And the man himself, this Mr. Glescu, was about the same height as-Morniel and me and he seemed to be not very much older. But there was a something about him—I don’t know, call it quality, true and tremendous quality—that would have cowed the Duke of Wellington. Civilized, maybe that’s the word: he was the most civilized-looking man I’d ever seen.

He stepped forward. “We will now,” he said in a rich, wonderfully resonant voice, “indulge in the twentieth-century custom of shaking hands.”

So we indulged in the twentieth-century custom of shaking hands with him. First Morniel, then me—and both very gingerly. Mr. Glescu shook hands with a peculiar awkwardness that made me think of the way an Iowan farmer might eat with chopsticks for the first time.

The ceremony over, he stood there and beamed at us. Or, rather, at Morniel.

“What a moment, eh?” he said. “What a supreme moment!”

Morniel took a deep breath and I knew that all those years of meeting process servers unexpectedly on the stairs had begun to pay off. He was recovering; his mind was beginning to work again.

“How do you mean ‘what a moment’?” he asked. “What’s so special about it? Are you the—the inventor of time travel?”

Mr. Glescu twinkled with laughter. “Me? An inventor?

Oh, no. No, no! Time travel was invented by Antoinette Ingeborg in—but that was after your time. Hardly worth going into at the moment, especially since I only have half an hour.”

“Why half an hour?” I asked, not so much because I was curious as because it seemed like a good question.

“The skindrom can only be maintained that long,” he elucidated. “The skindrom is—well, call it a transmitting device that enables me to appear in your period. There is such an enormous expenditure of power required that a trip into the past is made only once every fifty years. The privilege is awarded as a sort of Gobel. I hope I have the word right. It is Gobel isn’t it? The award made in your time?”