in as straight a course as possible.

In the east, the moon was just beginning to rise; in the west, traces
of the sunset lingered blood-red just above the horizon. On the
highway below, a knight sitting astride a brown rohorse and bearing a
white shield with a red cross in the center was riding toward Carbonek
to challenge a twenty-second century "felon paynim" in imitation
Age-of-Chivalry armor. In the valley Mallory had just left behind him
there were two castles named _Yore_, and soon, a third would pop into
existence and yet another Mallory come riding out. Mallory grinned. It
was a little bit like playing chess.

The forest which Easy Money presently entered was parklike in places,
and sometimes the trees thinned out into wide, moonlit meadows.
Crossing one of the meadows, Mallory saw the first star, and when at
length Easy Money emerged on the highway, the heavens were decked out
in typical midsummer panoply. The rohorse had followed its programming
almost perfectly and had emerged at a point just south of the lane
leading to the castle of Carbonek. All Mallory had to do was to
encephalo-guide it farther down the highway to a point beyond the site
of the forthcoming joust. While doing so, he kept well within the
concealing shadows of the bordering oaks and beeches where the ground
was soft and could give forth no telltale _clip-clop_ of hoofbeats.
His circumspection proved wise--as in one sense, of course, it already
had--and when the false Sir Launcelot came riding by on his way to the
castle and the chamber of the Sangraal, he was no more aware of
Mallory III's presence by the roadside than he would presently be
aware of Mallory II's presence in the shadows of the trees that
bordered the lane.

Mallory III grinned again and brought Easy Money to a halt just beyond
the next bend. "Wit ye well, Sir Jason, that thy hours be numbered,"
he said.

He remained seated in the saddle, feeling pretty good about the
world. In no time at all, if his one-man ambuscade came off, he would
be on his way back to the _Yore_, and thence to the twenty-second
century and a haircut. Selling the Sangraal without the aid of a
professional time-fence like Perfidion would be difficult, of course,
but it could be done, and once it was done, he, Mallory, could take
his place on Get-Rich-Quick Street with the best of them, and no
questions would be asked. There was, to be sure, the problem of what
to do about a certain damosel that hig