“You’re missing something. Believe me, lady, you’re missing something. The first course is a kind of light, fast movement, all herbs from Aldebaran IV mixed with a spicy vinegar from Aldebaran IX. The second course, Consomme Grand, is a lot slower and kind of majestic. Oehele bases it all on a broth made from the white chund, a native rabbity animal they have on Aldebaran IV. See, he uses only native Aldebaranian foods to suggest a Martian dish. Get it? The same thing Kratzmeier did in A Long, Long Dessert on Deimos and Phobos, only it’s a lot better. More modern-like, if you know what I mean. Now in the third course, Oehele really takes off. He—”
“Please, Mr. Winthrop!” Mrs. Brucks begged. “Enough! Too much! I don’t want to hear any more.” She glared at him, trying to restrain her lips from curling in contempt. She’d had far too much of this sort of thing from her son, Julius, years ago, when he’d been running around with a crazy art crowd from City College and been spouting hours of incomprehensible trash at her that he’d picked up from the daily newspaper’s musical reviews and the printed notes in record albums. One thing she’d learned the hard way was how to recognize an esthetic phony.
Winthrop shrugged. “Okay, okay. But you’d think you’d at least want to try it. The others at least tried it. They took a bite of classical Kratzmeier or Gura-Hok, they didn’t like it, they spat it out—fine. But you’ve been living on nothing but that damn twentieth century grub since we arrived. After the first day, you haven’t set foot outside your room. And the way you asked the room to decorate itself—Keerist! It’s so old-fashioned, it makes me sick. You’re living in the twenty-fifth century, lady; wake up!”
“Mr. Winthrop,” she said sternly. “Yes or no? You’re going to be nice or not?”
“You’re in your fifties,” he pointed out. “Fifties, Mrs. Brucks. In our time, you can expect to live what? Ten or fifteen more years. Tops. Here, you might see another thirty, maybe forty. Me, I figure I’m good for at least another twenty. With the medical machines they got, they can do wonders. And no wars to worry about, no epidemics, no depressions, nothing. Everything free, lots of exciting things to do, Mars, Venus, the stars. Why in hell are you so crazy to go back?”
Mrs. Brucks’ already half-dissolved self-control gave way completely. “Because it’s my home,” she sobbed. “Because it’s what I understand. Because I want to be with my husband, my children, my grandchildren. And because I don’t like it here, Mr. Winthrop, I don’t like it here!”
“So go back!” Winthrop yelled. The room which for the last few moments had settled into a pale golden-yellow, turned rose-color again in sympathy. “Go the hell back! There’s not one of you with the guts of a cockroach. Even that young fellow, what’s-his-name, Dave Pollock, I thought he had guts. He went out with me for the first week and he tried everything once. But he got scared too, and went back to his little old comfy room. It’s too dec-a-dent, he says, too dec-a-dent. So take him with you—and go back, all of you!”
“But we can’t go back without you, Mr. Winthrop. Remember they said the transfer has to be complete on both sides? One stays behind, all stay. We can’t go back without you.”
Winthrop smiled and stroked the throbbing vein on his neck. “You’re damn tooting you can’t go back without me. And I’m staying. This is one time that old Winthrop calls the tune.”
“Please, Mr. Winthrop, don’t be stubborn. Be nice. Don’t make us force you.”
“You can’t force me,” he told her with a triumphant leer. “I know my rights. According to the law of twenty-fifth century America, no human being can be forced to do anything. Fact. I tooked it up. You try to gang up on me, carry me out of here, all I do is set up a holler that I’m being forced and one! two! three! a flock of government machines show up and turn me loose. That’s the way it works. Put that in your old calabash and smoke it!”
“Listen,” she said, as she turned to leave. “At six o’clock, we’ll all be in the time machine building. Maybe you’ll change your mind, Mr. Winthrop.”
“I won’t,” he shot after her. “That’s one thing you can be sure of—I won’t change my mind.”
So Mrs. Brucks went back to her room and told the others that Winthrop was stubborn as ever.
Oliver T. Mead, vice-president in charge of public relations for Sweetbottom Septic Tanks, Inc., of Gary, Indiana, drummed impatiently on the arm of the red leather easy chair that Mrs. Brucks’ room had created especially for him. “Ridiculous!” he exclaimed. “Ridiculous and absolutely nonsensical. That a derelict, a vagrant, should be able to keep people from going about their business … do you know that there’s going to be a nationwide sales conference of Sweetbottom retail outlets in a few days? I’ve got to be there. I absolutely must return tonight to our time as scheduled, no ifs, no ands, no buts. There’s going to be one unholy mess, I can tell you, if the responsible individuals in this period don’t see to that.”
“I bet there will he,” Mary Ann Carthington said from behind round, respectful and well-mascaraed eyes. “A big firm like that can really give them what for, Mr. Mead.”
Dave Pollock grimaced at her wearily. “A firm five hundred years out of existence? Who’re they going to complain to—the history books?”
As the portly man stiffened and swung around angrily, Mrs. Brucks held up her hands and said, “Don’t get upset, don’t fight. Let’s talk, let’s think it out, only don’t fight. You think it’s the truth we can’t force him to go back?”
Mr. Mead leaned back and stared out of a nonexistent window. “Could be. Then again, it might not. I’m willing to believe anything—anything!—of 2458 A.D. by now, but this smacks of criminal irresponsibility. That they should invite us to visit their time and then not make every possible effort to see that we return safe and sound at the end of two weeks as scheduled—besides, what about their people visiting in our time, the five with whom we transferred? If we’re stuck here, they’ll be stuck in 1958. Forever. Any government worthy of the name owes protection to its citizens traveling abroad. Without it, it’s less than worthless: a tax-grabbing, boondoggling, inept bureaucracy that’s—that’s positively criminal!”
Mary Ann Carthington’s pert little face had been nodding in time to his fist beating on the red leather armchair. “That’s what I say. Only the government seems to be all machines. How can you argue with machines? The only government man we’ve seen since we arrived was that Mr. Storku who welcomed us officially to the United States of America of 2458.
And he didn’t seem very interested in us. At least, he didn’t show any interest.”
“The Chief of Protocol for the State Department, you mean?” Dave Pollock asked. “The one who yawned when you told him how distinguished he looked?”
The girl made a slight, slapping gesture at him, accompanied by a reproachful smile. “Oh, you.”
“Well, then, here’s what we have to do. One,” Mr. Mead rose and proceeded to open the fingers of his right hand one at a time. “We have to go on the basis of the only human being in the government we’ve met personally, this Mr. Storku. Two, we have to select a qualified representative from among us. Three, this qualified representative has to approach Mr. Storku in his official capacity and lay the facts before him. The facts, complete and unequivocal. How his government managed somehow to communicate with our government the fact that time travel was possible, but only if certain physical laws were taken into consideration, most particularly the law of—the law of —What is that law, Pollock?”