What isn't an offense here? Jeremy wondered. “I'm not trying to stir up anything,” he said. “I asked a reasonable question, and you didn't give me an answer. Or maybe you did.”

“You may be as clever as you please. You may quibble with words however you please. The official report is still due in two days. Remember that. Obey the law.” Iulio Balbo's bow was a small masterpiece of sarcasm. He stalked away like a cat with ruffled fur.

Muttering, Jeremy closed the door. He was the sort who usually put schoolwork off till the last minute. Without a deadline, he couldn't get interested in what he was supposed to do. Well, he had a deadline now. This was work of a different kind from what he got in school. There, he had to show off how much he knew. Here, he would have to disguise most of what he knew.

He sat down with pen and ink and paper and got to work. He set out to make the report as confusing as he could. To do that, he started by writing it in classical Latin, not neoLatin. The old language was made for bending back on itself until someone reading it wasn't quite sure exactly what it said. Maybe that hadn't been true when classical Latin was the Roman Empire's usual spoken language. Jeremy wouldn't even have bet on that. Now, though, one of the things officials here used it for was confusing one another. Jeremy intended to use it the same way.

He tried to make his answers to the questions the locals had asked him contradict one another. He had to be careful with that. If he was too obvious about it, he would get himself in trouble. But if he made his classical Latin fancy enough, nothing was obvious.

As soon as he figured that out, the official report stopped being a nuisance. It stopped being something he had to do. It turned into something that was fun to do. When he'd finished the first few sections, he showed Amanda what he'd written. “What do you think?” he asked.

She started working her way through it. She hadn't got very far before she looked up and crossed her eyes. “What are you talking about here?” she said. “It sounds like it ought to mean something, but I don't think it does.”

“Oh, good,” he said. “That's what I was trying to do.”

“Will the city prefect let you get away with it?” she asked.

“I hope so,” Jeremy answered. “The first thing he'll do is make sure we did turn in an official report by the due date.

That's how I figure it, anyhow. When he sees we did, he may not even have anybody read it right away. He's got other things to worry about, after all-yeah, just a few. And if he does have somebody read it and they decide they don't like it, what can he do? Have us write another one, right? This will buy us time, anyhow.“

Amanda nodded. She didn't seem to want to meet his eyes, though. That was all right. He didn't want to meet hers, either. They both had to be wondering whether buying time mattered. It certainly did, if the home timeline could get in touch with them fairly soon. But every passing day made that seem less likely. If they really were stuck here…

Jeremy shook his head. He wouldn't think that. He refused to believe it. Amanda said, “Before you give this report to the locals, scan it into the computer. That way, everyone will know just what you've told them.” She wouldn't believe they were permanently cut off any more than he would.

“I'll do that,” he promised. “I just wanted you to see what I was up to.”

“I like it,” his sister said. “You've got nerve.” She pointed to him. “When you turn it in, make sure you get a receipt from the clerk who takes it. Don't give the locals any excuse to say we didn't follow the rules.”

That was also good advice. “I'll take care of it,” Jeremy said. “Now I have to finish writing the silly thing.”

The more of it he wrote, the sillier it got, too. It also occurred to him that telling the exact truth would have been sure to convince officials here that he was out of his mind. Tempting-but no. The secret of crosstime travel had to stay hidden.

When he carried the official report to the prefect's palace, he saw a few buildings with holes in them. A handful of others had been knocked flat. But the siege, so far, hadn't done all that much damage. Jeremy knew Polisso had been lucky. If a fire started on a windy day and began to spread… That was one more thing he didn't want to think about.

He gave the report to one of Sesto Capurnio's secretaries- a junior man, not Iulio Balbo. The fellow took it and stuck it in a pigeonhole without giving it more than a quick glance. He seemed surprised when Jeremy asked for a receipt, but gave him one without making a fuss.

As Jeremy started back toward his house, he thought, Maybe this is one of those stupid assignments where they don't even look at it once you turn it in. Somehow, though, he had trouble believing it.

There was an ancient stone plaque by the fountain near the traders' house. In classical Latin full of abbreviations, it told how a man named Quintus Ninnius Hasta had given the money to set up the fountain. That plaque had been standing there for two thousand years, more or less. Amanda wondered if anyone inside Polisso knew anything else about Quintus Ninnius Hasta. She also wondered if anyone outside of Polisso had ever heard of him at all.

When she carried a water jar to the fountain early one muggy morning, she stared in surprise and dismay. A cannon-ball had smashed the marble plaque-and most of the brick wall in which it was set. Chunks of shattered stone and brick lay in the street. Women kicked through them on the way to get water.

“Well, so what?” one of those women said when Amanda exclaimed about the loss. “Plenty of other old stuff in this town, sweetie, believe me.”

She wasn't wrong. A little talk showed that most of the other women had the same point of view. Amanda didn't, and couldn't. In the part of Los Angeles where she'd lived all her life, nothing dated back earlier than the middle of the twentieth century. The first European settlement in California wasn't much more than three hundred years old. To her, things that had stood for two thousand years were precious antiques. They weren't routine landmarks or, worse, old junk.

“If you worry about all the old things,” a woman said, “how are you ever going to put up anything new?” Again, most of the heads around the fountain bobbed up and down in agreement.

That wasn't a question with an easy answer, either. If you lived where other people had been living for a couple of thousand years, you didn't get excited about remains of the distant past. You took them for granted. And if, say, you needed building stone, you were liable to knock down something old and reuse what had gone into it. That was often easier and cheaper than hauling in new stone from somewhere else. And if that old building had been standing there for a thousand years, or fifteen hundred-so what?

Try as she would, Amanda couldn't think, So what? To her, it was worth keeping around just because it was old. The local women laughed at her. “If a place like that's falling down around your ears, what good is it?” one of them asked.

“Better to get rid of it,” another woman agreed.

“But… But…” Amanda tried to put her feelings into words. After some struggle, she did: “But you could learn so much about the way things were long ago if you studied old things.“

All the women around the fountain laughed at her. “Who cares, except for a few old fools with more money than sense?” said a squat woman with a burn scar on her cheek.

“Things weren't so different, anyway,” a gray-haired woman added.

By the standards of the home timeline, she wasn't wrong. Things in Agrippan Rome had changed much less in the twenty-one hundred years since Augustus' day than they had in the home timeline. And people here weren't much aware of the changes that had happened. When modern painters showed ancient scenes, they dressed people in modern clothes. They didn't remember that styles had changed. They had ancient Roman legionaries wearing modern armor, too. They did-usually-remember soldiers in the old days hadn't known about muskets. But that was about as far as it went.