“You are getting ahead fast, Hamilton,” he said to him when they had returned to the clubroom. “You’ll be up with me soon. By the way, what did you think of the object lesson?”
“I don’t see what else you could have done, ” Hamilton declared. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
“‘You can’t make an — ‘ Say, that’s a good one!” McFee laughed and dug him in the ribs. “Did you make it up, or hear it somewhere?”
Hamilton shrugged. He promised himself that he would cut off McFee’s ears for that dig in the ribs-after all this was over.
He reported the matter in detail, through devious channels, to Mordan, including his own part as an accessory before and after the fact. Getting his reports to Mordan occupied a good portion of his time and thoughts. Neither of his secret lives could be permitted to show above water. His daily conduct had to conform, superficially, with his public persona; it was necessary to continue his social life as usual, see his agent when his affairs required it, be seen in public in his habitual manner. It is not necessary to enumerate the varied means by which he found safe channels of communication to Mordan in the midst of this pattern; the methods of intrigue have varied little through the millennia. One example will suffice; Mordan had provided him with a tube address to which (he maintained) messages might be safely sent. He dare not assume that it was safe to stat a letter over his own telephone, but he could and did assume that a public phone picked at random could be used for dictation recording. The spool containing his report would then be consigned at once to the anonymity of the postal system.
Longcourt Phyllis took up much of his free time. He freely admitted that the woman intrigued him; he did not admit even to himself that she represented anything more than diversion to him. Nevertheless he was quite likely to be found waiting for her at the end of her working day. For she was a working woman-four hours a day, seven days a week, forty weeks a year, as a practical psycho-pediatrician in the Wallingford Infant Development Center.
Her occupation disturbed him a little. Why anyone should voluntarily associate day after day with a mob of yelling sticky little brats was beyond him. She seemed normal otherwise-normal but stimulating.
He was too preoccupied to take much interest in the news of the world these days, which was why he did not follow the career of J. Darlington Smith, the “Man from the Past, ” very closely. He was aware that Smith had been a news sensation for a few days, until crowded out by lunar field trials, and a report (erroneous) of intelligent life on Ganymede. The public soon filed him away with the duckbill platypus and the mummy of Rameses II-interesting relics of the past no doubt, but nothing to get excited about. It might have been different if his advent had been by means of the often discussed and theoretically impossible time travel, but it was nothing of the sort-simply an odd case of suspended animation. A sight-sound record from the same period was just as interesting-if one were interested.
Hamilton had seen him once, for a few minutes, in a newscast. He spoke with a barbarous accent and was dressed in his ancient costume, baggy pantaloons described by the interlocutor as “plus fours” and a shapeless knitted garment which covered his chest and arms. None of which prepared Hamilton for the reception of a stat relating to J. Darlington Smith.
“Greetings,” it began, etc. etc. The gist of it was that the interlocutor appointed by the Institution as temporary guardian for Smith desired that Hamilton grant the favor of an hour of his no-doubt valuable time to Smith. No explanation.
In his bemused frame of mind his first impulse was to ignore it. Then he recalled that such an act would not have fitted his former, pre-intrigue, conduct. He would have seen the barbarian, from sheer curiosity.
Now was as good a time as any. He called the Institution, got hold of the interlocutor, and arranged for Smith to come to his apartment at once. As an afterthought he called Monroe-Alpha, he having remembered his friend’s romantic interest in Smith. He explained what was about to take place. “I thought you might like to meet your primitive hero.”