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He drifted down into the courtyard of a shadowed sandstone ruin.
It had once been a temple with Corinthian columns. Now the roof had caved in
and half the columns sprawled, cracked and scavenged.
Two men sat on the broken flagstones of the square, talking.
Markham landed with a mild bounce. The land was rich and verdant. Grapes hung
in bunches bigger than a man's head. From orderly rows of stakes grew plots of
tomatoes, of ripe wheat, of odd globular fruit. Men and women worked the
fields. Some strolled, hand in hand.
If this was Hell, he wouldn't mind.
The two men were old, heavy-browned. One wore a sweater, shorts, sandals. The
second wore nothing and was quite hairy.
Markham walked over to them, easing the kinks out of his knotted muscles. "I
wonder if -"
The sweatered man looked up. "Oh, it's you," he said in heavily accented
English. Markham couldn't spot the accent but the man was swarthy,
full-lipped. Mediterranean, almost Asiatic.
"W-what?"
"We heard you were coming."
The nude man nodded. Markham felt a shock as the shaggy head lifted and wise
old eyes regarded him. "I heard you ver bringing my friend Russell," Einstein
said with a thick German accent.
"You? Here?"
"I haff been waiting for my friend a long time."
"But you were a saint! How could you end up in Hell, when -"
Einstein smiled broadly, eyes crinkling. "Do not bother with questions we
cannot attack."
"Yes," the clothed man said solemnly, "we have learned that here."
"Where is 'here'?" Markham demanded.
"We are in a quiet zone," Einstein said.
"A Gap?"
"If you vish." Einstein shrugged away matters of definition.
"We are beneath the Rude Lands, where you were," the other man said.
Markham felt a sudden flush of joy rush over him. "Then I've ... I've
escaped?"
"From Hell? No," the swarthy man said slowly. "And how long you or any of us
will remain here, no one knows."
"Is ... God here?"
Einstein chuckled. "Nein, but every one thinks that when they first come here.
I haff not seen the gentleman."
His mind aswirl with speculations, Markham turned to the other man. "Who...
are you?"
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"Thales of Miletus," The man held out his hand, but flat palm up, not in the
traditional handshake. Markham pressed his palm into that of Thales,
remembering that the handshake formality he knew was a Roman custom. Thales
had died centuries before the rise of Athens, much less Rome.
Markham tried to recall his undergraduate smattering of Greek history. Thales
had introduced abstract reasoning into science, devised the method of
deductive reasoning, and claimed that everything was in essence made of water,
the one substance he knew had both solid, liquid and vapor forms. The
Athenians had regarded him as the greatest of the early philosophers.
Markham sat down unsteadily on the chipped flagstones. One gave him a hard
jab, as if this world were reminding him of its persistent, gritty, painful
reality.
"You ... were both mathematical reasoners," Markham muttered, staring into the
two faces that beamed at him. "I suppose I am, too, though I'm really a fly on
the wall compared to you..."He smiled wanly. "Have I come to some sort of
refuge?"
Thales's mouth twisted in disapproval. "You dismiss me as mere numerologist?"
"Well, no -"
"I remind you that in the city of Miletus I once humiliated the so-called
'practical' men by cornering the market in olive presses. When the crop came
good - as I had calculated, a half year before - I charged them, great and
often. I laughed muchly while they scowled, and thus made my fortune. No mere
abstract reasoner, I."
"I'm sorry, sir. I didn't mean ..." His voice trailed off. It had been
millenia since Thales died.
"You can remember that far back?"
"Of course. Oh, I spy your intent. In the Rude Lands memory rubs away on the
stones of agony."
Einstein said, "Here, not."
Markham said eagerly, "In all that time, have you found out what's going on
here?"
Thales blinked. "Why, no. It is barely possible to learn this fool tongue."
"English?"
"Yea. It is ripe with tangle and contort."
"But you've had -"
"A year, no more."
Markham gaped. Einstein said, "Ja, and I haff been heir perhaps a few months."
"That's -"
"Vee know vye you are disturbed," Einstein said. "Vee are in a pocket, a
leftover is maybe. A drain which collects junk, I denk." Einstein chuckled
agreeably.
Somehow Markham had never thought of Einstein as a stooped little man with a
broad, comic accent. Yet here he was, no icon, but a cheery figure brimming
with life. Markham found he was blinking back tears. To come to this, a green
and warm paradise, in the company of the greatest minds in history...
Thales said stubbornly, "I cannot ponder this point of singular points,
Einstein, when you persist in saying that there are no such things as points."
Einstein shook his shaggy head. "Let us go back to time, eh? You here, me
here, this new Junge Markham - proves that gedanken experiment is right. All
time arrows here can go forward or back. Only solution to field equations, I
say, is a singularity "n time. Not space!"
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