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‘You should have come to me before.’
    ‘I tried to, but you were always out or –’
    ‘Yes,’ crossing his legs under the desk to allow one foot to tap on air, ‘you should have come to me before, we could have rapped, talked this out. Clarified a few teaching concepts.’
    That clarification, he explained, ought to involve a thorough-going process evolving in context and circumstance, exploring the infrastructure of any classroom situation according to well-defined parameters, without of course rejecting in advance those options which, in a broader perspective, might be seen to underpin any meaningful discussion attempting to cut through the appropriate interface … right?
    But even before he could get rid of Goun, Rogers heard someone else in the outer office, sneezing.
    PROJECT ROGER, read the sign on the door, hastily stencilled four years before and somehow never corrected. Ben Franklin paused a moment – should he knock? – before using his keycard and entering the darkened room.
    A few red jewel-lights shone weakly in the background like older, more distant stars. Somewhat nearer, the glass box drew the eye to its green glow, the aquarium exhibiting in its luminous depths that marine oddity, the face of Dan Sonnenschein.
    It was an odd face. Under normal light it reminded some of the younger Updike;
redux
under green light it was nearer the face of Jiminy Cricket.
    ‘Dan?’
    ‘Just a sec.’ No warmth in that voice, only a flat command that might have issued from some other exhibition oddity: Donovan’s Brain, say … Moxon’s Master? … Ben groped his way towards a chair and a simile …
    Bacon’s Brazen Head, that was it. That mysterious entity that (if it ever existed) used even more mysterious Arab clockwork …
    ‘Bacon knew,’ he muttered, ‘… secret of the peacock fountain of Al-Jazari …’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Nothing. Nothing.’
    ‘Just a sec.’ A sec, many secs might tick by on clocks elsewhere, but here time moved in silence and darkness at an unknown speed (secs per sec). He waited as one who has just felt an earth tremor or the kick of an unborn child waits, in darkness and silence for the next, the confirming instance. Time was indivisible, all the silences and uncertainty between the ticks joined up (sec to sec) into one continuum of doubt, reaching back seven centuries to that night when a servant sat waiting for the brass head to speak.
    Time is,
the servant thought he heard, but waited to be sure.
Time was,
but why wake Friar Bacon for that?
Time is past,
said the grinning brass head, and fell to pieces (or so the servant would report, when he had hidden his hammer and wakened the good Friar).
    To be fair, the servant was only following the example of Aquinas, who reasoned (with logic ruthless enough for any machine) that to destroy a thing is to create a possibility: ‘If it did already exist, the statue could not come into being,’ he wrote. Just as affirmation and negation cannot exist simultaneously, so neither can privation and the form …” It was Aquinas, the Swine of Sicily, waddling on a Paris street, who was accosted by a stranger made entirely of wood, metal, glass, wax and leather the automaton brought into being (through thirty years’ work) by Albertus Magnus. Instantly Aquinas raised his staff and brought about the possibility of another thirty years’ work …
    Dr Helen Boag touched the intercom. ‘Jim, come in here, willyou? And bring the diary.’ She unfurled her copy of the
Caribou
and glanced over the headlines:
    CAMPUS RIPPER STRIKES AGAIN
    Third Body Found
    SOCCER SQUAD SHAPES UP
    Fergusen Predicts ‘Pow Season’
    GRADES AT LAST!
    Camp Ops Strike Ends
    CHESS CMPTR CHEATS IN IOWA OPEN
    BLIZZZARD!
    Park-O-Mat Mangles Dean’s Limo
    Looking up from the last story as Jim came in, she grinned. ‘Listen, what day do I have for that Emergency Finance Committee thing?’
    ‘Next Tuesday, ma’am.’
    ‘Scrub it. Just heard terrible whispers, omens of