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only extend as far back as 1500; okay, watching London burn down in 1666.”
    “Right—if there happens to be a gap then. And there. You can’t reenter at arbitrary points, only through an existing gap. And,” he said with a note of discoverer’s pride, “it is possible to aim for one gap rather than another—it depends on the amount of… propulsion used in exiting from your own gap. And it is possible to pinpoint the locations of the gaps in time and space. They radiate out in a mathematically predictable pattern from their source—whatever that can have been—in early 1802.”
    Doyle was embarrassed to realize that his palms were damp. “This propulsion you mention,” he said thoughtfully, “is it something you can produce?”
    Darrow grinned ferociously. “Yes.”
    Doyle was beginning to see a purpose in the demolished lot outside, all these books, and perhaps even his own presence. “So you’re able to go voyaging through history.” He smiled uneasily at the old man, trying to imagine J. Cochran Darrow, even old and sick, at large in some previous century. “I fear thee, ancient mariner.”
    “Yes, that does bring us to Coleridge—and you. Do you know where Coleridge was on the evening of Saturday, the first of September, in 1810?”
    “Good Lord, no. William Ashbless arrived in London only… about a week later. But Coleridge? I know he was living in London then…”
    “Yes. Well, on the Saturday evening I mentioned, Coleridge gave a lecture on Milton’s Aereopagitica at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand.”
    “Oh, that’s right. But it was Lycidas, wasn’t it?”
    “No. Montagu wasn’t present, and he got it wrong.”
    “But the Montagu letter is the only mention anywhere of that lecture.” Doyle cocked his head. “Uh… isn’t it?”
    The old man smiled. “When DIRE undertakes to do a job of research, son, we’re thorough. No, two of the men who attended, a publisher’s clerk and a schoolmaster, left journals which have come into my hands. It was the Aereopagitica. The schoolteacher even managed to get a fair amount of the lecture down in shorthand.”
    “When did you find this?” Doyle asked quickly. An unpublished Coleridge lecture! My God, he thought with a surge of bitter envy, if I’d had that two years ago, my Nigh-Related Guest would have got a different sort of review.
    “A month or so ago. It was only in February that I got concrete results from the Denver crew, and since then DIRE has been obtaining every available book or journal concerning London in 1810.”
    Doyle spread his hands. “Why?”
    “Because one of these time gaps is just outside Kensington, five miles from the Strand, on the evening of the first of September, 1810. And unlike most gaps that close to the 1802 source, this one is four hours long.”
    Doyle leaned forward to help himself to another cupful of the brandy. The excitement building in him was so big that he tried to stifle it by reminding himself that what was being discussed here was, though fascinating, impossible. Stick with it for the twenty thousand, he advised himself, and maybe the possibility of getting your hands on Robb’s journal or that schoolteacher’s notebook. But he wasn’t fooling himself—he wanted to participate in this. “And there’s another gap here and now, of course.”
    “Here, all right, but not quite now. We’re”—Darrow looked at his watch—”still several hours upstream of it. It’s of a typical size for one this far from the source—the upstream edge is tonight, the downstream edge at about dawn of the day after tomorrow. As soon as Denver pinpointed this gap I bought the entire area the field would cover, and got busy levelling it. We don’t want to take any buildings back with us, do we?”
    Doyle realized his own grin must have looked as conspiratorial as Darrow’s. “No, we don’t.”
    Darrow sighed with relief and satisfaction. He picked up the phone just as it started to ring.