Waiting for the Olympians

by Frederik Pohl

Chapter 1

The Day of the Two Rejections

If I had been writing it as a romance, I would have called the chapter about that last day in London something like “The Day of the Two Rejections”. It was a nasty day in late December just before the holidays. The weather was cold, wet, and miserable—well, I said it was London, didn’t I?—but everybody was in a sort of expectant holiday mood; it had just been announced that the Olympians would be arriving no later than the following August, and everybody was excited about that. All the taxi drivers were busy, and so I was late for my lunch with Lidia. “How was Manahattan?” I asked, sliding into the booth beside her and giving her a quick kiss.

“Manahattan was very nice,” she said, pouring me a drink. Lidia was a writer, too—well they call themselves writers, the ones who follow famous people around and write down all their gossip and jokes and put them out as books for the amusement of the idle. That’s not really writing, of course. There’s nothing creative about it. But it pays well, and the research (Lidia always told me) was a lot of fun. She spent a lot of time travelling around the celebrity circuit, which was not very good for our romance. She watched me drink the first glass before she remembered to ask politely, “Did you finish the book?”

“Don’t call it ‘the book’,” I said. “Call it by its name, An Ass’ Olympiad. I’m going to see Marcus about it this afternoon.”

“That’s not what I’d call a great title,” she commented. Lidia was always willing to give me her opinion on anything, when she didn’t like it. “Really, don’t you think it’s too late to be writing another sci-rom about the Olympians?” And then she smiled brightly and said, “I’ve got something to say to you, Julie. Have another drink first.”

So I knew what was coming right away, and that was the first rejection.

I’d seen this scene building up. Even before she left on that last “research” trip to the West I had begun to suspect that some of that early ardour had cooled, so I wasn’t really surprised when she told me, without any further foreplay, “I’ve met somebody else, Julie.”

I said, “I see.” I really did see, and so I poured myself a third drink while she told me about it.

“He’s a former space pilot, Julius. He’s been to Mars and the Moon and everywhere, and oh, he’s such a sweet man. And he’s a champion wrestler, too, would you believe it? Of course, he’s still married, as it happens. But he’s going to talk to his wife about a divorce as soon as the kids are just a little older.”

She looked at me challengingly, waiting for me to tell her she was an idiot. I had no intention of saying anything at all, as a matter of fact, but just in case I had, she added, “Don’t say what you’re thinking.”

“I wasn’t thinking anything,” I protested.

She sighed. “You’re taking this very well,” she told me. She sounded as though that were a great disappointment to her. “Listen, Julius, I didn’t plan this. Truly, you’ll always be dear to me in a special way. I hope we can always be friends—” I stopped listening around then.

There was plenty more in the same vein, but only the details were a surprise. When she told me our little affair was over I took it calmly enough. I always knew that Lidia had a weakness for the more athletic type. Worse than that, she never respected the kind of writing I do, anyway. She had the usual establishment contempt for science-adventure romances about the future and adventures on alien planets, and what sort of relationship could that lead to, in the long run?

So I left her with a kiss and a smile, neither of them very sincere, and headed for my editor’s office. That was where I got the second rejection. The one that really hurt.

* * *

Mark’s office was in the old part of London, down by the river. It’s an old company, in an old building, and most of the staff are old, too. When the company needs clerks or copy-editors it has a habit of picking up tutors whose students have grown up and don’t need them any more, and retraining them. Of course, that’s just for the people in the lower echelons. The higher-ups, like Mark himself, are free, salaried executives, with the executive privilege of interminable, winey author-and-editor lunches that don’t end until the afternoon.

I had to wait half an hour to see him; obviously he had been having one of them that day. I didn’t mind. I had every confidence that our interview was going to be short, pleasant, and remunerative. I knew very well that An Ass’ Olympiad was one of the best sci-roms I had ever done. Even the title was clever. The book was a satire, with classical overtones—from The Golden Ass of the ancient writer, Lucius Apuleius, two thousand years ago or so; I had played off the classic in a comic, adventurous little story about the coming of the real Olympians. I can always tell when a book is going really well and I knew the fans would eat this one up…

When I finally got in to see Marcus he had a glassy, after-lunch look in his eye, and I could see my manuscript on his desk.

I also saw that clipped to it was a red-bordered certificate, and that was the first warning of bad news. The certificate was the censor’s verdict, and the red border meant it was an obstat.

Mark didn’t keep me in suspense. “We can’t publish,” he said, pressing his palm on the manuscript. “The censors have turned it down.”

“They can’t!” I cried, making his old secretary lift his head from his desk in the corner of the room to stare at me.

“They did,” Mark said. “I’ll read you what the obstat says: ‘—of a nature which may give offence to the delegation from the Galactic Consortium, usually referred to as the Olympians—’ and ‘—thus endangering the security and tranquillity of the Empire—’ and, well, basically it just says no. No revisions suggested. Just a complete veto; it’s waste paper now, Julie. Forget it.”

“But everybody is writing about the Olympians!” I yelped.

“Everybody was” he corrected. “Now they’re getting close, and the censors don’t want to take any more chances.” He leaned back to rub his eyes, obviously wishing he could be taking a nice nap instead of breaking my heart. Then he added tiredly, “So what do you want to do, Julie? Write us a replacement? It would have to be fast, you understand; the front office doesn’t like having contracts outstanding for more than thirty days after due date. And it would have to be good. You’re not going to get away with pulling some old reject out of your trunk—I’ve seen all those already, anyway.”

“How the hells do you expect me to write a whole new book in thirty days?” I demanded.

He shrugged, looking sleepier and less interested in my problem than ever. “If you can’t, you can’t. Then you’ll just have to give back the advance,” he told me.

* * *

I calmed down fast. “Well, no,” I said, “there’s no question of having to do that. I don’t know about finishing it in thirty days, though—”

“I do,” he said flatly. He watched me shrug. “Have you got an idea for the new one?”

“Mark,” I said patiently, “I’ve always got ideas for new ones. That’s what a professional writer is. He’s a machine for thinking up ideas. I always have more ideas than I can ever write—”

“Do you?” he insisted.

I surrendered, because if I’d said yes the next thing would have been that he’d want me to tell him what it was. “Not exactly,” I admitted.

“Then,” he said, “you’d better go wherever you do to get ideas, because, give us the new book or give us back the advance, thirty days is all you’ve got.”

* * *

There’s an editor for you.

They’re all the same. At first they’re all honey and sweet talk, with those long alcoholic lunches and blue-sky conversation about million-copy printings while they wheedle you into signing the contract. Then they turn nasty. They want the actual book delivered. When they don’t get it, or when the censors say they can’t print it, then there isn’t any more sweet talk and all the conversation is about how the aediles will escort you to debtors’ prison.

So I took his advice. I knew where to go for ideas, and it wasn’t in London. No sensible man stays in London in the winter anyway, because of the weather and because it’s too full of foreigners. I still can’t get used to seeing all those huge rustic Northmen and dark Hindian and Arabian women in the heart of town. I admit I can be turned on by that red caste mark or by a pair of flashing dark eyes shining through all the robes and veils—suppose what you imagine is always more exciting than what you can see, especially when what you see is the short, dumpy Britain women like Lidia.

So I made a reservation on the overnight train to Rome, to transfer there to a hydrofoil for Alexandria. I packed with a good heart, not neglecting to take along a floppy sun hat, a flask of insect repellent, and—oh, of course—stylus and blank tablets enough to last me for the whole trip just in case a book idea emerged for me to write. Egypt! Where the world conference on the Olympians was starting its winter session… where I would be among the scientists and astronauts who always sparked ideas for new science-adventure romances for me to write… where it would be warm…

Where my publisher’s aediles would have trouble finding me, in the event that no idea for a new novel came along.

Chapter 2

On the Way to the Idea Place

No idea did.

That was disappointing. I do some of my best writing on trains, aircraft, and ships, because there aren’t any interruptions and you can’t decide to go out for a walk because there isn’t any place to walk to. It didn’t work this time. All the while the train was slithering across the wet, bare English winter countryside towards the Channel, I sat with my tablet in front of me and the stylus poised to write, but by the time we dipped into the tunnel the tablet was still virgin.

I couldn’t fool myself. I was stuck. I mean, stuck. Nothing happened in my head that could transform itself into an opening scene for a new sci-rom novel.

It wasn’t the first time in my writing career that I’d been stuck with the writer’s block. That’s a sort of occupational disease for any writer. But this time was the worst. I’d really counted on An Ass’ Olympiad. I had even calculated that the publication date could be made to coincide with that wonderful day when the Olympians themselves arrived in our solar system, with all sorts of wonderful publicity for my book flowing out of that great event, so the sales should be immense… and, worse than that, I’d already spent the on-signing advance. All I had left was credit, and not much of that.

Not for the first time, I wondered what it would have been like if I had followed some other career. If I’d stayed in the civil service, for instance, as my father had wanted.

Really, I hadn’t had much choice. I was born during the Space Tricentennial Year, and my mother told me the first word I said was “Mars”. She said there was a little misunderstanding there, because at first she thought I was talking about the god, not the planet, and she and my father had long talks about whether to train me for the priesthood, but by the time I could read she knew I was a space nut. Like a lot of my generation (the ones that read my books), I grew up on spaceflight. I was a teenager when the first pictures came back from the space probe to the Alpha Centauri planet Julia, with its crystal grasses and silver-leafed trees. As a boy I corresponded with another youth who lived in the cavern colonies on the Moon, and I read with delight the shoot-’em-ups about outlaws and aediles chasing each other around the satellites of Jupiter. I wasn’t the only kid who grew up space-happy, but I never got over it.

