“That famous.” The blond beard worked the way a child’s face does when it’s about to cry.“That famous! ”

“That famous!” Mr. Glescu assured him. “Who is the man with whom modern painting, in its full glory, is said to have definitely begun? Who is the man whose designs and special manipulations of color have dominated architecture for the past five centuries, who is responsible for the arrangement of our cities, the shape of our every artifact, the very texture of our clothing.”

“Me?” Morniel inquired weakly.

“You!” No other man in the history of art has exerted such a massive influence over design or over so wide an area of art for so long a period of time. To whom can I compare you, sir? To what other artist in history can I compare you?”

“Rembrandt?” Morniel suggested. He seemed to be trying to be helpful. “Da Vinci?”

Mr. Glescu sneered. “Rembrandt and Da Vinci in the same breath as you? Ridiculous! They lacked your universality, your taste for the cosmic, your sense of the all-encompassing. No, to relate you properly to an equal, one must go outside painting, to literature, possibly. Shakespeare, with his vast breadth of understanding, with the resounding organ notes of his poetry and with his tremendous influence on the later English language—but even Shakespeare, I’m afraid, even Shakespeare—” He shook his head sadly.

“Wow!” breathed Morniel Mathaway.

“Speaking of Shakespeare,” I broke in, “do you happen to know of a poet named David Dantziger? Did much of his work survive?”

“Is that you?”

“Yes,” I told the man from 2487 A.D. eagerly. “That’s me, Dave Dantziger.”

He wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t seem to remember any—What school of poetry do you belong to?”

“Well, they call it by various names. Anti-imagist is the most usual one. Anti-imagist or post-imagist.”

“No,” said Mr. Glescu after thinking for a while. “The only poet I can remember for this time and this part of the world is Peter Tedd.”