"Ask if she"s got a private room somewhere," Gorson said.
Joe tried again in Raquel"s Tenth Century Spanish but the girl only smiled. "Oh h.e.l.l!" he said, "this isn"t really happening." He turned around to rea.s.sure him- self-and faced two more naked girls.
"Holy Neptune," Joe muttered.
The girl recognized a G.o.d"s name: "Roumanu"?" she asked.
Roumanu-Roman!
"No," Joe said. "Non sum Roma.n.u.s."
"Ah." There was polite disappointment in the girl"s tone.
"Are you?"
"Roumanu ego?" She gave a fluting laugh and slipped into some form of b.a.s.t.a.r.d Greek which Joe could follow only vaguely. He sighed and tried to keep his eyes on her face. d.a.m.n women! Maybe he"d stumbled into a Tenth Century nudist colony. When in Rome . . . His eyes strayed back to those firm, upward pointing-
"Where are we?" he asked. "What is this island?"
It sounded like Phryxos and rang no bell with Joe.
"What"s she saying?" Gorson asked.
"I"m trying to find out where we are. Where"s Spain?
Hispania-Iberia. Lusitania?"
She shrugged and those pink tipped things jiggled.
"Where"s Africa?"
Understanding glinted in the blonde"s eyes. She pointed. Joe stared and did a double take. Unless the sun was crazy, this blonde was pointing due south.
"Where"s Rome?" he persisted. She pointed vaguely
west. "Impossible," Joe said. "We"re in the Atlantic."
But a horrible suspicion was growing on him. That warm water-this balmy climate. And what was a vol- canic island doing in this part of the Atlantic? "Quo modo appallatur hoc mare?" he asked-how is this sea named?
"Agaios"
"Aegean!" Joe shook his head. Even without a s.e.xtant he couldn"t be that far off. But another thought struck him. "What year is this?"
The girls stared.
"Are you Christian?"
No reaction.
"Moslem?" Still no reaction.
Joe knew d.a.m.ned well he"d been in the Atlantic last night. The last jump in s.p.a.ce had also been a jump in time. Was this one? How was a history professor to know when people wouldn"t keep track of time? "Who is your G.o.d?" he asked.
The first girl had given up wriggling in the gra.s.s and came around the pool to join the other two. "Aphrodite,"
she said.
"Venus," the other girl corrected. "He speaks Latin."
"It figures," Joe muttered. He pa.s.sed a hand over his eyes and tried again. "What," he asked, "is Caesar"s name?"
"Gaius Octavius."
Joe felt a thrill of recognition. That tied it down to, let"s see ... He took over in 31 B.C. and died in 14 A.D.
But there were too d.a.m.n many Gaii in Roman history.
"Is this Gaius the adopted son of Julius Caesar?" The girls nodded.
"What"re they saying?" Gorson asked.
"Later," Joe said. By one felicitous stroke he had located them within forty-five years-but this, as he recalled, was a turbulent time, even though the Romans
preferred to regard it as the Augustan Peace. Another thought came.
"Augustus?" he asked.
The girls looked blank.
"Is Gaius Octavius called Augustus?"
The girls were unsure.
"Is he young?"
They nodded.
And that tied it down: Gaius Octavius took over in 31 B.C. In 27 he a.s.sumed the t.i.tle Augustus. Joe de- cided to quit while he was ahead.
"Is this a nudist colony?" Gorson asked. "Why aren"t they wearing clothes?"
"Forget to ask," Joe parenthesized. "How many of you are there on this island?"
The girls preferred not to understand. "How many you?" one finally countered.
Joe decided it was his turn to avoid an answer.
Gorson was frantic. "What"re they saying?" he in- sisted.
"Getting information"s like pulling teeth," Joe ex- plained, "but I think-" He was about to say they"d gone back another thousand years, then-he didn"t quite know why-he decided not to.
"How many you?" the girl was insisting.
"Many," Joe said. "Brave men, well armed. Where is your camp? Are you natives?" He was only talking to two girls now. He wondered when and where the others had disappeared. "We were on our way to Rome," one girl explained.
"Where from?"
The name was meaningless to Joe. "Were you going to Rome or being taken there?" Again the girls opted not to understand. "Do you want to go Rome or back home?"
"Rome!" they clamored. "Rome, Rome! No home, Rome!"