A little later, and despite my best efforts – well, some effort on my part, George still insisted on visiting his, uh, friend.
    The Al-zed Medicenter is big. Besides the main entrance, the multitier complex occupied several ten-squares of the city’s north- northwest district. Between the medicenter, the spaceport, and the ADF headquarters and Drac base, there wasn’t much else. I don’t know. Maybe it was the proximity to the ADF that bothered me, or all the uniforms, or something, but I felt that George was walking into a trap. Raggie! I knew he was walking into trouble.
    “Look,” I said in exasperation. “At least change your clothes so you look normal.”
    “Very well,” he replied.
    That was too easy, I thought to myself. George, in the all of four hours I’d known him, had never given in to anything I suggested. I looked at him and scratched my left ear. He looked at me with expectation.
    “What?” I asked.
    “You suggested a change of clothes.” He spread his hands. “Do you have any suggestions for dress? Remember, I’m new to this time.”
    “Oh. Yeah. New...” I swallowed. I’d forgotten. How? Don’t ask me. I just did, that’s all. “Uh,” I said, “I’ll get you some of my call, uh, clothes.” My mind was going. It had to be.
    A few moments later, George looked like any other Drac. Except for those teeth. Finally, I asked. “What’s with the teeth?”
    “You haven’t seen false teeth?” He reached in his mouth and... pulled them out!
    I stared, not believing.
    “Here,” he said, handing them to me. His mouth looked funny. The teeth, if you could call them that, looked even funnier. They were painted... white. And were made out of wood!
    I found someplace to sit down and sat. Then I noticed the inside of the teeth. Marks – like ... I looked at him and said, “Grin at me.”
    He smiled – his lips pulled back and exposed raw gums. It was horrible. But something caught my attention. That same something had marked the inside of the wooden teeth.
    “Did you know,” I asked, “that your teeth are growing?”
    “Yes. It was irritating for a while. Like a newborn babe.” He smiled broadly. “An after effect of the fountain’s elixir.”
    I looked back at the teeth I held.

    Some time must have passed, because George was acting impatient. I glanced up at him and stood. No need to ask if he was ready. He was. I handed back his teeth, which he promptly slipped into his mouth. I shuddered involuntarily. How could anything be so, so awful?
    At the street level, I activated a navlog and studied the possibilities. Getting around Al-Zed was easy, if you knew how to use the system. George didn’t. That was obvious. He was staring up at the buildings.
    “How tall are these?” he asked.
    I looked at him and shrugged. I don’t know how tall the buildings are. I don’t care. Nobody cares, except for the flyers... And as long as the buildings are below them, they don’t care, either.
    “I don’t know,” I told him. I’d found what I wanted. “Come on,” I told him, and led the way to the north-bound slips. We’d transfer at the bell tower. Well, where there used to be a bell-tower. Then on up to the northwest sector of Al-zed. I didn’t look forward to the trip. Too many uniforms.
    George seemed to enjoy himself, though. He watched the buildings flow past, and marveled at how the slips worked, slowly at first, then faster as you walked them outward to the fastest, with its moving wall of projected mountains, forests, and places no one believed ever existed.
    It fascinated me, but bored George. When I pointed out a mountain, he shrugged, and turned back toward the slower slips and the city. I didn’t understand him at all.
    I timed the stop perfectly. George gasped at the size of the building in front of him. “That?” he asked.
    I nodded. The clouds were a bit low today, but they didn’t hide the top of the medicenter. The other building – the Alliance headquarters – now that was a tall building. I touched his arm to get his attention and pointed out the headquarters building. Each of the tall towers disappeared into the clouds. What he didn’t know is that the central tower ran up another two hundred stories over the surrounding towers. Not the tallest in Al-zed, but one of them.
    “George,” I said. He was practically tipping over, looking as far up as the clouds would let him. He ignored me, mouth open.
    “George,” I said a second time. I took his arm and led toward the massive entrance to the medicenter. “Time to go, George. You can gawk later.”
    “It has to be the Tower of Babel,” he said in awe. “Or five of them,” he said in a lower voice.
    “Uh, right.”
