I had a flash. “You wouldn’t mean Nobel, by any chance? The Nobel Prize?”

He nodded his head enthusiastically. “That’s it! The Nobel Prize. The trip is awarded to outstanding scholars as a kind of Nobel Prize. Once every fifty years—the man selected by the gardunax as the most pre-eminent—that sort of thing. Up to now, of course, it’s always gone to historians and they’ve frittered it away on the Siege of Troy, the first atom-bomb explosion at Los Alamos, the discovery of America—things like that. But this year—”

“Yes?” Morniel broke in, his voice quavering. We were both suddenly remembering that Mr. Glescu had known his name. “What kind of scholar are you?”

Mr. Glescu made us a slight bow with his head, “I am an art scholar. My specialty is art history. And my special field in art history is…”

“What?” Morniel demanded, his voice no longer quavering, but positively screechy. “What is your special field?”

Again a slight bow from Mr. Glescu’s head. “You, Mr. Mathaway. In my own period, I may say without much fear of contradiction, I am the greatest living authority on the life and works of Morniel Mathaway. My special field is you.”

Morniel went white. He groped his way to the bed and sat down as if his hips were made of glass. He opened his mouth several times and couldn’t seem to get a sound out. Finally, he gulped, clenched his fists and got a grip on himself.

“Do—do you mean,” he managed to croak at last, “that I’m famous? That famous?”

“Famous? You, my dear sir, are beyond fame. You are one of the immortals the human race has produced. As I put it—rather well if I may say so—in my last book, Mathaway, the Man Who Shaped the Future: ‘How rarely has it fallen to the lot of individual human endeavor to—’ ”