Free Fireball by John Christopher Page B

Quintus Cornelius?” Brad nodded. “Do you think that was wise?”
    â€œI’m not quite sure yet. It happened. He was interested in my jeans. He hadn’t seen cloth like that before. And then there was the zipper; that really got to him. He’s bright for an old guy, and open-minded for a Roman. He questioned me: What land did I come from where they did such ingeniousmetalworking? I could have tried lying, I suppose, and said it was from the same land where Pliny said men carried their heads underneath their arms, but I didn’t think he’d buy that. And he’d done a lot for me already, so I wanted to be honest with him. Anyway, I decided to go for broke and showed him my watch—I’d managed to hide it in my jeans pocket before the others could spot it.”
    The watch, which had been a considerable source of envy to Simon, was a calendar quartz alarm chronometer. He tried to imagine the impact it would have on someone accustomed to telling time by sundials and water clocks. He asked: “What did he make of it?”
    â€œHe thought it was magic. It took him a long time to understand what it was meant to do—Arabic numerals never got invented in this world, so the readout didn’t mean anything in itself, but the flashing digits fascinated him, especially when I demonstrated all the functions. The alarm in particular. One thing he knew for sure was that it hadn’t come from any place in either the Roman or the Chinese empires, and it seemed even less likely that it had been made by barbarians. At that time I thought, likeyou, that we’d gone back into the past. Quintus Cornelius was ready to accept that I’d come from some distant future, as the least unreasonable of all the possible absurdities.
    â€œThen, as we went on talking, the discrepancies started to crop up. Like dating. They date the way the Romans did before Christianity— A.U.C. not A.D. Ab urbe condita —from the founding of the city. And I discovered this Rome had been founded two and a half thousand years ago. And that Britain had been a Roman province for nearly two thousand years, not a couple of hundred. He got to it almost as soon as I did. Once you’ve accepted that someone has come from the future, I guess it’s not too difficult switching that to a parallel world. As I say, he’s open-minded for a Roman. It’s probably to do with being a Christian. They’re tolerated, but not really part of things.”
    Simon had been trying to come to grips with the situation. He said, feeling his way: “The Roman Empire never fell in this world. So . . .”
    His words trailed off. Brad said: “So a whole lot of things. No Mohammed, for instance; or if there was one, he lived and died obscure. No Islamanyway. And it was probably out of Islam that the ideas came that led to the Renaissance and later to science and engineering. This world has scarcely changed in two thousand years. Some minor improvements—in glassmaking, for instance—but nothing fundamental.”
    â€œI still don’t see how that could happen.”
    â€œAncient Egypt lasted for thousands of years with almost nothing changing. So did China. We take rapid change for granted, but really it’s pretty unusual. Static civilizations are probably more natural. And Julian—the Julian who survived—did a sound job in stabilizing his world. He completely reorganized both the army and the empire. Except for Jews and Christians, every citizen has to do military service. That turned the army back into a citizen army and got rid of the mercenaries. And he laid down a rule that no emperor could be succeeded by an emperor from the same province, though they always rule from Rome. On top of that he defused the Christian problem. That was probably the most important thing he did do.”
    â€œHow do you mean—defused?”
    â€œThe basic problem was that the Christians