"No. But I understand the cantankerous nature of the human beast. You really think the Queen's men would chase you this far?"
"No. But there's them here what would be pleased to lay hands on the genuine Kerry O'Driscol. Them as put down the draft laws during the recent brouhaha with the South. And there's them from Washington City worried about what the Fenians might be planning for Canada, and them on the other side o' the law what feels O'Driscol owes them."
With those points as arguments, and Patrick's growing interest in Fiala to tilt the balance, Fian did not have a great deal of difficulty convincing O'Driscol that he should join their move west. The Irishman had lost virtually all taste for the life of a political activist.
It was a romantic era. With no State to demand her total devotion, Fiala enjoyed a postponed adolescence. Her life became a masquerade, she a tourist enjoying a foreign time. Even Fian succumbed, somewhat, to the Mardi Gras spirit.
Without duties or obligations, the soul was at liberty to chase butterflies of personal happiness.
Diversion was a necessity. Two centuries could make a long, boring walk home.
That making it was possible was beyond doubt. Fiala didn't abandon herself completely. She researched contemporary medicine with the same intensity given play. And she quickly developed substitute rejuvenation courses that would see them into a more medically enlightened age, where the real thing could be obtained.
Fial's job was to twist the tail of the tiger of capitalism till it yielded up enough danegeld to finance Fian in the creation of a primitive tachyon communicator. Fian was driven by a need to warn his future, or past, of Neulist's imbecilic actions.
"What I'm trying to do," he once told Fiala-she had just rendered a professional opinion, warning him that he had begun showing obsessive-compulsive tendencies-illustrating with a piece of string in which he had tied a loop, "is use the machine to snip out this backward loop, so, and have a straight line again."
"Too many paradoxes for me."
"Such as?"
"If you were going to be successful, we would've gotten the message already. We wouldn't be here now."
"Not necessarily. There's still a knot in the string. Anyway, without computers, all I have to go on is intuition. My feeling is that there's an oscillation. A duplication. Where it happens both ways. And going either way makes the other happen."
"Isaac Newton?"
"Or thermodynamics."
But Fian erred in his topological analogy, though he was on the right track. The string and loop were too linear. He should have been thinking of a Klein bottle, where the loop could go any of a thousand directions, inside and out, and still come back to the same starting point.
• • •
"It's… elegant," Fiala decided. They were viewing the St. Louis house for the first time. "Period. Definitely period." She descended from the carriage. Patrick helped, then ran to open the gate. She had captivated the Irishman completely.
Fian followed with an amused smile. For Patrick's peace of mind he pretended ignorance of what was going on.
"It's remote enough." The nearest house was a quarter mile away, on the Shaw estate. "Come on, Father! Let's see what it looks like inside."
"I'm glad you're making the best of this. I never gave you much happiness before the accident."
"You were all right. For our times. Anyway, it'll all get tiresome. It's a long time to wait."
"Have a good time while you can, then."
Fian's obsessive work on his communicator persisted for a full two decades. He was compelled, to all practical purposes, to create his own technology, and that was a challenge worthy of an Einstein. Patrick made an invaluable, if ignorant, assistant.
Fial, from Rochester, made it all possible.
Patrick's eventual disappearance finally murdered the little joy left in the working vacation.
There was nothing mysterious about it. He had found a woman interested in marrying and raising children. He hadn't the nerve to explain in person, so just left a note.
"And I taught him to read and write!" Fiala spat.
"He was a good Catholic man," her father replied. "His conscience got to bothering him. It had to happen someday. Be glad you got as much as you did."
Fiala would not be consoled. She had loved O'Driscol in the silly, romantic style of the time, and insisted that she was desolate. In a month, though, the hard-headed twenty-first century doctor returned and the decades with Patrick slipped into perspective. An amusing, diverting episode along the long road home. Nothing more.
The absence of the Irishman's perpetual optimism made itself felt in Fian's work immediately. Fian had never realized just how much donkey work there was. But he kept plugging for another two years.
"That's it!" he shouted disgustedly one morning. "There's no way to build the thing using tubes. I can't create a pure enough vacuum. It'll be another seventy years before I can go solid state. Fiala, I'm going home."
"Where?"
"Back to Prague. Just for a year or two. It's time those coins were replaced anyway. Fial can spare the money now."
The new land held no more excitement for Fiala, either. "I'll start packing. Are we going to sell the house?"
"No. I want you to stay. You'll be safe. Neulist could be prowling Europe like some vengeance-mad Wandering Jew. Damn. Wouldn't it have saved a lot of trouble if that bomb had killed him?"
The argument ran for days, but Fiala finally had to accept her fate, to remain behind.
Thus did the lonely years begin.
For one reason or another-his excuses always sounded good-Fian never got around to coming back. Eventually, Fiala resigned herself. He never would.
There was the occasional lover, when she encountered a man who, like Patrick, couldn't sense the difference about her. She tried making friends with the new people building nearby, but few of them were immune to her alienness.
The loneliness became unspeakable for one raised in the crowded communal life of the densely populated State. It was broken only by occasional letters from Fial or her father. And those, ultimately, only depressed her more, for their loneliness leaked through their cheerful words.
The past was indeed a foreign land.
Maybe the Christians were on the right track. There was a hell. And this was it.