Not for the first time, I wondered what it would have been like if I had followed some other career. If I’d stayed in the civil service, for instance, as my father had wanted.
Really, I hadn’t had much choice. I was born during the Space Tricentennial Year, and my mother told me the first word I said was “Mars”. She said there was a little misunderstanding there, because at first she thought I was talking about the god, not the planet, and she and my father had long talks about whether to train me for the priesthood, but by the time I could read she knew I was a space nut. Like a lot of my generation (the ones that read my books), I grew up on spaceflight. I was a teenager when the first pictures came back from the space probe to the Alpha Centauri planet Julia, with its crystal grasses and silver-leafed trees. As a boy I corresponded with another youth who lived in the cavern colonies on the Moon, and I read with delight the shoot-’em-ups about outlaws and aediles chasing each other around the satellites of Jupiter. I wasn’t the only kid who grew up space-happy, but I never got over it.
Naturally I became a science-adventure romance writer; what else did I know anything about? As soon as I began to get actual money for my fantasies I quit my job as secretary to one of the imperial legates on the Western continents and went full-time pro.
I prospered at it, too — prospered reasonably, at least — well, to be more exact, I earned a liveable, if irregular, income out of the two sci-roms a year I could manage to write, and enough of a surplus to support the habit of dating pretty women like Lidia out of the occasional bonus when one of the books was made into a broadcast drama or a play.
Then along came the message from the Olympians, and the whole face of science-adventure romans was changed forever.
It was the most exciting news in the history of the world, of course. There really were other intelligent races out there among the stars of the Galaxy! It had never occurred to me that it would affect me personally, except with joy.
Joy it was, at first. I managed to talk my way into the Alpine radio observatory that had recorded that first message, and I heard it recorded with my own ears:
Dit squab dit.
Dit squee dit squab dit dit.
Dit squee dit squee dit squab dit dit dit.
Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squab wooooo.
Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squab dit dit dit dit dit.
It all looks so simple now, but it took a while before anyone figured out just what this first message from the Olympians was. (Of course, we didn’t call them Olympians then. We wouldn’t call them that now if the priests had anything to say about it, because they think it’s almost sacrilegious, but what else are you going to call godlike beings from the heavens? The name caught on right away, and the priests just had to learn to live with it.) It was, in fact, my good friend Flavius Samuelus ben Samuelus who first deciphered it and produced the right answer to transmit back to the senders — the one that, four years later, let the Olympians know we had heard them.
Meanwhile, we all knew this wonderful new truth: we weren’t alone in the universe! Excitement exploded. The market for sci-roms boomed. My very next book was The Radio Gods, and it sold its head off.
I thought it would go on forever.
It might have, too… if it hadn’t been for the timorous censors.
I slept through the tunnel — all the tunnels, even the ones through the Alps — and by the time I woke up we were halfway down to Rome.
In spite of the fact that the tablets remained obstinately blank, I felt more cheerful. Lidia was just a fading memory, I still had twenty-nine days to turn in a new sci-rom and Rome, after all, is still Rome! The centre of the universe — well, not counting what new lessons in astronomical geography the Olympians might teach us. At least, it’s the greatest city in the world. It’s the place where all the action is.
By the time I’d sent the porter for breakfast and changed into a clean robe we were there, and I alighted into the great, noisy train shed.
I hadn’t been in the city for several years, but Rome doesn’t change much. The Tiber still stank. The big new apartment buildings still hid the old ruins until you were almost on top of them, the flies were still awful, and the Roman youths still clustered around the train station to sell you guided tours to the Golden House (as though any of them could ever get past the Legion guards!), or sacred amulets, or their sisters.
Because I used to be a secretary on the staff of the proconsul to the Cherokee Nation, I have friends in Rome. Because I hadn’t had the good sense to call ahead, none of them were home. I had no choice. I had to take a room in a high-rise inn on the Palatine.
It was ferociously expensive, of course. Everything in Rome is — that’s why people like to live in dreary outposts like London — but I figured that by the time the bills came in I would either have found something to satisfy Marcus and get the rest of the advance, or I’d be in so much trouble a few extra debts wouldn’t matter.
Having reached that decision, I decided to treat myself to a servant. I picked out a grinning, muscular Sicilian at the rental desk in the lobby, gave him the keys for my luggage, and instructed him to take it to my room — and to make me a reservation for the next day’s hoverflight to Alexandria.
That’s when my luck began to get better.
When the Sicilian came to the wine shop to ask me for further orders, he reported, “There’s another citizen who’s booked on the same flight, Citizen Julius. Would you like to share a compartment with him?”
It’s nice when you rent a servant who tries to save you money. I said approvingly, “What kind of a person is he? I don’t want to get stuck with some real bore.”
“You can see for yourself, Julius. He’s in the baths right now. He’s a Judaean. His name is Flavius Samuelus.”
Five minutes later I had my clothes off and a sheet wrapped around me, and I was in the tepidarium, peering around at everybody there.
I picked Sam out at once. He was stretched out with his eyes closed while a masseur pummelled his fat old flesh. I climbed onto the slab next to his without speaking. When he groaned and rolled over, opening his eyes, I said, “Hello, Sam.”
It took him a moment to recognize me; he didn’t have his glasses in. But when he squinted hard enough his face broke out into a grin. “Julie!” he cried. “Small world! It’s good to see you again!”
And he reached out to clasp fists-over-elbows, really welcoming, just as I had expected; because one of the things I like best about Flavius Samuelus is that he likes me. One of the other things I like best about Sam is that, although he is a competitor, he is also an undepletable natural resource. He writes sci-roms himself. He does more than that. He has helped me with the science part of my own sci-roms any number of times, and it had crossed my mind as soon as I heard the Sicilian say his name that he might be just what I wanted in the present emergency.
Sam is at least seventy years old. His head is hairless. There’s a huge brown age spot on the top of his scalp. His throat hangs in a pouch of flesh, and his eyelids sag. But you’d never guess any of that if you were simply talking to him on the phone. He has the quick, chirpy voice of a twenty-year-old, and the mind of one, too — of an extraordinarily bright twenty-year-old. He gets enthusiastic.