Time's Revenge

Illustration by Ron Chironna

On his last three visits my friend the Time Traveler had come to the front door, and I thought I had got him trained. I was all the more startled, therefore, when one evening, as I was microwaving my supper, he arrived through the door of the broom cupboard instead. He had not been in the broom cupboard, of course—he is the thinnest person I know, but two brooms, two mops and the vacuum cleaner leave barely room even for another broomstick. The interface between this Universe and the one he inhabits had been set up a millimeter or two in front of the door itself, and he came through that.

It was the first time I had actually seen the process—other times he was just there, when I turned around, or looked up, or opened the door. His most prominent features (in the sense of projecting further than the rest)—a tuft of hair, the tips of his nose and his little pointed beard, the knuckles of one hand—suddenly projected from the dark-stained wood, like those of a corpse not quite submerged in melted chocolate. I didn’t scream, but I emitted a definite squeak, by which time he had come all the way through and was standing in front of the undamaged door, in a pale grey suit, with a bow tie as usual a little on one side—looking thoroughly upset.

That had nothing to do with my behaviour. I don’t think he noticed that I was anything more than a little surprised. He seldom came to visit me except when he was upset. When one of his forays had gone well, presumably he went straight back to his own Universe to report to his fellow workers—they did not, I gathered, go in for superiors over there—and prepared for the next one.

He turned up on my doorstep, or inside the house, every couple of months, but that says nothing about the actual frequency with which things went wrong. He was making use of occasions when my husband would be away. I had given him a list of them. Harold considers himself a realist; if he had been forced to believe in time travel—and even the hardest head gets dented if enough evidence is piled on—it would have seriously damaged his belief in his own sanity, and I was not sure that I knew how to cope with that.

I, on the other hand, believe my own eyes, even when they tell me impossible things. For instance, during a visit to the British Museum, that the gentleman I had seen about ten minutes earlier, in a charcoal-grey lounge suit, asking the warder for directions to the curators’ section, had just entered the gallery from the opposite direction wearing a jacket of Harris tweed.

To visit one of the nine curators one has to enquire at Reception and be announced by phone, then go to the appropriate gallery, find a bell-push to summon a clerk, and sign the Visitors’ Book, before being conducted along a route whose length varies from gallery to gallery, to the curator’s room. The gentleman in charcoal grey had spent a couple of minutes looking—I supposed—for the bell-push, before consulting the warder on duty, so I had had time to observe him. There was no doubt in my mind that the one in Harris tweed was the same man. He might have gone around through the labyrinth of passages that connects the working parts of the Museum with the exhibition halls; but why had he changed his clothes on the way? Also it seemed to me that his beard was a slightly different shape, his hair a little longer—and hadn’t he been sporting sideburns, clipped short but noticeable? His cheeks were now shaved quite clean.

The explanation was obvious. However, one does not come across a pair of really identical twins very often. I took it that they intended to meet and I wanted to see them side by side, so I got behind a large glass case, containing smallish exhibits on glass shelves, and waited for the other twin to emerge. He did so in a few minutes, talking presumably to a curator; they paused at the gate to finish the conversation.

I glanced at the other twin, just in time to see him catch sight of the first and, having registered surprise, shock and horrified understanding in very rapid succession, turn on his heel and hurry back the way he had come.

His double was still talking to the curator, both of them oblivious to Harris Tweed’s existence. I came out from behind the case and set off in pursuit.

I had no plan in mind; I just wanted to see what would happen next. I followed him for the length of two galleries and out on to the main stairs; down past the landing with the case of Benin bronzes—no time to admire them—and into the postcard section of the ground floor. He had slowed down a good deal and I was only about six feet behind him when he turned suddenly and looked me in the face.

I didn’t have time to expect anything, although I think the words “Madam, are you following me?” sounded momentarily in my mind’s ear. He said, “May I offer you a cup of tea?”

The postcard section leads to the Museum’s tea shop. It was fairly early in the afternoon and we had no difficulty in finding a table well away from potential listeners. My host went to the counter and returned with a tray containing a fair-sized teapot, milk, sugar and a selection of quite attractive-looking cakes.

He offered me the traditional women’s role of pourer-out and I accepted, reflecting that it would also make it more difficult to administer drugs—not that tea is a very promising vehicle for this purpose. Possibly divining this line of thought, my companion accepted the cup I gave him and took a large mouthful, without waiting for me to do so. I followed suit. For museum tea it was not at all bad. The cakes were drier than their appearance suggested, but that was not his fault.

