Smith stepped closer to Ian and gave him a hard, appraising stare that seemed to slice into his soul. Ian tried to hold Smith's gaze, but after a brief painful struggle, he broke off the one-sided contest of wills.
"Ah, yes." Smith turned away from Ian and walked back up to the dais, regaining the seat occupied in the last interview by Gregor. Smith pointed to the far corner of the dais.
"There's a chair over there. Fetch it and come sit be fore me."
"Should I kneel first or something like that?"
"Very good, Ian, very good. But if any of my people heard that comment in that tone, you'd be dead before even I could stop them." He paused for a moment then stared him straight in the eye. "So don't be a wise-ass, or your shit will be cooked."
Ian grabbed the chair and sat down.
Smith was silent for some minutes, and Ian thought it best to let him take the lead in whatever it was that was going to happen.
Still staring straight into his eyes, Smith finally started. "You're a historian, are you not? That's what the ship's records indicate."
"Yes, I'm a historian."
"Then as a historian I know you have a million questions. I have my questions, too, but perhaps they will be answered better if I see what path it is that you choose."
Smith stretched and mumbled a quiet curse while rub bing his back. "Go ahead, historian, ask."
As the fullness of his opportunity washed over him, for a moment Ian was struck speechless. The past was but a dream, a dream lived more richly by any good historian, but still a dream. He thought for a moment that he had touched it with the life-extension colony, but that had turned to the ashes of senility. Yet here sat Franklin Smith, someone out of a past as distant and dead as Ssu — ma Zhung, Hitler, Napoleon, or Clarke. He had read of Smith, had charted his activities during the days leading up to the Holocaust and studied his in strumental role in the grand conspiracy of the colonies to escape disaster. And now he sat across from him. Was it really even him at all? he suddenly wondered, growing suspicious.
"How?"
"How. Ah, yes, how am I here; not forgotten ashes, nor half-remembered legend." He stretched again and leaned forward. "You know, Ian, I suspected that would be your first question. The others"-he waved vaguely, as if indicating the entire universe-"take it as a miracle. But it was nothing more than a damn good research pro gram at U.S.C. Have you heard of U.S.C.?"
Ian shook his head.
"Not a great school-the Chinese research programs were far better at that point-but still not bad. Well, they had isolated a number of the properties of hibernation. It was on the eve of the war…" His voice trailed off for a moment and he was silent.
He suddenly looked up at Ian with a start. "Just re membering, you see, it really wasn't that long ago for me. Before the war, an old professor of mine who was in on the project was exiled to the life-extension colony. I looked him up afterward. I heard that your records indicate a visit there, as well?"
Ian nodded but said nothing.
"He gave me a number of doses and the antidote for it, in consideration for a favor of mine."
"Such as not destroying the life-extension colony the way you did a couple of the others?"
Smith was silent again, and Ian wondered if he had gone too far. Smith smiled as if in warning, then contin ued.
"Through the accident of being scheduled in one of his classes while still an undergraduate, and a later chance meeting, I can sit here today, a millennium hence. While he…" His voice trailed off again for a moment. "Well, while he, if unfortunate enough to survive what happened, has long ago been taken by the inevitable thief of life and gone into the darkness.
"So, with such a simple turn of fate, I am injected with the drug and fall into a deep dreamless sleep. It can be for a day, or it can, as in one case, last for over a century- as long as I am occasionally given an intravenous injection and my unsensing limbs are manipulated so that they do not atrophy. A century, I said, and to my body not a month has passed. When there is need for me, I am wakened by the antidote. And so it was that Gregor, whose grandfather had once so served me, decided that I should be called, so that I might judge for myself what it is that you bring to me."
"And the passage of the centuries is nothing then to you?"
"The leave-taking, the war, the first months of madness are not two years past for me. A millennium, Ian Lacklin, is as if only yesterday. This long inexorable journey but a brief flicker in time. Your wondrous machine, Ian Lack lin, which has taken the journey of over fifty generations and compressed it into a moment, does in some ways compare with the journey that I have taken, as well. You remember Earth as it is today. And I, I have memories just as fresh, but of an Earth now gone for a thousand years."
He chuckled sadly in that rich, full voice.
"Only one question answered so far, Ian Lacklin. There must be yet ten thousand more."
He was right, and Ian wondered for a moment if the conversation could just continue forever, postponing what he feared was the inevitable order for his death.
"I know that you've had contact with several colonies from Earth, but you haven't run into anything else? You know, contact of some kind?"
"You mean an alien civilization?"
Ian nodded.
"We've picked up some signals, most from the original SETI point. I was told there was one quite close not a generation ago, but so far, Ian, nothing. Why do you ask?"
"Oh, just curious, that's all."
Smith looked at Ian closely, as if he suspected something, so Ian quickly pushed ahead with another question.
"I know the how of your cheating death and time. But why?"
"Wouldn't you cheat it? Think for a moment, Ian Lack lin. How long does the average man now live on Earth?"
"Three score is pretty good."
"Ah, yes, I imagine the aftereffects of the war. Before that madness came, we were averaging a full century on Earth. Some aboard the geriatric units were approaching a century and a half."
"On the life-extension unit many have passed the mil lennium mark," Ian replied, "but it wasn't a very pretty sight."
"Yes, yes, I can imagine. But as I was saying, suppose you could be given the chance to go to sleep and awaken for one or two days in each of the centuries to come- down through the ages, forever seeing what new and won drous things would await us in our future. Wouldn't you take it?"
Ian could only agree, but underneath it all he imagined that it would be exciting and terribly empty-to awaken each time in a world where he knew no one. He sensed something else; a faint glimmer of excitement shone in Smith's eyes that wasn't there before.
"But there is another reason, isn't there?"
Franklin smiled. And the smile to Ian was one of threat.
"There is my mission, as well." His voice increased in power, as if he was suddenly addressing a multitude rather than one nervous historian.
"Your mission, you say?"
"Yes, but another time for that, Ian Lacklin. You'll learn soon enough."
Ian sensed that a door had just been closed on a possible line of questioning, at least for the present, so he gathered in his thoughts for a moment and struck out in a new direction.
"According to Beaulieu, you were one of the key fig ures of the secretive Alpha Psi Council, the group that was instrumental in organizing the plan to evacuate all colonial units."
"Who is this Beaulieu?"
"One of the greatest historians alive today. It was Beau lieu who proved that man first landed on the Moon during the rule of Truman."
"Close enough," Smith muttered.
"He's leading the dig at Base Seven on Mars. The Copernican dig, the one that uncovered all the records of the Great Migration, was initiated by him, as well."
"I knew we should have blown that base as we moved out," Smith said evenly.