There had been more important things on Drake’s mind. Could Ana be cured? Where was she now? Had she been kept safe, for however much time had passed? Was it possible that she had been awakened before him, even long before him? That would be a disaster.

He glanced across at the other two workers, who were still chatting together in an alien tongue. “Language must have changed completely. I can understand you easily, but I cannot understand them at all.”

“You mean, understand the doctors?” The stranger Leon replied with a surprised expression on his lean face. “Of course you cannot. Neither can I. They are doctors. To each other they are naturally speaking Medicine.”

Drake raised his eyebrows. The look must have survived with its meaning intact across the centuries, because Par Leon went on, “That is right, Medicine. I cannot help you. I myself am fluent in Music and History — and, of course, Universal. And I learned Old Anglic to be able to study your times and to speak with you. But I know little or no Medicine.”

“Medicine is a language ?” Drake felt that his mind had been slowed by the long sleep and thawing treatment.

“Of course. Like Music or Chemistry or Computing. But surely this was already true in your own time. Did you not have languages specific to each — what is the word you use? — discipline?”

“I suppose that we did; but we didn’t realize it.” Par Leon’s question explained a great deal. No wonder that Drake had found psychologists, professional educators, social scientists, and physicists — to name but a few — incomprehensible. Even in his original time, the special jargon and odd acronyms had been signaling the arrival of new protolanguages, emerging forms as alien as Sanskrit or classical Greek. “How do you speak to the doctors?”

“For ordinary things? We employ Universal, which all understand. I do not attempt to speak actual Medicine. If I am in that subject-matter area, we keep a computer in the circuit to provide exact concept equivalents between language pairs.”