He said, “I would like to explain.”

I was amazed at the freedom with which he did so; it was not until afterwards that I realized just how safe he was. Even if I was fool enough to repeat any part of his confidences; even if—still less likely—I managed to interest anyone in authority—or, of course, the press—they were unlikely to find him. And if by some accident he chanced to have business somewhere and somewhen that they happened to look for him, he could simply disappear—preferably round a comer, but, if necessary, into thin air. This last I did not learn until some time later; but the moment I thought about passing on any part of the story to anyone I realised that I would be simply branding myself as a lunatic, or a practical joker—either of which would cause me to be shunned in future by anyone who heard of it.

As for his motive in telling me, that was simple; he had had a nasty shock and wanted someone to talk to. The boldness of my curiosity had suggested to him that I was unlikely to scream, faint or otherwise embarrass him and possibly that if I did get myself into trouble by talking about him it would simply serve me right.

He had, in fact, been present twice over in the gallery. The reason was silly but, once you accepted the facts of time-travel, also simple; he had double-booked appointments with different members of the Museum staff. The excuse was that on his own time-line the occasions were five years apart, and in recording the first occasion—he showed me a tiny pocket computer with a keyboard that unfolded like a pocket handkerchief almost to standard size—he had made a mistake about the year.

I said I had done the same thing a few weeks previously, when making out a cheque; but couldn’t he just have gone ahead and kept the second appointment? If that entailed running into his former self—he would, I suppose, have had to go through the same gate—he could simply have hailed him and explained to the curators) that they were twins.

“No, no, quite impossible. I could never do that.”

He sounded as though the suggestion was not only impossible but in the worst of taste, and I was slightly annoyed until he added “Dr. McCollum, with whom I had my appointment, was already approaching; in another moment he would have called to me. Then, inevitably, I must have seen myself—and I know that that did not happen.”

“But didn’t he speak to you—I mean your former self?”

“No… I think Dr. Bastable, with whom I had that meeting, was standing between us. I remember, I think, that a man brushed past us when we were standing by the gate and seemed to be looking for somebody. A moment later Dr. Bastable remembered something that he wanted to show me, and we went back to his office, so that Dr. McCollum and I did not meet on that occasion.”

“How are you going to explain why you didn’t meet on this occasion?” I enquired. “If he was coming out to look for you I suppose you must have been announced from the reception desk, so he’ll think you got lost somewhere on the way up.”

“Yes… dear me. I should have returned, with a tale of taking a wrong turning somewhere. It’s too late for that now.” He pondered. “I think… on the stairway I passed a lady who was suddenly taken ill, seriously, so that I conveyed her to hospital in a taxi.”

“Wouldn’t the people on the reception desk have noticed that?”

“Perhaps not. There happened to be a school party coming in… they were kept quite busy. And if Dr. McCollum does not believe me he will just think that I was dodging a business rival, or perhaps the police.” “He will?” I said, startled.

“Oh, yes. He thinks, you see, that I deal sometimes in antiques stolen from archaeological sites. Not with him; the jewels I am showing him have a very good provenance, from a collection made in the eighteenth century, but there are times when I can’t arrange that.” He gave a slightly hunted look at the wall clock. “I think perhaps I should telephone him now and arrange another appointment.”

Having watched a good many archaeological programmes on television, I knew that people who stole from sites were dreadfully wicked, and for a moment I missed the significance of his last remark. I grabbed his coat sleeve just as he was going away.

“Look, there’s a lot more I want to know. Can’t we meet again?” He probably would not want to come to the British Museum again for a bit and there are not many tea shops in London now. I fumbled in my bag and found an envelope with my address, I don’t carry visiting cards, and scribbled my phone number beside it. “Look, any time you’re in Wimbledon, why don’t you just drop in?”

He looked pleased as well as surprised, but I never really expected anything to come of it. However he turned up that very evening—at the front door that time—carrying a bottle of whisky from which he accepted one drink. (Harold and I don’t care for spirits, and know little about them; but on a later occasion, when we had to entertain his managing director, the remains of the bottle caused quite a stir, and I had to invent a mythical deceased uncle from whom I’d inherited it.) He came, I think, partly for the kind of reason that makes people visiting foreign countries feel one-up when they manage to rub shoulders with a “local”; but mostly because he was lonely. Later we became friends, but right then he wanted somebody to talk to, and having deliberately involved myself in his affairs I was fair game.

