He laughed.

'And now you've all come scuttling here, haven't you? Running from the monster, all the way to America.' She wrinkled her nose. 'Such a poky, dusty room, to be lodging a world-class mind. Godel should have come to Oxford. Einstein too. Better than this. I mean, they have cloisters built of brick! Bertrand Russell says that Princeton is as like Oxford as monkeys could make it.' She laughed prettily.

'Perhaps Einstein and Godel feel safer here than in an England which contains such people as you.'

'You're not very nice to me, are you, all things considered? Anyway Godel would be under no threat in the Reich. He's not even a Jew.' She began plucking books from the shelf, and flicked through their worn pages.

Ben gathered his clothes from where they had been scattered on the floor, and began to pull them on. 'You've had your fun. Maybe it's time you told me what you want from me.'

'Well, there are rumours about you,' she said smoothly. 'You and your professor. Look at these titles. Being And Time by Martin Heidegger. An Experiment With Time by John William Dunne. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, Edmund Husserl. You worked with Godel in Vienna, and now that he is here at the IAS you're starting to work with him again, aren't you? But not on the outer reaches of mathematical logic.' She glanced at a pencil note on the flyleaf of the Husserl, scrawled by Godel himself. 'My German is still poor… "The distinction between physical time and internal time-consciousness. Is that right?' As she leafed through the books there was a scent of dust, and stale tobacco – of Vienna. 'Ah. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Thought I'd find that here!'

He began to feel defensive, shut in, a feeling he remembered from Vienna, when he had been the target of the 'anti-relativity clubs' and other anti-Semitic groups. 'How did you find all this out? Slept with half the faculty, did you?'