Naturally I became a science-adventure romance writer; what else did I know anything about? As soon as I began to get actual money for my fantasies I quit my job as secretary to one of the imperial legates on the Western continents and went full-time pro.

I prospered at it, too—prospered reasonably, at least—well, to be more exact, I earned a liveable, if irregular, income out of the two sci-roms a year I could manage to write, and enough of a surplus to support the habit of dating pretty women like Lidia out of the occasional bonus when one of the books was made into a broadcast drama or a play.

Then along came the message from the Olympians, and the whole face of science-adventure romans was changed forever.

It was the most exciting news in the history of the world, of course. There really were other intelligent races out there among the stars of the Galaxy! It had never occurred to me that it would affect me personally, except with joy.

Joy it was, at first. I managed to talk my way into the Alpine radio observatory that had recorded that first message, and I heard it recorded with my own ears:

Dit squab dit.

Dit squee dit squab dit dit.

Dit squee dit squee dit squab dit dit dit.

Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squab wooooo.

Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squab dit dit dit dit dit.

It all looks so simple now, but it took a while before anyone figured out just what this first message from the Olympians was. (Of course, we didn’t call them Olympians then. We wouldn’t call them that now if the priests had anything to say about it, because they think it’s almost sacrilegious, but what else are you going to call godlike beings from the heavens? The name caught on right away, and the priests just had to learn to live with it.) It was, in fact, my good friend Flavius Samuelus ben Samuelus who first deciphered it and produced the right answer to transmit back to the senders—the one that, four years later, let the Olympians know we had heard them.

Meanwhile, we all knew this wonderful new truth: we weren’t alone in the universe! Excitement exploded. The market for sci-roms boomed. My very next book was The Radio Gods, and it sold its head off.

I thought it would go on forever.

It might have, too… if it hadn’t been for the timorous censors.

* * *

I slept through the tunnel—all the tunnels, even the ones through the Alps—and by the time I woke up we were halfway down to Rome.

In spite of the fact that the tablets remained obstinately blank, I felt more cheerful. Lidia was just a fading memory, I still had twenty-nine days to turn in a new sci-rom and Rome, after all, is still Rome! The centre of the universe—well, not counting what new lessons in astronomical geography the Olympians might teach us. At least, it’s the greatest city in the world. It’s the place where all the action is.

By the time I’d sent the porter for breakfast and changed into a clean robe we were there, and I alighted into the great, noisy train shed.

I hadn’t been in the city for several years, but Rome doesn’t change much. The Tiber still stank. The big new apartment buildings still hid the old ruins until you were almost on top of them, the flies were still awful, and the Roman youths still clustered around the train station to sell you guided tours to the Golden House (as though any of them could ever get past the Legion guards!), or sacred amulets, or their sisters.

Because I used to be a secretary on the staff of the proconsul to the Cherokee Nation, I have friends in Rome. Because I hadn’t had the good sense to call ahead, none of them were home. I had no choice. I had to take a room in a high-rise inn on the Palatine.

It was ferociously expensive, of course. Everything in Rome is—that’s why people like to live in dreary outposts like London—but I figured that by the time the bills came in I would either have found something to satisfy Marcus and get the rest of the advance, or I’d be in so much trouble a few extra debts wouldn’t matter.

Having reached that decision, I decided to treat myself to a servant. I picked out a grinning, muscular Sicilian at the rental desk in the lobby, gave him the keys for my luggage, and instructed him to take it to my room—and to make me a reservation for the next day’s hover-flight to Alexandria.

That’s when my luck began to get better.

When the Sicilian came to the wine shop to ask me for further orders, he reported, “There’s another citizen who’s booked on the same flight, Citizen Julius. Would you like to share a compartment with him?”

It’s nice when you rent a servant who tries to save you money. I said approvingly, “What kind of a person is he? I don’t want to get stuck with some real bore.”

“You can see for yourself, Julius. He’s in the baths right now. He’s a Judaean. His name is Flavius Samuelus.”

Five minutes later I had my clothes off and a sheet wrapped around me, and I was in the tepidarium, peering around at everybody there.

I picked Sam out at once. He was stretched out with his eyes closed while a masseur pummelled his fat old flesh. I climbed onto the slab next to his without speaking. When he groaned and rolled over, opening his eyes, I said, “Hello, Sam.”

It took him a moment to recognize me; he didn’t have his glasses in. But when he squinted hard enough his face broke out into a grin. “Julie!” he cried. “Small world! It’s good to see you again!”

And he reached out to clasp fists-over-elbows, really welcoming, just as I had expected; because one of the things I like best about Flavius Samuelus is that he likes me. One of the other things I like best about Sam is that, although he is a competitor, he is also an undepletable natural resource. He writes sci-roms himself. He does more than that. He has helped me with the science part of my own sci-roms any number of times, and it had crossed my mind as soon as I heard the Sicilian say his name that he might be just what I wanted in the present emergency.

Sam is at least seventy years old. His head is hairless. There’s a huge brown age spot on the top of his scalp. His throat hangs in a pouch of flesh, and his eyelids sag. But you’d never guess any of that if you were simply talking to him on the phone. He has the quick, chirpy voice of a twenty-year-old, and the mind of one, too—of an extraordinarily bright twenty-year-old. He gets enthusiastic.

That complicates things, because Sam’s brain works faster than it ought to. Sometimes that makes him hard to talk to, because he’s usually three or four exchanges ahead of most people. So the next thing he says to you is as likely as not to be the response to some question that you are inevitably going to ask, but haven’t yet thought of.

It is an unpleasant fact of life that Sam’s sci-roms sell better than mine do. It is a tribute to Sam’s personality that I don’t hate him. He has an unfair advantage over the rest of us, since he is a professional astronomer himself. He only writes sci-roms for fun, in his spare time, of which he doesn’t have a whole lot. Most of his working hours are spent running a space probe of his own, the one that circles the Epsilon Eridani planet, Dione. I can stand his success (and, admit it! his talent) because he is generous with his ideas. As soon as we had agreed to share the hoverflight compartment, I put it to him directly. Well, almost directly. I said, “Sam, I’ve been wondering about something. When the Olympians get here, what is it going to mean to us?”

He was the right person to ask, of course; Sam knew more about the Olympians than anyone alive. But he was the wrong person to expect a direct answer from. He rose up, clutching his robe around him. He waved away the masseur and looked at me in friendly amusement, out of those bright black eyes under the flyaway eyebrows and the drooping lids. “Why do you need a new sci-rom plot right now he?” asked.

“Hells,” I said ruefully, and decided to come clean. “It wouldn’t be the first time I asked you, Sam. Only this time I really need it.” And I told him the story of the novel the censors obstatted and the editor who was after a quick replacement—or my blood, choice of one.

He nibbled thoughtfully at the knuckle of his thumb. “What was this novel of yours about?” he asked curiously.

“It was a satire, Sam. An Ass’ Olympiad. About the Olympians coming down to Earth in a matter transporter, only there’s a mix-up in the transmission and one of them accidentally gets turned into an ass. It’s got some funny bits in it.”

“It sure has, Julie. Has had for a couple dozen centuries.”

“Well, I didn’t say it was altogether original only—”

He was shaking his head. “I thought you were smarter than that, Julie. What did you expect the censors to do, jeopardize the most important event in human history for the sake of a dumb sci-rom?”

“It’s not a dumb—”

“It’s dumb to risk offending them,” he said, overruling me firmly. “Best to be safe and not write about them at all.”

“But everybody’s been doing it!”

“Nobody’s been turning them into asses,” he pointed out. “Julie, there’s a limit to sci-rom speculation. When you write about the Olympians you’re right up at that limit. Any speculation about them can be enough reason for them to pull out of the meeting entirely, and we might never get a chance like this again.”

“They wouldn’t—”

“Ah, Julie,” he said, disgusted, “you don’t have any idea what they would or wouldn’t do. The censors made the right decision. Who knows what the Olympians are going to be like?”

“You do,” I told him.

He laughed. There was an uneasy sound to it, though. “I wish I did. About the only thing we do know is that they don’t appear to be just any old intelligent race; they have moral standards. We don’t have any idea what those standards are, really. I don’t know what your book says, but maybe you speculated that the Olympians were bringing us all kinds of new things—a cure for cancer, new psychedelic drugs, even eternal life—”

“What kind of psychedelic drugs might they bring, exactly?” I asked.

“Down, boy! I’m telling you not to think about that kind of idea. The point is that whatever you imagined might easily turn out to be the most repulsive and immoral thing the Olympians can think of. The stakes are too high. This is a once-only chance. We can’t let it go sour.”

“But I need a story,” I wailed.

“Well, yes,” he admitted, “I suppose you do. Let me think about it. Let’s get cleaned up and get out of here.”

While we were in the hot drench, while we were dressing, while eating a light lunch, Sam chattered on about the forthcoming conference in Alexandria. I was pleased to listen. Apart from the fact that everything he said was interesting, I began to feel hopeful about actually producing a book for Mark. If anybody could help me, Sam could, and he was a problem addict. He couldn’t resist a challenge.

That was undoubtedly why he was the first to puzzle out the Olympians’ interminably repeated squees and squabs. If you simply took the dit to be numeral one, and the squee to be plus sign, and the squab to be an equals sign, then “Dit squee dit squab dit dit” simply came out as “One plus one equals two.”

That was easy enough. It didn’t take a super brain like Sam’s to substitute our terms for theirs and reveal the message to be simple arithmetic—except for the mysterious “wooooo”:

Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squab wooooo.

What was the “wooooo” supposed to mean? A special convention to represent the numeral four?

Sam knew right away, of course. As soon as he heard the message he telegraphed the solution from his library in Padua:

“The message calls for an answer. ‘Wooooo’ means question mark. The answer is four.”