    The doors gave him problems, too. He didn’t realize that each set of doors took us through decontamination chambers. He kept trying to open the next set of doors. “Just be patient, George,” I said. “Only one more set to go.”
    The decon was silent, but effective. By the time we got into the lobby, George’s nose was twitching. He stopped and looked back at the process. By the time he turned back, I was at the infoterm. “Locate Ben Franklin,” I told it.
    “TOWER FIVE, FLOOR SIXTY-NINE, ROOM ONE NINE TWO,” came the response.
    “Where?” George asked.
    “Come on,” I said. I had grabbed a pair of ident tabs, and they would get us where we wanted to go. I led him to the shaft and showed him how to put ident tab next to the sensor.
    The shaft’s programming took us to the right tower and floor. And somewhat close to the room. We still had to walk a ways.
    “Those are remarkable. How can we float upward and sideways and arrive where we are intended?”
    “It’s all in the gravity, George. We can control relative gravity. They do it on our ships and we do it here, in Al-zed.”
    “Remarkable.”
    “Here’s the room,” I said. There was a moniterm in the wall. It showed a relatively young man with a high forehead. A bit on the heavy side, maybe stocky would be a good way of describing it. I pointed to the image. “Is that him?”
    George came over and looked at the image. “He did it!” he said quietly.
    “Did what?” I asked.
    “He took the elixir, too,” he said matter-of-factly. “We thought he died.” He turned to me, very somber. “He said that might be the result – leaving our bodies behind.” He turned back and looked at the moniterm. Then, before I could stop him, George was opening the door. “Ben!” he said as he burst into the room. The door slid shut behind him, leaving me outside.
    A couple of orderlies ran up. “Did someone open that door?” the first asked.
    I nodded and pointed at the moniterm. The two were hugging and kissing each other. Strangest damned thing I ever saw.
One of the orderlies backed away from the term, his face ashen white. Grown men didn’t kiss. Not at all in this day and age. Maybe in times past, they had odd, uh, practices, but not since the riots and the reforms.
    Whatever George was, I was glad he wasn’t that way with me. And whatever his claim might have been, even to the phony, uh, currency, that scene just finished his freedom.
    “You know him?” the other orderly asked in a grave voice.
    I shook my head. “No,” I said, maybe a little too hurriedly.
    The orderly gave me a funny look. “Not like that, certainly.”
    “His name?”
    “He called himself George Washington.”
    “Um. Why don’t you come with me, Mister...”
    “Ankhor, Sondath Ankhor.”
    “Ah. Drac?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And him?”
    “He says he’s from somewhere called dirt...”
    A medico had come up.
    “Another one, Doctor,” the orderly said.
    “This...?” he asked nodding toward me.
    The orderly pointed toward the image on the wall. “In there. They were, uh, intimate.”
    “Oh? And this one?”
    “He didn’t go in. Uh, doc?”
    “Yes?”
    “I don’t think he’s like them. He looked pretty shocked at what we saw.”
    I was in a daze. The conversation didn’t mean much, or at least what else they said didn’t stay with me for long. Not that it got me into trouble, but seeing two grown men kissing... ugh!
    After about an hour, the same medico that met us in the hall came in and sat down.
    “You’ve an interesting story, Mister Ankhor. Are you sure you don’t know who this Drac is?”
    I shook my head. “He said that he was a President or something like that. He even showed me this piece of paper that had his picture on it...”
    “Yes,” the medico said, interrupting. “You’ve told me that before.”
    “Doc.” I was concerned.
    “What?”
    “Do you know who he is?”
    “To be honest? Off the record?”
    I nodded, twice.
    “He’s as deluded as the person in the room. They claim to know each other but are a real puzzle. If they were Dracs, we’d ship them off to Lake Charles and be done with it.”
    “I thought...”
    “I did. But that’s officially.”
    “Then... if he isn’t Drac, then do you suppose that he’s...”
    “... telling the truth?” The medico shrugged. “The psyches say that this Ben Franklin isn’t lying.”
    I sat back on the divan. “Are they?”
    “I’ll tell you what they aren’t,” the medico said. “They aren’t any member of any Alliance Planet that we know of, if that helps.”
    “But they look like Dracs.”