Anyway, he wanted me to understand that he did not steal from archaeological sites or anywhere else; the items he sold had been bought from the artists who made them, at the going rate. The problem was that these transactions were not accompanied by the usual records, since they had taken place about 2,500 years ago.

“But then scientific tests would show that they were quite new,” I said, airing the expertise I got from various TV programmes.

“Oh, we don’t put them on the market straight away, of course. We bury them in the right kind of soil and dig them up a couple of thousand years later.”

I blinked. “Is that safe? Suppose someone else found the spot?”

“They were buried in—I forget just when—some time in the Pliocene, I think. In any case, well before the appearance of Homo sapiens. ”

I blinked again.

“So,” continued the Time Traveler gloomily, “everything I handle has an authentic patina, authentic attribution—I insist on having the pieces signed—and passes all scientific tests; and half the time I still have to pose as a grave-robber in order to sell it.”

“How about the other half?” I enquired, fascinated.

“For the other half I manage to blame the grave-robbing on somebody else. Usually some anonymous person in the eighteenth century, before the laws against exporting national relics came into force. There were quite a number of collectors then, and some of their collections got dispersed, without any record of where the items ended up. So with certain types of objects one can… er… lay a trail suggesting that they were bought from the original finder by Lord So-and-so or Prince Whatsisname, and later passed through various hands, until they ended up in mine. Especially, of course, if they correspond to some item included in the catalogue of that collection, which has since disappeared. For example—am I boring you?”

I assured him, with the utmost sincerity, that he wasn’t.

“Well then, for example, take the last thing I commissioned—only a couple of days ago in my lifetime. The catalogue of the seventh Duke of Pontecalmo’s collection lists a life-size bronze statue of Persephone, attributed to Theodoros. You’ve heard of him?”

“The Samian sculptor?” I said.

“That’s the one.” He was not particularly impressed by my knowledge: I decided not to mention that it derived from a novel by Mary Renault. “So I went to Samos in—” he paused, evidently calculating. “By the present calendar it would have been 528 B.C.—”

“You went there yourself?” I exclaimed. I don’t know quite how I had thought the transaction was to be arranged: probably I had been too absorbed in what he was actually saying, to extrapolate from it. I wonder how he would look in a tunic and sandals; of course a lot would depend on his legs. Or did men in their fifties stick to ankle-length robes?

“Of course. That’s where most of the fun lies… I speak Greek of that period, of course, with a moderate Persian accent; and Persian with a Corinthian accent. One can’t simply pose as a Greek, you see; it would have to be a citizen of one particular polis, Athens or Thebes or Sparta or whatever. Then you’d almost certainly run into fellow citizens and be asked about your relations and which of the twelve tribes you belonged to, and if you told him that he’d want to go into the matter further; it’s much safer to be a foreigner. There are plenty of them around in the big cities. For Theodoros’s benefit I was the agent of a Persian nobleman—a minor one he wouldn’t expect to have heard of, but with an eclectic taste in bronzes.”

“But aren’t Persians pretty unpopular in Greece?” I enquired.

“Not at that time-point. Marathon won’t happen for nearly forty years. They’re a bit wary of Cambyses, but they admired his father, Cyrus. No, I ought to have been safe enough.”

“Ought to have been?” I said.

“Oh—well, as it turned out I didn’t come to any harm, but I mistimed my visit a little. I stayed on Samos to see the work start on ‘Persephone.’ Alter I’d been there a week I went down to Theodoros’s yard, in the afternoon, because he was going to finish the core of the statue from the model and I was curious to see her. The core of a big bronze is made of clay, you know, and modeled just like the statue except for the fine detail. He’d been building up the bulk of it for a couple of days, allowing each layer to dry, partly, before he attached the next. A layer of fresh clay had just been applied all over, ready for the finer modeling, when a tremendous row broke out nearby. The yard was in the lower part of the town, quite close to the docks. What had happened—do you know anything of samian history?”

“Not very much,” I said cautiously.

“Well, around that time the ruler, Polykrates, had tried to get rid of some… er… dissidents, by shipping them off to visit Cambyses—ostensibly as a sort of embassy, but actually carrying a letter which asked Camybses to have them all put to death. However, they were cannier than he expected; opened the letter on the way and turned back, intending to take Samos over. They didn’t succeed; Polykrats and his mercenary troops were too much for them; but for some hours there was a running battle going on in the lower town and that was what we’d heard. It’s all on record, of course, but nobody gives the dates; and historians’ best guess was that it had all happened the year before.

