“So…a Latin tongue!” Stane’s eyes glittered. The blaster shook in his hand. “When be you from?”

“The twentieth century after Christ, and our land hight Lyonesse. It lies across the western ocean—”

“America!” It was a gasp. ‘Was it ever called America?”

“No. I wot not what you speak of.”

Stane shuddered uncontrollably. Mastering himself: “Know you the Roman tongue?”

Everard nodded.

Stane laughed nervously. ‘Then let us speak that. If you know how sick I am of this local hog language…” His Latin was a little broken, obviously he had picked it up in this century, but fluent enough. He waved the blaster. “Pardon my discourtesy. But I have to be careful.”

“Naturally,” said Everard. “Ah…my name is Mencius, and my friend is Iuvenalis. We came from the future, as you have guessed; we are historians, and time travel has just been invented.”

“Properly speaking, I am Rozher Schtein, from the year 2987. Have you…heard of me?”

‘Who else?” said Everard. “We came back looking for this mysterious Stane who seemed to be one of the crucial figures of history. We suspected he might have been a time traveler, peregrinator temporis, that is. Now we know.”

“Three years,” Schtein began pacing feverishly, the blaster swinging in his hand; but he was too far off for a sudden leap. “Three years I have been here. If you knew how often I have lain awake, wondering if I would succeed…Tell me, is your world united?”

“The world and the planets,” said Everard. “They have been for a long time.” Inwardly, he shivered. His life hung on his ability to guess what Schtein’s plans were.

“And you are a free people?”

‘We are. That is to say, the Emperor presides, but the Senate makes the laws and it is elected by the people.”

There was an almost holy look on the gnomish face, transfiguring it. “As I dreamed,” whispered Schtein. “Thank you.”

“So you came back from your period to…create history?”

“No,” said Schtein. “To change it.”

Words tumbled out of him, as if he had wished to speak and dared not for many years: “I was a historian too. By chance I met a man who claimed to be a merchant from the Saturnian moons, but since I had lived there once, I saw through the fraud. Investigating, I learned the truth. He was a time traveler from the very far future.

“You must understand, the age I lived in was a terrible one, and as a psychographic historian I realized that the war, poverty, and tyranny which cursed us were not due to any innate evil in man, but to simple cause and effect. Machine technology had risen in a world divided against itself, and war grew to be an ever larger and more destructive enterprise. There had been periods of peace, even fairly long ones; but the disease was too deep-rooted, conflict was a part of our very civilization. My family had been wiped out in a Venusian raid, I had nothing to lose. I took the time machine after…disposing…of its owner.