Chilled by his brush with the past, Breton tried to increase his hold on the present, but Kate and the Palfreys were still absorbed in the unusual sample of automatic writing. He listened for a moment as they went through the ritual of trying to identify the author, then allowed his mind to drift in a warm alcoholic haze. A lot seemed to have happened in an evening which had started off in an atmosphere of distilled dullness. I should have stayed in the office with Carl, he thought. The Blundell Cement Company survey had to be com pleted in less than a week, and had been going slowly even before the unlikely twenty milligal discrepancies in the gravimeter readings showed up. Perhaps they had not been corrected properly. Carl was good, but there were so many factors to be considered in gravity surveying — sun and moon positions, tidal movements, elastic deformation of the Earth’s crust, etc. Anybody could make a mistake, even Carl. And anybody could send or receive an anonymous phone call. I was crazy to imagine all those specially engineered connotations — I was caught off balance, that’s all. The call was a psychological banana skin and nothing more. Good phrase, that… and the whiskey’s good too. Even the Palfreys are all right if you look at them the right way — especially Miriam. Nice figure. Too bad that she had to let her whole life be influenced by the fact she was born with that Hollywood Inca M.G.M. Ancient Egyptian priestess face. If she looked like Elizabeth Taylor she could come around here every night… Or even Robert Taylor…

Feeling himself borne up on a malty cloud of benevolence, Breton tuned in again on the conversation across the room and heard Kate say something about Oscar Wilde.

“Not again,” he protested mildly. “Not Oscar Wilde again!”

Kate ignored him and Miriam smiled her sculptured smile, but Gordon Pa]frey was in the mood to talk.

“We aren’t saying that Oscar Wilde communicated these words, John. But somebody did — and the style of some of the stuff is identical to that of Wilde’s early prose — “