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ongoing accumulation of worthwhile ideas that certain immature societies try so gropingly to conceptualize with the notion of 'progress.' " The voice had ceased to have anything of the absent-minded professor about it. Indeed, it was as the voice of many trumpets. But then the moment was past, as was Sarnac's memory of it, and there was only Tylar, sitting across the desk and looking faintly embarrassed.
    "But, my dear fellow," he said diffidently, "you need have no worries concerning your discharge of your duties. When our business is concluded, I will return you to this place and time . . . whatever time this is." He glanced at an ordinary-seeming timepiece. "Loriima III's 28.6 hour rotation period is frightfully confusing, don't you agree?"
    Sarnac blinked. All right, that settled it: Tylar was mad as a hatter. But then the stranger rose and reached into a pocket. Sarnac stiffened . . . but the device Tylar produced was clearly not a weapon. He placed it on the floor. Sarnac waited for him to do or say something. But all that happened was that a doorway-sized rectangle, outlined in glowing insubstantial bars of refracted light, formed with its lower left-hand corner resting on Tylar's device. Sarnac blinked repeatedly, for through that outline he saw not the room beyond but . . . what?
    "Shall we go, Admiral?" Tylar asked pleasantly, and stepped through the immaterial portal. Then he turned and beckoned. "Here lie your dreams."
    As though in a dream, Sarnac followed him.

Chapter Two
    They had passed through two more of the portals before Sarnac called a halt. One had led into a corridor in what Sarnac was somehow sure was a space vessel—although there were no sensations that he could have pointed to in support of his conviction—and the second had given entry through what had been a solid bulkhead into . . . this place.
    "Wait! Wait, Tylar!" He stood stock-still in the gentle breeze under the blue vault of sky, looking around at the intricately landscaped grounds of what seemed to be a villa whose gracefulness transcended all canons of architectural form and, indeed, somehow incorporated them. He tried to speak again, but no words would come—how does one frame questions about the patently impossible? He could only drink in the heart-stopping loveliness of it.
    There was an indefinable oddness about every perspective, and an even more indefinable sense that there were things here he was not seeing, not because they were invisible but because they were incomprehensible—his brain simply edited them out, refusing to process the input of his eyes. But none of this detracted from the almost unendurable perfection of the scene.
    Tylar turned around and faced him. "Yes, I know this is all a bit much, Admiral. For now, suffice it to say that we are in an artificially-generated pocket universe . . . and that you have been here before."
    The odd thing was, Sarnac never for an instant doubted him. For this was one of the impossible settings he glimpsed in his dreams as if by flashes of lightning. But he could accept no more. He closed his eyes, shutting out the vista of achingly unattainable beauty, and forced himself to speak.
    "Tylar, before I go another step you've got to tell me more. I want to know who you are and where you're from and what you once did to me."
    Tylar regarded him for a couple of heartbeats, then spoke briskly. "If you think about it, I'm sure you'll conclude that the question of my origin can have only one possible answer, however fantastic that answer may seem in light of your civilization's understanding of reality. I am from your future—your quite remote future. As for what I did to you, I took you and your Tiraena into the timestream that my people have learned to navigate, after rescuing you from your Korvaash captors near the end of your voyage from Sirius to Sol fifteen years ago—"
    Sarnac came out of his paralysis with a jolt. " What? Tylar, what the hell are you talking about?