3xT

by Harry Turtledove

  The man didn't return the gesture, but he seemed to understand what it meant. He stood up and took a couple of steps forward to put himself between the woman and Greenberg and Jennifer. Then he spoke again, this time in a questioning tone. Jennifer made what she thought was a pretty fair guess at what he was saying. You were there in that strange place with those monsters. Now you're here. What's going on?

  "Time for that special effect we were talking about," she whispered, for the benefit of the anthropologists outside.

  Without warning, a holovid projection of a Foitan sprang into being, a few meters away from the primitives. The woman let out a piercing shriek. The man shouted, too, fear and fury mingling in his voice. He looked around wildly for a stone to throw.

  "You!" Greenberg said in a commanding tone, stabbing out his forefinger at the alarmingly perfect image. "Go away and never come back!" He struck a pose that proclaimed he had every right to order the big, blue alien around so.

  The projection winked out as if it had never been. The man and woman shouted again, this time in amazement. Then they both hurried over to Greenberg, embraced him, and pounded him on the back. He staggered under the joyful blows. "They're stronger than they think," he wheezed, trying to stay upright.

  "Congratulations," the anthropologist said into his and Jennifer's ears. "You are now a powerful wizard."

  "Good." Greenberg turned his head. "Ah, I see the second part of the demonstration is on its way."

  Four plates floated toward the humans. Each one carried a thick steak, a couple of apples, and some ripe strawberries. The primitives needed another few seconds to spot them. Then they started exclaiming all over again.

  Jennifer intercepted two of the plates, Greenberg the other two. She passed one to each Cro-Magnon, then unhooked a couple of knives from her belt and handed them to the primitives, too. She drew one more for herself. Greenberg had his own. She cut a chunk from her steak, stabbed it, and lifted it to her mouth. Fancy manners could come later.

  Neither of the humans just out of cold sleep had recognized the metal knife for what it was—they were used to tools of bone and stone. But they caught on quickly. The man grunted in wonder as the keen blade slid through the meat. He grunted again, this time happily, when the first bite went into his mouth. Jennifer knew just how he felt. After so long on Foitani kibbles, every meal of honest food was a special treat.

  The primitives made the steaks vanish in short order. They inhaled the strawberries and ate the apples cores, stems and all. When they saw that Greenberg and Jennifer didn't want their cores, they made questioning noises and reached out for them. Getting no rebuff, they ate them, too.

  "Hunter-gatherers can't afford to waste any amount of food, no matter how small," the anthropologist said.

  The man kept trying the edge of the knife with his thumb. The woman said something to him, rather sharply. With obvious reluctance, he held out the knife to Jennifer. The woman held out hers.

  Jennifer shook her head as she made pushing noises. "No, they're yours to keep," she said.

  When the primitives realized what she meant, they whooped with glee and pummeled her as they had Greenberg. The man also reached under her synthetic fur and squeezed her left breast. She knocked his hand away. He didn't try twice. She gave him points for getting the idea in a hurry.

  She pointed to herself. "Jennifer," she said.

  "Bernard." Greenberg did the same thing.

  The man's eyes lit up. He thumped his own chest. "Nangar," he declared.

  He spoke to the woman. "Loto," she said, touching herself.

  "I wonder if those are names or if they just mean 'man' and 'woman,'" an anthropologist radioed to Jennifer and Greenberg. "Well, we'll find out soon enough."

  Language lessons went on from there, with parts of the body and the names of things close by. Nangar seemed to have an easier time picking up Spanglish words than Loto did.

  "Maybe the tribe next door spoke a different language," the anthropologist suggested. "We think men traveled more widely through a tribal range than women, so he could be more used to using different words than she is."

  After a while, Nangar pointed to the distant herds, which were actually holovid projections on a not-so-distant wall. With his own speech and many gestures, he got across the idea of hunting and then feasting. He gazed confidently at Greenberg all the while. Jennifer said, "After you got rid of that Foitan, Bernard, he figures you can do anything."

  Greenberg grinned wryly. "No matter how big a wizard I am, I don't think I can put much nourishment into a projection. Maybe it's time to distract him again." He spoke as much to the waiting anthropologists as to Jennifer.

  A few seconds later, a couple of the scientists came out from behind a boulder. They wore modern cold-weather gear. Nangar and Loto drew back in alarm. "Friends," Jennifer said reassuringly. She went over and smiled at the newcomers, patting them on the back. So did Greenberg.

  The primitives remained dubious until one of the anthropologists reached into her backpack and took out several pieces of roasted chicken. When she passed them to Loto and Nangar, she found that the way to their hearts lay through their stomachs. Although they'd eaten a good-sized meal not long before, they devoured the chicken and gnawed clean the bones the anthropologists discarded.

  The woman who'd given them the treat looked faintly appalled. "The way they eat, it's a wonder they aren't two hundred kilos each."

  "The fact that they aren't tells you how often—or rather, how seldom—they get the chance to eat like this," her male companion answered. She thought it over and nodded.

  Seeing that friendly relations had been established between the primitives and the people whose job it would be to guide them into the modern worlds, Greenberg and Jennifer strolled casually toward the boulder from in back of which the anthropologists had emerged. Several more anthropologists waited in the doorway the boulder concealed. They greeted the two traders with almost as much enthusiasm as Nangar and Loto had shown. One of them—in the crowd, Jennifer couldn't tell which one—let his hands wander more than they might have. Whoever he was, he didn't have Nangar's excuse for bad manners—he was supposed to be civilized.

