The Synthetic Barbarian

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How's that, Miss Bergstrom? My strangest client? Let's see…There was…come to think, I'm sure the balmiest was young Standish, Clifton Standish. Of course you'll be careful of using people's true names in your story, because of the chance of lawsuits.

I first heard about Standish when I got back from taking a party of paleontologists to the Permian, so they could settle arguments over which kind of Permian lizard was the ancestor of the dinosaurs, and which of the mammals, and all the rest. They explained that most of these creatures weren't really lizards but belonged to other orders. But they looked like lizards and scuttled like lizards, so I'm willing to call them "lizards," just as we call all members of two quite distinct later reptilian orders "dinosaurs."

The Raja—that is, my partner, Chandra Aiyar—had been holding down the office in my absence. One day this bloke Standish came in with his friend Hofmann, saying they wanted a time safari to caveman days, to shoot dinosaurs the way our ancestors used to do.

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