“I think Professor Wheaton here,” as Noxon indicated their host, “has a good suggestion. Why don’t we skip ahead to when the ship we call the Visitors departs from Earth, and then wait out the time till they return? If we can’t learn what we need to at that time, we can always come back. And in the meantime, I can make some jaunts back in time and compile a decent fortune by buying a few shares of Xerox, Microsoft, Apple, a few others. Or even earlier, in the heyday of untaxed capitalism. We don’t need a huge amount—just enough in a Swiss account that no matter what time period we need to visit, we’ll have contemporary funds we can draw on.”
“Deborah’s been briefing you,” said Anthropologist Wheaton.
“He’s so ignorant,” said Deborah. “It seemed the least I could do.”
Philologist Wheaton took Deborah’s shopping list to the grocery store, while Noxon, Ram, Deborah, and Anthropologist Wheaton busied themselves with glancing through the bookshelves and scanning their hos
t’s publications. “He writes very well,” said Anthropologist Wheaton. “Clear prose, opinionated but with plenty of grounding in sources.”
“Why does this sound like self-praise?” asked Ram.
“It’s not,” said Anthropologist Wheaton. “And if I had chosen to pursue philology, I can’t help but hope I would have refrained from some of his stranger speculations.”
“Because you never speculated in your anthropological work,” said Deborah.
“Ah, but I can prove myself right, now. At least to my own satisfaction. Basketweaving Erectids! Ropes and twines! Deliberately planted and cultivated yams! Continuing communication between the alpha-centered forest group and the monogamous savannah group.”
“Not monogamous,” said Deborah. “We weren’t there long enough to know that.”
“Monogamy-ready, then,” said her father.
“Don’t you have a memory card with all your publications on it?” asked Ram.
“I do,” said Anthropologist Wheaton.
“As do I,” said Deborah. “I didn’t think he’d be happy to leave all those behind.”
“My darling girl,” said her father.
“You are a darling,” said Noxon, allowing no trace of irony to enter his tone. “I need a blind clerk with a good memory.”
“And I need a facemask,” said Deborah. “Maybe we can work out a trade.”
“Let’s see what the future brings,” said Ram Odin.
After a few days, Noxon and Ram followed their host’s suggestion, skipping ahead a few months at a time. Deborah and her father stayed behind, ostensibly to research worldwide public opinion and government actions, but mostly, Noxon believed, for the professors Wheaton to read each other’s work and criticize it in a most friendly, collegial, and sarcastic manner.
Noxon and Ram lingered for a while after Ram’s ship launched, and then again when the Visitors’ ship took off. Ram was fascinated to study what scientists learned from his first passage through the fold. They had no idea of the split into nineteen forward ships and one backward one—though one mathematician did speculate that microdifferences among the onboard computers might cause a division of outcomes. To avoid any chance of that, the Visitors’ ship was designed to use only one computer for navigation and guidance, and all other computers were switched off during the leap across the fold.
For a couple of months after the Visitors’ ship was launched, Noxon and Ram skipped ahead only a few days at a time. Then Noxon stopped blind-jumping entirely. He only moved forward by very rapid time-slicing, so that they caught a glimpse of the intervening days.
Thus it was that they were time-slicing in the back bedroom of Wheaton’s apartment when there was a blinding flash of light and searing heat. The floor disappeared beneath them; the whole house disappeared. They plunged downward, but Noxon kept on time-slicing, so the fires were out for days before they landed.
The building was gone.
In the midst of time-slicing, they couldn’t converse about what just happened, but it was soon obvious that the event had flattened all the buildings in their vicinity. Forest fires had raged on the nearby hills, and here and there they were still smoldering, giving off a red glow at night.
Noxon increased the gaps in his time-slicing, so they raced forward, spending less time in any one minute or hour. The forest fires died out completely. Everything seemed calm. Noxon was about to bring them out of time-slicing mode when he saw several aircraft of strange, wingless design come hurtling by in the near distance, not very high above the ground. Only when they had passed by did he take Ram back to the regular flow of time.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Ram immediately. “I think that was a nuclear blast and we’re going to be eaten alive by radiation.”
“Let’s get to a place where there weren’t any buildings or parked cars, so we can jump back safely.” Noxon began scanning for paths so he could pick an appropriate moment to return unobserved. He tried to avoid noticing where all the paths ended abruptly with the blast.
“I didn’t know anybody was on the brink of war,” said Noxon as they walked.
“Nobody was,” said Ram. “Nobody on Earth.”
“What do you mean?”