The host brought a napkin with two small pastries and a little silver dish full of white steaming lumps. “Brioche de foie gras, croustade de ris de veau a la financière, and quenelles de brochet au beurre d’ecrevisses. Eat! Enjoy!” He swept out.

“Financier, huh?” muttered Richard. “There’s a good epitaph.” He ate the pastries. One was like a cream puff stuffed with delicious spiced liver. The other seemed to be a fluted tart shell filled with bits of meat, mushrooms, and unidentifiable tidbits in Madeira sauce. The dish with white sauce consisted of delicate fish dumplings.

“This is delicious, but what am I eating?” he asked the host, who had emerged to take the credit cards of the local diners.

“The brioche is filled with goose liver pâté. The tart has a slice of truffle, braised veal sweetbread, and a garnish of tiny chicken dumplings, cock’s combs, and kidneys in wine sauce. The pike dumplings are served in creamy crayfish butter.”

“Good God,” said Richard.

“I have an outstanding vintage coming up with the main course. But first, grilled baby lamb filet with little vegetables, and to set it off, a splendid young Fumé from the Chateau du Nozet.”

Richard ate and sipped, sipped and ate. Finally the host returned with a small chicken like that which Stein had lately devoured. “The speciality of the house, Poularde Diva! The most adolescent of young pullets, stuffed with rice, truffles, and foie gras, poached and coated with paprika supreme sauce. To accompany it, a magnificent Chateau Grillet.”

“You’re kidding!” Richard exclaimed.

“It never leaves the planet Earth,” the host assured him solemnly. “It rarely leaves France. Get this behind your uvula guy, and your stomach’ll think you died and went to heaven.” Once again he whirled out.

Stein gaped. “My chicken tasted good,” he ventured. “But I ate it with Tuborg.”

“To each his own,” Richard said. After a long pause for attending to business, he wiped pink sauce off his mustache and said, “You figure somebody on the other side of the gate will know how to brew up some good booze?”

Stein’s eyes narrowed. “How you know I’m goin’ over?”

“Because you couldn’t look less like some colonial gorf visiting the Old Country. You ever thought about where your next bucket of suds is coming from in the Pliocene?”

“Christ!” exclaimed Stein.

“Now me, I’m a wine freak. As much as I could be, dragging my ass all over the Milky Way. I was a spacer. I got busted. I don’t wanta talk about it. You can call me Richard. Not Rick. Not Dick. Richard.”

“I’m Steinie.” The big driller thought for a minute. “The stuff they sent me about this Exile told how they let you sleep-learn any simple technology you think would be useful in the other world. I don’t remember if it was on the list, but I bet I could cram brewing easy. And the hard sauce, you can make that outa just about anything. Only tricky bit would be the condensation column, and you could whip that up outa copper-film decamole and hide it in your hollow tooth if they didn’t wanta let you in with it on the up. You with your wine, though, you might have a problem. Don’t they use special grapes and stuff?”

“Don’t they fuggin’ ever,” said Richard gloomily, squinting through the glass of Grillet. “I suppose the soil would be different back then, too. But you might be able to come up with something halfway decent. Let’s see. Grapevine cuttings of course, and definitely yeast cultures, or you’d end up with moose pee for sure. And you’d have to know how to make some kind of bottles. What did they use before glass and plass?”

“Little brown jugs?” Stein suggested.

“Right. Ceramic. And I think you can make bottles outa leather if you heat and mold it in water, Christ! Will you listen to me? The hung spacer carving out a new career as a grape-squash moonshiner.”

“Could you get a recipe for akvavit?” Stein was wistful. “It’s just neat alcohol with a little caraway seed. I’ll buy all you can make.” He did a double take. “Buy? I mean barter, or something… Shit. You think there’ll be anything civilized waiting for us?”

“They’ve had nearly seventy years to work on it.”

“I guess it all depends,” Stein said hesitantly.

Richard grunted. “I know what you’re thinking. It all depends on what the rest of the fruitcakes have been up to all this time. Have they got a little pioneer paradise going, or do they spend their time scratching fleas and carving each other’s tripes out?”

The host came up with a dirty old bottle, which he cradled like a precious child. “And here… the climax! But it’ll cost you. Chateau d’Yquem ’83, the famous Lost Vintage of the Metapsychic Rebellion year.”

Richard’s face, furrowed with old pain, was suddenly transformed. He studied the tattered label with reverence. “Could it still be alive?”

“As God wills,” shrugged mon hôte. “Four point five kilo-bux the bottle.”

Stein’s mouth dropped. Richard nodded and the host began to draw the cork.

“Jeez, Richard, can I hit you for a little taste? I’ll pay if you want. But I never had anything that cost so much.”

“Landlord, three glasses! We will all drink to my toast.”

The host sniffed the cork hopefully, gave a beatific smile, then poured three half-glasses of golden-brown liquid that sparkled like topaz in the lantern light.

Richard lifted his glass to the other two.

The ex-spacer and the cafe proprietor closed their eyes and sampled the wine. Stein tossed his down in one gulp, grinned, and said, “Hey! It tastes like flowers! But not much sock to it, is there?”

Richard winced. “Bring my buddy here a crock of eau de vie. You’ll like that, Steinie. Sort of akvavit without the seeds… You and I, landlord, will continue to bless our tonsils with the Sauternes.”

So the evening wore on, Voorhees and Oleson told each other edited versions of the sad stories of their lives while the proprietor of the café clucked in sympathy and kept refilling his own glass. A second bottle of Yquem was called for and then a third. After a while, Stein bashfully told them what Georgina’s other farewell presents had been. His new friends demanded that he model them; so he went out into the darkened egg park, got the stuff from the boot, and stalked back into the café resplendent in a wolfskin kilt, a wide leather collar and belt studded with gold and amber, a bronze Vikso helmet, and a big steel-bladed battle-axe.

Richard toasted the Viking with the last of the Chateau d’Yquem, which he chugalugged from the bottle.

Stein said, “The horns on the helmet were really like ceremonial, Georgina said. Vikings didn’t wear ’em in battle. So these are demountable.”

Richard giggled. “You look perfeck, Steinie ole rascal! Jus’ perfeck! Bring on th’mashtodons ’n’ dinosaurs ’n’ whatall. All they hafta do’s look at you and they’ll piss blue.” His face changed. “Why din’ I bring a costume? Everybody goes back in time needs a costume. Why din’ I think? Now I’ll hafta go through the time-gate in fuggin’ civvies. Never did have no class, Voorhees, dumb damn Dutchman. No fuggin’ class never.”

“Aw, don’ be sad, Richard,” begged the caféman. “You don’t wanna spoil yer meal ’n’ lovely wine.” His beady eyes lit with an expression of drunken craft. “Got it! There’s guy in Lyon runs the flickin’ opera. Comes up here ’n’ eats himself shtooperuss. An’ this guy’s au ciel du cochon over one kinda wine, ’n’ I gotta whole case you c’d use t’bribe ’em if y’could stan’ the tab. They got any kinda, costume y’d want at the opera. Merde alors, it’s not even two hunnerd hours yet! Guy might not even be ’n bed! What say?”