Departures

“To have come so close!” the stranger said again. Now that he was no longer abasing himself, Kahn saw that the motions of his lips did not match the words the tech writer was hearing. The fellow shook his head in chagrin.”There goes my academic career, all because the scrofulous temporal phase link dropped me into the Late Middle First Primitive instead of the Mid-Middle.” He started to cry again.

He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Kahn, but his-what had he called it?-his pangloss kept working. “I can’t understand it. I was supposed to home on the mental vibrations of Temujin, Genghis Khan-”

He and Kahn realized at the same time what must have happened. Fury replaced the tears. Kahn waited for that finger to blast him to wherever the window had gone. The look on the fellow’s face said that might not be good enough-the sword might come out instead.

Then the stranger tried to master himself. It was a visible process, and audible. “Because I observe savages,” Kahn heard, “must I behave as one?”

His earlier wild mood swings made yes an all too likely answer to that. Kahn said quickly, “Can’t you just go on to the Temujin you really wanted to see?”

“It doesn’t work that way,” the stranger answered bleakly. “Once I am out of the temporal flow, returning only snaps me back to my own time, and then what am I? A graduate student in ancientest history without fieldwork, without a dissertation- and a laughingstock for the entire collegium.”

For the first time, he seemed a real person to Kahn, because the tech writer understood what he was feeling. His own education had ground to an ignominious halt a few months after he’d got his bachelor’s degree, when he had to admit his brain simply was not up to graduate work in physics-that being a subject as remote from Mongol history as possible.

He said, “Maybe you could do your work on twentieth-century America instead of the Mongols.”

“I don’t know anything about the Late Middle First Primitive,” the time traveler said petulantly-narrow specialization looked to be a universal constant.

“Maybe if you had a guide.” Anything, Kahn thought, to get the fellow’s mind off his anger, and off his ferocious finger. “I could do it, if you like. We’ve come a long way since the thirteenth century, you know.”

“I doubt it.”

Stung by the morose dismissal, Kahn snapped, “I’m going home in a few minutes. Come along if you want, or else don’t.”

“I’ll come,” the stranger said, sighing. “I may as well. It won’t help, though. Nothing will help.”

He was so woebegone that Kahn’s sympathy revived. “It won’t be so bad. You’ll get to see just about all of Los Angeles during the ride.” As far as he could remember, that was the first time he had ever had anything good to say about his daily commute. He lived in Reseda, in the western part of the San Fernando Valley, about forty-five miles northwest of where he worked. Some days it felt as if he spent more time in his car than on the job.

After saving the document he had been working on when the time traveler had arrived, Kahn undid his tie, slung his sport coat over his shoulder, and said, “Well, let’s go, uh-what do I call you, anyhow?”

“My name is Lasoporp Rof. My friends would call me Rof. You call me Lasoporp.”

So there, Kahn thought as they walked out of the building. The security guard gave Lasoporp Rof an odd look, but only a brief one. Clothes did not make the man, not in L.A.

The time traveler showed a small revival of interest in the parking lot. “This is your trusty Mongol steed, Temujin Genghis Kahn, able to travel long distances without tiring?”

“You can call me T.G.,” Kahn said, pleased to get a little of his own back. “And this is my trusty Japanese Toyota, Lasoporp, able to travel long distances without running out of gas.”

Lasoporp Rof grunted and got in.

“How far must we fare to your yurt?” he asked when the tech writer had joined him.

“My condo,” Kahn corrected absently. “How is it you know all this Mongol history without knowing anything else?”

“Some records of the Mongols survived the First Great Lacuna to be translated into Snoit.”

“That’s your language?”

“Gods and goddesses, no! But it was a liturgical language all through the First Intermediate and the Second Primitive, up to about nineteen thousand years before my time.”

“Oh.”

“How long will the journey to your yurt take, T.G.?” Lasoporp Rof asked as Kahn got on I-605 going north.

The tech writer ignored the slip; he was concentrating on his driving. “An hour if there were no traffic, an hour and a half on a regular sort of day, two hours if things jam up bad.” Close to a dozen different combinations of freeways would get him home. None was much faster than any of the others.