Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 (31 page)

And he wasn’t much to look at—rather small, with outsize nose and ears and a diffident manner. At college they had called him Mouse Padway. Oh, well, a man in exploratory work was a fool to marry, anyway. Just look at the divorce rate among them—anthropologists, paleontologists, and such—

“Could you drop me at the Pantheon?” he asked. “I’ve never examined it closely, and it’s just a couple of blocks to my hotel.”

“Yes, doc-tor, though I am afraid you will get wet. It looks like rain, does it not?”

“That’s all right. This coat will shed water.”

Tancredi shrugged. They bucketed down the Corso Vittorio Emanuele and screeched around the corner into the Via Cestari. Padway got out at the Piazza del Pantheon, and Tancredi departed, waving both arms and shouting: “Tomorrow at eight, then?
Si
, fine.”

***

Padway looked at the building for a few minutes. He had always thought it a very ugly one, with the Corinthian front stuck on the brick rotunda. Of course that great concrete dome had taken some eng
i
neering, considering when it had been erected. Then he had to jump to avoid being spattered as a man in a military uniform tore by on a motorcycle.

Padway walked over to the portico, round which clustered men engaged in the national sport of loitering. One of the things that he liked about Italy was that here he was, by comparison, a fairly tall man. Thunder
rumbled behind him, and a raindrop struck his hand. He began to take long steps. Even if his trench coat would shed water, he didn’t want his new twelve-thousand-lire Borsalino soaked. He liked that hat.

His reflections were cut off in their prime by the grand-daddy of all lightning flashes, which struck the Piazza to his right. The pavement dropped out from under him like a trapdoor.

His feet seemed to be dangling over nothing. He could not see anything for the reddish-purple a
f
ter-images in his retinas. The thunder rolled on and on.

It was a most disconcerting feeling, hanging in the midst of nothing. There was no uprush of air as in falling down a shaft. He felt somewhat as Alice must have felt on her leisurely fall down the rabbit-hole, except that his senses gave him no clear information as to what was happening. He could not even guess how fast it was happening.

Then something hard smacked his soles. He almost fell. The impact was about as strong as that resulting from a two-foot fall. As he staggered by he hit his shin on something. He said “Ouch!”

His retinas cleared. He was standing in the depression caused by the drop of a roughly circular piece of pavement.

The rain was coming down hard, now. He climbed out of the pit and ran under the portico of the Pa
n
theon. It was so dark that the lights in the building ought to have been switched on. They were not.

Padway saw something curious: the red brick of the rotunda was covered by slabs of marble facing. That, he thought, was one of the restoration jobs that Tancredi had been complaining about.

Padway’s eyes glided indifferently over the nearest of the loafers. They switched back again sharply. The man, instead of coat and pants, was wearing a dirty white woolen tunic.

It was odd. But if the man wanted to wear such a getup, it was none of Padway’s business.

The gloom was brightening a little. Now Padway’s eyes began to dance from person to person. They were all wearing tunics. Some had come under the portico to get out of the rain. These also wore tunics, sometimes with poncholike cloaks over them.

A few of them stared at Padway without much curiosity. He and they were still staring when the shower let up a few minutes later. Padway knew fear.

The tunics alone would not have frightened him. A single incongruous fact might have a rational if r
e
condite explanation. But everywhere he looked more of these facts crowded in on him. He could not co
n
cisely notice them all at once.

The concrete sidewalk had been replaced by slabs of slate.

There were still buildings around the Piazza, but they were not the same buildings. Over the lower ones Padway could see that the Senate House and the Ministry of Communications—both fairly conspicuous objects—were missing.

The sounds were different. The honk of taxi horns was absent. There were no taxis to honk. Instead, two oxcarts creaked slowly and shrilly down the via
della
Minerva.

Padway sniffed. The garlic-and-gasoline aroma of modern Rome had been replaced by a bar
n
yard-and-backhouse symphony wherein the smell of horse was the strongest and also the most mentionable motif. Another ingredient was incense, wafting from the door of the Pantheon.

The sun came out. Padway stepped out into it. Yes, the portico still bore the inscription crediting the construction of the building to M. Agrippa.

Glancing around to see that he was not watched, Padway stepped up to one of the pillars and slammed his
fist into it. It hurt.

“Hell,” said Padway, looking at his bruised knuckles.

He thought, I’m not asleep.
All this is too solid and consistent for a dream. There’s nothing fantastic about the early afternoon sunshine and the beggars around the Piazza.

But if he was not asleep, what?
He might be crazy…But that was a hypothesis difficult to build a sensible course of action on.

There was Tancredi’s theory about slipping back in time. Had he slipped back, or had something ha
p
pened to him to make him imagine he had? The time-travel idea did not appeal to Padway. It sounded metaphysical, and he was a hardened empiricist.

There was the possibility of amnesia. Suppose that flash of lightning had actually hit him and suppressed his memory up to that time; then suppose something had happened to jar it loose again…He would have a gap in his memory between the first lightning flash and his arrival in this archaistic copy of old Rome. All sorts of things might have happened in the meantime. He might have blundered into a movie set. Mussolini, having long secretly believed himself a reincarnation of Julius Caesar, might have decided to make his people adopt classical Roman costume.

It was an attractive theory. But the fact that he was wearing exactly the same clothes, and had the same things in his pockets as before the flash, exploded it.