And so the reply to the stars was transmitted on its way:

Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squab dit dit dit dit.

The human race had turned in its test paper in the entrance examination, and the slow process of establishing communication had begun.

It took four years before the Olympians responded. Obviously, they weren’t nearby. Also obviously, they weren’t simple folk like ourselves, sending out radio messages from a planet of a star two light-years away, because there wasn’t any star there; the reply came from a point in space where none of our telescopes or probes had found anything at all.

By then Sam was deeply involved. He was the first to point out that the star folk had undoubtedly chosen to send a weak signal, because they wanted to be sure our technology was reasonably well developed before we tried to answer. He was one of the impatient ones who talked the collegium authorities into beginning transmission of all sorts of mathematical formulae, and then simple word relationships to start sending something to the Olympians while we waited for radio waves to creep to wherever they were and back with an answer.

Sam wasn’t the only one, of course. He wasn’t even the principal investigator when they got into the hard work of developing a common vocabulary. There were better specialists than Sam at linguistics and cryptanalysis.

But it was Sam who first noticed, early on, that the response time to our messages was getting shorter. Meaning that the Olympians were on their way towards us.

By then they’d begun sending picture mosaics. They came in as strings of dits and dahs, 550,564 bits long. Someone quickly figured out that that was the square of 742, and when they displayed the string as a square matrix, black cells for the dits and white ones for the dahs, the image of the first Olympian leaped out.

Everybody remembers that picture. Everyone on Earth saw it, except for the totally blind—it was on every broadcast screen and news journal in the world—and even the blind listened to the atomical descriptions every commentator supplied. Two tails. A fleshy, beard-like thing that hung down from its chin. Four legs. A ruff of spikes down what seemed to be the backbone. Eyes set wide apart on bulges from the cheekbones.

That first Olympian was not at all pretty, but it was definitely alien.

When the next string turned out very similar to the first, it was Sam who saw at once that it was simply a slightly rotated view of the same being. The Olympians took forty-one pictures to give us the complete likeness of that first one in the round…

Then they began sending pictures of the others.

It had never occurred to anyone, not even Sam, that we would be dealing not with one super race, but with at least twenty-two of them. There were that many separate forms of alien beings, and each one uglier and more strange than the one before.

That was one of the reasons the priests didn’t like calling them Olympians. We’re pretty ecumenical about our gods, but none of them looked anything like any of those, and some of the older priests never stopped muttering about blasphemy.

Halfway through the third course of our lunch and the second flask of wine, Sam broke off his description of the latest communiqué from the Olympians—they’d been acknowledging receipt of our transmissions about Earthly history—to lift his head and grin at me.

“Got it,” he said.

I turned and blinked at him. Actually, I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to his monologue because I had been keeping my eye on the pretty Kievan waitress. She had attracted my attention because—well, I mean, after attracting my attention because of her extremely well-developed figure and the sparsity of clothing to conceal it—because she was wearing a gold citizen’s amulet around her neck. She wasn’t a slave. That made her more intriguing. I can’t ever get really interested in slave women, because it isn’t sporting, but I had got quite interested in this woman.

“Are you listening to me?” Sam demanded testily.

“Of course I am. What have you got?”

“I’ve got the answer to your problem.” He beamed. “Not just a sci-rom novel plot. A whole new kind of sci-rom! Why don’t you write a book about what it will be like if the Olympians don’t come?”

I love the way half of Sam’s brain works at questions while the other half is doing something completely different, but I can’t always follow what comes out of it. “I don’t see what you mean. If I write about the Olympians not coming, isn’t that just as bad as if I write about them doing it?”

“No, no,” he snapped. “Listen to what I say! Leave the Olympians out entirely. Just write about a future that might happen, but won’t.”

The waitress was hovering over us, picking up used plates. I was conscious of her listening as I responded with dignity, “Sam, that’s not my style. My sci-roms may not sell as well as yours do, but I’ve got just as much integrity. I never write anything that I don’t believe is at least possible.”

“Julie, get your mind off your gonads”—so he hadn’t missed the attention I was giving the girl—“and use that pitifully tiny brain of yours. I’m talking about something that could be possible, in some alternative future, if you see what I mean.”

I didn’t see at all. “What’s an alternative future?”

“It’s a future that might happen, but won’t,” he explained. “Like if the Olympians don’t come to see us.”

I shook my head, puzzled. “But we already know they’re coming,” I pointed out.

“But suppose they weren’t! Suppose they hadn’t contacted us years ago.”

“But they did,” I said, trying to straighten out his thinking on the subject. He only sighed.

“I see I’m not getting through to you,” he said, pulling his robe around him and getting to his feet. “Get on with your waitress. I’ve got some messages to send. I’ll see you on the ship.”

* * *

Well, for one reason or another I didn’t get anywhere with the waitress. She said she was married, happily and monogamously. Well, I couldn’t see why any lawful, free husband would have his wife out working at a job like that, but I was surprised she didn’t show more interest in one of my lineage—

I’d better explain about that.

You see, my family has a claim to fame. Genealogists say we are descended from the line of Julius Caesar himself.

I mention that claim myself, sometimes, though usually only when I’ve been drinking—I suppose it is one of the reasons that Lidia, always a snob, took up with me in the first place. It isn’t a serious matter. After all, Julius Caesar died more than two thousand years ago. There have been sixty or seventy generations since then, not to mention the fact that, although Ancestor Julius certainly left a lot of children behind him, none of them happened to be born to a woman he happened to be married to. I don’t even look very Roman. There must have been a Nordiman or two in the line, because I’m tall and fair-haired, which no respectable Roman ever was.

Still, even if I’m not exactly the lawful heir to the divine Julius, I at least come of a pretty ancient and distinguished line. You would have thought a mere waitress would have taken that into account before turning me down.

She hadn’t, though. When I woke up the next morning—alone—Sam was gone from the inn, although the skipship for Alexandria wasn’t due to sail until late evening.

I didn’t see him all day. I didn’t look for him very hard, because I woke up feeling a little ashamed of myself. Why should a grown man, a celebrated author of more than forty bestselling (well, reasonably well-selling) sci-roms, depend on somebody else for his ideas?

So I turned my baggage over to the servant, checked out of the inn, and took the underground to the Library of Rome.

Rome isn’t only the imperial capital of the world, it’s the scientific capital, too. The big old telescopes out on the hills aren’t much use any more, because the lights from the city spoil their night viewing, and anyway the big optical telescopes are all out in space now. Still, they were where Galileus detected the first extrasolar planet and Tychus made his famous spectrographs of the last great supernova in our own galaxy, only a couple of dozen years after the first space-flight. The scientific tradition survives. Rome is still the headquarters of the Collegium of Sciences.

That’s why the Library of Rome is so great for someone like me. They have direct access to the Collegium data base, and you don’t even have to pay transmission tolls. I signed myself in, laid out my tablets and stylus on the desk they assigned me, and began calling up files.

Somewhere there had to be an idea for a science-adventure romance no one had written yet…

Somewhere there no doubt was, but I couldn’t find it. Usually you can get a lot of help from a smart research librarian, but it seemed they’d put on a lot of new people in the Library of Rome—Iberians, mostly; reduced to slave status because they’d taken part in last year’s Lusitanian uprising. There were so many Iberians on the market for a while that they depressed the price. I would have bought some as a speculation, knowing that the price would go up—after all, there aren’t that many uprisings and the demand for slaves never stops. But I was temporarily short of capital, and besides you have to feed them. If the ones at the Library of Rome were a fair sample, they were no bargains anyway.

I gave up. The weather had improved enough to make a stroll around town attractive, and so I wandered towards the Ostia mono-rail.

Rome was busy, as always. There was a bullfight going on in the Coliseum and racing at the Circus Maximus. Tourist buses were jamming narrow streets. A long religious procession was circling the Pantheon, but I didn’t get close enough to see which particular gods were being honoured today. I don’t like crowds. Especially Roman crowds, because there are even more foreigners in Rome than in London, Africs and Hinds, Hans and Northmen—every race on the face of the Earth sends its tourists to visit the Imperial City. And Rome obliges with spectacles. I paused at one of them, for the changing of the guard at the Golden House. Of course, the Caesar and his wife were nowhere to be seen—off on one of their endless ceremonial tours of the dominions, no doubt, or at least opening a new supermarket somewhere. But the Algonkian family standing in front of me were thrilled as the honour Legions marched and countermarched their standards around the palace. I remembered enough Cherokee to ask the Algonkians where they were from, but the languages aren’t really very close and the man’s Cherokee was even worse than mine. We just smiled at each other.

As soon as the Legions were out of the way I headed for the train.

I knew in the back of my mind that I should have been worrying about my financial position. The clock was running on my thirty days of grace. I didn’t, though. I was buoyed up by a feeling of confidence. Confidence in my good friend Flavius Samuelus, who, I knew, no matter what he was doing with most of his brain, was still cogitating an idea for me with some part of it.

* * *

It did not occur to me that even Sam had limitations. Or that something so much more important than my own problems was taking up his attention that he didn’t have much left for me.

I didn’t see Sam come onto the skip-ship, and I didn’t see him in our compartment. Even when the ship’s fans began to rumble and we slid down the ways into the Tyrrhenian Sea he wasn’t there. I dozed off, beginning to worry that he might have missed the boat; but late that night, already asleep, I half woke, just long enough to hear him stumbling in. “I’ve been on the bridge,” he said when I muttered something. “Go back to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”

When I woke, I thought it might have been a dream, because he was up and gone before me. But his bed had been slept in, however briefly, and the cabin steward reassured me when he brought my morning wine. Yes, Citizen Flavius Samuelus was certainly on the hover. He was in the captain’s own quarters, as a matter of fact, although what he was doing there the steward could not say.