  Jennifer changed back into proper clothes with more than a little relief. Greenberg was waiting in the hall outside her cubicle when she emerged. "Do you want to hang around for a while and watch them work with the CroMagnons?" he asked.

  She shook her head. "Do you?"

  "No, not really," he said. "They do want us to stay on call for a few days, though, in case they run into trouble and need our familiar faces."

  "I suppose that's fair enough." Jennifer sighed. "Still, what I'd like most would be just to start picking up the threads of my normal life again."

  "Normal life? What's that? I gave it up when I decided to become a trader. But I will say that the time I spent in the Foitani sphere turned out to be even farther from normal than I was quite braced for myself." Greenberg smiled and set his hand on her waist. "Not that all of it was bad, not by a long shot."

  Her hand covered his. "No, not all of it was bad. We wouldn't have ended up together if they hadn't kidnapped me, and I'm glad we did. But I'm a whole lot gladder to be back on a human world again and to feel fairly sure no one's going to shoot at me or fire a missile at my ship in the next twenty minutes."

  "Amen to that," he said. "All the same, I can't help wondering whether the kwopillot and the vodranet decided to talk things over or just slug it out."

  "I wonder, too," Jennifer said. "Still, you did the right thing when you got us out of there. We never would have found a better chance. But I would like to know what the Foitani ended up doing. I wonder if we'll ever find out."

  * * *

  "Hello, dear," Ella Metchnikova said as her path crossed Jennifer's on the edge of the university campus. "You must come over to my place before long. I have a marvelous new—well, old, I should say—drink that everyone loves. It's called a Black Russian, and you simply would
not believe what drinking two or three of them will do to you."

  "Set you up for a liver transplant?" Jennifer asked, not altogether in jest—some of Ella's concoctions seemed to have been invented by ancient temperance workers intent on demonstrating the evils of ethanol poisoning by horrible example.

  Ella laughed heartily. Despite mixological experiments too numerous to remember, her liver was still intact—unless, of course, this was her second or third by now. She said, "They're not as bad as all that. And bring your Bernard by. Perhaps he'd be interested in the recipe as something he could trade to, ah, aliens."

  To unsuspecting aliens, Jennifer thought, inserting a likely word into Ella's hesitation. Her friend meant well, though, so she said, "Maybe he would be—you never can tell. Still, I can't bring him by for a while; he set out on a trading run last week and he won't be back for a few months."

  "Really? What an—interesting—arrangement. Do you plan on, ah, consoling yourself with someone else while he's off being primitive?" Ella's eyes went big and round.

  "No," Jennifer said shortly. Ella Metchnikova wanted everything to be melodramatic. Jennifer had been in the middle of enough melodrama to last her a lifetime. But however volatile Ella was, she came through in a pinch. Jennifer said, "Thanks again for putting my stuff into storage when I disappeared."

  "It was only my duty, dear," Ella said grandly. "Unlike some I could name but won't—Ali Bakhtiar, for instance—I was always sure you would come back."

  "There were a lot of times when I wasn't," Jennifer said. Her kidnapping and spectacular return with Nangar and Loto had given her brief media fame on Saugus; she wasn't the least bit sorry it had finally started to wear off. She and Greenberg hadn't given the snoops all the lurid details of their adventures; that would only have made getting back to the ordinary course of day to day life harder.

  Ella looked down at her watch. "Oh, dear, I'm late; I must fly. Call me soon, Jennifer—promise you will."

  "I promise," Jennifer said. She was late, too, not a good thing to be on the first day of a new semester. Ella went on her way. Jennifer hurried across the campus. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw people stop and look at her. That had happened before the Foitani kidnapped her, too, but now about as many were women as men—a legacy of having had her face in the holovid tank a lot. She hoped that sort of attention would die down soon. She wanted no part of it. Aside from Bernard, all she wanted was to get back to work.

  Even that wouldn't be easy. Almost in a trot, she went past the building where she'd lectured before notoriety came her way. No hall in that building was big enough to hold a class the size of the one she'd be teaching today. The enrollment was three times as big as she'd ever had before, which angered her more than it pleased her. She wanted students who would be interested in the material she presented, not in her as a curiosity.

  She checked the time and swore. Five minutes late—that was disgraceful. But there at last ahead of her lay the second biggest lecture hall Saugus Central University boasted. The rear double doors were closed, which meant all the students were already inside. She swore again. They had to be thinking unkind thoughts about her. She fairly ran toward the special faculty entrance, which let her in right behind the podium.

  She dashed up the steps onto the lecturer's platform. "I'm sorry, class," she began as she got her first look at this year's crop of students. "I—"

  She stopped dead. She knew she shouldn't, but she couldn't help it. Better than three-quarters of the seats in the huge chamber were occupied by Foitani—blue Foitani from Odern, gray-blue Foitani from Rof Golan, green-blue Great Ones, purple and brown and gray and even pink Foitani from worlds she'd never heard of. Hundreds of pairs of round, attentive, deeply colored eyes bored into hers.

  They didn't kill each other off, she thought. Good—I think. She took a deep breath and started her lecture. Translators droned to turn her words into ones Foitani could understand. Somehow she got through it. "I'm sorry; I can't take questions today," she said when she was through.

  She hurried out of the lecture hall, found a public phone, fed her access card into it, and checked the listings. Then she made a call. A man's face appeared on the screen. "Universal Protective Services," he said. "We're the best on Saugus."

  "You'd better be," she told him.

  THE END

  For more great books visit

  http://www.webscription.net/