Port. Lord, it
would be good to get home again and get a haircut! "Here goes," he
told Rowena, and threw the switch.

There was a faint tremor. "Brace yourself, Rowena," he said, and took
her over to the control-room telewindow.

[Illustration]

Together, they gazed upon the screen. Mallory gasped. The vista of
spiral suburban dwellings which he had been expecting was not in the
offing. In its stead was a green, tree-stippled countryside. In the
distance, a castle was clearly discernible.

He stared at it. It wasn't a sixth-century job like Carbonek--it was
much more modern. But it was still a castle. Obviously, the jump-board
had malfunctioned and thrown the _Yore_ only a little ways into the
future, the while leaving it in pretty much the same locale.

He returned to the jump-board to find out. Just as he reached it, its
lights flickered and went out. The time and space-dials, however,
remained illumined long enough for him to see when and where the TSB
had re-materialized. The year was 1428 A.D.; the locale, Warwickshire.

Mallory made tracks for the generator room. The generator was smoking,
and the room reeked with the stench of shorted wires.

He swore. Perfidion!

So that was why the man had broken with tradition and invited a common
time-thief to a game of golp!

If he had been anyone but Perfidion he would have gimmicked the
controls of the _Yore_ so that Mallory would have wound up directly in
the fifteenth century sans sojourn in the sixth. But being Perfidion,
he had wanted Mallory to know how completely he was being outsmarted.
The chances were, though, that if the man had anticipated the
near-coincidence of the two visits to the chamber of the Sangraal he
would have seen to it that Mallory had never gotten a chance to use
his Sir Galahad suit.

Returning to the control room, Mallory saw that the lumillusion panel had
been pre-programmed to materialize the _Yore_ as a fifteenth-century
English castle. Apparently it had been in the books all along for him to
become a fifteenth-century knight, just as it had been in the books all
along for Perfidion to become the proprietor of a misplaced hot-dog stand.

Mallory laughed. He had gotten the best of the bargain after all. At
least there was no smog in the fifteenth century.

Who was he supposed to be? he wondered. Had his name gone down in
history by any chance?

Abruptly he gasped. Was _he_ the Sir Thomas Malory with estates in
Northampshire an