I spent the morning relaxing on the deck of the hover, soaking in the sun. The ship wasn’t exactly a hover any more. We had transited the Sicilian Straits during the night and now, out in the open Mediterranean, the captain had lowered the stilts, pulled up the hover skirts, and extended the screws. We were hydrofoiling across the sea at easily a hundred miles an hour. It was a smooth, relaxing ride; the vanes that supported us were twenty feet under the surface of the water, and so there was no wave action to bounce us around.

Lying on my back and squinting up at the warm southern sky, I could see a three-winged airliner rise up from the horizon behind us and gradually overtake us, to disappear ahead of our bows. The plane wasn’t going much faster than we were—and we had all the comfort, while they were paying twice as much for passage.

I opened my eyes all the way when I caught a glimpse of someone standing beside me. In fact, I sat up quickly, because it was Sam. He looked as though he hadn’t had much sleep, and he was holding a floppy sun hat with one hand against the wind of our passage. “Where’ve you been?” I asked.

“Haven’t you been watching the news?” he asked. I shook my head. “The transmissions from the Olympians have stopped,” he told me.

I opened my eyes really wide at that, because it was an unpleasant surprise. Still, Sam didn’t seem that upset. Displeased, yes. Maybe even a little concerned, but not as shaken up as I was prepared to feel. “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “It could be just interference from the sun. It’s in Sagittarius now, so it’s pretty much between us and them. There’s been trouble with static for a couple of days now.”

I ventured, “So the transmissions will start up again pretty soon?”

He shrugged and waved to the deck steward for one of those hot decoctions Judaeans like. When he spoke it was on a different topic. “I don’t think I made you understand what I meant yesterday,” he said. “Let me see if I can explain what I meant by an alternate world. You remember your history? How Fornius Velio conquered the Mayans and Romanized the Western Continents six or seven hundred years ago? Well, suppose he hadn’t.”

“But he did, Sam.”

“I know he did,” Sam said patiently. “I’m saying suppose. Suppose the Legions had been defeated at the Battle of Tehultapec.”

I laughed. I was sure he was joking. “The Legions? Defeated? But the Legions have never been defeated.”

“That’s not true,” Sam said in reproof. He hates it when people don’t get their facts straight. “Remember Varus.”

“Oh, hells, Sam, that was ancient history! When was it, two thousand years ago? In the time of Augustus Caesar? And it was only a temporary defeat, anyway. The Emperor Drusus got the eagles back.” And got all of Gaul for the Empire, too. That was one of the first big trans-Alpine conquests. The Gauls are about as Roman as you can get these days, especially when it comes to drinking wine.

He shook his head. “Suppose Fornius Velio had had a temporary defeat, then.”

I tried to follow his argument, but it wasn’t easy. “What difference would that have made? Sooner or later the Legions would have conquered. They always have, you know.”

“That’s true,” he said reasonably, “but if that particular conquest hadn’t happened then, the whole course of history would have been different. We wouldn’t have had the great westward migrations to fill up those empty continents. The Hans and the Hinds wouldn’t have been surrounded on both sides, so they might still be independent nations. It would have been a different world. Do you see what I’m driving at? That’s what I mean by an alternate world—one that might have happened, but didn’t.”

I tried to be polite to him. “Sam,” I said, “you’ve just described the difference between a sci-rom and a fantasy. I don’t do fantasy. Besides,” I went on, not wanting to hurt his feelings, “I don’t see how different things would have been, really. I can’t believe the world would be changed enough to build a sci-rom plot on.”

He gazed blankly at me for a moment, then turned and looked out to sea. Then, without transition, he said, “There’s one funny thing. The Martian colonies aren’t getting a transmission, either. And they aren’t occluded by the sun.”

I frowned. “What does that mean, Sam?”

He shook his head. “I wish I knew,” he said.

Chapter 3

In Old Alexandria

The Pharos was bright in the sunset light as we came into the port of Alexandria. We were on hover again, at slow speeds, and the chop at the breakwater bumped us around. But once we got to the inner harbour the water was calm.

Sam had spent the afternoon back in the captain’s quarters, keeping in contact with the Collegium of Sciences, but he showed up as we moored. He saw me gazing towards the rental desk on the dock but shook his head. “Don’t bother with a rental, Julie,” he ordered. “Let my niece’s servants take your baggage. We’re staying with her.”

That was good news. Inn rooms in Alexandria are almost as pricey as Rome’s. I thanked him, but he didn’t even listen. He turned our bags over to a porter from his niece’s domicile, a little Arabian who was a lot stronger than he looked, and disappeared towards the Hall of the Egyptian Senate-Inferior, where the conference was going to be held.

I hailed a three-wheeler and gave the driver the address of Sam’s niece.

No matter what the Egyptians think, Alexandria is a dirty little town. The Choctaws have a bigger capital, and the Kievans have a cleaner one. Also Alexandria’s famous library is a joke. After my (one would like to believe) ancestor Julius Caesar let it burn to the ground, the Egyptians did build it up again But it is so old-fashioned that there’s nothing in it but books.

The home of Sam’s niece was in a particularly run-down section of that run-down town, only a few streets from the harbourside. You could hear the noise of the cargo winches from the docks, but you couldn’t hear them very well because of the noise of the streets themselves, thick with goods vans and drivers cursing each other as they jockeyed around the narrow corners. The house itself was bigger than I had expected. But, at least from the outside, that was all you could say for it. It was faced with cheap Egyptian stucco rather than marble, and right next door to it was a slave-rental barracks.

At least, I reminded myself, it was free. I kicked at the door and shouted for the butler.

It wasn’t the butler who opened it for me. It was Sam’s niece herself, and she was a nice surprise. She was almost as tall as I was and just as fair. Besides, she was young and very good-looking. “You must be Julius,” she said. “I am Rachel, niece of Citizen Flavius Samuelus ben Samuelus, and I welcome you to my home.”

I kissed her hand. It’s a Kievan custom that I like, especially with pretty girls I don’t yet know well, but hope to. “You don’t look Judaean,” I told her.

“You don’t look like a sci-rom hack,” she replied. Her voice was less chilling than her words, but not much. “Uncle Sam isn’t here, and I’m afraid I’ve got work I must do. Basilius will show you to your rooms and offer you some refreshment.”

* * *

I usually make a better first impression on young women. I usually work at it more carefully, but she had taken me by surprise. I had more or less expected that Sam’s niece would look more or less like Sam, except probably for the baldness and the wrinkled face. I could not have been more wrong.

I had been wrong about the house, too. It was a big one. There had to be well over a dozen rooms, not counting servants’ quarters, and the atrium was covered with one of those partly reflecting films that keep the worst of the heat out.

The famous Egyptian sun was directly overhead when Basilius, Rachel’s butler, showed me my rooms. They were pleasingly bright and airy, but Basilius suggested I might enjoy being outside. He was right. He brought me wine and fruits in the atrium, a pleasant bench by a fountain. Through the film the sun looked only pale and pleasant instead of deadly hot. The fruit was fresh, too—pineapples from Lebanon, oranges from Judaea, apples that must have come all the way from somewhere in Gaul. The only thing wrong that I could see was that Rachel herself stayed in her rooms, so I didn’t have a chance to try to put myself in a better light with her.

She had left instructions for my comfort, though. Basilius clapped his hands and another servant appeared, bearing stylus and tablets in case I should decide to work. I was surprised to see that both Basilius and the other one were Africs; they don’t usually get into political trouble, or trouble with the aediles of any kind, so not many of them are slaves.

The fountain was a Cupid statue. In some circumstances I would have thought of that as a good sign, but here it didn’t seem to mean anything. Cupid’s nose was chipped, and the fountain was obviously older than Rachel was. I thought of just staying there until Rachel came out, but when I asked Basilius when that would be he gave me a look of delicate patronizing. “Citizeness Rachel works through the afternoon, Citizen Julius,” he informed me.

“Oh? And what does she work at?”

“Citizeness Rachel is a famous historian,” he said. “She often works straight through until bedtime. But for you and her uncle, of course, dinner will be served at your convenience.”

He was quite an obliging fellow. “Thank you, Basilius,” I said. “I believe I’ll go out for a few hours myself.” And then, as he turned politely to go, I said curiously, “You don’t look like a very dangerous criminal. If you don’t mind my asking, what were you enslaved for?”

“Oh, not for anything violent, Citizen Julius,” he assured me. “Just for debts.

* * *

I found my way to the Hall of the Egyptian Senate-Inferior easily enough. There was a lot of traffic going that way, because it is, after all, one of the sights of Alexandria.

The Senate-Inferior wasn’t in session at the time. There was no reason it should have been, of course, because what did the Egyptians need a Senate of any kind for? The time when they’d made any significant decisions for themselves was many centuries past.

They’d spread themselves for the conference, though. The Senate Temple had niches for at least half a hundred gods. There were the customary figures of Amon-Ra and Jupiter and all the other main figures of the pantheon, of course, but for the sake of the visitors they had installed Ahura-Mazda, Yahweh, Freya, Quetzalcoatl, and at least a dozen I didn’t recognize at all. They were all decorated with fresh sacrifices of flowers and fruits, showing that the tourists, if not the astronomers—and probably the astronomers as well—were taking no chances in getting communications with the Olympians restored. Scientists are an agnostic lot, of course—well, most educated people are, aren’t they? But even an agnostic will risk a piece of fruit to placate a god, just on the chance he’s wrong.

