He sniffed at the wine. "Not that. How about a Sam Adams?"
"Any thoughts on dinner? We have a wonderful seafood special tonight, a new dish from ancient Egypt..."
"Hell, no. Let Arley experiment on somebody else. You still doing that beef thing you had in here last week?"
Julie dimpled "We sure are. Rare?"
"Make it moo."
Margo looked like she was about to lose her appetite or worse.
Kit grinned. "What's wrong, kid? No stomach for blood?"
Margo compressed her lips. "I'm fine."
Sven eyed her. "You sure act squeamish for a kid about to try time scouting."
She fidgeted in her chair, but refrained from comment:
"Speaking of time scouting," Kit said, rubbing the side of his nose, "any thoughts about the answer to that question I posed?"
Margo glanced at Sven. She looked suddenly very young and uncertain. Then her chin came up. "Well ...A time scout's job is to find out where a gate leads."
Kit shook his head. "I didn't ask what a scout's job was, I asked what a scout's goals are. That's a little different proposition."
For a second, she looked so tired and hungry and miserable and confused, Kit thought she might cry. He prompted, "Just tell me what pops into your head What's a scout's primary goal?"
"To make money."
Sven let loose an astonishing guffaw that startled diners in a circle three tables deep, then pounded Margo's back with friendly affection. She nearly came adrift from her chair, but managed a sheepish smile. Kit grinned. "Money, eh? Well, yes, if you're lucky. If the gate you push doesn't lead to the Russian steppes in the middle of the last ice age. A few scientists might want a peek, but there's not much commercial potential in a mile-high glacier. What else?"
"To stay alive," she said, with a tiny toss of her short hair.
"Absolutely," Kit agreed.
"You're gettin' there, girl. What else?" Sven asked, taking the burden of grilling her off Kit's hands.
She chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. "Learn stuff about where you are, of course. Do you take a camera?"
Kit thought about Catherine the Great and her Russian boar and winked at Sven. He'd clearly read the same article, judging by the sudden twinkle in his eyes. "Sometimes. Usually not. Cameras aren't essential equipment."
"What else ought to be my goal, then?"
Kit nodded. "Good. You're asking questions." He leaned forward. "Point number one: the kind of karate you've learned in high school might be great for a soldier attacking someone else, but soldiering-fighting battles-isn't the primary goal of a scout."
"Hell, no," Sven muttered. "You want a battle, go live in Serbia or anywhere from Istanbul down to Cairo. Last I heard, Israel was threatening to pop a nuke or two if the Moslem states didn't stop recruiting jihad fighters from down time and I can't say as I blame either side. Gad, what a mess."
Even Margo had the sense to shiver. What the time strings had done to the incendiary Middle East didn't bear thinking about. A coalition of Moslem and Jewish women had come together to try and stop the fighting, but so far neither side was listening to the voice of sanity. The whole region had been declared off limits after TT-66 had been bombed into oblivion. Kit, like most 'eighty-sixers, had lost good friends during the death of the station.
Kit cleared his throat and defused the sudden chill by pouring wine for Margo and himself. "All right, then," Kit said, "a scout's goal isn't to engage in battle. It's to go someplace, to learn whatever he can, then. get away clean, doing the least amount of damage to the local environment including the denizens of that environment."
"Especially the denizens," Sven said, by way of emphasis. "Anything else is borrowing trouble. Big trouble. If you piss off somebody who can't be killed and you end in a life-or-death situation with them, you'll be the one kissing your backside goodbye."
"Wait a second," Margo said with a frown. "What do you mean, somebody who can't be killed? Anybody can be killed."
"Not exactly" Kit said quietly. "If someone's death would alter history, then that person can't be killed. At least, not by an up-timer. Paradox will not happen. History won't change. People have tried. It never works.
Never. Let's say you try to assassinate somebody famous, like George Washington. Your gun will jam or misfire, or you'll trip at the last second so the knife doesn't hit a vital spot. Something will happen to prevent you from changing anything critical. The tricky part here is, it can happen when you least expect it."
"Like if you get into a fatal fight with somebody who seems unimportant," Sven said quietly. "If their death would affect history, then they won't die. That doesn't mean you won't."
For once, Margo looked worried instead of flippant. She glanced at Sven, then back to Kit. "Okay." It came out surprisingly subdued. "What else?"
"Another point to remember is that we're the outsiders, down time. Even if somebody is unimportant enough that their death wouldn't matter to history, we don't have a moral right to go barging in with a macho attitude that we'll just smash anything that puts us in danger, without taking precautions to avoid problems in the first place."
"The best way to win a fight," Sven put in, "is to avoid fighting in the first place. The real kicker, of course, is learning how to avoid the fight."
Margo chewed one thumbnail. "And if you can't? I mean, what if some psychopathic kook jumps you?"
His cruel comments about Jack the Ripper had clearly made an impression. Kit refilled her wineglass. "That's always possible, of course, and sometimes there may be nothing for it but to break a neck or shatter a kneecap, but most of the time your goal is to be invisible. If you can't be, then your goal is to keep someone from breaking your neck or shattering your kneecap. And, of course, to get the hell back to the terminal in one piece. When it comes to scouts, heroes are just people who confuse cowardice with common sense."
Sven gestured lazily with one thick hand. "Anybody knows that, Kit does. A real running expert on smash and skedaddle. And the only man on the station I can't throw five out of five times, sparring."
Kit chuckled thinly, drawing little circles in the condensate on the tabletop. "Only before I retired, buddy. I wouldn't go near you, right now. -"
"Only proves you should," Sven came back with a grin. "Keep you on your toes. Keep you young."
"Don't rub it in too deep," Kit laughed. "You're not that far behind me. Let's see, how old will you be come June?"
"Old enough," Sven said with a mock glower that fooled no one.
Margo was staring, oogle-eyed, from one to the other. Then quite suddenly she relaxed, as though she'd finally decided Sven didn't plan to pick up his steak knife and do her in between the salad and the main course.
"Now, that's not to say," Kit said with a smile, drawing the discussion back to the topic at hand, "that there's anything inherently wrong with good karate. I've got a black in Sho Shin Ri and another in... Well, I have several and they're all useful now and again. But Aikido which is what happened to you, by the way is probably the perfect defensive art."
Margo did another beautifully executed stationary female flounce and glared at him-although less murderously than in the gym. "That was humiliating."
"So's dying," Sven said laconically.
Margo flushed. "Okay, so I have a lot to learn. That's why I came looking for a teacher. At least it'll be more interesting than math."
Sven grinned. "You don't know math, you'll kill yourself just as dead as a back-street punk with a dirk would. Now, if you really want to kill, Korean Hap Ki Do or Hwarangdo are interesting forms to get into. If you have six or eight years. Of course," Sven rubbed his hands together and grinned, "Kit will tell you the years spent studying Hap Ki Do's art of invisibility would be far more useful to a scout than its fighting style."