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wounded man struggled, trying to speak. Horace raised him higher. Enid tried to wipe the blood off his mouth with a filmy handkerchief, only smearing it.
    â€œAthens,” came the blood-choked whisper. “Athens base gone. Destroyed.”
    He slumped more deeply into Horace’s arms.
    Boone pushed closer to Horace and laid his fingers on Gahan’s throat, feeling for a pulse. He took his hand away.
    â€œThis man is dead,” he said.
    Reverently, Horace withdrew his arms and let Gahan slump onto the grass. He rose slowly to his feet and the silence of the group was deadly. They looked at one another, not quite understanding.
    Timothy said to Boone, “We shouldn’t leave him out here. Will you help me carry him?”
    â€œWe’ll have to bury him,” said Emma. “We’ll have to dig a grave.”
    â€œWe have to talk,” said Horace. “First, before anything, we will have to talk.”
    â€œWhere do you want to put him?” Timothy asked Emma.
    â€œA bedroom,” said Emma. “Upstairs. The back bedroom to the right. We can’t put him in the drawing room. All that blood will spoil the furniture.”
    â€œHow about the gun room? That would be easier. We wouldn’t have to haul him up the stairs. There’s a leather couch in there. We can wipe off the leather.”
    â€œAll right, then. The gun room.”
    Boone and Timothy picked up the body, Boone by the shoulders, Timothy by the feet. They made their way across the kitchen and through the dining room, with David shoving aside the pushed-back chairs to clear room for them. At the far end of the drawing room, they reached the gun room door.
    â€œOver there,” said Timothy. “Over there against the wall.”
    They laid the dead man on the couch and Timothy stood looking down at him.
    â€œI don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how to handle this. There has been no death in this house since first we came. It’s a new experience and we are not ready for it. We’re very close to immortal, you know. The time mechanism keeps it that way.”
    â€œNo, I hadn’t known,” said Boone.
    â€œInside the time bubble we do not age. We age only when we are outside of it.”
    Boone said nothing in reply.
    â€œThis is bad,” said Timothy. “This is one of the crisis points that you run across in history. We must decide what we should do. Decision and no mistakes. That’s important—no mistakes. Come with me. The others will be talking.”
    The others were not talking. Gathered in the dining room, they were shouting and screaming at one another.
    â€œI knew it,” Emma screamed. “I knew it. I just knew it. We were getting along too well. We thought it would keep on that way forever. We should have been looking ahead, making plans …”
    â€œMaking plans for what?” yelled David, drowning her out. “How could we know what to plan for? How could we know what might happen?”
    â€œDon’t you yell at my wife!” roared Horace. “Don’t you ever again use that tone of voice to your sister. She is right. We should have imagined all sorts of contingencies and worked out models for our reaction to them. We shouldn’t be standing here, like we are right now, caught unawares and trying to figure out the best course to follow.”
    â€œI think,” said Timothy, adding his voice to the squabble, “that what we had better do is just settle down and do some quiet thinking on it.”
    â€œWe haven’t the time to do any quiet thinking on it,” yelled Horace. “Not the leisurely kind of thinking that you mean. I know you, Timothy. You just put things off. You won’t face up to anything. You never would face up to anything. I remember the time …”
    â€œI agree we should be doing something,” David shouted. “I think Timothy’s approach is wrong. It’s