Outside the hall, hucksters were already putting up their stands, although the first sessions wouldn’t begin for another day. I bought some dates from one of them and wandered around, eating dates and studying the marble frieze on the wall of the Senate. It showed the rippling fields of corn, wheat, and potatoes that had made Egypt the breadbasket of the Empire for two thousand years. It didn’t show anything about the Olympians, of course. Space is not a subject that interests the Egyptians a lot. They prefer to look back on their glorious (they say it’s glorious) past; and there would have been no point in having the conference on the Olympians there at all, except who wants to go to some northern city in December?

Inside, the great hall was empty, except for slaves arranging seat cushions and cuspidors for the participants. The exhibit halls were noisy with workers setting up displays, but they didn’t want people dropping in to bother them, and the participants’ lounges were dark.

I was lucky enough to find the media room open. It was always good for a free glass of wine, and besides, I wanted to know where everyone was. The slave in charge couldn’t tell me. “There’s supposed to be a private executive meeting somewhere, that’s all I know—and there’s all these journalists looking for someone to interview.” And then, peering over my shoulder as I signed in: “Oh, you’re the fellow that writes the sci-roms, aren’t you? Well, maybe one of the journalists would settle for you.”

It wasn’t the most flattering invitation I’d ever had. Still, I didn’t say no. Marcus is always after me to do publicity gigs whenever I get the chance, because he thinks it sells books, and it was worthwhile trying to please Marcus just then.

The journalist wasn’t much pleased, though. They’d set up a couple of studios in the basement of the Senate, and when I found the one I was directed to, the interviewer was fussing over his hairdo in front of a mirror. A couple of technicians were lounging in front of the tube, watching a broadcast comedy series. When I introduced myself the interviewer took his eyes off his own image long enough to cast a doubtful look in my direction.

“You’re not a real astronomer,” he told me.

I shrugged. I couldn’t deny it.

“Still,” he grumbled, “I’d better get some kind of a spot for the late news. All right. Sit over there, and try to sound as if you know what you’re talking about.” Then he began telling the technical crew what to do.

That was a strange thing. I’d already noticed that the technicians wore citizens’ gold. The interviewer didn’t. But he was the one who was giving them orders.

I didn’t approve of that at all. I don’t like big commercial outfits that put slaves in positions of authority over free citizens. It’s a bad practice. Jobs like tutors, college professors, doctors, and so on are fine; slaves can do them as well as a citizen, and usually a lot cheaper. But there’s a moral issue involved here. A slave must have a master. Otherwise, how can you call him a slave? And when you let the slave be the master, even in something as trivial as a broadcasting studio, you strike at the foundations of society.

The other thing is that it isn’t fair competition. There are free citizens who need those jobs. We had some of that in my own line of work a few years ago. There were two or three slave authors turning out adventure novels, but the rest of us got together and put a stop to it—especially after Marcus bought one of them to use as a sub-editor. Not one citizen writer would work with her. Mark finally had to put her into the publicity department, where she couldn’t do any harm.

So I started the interview with a chip on my shoulder, and his first question made it worse. He plunged right in. “When you’re pounding out those sci-roms of yours, do you make any effort to keep in touch with scientific reality? Do you know, for instance, that the Olympians have stopped transmitting?”

I scowled at him, regardless of the cameras. “Science-adventure romances are about scientific reality. And the Olympians haven’t ‘stopped’ as you put it. There’s just been a technical hitch of some kind, probably caused by radio interference from our own sun. As I said in my earlier romance, The Radio Gods, electromagnetic impulses are susceptible to—”

He cut me off. “It’s been—” he glanced at his watch—“twenty-nine hours since they stopped. That doesn’t sound like just a technical hitch.”

“Of course it is. There’s no reason for them to stop. We’ve already demonstrated to them that we’re truly civilized, first because we’re technological, second because we don’t fight wars any more—that was cleared up in the first year. As I said in my roman, The Radio Gods—”

He gave me a pained look, then turned and winked into the camera. “You can’t keep a hack from plugging his books, can you?” he remarked humorously. “But it looks like he doesn’t want to use that wild imagination unless he gets paid for it. All I’m asking him for is a guess at why the Olympians don’t want to talk to us any more, and all he gives me is commercials.”

As though there were any other reason to do interviews! “Look here,” I said sharply, “if you can’t be courteous when you speak to a citizen, I’m not prepared to go on with this conversation at all.”

“So be it, pal,” he said, icy cold. He turned to the technical crew. “Stop the cameras,” he ordered. “We’re going back to the studio. This is a waste of time.” We parted on terms of mutual dislike, and once again I had done something that my editor would have been glad to kill me for.

That night at dinner, Sam was no comfort. “He’s an unpleasant man, sure,” he told me. “But the trouble is, I’m afraid he’s right.”

“They’ve really stopped?”

Sam shrugged. “We’re not in line with the sun any more, so that’s definitely not the reason. Damn. I was hoping it would be.”

“I’m sorry about that, Uncle Sam,” Rachel said gently. She was wearing a simple white robe, Hannish silk by the look of it, with no decorations at all. It really looked good on her. I didn’t think there was anything under it except for some very well-formed female flesh.

“I’m sorry, too,” he grumbled. His concerns didn’t affect his appetite, though. He was ladling in the first course—a sort of chicken soup, with bits of a kind of pastry floating in it—and, for that matter, so was I. Whatever Rachel’s faults might be, she had a good cook. It was plain home cooking, none of your partridge-in-a-rabbit-inside-a-boar kind of thing, but well prepared and expertly served by her butler, Basilius. “Anyway,” Sam said, mopping up the last of the broth, “I’ve figured it out.”

“Why the Olympians stopped?” I asked, to encourage him to go on with the revelation.

“No, no! I mean about your romance, Julie. My alternate world idea. If you don’t want to write about a different future, how about a different now?”

I didn’t get a chance to ask him about what he was talking about, because Rachel beat me to it. “There’s only one now, Sam, dear,” she pointed out. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Sam groaned. “Not you, too, honey,” he complained. “I’m talking about a new kind of sci-rom.”

“I don’t read many sci-roms,” she apologized, in the tone that isn’t an apology at all.

He ignored that. “You’re a historian, aren’t you?” She didn’t bother to confirm it; obviously, it was the thing she was that shaped her life. “So what if history had gone a different way?”

He beamed at us as happily as though he had said something that made sense. Neither of us beamed back. Rachel pointed out the flaw in his remark. “It didn’t, though,” she told him.

“I said suppose! This isn’t the only possible now, it’s just the one that happened to occur! There could have been a million different ones. Look at all the events in the past that could have gone a different way. Suppose Annius Publius hadn’t discovered the Western Continents in City Year 1820. Suppose Caesar Publius Terminus hadn’t decreed the development of a space program in 2122. Don’t you see what I’m driving at? What kind of a world would we be living in now if those things hadn’t happened?”

Rachel opened her mouth to speak, but she was saved by the butler. He appeared in the doorway with a look of silent appeal. When she excused herself to see what was needed in the kitchen, that left it up to me. “I never wrote anything like that, Sam,” I told him. “I don’t know anybody else who did, either.”

“That’s exactly what I’m driving at! It would be something completely new in sci-roms. Don’t you want to pioneer a whole new kind of story?”

Out of the wisdom of experience, I told him, “Pioneers don’t make any money, Sam.” He scowled at me. “You could write it yourself,” I suggested.

That just changed the annoyance to gloom. “I wish I could. But until this business with the Olympians is cleared up, I’m not going to have much time for sci-roms. No, it’s up to you, Julie.”

Then Rachel came back in, looking pleased with herself, followed by Basilius bearing a huge silver platter containing the main course.

Sam cheered up at once. So did I. The main dish was a whole roasted baby kid, and I realized that the reason Rachel had been called into the kitchen was so that she could weave a garland of flowers around its tiny baby horn buds herself. The maid servant followed with a pitcher of wine, replenishing all our goblets. All in all, we were busy enough eating to stop any conversation but compliments on the food.

Then Sam looked at his watch. “Great dinner, Rachel,” he told his niece, “but I’ve got to get back. What about it?”

“What about what?” she asked.

“About helping poor Julie with some historical turning points he can use in the story?”

He hadn’t listened to a word I’d said. I didn’t have to say so, because Rachel was looking concerned. She said apologetically, “I don’t know anything about those periods you were talking about—Publius Terminus, and so on. My speciality is the immediate post-Augustan period, when the Senate came back to power.”

“Fine,” he said, pleased with himself and showing it. “That’s as good a period as any. Think how different things might be now if some little event then had gone in a different way. Say, if Augustus hadn’t married Lady Livia and adopted her son Drusus to succeed him.” He turned to me, encouraging me to take fire from his spark of inspiration. “I’m sure you see the possibilities, Julie! Tell you what you should do. The night’s young yet; take Rachel out dancing or something; have a few drinks; listen to her talk. What’s wrong with that? You two young people ought to be having fun, anyway!”

* * *

That was definitely the most intelligent thing intelligent Sam had said in days.

So I thought, anyway, and Rachel was a good enough niece to heed her uncle’s advice. Because I was a stranger in town, I had to let her pick the place. After the first couple she mentioned I realized that she was tactfully trying to spare my pocketbook. I couldn’t allow that. After all, a night on the town with Rachel was probably cheaper, and anyway a whole lot more interesting, than the cost of an inn and meals.

We settled on a place right on the harbour-side, out towards the breakwater. It was a revolving nightclub on top of an inn built along the style of one of the old Pyramids. As the room slowly turned we saw the lights of the city of Alexandria, the shipping in the harbour then the wide sea itself, its gentle waves reflecting starlight.

I was prepared to forget the whole idea of alternate worlds, but Rachel was more dutiful than that. After the first dance, she said, “I think I can help you. There was something that happened in Drusus’ reign—”

“Do we have to talk about that?” I asked, refilling her glass.

“But Uncle Sam said we should. I thought you wanted to try a new kind of sci-rom.”

