That was not the literal truth, but it was near enough. He had often driven through ammonia gales and could still remember the poisonous cascades streaming down the windows only a few centimeters before his eyes. But this was harmless-no, beneficent-water, the source of life both on Earth and on

Titan. If he opened the door now he would merely get wet; he would not die horribly. But the instincts of a lifetime were hard to overcome, and he knew that it would require a real effort of will to leave the protection of the limousine.

And it was a genuine limousine-another first for Duncan. Never before had he traveled in such sybaritic comfort, with a communications console on one side and a well-stocked bar on the other. Washington saw his admiring gaze and commented: “Impressive, isn’t it? They don’t make them any more. This was President Bernstein’s favorite car.”

Duncan was not too good on American presidents -after all, there had been by now ninety-five of them-but he had an approximate idea of Bernstein’s date. He performed a quick calculation, didn’t believe the

resuli, and repeated it. “That means-it’s more than a hundred and fifty years old!”

“And it’s probably good for another hundred and fifty. Of course, the upholstery-real leather, notice -is replaced every twenty years or so. If these seats could talk, they could tell some secrets. As a matter of fact, they often did-but you have my personal assurance that it’s now been thoroughly debugged.”

“Debugged? Oh, I know what you mean. Anyway, I don’t have any secrets.”

“Then we’ll soon provide you with some; that’s our chief local industry.”

As the beautiful old car cruised in almost perfect silence under the guidance of its automatic controls, Duncan tried to see something of the terrain through which he was passing. The spaceport was fifty kilometers from the city-no one had yet invented a noiseless rocket-and the four-lane highway bore a surprising amount of traffic. Duncan could count at least twenty vehicles of various types, and even though they were all moving in the same direction, the spectacle was somewhat alarming.

“I hope all those other cars are on automatic,” he said anxiously.

Washington looked a little shocked. “Of course,” he said. “It’s been a criminal offense for-oh-at least a hundred years to drive manually on a public highway. Though we still have occasional psychopaths who kill themselves and other people.”

That was an interesting admission; Earth had not solved all its problems.

One of the greatest dangers to the Technological Society was the unpredictable madman who tried to express his frustrationsconsciously or otherwise-by sabotage. There had been hideous instances of this in the past. The destruction of the Gondwana reactor in the early twenty-first century was perhaps the best-known example. Since Titan was even more vulnerable than Earth in this respect, Duncan would have liked to discuss the matter further; but to do so within an hour of his arrival would hardly be tactful.

He was quite sure that if he did commit such a faux pas, his host would neatly divert the conversation without causing him the slightest embarrassment. During the short time that they had been acquainted, Duncan had decided that George Washington was a very polished diplomat, with the selfassurance that comes only with a family tree whose roots are several hundred years deep. Yet it would have been hard to imagine anyone less like his distinguished namesake, for this George Washington was a short, bald, and rather plump brown man, very elegantly dressed and bejeweled. The baldness and plumpness were both rather surprising, since they could be so easily corrected. On the other hand, they did provide a mark of distinction, and perhaps that was the idea. But this was another sensitive subject that Duncan would be well advised to avoid-at least until he knew his host much better. And perhaps not even then.

The car was now passing over a slender bridge spanning a wide and rather dirty river. The spectacle of so much genuine water was impressive, but it looked very cold and dismal on this dreary night.

“The Potomac,” said Washington. “But wait until you see it on a sunny day, after that silt’s gone downstream. Then it’s blue and sparkling, and you’d never guess it took two hundred years of hard work to get it that way. And that’s Watergate-not the original, of course; that was pulled down around 2000, though the Democrats wanted to make it a national monument. And the

Kennedy Center-that is the original, more or less. Every fifty years some architect tries to salvage it, but now it’s been given up as a bad job.”

So this was Washington, still basking (though not very effectively, on a night like this)) in its former glories. Duncan had read that the physical appearance of the city had changed very little in three hundred years, and he could well believe it. Most of the old government and public buildings had been carefully preserved. The result, said the critics, was the largest inhabited museum in the world.

A little later, the car turned into a driveway which led through beautifully kept lawns. There was a gentle beeping from the control

panel, and a sign flashed beneath the steering handle: SWITCH TO MANUAL George Washington took over, and proceeded at a cautious twenty klicks between flower beds and sculptured bushes, coming to a halt under the portico of an obviously very old building. It seemed much too large for a private house, but rather too small for a hotel, despite the fact that it bore the sign, in lettering so elaborate that it was almost impossible to read: CENTENNIAL HOTEL.

Professor Washington seemed to have an extraordinary knack of anticipating questions before they could be asked.

“It was built by a railroad baron, in the late nineteenth century. He wanted to have somewhere to entertain Congress, and the investment paid him several thousand percent. We’ve taken it over for the occasion, and most of the official guests will be staying here.”

To Duncan’s astonishment-and embarrassment, since personal service was unknown on Titan-his scanty baggage was seized by two black gentlemen wearing gorgeous liveries. One of them addressed him in a soft, musical language of which he could not comprehend a single word.

“You’re overdoing it, Henry,” George Washington remonstrated mildly. “That may be genuine slave patter, but what’s the point if only you linguistic historians can understand it? And where did you get that make-up? I may need some myself.”

Despite this appeal, Duncan still found the reply unintelligible. On their way up in a gilded birdcage of a tiny elevator, Washington commented: “I’m afraid Professor Murchison is entering too thoroughly into the Spirit of ‘76. Still, it shows we’ve made some progress. A couple of centuries ago, if you’d suggested to him that he play one of his humbler ancestors, even in a pageant, he’d have knocked your head off. Now he’s having a perfectly wonderful time, and we may not be able to get him back to his classes at

Georgetown.”

Washington looked at his plump, brown hand and sighed. “It’s getting more and more difficult to find a genuine black skin. I’m no race snob,” he added hastily, “but it will be a pity when we’re all the same shade of off white. Meanwhile, I suppose you do have a slightly unfair advantage.”

Duncan looked at him for a moment with puzzled incomprehension. He had never given any more thought to his skin color than to that of his hair; indeed, if suddenly challenged, he would have been hard pressed to describe either. Certainly he had never thought of himself as black; but now he realized, with understandable satisfaction, that he was several shades darker than George Washington, descendant of African kings.