The professor was an important and a busy man, one of the senior heads of the School of Theology at The College. Established in Kansas in 1870 with a sister college in Indiana, it had fared well over the years and listed among its alumni a number of senators, judges, and well-known figures from all walks of life. In fact, a good degree from The College seemed a passport to a good job in law or politics or Washington. Walters proudly described it to the uninitiated as a neoconservative fundamentalist institution. It seemed there was nothing—and no one—that Professor Fitzalan Walters didn’t know. A decade ago he had written a seminal book around the subject of the Second Coming of Christ. It suited Calvin’s moral beliefs and broader interests to look for a lecturing position that would pay enough to feed him while he got his master’s and then, he hoped, his doctorate; and when an advertisement for a post at The College seemed to offer what he was looking for, he applied. Professor Walters—FW as he liked to be called by his friends—had shown a keen interest in Calvin at their first interview. They had talked at length about his ancestor Dr. John Dee, whom he already knew to be a forebear. It was certainly Calvin’s job to ingratiate himself, but actually he was flattered: some people thought Dee a crackpot, but FW accorded him respect and was curious. Many people believed that Dee had indeed, as promised by the angel conversations, been given details about the Apocalypse and the Second Coming. What might have been contained in his writings, they had conjectured, and what had become of a great many of these? It was known that Dee’s house had been robbed, and his library looted while he was abroad in Bohemia in the 1580s. Walters seemed to know many details about Dee’s life and work, many more even than Calvin.