When the door of the hotel suite closed behind him, and it was no longer necessary to keep up appearances, Duncan collapsed thankfully into one of the heavily padded chairs. It tilted backward so voluptuously that he guessed it had been especially designed for visitors from low-gravity worlds. George Washington was certainly an admirable host and seemed to have thought of everything. Nevertheless, Duncan knew that it would be a long time before he felt really at ease.

Quite apart from the drag of gravity, there were dozens of subtler reminders that he was not on his home world. One was the very size of the room; by Titanian standards, it was enormous. And it was furnished in such luxury as he had never seen in real life, but only in historical plays. Yet that, of course, was completely appropriate; he was living in the middle of history. This mansion had been built before the first man had ventured beyond the atmosphere, and he guessed that most of its fittings were contemporary. The cabinets full of delicate glassware, the oil paintings, the quaint old photographs of stiffly posed and long-forgotten eminences (perhaps the original Washington-no, cameras hadn’t been invented tfien), the heavy drapes-none of these could have been matched on Titan, and Duncan doubted if their holographic patterns were even stored in the Central

Library. The very communications console looked as if it dated back to the last century. Although all the elements were familiar-the blank gray screen, the alphanumeric keyboard, the camera lens and speaker grille-something about the design gave it an oldfashioned appearance. When he felt that he could again walk a few yards without danger of collapse, Duncan made his way cautiously to the console and parked himself heavily on the chair in front of it.

The type and serial numbers were in the usual place, tucked away at the side of the screen. Yes, there was the date-2183. It was almost a hundred years old.

Yet apart from a slight fuzziness of the “e” and “a” on the contact pads, there was practically no sign of wear. And why should there be, in a piece of equipment that did not contain a single moving part?

This was another sharp reminder that Earth was an old world, and had learned to conserve the past. Novelty for its own sake was an unlamented relic of the centuries of waste. If a piece of equipment functioned satisfactorily, it was not replaced merely because of changes in style, but only if it broke down, or there was some fundamental improvement in performance. The home communications console—or Comsole-had reached its technological plateau in the early twenty-first century, and Duncan was prepared to bet that there were units on Earth that had given continuous service for over two hundred years.

And that was not even one tenth of the history of this world. For the first time in his life, Duncan felt an almost overwhelming sense of inferiority.

He had not really believed that the Terrans would regard him as a

barbarian from the outer darkness; but now he was not so sure.

EMBASSY

Duncan’s Minisec: had been a parting gift from Colin, and he was not completely familiar with its controls. There had been nothing really wrong with his old unit, and he had left it behind with some regret; but the casing had become stained and battle scarred and he had to agree that it was not elegant enough for Earth.

The “Sec was the standard size of all such units, determined by what could fit comfortably in the normal human hand. At a quick glance, it did not differ greatly from one of the small electronic calculators that had started coming into general use in the late twentieth century. It was, however, infinitely more versatile, and Duncan could not imagine how life would be possible without it.

Because of the finite size of clumsy human fingers, it had no more controls than its ancestors of three centuries earlier. There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had a virtually unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation-for the character visible on each stud changed according to the mode. Thus on ALPHANUMERIC, twenty-six of the studs bore the letters of the alphabet, while ten showed the digits zero to nine. On MATH, the letters disappeared from the alphabetical studs and were replaced by X, +, - , —, =, and all the standard mathematical functions.

Another mode was DICTIONARY. The “Sec stored over a hundred thousand words, whose three-line definitions could be displayed on the bright little screen, steadily rolling over page by page if desired. CLOCK

and CALENDAR also used the screen for display, but for dealing with vast amounts of information it was desirable to link the “Sec to the much larger screen of a standard Comsole. This could be done through the unit’s optical interface-a tiny Transmit Receive bull’s-eye operating in the near ultraviolet As long as this lens was in visual range of the corresponding sensor on a Comsole, the two units could happily exchange information at the rate of megabits per second. Thus when the “Sec’s own internal memory was saturated, its contents could be dumped into a larger store for permanent keeping; or, conversely, it could be loaded up through the optical link with any special data required for a particular job.

Duncan was now employing it for its simplest possible use-merely as a speech recorder, which was almost an insult to a machine of such power. But first there was an important matter to settle-the question of security.

An easily remembered word, preferably one that would never be employed in this context, would be the simplest key. Better still, a word that did not even exist-then it could never accidentally trigger the “Sec’s memory.

Suddenly, he had it. There was one name he would never forget; and if he deliberately misspelled it….

He carefully pecked Out KALINDY, followed by the sequence of instructions that would set up the memory. Then he unplugged the tiny radio mike pinned it on his shirt, spoke a test message, and checked that the machine would play it back only after it had been given the correct order.

Duncan had never kept a diary, but he had decided to do so as soon as he arrived on Earth. In a few weeks he would meet more people and visit more places than in the whole of his preceding life, and would certainly have experiences that could never be repeated when he returned to Titan. He was determined to miss nothing that could be helped, for the memories he was storing now would be of inestimable value in the years ahead. How many times in his old age, he wondered,

would he play back these words of his youth … ? 112276 June 12. I’m still adapting to Earth gravity, and don’t think I’ll ever get really used to it. But I can stand for an hour at a time now, without developing too many aches and pains. Yesterday I saw a an actually jumping. I could hardly believe my eyes….

“George, who thinks of everything, has arranged a masseur for me. I don’t know if that’s helped at all, but it’s certainly an interesting experience.”

Duncan stopped recording and contemplated this slight understatement. Such luxuries were rare on Titan, and he had never before had a massage in his life. Bernie Patras, the amiable and uninhibited young man who had visited him, had shown a remarkable (indeed, startling) knowledge of physiology, and had also given Duncan much useful advice. He was a specialist in treating off-worlders, and recommended one sovereign cure for gravitational complaints. “Spend an hour a day floating in a bath-at least for the first month. Don’t let your schedule squeeze this out, no matter how busy you are. If you have to, you can do a lot of work in a tub-reading, dictating, and so forth. Why, the Lunar Ambassador used to hold briefings with just his nose and mouth above water. Said he could think better that way….”