"Oh, hi, Dom," he said. "Back already? Listen, Gribbin here says they used vanadium targets in the accelerator and got nearly twice the brilliance. What do you think of that?"
I grinned at him. "Not much," I confessed. "I'm the one who's a senator when he's back home, Dom. The one you were with in Washington when we got snatched."
"Oh, that one," he said, amused. "Well, I'm not that Dom either. He's off checking up on his wife."
I winced. "Well, tell him I was looking for him," I said, turning away, wishing I'd been as lucky as he. If only they'd caught my Nyla up in the sweep, instead of the No-Thumbs woman . . . and then . .
I stopped, swallowing hard.
"Hey," I said. "They didn't snatch his wife, did they? She was in her own time, and she wasn't working on paratime!"
"No, of course not," said the other Dom. He gave me a puzzled look. "He applied for her to join him, that's all. He just went to see when she's coming in."
"Applied . . . to join. . . . You mean . . . "
And he did mean just what I thought he meant. That was policy. The kidnappers weren't inhuman. They were willing to let us bring our families over, provided our families were willing to come.
All I had to do was apply.
Forty minutes later I was in the Biltmore Hotel, waiting my turn to—to, I guess the word is propose. I wasn't alone. There were fifty men in line with me on the same errand. We didn't talk much, because each one of us was busy rehearsing the speech we were about to make. When I felt a tap on my shoulder I flinched.
But it was only Nicky. "You, too, Dom?" he said, grinning. "I've just finished. Now if Greta will only say yes
Suddenly we were the center of attention, as the men before and behind me in the line turned to hear what the man who had already done it had to say. "She didn't answer?" I asked.
"Answer? No! You don't talk to her directly," he explained. "They don't have enough channels for that, I guess. What you do, you go into a room and they sort of film you—I don't suppose it's really film—anyway, you say what you have to say. Then they locate your wife, or whatever, and transmit it to her. What did you call those things? Holograms? It will be a sort of hologram image of you, and you can talk for one minute. Then it's up to her—"
Then it would be up to her.
What do you say to a woman to make her give up a world that loves her for the sake of chancy adventures in exile? All the time I was inching ahead in the line, all the time I was giving information about Nyla Bowquist to the attendant who would have to locate her, I invented reasons. Not reasons. Bribes. Airy-fairy promises of what our life would be like. . . . As if I knew any of that!
And when at last I was in front of the lens, with the bright lights glaring into my eyes, I abandoned the reasons and the bribes. All I could find to say was, "Nyla, my darling, I love you. Please come here and marry me."
By Saturday we were wholly germ-free and ready to start our new lives. By Saturday the woman at the Baltmore desk was already tired of seeing both Nicky and me. There were only a limited number of channels to other times, she explained, and very heavy demands on all of them. No, she didn't know whether Nyla had even received my message yet. Yes, Nyla would be told everything she needed to know about what this world was like and how to get here. No, she couldn't even guess how long it would take. Sometimes it was less than a day, but some people hadn't had a response even three weeks later. .
I didn't want to wait three weeks. I didn't want to be lonely that long ... especially when it might happen that all I would get at the end of the three weeks was the knowledge that I would be lonely forever.
Meanwhile I had to fill my time one way or another. Nicky had the same problem, but he didn't seem to have the same trouble doing it. When he wasn't working he was exploring; when he wasn't exploring he has hunched over the data-machine terminal in our room, trying to learn as much as he could. About the third time I came to him to ask how many ooties went into a oddy-poot he said, "Really, Dom, how are you going to get along here if you can't even make change?"
"It's so confusing, Nicky. All those ones and zeroes."
"It's binary arithmetic," he corrected me. "One equals one. One-oh equals two. One-one equals three—" And he drew me a column of figures:
1 1
10 2
11 3
100 4
101 5
"Sure, Nicky, sure," I groused, "but what do you do when you get up to those ten or twelve digit numbers? How do you even say the suckers?"
He said seriously, "What you do, Dom, is learn the pronouncing codes."
"Why should I? No, no, I know," I said, to head him off, "the reason I should learn is that I'm stuck here, and when in Rome you learn to use Roman numbers, right? Only it's dumb! Maybe there's some little saving in time or something; but it must have cost them millions to switch over from decimal to binary."
He laughed. "You know what it cost them? Bear in mind, they've put all their data into electronic storage. So they pushed a button somewhere and the machines did a global search-and-replace. All at once. All over the world. All over all the worlds that were involved; and from then on it was standard."
I gazed at him. "That's computer talk," I said. "You've learned a lot since you got out of your own time."
"I didn't have the choice, Dom," he said, "and sooner or later you're going to realize that neither do you. Here. I'll get you started." And he punched out some commands on the machine and got up. "Start by learning how to count," he ordered, and left me to it.
Of course, he was right.
So I got serious. I took my mind off me and my problems, I even took it off Nyla, and I tried to concentrate. What Nicky had called up for me was an old document called On Binary Digits and Human Habits, and it told me all I wanted to know about binary arithmetic and the way to write it and say it.
The writing conventions were easy enough. The custom was to write numbers in binary in groups of six digits, with a hyphen in the middle, 000-000. When there were more than six digits they used commas, just as we used to for thousands and millions: 000-000,000-000. I laboriously converted the present year into binary, and 1983 came out as:
1-111,011-111
It looked pretty dumb to me.
Then, reading on, I discovered that they pronounced each group of six according to some cockamamy rule that looked ridiculous at first, but got easy after I'd studied the table for a while. You pronounced each three-digit group slightly differently, according to whether it was before or after the hyphen, but that was only to make saying the words easier:
Binary Pronunciation Pronunciation alone
quantity in first group or in second group
000 ohly pohl
001 ooty poot
010 ahtah pahtah
011 oddy pod
100 too too
101 totter tot
110 dye dye
111 teeter tee
So numbers like "ten"—i.e., 1-010—became "ooty-pahtah" and "fifty," or 110-010, became "dye-pahtah," and when Nicky came back into the room I was able to tell him, "Four months or so from now, on New Year's Eve, I am going to wish you a Happy New Ooty-tee, oddy-tee."
"Well done, Dom," he grinned, "but that's this year. Next year will be 1984, and that's ooty-tee, too-pohl."