On the fringe of a bed of tall gladioli a man had stepped out of a hovercar and dismissed it. He seemed young, although you couldn’t really tell. He moved idly across the grass, like a sightseer. His gait was peculiar, and he wore an expression of grave joy as he minced toward them.
“Look how he walks!” exulted Whitlow.
“I am looking. What about it?”
“Whah, Chuck, he’s out of low-gee! Thur’s a fella just back from a long trip if Ah ever saw one, and prob’ly loaded with pay. Sic ‘im!”
Forrester accepted Whitlow’s diagnosis unquestioningly. He marched up to the spaceman and said clearly, “My name is Charles D. Forrester, and due to my ignorance of the customs of this time I’ve lost all my money and have no work. If you could possibly spare me some cash, I would be deeply indebted to you.”
Whitlow appeared magically at his elbow. “That goes for me, too, boss,” he said sorrowfully. “We both in pretty bad trouble. If you could be kahnd enough to help us now, we’d be eternally grateful.”
The man stopped, his hands in his pockets, neither surprised nor disturbed. He turned to face them with grave interest. “Sorry to hear that, gentlemen,” he said. “What seems to be your problem, sir?”
“Mahn? Well, it’s just about lahk Forrester here. Mah name’s Whitlow, Jurry Whitlow. It starts way back when Ah was first born, working in the mahns in West Virginia. They closed down, and—”
The spaceman was not only polite but patient. He listened attentively through all of Whitlow’s long story, and to as much of Forrester’s as Forrester thought worth telling. He commiserated with them, wrote their names down, and promised to look for them again if he ever came back this way. He was, in short, an ideal prospect—not only a spaceman, but a member of one of the rotating crews who manned the right-angle communications satellites that whirled out around the sun at ninety degrees to the ecliptic, furnishing interference-free relay facilities for the whole solar system. The job paid well, but that was only part of it. Because of the energy budget for matching orbits with the right-angle satellites, the crews were relieved only at six-month intervals, and they came back with a fortune in their pockets and a mad hunger for company; and Whitlow and Forrester walked away from him with two thousand dollars apiece.
That night they ate their dinner in a restaurant. Over Whitlow’s protests, Forrester insisted on standing treat.
The restaurant was a hangout for Forgotten Men—and Forgotten Women. It was something like a private home, something like an Automat. You had full joymaker service in it, but in order to make it work you had to feed money into a slot. The prices caused Forrester’s scalp to prickle, but he reassured himself that he was just learning the ropes and experience was worth paying for; so at Whitlow’s suggestion they started with a squirt of joy apiece (fifty dollars a shot), then cocktails (forty), then a clear, filling soup (twenty-five), then more drinks, and about then Forrester began to lose count. He remembered something that looked like meat but wasn’t—it seemed to be coated with a sort of vanilla fudge, although it was bloody inside—and then they began drinking in earnest.
They were not alone. The place was crowded. Whitlow seemed to know everyone there, an assembly that hailed from six centuries, seven continents, and one or two extraterrestrial planets and moons.
There was a huge red-faced man named Kevin O’Rourke na Solis Lacis, who gave Forrester a shock until they exchanged names, for he resembled Heinzie the Assassin. The reason was good, when Forrester found it out: they were both Martians. O’Rourke, however, was a poet. As a matter of principle, he refused to accept the bribes of what he called the iron-headed state. Probing, Forrester discovered that he was talking about foundation grants, which were available to poets in almost any quantity; but O’Rourke spurned them all. He had been briefly involved with the Ned Lud Society—but they were as bad as the iron-heads, he declared. All Earth was a disaster area. Let the Sirians take it away! “So why don’t you go back to Mars?” Forrester inquired, politely enough; but the Martian took it as an insult, glowered, and lumbered away across the room.
“Don’ worry ‘bout heem,” said the pretty little dark girl who had somehow come to be leaning against Forrester’s shoulder, helping him drink his drink. “He be back. Certainement.”
There was a certain United Nations quality to the gathering, Forrester was discovering. Apart from a few oddballs like the Martian poet, the bulk of the Forgotten Men seemed to come from nearly his own time. Had the hardest time fitting in, he supposed—and the hardest time earning money.
But it was not always that. The tiny dark girl, for instance, had originally been a ballet dancer from Czechoslovakia, shot as a Chinese Bolshevik counter-revolutionary in 1991, frozen at great peril by the Khrushchevite underground, revived, killed seven times since in one way or another, and revived each time. Her reasons for hiding out with the Forgotten Men had nothing to do with money—she was loaded, Whitlow whispered; had made a collection of gold and gems from admirers in a dozen countries, over the centuries, and owned them with their pyramiding value now. But one of her assassinations had produced some cell changes in the brain, and now she awoke each time convinced that Stalinist agents lurked abroad, waiting for her. She did not exactly fear them. She objected to the idea of being killed somewhat as Forrester, in the old days, had objected to going to the dentist: you didn’t really worry about it, but you were pretty sure it would be unpleasant. As someone who had seen each of seven centuries, Forrester found her fascinating—and she was beautiful as well. But she quickly became so drunk that her reminiscences stopped making sense.
He got up for another drink and found himself lurching slightly. Only slightly, he was sure, but somehow, when he got the drink, it spilled all over a lean, old, nearly bald man, who grinned and nodded and said, “Tenga dura, signore! E precioso!”
“You’re right,” said Forrester, and sat down beside him. Whitlow had pointed him out as they entered, as a sort of curiosity; he had actually been born before Forrester himself. He had been a hundred and seven years old when, in 1988, he had died of an embolism. The embolism could have been repaired at once, but the ravages of age could not. Not then. After six centuries in the dreamless, liquid-helium sleep, his original stake had multiplied to the point where the trustees of the freezer had decided to revive him; but there had been only money enough to give him operational youth. Not much had been done cosmetically; and it had taken everything he had. “I bet you’ve had an interesting life,” Forrester told him solemnly, finishing what remained in his glass.
The man gave him a grave nod. “Signore,” he said, “durante la vita mia prima del morte, era un uomo grande! Nel tempo del Duce—ah! Un maggiore del esercito, io, e dappertutto non mi dispiacciono le donne!”
Whitlow patted the old man on the shoulder and led Forrester away. “Forebrain damage,” he whispered.
“But he was talking in Italian.”
“Sure, Chuck. He can’t learn raht, that’s what he’s doing here. You know, they ain’t many jobs for a fella that can’t talk lahk the rest of us.”
The Martian lurched past them, his head twisted sidewise toward them. Whether he had been listening or not Forrester could not say, but he was declaiming, “Talk like de rest. Live like de rest. Live for de state, for de state knows what’s best.”
The whole party was coming to life, thought Forrester, flushed and happy. A small man in a green ruff—it seemed to be an imitation of the Sirian coloration—cried, “And what’s best? Adolf Berle asked it half a millennium ago: ‘What does a corporation want?’ And the state has become a corporation!”
The ballet dancer hiccoughed and opened glazed and angry eyes. “Stalinist!” she hissed, then returned to sleep; and Forrester dug deep for hundred-dollar bills and fed them to the joymaker slots for more drinks all around.