They were waiting for him, as he regained his feet on the quivering surface of a spring-loaded, canvas trampoline. The bright, mid-morning sun blinded him for an instant, but their voices assailed his ears in a mighty roar of approval as he squinted under his hand and peered around him.
"Attaboy, Sexy," a shrill female voice piped. The roof-top was jammed with a pressing throng of—nearly naked people. In the cleared semi-circle about him a cordon of male bodies-beautiful restrained the mob behind a rope from which a long streamer hung with letters reading:
"WELCOME, SEXTUS, TO 2153 A. D."
Reaching over the edge of the canvas platform with outstretched hand was a single, willowy, sun-baked oldster in a purple loin-cloth. His hair and beard were a dazzling white, and his face was wreathed in a silly smile, the kind officials always wear when presenting the keys to the city.
He shuffled his white kid sandals and spoke with an accent: "Welcome to 2153, Sextus Rollo Forsyte! California salutes you!"
Somewhere down on the street a raucous brass band broke into the Stars and Stripes Forever that quickly medlied into California, Here We Come!
Sextus shrank back against the wall and felt ancient bricks crumble into dust against his hands. The magnitude of his disaster crushed in upon shrinking soul, and as his nimble imagination grasped the stunning significance every molecule of his being vibrated with horror. He had been warned not to open a window.
"You have fulfilled the legend," the old man sang joyously. "You are a famous man." How famous, Sextus was forced to acknowledge as a television boom snaked over the heads of the crowd trailing a wisp of cable and cast its baleful, glassy eye full into his face.
"Two hundred years to the day, as my great-great-grandfather predicted. I am Clark Bradford, direct descendent of—"