. Remember when he telled us of Barrier and his resolve?”
“Can I forget?”
“How doed he know of Barrier? Tell me that.”
“I don’t know,” Martha confessed. “I have wondered—”
“He knowed of Barrier then because he bees here now. He telled me then just what we must now tell him.”
“Then for Heaven’s sake,” Brent groaned, “tell me.”
“Your pardon, John. My sister bees not so quick to grasp source of these temporal confusions. More bond?” He had the bottle in his hand when he suddenly stopped, thrust it back in the cabinet, and murmured, “Go into bedroom.”
Brent obeyed. This was no time for displaying initiative. And no sooner had the bedroom door closed behind him than he heard the voice of the Stapper. (The mental notebook recorded that apartment buildings must be large, if it had taken this long for the search to reach here.)
“No,” Stephen was saying. “My sister and I have beed here for past half-hour. We seed no one.”
“State thanks you,” the Stapper muttered, so casually that the phrase must have been an official formula. His steps sounded receding. Then they stopped, and there was the noise of loud sniffs.
“Dear God,” thought Brent, “have they crossed the bulls with bloodhounds?”
“Bond,” the Stapper announced.
“Dear me,” came Martha’s voice. “Who haves beed in here today, Stephen?”
“I’m homeopath,” said the Stapper. “Like cures like. A little bond might make me forget I smelled it.”
There was a bark from Stephen and a clink of glasses. No noise from either of them as they downed the liquor. Those, sir, were men. (Memo: Find out why such unbelievable rotgut is called bond, of all things.)
“State thanks you,” said the Stapper, and laughed. “You know George Starvel, don’t you?”
A slightly hesitant “Yes” from Stephen.
“When you see him again, I think you’ll find he haves changed his mind. About many things.”
There was silence. Then Stephen opened the bedroom door and beckoned Brent back into the living room. He handed him a glass of bond and said, “I will be brief.”
Brent, now forewarned, sipped at the liquor and found it cheerfully warming as he assimilated the new facts.
In the middle of the twenty-fourth century, he learned, civilization had reached a high point of comfort, satisfaction, achievement—and stagnation. The combination of atomic power and De Bainville’s revolutionary formulation of the principles of labor and finance had seemed to solve all economic problems. The astounding development of synthetics had destroyed the urgent need for raw materials and colonies and abolished the distinction between haves and have-nots among nations. Schwarzwalder’s Compendium had achieved the dream of the early Encyclopedists— the complete systematization of human knowledge. Farthing had regularized the English language, an achievement paralleled by the work of Zinsmeister, Timofeov,
