by John Boyd
“Say something in Greek,” she challenged.
“Pure Athenian or with a Cretan accent?”
“Speak in Athens Greek,” she said, “but speak slowly.”
He was positive she was bluffing, but he did not speak slowly. He spoke in a conversational tempo, and he spoke the truth: “You are one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen, and though I know that beauty and virtue are seldom found together, with you it would make no difference. Literally, I could make love to you for one hundred years and not grow tired, if you should last so long.”
She dropped her eyes in wonderment and pleased shyness and said, “I saw your lips moving but I couldn’t understand a word you said.”
So she had understood every word. Well, the truth was the truth.
Suddenly she leaned toward him, speaking intently.
“Our movement could use your language talents. No—I’ll be more honest with you. I need you. All that I could offer would be my deep appreciation and the satisfaction you would gain from laboring in a cause greater and more enduring than either you or me.”
She was waving her hands in the manner of the Greeks—or the Jews—and those hands, her dark eyes, the Semitic cast to her features ripped him with a nostalgia he fought to conceal. Once again he was in old Jerusalem, and the girl across from him was Mary Magdalene. She had the same intensity, driving, persuasive, unselfish, of Mary Magdalene, and she was using almost the same argument that Mary had used when she had persuaded him to turn over his seat to Joshua, now called Jesus, and relinquish passage to their friend on the last starship from earth.
Patterns never changed. The tides of history were sweeping back, and his only earthly love had come again. Mary Magdalene sat before him only slightly changed in form and manner, and her wit and her expressions were those of his only unearthly love, Helix. He bowed his head, pretending to pinch his nose bridge—she even described him as “silly” and “a nut,” as Helix did.
When he raised his eyes, Helen was silent, but the pleading continued in her gaze.
“Tell you what, Helen; why don’t I drop by your pad tomorrow evening? We can turn over the idea and see what crawls out.”
“I’ll be in to you,” she said, speaking as she wrote her address onto notepaper, “because I like you and I think you could be very valuable to the organization. Your social thinking is probably out of focus because you’re an engineer, but engineers are men of action.”
“Yes,” he agreed, accepting her address. “When it comes to action, we’re in the top three per cent, particularly in matters relating to unions between students.”
“Oh, I trust a nut,” she said, rising, “and I thank you for the treat and the conversation. But I must hurry to Man and Civ. Don’t forget Saturday. Come around six, and I’ll fix you a bite.”
He would remember Saturday, he knew, as he watched her walk from the table with a swaying movement—that reminded him of Helix. He had been thinking of Helix more often of late. In a matter of seconds now, her time, she and her dad were going to have the surprise of their lives when the door of the space taxicab opened and the Hebrew Prophet stepped out. Or maybe they wouldn’t.
Well, he had had to do it that way; there had been too many questions left dangling between here and out there. As Flaxon had once said, the truth lay in the eye of the beholder, and Haldane had weak eyes. Not that he believed that any deliberate lies had been told; it was just that the truth behaved strangely in the presence of Fairweathers. And Joshua’s parables were crystal clear if one took into consideration that crystals bend light, and Haldane IV, alias Judas Iscariot, alias Hal Dane, had never been skilled in spectrum analysis.
For one thing, Haldane wondered if he had sidetracked history or derailed it when he laid the hissop-drugged body of Jesus into the one-seater right after the Crucifixion. Personally, he couldn’t lose either way. If he had triggered Armageddon when he launched the starship, then it was oblivion for him and he could use the sleep. That filling in his tooth was giving him a bad time, and he couldn’t have it removed. Any dentist would take one look at that receiving set, figure him for a foreign agent, and yell for the F.B.I.
Once the F.B.I, found out he had been a citizen of Georgia for three hundred years, they’d know that Georgia wasn’t the one next to Alabama and call in the C.I.A. The C.I.A. would check with Interpol and the International Police would call Istanbul, Damascus, Rome, Paris, London and Moscow (Oh boy! He hoped they never checked Tbilisi and got word from the descendants of Ailya Golovina) and somebody would start figuring that something had gone slightly askew.
He could see the headlines, now, in 48-point Futura bold:
“WANDERING JEW” DISCOVERED ALIVE:
ADMITS HE WAS JUDAS ISCARIOT!!!
Wouldn’t the goyim be fried to find that Judas Iscariot was a Christian?
The tooth was making his mind wander.
Helen Patrouklos paused at the entrance to wave goodby to him, and the Wandering Jew waved back. At the precise moment his hand fell to the table-top, a plaintive-voiced cowboy started to sing, “I jest caint bear to say good-by.”
If he had engineered the final merger of the ultimate thesis with the ultimate antithesis, then it would be the great Jubilee and nobody would lose, except possibly the professor of economics at Marston Meadows.
The tooth wouldn’t be so troublesome if he could pick up a little popular or classical music now and then.
He couldn’t lose by joining Helen. If her organization helped bring harmony to this world, then harmony might speed the development of a decent technology. If not, he would still have the pleasure of her company, and he would need all the diversion he could find; at the present rate of scientific progress it would be another two thousand years before he could catch a starship off this cruddy planet.
There was another possibility he dreaded. He might have to tarry until He returned, and that would mean Purgatory if he were doomed to walk the earth, somewhere between the sophomore and junior class, for the next ten thousand years. Life would really be tedious, jest a-settin’… just sitting and listening to his tooth play that gosh-derned country and western music all the time.