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this country?” Barry shouted.  
    Lenoir gave a shrug, a French shrug (some things never change). “Louis is king,” he said. “Louis the Eleventh. The dirty old spider.”  
    They stood staring at each other like wooden Indians for some time. Lenoir spoke first. “Then you’re a man?” “Yes. Look, Lenoir, I think you—your spell—you must have muffed it a bit.”  
    “Evidently,” said the alchemist. “Are you French?” “No.”  
    “Are you English?” Lenois glared. “Are you a filthy Goddam?”  
    “No. No. I’m from America. I’m from the—from your future. From the twentieth century A.D.” Barry blushed. It sounded silly, and he was a modest man. But he knew this was no illusion. The room he stood in, his room, was new. Not five centuries old. Unswept, but new. And the copy of Albertus Magnus by his knee was new, bound in soft supple calfskin, the gold lettering gleaming. And there stood Lenoir in his black gown, not in costume, at home....  
    “Please sit down, sir,” Lenoir was saying. And he added, with the fine though absent courtesy of the poor scholar, “Are you tired from the journey? I have bread and cheese, if you’ll honor me by sharing it.”  
    They sat at the table munching bread and cheese. At first Lenoir tried to explain why he had tried black magic. “I was fed up,” he said. “Fed up! I’ve slaved in solitude since I was twenty, for what? For knowledge. To learn some of Nature’s secrets. They are not to be learned.” He drove his knife half an inch into the table, and Barry jumped. Lenoir was a thin little fellow, but evidently a passionate one. It was a fine face, though pale and lean: intelligent, alert, vivid. Barry was reminded of the face of a famous atomic physicist, seen in newspaper pictures up until 1953. Somehow this likeness prompted him to say, “Some are, Lenoir; we’ve learned a good bit, here and there...”  
    “What?” said the alchemist, skeptical but curious. “Well, I’m no scientist—”  
    “Can you make gold?” He grinned as he asked.  
    “No, I don’t think so, but they do make diamonds.”  
    “How?”  
    “Carbon—coal, you know—under great heat and pressure, I believe. Coal and diamond are both carbon, you know, the same element.”  
    “Element?”  
    “Now as I say, I’m no—”  
    “Which is the primal element?” Lenoir shouted, his eyes fiery, the knife poised in his hand.  
    “There are about a hundred elements,” Barry said coldly, hiding his alarm.  
    Two hours later, having squeezed out of Barry every dribble of the remnants of his college chemistry course, Lenoir rushed out into the night and reappeared shortly with a bottle. “O my master,” he cried, “to think I offered you only bread and cheese!” It was a pleasant burgundy, vintage 1477, a good year. After they had drunk a glass together Lenoir said, “If somehow I could repay you...”  
    “You can. Do you know the name of the poet Francois Villon?”  
    “Yes,” Lenoir said with some surprise, “but he wrote only French trash, you know, not in Latin.”  
    “Do you know how or when he died?”  
    “Oh, yes; hanged at Montfaucon here in ’64 or ’65, with a crew of no-goods like himself. Why?”  
    Two hours later the bottle was dry, their throats were dry, and the watchman had called three o’clock of a cold clear morning. “Jehan, I'm worn out,” Barry said, “you’d better send me back.” The alchemist was too polite, too grateful, and perhaps also too tired to argue. Barry stood stiffly inside the pentagram, a tall bony figure muffled in a brown blanket, smoking a Gauloise Bleue. “Adieu,” Lenoir said sadly. “Au revoir,” Barry replied. Lenoir began to read the spell backwards. The candle flickered, his voice softened. “Me audi, haere, haere,” he read, sighed, and looked up. The pentagram was empty. The candle flickered. “But I learned so little!” Lenoir cried out to the empty room. Then he beat