    He nodded and stood. “If you hadn’t been involved, you wouldn’t be here, do you know that?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “He has no ident. We can’t match him or his psyche.”
    I stared at the medico. He smiled. I didn’t like the look of that.
    “Wait a minute,” I said.
    “He’s wearing your clothes.”
    I closed my eyes. Then I opened them. “What he was wearing wasn’t anything I’d wear.”
    A frown crossed the medico’s face. “Describe his clothes,” he ordered.
    I looked at him. It was an order.
    “No,” the medico said, “wait until I get someone else in here.”
    He left the room. I stood, wondering what was going on.
    Time drug on and on, until a uniform walked in... two of them. They were military and they wanted to know a lot!
Four hours later, I’d been through it all. I hate sessions like that. They had more questions than I had answers. When they left, the same medico was back and looking lost. I stared at him.
    “Hey,” he said. “All I did was to report that we had another one and someone that might (he emphasized the word, might) know them.”
    I was disgusted. Not only had I been asked a bunch of questions for which I had no answers for, but the medico told me they had given him the same treatment. He had fewer answers than I had. “Well, I didn’t know him.”
    He smiled. “That much was apparent. Sorry I got you involved.”
    A lot of good that did me. “Well, what next?” I asked.
    “Tests and more questions.”
    “From us?”
    He shook his head. “Probably not. From them.”
    That made sense. Ask them. Why didn’t I think of that? It would be nice if we knew what was going on. I looked at the medico. He had a thoughtful look on his face. “You’ve got an idea?” I asked.
    “We’re involved,” he said.
    “And?”
    “We’ve got a right to what they find out.”
    “You sure?”
    “I know what I’m talking about. This George person is your ward.”
    “What?”
    “What do you think I was talking about earlier?”
    “No...” I couldn’t believe it. My ward. “What about the state?”
    “Hah! They don’t want him. Not unless they take him to Lake Charles.”
    “For?”
    “Uh-huh. Deviant behavior. We’ve got it on both of them.”
    “If they were Dracs,” I reminded him.
    His face fell.
    “Doc,” I said. He looked at me. “What do you know about this elixir or whatever George was babbling about...”
    The medico went to the desk. “Let me see,” he said as he started working at a term of some sort. I went around so that I could see what he was doing. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Mostly numbers of some sort.
    “Ben Franklin’s psyche profile,” he explained.
    I went back to the divan and sat down.
    “Don’t believe this stuff,” he said. “A really smart person knows how to manipulate the results and Franklin looks like he understood what was going on... not at first, but later. He started spouting homilies at some of the questions.”
    I was tired. “The elixir, Doc. What does it say about the elixir?”
    “Did you know he had a sample with him?”
    I sat up, suddenly awake. “Huh? A sample? Did you test it?”
    “Every way to Qarlsdorth.”
    “And?”
    “Nothing. We don’t know what it is or how it works.”
    I stared at him.
    “Seriously,” he responded. “Some of the elements look familiar, but they aren’t. At least, not at the molecular level.”
    That was hard to believe. “Did you try non-destructive?”
    “We tried everything, include a radar pulse. Nothing.”
    Something sounded familiar. “Could I be dreaming this?”
    “What? Why?”
    “I write compudrams, Doc. I get involved in my stories. Could I be dreaming?”
    He frowned and smiled cynically. “How could you tell? Do you think I’d tell you? Or at least be beyond suspicion of misleading you?”
    “Well...” He had me stumped. I didn’t know how I could tell the truth. “Maybe I should pinch myself.”
    “It won’t do any good. We know now that people can psychologically imagine pain...”
    I sighed and stared down at my feet. “I hope this is a dream.”
    “I wish it were.” He put his hand on the input pad.
    The screen cleared. Probably an ident system. He instructed the system to do something. I was still confused about how I was involved. Maybe there was a way out. “Uh,” I said.
    “Yes?” he replied as he continued to work with the computer.
    “Aren’t, uh, wards usually younger than their guardians?”
    “Think about what it means, ‘to guard.’”
    I didn’t want to think about that. “I’m no jailer.”
    “Ever hear of ‘protective custody’?”
    I swallowed.
    “Here we are.”
    The name Benjamin Franklin was at the top of the display. Below it was his image, and the word “alien” underneath. “Not Drac,” I said.