“Theodoros had been working on the statue out of doors, so that the clay would dry sooner. When the row started his first idea was to get it into the workshop. It was standing on a large board, which was moved about on rollers; but it was an awkward thing to shift—the ground wasn’t exactly level and every time it hit a bump somebody had to steady the figure in case it toppled—I did it a couple of times myself. However we got it inside, and Theodoros barred the doors—with all of us still in there; it didn’t seem a good idea to be left outside. Theodoros just settled down to make sketches of the model from various angles, and the assistants started a dice game in one comer, and I… just wandered around. In a couple of hours the noise stopped, and after another half an hour somebody went out and found all quiet, and by then it was getting on for sunset, so we all went home.

“No trouble, in fact, so far as I was concerned, except that I’d been carrying my E.T.T. in my hand, as a precaution, and—”

“Your what?” I interrupted.

“My—oh. E.T.T.—for Emergency Trans-Temporator. It’s a safety device. If things go seriously wrong and we can’t get to an interface—” He stopped, pulled at his beard, and started again.

“Did I explain that my… er… base of operations is in another universe? Not one of these parallel affairs people write about. It’s a kind of offshoot of this one, but independent—with its own dimensions of space and time. We can set up an interface between it and this one at any place-time we choose, and go through; but that can only be done from the other side—my home side, I mean. We don’t have the… er… machinery in this Universe.

“The usual practice is to set up two or three interfaces, beside recognisable landmarks, so that if for some reason one of them can’t be reached we have an alternative. The E.T.T. is only for use in really urgent danger. It’s always carried, when one of us is in the Main Continuum. It’s quite small, about an inch long and weighing a couple of ounces—but not primed unless there’s likely to be serious trouble. Once it’s been primed a simple twist of the activator will take you straight back to base. You disappear, in fact, with a loud pop—that’s the air rushing in to fill the space.”

“Startling for bystanders,” I said.

“Exactly. That’s one reason why we don’t use the thing if we can possibly help it. The other is that being shot from one universe to another is unpleasant and rather dangerous. One or two people have arrived dead—asphyxiated. We’re warned to take a deep breath before using the thing and to hyperventilate if we have time, but in an emergency people sometimes forget.”

I found that I had taken a deep breath myself and was holding on to it. I let it go, feeling foolish, and said, “Did you say you’d lost the thing?”

“Absolutely. I remembered taking it out and priming it, soon after the noise started, and then holding it in my fist… and then I suppose I forgot about it and let it drop… Oh, don’t worry. Theodoros won’t suddenly find himself in another universe, even if he were to pick it up and fiddle with it. It won’t work for anybody else. It’s sensitized to the chemistry of my skin.”

“Yes, but what happens if you get into real danger and haven’t got it?”

“Oh, I picked up another one. It was a nuisance—I had to spend two days at… er… base, waiting for it to be ready. Then I decided to attend to various matters in this placetime before returning to Samos. I’d spent nearly nine months in various parts of the sixth century B.C.: and I felt like a change…”

The Time Traveler left soon afterwards and I sat in my nice conventional suburban sitting room, contemplating the armchair from which he had just risen and wondering whether the whole episode had been a dream…

A week or so later, however, he dropped in again. Fortunately, although Harold had returned from his latest business trip, he was not at home at the time. It was then that I gave the Time Traveler a schedule of occasions when he could conveniently call on me; and he used it faithfully from that day on.

The arrangement had been in force for about a year and a half, so far as I was concerned. I gathered that in his lifetime the interval had been three or four times as long. He never looked any older to me; but on this occasion he looked tired, discouraged and down in the mouth. He flopped into his usual chair and sat there, staring at the carpet. I gave him a glass of his own whisky (the original bottle had been replaced several times) and asked what had gone wrong.

He uttered a sort of groan, pulled an envelope from his pocket, sorted through the photographs inside it and handed one across.

“Look at that,” he said.

In showed the figure of a woman, in polished bronze. She sat on a kind of throne, looking straight ahead—straight out of the picture. It was a most striking face; young, but formidable. The inlaid eyes with their brilliant white and dark irises were intimidatingly alive.

I remembered his first visit to me.

“This is your ‘Persephone,’ isn’t it?” I said.

He gave a miserable nod and sank his head in his hands.

I looked at the picture again. Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. Yes, she looked like that. Now that I knew for sure, I could see other things in the face besides its power; traces of the young girl, Demeter’s daughter, picking flowers in the meadow from which Hades had snatched her into his dark chariot; memories of spring and summer in the world of the living, won for her by a mother who was also formidable in her way.

“Who was the model?” I asked.