He listened to the chatter of a couple of the loafers. Padway spoke fair, if pedantic, Italian. He could not quite get the substance of these men’s talk. In the rush of syllables he would often catch a familiar sound-group, but never enough at one time. Their speech had the tantalizing pseudo familiarity of Plat
t
deutsch to an English-speaking person.

He thought of Latin. At once the loafers’ speech became more familiar. They were not speaking classical Latin. But Padway found that if he took one of their sentences and matched it first against Italian and then against Latin, he could understand most of it.

He decided that they were speaking a late form of Vulgar Latin, rather more than halfway from the language of Cicero to that of Dante. He had never even tried to speak this hybrid. But by dredging his memory for his knowledge of sound changes, he could make a stab at it:
Omnia Gallia e devisa en parte trei, quaro una encolont Belge, alia
…

The two loafers had observed his eavesdropping. They frowned, lowered their voices, and moved off.

No, the hypothesis of delirium might be a tough one, but it offered fewer difficulties than that of the time-slip.

If he was imagining things, was he really standing in front of the Pantheon and imagining that the people were dressed and speaking in the manner of the period 300-900 A.D.? Or was he lying in a hospital bed recovering from near-electrocution and imagining he was in front of the Pantheon? In the former case he ought to find a policeman and have himself taken to a hospital. In the latter this would be waste motion. For safety’s sake he had better assume the former.

No doubt one of these people was really a policeman complete with shiny hat. What did he mean “r
e
ally”? Let Bertrand Russell and Alfred Korzybski worry about that. How to find…

A beggar had been whining at him for a couple of minutes. Padway gave such a perfect impression of deafness that the ragged little hunchback moved off. Now another man was speaking to him. On his left palm the man held a string of beads with a cross, all in a heap. Between his right thumb and forefinger he
held the clasp of the string. He raised his right hand until the whole string hung from it, then lowered it back onto his left palm, then raised it again, talking all the while.

Whenever and however all this was, that gesture assured Padway that he was still in Italy.

Padway asked in Italian: “Could you tell me where I could find a policeman?”

The man stopped his sales talk, shrugged, and replied, “
Non compr’ endo
.”

“Hey!” said Padway. The man paused. With great concentration Padway translated his request into what he hoped was Vulgar Latin.

The man thought, and said he didn’t know.

Padway started to turn elsewhere. But the seller of beads called to another hawker: “
Marco!
The ge
n
tleman wants to find a police agent.”

“The gentleman is brave. He is also crazy,” replied Marco.

The bead-seller laughed. So did several people. Padway grinned a little; the people were human if not very helpful, He said: “Please, I—really—want—to—know.”

The second hawker, who had a tray full of brass knick-knacks tied around his neck, shrugged. He rattled off a paragraph that Padway could not follow.

Padway slowly asked the bead-seller: “What did he say?”

“He said he didn’t know,” replied the bead-seller. “I don’t know either.”

Padway started to walk off. The bead-seller called after him: “Mister.”

“Yes?”

“Did you mean an agent of the municipal prefect?”

“Yes.”

“Marco, where can the gentleman find an agent of the municipal prefect?”

“I don’t know,” said Marco.

The bead-seller shrugged. “Sorry, I don’t know either.”

If this were twentieth-century Rome, there would be no difficulty about finding a cop. And not even Benny the Moose could make a whole city change its language. So he must be in (a) a movie set, (b) ancient Rome (the Tancredi hypothesis), or (c) a figment of his imagination.

He started walking. Talking was too much of a strain.

It was not long before any lingering hopes about a movie set were dashed by the discovery that this a
l
leged ancient city stretched for miles in all directions, and that its street plan was quite different from that of modern Rome. Padway found his little pocket map nearly useless.

The signs on the shops were in intelligible classical Latin. The spelling had remained as in Caesar’s time, if the pronunciation had not.

The streets were narrow, and for the most part not very crowded. The town had a drowsy, sha
b
by-genteel, rundown personality, like that of Philadelphia.

At one relatively busy intersection Padway watched a man on a horse direct traffic. He would hold up a hand to stop an oxcart, and beckon a sedan chair across. The man wore a gaudily striped shirt and leather trousers. He looked like a central or northern European rather than an Italian.

Padway leaned against a wall, listening. A man would say a sentence just too fast for him to catch. It was like having your hook nibbled but never taken. By terrific concentration, Padway forced himself to think in Latin. He mixed his cases and numbers, but as long as he confined himself to simple sentences he did not
have too much trouble with vocabulary.

A couple of small boys were watching him. When he looked at them they giggled and raced off.

It reminded Padway of those United States Government projects for the restoration of Colonial towns, like Williamsburg. But this looked like the real thing. No restoration included all the dirt and disease, the insults and
altercations, that
Padway had seen and heard in an hour’s walk.

Only two hypotheses remained: delirium and time-slip. Delirium now seemed the less probable. He would act on the assumption that things were in fact what they seemed.

He couldn’t stand there indefinitely. He’d have to ask questions and get himself oriented. The idea gave him gooseflesh. He had a phobia about accosting strangers. Twice he opened his mouth, but his glottis closed up tight with stage fright.

Come on, Padway, get a grip on yourself. “I beg your pardon, but could you tell me the date?”

The man
addressed,
a mild-looking person with a loaf of bread under his arm, stopped and looked blank.
“
Qui’ e’?
What is it?”

“I said, could you tell me the date?”

The man frowned. Was he going to be nasty? But all he said was, “
Non compr’ endo
.” Padway tried again, speaking very slowly. The man repeated that he did not understand.