Free Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt Page A

first night, at the show, of his interest. But ultimately that would have required him to admit his lack of success with her. Couldn’t let that happen. No way.
    He’d known Adrian Shelborne all his life. They’d gone to the same schools, hung out together, even been in Scouts together. Once, they’d chased the same girl. She’d eventually run off with one of the male cheer-leaders, embarrassing them both. Short of combat, nothing can bond males like being dumped by the same young woman.
    Shel’s father had money, and prestige, and had helped Shel get to Princeton. Dave had gone to Temple, a local school that his family could afford. But he’d done well, discovered a facility for languages, and learned Greek so he could read Homer in the original. Ho phylos esten allos autos. A friend is a second self. He’d gone on to master Latin.
    There was something majestic in the classical tongues, a sense of dignity and power that, somehow, didn’t surface in English. Maybe it was simply a matter of too much familiarity. Whatever it was, he eventually found himself immersed in Hellenic and Roman culture, acquired French and Spanish along the way, and was now in the process of learning Italian. Two years earlier, he’d published Speaking in Tongues , a treatise on the development of language and its connection to social mores.
    Shel had always been a wild type, a guy who’d been everywhere, who had pictures of himself standing in front of the Vatican, riding a camel around a pyramid, standing on a rope bridge in Turkestan. He’d once played a guitar with the Popinjays in Dallas, and had apparently fit right in. How could Dave, whose folks thought hanging out in the Poconos was a big deal, keep up with that?
    Nevertheless, they’d remained close friends over the years. Despite his advantages, Shel was a solid guy. No pretense. No illusions about self-importance. And the last person who was likely to suffer a blackout and wake up two hundred miles away. That business Wednesday had sent chills through him and left him with a sense that reality was coming undone. It was like an experience he’d had when he was about ten. His folks had taken him to see a magician perform at the Walnut. The guy had made basketballs flo at through the air, put a woman into a cabinet and taken the cabinet apart and she wasn’t there anymore. They’d put chains around the magician, put him inside a narrow box, and hung the box from the overhead, so there was no way he could have gotten out of it without being seen, and when they lowered the box and opened it, he was gone, and in his place was the woman who’d disappeared from the cabinet.
    It was the night in which Dave came to believe in magic. To conclude that anything could happen, that there were no rules. No boundaries. Wednesday had felt like that, too. The bewildered look in Shel’s eyes, the way he’d sat slumped in the car on the road back from western Pennsylvania, the way his voice shook when he tried to explain what had happened and discovered he had no idea what had happened.
    Sometimes it was just magic.
    Then the phone call: Something had happened again. Shel hadn’t admitted it, but it was in his voice. The guy was scared.
     
     
    SO Dave passed on Helen and the Serendip, and was dutifully waiting when Shel pulled up outside a little before nine. It was raining, one of those steady, bleak October drizzles. “What’s wrong?” Dave asked.
    “It’s hard to explain.” Shel was carrying a computer bag. He dropped the bag on the floor, took off his jacket, and fell into a chair. “Dave,” he said, “I know what happened to my father.”
    The room grew still.
    “Is he okay?”
    “No. I don’t think so.” The weather rattled the windows. “I also know what happened Wednesday.”
    Dave sat down on the sofa opposite him. “What happened?”
    “Okay, what I have to show you is off-the-wall stuff. I mean seriously off the wall. But before I say any more, I want you to