“Oh, she was a hetaera. No marriageable girl would pose, and of course no married woman. Theodoros told me something of her history; she’d been stolen by bandits when she was twelve years old, and carried off to their stronghold in the mountains. About three years later the bandits became such a problem that the local lords got together to hunt them down. The men were killed fighting and the women sold as slaves. She was bought by a hetaera who took a fancy to her, had her taught to read and sing and play the lyre and the rest of their arts. The mistress died after a couple of years, killed by a jealous lover; the girl was enfranchised under her will. She became a hetaera herself, and worked her way up from the provinces to Samos. She wasn’t at the top of her profession—too outspoken and not flexible enough in accommodating herself to clients’ fantasies, but she was building up quite a reputation all the same.”

He had revived somewhat while he was speaking, but heaved a sigh and relapsed into gloom immediately when he stopped. I looked at the photograph and tried to assimilate what he had told me about the original. A story that seemed straight out of a classical bodice-ripper; and yet, looking at that face, entirely believable. Of course, Persephone also must have been a survivor, in her own way….

I roused myself to say, “So what went wrong?”

The Time Traveler took his head out of his hands and looked puzzled.

“I asked why you look as though you’ve been through the shredder,” I said, inaccurately, “and you handed me this photograph. The statue looks perfectly OK to me. Did it get damaged, or—’’ I realised suddenly that it did not look in the least as though it had been buried for 2,500 years—“did you forget, and polish the patina off it, or what?”

“No, no.” It came out like another groan. He fumbled out another photograph and gave it to me. It showed the same figure, but with the smooth dark greenness that comes from long aging of bronze without interference. The throne was gone; Persephone sat on a boxy wooden chair, instead. If anything, she looked even more impressive than before.

“Well, then,” I said, puzzled, “what went wrong?”

He buried his face in his hands again; but after a few seconds he straightened up and tried, rather resentfully, to make sense.

“We took her off the throne because we buried her—it was a lot easier that way. She’d been fastened to it with rivets. When we dug her up the area around the rivet holes was somewhat corroded, in places the bronze actually flaked away. I invited my contact at the British Museum to come and see her—”

“Where?” I interrupted.

“Oh, I hired a bank vault to keep her in. I had to bring in a couple of spotlights for his inspection, of course. He was absolutely overcome when he saw her; spent a long time just sitting and staring. Then he asked if he could take samples from the damaged area, for scientific tests. Of course, I agreed.”

“Of course,” I said.

“The asking price was two and a half million-pounds, I mean. Of course, he had to discuss it with his colleagues, but he thought he knew a handful of millionaires who could be persuaded to put up the cash. He was supposed to get in touch with me three days ago.”

“Didn’t he?” I asked, after the pause seemed to have gone on long enough.

“No. I was puzzled. I tried to call him, but was told he’d gone out of the country. That seemed most unlikely; he would surely have let me know. In the end I broke into the Museum’s computer, to find out what had gone wrong.”

I was momentarily startled; then I remembered that breaking into a computer did not involve physical violence.

“Did you find out?” I said, when it seemed that nothing more would be forthcoming without a prod.

“Oh, yes. I found out.” He made a very small gesture that somehow conveyed infinite despair.

“Well, was something wrong with the—the thermoluminescence or something?” This method of dating baked clay objects, including the core of bronze statues, had featured largely in a couple of archaeological paperbacks I had read recently.

“No, not that. The estimated age was 2,350 years plus or minus 400—quite close enough. It was the bronze that was wrong.”

“What?”

“The proportions of copper and tin were within the usual limits for the period, but there was more than half a percent of other metals. Under X-ray fluorescence it showed traces of half a dozen metals—lithium, iridium, niobium, cobalt, samarium, nickel. They were all concentrated in one part of the flake. There was not enough of it for quantitative analysis, but the analysts guessed that the proportion of metal other than bronze in one spot was something like three percent. So he analysed the clay of the core and found traces of several of the metals in that, as well.”

I mulled this over and could make nothing of it.

“How bad is that? Couldn’t Theodoros just have got hold of some ore that happened to have these other metals in it as well as copper?”

“Cobalt, perhaps, and nickel. Not the rest. The only way you’d find that assemblage of elements together would be if they’d been put together, in an artifact of some sort. And nobody even knew that most of them existed, until the nineteenth century A.D.”

“Then how did they get into the bronze?” I said.

The Time Traveler wiped sweat from his brow with a hand that shook, noticeably.

