Lest Darkness Fall (2 page)

            It was odd. But if the man
wanted to wear such a getup, it was none of Padway's business.

            The gloom was brightening a
little. Now Padway's eyes began to dance from person to person. They were all
wearing tunics. Some had come under the portico to get out of the rain. These
also wore tunics, sometimes with poncho-like cloaks over them.

            A few of them stared at
Padway without much curiosity. He and they were still staring when the shower
let up a few minutes later. Padway knew fear.

            The tunics alone would not
have frightened him. A single incongruous fact might have a rational if
recondite explanation. But everywhere he looked more of these facts crowded in
on him. He could not concisely notice them all at once.

            The concrete sidewalk had
been replaced by slabs of slate.

            There
were
still
buildings around the Piazza, but they were not the same buildings. Over the
lower ones Padway could see that the Senate House and the Ministry of
Communications — both fairly conspicuous objects — were missing. The sounds
were different. The honk of taxi horns was absent. There were no taxis to honk.
Instead, two oxcarts creaked slowly and shrilly down the Via della Minerva.

            Padway sniffed. The
garlic-and-gasoline aroma of modern Rome had been replaced by a
barnyard-and-backhouse symphony wherein the smell of horse was the strongest
and also the most mentionable motif. Another ingredient was incense, wafting
from the door of the Pantheon.

            The sun came out. Padway
stepped out into it. Yes, the portico still bore the inscription crediting the
construction of the building to M. Agrippa.

            Glancing around to see that
he was not watched, Padway stepped up to one of the pillars and slammed his
fist into it. It hurt.

            "Hell," said
Padway, looking at his bruised knuckles.

            He thought, I'm not asleep.
All this is too solid and consistent for a dream. There's nothing fantastic
about the early afternoon sunshine and the beggars around the Piazza.

            But if he was not asleep,
what? He might be crazy ... But that was a hypothesis difficult to build a
sensible course of action on.

            There was Tancredi's theory
about slipping back in time. Had he slipped back, or had something happened to
him to make him imagine he had? The time-travel idea did not appeal to Padway.
It sounded metaphysical, and he was a hardened empiricist.

            There was the possibility of
amnesia. Suppose that flash of lightning had actually hit him and suppressed
his memory up to that time; then suppose something had happened to jar it loose
again ... He would have a gap in his memory between the first lightning flash
and his arrival in this archaistic copy of old Rome. All sorts of things might
have happened in the meantime. He might have blundered into a movie set.
Mussolini, having long secretly believed himself a reincarnation of Julius
Caesar, might have decided to make his people adopt classical Roman costume.

            It was an attractive theory.
But the fact that he was wearing exactly the same clothes, and had the same
things in his pockets as before the flash, exploded it.

            He listened to the chatter
of a couple of the loafers. Padway spoke fair, if pedantic, Italian. He could
not quite get the substance of these men's talk. In the rush of syllables he
would often catch a familiar sound-group, but never enough at one time. Their
speech had the tantalizing pseudo-familiarity of Plattdeutsch to an
English-speaking person.

            He thought of Latin. At once
the loafers' speech became more familiar. They were not speaking Classical
Latin. But Padway found that if he took one of their sentences and matched it
first against Italian and then against Latin, he could understand most of it.

            He decided that they were
speaking a late form of Vulgar Latin, rather more than halfway from the
language of Cicero to that of Dante. He had never even tried to speak this
hybrid. But by dredging his memory for his knowledge of sound changes, he could
make a stab at it:
Omnia Gallia e devisa en parte trei, quaro una encolont
Belge, alia ...

            The two loafers had observed
his eavesdropping. They frowned, lowered their voices, and moved off.

            No, the hypothesis of
delirium might be a tough one, but it offered fewer difficulties than that of
the time-slip.

            If he was imaging things,
was he really standing in front of the Pantheon and imaging that the people
were dressed and speaking in the manner of the period 300-900 A.D.? Or was he
lying in a hospital bed recovering from near-electrocution and imaging he was
in front of the Pantheon? In the former case he ought to find a policeman and
have himself taken to a hospital. In the latter this would be waste motion. For
safety's sake he had better assume the former.

            No doubt one of these people
was really a policeman complete with shiny hat. What did he mean
"really"? Let Bertrand Russell and Alfred Korzybski worry about that.
How to find ...

            A beggar had been whining at
him for a couple of minutes. Padway gave such a perfect impression of deafness
that the ragged little hunchback moved off. Now another man was speaking to
him. On his left palm the man held a string of beads with a cross, all in a
heap. Between his right thumb and forefinger he held the clasp of the string.
He raised his right hand until the whole string hung from it, then lowered it
back onto his left palm, then raised it again, talking all the while.

