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where they had worn a red mark, and combed fingers through his beard. It was a well-defined beard, following the conventional course along his sharp jaw from sideburns to moustache, but it seemed to get mussed every hour or so, as did his hair. He was puffing from the bike ride more than usual. Either he had put on some weight in the last week, he deduced, or the simple erosion of age had nicked a little deeper. He was fifty-two and kept in moderately good condition. Medical research had shown enough of a correlation between exercise and long life to keep him at it.
    He pushed open the glass doors and headed for Renfrew's laboratory.
    Every week or so he had come round to peer judiciously at the equipment and nod, but in truth he learned little by the visits. His interests lay in the theory behind the electronic maze. Gingerly he entered the busy ball of sound that was the lab.
    He could see Renfrew through the office window–stocky, rumpled as usual, his shirt un-tucked, his mouse-brown hair falling untidily over his forehead. He was shuffling papers round on his cluttered desk. Markham did not recognize the other man. He assumed it was Peterson and was amused by the contrast between the two. Peterson's dark hair was smoothly in place and he was expensively and elegantly tailored. He looked suave and self-confident and, thought Markham, altogether a tough bastard to deal with. Experience had taught him that it was hard to get through to that type of cool, self-contained Englishman.
    He opened the office door, giving it a perfunctory knock as he did so.
    Both men turned towards him. Renfrew appeared relieved and jumped up, knocking a book off his desk.
    "Ah, Markham, here you are," he said unnecessarily. "This is Mr.
    Peterson from the Council."
    Peterson rose smoothly from his chair and extended a hand.
    "How do you do, Dr. Markham."
    Markham shook his hand vigorously.
    "Glad to meet you. Have you looked at John's experiment yet?"
    "Yes, just now." Peterson looked faintly perturbed by the speed with which Markham came to the point. "How does the NSF feel about this, do you know?"
    "No opinion so far. I haven't reported to them. They asked me only last week to act as liaison. Can we sit down?"
    Without waiting for an answer Markham crossed the room, cleared the only other chair, and sat down, putting one ankle up on his knee. The other two men resumed their seats, less casually.
    "You're a plasma physicist, is that right, Dr. Markham?"
    "Yes. I'm here on sabbatical leave. Most of my work has been in plasmas until the last few years. I wrote a paper on tachyon theory long ago, before they were discovered and became fashionable. I suppose that's why the NSF asked me to be here."

    "Did you read the copy of the proposal that I sent you?" Peterson asked.
    "Yes, I did. It's good," Markham said decisively. "The theory's fine. I've been working on the ideas behind Renfrew's experiment for some time now."
    "You think this experiment will work, then?"
    "We know the technique works. Whether we can actually communicate with the past–that we don't know."
    "And this set-up here—"Peterson swept an arm towards the laboratory bay, "–can do that?"
    "If we're damned lucky. We know there were similar nuclear resonance experiments at the Cavendish and a few other places, in the States and the Soviet Union, functioning as far back as the 1950s. In principle they could pick up coherent signals induced by tachyons."
    "So we can send them telegrams?"
    "Yes, but that's all. It's a highly restricted form of time travel. This is the only way anyone's figured out how to send messages into the past. We can't transmit objects or people."
    Peterson shook his head. "I did a degree involving social issues and computers. Even I'm—"
    "Cambridge?" Markham broke in.
    "Yes, King's College." Markham nodded to himself and Peterson hesitated. He disliked the American's obvious putting of him in a category. He did the same thing himself, of course, but