Noxon was used to walking hundreds of miles in a row, stopping only for sleep and meals. Ram Odin was not. So when they reached the door of the house Ram was looking for, miles from the bus station, he was sweaty and exhausted, while Noxon wasn’t even tired.
“Why do you think these people will help us?” asked Noxon.
“Because we have something to trade,” said Ram Odin.
“What do we have?” asked Noxon.
“Time travel,” said Ram Odin.
“This already sounds like a bad idea,” said Noxon.
“It’s a brilliant idea, and I think you’ll enjoy every minute of it. Well, maybe not the first few minutes, but all the rest of them.”
“What happens in the first few minutes?”
“We have to prove to them that we’re not insane.”
The door was answered by a young woman wearing large opaque glasses. “I don’t think I know you. Do you have an appointment?”
“A long-standing one, and you do know me, Deborah Wheaton. I’m betting you left your glasses in reading mode.”
“I did. But it can’t be you, Cousin Ram, because you’re in Houston training and competing to be pilot of the first starship.”
“Oh, I’m definitely there right now. I remember it well. But to me that was nine years ago, I think. And I’m quite sure your father wants to talk to me, with or without an appointment.”
“That’s always true,” said Deborah. “And with or without your right mind.”
“He’s never had a right mind,” said a man behind her, a thin, spectral figure with ordinary glasses and disheveled hair, as if he often ran his hands through it, but never a comb.
“Uncle Georgia,” said Ram.
“Who’s your friend?” asked Uncle Georgia.
“This is Rigg Noxon. He’s been pretending to be a Quechua from Peru, here to consult with a plastic surgeon.”
Georgia leaned in close to study Noxon’s face. “Odd placement of the eyes, and they seem protuberant. I don’t see brow ridges at all. Do those eyes actually work?”
“Yes,” said Noxon. “Since you’re not my uncle, what do I call you?”
“I’m not his uncle, either. I’m Professor Wheaton, to my students. ‘Wheat’ to my colleagues. ‘Georgia’ was a nickname given to me within the family, when I first showed interest in primitive anthropes. After an action-movie archaeologist named Ohio Jackson or something. As if archaeologists had anything to do with anthropes.”
“So you’re from Georgia?” asked Noxon.
“I’m from Iowa,” said Wheaton. “I think my cousins enjoyed calling me Georgia. It was a slur on my masculinity. Naturally, to overcompensate, I went into erectology.”
Ram chuckled, and explained to Noxon. “Nothing to do with urology. Uncle Georgia studies Homo erectus.”
“The first true humans,” said Wheaton. “Or so I have tried to prove. They had complete mastery of fire. They evolved the articulate hand, the running foot. They had also mastered weaving and wore clothing, though not for the purposes we use it for now. And agriculture—not just cultivation—at least two hundred thousand years before anybody else believes it started, and maybe a million. Just because Western civilization used cereal grains doesn’t mean that’s how agriculture began. It was yams, young man! Yams and taro root, legumes and berries. Nothing that would show up in the fossil record, but the signs are in the teeth! Small ones. Can’t evolve small teeth unless you’re eating soft food!”
“We’re still standing on the porch,” said Ram Odin.
“Is that my fault? Is the door locked? Don’t your feet work? Come in, uninvited visitors. I was just thinking of peeing when the doorbell rang, and I’m of that age when it d
oesn’t pay to ignore nature’s call.” Wheaton disappeared inside the house. Deborah ushered Noxon and Ram into what might have been a library. It was lined with books, books and journals were stacked everywhere, and on top of most stacks were fossils inside acrylic boxes.
“It feels like home,” said Ram Odin.
“It looks like the basement of an ill-run museum,” said Deborah, “but I think that’s what you meant.”