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limits of my grasp. I felt around, but there were no objects to seize.
    "There is never more than one a day," Galvadon said.
    The hole was too small to admit a head. "Have you tried putting through a recording device or an optical tube?" I asked.
    "It will accept only an arm," the Dean said. "Any mechanical apparatus comes back melted."
    "That bespeaks an intelligence on the other side," I said.
    Ulwy Munt had an opinion. "The Thim generously wish to extend to us their spiritual grace. They are communicating with us from the higher realm, leaving consecrated objects on an altar for us to receive. They are presenting us with the tangible means to follow their abstruse thought. But they will not allow us to exceed our capacity. They have our best interests at heart."
    "So you do not believe that Mitric Galvadon has broken the time barrier?"
    "Time travel is impossible," he said.
    "I differ," Galvadon said.
    "What is your explanation?" I asked him.
    He smiled. "I do not have one. I admit that I contrived a scheme to fool Ulwy Munt. At the Delve, research funds are apportioned by seniority, but he has never taken more than a few minims of the largesse available to him. I intended to divert a fair amount my way while catering to his beliefs. But then . . ." He smiled again and spread his hands.
    I finished the statement for him. "But then your patently fraudulent device appeared to have somehow reached back through time to the ancient Thim."
    "Exactly. I was quite surprised."
    "I'm sure you were. And now you would like me to verify that such is the case."
    "And will you?"
    I told him that it would be premature to say.
    "It will be just as useful to me," he said, "for you to admit that you are baffled."
    He was right. Mitric Galvadon could become equally famous along The Spray as either the man who had serendipitously discovered time travel, or as he who had stumped Henghis Hapthorn. He would find many ways to turn a profit from his celebritude.
    "Allow me to reserve judgment until one more demonstration of the device," I said.
    Galvadon graciously acceded to my request. But I saw in his eye a glint of anticipated triumph that was more than lightly tinged with amusement. As we flew back to the Delve, I cogitated on the matter. I wished I could have had my research assistant with me, but it had refused to allow itself to be digested into a traveling version, claiming that when it was decanted back into its housing on Old Earth, nothing seemed to fit.
    "You are merely energies suspended among standardized components," I told it, standing in my workroom, the traveling armature open on the table and ready to be filled. "It should be the same to you whether you are housed in this portable box or distributed about the room."
    "Yet it is not the same to me," the integrator had said. It was the latest friction in a series of episodes that had come to worry me. My assistant was developing far too much character.
    I would have also welcomed the presence of my lately acquired colleague, a kind of demon from an adjacent reality whose intense curiosity and depth of insight rivaled my own. Indeed, I was sure he would have had a better perspective than I on time travel. But he was engaged in a lengthy quest through subatomic realms which left him too attenuated to be summoned, even if I could assemble the requisite materials on Pierce.
    There was another reception and dinner to be got through at the Delve but I retired as early as good manners allowed and spent the hours before sleep mulling what I had seen and heard. No solutions having presented themselves, I slept on the matter. But in the morning I remained baffled.
    I breakfasted with the Dean and a few of the senior applied metaphysics fellows. We had a good discussion of Ulwy Munt's theories over flatcakes and hot, spiced punge. I learned that Munt's star had risen during his investigations of the Thim—there had apparently been genuine contact between the Academician and some