“No, that’s your uncle who wants that. See, there’s a bit of a problem here. It’s true that editors are always begging for something new and different, but if you’re dumb enough to try to give it to them they don’t recognize it. When they ask for different, what they mean is something right down the good old ‘different’ groove.”

“I think,” she informed me, with the certainty of an oracle and a lot less confusion of style, “that when my uncle has an idea, it’s usually a good one.” I didn’t want to argue with her; I didn’t even disagree: at least usually. I let her talk. “You see,” she said, “my speciality is the transfer of power throughout early Roman history. What I’m studying right now is the Judaean Diaspora, after Drusus’ reign. You know what happened then, I suppose?”

Actually, I did—hazily. “That was the year of the Judaean rebellion, wasn’t it?”

She nodded. She looked very pretty when she nodded, her fair hair moving gracefully and her eyes sparkling. “You see, that was a great tragedy for the Judaeans, and, just as my uncle said, it needn’t have happened. If Procurator Tiberius had lived, it wouldn’t have.”

I coughed. “I’m not sure I know who Tiberius was,” I said apologetically.

“He was the Procurator of Judaea, and a very good one. He was just and fair. He was the brother of the Emperor Drusus—the one my uncle was talking about, Livia’s son, the adopted heir of Caesar Augustus. The one who restored the power of the Senate after Augustus had appropriated most of it for himself. Anyway, Tiberius was the best governor the Judaeans ever had, just as Drusus was the best emperor. Tiberius died just a year before the rebellion—ate some spoiled figs, they say, although it might have been his wife who did it—she was Julia, the daughter of Augustus by his first wife—”

I signalled distress. “I’m getting a little confused by all these names,” I admitted.

“Well, the important one to remember is Tiberius, and you know who he was. If he had lived, the rebellion probably wouldn’t have happened. Then there wouldn’t have been a Diaspora.”

“I see,” I said. “Would you like another dance?”

She frowned at me, then smiled. “Maybe that’s not such an interesting subject—unless you’re a Judaean, anyway,” she said. “All right, let’s dance.”

That was the best idea yet. It gave me a chance to confirm with my fingers what my eyes, ears, and nose had already told me; this was a very attractive young woman. She had insisted on changing, but fortunately the new gown was as soft and clinging as the old, and the palms of my hands rejoined in the tactile pleasure of her back and arm. I whispered, “I’m sorry if I sound stupid. I really don’t know a whole lot about early history—you know, the first thousand years or so after the Founding of the City.”

She didn’t bother to point out that she did. She moved with me to the music, very enjoyable, then she straightened up. “I’ve got a different idea,” she announced. “Let’s go back to the booth.” And she was already telling it to me as we left the dance floor. “Let’s talk about your own ancestor, Julius Caesar. He conquered Egypt, right here in Alexandria. But suppose the Egyptians had defeated him instead, as they very nearly did?”

I was paying close attention now—obviously she had been interested enough in me to ask Sam some questions! “They couldn’t have,” I told her. “Julius never lost a war. Anyway”—I discovered to my surprise that I was beginning to take Sam’s nutty idea seriously—“that would be a really hard one to write, wouldn’t it? If the Legions had been defeated, it would have changed the whole world. Can you imagine a world that isn’t Roman?”

She said sweetly, “No, but that’s more your job than mine, isn’t it?”

I shook my head. “It’s too bizarre,” I complained. “I couldn’t make the readers believe it.”

“You could try, Julius,” she told me. “You see, there’s an interesting possibility there. Drusus almost didn’t live to become Emperor. He was severely wounded in a war in Gaul, while Augustus was still alive. Tiberius—you remember Tiberius—”

“Yes, yes, his brother. The one you like. The one he made Procurator of Judaea.”

“That’s the one. Well, Tiberius rode day and night to bring Drusus the best doctors in Rome. He almost didn’t make it. They barely pulled Drusus through.”

“Yes?” I said encouragingly. “And what then?”

She looked uncertain. “Well, I don’t know what then.”

I poured some more wine. “I guess I could figure out some kind of speculative idea,” I said, ruminating. “Especially if you would help me with some of the details. I suppose Tiberius would have become Emperor instead of Drusus. You say he was a good man; so probably he would have done more or less what Drusus did—restore the power of the Senate, after Augustus and my revered great-great Julius between them had pretty nearly put it out of business—”

I stopped there, startled at my own words. It almost seemed that I was beginning to take Sam’s crazy idea seriously!

On the other hand, that wasn’t all bad. It almost seemed that Rachel was beginning to take me seriously.

That was a good thought. It kept me cheerful through half a dozen more dances and at least another hour of history lessons from her pretty lips… right up until the time when, after we had gone back to her house, I tiptoed out of my room towards hers, and found her butler, Basilius, asleep on a rug across her doorway, with a great, thick club by his side.

I didn’t sleep well that night.

Partly it was glandular. My head knew that Rachel didn’t want me creeping into her bedroom, or else she wouldn’t have put the butler there in the way. But my glands weren’t happy with that news. They had soaked up the smell and sight and feel of her, and they were complaining about being thwarted.

The worst part was waking up every hour or so to contemplate financial ruin.

Being poor wasn’t so bad. Every writer has to learn how to be poor from time to time, between cheques. It’s an annoyance, but not a catastrophe. You don’t get enslaved just for poverty.

But I had been running up some pretty big bills. And you do get enslaved for debt.

Chapter 4

The End of the Dream

The next morning I woke up late and grouchy and had to take a three-wheeler to the Hall of the Senate-Inferior.

It was slow going. As we approached, the traffic thickened even more. I could see the Legion forming for the ceremonial guard as the Pharaoh’s procession approached to open the ceremonies. The driver wouldn’t take me any closer than the outer square, and I had to wait there with all the tourists, while the Pharaoh dismounted from her royal litter.

There was a soft, pleasured noise from the crowd, halfway between a giggle and a sigh. That was the spectacle the tourists had come to see. They pressed against the sheathed swords of the Legionaries while the Pharaoh, head bare, robe trailing on the ground, advanced on the shrines outside the Senate building. She sacrificed reverently and unhurriedly to them, while the tourists flashed their cameras at her, and I began to worry about the time. What if she ecumenically decided to visit all fifty shrines? But after doing Isis, Amon-Ra, and Mother Nile, she went inside to declare the Congress open. The Legionaries relaxed. The tourists began to flow back to their buses, snapping pictures of themselves now, and I followed the Pharaoh inside.

She made a good—by which I mean short—opening address. The only thing wrong with it was that she was talking to mostly empty seats.

The Hall of the Alexandrian Senate-Inferior holds two thousand people. There weren’t more than a hundred and fifty in it. Most of those were huddled in small groups in the aisles and at the back of the hall, and they were paying no attention at all to the Pharaoh. I think she saw that and shortened her speech. At one moment she was telling us how the scientific investigation of the outside universe was completely in accord with the ancient traditions of Egypt—with hardly anyone listening—and at the next her voice had stopped without warning and she was handing her orb and sceptre to her attendants. She proceeded regally across the stage and out the wings.

The buzz of conversation hardly slackened. What they were talking about, of course, was the Olympians. Even when the Collegium-Presidor stepped forward and called for the first session to begin, the hall didn’t fill. At least most of the scattered groups of people in the room sat down—though still in clumps, and still doing a lot of whispering to each other.

Even the speakers didn’t seem very interested in what they were saying. The first one was an honorary Presidor-Emeritus from the southern highlands of Egypt, and he gave us a review of everything we knew about the Olympians.

He read it as hurriedly as though he were dictating it to a scribe. It wasn’t very interesting. The trouble, of course, was that his paper had been prepared days earlier, while the Olympian transmissions were still flooding in and no one had any thought they might be interrupted. It just didn’t seem relevant any more.

What I like about going to science congresses isn’t so much the actual papers the speakers deliver—I can get that sort of information better from the journals in the library. It isn’t even the back-and-forth discussion that follows each paper, although that sometimes produces useful background bits. What I get the most out of is what I call “the sound of science”—the kind of shorthand language scientists use when they’re talking to each other about their own specialities. So I usually sit somewhere at the back of the hall, with as much space around me as I can manage, my tablet in my lap and my stylus in my hand, writing down bits of dialogue and figuring how to put them into my next sci-rom.

There wasn’t much of that today. There wasn’t much discussion at all. One by one the speakers got up and read their papers, answered a couple of cursory questions with cursory replies, and hurried off; and when each one finished he left, and the audience got smaller because, as I finally figured out, no one was there who wasn’t obligated to be.

When boredom made me decide that I needed a glass of wine and a quick snack more than I needed to sit there with my still-blank tablet, I found out there was hardly anyone even in the lounges. There was no familiar face. No one seemed to know where Sam was. And in the afternoon, the Collegium-Presidor, bowing to the inevitable, announced that the remaining sessions would be postponed indefinitely.

The day was a total waste.

* * *

I had a lot more hopes for the night.

Rachel greeted me with the news that Sam had sent a message to say he was detained and wouldn’t make dinner.

“Did he say where he was?” She shook her head. “He’s off with some of the other top people,” I guessed. I told her about the collapse of the convention. Then I brightened. “At least let’s go out for dinner, then.”

Rachel firmly vetoed the idea. She was tactful enough not to mention money, although I was sure Sam had filled her in on my precarious financial state. “I like my own cook’s food better than any restaurant,” she told me. “We’ll eat here. There won’t be anything fancy tonight—just a simple meal for the two of us.”

The best part of that was “the two of us”. Basilius had arranged the couches in a sort of V, so that our heads were quite close together, with the low serving tables in easy reach between us. As soon as she lay down, Rachel confessed, “I didn’t get a lot of work done today. I couldn’t get that idea of yours out of my head.”