    He pointed at a figure. It was 782. “That doesn’t mean much,” I said.
    “I wouldn’t be surprised if your ward was within ten or so of this figure.”
    “What is it?”
    “His age.”
    “But...”
    He turned around. “Think about how we number years. What year is this?”
    “What? This is 424 SE.”
    “What does SE stand for?”
    “Space Era. What’s that got to do with it?”
    “What was before SE?”
    “NW. Why?”
    “What did NW stand for?”
    “New World.”
    “And before that?”
    “RE”
    “Reformation Era.” He explained, “We number our years from significant dates in history. If you combine them, then you might come up with something close to this... whatever date George gave. And, given the nature of things, all the different races in the Alliance, and the parallel nature of our histories...” He let that sit for a while.
    It didn’t do much good. I didn’t know much about the “other” races in the Alliance. All I cared about was the Dracs that liked my stuff. “I write compudrams, Doc. I’m no flippin’ ambassador.”
    “You don’t have to be to know about the Coceedn, the Zurthians, the Cxilleens.”
    “They’re just names to me.”
    “Sad. Well, that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that they have comparable events on all their worlds. What happened during the NW years?”
    “It started with discovery of the southern continents.”
    “Right. And people migrated, and then revolted against the Northern Continents.”
    A shiver ran up my back. “Could he?” I pointed toward the screen.
    “Be the great statesman of Southland? I doubt it. But on Coceedus, or Zurth... Maybe from before the... Naw, history runs too many parallels for that. It has never shown a reversal of events. Just some minor variations...”
    “You’ve lost me. They’ve got to be from somewhere. You should have seen his clothes.”
    “Uhm,” he grunted. “Like these?” The system displayed a multidimensional image of clothing much like George Washington was wearing. I nodded.
    He stood up. “I think we have something to add to this mystery.”
    Before he could go any further, one of the uniforms burst into the room. “Where are they?” he demanded.
    “They?” I replied.
    The medico had sat back down at his term. “Benjamin Franklin and George Washington,” he said. “They’re gone, aren’t they?”
    “What do you know about this?” the uniform demanded.
    “Get your commander. I think I know exactly what happened.”
    “What?” I asked as the uniform left the room.
    “Sit down, and when they come back, I’ll explain. Remember the elixir?”
    “I nodded.”
    “A key, perhaps, to time travel. But even more important, to immortality.”
    “That’s stupid.”
    He raised his eyebrows. “Is it? Think about it. Then listen to my theory.”

    I thought about it, all right. A lot, and listened very carefully to what the medico had to say. It was hard to believe, but made some sense. Of course, the uniforms didn’t believe him. And I kept my mouth shut.
    For many, many years, I kept my mouth shut about what the medico said. It made me rich, nonetheless. Rich because of the stories that kept cropping up in my head.
    But I never told them the story the way George told it. Not until last year. By then, old Ben Franklin and George Washington were long forgotten. But I couldn’t forget them. It wasn’t a dream. It was real. Somehow, that old piece of paper? The one that had George’s image on it? It survived. I still had it. And it got me to thinking and writing, and so I wrote one of the most popular compudrams of all time. It has made me fabulously wealthy and has been hailed as the pinnacle of my long career. The story of George and Ben, as I imagined them, plotting to escape death.
    You see, that’s my problem, too. I’ve already lived as long as possible for a Drac. I’d seen a lot and George and Ben were just part of it. More mysteries than anyone wanted to accept. Raggie, we thought that as we knew more, we’d have fewer mysteries. All we got was more of them. Like the weird story of a place between, where life could exist, but not as we know it. And this paper, this dollar bill. If George was from a couple of centuries earlier, how’d he get the dollar bill? And why’d he think he had to kill some president? We don’t even have a president. But I’m rambling. Something that goes along with age, I guess.
    Besides the bill with Washington’s image, and his clothes, there was something else. A vial of liquid that he left me, something I didn’t realize at the time. He said it only worked if you were near death. That was me. My life was ending. But this vial. What if I drank some? He said only a drop. Only one drop.
    Well, if this doesn’t work, I’ll erase this record, and forget the whole raggin’ thing.