            Whenever and however all
this was, that gesture assured Padway that he was still in Italy.

            Padway asked in Italian:
"Could you tell me where I could find a policeman?"

            The man stopped his sales
talk, shrugged, and replied,
"Non compr' endo."

            "Hey!" said
Padway. The man paused. With great concentration Padway translated his request
into what he hoped was Vulgar Latin.

            The man thought, and said he
didn't know. Padway started to turn elsewhere. But the seller of beads called
to another hawker: "
Marco!
The gentleman wants to find a police
agent."

            "The gentleman is
brave. He is also crazy," replied Marco.

            The bead-seller laughed. So
did several people. Padway grinned a little; the people were human if not very
helpful. He said: "Please, I — really — want — to — know."

            The second hawker, who had a
tray full of brass knick-knacks tied around his neck, shrugged. He rattled off
a paragraph that Padway could not follow.

            Padway slowly asked the
bead-seller: "What did he say?"

            "He said he didn't
know," replied the bead-seller. "I don't know either."

            Padway started to walk off.
The bead-seller called after him: "Mister."

            "Yes?"

            "Did you mean an agent
of the municipal prefect?"

            "Yes."

            "Marco, where can the
gentleman find an agent of the municipal prefect?"

            "I don't know,"
said Marco.

            The bead-seller shrugged.
"Sorry, I don't know either."

            If this were
twentieth-century Rome, there would be no difficulty about finding a cop. And
not even Benny the Moose could make a whole city change its language. So he
must be in (a) a movie set, (b) ancient Rome (the Tancredi hypothesis), or (c)
a figment of his imagination.

            He started walking. Talking
was too much of a strain.

            It was not long before any
lingering hopes about a movie set were dashed by the discovery that this
alleged ancient city stretched for miles in all directions, and that its street
plan was quite different from that of modern Rome. Padway found his little
pocket map nearly useless.

            The signs on the shops were
in intelligible Classical Latin. The spelling had remained as in Caesar's time,
if the pronunciation had not.

            The streets were narrow, and
for the most part not very crowded. The town had a drowsy, shabby-genteel,
run-down personality, like that of Philadelphia.

            At one relatively busy
intersection Padway watched a man on a horse direct traffic. He would hold up a
hand to stop an oxcart, and beckon a sedan chair across. The man wore a gaudily
striped shirt and leather trousers. He looked like a central or northern
European rather than an Italian.

            Padway leaned against a
wall, listening. A man would say a sentence just too fast for him to catch. It
was like having your hook nibbled but never taken. By terrific concentration,
Padway forced himself to think in Latin. He mixed his cases and numbers, but as
long as he confined himself to simple sentences he did not have too much
trouble with vocabulary.

            A couple of small boys were
watching him. When he looked at them they giggled and raced off.

            It reminded Padway of those
United States Government projects for the restoration of Colonial towns, like
Williamsburg. But this looked like the real thing. No restoration included all
the dirt and disease, the insults and altercations, that Padway had seen and
heard in an hour's walk.

            Only two hypotheses
remained: delirium and time-slip. Delirium now seemed the less probable. He
would act on the assumption that things were in fact what they seemed.

            He couldn't stand there
indefinitely. He'd have to ask questions and get himself oriented. The idea
gave him gooseflesh. He had a phobia about accosting strangers. Twice he opened
his mouth, but his glottis closed up tight with stage fright.

            Come on, Padway, get a grip
on yourself. "I beg your pardon, but could you tell me the date?

            The man addressed, a
mild-looking person with a loaf of bread under his arm, stopped and looked
blank. "
Qui' e'?
What is it?"

            "I said, could you tell
me the date?"

            The man frowned. Was he
going to be nasty? But all he said was, "
Non compr' endo
."
Padway tried again, speaking very slowly. The man repeated that he did not
understand.

            Padway fumbled for his
date-book and pencil. He wrote his request on a page of the date-book, and held
the thing up.

            The man peered at it, moving
his lips. His face cleared. "Oh, you want to know the date?" said he.

            "
Sic
, the
date."

            The man rattled a long
sentence at him. It might as well have been in Trabresh. Padway waved his hands
despairingly, crying, "
Lento
!"

            The man backed up and
started over. "I said I understood you, and I thought it was October 9th,
but I wasn't sure because I couldn't remember whether my mother's wedding
anniversary came three days ago or four."

            "What year?"

            "What
year
?"

            "
Sic
, what
year?"

            "Twelve eighty-eight
Anno
Urbis Conditae
."

            It was Padway's turn to be
puzzled. "Please, what is that in the Christian era?"