Ben snapped, 'You're damn cold, Julia.'

Julia laughed. 'No. Just realistic. Were you lovers?'

They spoke at the same time. 'No,' said Rory, and, 'Only once,' said Ben, more wistfully.

'And it was in pillow talk in Spain, I suppose, that you began to dream of time machines.'

'It was a pooling of interests,' Ben said.

Rory said, 'Studying history, I had come to feel a vast dissatisfaction. It need not have been this way! All the suffering, all the blood spilled – especially that provoked by religions, by prophets of peace. I wondered if it need be so – I longed for it not to be so.' He glanced at Ben. 'Then there was Ben's idle talk of Godel, this eccentric mathematical genius who twisted Einstein's equations and imagined it might be possible to reach out, around what he called "closed timelike curves, to touch the past…'

'That and my dreams,' Ben said.

Julia eyed him. 'What dreams?'

'I have always had intense dreams. Often they are like memories of visits to scenes in the past – and the future. Once or twice-'

'Go on.'

Rory said, 'There was one dream, of the bullet which nearly killed me.' He touched his neck.

'You are precognitive,' Julia said to Ben.

'So John William Dunne might say. He might speak of my animus floating free in a multidimensional spacetime.'

'Is that what you believe?'

'No.' He sighed. 'I'm one of the most rational people you're likely to meet, Julia. I don't even believe in God. And yet others believe such powers of me. Isn't that an irony?'

'And so from all this,' Julia said, 'from hints of precognition, from Godel's speculation about travel into the past, you began to design a time machine.'

'Not a machine,' Rory said. 'Though we gave it a machine-like name.'

'The Loom.'

'Yes. But it's a method, really.'

'A method for touching the past. For changing it. Is that right? And after Spain you came to this institute, where you worked together on realising your "method. You went so far as to wangle time on a calculating engine in Massachusetts. And you, Rory, began to work out, if you could make a change to the history that you found so unsatisfactory, exactly what change should be made.'