He was holding a fat stack of papers and folders, and he still had the key to the lab in his hand.

“Hullo, Jim,” she said, her back to me, and I wished I could see her face, too.

“What are you doing here?” he said in a voice I knew as well as my own. Good Lord! I was looking at Mr. Dunworthy.

Mr. Dunworthy! He’d told me stories about the infancy of time travel, but I had always thought of him as, you know, Mr. Dunworthy. I hadn’t imagined him as skinny or awkward. Or young. Or in love with somebody he couldn’t have.

“I came to talk to you,” she said. “And to Shoji. Where is he?”

“Meeting with the head,” Mr. Dunwor-Jim said. “Again.” He went over to the table and dumped his load of papers and folders on the end of it.

I switched peepholes, wishing they’d stay put.

“Is this a bad time?” she said.

“The worst of times,” he said, looking through the stack for something. “We’ve got a new head of the history faculty since you left to marry Bitty. Mr. Arnold P. Lassiter. “P” for Prudence. He’s so cautious we haven’t done a drop in three months. ‘Time travel is an endeavor that should not be undertaken without a complete knowledge of how it works.’ Which means filling up forms and more forms. He wants complete analyses on every drop — the ones he’s willing to authorize, that is, which are few and far between — parameter checks, slippage graphs, impact probability stats, security checks—” He stopped rummaging. “How did you get into the lab?”

“It was unlocked,” she said, which was a lie. I twisted my head around, trying to find an angle from which I could see her face.

“Wonderful,” Jim said. “If Prudence finds out, he’ll have a fit.” He found the folder he wanted and pulled it out of the stack. “Why isn’t Bitty the Bishop with you?” he said, almost belligerently.

“He’s in London, appealing the C of E’s ruling.”

Jim’s face changed. “I heard about Coventry’s being declared nonessential,” he said. “I’m sorry, Lizzie.”

Coventry. Lizzie. This was Elizabeth Bittner he was talking to, the wife of the last bishop of Coventry. The frail, white-haired lady I’d interviewed in Coventry. No wonder I’d thought her hair should be lighter.

“Nonessential,” she said. “A cathedral nonessential. Religion will be ruled nonessential next, and then Art and Truth. Not to mention History.” She walked toward the blacked-out windows and out of range.

Will you stand still? I thought.

“It’s so unfair,” she said. “They kept Bristol, you know. Bristol!”

“Why didn’t Coventry make the cut?” Jim said, moving so I couldn’t see him either.

“The C of E ruled that all churches and cathedrals have to be seventy-five percent self-supporting, which means tourists. And the tourists only come to see tombs and treasures. Canterbury’s got Becket, Winchester’s got Jane Austen and a black Tournai marble font, and St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields is in London, which has the Tower and Madame Tussaud’s. We used to have treasures. Unfortunately, they were all destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1940,” she said bitterly.

“There’s the baptistry window of the new cathedral,” Jim said.

“Yes. Unfortunately there’s also a church that looks like a factory warehouse and stained-glass windows that face the wrong way and the ugliest tapestry in existence. Mid-Nineteenth Century was not a good period in art. Or architecture.”

“They come to see the ruins of the old cathedral, don’t they?”

“Some of them. Not enough. Bitty tried to convince the Appropriations Committee that Coventry’s a special case, that it has historical importance, but it didn’t work. World War II was a long time ago. Scarcely anybody remembers it.” She sighed. “The appeal’s not going to work either.”

“What happens then? Will you have to close?”

She must have shaken her head. “We can’t afford to close. The diocese is too far in debt. We’ll have to sell.” She abruptly moved back into my line of sight, her face set. “The Church of the Hereafter made an offer. It’s a New Age sect. Ouija boards, manifestations, conversations with the dead. It’ll kill him, you know.”

“Will he be completely out of a job?”

“No,” she said wryly. “Religion’s nonessential, which means clergy are hard to come by. Rats deserting a sinking ship and all that. They’ve offered him the position of senior canon at Salisbury.”

“Good,” Jim said, too heartily. “Salisbury’s not on the nonessential list, is it?”

“No,” she said. “It has plenty of treasures. And Turner. It’s too bad he couldn’t have come to Coventry to paint. But you don’t understand. Bitty can’t bear to sell it. He’s descended from Thomas Botoner, who helped build the original cathedral. He loves the cathedral. He’d do anything to save it.”

“And you’d do anything for him.”

“Yes,” she said, looking steadily at him. “I would.” She took a deep breath. “That’s why I came to see you. I have a favor to ask.” She stepped eagerly toward him, and they both moved out of my line of sight.

“I was thinking if we could take people back through the net to see the cathedral,” she said, “to see it burn down, they’d realize what it meant, how important it was.”

“Take people back?” Jim said. “We have trouble getting Prudence to approve research drops, let alone tourist excursions.”

“They wouldn’t be tourist excursions,” she said, sounding hurt. “Just a few select people.”

“The Appropriations Committee?”

“And some vid reporters. If we had the public on our side — if they saw it with their own eyes, they’d realize—”

Jim must have been shaking his head, because she stopped and switched tactics. “We wouldn’t necessarily have to go back to the air raid,” she said rapidly. “We could go to the ruins afterward, or — or to the old cathedral. It could be in the middle of the night, when there wouldn’t be anybody in the cathedral. If they could just see the organ and the Dance of Death miserere and the Fifteenth-Century children’s cross for themselves, they’d realize what it meant to have lost Coventry Cathedral once, and they wouldn’t let it happen again.”

“Lizzie,” Jim said, and there was no mistaking that tone. And she had to know it was impossible. Oxford had never allowed sightseeing trips, not even in the good old days, and neither had the net.

She did know it. “You don’t understand,” she said despairingly. “It’ll kill him.”

The door opened, and a short scrawny kid with Asian features came in. “Jim, did you run the parameter—”

He stopped, looking at Lizzie. She must have cut a real swath in Oxford. Like Zuleika Dobson.

“Hullo, Shoji,” Lizzie said.

“Hullo, Liz,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“How’d the meeting with Prudence go?” Jim said.

“About like you’d expect,” Shoji said. “Now it’s the slippage he’s worried about. What’s its function? Why does it fluctuate so much?” His voice became prissy and affected, imitating Lassiter’s voice, “ ‘We must consider all possible consequences before we initiate action.’ ” He reverted to his own voice. “He wants a complete analysis of slippage patterns on all past drops before he’ll authorize any new ones.” He crossed out of my line of sight and over to the computers.

“You’re joking,” Jim said, following him. “That’ll take six months. We’ll never go anywhere.”

“I think that’s the general idea,” Shoji said, sitting down at the middle computer and beginning to type. “If we don’t go anywhere, there’s no risk. Why are the veils down?”

There was no record of a time traveller from the future or the past suddenly materializing in Balliol’s lab. Which either meant I hadn’t been caught or I’d come up with an extremely convincing story. I tried to think of one.

“If we don’t go anywhere,” Jim said, “how are we supposed to learn anything about time travel? Did you tell him science involves experiments?”