Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt [30]
“I think Galileo’s our best bet.”
“Okay. You’ll have to take some language lessons.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Good. Now, when you’ve done that, and you’re ready to go—”
“Yes?”
“I’m invited, right?”
“Of course. It’s why I came. You will come—”
“Sure.”
“Okay. I’ll call you when I’m ready.” He started for the door.
“Shel, one more question. What happens if we materialize in midair? Does the thing always set you on the ground?”
“It wasn’t something I thought to ask. We can put it to him when we find him.” He opened the door. Paused. “Dave, thanks.”
“Sure.”
“And don’t forget: Tell nobody, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“It won’t be easy. I want to talk about this to everybody I know.”
“I hear you. That was once in a lifetime out there tonight.”
SHEL was dead right. Dave wanted to call everybody. Old friends, his folks, his occasional girlfriend Katie Gibson, the guys on his bowling team, his department chairman at the university. Listen, Professor, you won’t believe this, but guess where I was earlier today. Or no, that wasn’t quite correct. Guess where I was one night in 1931, well before you were born. And who I talked to.
He should have brought something back. And remembered that he had. He reached into his pants pocket and retrieved it: a receipt from Lenox Hill Hospital for an amount that would barely pay a decent restaurant tab today. Dated December 13, 1931.
Looking as if it had been issued within the last hour.
Tomorrow he’d buy a frame. That baby was going to hang over his desk.
He should have tried to get Churchill to initial it. Should have taken some pictures.
Had he recalled Helen, he’d have realized he still had plenty of time to try for his accidental meeting with her at the Serendip. But she never entered his mind.
IT was almost impossible to get through his Monday classes. Latin 311 was reading Plutarch, the lives of Demosthenes and Cicero, and Dave couldn’t resist himself. “Try to imagine what it would be like,” he told his thirteen students, “if we could go back to classical Greece for an afternoon and join the crowd listening to Demosthenes. We’d hear a great orator persuading the Athenians to make war on Alexander. They lost, of course. And what’s the lesson, Jim?”
Jim laughed. “Just because somebody is articulate doesn’t mean he makes sense.”
That was as close as he got to telling them the truth, but it was a near thing. He wanted desperately to let them know that it really was possible to travel in time. No: more than that. That he had walked across to another century. That he had done it. Gone to another time. And he, by God, had the receipt from the Lenox Hill Hospital to prove it.
Hardest for him was sitting in the department meeting two days later, listening to Larry Stevens, unctuous, self-i mportant, always going on about his latest linguistic conclusions. The evolution of the German verb arbeiten, whose earlier forms, it seemed, had appeared farther back than anyone had realized. “Think what that means.”
Nobody ever ate lunch with Larry.
And Dave would have loved to point out that, if it really mattered, he could take Larry into a second-century Bavarian forest, where they could settle the business about the German verb once and for all.
The department chair was staring at him.
Later someone told him he’d been giggling.
KATIE had come into a small inheritance. She celebrated by taking him to dinner and a movie. “What did you want to see?” he asked her.
Thurgood. The film was, of course, a biopic of Thurgood Marshall. “Is that okay with you?”
Not really. But he didn’t conceal his lack of interest very effectively. “Sure,” he said.
“What’s wrong? It’s gotten good reviews.”
“Nothing’s wrong. Let’s go see it.”
“Dave . . . ?”
“No. It’s fine.” Dave had developed a resistance to any kind of drama written around racial conflict. He’d never been able to bring himself to read To Kill a Mockingbird. Or to see A Raisin in the Sun. His folks had given him a copy of The Souls of Black Folk, which included some of DuBois’s essays and letters. It was painful reading, and Dave