"But of course it’s Poundbury Man. It must be Pound-bury Man. Why, what else would it be?" His thin, brown-flecked hand made an uncertain movement toward his lips.

"Hard to say," Gideon’s fingers brushed the fragment’s edges with seeming carelessness. "It’s old, all right. Not thirty thousand years, but a good two or three thousand anyway. On a guess I’d say she might be from one of the brachycephalic Beaker populations, one of the later groups, maybe 1400 or 1500 b.c."

"No, no." Professor Hall-Waddington shook his head querulously. "It’s quite impossible, I tell you. How could… how…?"

His voice sputtered to a stop as he took his first good look at the skull. "Why," he said, pointing an accusatory finger at it, "that’s not Pummy."

He snatched it from Gideon. "Do you know what this is? It’s from Sutton Bell-you know Sutton Bell? A later Beaker site near Avebury-1500 b.c. or thereabouts. Look here." He hunted briefly along the skull’s jagged perimeter and found some faded, tiny numbers written in pen: SB J6-2. "You see? But how very odd! How did it get into Pummy’s case? And where’s Pummy?"

"This fragment-is it from the museum’s collection?"

"Yes, of course, but it ought to be in storage in the basement." The tense skin around his eyes relaxed slightly. "Someone must have accidentally exchanged the two, don’t you think? Why, Pummy must be right downstairs in the basement."

The run to the basement was made with a speed and directness of which Gideon had thought Professor Hall-Waddington incapable. Once there, the doors of a metal storage cabinet were thrown ajar, the contents hastily rummaged through, and finally the lid of a dusty cardboard box labeled SB J6-2 was flung heedlessly across the room. Professor Hall-Waddington thrust his face into the box.

"Empty! Pummy…Pummy appears to have been…" He held the box in trembling hands and looked up at Gideon with wondering eyes. "But why would anyone steal a thirty-thousand-year-old parieto-occipital calvareal fragment?"