The idea was Sam’s, actually, but I didn’t see any reason to correct her. “I’m flattered,” I told her. “I’m sorry I spoiled your work.”

She shrugged and went on. “I did a little reading on the period, especially about an interesting minor figure who lived around then, a Judaean preacher named Jeshua of Nazareth. Did you ever hear of him? Well, most people haven’t, but he had a lot of followers at one time. They called themselves Chrestians, and they were a very unruly bunch.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about Judaean history,” I said. Which was true; but then I added, “But I’d really like to learn more.” Which wasn’t—or at least hadn’t been until just then.

“Of course, Rachel said. No doubt to her it seemed quite natural that everyone in the world would wish to know more about the post-Augustan period. “Anyway, this Jeshua was on trial for sedition. He was condemned to death.’

I blinked at her. “Not just to slavery?”

She shook her head. “They didn’t just enslave criminals back then, they did physical things to them. Even executed them, sometimes in very barbarous ways. But Tiberius, as Proconsul, decided that the penalty was too extreme. So he commuted Jeshua’s death sentence. He just had him whipped and let him go. A very good decision, I think. Otherwise he would have made him a martyr, and gods know what would have happened after that. As it was, the Chrestians just gradually waned away… Basilius? You can bring the next course in now.”

I watched with interest as Basilius complied. It turned out to be larks and olives! I approved, not simply for the fact that I liked the dish. The “simple meal” was actually a lot more elaborate than she had provided for the three of us the night before.

Things were looking up. I said, “Can you tell me something, Rachel? I think you’re Judaean yourself, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I’m a little confused,” I said. “I thought the Judaeans believed in the god Yahveh.”

“Of course, Julie. We do.”

“Yes but—” I hesitated. I didn’t want to mess up the way things were going, but I was curious. “But you say ‘gods’. Isn’t that, well, a contradiction?”

“Not at all,” she told me civilly enough. “Yahveh’s commandments were brought down from a mountaintop by our great prophet, Moses, and they were very clear on the subject. One of them says, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ Well, we don’t, you see? Yahveh is our first god. There aren’t any before him. It’s all explained in the rabbinical writings.”

“And that’s what you go by, the rabbinical writings?”

She looked thoughtful. “In a way. We’re a very traditional people, Julie. Tradition is what we follow, the rabbinical writings simply explain the traditions.”

She had stopped eating. I stopped, too. Dreamily I reached out to caress her cheek.

She didn’t pull away. She didn’t respond, either. After a moment, she said, not looking at me, “For instance, there is a Judaean tradition that a woman is to be a virgin at the time of her marriage.”

My hand came away from her face by itself, without any conscious command from me. “Oh?”

“And the rabbinical writings more or less define the tradition, you see. They say that the head of the household is to stand guard at an unmarried daughter’s bedroom for the first hour of each night; if there is no male head of the household, a trusted slave is to be appointed to the job.”

“I see,” I said. “You’ve never been married, have you?”

“Not yet,” said Rachel, beginning to eat again.

* * *

I hadn’t ever been married, either, although, to be sure, I wasn’t exactly a virgin. It wasn’t that I had anything against marriage. It was only that the life of a sci-rom hack wasn’t what you would call exactly financially stable, and also the fact that I hadn’t ever come across the woman I wanted to spend my life with… or, to quote Rachel, “Not yet.”

I tried to keep my mind off that subject. I was sure that if my finances had been precarious before, they were now close to catastrophic.

The next morning I wondered what to do with my day, but Rachel settled it for me. She was waiting for me in the atrium. “Sit down with me, Julie,” she commanded, patting the bench beside me. “I was up late, thinking, and I think I’ve got something for you. Suppose this man Jeshua had been executed, after all.”

It wasn’t exactly the greeting I had been hoping for, nor was it something I had given a moment’s thought to, either. But I was glad enough to sit next to her in that pleasant little garden, with the gentled early sun shining down on us through the translucent shades. “Yes?” I said noncommittally, kissing her hand in greeting.

She waited a moment before she took her hand back. “That idea opened some interesting possibilities, Julie. Jeshua would have been a martyr, you see. I can easily imagine that under those circumstances his Chrestian followers would have had a lot more staying power. They might even have grown to be really important. Judaea was always in one kind of turmoil or another around that time, anyway—there were all sorts of prophecies and rumours about messiahs and changes in society. The Chrestians might even have come to dominate all of Judaea.”

I tried to be tactful. “There’s nothing wrong with being proud of your ancestors, Rachel. But, really, what difference would that have made?” I obviously hadn’t been tactful enough. She had turned to look at me with what looked like the beginning of a frown. I thought fast, and tried to cover myself. “On the other hand,” I went on quickly, “suppose you expanded that idea beyond Judaea.”

It turned into a real frown, but puzzled rather than angry. “What do you mean, beyond Judaea?”

“Well, suppose Jeshua’s Chrestian-Judaean kind of—what would you call it? Philosophy? Religion?”

“A little of both, I’d say.”

“Religious philosophy, then. Suppose it spread over most of the world, not just Judaea. That could be interesting.”

“But, really, no such thing hap—”

“Rachel, Rachel,” I said, covering her mouth with a fingertip affectionately. “We’re saying what if, remember? Every sci-rom writer is entitled to one big lie. Let’s say this is mine. Let’s say that Chrestian-Judaeanism became a world religion. Even Rome itself succumbs. Maybe the City becomes the—what do you call it—the place for the Sanhedrin of the Chrestian-Judaeans. And then what happens?”

“You tell me,” she said, half-amused, half-suspicious.

“Why, then,” I said, flexing the imagination of the trained sci-rom writer, “it might develop like the kind of conditions you’ve been talking about in the old days in Judaea. Maybe the whole world would be splintering into factions and sects, and then they fight.”

“Fight wars?” she asked incredulously.

“Fight big wars. Why not? It happened in Judaea, didn’t it? And then they might keep right on fighting them, all through historical times. After all, the only thing that’s kept the world united for the past two thousand years has been the Pax Romana. Without that—why, without that,” I went on, talking faster and making mental notes to myself as I went along, “let’s say that all the tribes of Europe turned into independent city-states. Like the Greeks, only bigger. And more powerful. And they fight, the Franks against the Vik Northmen against the Belgiae against the Kelts.”

She was shaking her head. “People wouldn’t be so silly, Julie,” she complained.

“How do you know that? Anyway, this is a sci-rom, dear.” I didn’t pause to see if she reacted to the “dear”. I went right on, but not failing to notice that she hadn’t objected. “The people will be as silly as I want them to be—as long as I can make it plausible enough for the fans. But you haven’t heard the best part of it. Let’s say the Chrestian-Judaeans take their religion seriously. They don’t do anything to go against the will of their god. What Yahveh said still goes, no matter what. Do you follow? That means they aren’t at all interested in scientific discovery, for instance.”

“No, stop right there!” she ordered, suddenly indignant. “Are you trying to say that we Judaeans aren’t interested in science? That I’m not? Or my Uncle Sam? And we’re certainly Judaeans.”

“But you’re not Chrestian-Judaeans, sweet. There’s a big difference. Why? Because I say there is, Rachel, and I’m the one writing the story. So, let’s see—“ I paused for thought—“all right, let’s say the Chrestians go through a long period of intellectual stagnation, and then—“ I paused, not because I didn’t know what was coming next but to build the effect—“and then along come the Olympians!”

She gazed at me blankly. “Yes?” she asked, encouraging but vague.

“Don’t you see it? And then this Chrestian-Judaean world, drowsing along in the middle of a pre-scientific dark age—no aircraft, no electronic broadcast, not even a printing press or a hovermachine—is suddenly thrown into contact with a super-technological civilization from outer space!” She was wrinkling her forehead at me, trying to understand what I was driving at. “It’s terrible culture shock,” I explained. “And not just for the people on Earth. Maybe the Olympians come to look us over, and they see that we’re technologically backward and divided into warring nations and all that… and what do they do? Why, they turn right around and leave us! And… and that’s the end of the book!”

She pursed her lips. “But maybe that’s what they’re doing now,” she said cautiously.

“But not for that reason, certainly. See, this isn’t our world I’m talking about. It’s a what if world.”

“It sounds a little far-fetched,” she said.

I said happily, “That’s where my skills come in. You don’t understand sci-rom, sweetheart. It’s the sci-rom writer’s job to push an idea as far as it will go—to the absolute limit of credibility—to the point where if he took just one step more the whole thing would collapse into absurdity. Trust me, Rachel. I’ll make them believe it.”

She was still pursing her pretty lips, but this time I didn’t wait for her to speak. I seized the bird of opportunity on the wing. I leaned towards her and kissed those lips, as I had been wanting to do for some time. Then I said, “I’ve got to get to a scribe; I want to get all this down before I forget it. I’ll be back when I can be, and—and until then—well, here.”

And I kissed her again, gently, firmly and long; and it was quite clear early in the process that she was kissing me back.

* * *

Being next to a rental barracks had its advantages. I found a scribe to rent at a decent price, and the rental manager even let me borrow one of their conference rooms that night to dictate in. By daybreak I had down the first two chapters and an outline of Sidewise to a Chrestian World.

Once I get that far in a book, the rest is just work. The general idea is set, the characters have announced themselves to me, it’s just a matter of closing my eyes for a moment to see what’s going to be happening and then opening them to dictate to the scribe. In this case, the scribes, plural, because the first one wore out in a few more hours and I had to employ a second, and then a third.

I didn’t sleep at all until it was all down. I think it was fifty-two straight hours, the longest I’d worked in one stretch in years. When it was all done I left it to be fair-copied. The rental agent agreed to get it down to the shipping offices by the harbour and dispatch it by fast air to Marcus in London.

