“What’s not to love?” asked Umbo.
“I’m sure your list is longer than mine.”
“Because I’m humble to a fault.”
“Self-doubting, you mean.”
“A problem you’ll never have,” said Umbo.
“I doubt myself all the time,” said Square. “I just don’t let it make me wonder whether I’m a good person or not.”
“Because you’re sure you are?”
“Because I am whatever I am, and whatever I say, and whatever I do, so I’m finding out what kind of man I am right along with everybody else.”
Umbo chuckled. “I envy you.”
“My astonishingly deep wisdom?” asked Square.
“Your facemask,” said Umbo. “Because you know you can say outrageously stupid things and nobody can slap you because your reaction time is so fast.”
CHAPTER 25
Preemptive
It wasn’t hard to persuade the younger version of Professor Wheaton that time travel was real, and that the oldish man with them was Wheaton toward the end of his career. Wheaton had always been an open-minded guy, and a few minutes of disappearing into slicetime could be quite convincing. The one thing Wheaton doubted was that his future career was in anthropology. “I’m a philologist,” he said.
“We had to catch him in his philologist phase,” sighed Old Wheaton. “You’ll get over it.”
“I don’t see why,” said Young Wheaton.
“The need for employment,” said Wheaton. “And the fact that whatever could be extracted from philology is already known. Besides, what does it matter that you’ve learned a half dozen languages? This boy can speak all of them.”
Young Wheaton—Georgia—tested Noxon in several ancient languages, then shrugged. “Party trick.”
In Gothic, Noxon said, “The only person who knows I got it right is you.”
“Well, I’m not going to lie. You really are speaking the languages. Badly.”
“My accent is identical to yours,” said Noxon.
“Not it’s not.”
“It has to be. I’m a perfect mimic, and I learned the language from you.”
“When? I never taught a class in Gothic.”
“Just now,” said Noxon. He turned to Ram Odin. “Georgia doesn’t understand how I could have learned Gothic from him, after hearing him speak it for ten seconds.”
“Not possible,” said Georgia. “Not even for a savant.”
“Not possible,” echoed Noxon, “and yet you just saw it.”
“For all I know, being a time traveler, you spent a year with a tribe that spoke Gothic with a particularly wretched accent.”
“Georgia Wheaton is well known to be tone deaf,” said Deborah. “No ear for accents.”
“Not true,” said Young Wheaton. “I speak like a native.”
“Dead languages, so nobody could check,” said Old Wheaton. “Perhaps another reason I abandoned philology. When I had a child to support.”
With theatrical flamboyance, Young Wheaton buried his face in his hands. “He knows all my secrets. Why are you here?”
“To save the life of your brother Arnold and his wife,” said Ram Odin. “And to save Deborah’s eyesight.”
Young Wheaton looked at Deborah. “You’re the baby?”
“All grown up,” she said. “You—he—raised me.”
“Well, aren’t I nice,” said Young Wheaton. He looked at Old Wheaton with some admiration now, instead of annoyance.
“Tomorrow afternoon they will set out on a car trip,” said Old Wheaton. “They’ll get onto the freeway and die in a fiery crash. Deborah is dragged out of her rear carseat by a passerby, but her eyes were already burnt out.”
“He’s the only father I ever knew,” said Deborah. “We’ll continue to exist—without my eyes, without his philology—but you won’t have to devote yourself to raising a baby, and my parents will get to raise a much prettier and better-functioning version of me.”
“So you’re going to this trouble for someone else,” said Young Wheaton.
“It would always be someone else,” said Deborah. “The undamaged baby. The only issue was whether to extinguish me or not.”
“And we don’t have any guarantee that they won’t all get hit by a bus a week from now,” said Noxon. “We’re not going to keep coming back to fix things. People die and things go wrong. We have work to do.”
“Heartless,” said Young Wheaton.
“Don’t judge,” said Ram Odin. “Every change he makes undoes everything that happens in other people’s futures. He tries to create minimal mess. But somebody won’t get a job because Deborah’s father isn’t dead to create the opening. Somebody won’t live in a certain house because Deborah’s family will be living there. Lots of changes that we can’t predict and won’t understand. Maybe somebody else will now die, hit by the same incompetent driver.”
“OK, I get all that,” said Young Wheaton. “He has to be heartless, to a degree. I can see that.”
“And now we need you to help us persuade your brother and sister-in-law to listen to us,” said Ram Odin.
“I can’t even persuade them to listen to me,” said Young Wheaton.
“All we need is an introduction, with both parents and the baby in the same room. We can take it from there.”
“Lanae is perfectly capable of refusing to believe the evidence of her own eyes,” said Young Wheaton.
“But Arnold can bring her around,” said Old Wheaton. “And she’s superstitious, as I recall. Tell her it’s bad luck to make the trip.”
“Not my job,” said Young Wheaton. “I’ll get you into the house. You take it from there.” He looked at Deborah. “I assume you have the same fingerprints as are on the birth certificate.”
“A little bigger now,” said Deborah.
“You’ll do fine,” said Young Wheaton.
“And then, after we’ve all saved their lives together,” said Old Wheaton, “we’ll go away and come back in about twenty years so we can live with you while we figure out how to prevent planetary genocide.”
That led to another explanation, but in the end, everything went according to plan. It took a couple of hours to get Lanae Wheaton to stop yelling and demanding that they leave the house, then weeping over Deborah’s missing eyes while murmuring, “My baby, my beautiful baby.” Then Noxon had Old Wheaton, Ram Odin, and grown-up Deborah hold hands and he jumped them back into the future.
A different future now. One in which Young Wheaton lived in a different city, because he was a professor of ancient languages at a different university. “My vids of the Erectids!” cried Old Wheaton. “I left them in the house! They’re gone forever!”
Deborah opened her purse and showed him the memory chips. “I thought of that and took them with us.”
“You see why I couldn’t part with her?” Wheaton said. “She’s my brain.”
“External storage,” said Ram Odin.
“Nice to be needed,” said Deborah.
They had a little money with them, but not enough for airfare. Wheaton’s credit cards were for accounts that had never been opened, with numbers that belonged either to no one or to somebody he’d never heard of. Again, Deborah’s purse was their salvation, but she only had about a thousand dollars. “I took it from your stash,” she told Wheaton.
“My stash?” he asked.
“Remember I had you put a thousand dollars into a hiding place so we’d have emergency cash?”
“No.”
“Well, I did, and you did, and this is it,” she said. “Busfare, maybe?”
“A plane ticket for one, and the rest of us slice time?” asked Noxon.
“Better than two days on a bus,” said Ram Odin.
“I’ve walked farther,” said Noxon. “It’s not as hard as you might think.”
“We’d get arrested,” said Wheaton. “It’s very suspicious to be cross-country pedestrians wearing civilian clothes.”
“And we can’t live off the land,” said Ram Odin. “All the land belongs to somebody, and there are still plenty of people who shoot trespassers.”