“That’s cheering,” he said. “As I’d hoped.” She regarded him closely, for minutes while the aircar whispered through an April sky the color of her eyes. “Your message was never clear as to why you left,” she said.

He looked away, down to the brick and concrete earth, up again to clouds. “It’s hard to explain. Disgust would be the simplest word. I had no close personal ties after my mother died. And I saw freedom being crushed in most of the world, rotted and vulgarized in my own country; I read interviews with allegedly sane leaders, who spoke calmly of incinerating some tens of millions of women and children, if national policy so demanded. What had I to lose?”

She grimaced. “You did wisely, Tom. I won’er why so few others did the same. But then, there were the Atomic Wars, an’ all their aftermath. Not much chance for escape. Nowadays, not much incentive. Who, with access to a time accelerator, ’d want to leave this world?”

He watched her, healthy, serene, and beautiful, and thought: Who, indeed? Of course he hadn’t found any Utopia, but he hadn’t been so naive as to expect that. It was enough to have found hope. He took out another cigarette, offered her one, and was politely refused. “Very few people use tobacco,” she said. “Maybe jus’ ’cause how expensive ’tis. But if you want, ’s your own affair.”

“The supremely civilized art,” he said. “Minding one’s own business.”

She gave him a long, sidewise look. “Could be my business too,” she murmured. “You’re a han’some buddo, Tom.”

The drug didn’t slow down his pulse much.

He steered the conversation toward herself. She told him she was interested in sports and theatricals. Another bit of semantic confusion straightened itself out after he realized that “amateur performances” would have been a redundant phrase. All art nowadays was amateur, in the sense of being done for love (and, admittedly, social prestige) by people who had no need to do it for money. The mass-produced entertainment of Barlow’s birth century was long forgotten. He was not displeased to learn that scientific research, as opposed to technology and engineering, was classed among the arts. Amily voiced a few opinions on Shakespeare’s real intent in Hamlet and Lear, which might be banal to her contemporaries but to Barlow were so novel and perceptive that he felt this would prove one of the great artistic eras.

“But I did expect more change,” he said. “More inventions, especially. What I’ve seen looks less than fifty years in advance of my period. No offense,” he hastened to add.

Her expression was puzzled rather than hurt. “Why should there be change? Isn’ this aircar good enough?”

Perhaps these folk were only rationalizing a static technology forced on them by swollen population and dwindled resources. Obviously capitalism such as Barlow’s America had known, with its inherent need to innovate, was extinct. But he didn’t mind. So much so-called progress had been sheer hokum anyhow. Let the world take a thousand years to digest the authentic advances of the Industrial Revolution; give the simple graces of living a chance to catch up.