“Or longer.”
“And you wouldn’t hear back from them for another hundred years after that.”
He shrugs. “The speed of light is the speed of light.”
At the end of his standard eight hundredth tour of duty, which fell in the thirteenth century, he was to have been replaced by a young agent, and return to Vrizhongil for a headquarters job for another five hundred years before retiring. But no mother ship arrived in 1229. No mother ship ever showed up again. He’s been waiting ever since. And he never retired. The chronicle, he tells her, “is rather absurdly up to date.”
He explains that his people possess, by human standards, an uncanny ability to learn languages, so that during his biannual field expeditions, the northern hemisphere in December and the southern in June, he could move among people incognito. When he was threatened with harm or capture, he protected himself with a weapon, a long wand, which temporarily paralyzed every creature (“except, oddly, marsupials”) within 200 feet. He used the weapon, according to his records, 373 times in 1,442 years.
Quite often, however, when his aircraft hovered for long periods at very low altitudes, people saw it and became alarmed. To demonstrate his peaceful intentions, he would give away tokens, beads and bits of gold.
“The way that poll takers,” he says, a little defensively, “offer small cash payments in exchange for participating in a survey. It was one of our standard protocols.”
“And the station was established in the Arctic,” she asks, “for secrecy’s sake?”
He nods. “Yes, and for my personal comfort as well. Vrizhongil is a cold planet. During these hellish months,” he says, nodding toward the windows, “I give thanks every day for the invention of air-conditioning.” Outside it was almost ninety degrees, but Nancy had put on his sweater. “The region of my birth is considered warm, and temperatures there are the equivalent of Fairbanks. Or were, anyway.”
“But so—why are you here now, in Chicago? Why aren’t you in the Arctic?”
“Because it’s my kind of town?”
She doesn’t get the joke.
“An accident,” he says. He was wrapping up one of his annual northern field surveys, having just revisited and filmed the large Indian city of Cahokia, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. Flying north, back toward the station, he suddenly lost power, and crash-landed in Lake Michigan. He managed to get gold, as well as the paralyzer, video equipment, and portable beacon—he touched the blinking device on the table—into the emergency raft. His aircraft sank.
“Our orders were unequivocal—remain as close as possible to one’s last position and wait for…rescue. Besides, back then I had no means of returning to the Arctic. So I built a home in the woods and coexisted with the natives. Every so often I brandished the paralyzer to reestablish my bona fides.” He smiles. “And I’m afraid I never disabused them of their ‘White God from the Heavens’ idea.”
“But what about, you know, the Europeans, the settlers?”
“They came later. Much later.” He pauses, possibly for dramatic effect. “Three hundred and fifty-six years later. I crashed in February 1317. When the French arrived, fortunately, they ignored the stories the Indians told about me. I was just another supernatural character in one of the savages’ supernatural myths. Fiction.”
“So for food, you hunted and gathered?”
“I don’t eat. As such. My body absorbs nutrients from the air.” This tangent makes him dread that she will ask to use his bathroom. He has no toilet paper.
He tells her about moving into Chicago not long after it was founded, about buying what he needed with pieces of his gold, about working at odd jobs in order to conserve the gold, about losing his video camera and paralyzer in the great fire of 1871, about the difficulty of employment in this era of income taxes and Social Security and government IDs. He has, of course, never sought medical care from a physician, and has kept changing residences so that neighbors don’t get too curious about why he doesn’t seem to age, or die. This is his fourteenth apartment. But except for the years he spent up in Winnetka, from the 1940s through the 1960s, in order to experience suburban life firsthand—“Once an anthropologist, always an anthropologist”—he has lived in Chicago since 1837.
They had talked for more than three hours, and Nicholas had awoken three hours before she arrived. He’s getting drowsy.
“You’ve told me almost nothing about your planet,” she says. “Your people, your history. We have so much to talk about. So much.”
“We do indeed. But if you don’t mind, perhaps we can finish for the day and continue our conversation tomorrow?”
“Oh, yes, of course, yes, absolutely.” But what if he runs away? What if he dies overnight? Then she reassures herself. She had today’s recordings. She’d taken pictures of him. She’d photographed the station, and knows its location exactly. Everything would be okay. She reaches over and touches his shoulder.
“Thank you. This is so extraordinary, I can’t…words really don’t…thank you.”
“I’m pleased, too. Extraordinarily pleased that it was you who made the discovery. I’m very, very lucky.”
“You’re lucky? Well, this is—I mean, I’ve won the lottery to end all lotteries, right? It’s Christmas in July!”
He chuckles, and the chuckle becomes, as he sits back, a full-throttle guffaw.
She’s horrified. Is he about to tell her that this has all been a practical joke, a hoax? That he’s an actor in some incredibly elaborate reality show?
“I’m sorry,” he says finally, still chuckling. “My fatigue has ruined my manners. I’m so sorry.”
“What?”
“There’s another part of the story you need to know. I was going to save it for tomorrow. But now that I’ve upset you, that won’t do.”
He begins by describing his aircraft in more detail than he had before: small, just twenty-six feet long, a large transparent canopy, landing rails instead of wheels, and a thicket of navigational probes extending from the front of the fuselage.
“When the people of the north, the Nordics and the Lapps and the rest, saw me flying, cruising at low altitudes through their midwinter skies nine hundred years ago, eleven hundred years ago, what do you suppose they thought they were seeing?”