“My hero? What do you mean?”
“I thought you were telling me what a bucolic paradise he came from?”
“Oh, that! Slight mistake in dates. Smith is from 1926. It seems that gadgeting was beginning to spoil the culture, even then.”
“Then you wouldn’t be interested in seeing him?”
“Oh, I think I would. It was a transition period. He may have seen something of the old culture with his own eyes. I’ll be over, but I may be a little late.”
“Fine. Long life.” He cleared without waiting for a reply. Smith showed up promptly, alone. He was dressed, rather badly, in modern clothes, but was unarmed.
“I’m John Darlington Smith, ” he began.
Hamilton hesitated for a moment at the sight of the brassard, then decided to treat him as an equal. Discrimination, he felt, under the circumstances would be sheer unkindness. “I am honored that you visit me, sir.”
“Not at all. Awfully good of you, and so forth.”
“I had expected that there would be someone with you.”
“Oh, you mean my nursemaid.” He grinned boyishly. He was, Hamilton decided, perhaps ten years younger than Hamilton himself-discounting the years he had spent in stasis. “I’m beginning to manage the lingo all right, well enough to get around.”
“I suppose so, ” Hamilton agreed. “Both lingos are basically Anglic.”
“It’s not so difficult. I wish lingo were the only trouble I had.”
Hamilton was a little at a loss as to how to handle him. It was utterly inurbane to display interest in a stranger’s personal affairs, dangerous, if the stranger were an armed citizen. But this lad seemed to invite friendly interest. “What is troubling you, sir?”
“Well, lots of things, hard to define. Everything is different.”
“Didn’t you expect things to be different?”
“I didn’t expect anything. I didn’t expect to come to…to now.”
“Eh? I understand that-never mind. Do you mean that you did not know that you were entering the ‘stasis’?”
“I did and I didn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well…Listen, do you think you could stand a long story? I’ve told this story about forty-eleven times, and I know it doesn’t do any good to try to shorten it. They just don’t understand.”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, I’d better go back a little. I graduated from Eastern U in the spring of ’26 and — ”
“You what?”
“Oh, dear! You see in those days the schools — ”
“Sorry. Just tell it your own way. Anything I can’t pick up I’ll ask you about later.”
“Maybe that would be better. I had a pretty good job offered to me, selling bonds-one of the best houses on the Street. I was pretty well known-All-American back two seasons.” Hamilton restrained himself, and made about four mental notes.
“That’s an athletic honor, ” Smith explained hastily. “You’ll understand. I don’t want you to think I was a football bum, though. To be sure the fraternity helped me a little, but I worked for every cent I got. Worked summers, too. And I studied. My major was Efficiency Engineering. I had a pretty thorough education in business, finance, economics, salesmanship. It’s true that I got my job because Grantland Rice picked me-I mean football helped a lot to make me well known-but I was prepared to be an asset to any firm that hired me. You see that, don’t you?”
“Oh, most certainly!”
“It’s important, because it has a bearing on what happened afterwards. I wasn’t working on my second million but I was getting along. Things were slick enough. The night it happened I was celebrating a little-with reason. I had unloaded an allotment of South American Republics — ”
“Eh?”
“Bonds. It seemed like a good time to throw a party. It was a Saturday night, so everybody started out with the dinner-dance at the country club. It was the usual thing. I looked over the flappers for a while, didn’t see one I wanted to dance with, and wandered into the locker room, looking for a drink. The attendant used to sell it to people he could trust.”
“Which reminds me, ” said Hamilton, and returned a moment later with glasses and refreshment.
“Thanks. His gin was pure bathtub, but usually reliable. Maybe it wasn’t, that night. Or maybe I should have eaten dinner. Anyhow, I found myself listening to an argument that was going on in one end of the room. One of these parlor bolsheviks was holding forth-maybe you still have the type? Attack anything, just so long as it was respectable and decent.”