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“You see why I couldn’t part with her?” Wheaton said. “She’s my brain.”
“External storage,” said Ram Odin.
“Nice to be needed,” said Deborah.
They had a little money with them, but not enough for airfare. Wheaton’s credit cards were for accounts that had never been opened, with numbers that belonged either to no one or to somebody he’d never heard of. Again, Deborah’s purse was their salvation, but she only had about a thousand dollars. “I took it from your stash,” she told Wheaton.
“My stash?” he asked.
“Remember I had you put a thousand dollars into a hiding place so we’d have emergency cash?”
“No.”
“Well, I did, and you did, and this is it,” she said. “Busfare, maybe?”
“A plane ticket for one, and the rest of us slice time?” asked Noxon.
“Better than two days on a bus,” said Ram Odin.
“I’ve walked farther,” said Noxon. “It’s not as hard as you might think.”
“We’d get arrested,” said Wheaton. “It’s very suspicious to be cross-country pedestrians wearing civilian clothes.”
“And we can’t live off the land,” said Ram Odin. “All the land belongs to somebody, and there are still plenty of people who shoot trespassers.”
“What an unfriendly country,” said Noxon.
“Different time, different place,” said Wheaton. “We think we’re a very welcoming country. Generous and kind. Unless we don’t like your language or the way you look.”
Noxon knew he had the language right, so it had to be the facemask.
They reached Young Wheaton’s apartment in Ithaca, New York, rather late at night. Not having cabfare, they had walked for more than an hour from the airport. At least they had no luggage. And they refused to let Noxon snare and cook food along the way. “Not legal here,” said Ram Odin. “Not without a license.”
“Well,” said Deborah, “you can take small animals without a license.”
“Possum,” said Wheaton. “Coon. Squirrel.”
“But we wouldn’t eat those,” said Deborah.
They talked for a while about why they would disdain perfectly good meat, until they got so tired from walking it stopped being fun to argue about nothing.
Philologist Wheaton was exactly Anthropologist Wheaton’s age now, of course, but they looked different. Philologist Wheaton was a little plumper. Softer. Paler. No outdoor life. Nobody looking after him. Noxon realized that Deborah really had made a difference in her adoptive father’s life.
“You knew we were coming,” complained Anthropologist Wheaton. “This is all the room you arranged for?”
“I have beds for everybody,” said Philologist Wheaton patiently, “and I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“No,” said Noxon. “I’ll sleep on the floor. I prefer it.”
“The couch is softer,” said Ram Odin.
“Soft beds give me a backache,” said Noxon.
“The old house was completely paid for,” said Anthropologist Wheaton. “I grew up there.”
“It was also in another state,” said Philologist Wheaton. “The commute would have killed me.”
“Do you have enough money to feed us all? We aren’t sure how long we’ll be here,” said Ram Odin.