“The only explanation that the analyst could suggest was that somebody had dropped an artifact containing them into the clay, while it was soft. And the only way that could happen was if the statue was a fake. A very recent fake. Samarium, for instance, was not used for anything whatever until the last half of the twentieth century, when it was incorporated in magnets.” He gave a heartrending sigh. “My contact was terribly disappointed, poor chap. And everybody at the museum is terribly worried, because if the statue is a fake it means that thermoluminescence measurements can’t be trusted any longer—I would have to have faked those, too.”

“Yes, but how—” I halted, struck by a memory. “The first time you came here—that thing you’d lost—with the initials—”

“The E.T.T.?”

“Yes. What was it made of?”

He heaved a sigh all the way up from his boots.

“You’re quite right, of course. It contains all those elements. When the statue was moved into the workshop the clay was still soft. Once, I remember, the whole thing tilted—the figure toppled forward. I was behind it, I put out my hand to hold the seat level—”

“The hand with the E.T.T. in it?” I said.

“I suppose so… If I had let go of it it would have rolled down—and then—”

The words that trembled on my lips were “She would have sat on it?” I suppressed them. Instead I said, “So what happens now?”

Visibly, he pulled himself together.

“First—tomorrow—as soon as the bank opens I go to the vault and scrape out more of the core, until I find the remains of the E.T.T. Then…” He relapsed into apathetic gloom.

I prodded gently. “What will the museum people do, I wonder?”

“Oh, lord… Dither around checking things for as long as they can. Then once they’re absolutely certain of their ground they’ll notify me they’re not interested, and warn every other major museum that I’ve started selling fakes as well as stolen goods. I’ll be finished, so far as they’re concerned.”

“And what about the statue?” I said. “Oh, I’ll take that across to America and take it around to a few of the big collectors. They don’t have access to the museum grapevine; they’ll do their own tests and be happy. I’ll make damned sure I’ve removed all the affected sections.”

“I suppose it means you won’t get your full price, though,” I said.

“No, why? I’ll probably get more than I would have done from the B.M., especially if I get an auction going between rival collectors. The museums are hard bargainers; they expect you to take part of the price in prestige… But, damn it, I hate to sell Persephone to someone who’ll keep her to himself, except when he wants to make somebody jealous.”

“What will you do with all the money?” I asked. It had suddenly occurred to me to wonder about the value of a bank balance to somebody domiciled in another universe.

“Oh, it will be used… We buy a great many things here—in this placetime, and others. Machines, instruments, all kinds of equipment. There aren’t enough of us to make all that we need, even if we wanted to spend our time that way—”

“What’s the equipment for?” I persisted.

“Oh, we have a good many projects,” said the Time Traveler vaguely. He caught my look, and was suddenly amused, for the first time that evening. “Don’t worry; they do not include taking over the Earth, now or at any future time… We do make use of certain placetimes in the past, though. There’s one island in the Late Jurassic… I think I might spend the rest of my life there, watching the sea…”

“The rest of your life?” I exclaimed.

“It’s time I retired. This proves it. A blunder like that… I may have set a permanent question-mark against the reliability of thermoluminescence. It’s reasonable to make use of the facilities in this Universe and pay for them at the going rate; but one mustn’t upset people unnecessarily. No, I shall retire to the Fortunate Isles and study the ammonites in the rock pools; I can’t do any harm with that.”

I swallowed hard and tried to keep from showing my dismay. I had not realised how important the Time Traveler’s visits had become in my pleasant, prosperous, humdrum existence. I felt as though the most fascinating book in the world was being snatched away from me, half read; but it was worse than that. I knew that in time I would begin to wonder whether our meetings had ever really occurred, or whether I had allowed some middle-aged fantasy to take such possession of my mind that I ended up by believing in it; and I hated the thought of it.

The Time Traveler’s glance fell on his half-finished whisky. He took up the glass and swallowed the rest.

We sat for a minute or two in silence. I, at least, had no idea what to say. The Time Traveler pulled absently at his beard.

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “it might be worth while to try one of the big American Museums. They tend to be quite sceptical about test results that they haven’t checked for themselves. And since I’ll have removed the source of the anomaly… Yes, I think it’s worth a go.” He put down the glass and rose to his feet.

“Do you mind if I go through your kitchen again? I’ll site the interface more carefully next time….”

Dumb with relief, I followed him into the kitchen. He raised his left hand and pressed the bezel of his signet ring against the door of the broom cupboard. It made no difference that I could see, but—

“See you in a couple of months,” said the Time Traveler. He merged himself with the woodwork, and disappeared.