I made a note to track down Ricky first thing, top priority. She was all that was left to me of the world I had known and she loomed very large in my mind. Dear little Ricky! If she had been ten years older I would never have looked at Belle . . . and wouldn’t have got my fingers burned.
Let’s see, how old would she be now? Forty-no, forty-one. It was hard to think of Ricky as forty-one. Still, that wouldn’t be old in a woman these days-or even those days. From forty feet you frequently couldn’t tell forty-one from eighteen.
If she was rich I’d let her buy me a drink and we would drink to Pete’s dear departed funny little soul.
And if something had slipped and she was poor in spite of the stock I had assigned her, then-by damn, I’d marry her! Yes, I would. It didn’t matter that she was ten years or so older than I was; in view of my established record for flubbing the dud I needed somebody older to look out for me and tell me no-and Ricky was just the girl who could do it. She had run Miles and Miles’s house with serious little-girl efficiency when she was less than ten; at forty she would be just the same, only mellowed.
I felt really warm and no longer lost in a strange land for the first time since I had wakened. Picky was the answer to everything.
Then deep inside me I heard a voice: “Look, stupid, you can’t marry Ricky, because a girl as sweet as she was going to be would now have been married for at least twenty years. She’ll have four kids. . maybe a son bigger than you are-and certainly a husband who won’t be amused by you in the role of good old Uncle Danny.”
I listened and my jaw sagged. Then I said feebly, “All right, all right-so I’ve missed the boat again. But I’m still going to look her up. They can’t do mote than shoot me. And, after all, she’s the only other person who really understood Pete.”
I turned another page, suddenly very glum at the thought of having lost both Ricky and Pete. After a while I fell asleep over the paper and slept until Eager Beaver or his twin fetched lunch.
While I was asleep I dreamed that Picky was holding me on her lap and saying, “It’s all right, Danny. I found Pete and now we’re both here to stay. Isn’t that so, Pete?”
“YeeeoW!”
The added vocabularies were a cinch; I spent much more time on the historical summaries. Quite a lot can happen in thirty years, but why put it down when everybody else knows it better than I do? I wasn’t surprised that the Great Asia Republic was crowding us out of the South American trade; that had been in the cards since the Formosall treaty. Nor was I surprised to find India more Balkanized than ever. The notion of England being a province of Canada stopped me for a moment. Which was the tail and which was the dog? I skipped over the panic of `87; gold was a wonderful engineering material for some uses; I could not regard it as a tragedy to find that it was now cheap and no longer a basis for money, no matter how many people lost their shirts in the change-over.
I stopped reading and thought about the things you could do with cheap gold, with its high density, good conductivity, extreme ductility . . . and stopped when I realized I would have to read the technical literature first. Shucks, in atomics alone it would be invaluable. The way the stuff could be worked, far better than any other metal, if you could use it in – I stopped, morally certain that Eager Beaver had had his “head” crammed full of gold. I would just have to get busy and find out what the boys had been doing in the “small back rooms” while I bad been away.
The Sawtelle Sanctuary wasn’t equipped to let me read up on engineering, so I told Doc Albrecht I was ready to check out. He shrugged, told me I was an idiot, and agreed. But I did stay one more night; I found that I was fagged just from lying back and watching words chase past in a book scanner.