The man wore a heavy fur coat over leather trousers and boots. He must have been dying out there in the heat, Kahn thought. Two scabbards hung at the fellow’s belt, one holding a knife, the other a curved sword. He smelled of sweat and rancid butter. The worst thing was that Kahn recognized the costume, though not the person in it.
He rose from his chair, feeling hot blood rush to his face. He had not been in a fight since the sixth grade, but he wanted to punch this fellow’s lights out. “If you’re not a singing telegram, pal, you’re in big trouble,” he said between clenched teeth.
The man did not burst into song. Kahn, who tended to think too much for his own good, took another look at the cutlery the fellow was carrying and decided that trying to kill him might not be such a good idea after all.
He stood irresolutely, and the moment passed. His shoulders sagged. “Very goddamn funny,” he said bitterly, hearing the weakness in his own voice and hating it. “I presume you know my father.”
To his amazement, the man in front of him went down on his knees, then thumped his forehead on the cheap indoor-outdoor office carpet. The door clicked shut at the same time. That made the stale, greasy stench worse, but it also kept anybody walking down the hall from seeing what was going on inside.
Fat lot of good that would do, Kahn realized. He clapped a hand to his forehead in horrified dismay. Doris, damn her blabbing soul, would spread this all over the office, and so would everyone else who had sported this kowtowing weirdo. How would he ever be able to look people in the face again?
He had to drag his attention back to the fellow, who, his face still against the nubby knit nylon, had started to talk. “No, Excellency,” he was saying in a voice Kahn seemed to hear between his ears rather than with them, “never did I have the privelege of meeting that great hero Yesugei. I-”
“Say, you are good,” Kahn said with grudging admiration. Not one in a million knew who Yesugei was or cared. He wished-Oh how he wished! — he didn’t himself. “What are you, one of dad’s grad students? If you wanted to get hold of me, why didn’t you just call?”
The man lifted his head from the rug, and looked at Kahn with as much perplexity as Kahn was giving him. “I had not thought to find the phrase ‘grad student’ on your lips, mighty lord.”
Kahn’s head was starting to spin. The most likely idea he’d had-and it wasn’t very-was that the maniac who would not get off the rug was some Syrian or Egyptian studying with his dad who wanted a favor from him. That would explain the flowery speech, at least. Why the fellow had to get into costume for that, though, was beyond him.
“Look, tell me what you want and take off, okay?” he said.
The strangers head went thump on the carpet again. “Merely the boon of observing you for a brief while, mighty lord.”
That was so far from anything Kahn had expected that he blurted, “Who the devil do you think I am, anyway?”
“Surely your Excellency can be no one else but Temujin, Genghis Khan-“
“Yes, thanks to my old man, I am Temujin Genghis Kahn,” Khan said, wishing for the nine millionth time that his father had dug ditches for a living instead of being a professor of Mongol history. It had made him the only first-grader at Oakdale ever to be called exclusively by his initials.
The fellow on the floor went on as if he had not spoken: “-unifier of the Mongols, conqueror of north China, subduer of the Khwarizm Shah, ravager of Russia, builder of the hugest s ever see-”
“-tech writher, in debt, divorced, driving an old Toyota,” Kahn finished the litany. He looked down at the stranger groveling before him. “You’re carrying on as if I were the real one, or something.”
The hangdog, puzzled look was back on the man’s face.
“Again you use strange terms, O Khan. Assure me, I pray, the pangloss properly renders my words into the Mongol speech.”
“Mongol?” Kahn was too far out of his depth not to come with the automatic truth. “This is English.”
“English?” The stranger’s eyebrows rose. “I’ve heard of it, I think. Then this is not the imperial yurt at Karakorum?”
“It’s Los Angeles.”
“Where?”
They stared at one another, each plainly convinced the other was crazy. At last the stranger said in a small voice, “Tell me the date, please.”
“Huh? It’s July 16th.”
“The year?”
Now positive he was humoring a madman, Kahn gave it to him. The next question confused him for a moment: “In what era is that?”
He finally figured out the meaning. “Christian, A.D. Anno domini. The Common Era-C.E.-if you don’t care for Christian dating of any flavor.”
One of those terms must have been familiar to the stranger. He screwed up his face and began to swear in a style that was bizarre but effective just the same. Kahn filed a couple of the choicer epithets to use himself. “Lizard piss” could come in handy almost any time, but he decided to save “sucker at the tit of a syphilitic sow” for when he really needed it-say, when a Mercedes cut him off on the freeway.
When the stranger finally ran out of oaths, he turned a face full of storm clouds on Kahn. “You are certain this is not central Asia in what you would call-let me think-the early thirteenth century?”
“Not the last time I looked,” Kahn said solemnly. He wished he could remember the security guard’s extension.
But instead of turning violent, the man in the Mongol clothes burst into tears. Kahn watched, amazed, as he unashamedly wept until he had cried himself out.
At last the stranger pulled himself together. He smacked fist into palm in frustration. “Oh, to have come so close and still missed! What are seven hundred miserable little years against fifty or sixty thousand?”
Kahn’s head was aching badly by now. He had had as much of this exchange as he could stand. “I’m so sorry,” he said with exquisite, ironic politeness. “You must be a time traveler, sir, and all this time I took you for a nut.”
The stranger waved it aside. “A natural error. However, if I were a nut, I would not be able to do this, for instance.” Afterward, Kahn would have sworn the fellow only pointed his finger at the office window, the window he had schemed so long and hard to get. A ray of blue light shot from the stranger’s fingernail. The next moment, the glass wasn’t there anymore.
July smog immediately started competing with the bland but breathable product the air conditioner turned out. Kahn coughed.
The stranger’s eyes went ecstatic (they also began filling with tears that had nothing to do with emotions). “The scent of burning hydrocarbons!” he exclaimed, breathing deeply, at least until he choked. “Undoubtedly from buildings torched in the search for loot.”
“No, from dinosaurs torched in the search for a parking space.” Kahn’s tongue led its own life, wild and free, while he tried to figure out whether he believed what he had just seen. He decided he did. His eyes might fool him, but he trusted his lungs. No way they could hurt so much unless the window glass really had disappeared.
“To have come so close!” the stranger said again. Now that he was no longer abasing himself, Kahn saw that the motions of his lips did not match the words the tech writer was hearing. The fellow shook his head in chagrin.”There goes my academic career, all because the scrofulous temporal phase link dropped me into the Late Middle First Primitive instead of the Mid-Middle.” He started to cry again.
He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Kahn, but his-what had he called it? — his pangloss kept working. “I can’t understand it. I was supposed to home on the mental vibrations of Temujin, Genghis Khan-”
He and Kahn realized at the same time what must have happened. Fury replaced the tears. Kahn waited for that finger to blast him to wherever the window had gone. The look on the fellow’s face said that might not be good enough-the sword might come out instead.