and jarring texts that it summarized had been systematically
destroyed, one by one, after the Galactic Historian had stripped them of
their objective information. If an historical event was not included in
the manuscript, it failed as an event. It ceased to have reality.

The responsibility was the Galactic Historian's alone and he did not
take it lightly. But he had a lot on his minds and, of late, he hadn't
been sleeping well. He was overworked and over-tired and over-anxious.
He hadn't seen his wives for two Mixxx months and he was worried about
them--all fifty of them.

He never should have let them take the Hub cruise in the first place.
But they'd been so enthusiastic and so eager that he simply hadn't had
the hearts to let them down. Now, despite his better judgments, he was
beginning to wonder if they might not be on the make for another
coordinator.

Wives trouble, on top of all his chronological trouble, was too much.
The Galactic Historian could hardly be blamed for wanting to see the
last of the manuscript, for wanting to transmit it to his publishers,
potential hiatuses and all, and take the next warp for the Hub.

But he was an historian--_the_ historian, in fact--and he persisted
heroically in his task, rereading stale paragraphs and checking dreary
dates, going over battles and conquests and invasions and interregnums.
Despite his mood and despite the heat, the manuscript probably would
have arrived at his publishers chronologically complete. So complete, in
fact, that schoolteachers all over the galaxy would have gotten the
textbook they had always wanted--a concise chronicle of everything that
had ever happened since the explosion of the primeval atom, a history
textbook that no other history textbook could contradict for the simple
reason that there were no other history textbooks.

As it was, they got the textbook, but it did not contain everything that
had ever happened. Not quite.

Two factors were responsible for the omission. The first was an
oversight on the part of the Galactic Historian. With so much on his
minds, he had forgotten to number the pages of the manuscript.

The second factor was the breeze.

The breeze was the ultimate archfiend and there can be no question as to
its motivation. Nothing short of sheer malice could have caused it
suddenly to remember its function after neglecting that function all
evening.

All evening it had been tiptoeing down the hillsides and across t