Time Scout 01 – Asprin, Robert

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It wasn’t difficult to tell visitors from ‘eighty-sixers. Visitors were the ones with the round mouths and rounder eyes and steadily decreasing bankrolls.

Like refugees from Grandma’s attic, they were decked out in whatever the Outfitters had decreed the current “look of the century.” Invariable struggles with unfamiliar bits of clothing, awkward baggage arrangements, and foreign money marked them even faster than an up tilted head on a New York City sidewalk.

‘Eighty-sixers, by contrast, stood out by virtue of omission. They neither gawked nor engaged in that most offensive of tourist behaviors, the

“I-know-it-all-and-will-share-it with-you” bravado that masks someone who wouldn’t know a drachma from a sesterce, even if his life depended on it!

Which, in TT-86, it might.

Nope, the ‘eighty-sixers were the ones who hauled luggage, snagged stray children back from the brink of disaster, and calmed flaring tempers in three different languages in as many minutes, all without loosening a fold of those impossible-to-wrap Roman togas or bumping into a single person with those equally impossible-to-manage Victorian bustles.

‘Eighty-sixers were right at home in La-La Land.

Frankly, Malcolm Moore couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.