sedative to quiet him," said Ghalil. "He cannot be roused. It would take hours, in any case." 

"I'd like to ask them," said Coghlan bitterly, "what they did to a mirror that would make its surface produce a ghost of itself. It must have been something utterly silly!"

He paced up and down, clenching and unclenching his hands. 

"To make a gadget Duval called a 'magic mirror'"--his tone was sarcastic--"they might try diamond-dust or donkey-dung or a whale's eyelashes. And one of them might work! Somebody did get this gadget, by accident we can't hope to repeat!"

"Why not?"

"We can't think, any more, like lunatics or barbarians or Byzantine alchemists!" snapped Coghlan. "We just can't! It's like a telephone! Useless by itself. You have to have two telephones in two places at the same time. We can see that. To use a thing like this, you have to have two instruments in the same place at different times! With telephones you need a connection of wire, joining them. With this gadget you need a connection of place, joining the times!"

"A singularly convincing fantasy," said Ghalil, his eyes admiring. "And just as you can detect the wire between two telephone instruments--"

"--You can detect the place where gadgets are connected in different times! The connection is cold. It condenses moisture. Heat goes into it and disappears. And I know," said Coghlan defiantly, "that I am talking nonsense! But I also know how to make a connection which will create cold, though I haven't the ghost--_hah_, damn it!--of an idea how to make the instruments it could connect! And making the connection is as far from making the gadgets as drawing a copper wire is from making a telephone exchange! All I know is that an alnico magnet will act as one instrument, so that the connection can exist!"Mannard growled: "What the hell is all this? Stick to facts! What happened to Duval?"

"Tomorrow," said Coghlan in angry calm, "he's going to tell us that he heard faint voices through the silvery film when he played with the magnet. He's going to say the voices were talking in Byzantine Greek. He's going to say he tried to rap on the silver stuff--it looked solid--to attract their attention. And whatever he rapped with went through! He'll say he heard them exclaim, and that he got excited and told them who he was--maybe he'll ask them if they were working with Appolonius, because Appolonius was mentioned on the fly-leaf 

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