“-tech writher, in debt, divorced, driving an old Toyota,” Kahn finished the litany. He looked down at the stranger groveling before him. “You’re carrying on as if I were the real one, or something.”

The hangdog, puzzled look was back on the man’s face.

“Again you use strange terms, O Khan. Assure me, I pray, the pangloss properly renders my words into the Mongol speech.”

“Mongol?” Kahn was too far out of his depth not to come with the automatic truth. “This is English.”

“English?” The stranger’s eyebrows rose. “I’ve heard of it, I think. Then this is not the imperial yurt at Karakorum?”

“It’s Los Angeles.”

“Where?”

They stared at one another, each plainly convinced the other was crazy. At last the stranger said in a small voice, “Tell me the date, please.”

“Huh? It’s July 16th.”

“The year?”

Now positive he was humoring a madman, Kahn gave it to him. The next question confused him for a moment: “In what era is that?”

He finally figured out the meaning. “Christian, A.D. Anno domini. The Common Era-C.E.-if you don’t care for Christian dating of any flavor.”

One of those terms must have been familiar to the stranger. He screwed up his face and began to swear in a style that was bizarre but effective just the same. Kahn filed a couple of the choicer epithets to use himself. “Lizard piss” could come in handy almost any time, but he decided to save “sucker at the tit of a syphilitic sow” for when he really needed it-say, when a Mercedes cut him off on the freeway.

When the stranger finally ran out of oaths, he turned a face full of storm clouds on Kahn. “You are certain this is not central Asia in what you would call-let me think-the early thirteenth century?”

“Not the last time I looked,” Kahn said solemnly. He wished he could remember the security guard’s extension.

But instead of turning violent, the man in the Mongol clothes burst into tears. Kahn watched, amazed, as he unashamedly wept until he had cried himself out.

At last the stranger pulled himself together. He smacked fist into palm in frustration. “Oh, to have come so close and still missed! What are seven hundred miserable little years against fifty or sixty thousand?”

Kahn’s head was aching badly by now. He had had as much of this exchange as he could stand. “I’m so sorry,” he said with exquisite, ironic politeness. “You must be a time traveler, sir, and all this time I took you for a nut.”

The stranger waved it aside. “A natural error. However, if I were a nut, I would not be able to do this, for instance.” Afterward, Kahn would have sworn the fellow only pointed his finger at the office window, the window he had schemed so long and hard to get. A ray of blue light shot from the stranger’s fingernail. The next moment, the glass wasn’t there anymore.

July smog immediately started competing with the bland but breathable product the air conditioner turned out. Kahn coughed.

The stranger’s eyes went ecstatic (they also began filling with tears that had nothing to do with emotions). “The scent of burning hydrocarbons!” he exclaimed, breathing deeply, at least until he choked. “Undoubtedly from buildings torched in the search for loot.”

“No, from dinosaurs torched in the search for a parking space.” Kahn’s tongue led its own life, wild and free, while he tried to figure out whether he believed what he had just seen. He decided he did. His eyes might fool him, but he trusted his lungs. No way they could hurt so much unless the window glass really had disappeared.

“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.”