“Lead me to it,” grinned John Brent.
The rabbitty little State linguist received Brent effusively. “Ah, thank Cosmos!” he gasped. “Travelers be driving me mad! Such gibberish you have never heared! Such irregularities! Frightful! You be Slanduch?”
“I be. I have speaked several languages all my life. I can even speak pre-Zinsmeister German.” And he began to recite Die Lorelei. “Die Luft ist kiihl undes dunkelt, und ruhigfliesst der Rhein— ”
“Terrible! Ist! Such vile irregularity! And articles! But come, young man. We’ll see what you can do with these temporal barbarians!”
There were three travelers in the room Brent entered, with the shocked linguist and two rodded Stappers in attendance. One of the three was the woman he had noticed in that first cataclysmic instant of arrival, a strapping Amazonic blonde who looked as though she could break any two unarmed Stappers with her bare fingers. Another was a neat little man with a curly and minute forked beard and restless hands. The third—
The third was hell to describe. They were all dressed now in the conventional robes of the Stasis, but even in these familiar garments he was clearly not quite human. If man is a featherless biped, then this was a man; but men do not usually have greenish skin with vestigial scales and a trace of a gill-opening behind each ear.
“Ask each of them three things,” the linguist instructed Brent. “When he comes from, what his name bees, and what be his intentions.”
Brent picked Tiny Beard as the easiest-looking start. “O.K. You!” He pointed, and the man stepped forward. “What part of time do you come from?”
“A pox o’ thee, sirrah, and the goodyears take thee! An thou wouldst but hearken, thou might’st learn all.”
The State linguist moaned. “You hear, young man? How can one interpret such jargon?”
Brent smiled. “It bees O.K. This bees simply English as it beed speaked thousand years ago. This man must have beed aiming at earlier time and prepared himself. . . Thy pardon, sir. These kerns deem all speech barbaric save that which their own conceit hath evolved. Bear with me, and all will be well.”
“Spoken like a true knight!” the traveler exclaimed. “Forgive my rash words, sir.
Surely my good daemon hath led thee hither. Thou wouldst know—”
“Whence comest thou?”
“From many years hence. Thousands upon thousands of summers have yet to run their course ere I—”
“Forgive me, sir; but of that much we are aware. Let us be precise.”
“Why then, marry, sir, tis from the fifth century.”
Brent frowned. But to attempt to understand the gentleman’s system of dating would take too much time at the moment. “And thy name, sir?”
“Kruj, sir. Or an thou wouldst be formal and courtly, Kruj Krujil Krujilar. But let Kruj suffice thee.”
“And what most concerneth these gentlemen here is the matter of thine intentions. What are thy projects in this our earlier world?”
“My projects?” Kruj coughed. “Sir, in thee I behold a man of feeling, of sensibility, a man to whom one may speak one’s mind. Many projects have I in good sooth, most carefully projected for me by the Zhurmandril. Much must I study in these realms of the great Elizabeth—though ’sblood! I know not how they seem so different from my conceits! But one thing above all else do I covet. I would to the Mermaid Tavern.” Brent grinned. “I fear me, sir, that we must talk at greater length. Much hast thou mistaken and much must I make clear. But first I must talk with these others.” Kruj retired, frowning and plucking at his shred of beard. Brent beckoned to the woman. She strode forth so vigorously that both Stappers bared their rods.
“Madam,” Brent ventured tentatively, “what part of time do you come from?”
“Evybuy taws so fuy,” she growled. “Bu I unnasta. Wy cachoo unnasta me?” Brent laughed. “Is that all that’s the trouble? You don’t mind if I go on talking like this, do you?”
“Naw. You taw howeh you wanna, slonsoo donna like I dih taw stray.” Fascinating, Brent thought. All final consonants lost, and many others. Vowels corrupted along lines indicated in twentieth-century colloquial speech. Consonants sometimes restored in liaison as in French.
“What time do you come from, then?”
“Twenny-ni twenny-fie. N were am I now?”
“Twenty-four seventy-three. And your name, madam?”
“Mimi.”
Brent had an incongruous vision of this giantess dying operatically in a Paris garret. “So. And your intentions here?”
“Ai gonno intenchuns. Juh wanna see wha go.”
“You will, madam, I assure you. And now—” He beckoned to the green-skinned biped, who advanced with a curious lurching motion like a deep-sea diver.
“And you, sir. When do you come from?”
“Ya studier langue earthly. Vyerit todo langue isos. Ou comprendo wie govorit people.”
Brent was on the ropes and groggy. The familiarity of some of the words made the entire speech even more incomprehensible. “Says which?” he gasped.
The green man exploded. “Ou existier nada but dolts, cochons, duraki v this terre? Nikovo parla langue earthly? Potztausend Sapperment en la leche de tu madre and I do mean you!”
Brent reeled. But even reeling he saw the disapproving frown of the State linguist and the itching fingers of the Stappers. He faced the green man calmly and said with utmost courtesy, “’Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble over the rivering waters of the hither-and-thithering waters of pigeons on the grass alas.” He turned to the linguist. “He says he won’t talk.”
Brent wrote in the never-to-be-read journal: It was Martha again who solved my green man for me. She pointed out that he was patently extraterrestrial. (Apparently Nakamura’s Law of Spatial Acceleration is as false as Charnwood’s Law of Temporal Metabolism.) The vestigial scales and gills might well indicate Venus as his origin. He must come from some far distant future when the earth is overrun by inhabitants of other planets and terrestrial culture is all but lost. He had prepared himself for time travel by studying the speech of earth—langue earthly—reconstructed from some larger equivalent of