Then at last I stumbled back to Rachel’s house to sleep. I was surprised to find that it was still dark, an hour or more before sunrise.

Basilius let me in, looking startled as he studied my sunken eyes and unshaved face. “Let me sleep until I wake up,” I ordered. There was a journal neatly folded beside my bed, but I didn’t look at it. I lay down, turned over once, and was gone.

When I woke up, at least twelve hours had passed. I had Basilius bring me something to eat and shave me, and when I finally got out to the atrium it was nearly sundown and Rachel was waiting for me. I told her what I’d done, and she told me about the last message from the Olympians. “Last?” I objected. “How can you be sure it’s the last?”

“Because they said so,” she told me sadly. “They said they were breaking off communications.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking about that. “Poor Sam.” And she looked so doleful that I couldn’t help myself, I took her in my arms.

Consolation turned to kissing, and when we had done quite a lot of that she leaned back, smiling at me.

I couldn’t help what I said then, either. It startled me to hear the words come out of my mouth as I said, “Rachel, I wish we could get married.”

She pulled back, looking at me with affection and a little surprised amusement. “Are you proposing to me?”

I was careful of my grammar. “That was a subjunctive, sweet. I said I wished we could get married.”

“I understood that. What I want to know is whether you’re asking me to grant your wish.”

“No—well, hells, yes! But what I wish first is that I had the right to ask you. Sci-rom writers don’t have the most solid financial situation, you know. The way you live here—”

“The way I live here,” she said, “is paid for by the estate I inherited from my father. Getting married won’t take it away.”

“But that’s your estate, my darling. I’ve been poor, but I’ve never been a parasite.”

“You won’t be a parasite,” she said softly, and I realized that she was being careful about her grammar, too.

Which took a lot of willpower on my part. “Rachel,” I said, “I should be hearing from my editor any time now. If this new kind of sci-rom catches on—if it’s as popular as it might be—”

“Yes?” she prompted.

“Why,” I said, “then maybe I can actually ask you. But I don’t know that. Marcus probably has it by now, but I don’t know if he’s read it. And then I won’t know his decision till I hear from him. And now, with all the confusion about the Olympians, that might take weeks—”

“Julie,” she said, putting her finger over her lips, “call him up.”

* * *

The circuits were all busy, but I finally got through—and, because it was well after lunch, Marcus was in his office. More than that, he was quite sober. “Julie, you bastard,” he cried, sounding really furious, “where the hells have you been hiding? I ought to have you whipped.”

But he hadn’t said anything about getting the aediles after me. “Did you have a chance to read Sidewise to a Chrestian World?” I asked.

“The what? Oh, that thing. Nah. I haven’t even looked at it. I’ll buy it, naturally,” he said. “But what I’m talking about is An Ass’ Olympiad. The censors won’t stop it now, you know. In fact, all I want you to do now is make the Olympians a little dumber, a little nastier—you’ve got a biggie here, Julie! I think we can get a broadcast out of it, even. So when can you get back here to fix it up?”

“Why—well, pretty soon, I guess, only I haven’t checked the hover timetable—”

“Hover, hell! You’re coming back by fast plane—we’ll pick up the tab. And, oh, by the way, we’re doubling your advance. The payment will be in your account this afternoon.”

And ten minutes later, when I unsubjunctively proposed to Rachel, she quickly and unsubjunctively accepted; and the high-speed flight to London takes nine hours, but I was grinning all the way.

* * *

Chapter 5

The Way It Is When You’ve Got It Made

To be a freelance writer is to live in a certain kind of ease. Not very easeful financially, maybe, but in a lot of other ways. You don’t have to go to an office every day, you get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing your very own words being read on hovers and trains by total strangers. To be a potentially bestselling writer is a whole order of magnitude different. Marcus put me up in an inn right next to the publishing company’s offices and stood over me while I turned my poor imaginary Olympian into the most doltish, feckless, unlikeable being the universe had ever seen. The more I made the Olympian contemptibly comic, the more Marcus loved it. So did everyone else in the office; so did their affiliates in Kiev and Manahattan and Kalkut and half a dozen other cities all around the world, and he informed me proudly that they were publishing my book simultaneously in all of them. “We’ll be the first ones out, Julie,” he exulted. “It’s going to be a mint! Money? Well, of course you can have more money—you’re in the big-time now!” And, yes, the broadcast studios were interested—interested enough to sign a contract even before I’d finished the revisions; and so were the journals, who came for interviews every minute that Marcus would let me off from correcting the proofs and posing for jacket photographs and speaking to their sales staff; and, all in all, I hardly had a chance to breathe until I was back on the highspeed aircraft to Alexandria and my bride.

Sam had agreed to give the bride away, and he met me at the airpad. He looked older and more tired, but resigned. As we drove to Rachel’s house, where the wedding guests were already beginning to gather, I tried to cheer him up. I had plenty of joy myself; I wanted to share it. So I offered, “At least, now you can get back to your real work.”

He looked at me strangely. “Writing sci-roms?” he asked.

“No, of course not! That’s good enough for me, but you’ve still got your extrasolar probe to keep you busy.”

“Julie,” he said sadly, “where have you been lately? Didn’t you see the last Olympian message?”

“Well, sure,” I said, offended. “Everybody did, didn’t they?” And then I thought for a moment, and, actually, it had been Rachel who had told me about it. I’d never actually looked at a journal or a broadcast. “I guess I was pretty busy,” I said lamely.

He looked sadder than ever. “Then maybe you don’t know that they said they weren’t only terminating all their own transmissions to us, they were terminating even our own probes.”

“Oh, no, Sam! I would have heard if the probes had stopped transmitting!”

He said patiently, “No, you wouldn’t, because the data they were sending is still on its way to us. We’ve still got a few years coming in from our probes. But that’s it. We’re out of interstellar space, Julie. They don’t want us there.”

He broke off, peering out the window. “And that’s the way it is,” he said. “We’re here, though, and you better get inside. Rachel’s going to be tired of sitting under that canopy without you around.”

* * *

The greatest thing of all about being a bestselling author, if you like travelling, is that when you fly around the world somebody else pays for the tickets. Marcus’s publicity department fixed up the whole thing. Personal appearances, bookstore autographings, college lectures, broadcasts, publishers’ meetings, receptions—we were kept busy for a solid month, and it made a hell of a fine honeymoon.

Of course any honeymoon would have been wonderful as long as Rachel was the bride, but without the publishers bankrolling us we might not have visited six of the seven continents on the way. (We didn’t bother with Polaris Australis—nobody there but penguins.) And we took time for ourselves along the way, on beaches in Hindia and the islands of Han, in the wonderful shops of Manahattan and a dozen other cities of the Western Continents—we did it all.

When we got back to Alexandria the contractors had finished the remodeling of Rachel’s villa—which, we had decided, would now be our winter home, though our next priority was going to be to find a place where we could spend the busy part of the year in London. Sam had moved back in and, with Basilius, greeted us formally as we came to the door.

“I thought you’d be in Rome,” I told him, once we were settled and Rachel had gone to inspect what had been done with her baths.

“Not while I’m still trying to understand what went wrong,” he said “The research is going on right here; this is where we transmitted from.”

I shrugged and took a sip of the Falernian wine Basilius had left for us. I held the goblet up critically: a little cloudy, I thought, and in the vat too long. And then I grinned at myself, because a few weeks earlier I would have been delighted at anything so costly. “But we know what went wrong,” I told him reasonably. “They decided against us.”

“Of course they did,” he said. “But why? I’ve been trying to work out just what messages were being received when they broke off communications.”

“Do you think we said something to offend them?”

He scratched the age spot on his bald head, staring at me. Then he sighed. “What would you think, Julius?”

“Well, maybe so,” I admitted. “What messages were they?”

“I’m not sure. It took a lot of digging. The Olympians, you know, acknowledged receipt of each message by repeating the last hundred and forty groups—”

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, they did. The last message they acknowledged was a history of Rome. Unfortunately, it was 650,000 words long.”

“So you have to read the whole history?”

“Not just read it, Julie; we have to try to figure out what might have been in it that wasn’t in any previous message. We’ve had two or three hundred researchers collating every previous message, and the only thing that was new was some of the social data from the last census—”

I interrupted him. “I thought you said it was a history.”

“It was at the end of the history. We were giving pretty current data—so many of equestrian rank, so many citizens, so many freedmen, so many slaves.” He hesitated, and then said thoughtfully, “Paulus Magnus—I don’t know if you know him, he’s an Algonkan—pointed out that that was the first time we’d ever mentioned slavery.”

I waited for him to go on. “Yes?” I said encouragingly.

He shrugged. “Nothing. Paulus is a slave himself, so naturally he’s got it on his mind a lot.”

“I don’t quite see what that has to do with anything,” I said. “Isn’t there anything else?”

“Oh,” he said, “there are a thousand theories. There were some health data, too, and some people think the Olympians might have suddenly got worried about some new microorganism killing them off. Or we weren’t polite enough. Or maybe—who knows—there was some sort of power struggle among them, and the side that came out on top just didn’t want any more new races in their community.”

“And we don’t know yet which it was?”

“It’s worse than that, Julie,” he told me sombrely. “I don’t think we ever will find out what it was that made them decide they didn’t want to have anything to do with us.” And in that, too, Flavius Samuelus ben Samuelus was a very intelligent man. Because we never have.

Content

Waiting for the Olympians
by Frederik Pohl

Chapter 1 The Day of the Two Rejections

Chapter 2 On the Way to the Idea Place

Chapter 3 In Old Alexandria

Chapter 4 The End of the Dream

Chapter 5 The Way It Is When You’ve Got It Made