Karen flipped through the Los Angeles Times. Just about all the photos and ads in the paper were in color, which they hadn’t been in 1994. “We don’t want the sappy kiddy shows,” she said. “Those are just as bad as they ever were, maybe worse.” Jonathan didn’t argue with that, either. She pointed to one movie ad and started to giggle. “Here. The Curse of Rhodes. A horror flick. How can they mess that up?”
“Isn’t that why we’re going?” Jonathan asked. Karen raised an eyebrow. He explained: “To find out how they can mess it up.”
“Oh.” Karen laughed. “Sure. But we know from the start that this is hokum.” She pointed to the ad again. A bronze statue strode across what was presumably the Aegean with a naked girl in its arms. A few wisps of her long blond hair kept things technically decent.
“Works for me,” Jonathan said solemnly. Karen made the kind of noise that meant she would clobber him if she weren’t such an enlightened, tolerant wife: a noise only a little less effective than a real set of lumps would have been. Jonathan mimed a whiplash injury and pointed out, “You were the one who suggested it.”
“Well, let’s go,” she said. “We can always throw popcorn at the screen if it gets too awful.” She paused. “We may pick different times.”
“Here’s hoping,” Jonathan said, and laughed when she made a face at him.
Most of the people buying tickets for the movie were in their teens or twenties. Most of the ones who weren’t had ten- or twelve-year-old boys in tow. Jonathan and Karen looked at each other, as if to ask, What are we getting ourselves into? They both started to laugh. Maybe a really bad horror movie was just what they needed.
Jonathan bought popcorn and candy and Cokes. The smells of the concession stand hadn’t changed a bit since before he went into cold sleep. Prices had, but not too badly. Even back then, theaters had gouged people on snacks.
The slope of the rows of seats was steeper than it had been back in a twentieth-century theater. That let each seat have a proper back without interfering with children’s views of the screen. Some unknown genius had thought of putting a cup holder in each armrest. The rows were father apart than they had been; Jonathan could stretch out his feet. He closed his eyes. “Good night.”
“If you can’t stay awake to leer at the naked girls, don’t expect me to shake you,” Karen said. He sat up very straight. She poked him.
Down went the lights. There were more ads and fewer coming attractions than Jonathan remembered. Maybe that meant he was turning into a curmudgeon. But, by body time, it hadn’t been that long ago, so maybe the folks who ran things were trying harder to squeeze money out of people. The sound was louder than he remembered, too. He had as much trouble enjoying the music as his father had had with what he’d listened to when he was young.
That same pounding, noisy beat suffused The Curse of Rhodes. For a while, he hardly noticed it. The special effects were astonishing. A lot of them would have been impossible, or impossibly expensive, in the twentieth century. Computers could do all sorts of things that had been beyond them in those days.
And then Jonathan noticed something that wasn’t a special effect. He stared at the elderly archaeologist who was trying to calm the frightened young hero and heroine-and who was bound to come to a Bad End before long. “Look at that guy,” he whispered to Karen. “I’ll be damned if that’s not Matt Damon.”
She eyed the actor. “My God! You’re right. He used to be just a little older than our kids-and he still is.” She squeezed his hand. “We’ve been away a long time.”
The Curse of Rhodes showed that in other ways, too. The violence was one thing. Gore and horror movies went together like pepperoni and pizza. But some of the doings between the hero, the heroine, and the resurrected, bad-tempered Colossus of Rhodes… Jonathan wouldn’t have taken a ten-year-old to see them in 1994. He wasn’t so sure he would have gone himself. The heroine was either a natural blonde or very thorough. She was also limber enough for an Olympic gymnast, though he didn’t think they gave gold medals in that.
As the Colossus sank beneath the waves-gone for good or ready to return in a sequel, depending on how The Curse of Rhodes did-and the credits rolled, the house lights came up. “What did you think?” Karen asked.
“I know what the curse of Rhodes is now,” Jonathan said. “The screenwriter, or maybe the director.” Karen stuck out her tongue at him. He went on, “It was really dumb and really gory and really dirty.”
She nodded. “That’s what we came for.”
Was it? Jonathan wasn’t so sure. He thought they’d come not least to try to forge some link between the time in which they’d lived and the one in which they found themselves. The movie hadn’t done it-not for him, anyhow. Instead, it reminded him over and over what a stranger he was here and now. With a shrug, he started for the parking lot. Maybe time would help. Maybe nothing would. He’d have to find out day by day, that was all.
Some things didn’t change. The building in downtown Los Angeles where Sam Yeager faced a colonel who’d been born about the time he left for Tau Ceti was the one where he’d worked a generation before that, before he got saddled with the responsibility for Mickey and Donald. The office furniture hadn’t changed much, either. He wondered whether that battered metal desk could possibly date from the 1960s.
Colonel Goldschmidt said, “No, you are not permitted to see any Lizards. You might pass intelligence from Fleetlord Atvar to them.”
You bureaucratic idiot. Sam didn’t say it. He was ever so tempted, but he didn’t. What a good boy am I, he thought, even if he didn’t have a plum on his thumb. Clinging to shreds of patience, he said, “Colonel, you or somebody gave me permission to see Atvar. I’m sure you or somebody listened to what we said. If I’d wanted to do that, I could have gone to a pay phone the minute I got out of his hotel room.”
“But you didn’t do that. You didn’t telephone any Lizards from your place of residence, either.” Goldschmidt had a narrow face with cold blue eyes set too close together. He wore a wedding ring, which proved somebody loved him. Sam wondered why.
“So you’ve been monitoring me,” he said. Goldschmidt nodded. Sam asked, “If you people thought I was that big a menace, why did you let me see him in the first place?”
“There were discussions about that,” Goldschmidt replied. He gave no details. Even though the discussions had been about Yeager, the hatchet-faced colonel’s view was that they were none of his business. “It was decided that the risk was acceptable.”
It was decided. Maybe that meant God had sent down a choir of angels with the answer. More likely, it meant no one wanted to admit he’d done the deciding. No, some things didn’t change. Sam said, “Seems to me you people didn’t think this through as well as you might have. Now that I have seen Atvar, how are you going to keep me away from Lizards for the rest of my life? When I take an elevator down to the lobby and walk out on the street, it’s better than even money that I bump into one, or two, or three. We’re only a few blocks from the Race’s consulate, you know.”
Colonel Goldschmidt looked as if his stomach pained him. “I have my orders, Mr. Yeager. You are not permitted to travel to any territory occupied by the Race or to contact any members of the Race.”
“Then you can lock me up and throw away the key”-Sam was careful to use the human idiom, not the Lizards’-“because I’ve already done it.”
“What? Where? How?” Now Goldschmidt looked horrified. Had something slipped past him and his stooges?
“My adopted sons-Mickey and Donald,” Sam said.
“Oh. Them.” Relief made the colonel’s voice sound amazingly human for a moment. “They don’t count. They’re U.S. citizens, and are considered reliable.”