McGregor winced. "I will be damned," Pete said.

She continued inexorably, "Does the name Klaus Barbie mean anything to either of you?"

"The Butcher of Lyon," Pete exclaimed. "I went through there not long after the Nazis left. What about him?"

"He's living in South America now, because he was a resource to our intelligence agencies and we helped spirit him away from the French. Just about thirty years from now, he'll finally get captured and we'll get around to apologizing to France."

Pete started to say, "I don't believe it," but the words stuck in his throat.

"Shall I go on?" Michelle asked McGregor. "Or will you believe I have some reason for doing things like I am?"

"You have an unpleasant way of making your points," he said, but took the argument no further.

She unlocked the garage door, swung it up, turned on the light, and closed it behind the three of them. The front third of the garage held the same sort of stuff Pete's did: a couple of trashcans, a lawnmower, some gardening and hand tools, a pile of boxes filled with miscellaneous junk. The rest was walled off. A door had been cut in the wall; a stout deadbolt gleamed above the knob.

"This is where I do my real work," she said as she unbolted and unlocked it.

She reached for a light switch just to the side of the door. Pete was not sure what to expect?probably something like the inside of a flying saucer. It wasn't like that. The general impressions reminded him of his own working area: office furniture, lots of books and records. There was an amenity he wished he had thought of for himself?a small refrigerator?in one corner.

The more he looked, though, the stranger things got. The television set was no model he had seen before, and he did not know what the small box, full of knobs and buttons, attached to it was. The radio, record player, and speakers were similarly recognizable but not familiar, and seemed somehow naked out by themselves without a cabinet.

And the gadget on the desk had a keyboard, but if its mother was a typewriter, she had been unfaithful with a TV set. Wires led to a couple of other unfamiliar machines?no, wait, there was paper in one of them. "No wonder your paper looks like that!" Pete said. "You've got little side-strips for the holes to mesh with the sprockets of the electric printer, and then you just peel them off. How clever!"

"That was the hardest thing to install," she remarked. "I don't want to say much about how I travel, but I can't bring anything back with me that I can't carry. These days I mostly stay here, anyway, unless I need something I can only get uptime. Happens I like it here."

Pete walked over to the desk. There was a magazine on it, next to the keyboard-cum-screen. He did not recognize the title, or the emblem prominently displayed on the cover: a stylized rabbit's head in a bow tie. "Gala 33rd Anniversary Issue!" the magazine proclaimed. The date (seeing that gave him chills) let him make a quick subtraction.

"It's almost ready to begin." The connection with his own times was cheering, in a way. Then he noticed something else. "This cost five dollars?" he said in horror.

"It's not as awful as it sounds," Michelle reassured him. "In terms of 1953 money, it's somewhere between a dollar and a dollar and a half."

He frowned. Not even the postwar inflation had been as bad as that. Some things in the future looked to be mixed blessings after all.

He picked up the magazine. "May I?"

"Go ahead," she said. There was something in her voice he could not quite read. She kept her face carefully blank as she went on, "In some ways it will probably interest you more than it does me."

The first few pages were mostly ads. The quality of the color reproduction surpassed anything 1953 could offer. Pete gaped at the lines of the cars. They were the most blatantly different element, though fashions had also changed, women's hairstyles were new, and mustaches and beards were common on men.

The magazine fell open naturally at the center. A very pretty girl smiled out at Pete. "Ah, I see what you meant; it's like Esquire," he said, and opened the foldout.

He closed it in a hurry, scarlet to the roots of his hair. "Where did you get this, this pornography?" he stammered.

He turned even redder when he saw how hard she was trying not to laugh at him. "By my standards, it isn't pornography; in fact, it's very mild, compared to some others," she said gently. "And I bought it at the same place I got my little calculator?the Rexall's at the corner of Vermont and Gardena Boulevard."

"You bought it yourself? You didn't have a man get it for you? I don't believe it. How could you show your face anywhere afterward?"

"Women do a lot of things in my time that they can't do here-and-now." She eyed him with disconcerting directness, smiled so that her lips parted very slightly. Did that mean what he thought it did? He was not sure he wanted to know. He had never seriously looked at another woman since he married Katherine, but there was no denying he felt drawn to Michelle Gordian now. He could not tell where his interest in her for her origin stopped and his interest in her as a person?and as a woman?began.

He was grateful when she changed the subject, and suspected her to be aware of it. She said, "Anyhow, the pictures weren't the reason I bought the magazine. It has a Clarke story in it that I want to use."

For a moment, all that did was to convince Pete that the publication wasn't obscene, at least in its own context: he could not imagine Arthur Clarke publishing in anything that was. Then the full meaning of her words hit him. "You're saying you've plagiarized all your work, then?" he asked coldly. "So that's why you came back here?to make an easy living off what other people have done." His liking for her flickered and blew out.

"It certainly looks that way," McGregor put in. Where exotic technology had lured Pete, with editor's instinct McGregor had been drawn to the bookshelves. Most of the volumes there were pocket books. Some of the writers' names were familiar, others not. The books were shelved alphabetically by author's last name; Pete's glance flicked to the L's. He was startled to see how much he had done?would have done??will have done? He gave up on the right verb form.

In any case, McGregor was holding several books in his hand. He showed one to Pete. "You'll notice it's called Neutron Star," he said. "It also has 'At the Core' and 'The Handicapped' in it. Here's another one: The Hugo Winners, Volume V, with 'Not So You'd Notice.' I can go on for a while, if you like."

He looked at Michelle Gordian as at some particularly unpleasant insect, an expression Pete understood completely. He had always reckoned thieves of other people's work beneath contempt; that the authors of the stories stolen here could have no chance to prove these words their own only made it worse.

Pete could not even bring himself to respect the way Michelle stood up to the scorn he and McGregor directed at her. "Don't you want to hear my reason for doing what I'm doing?" she asked.

"Does it matter?" Pete ground out. He felt ashamed of his thoughts of a few minutes before.

"It's obvious anyway," McGregor said. "It's one of the oldest clich?s in science fiction?the time-traveler using special knowledge to get rich. I never thought I'd see anyone actually do it, that's all."

" 'Get rich?' " Michelle echoed. It was her turn to flush now, but from anger rather than embarrassment. "Not likely, at three cents a word and down. If money were what I wanted, there are easier ways than spending so much time in front of my word processor." Seeing their uncomprehending looks, she jabbed a thumb at the mutant typewriter.

Pete thought of his own troubles making ends meet, but her expostulation did nothing to move McGregor. "What then?" the editor snapped. "Look at the name you've built for yourself here and now. Who are you up in your own time?"