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seemed more a response to his plight than a physical reaction to the raki. “What will they do to a foreigner, hey? A terrible Turk who has stolen money from the government? I did not know, at first—but who will believe that?”
    He stared glumly into his empty glass.
    Sue got up smoothly and took the bottle. “I think, Mustafa,” she said mildly as she poured and added ice for all of them, “that you’d better tell us what your boss is doing with the money and why they’ll think he’s a candidate for the funny farm. Sorry, why he’s crazy.”
    â€œDr. Gustafson,” the Turk said, “thinks he has met persons from another time. Our future. They call themselves Travelers. A man named Selve and two women with him.” Mustafa frowned, because his words did not properly indicate Selve’s position in the hierarchy, even according to Moslem perceptions. He continued regardless, “Dr. Gustafson thinks he has been told how to build a, a time transport. He has used funds from his grant and he has done so. Built it. We have built it.” Mustafa drew a tight circle around his heart with an index finger.
    â€œI think,” said Charles Eisley, “that there are some avenues that can be profitably attempted. To present the data in a fashion that minimizes the danger to your, ah, status, Mustafa.”
    He swirled the ice and raki in the bottom of his glass, but he kept his eyes candidly, disarmingly, on those of the young man consulting him. He had met Bayar as a friend. Both men had been lonely for things which were simply alien to most of the people with whom they came in contact, even at a cosmopolitan university. Now, however, the Turk was presenting himself as a “case”; and Eisley’s reflexes were taking over whether he liked it or not. “It’s to nobody’s benefit to have a major flap about this, after all.… A respected professor losing, ah, touch as he gets older. Outsiders, perhaps cultists of some sort, taking advantage of him.”
    Eisley stood up, sucking in his gut as was his recent practice. He had not been conscious of his body before he met Sue. He knew that he was soft and that he carried thirty pounds of which the weight charts would not approve; but diplomacy is a sedentary occupation, and Charles looked well enough in tailored suits against the men he met on the embassy cocktail circuit. It had hit him like a sledgehammer when his wife left him—not that there was any love lost by then, but the change.
    Which did not mean that Eisley began taking care of his body, only that he began drinking more. Then he met Sue, and there was now an exercise bench hidden from her in the room that had only been box storage until then. He would have changed his will sooner if he had known spirits as joyous as Sue Schlicter lurked in lawyers’ offices.
    â€œSo for embarrassment,” said Mustafa Bayar, a gleam of puppyish hope in his eyes, “you think they will not wish to make examples of the others and even me?”
    â€œIt would make no sense to do so,” said Eisley, aged forty-six and trying to shrink his waistline a decade for his thirty-year-old mistress. His words were true, but what his mind really meant was that as a diplomat, a negotiator, he could see no sense in publicity. He would have felt the same way at learning the Russians were basing nuclear weapons in Greece: get them out quietly, and for God’s sake don’t let the media learn and start a flap. He knew also that many people—and the Army Research Office might take a typically army attitude to diplomatic questions—did not think the way Foreign Service officers were expected to think.
    Sue poured more raki all around. Her face broadened in a slow smile. “You know,” she said, “that may be the best way to cover Mustafa’s ass. But it seems to me that it could cause problems in another way.”
    Eisley pursed