lure and high blood pressure," and having a last
quiet smile at having cheated the bomb, when Bruce jumped up and back
from the chest.

"That does it!" he announced cheerily. "She's as safe as the Bank of
England."

Sevensee and Maud stopped themselves just short of knocking him down and
I said to myself, "Hey, let's get a move on! I thought heart attacks
were fast."

Before anyone else could speak, Beau did. He had turned around from the
Major Maintainer and pulled aside one of the earphones.

"I got headquarters," he said crisply. "They told me how to disarm the
bomb--I merely said I thought we ought to know. What did you do, sir?"
he called to Bruce.

"There's a row of four ankhs just below the lock. The first to your left
you give a quarter turn to the right, the second a quarter turn to the
left, same for the fourth, and you don't touch the third."

"That is it, sir," Beau confirmed.

The long silence was too much for me; I guess I must have the shortest
span for unspoken relief going. I drew some nourishment out of my
restored arteries into my brain cells and yelled, "Siddy, I know I'm a
tricksy trull and the High Vixen of all Foxes, but what the Hell is
Peterhouse?"

"The oldest college at Cambridge," he told me rather coolly.

CHAPTER 16

"Familiar with infinite universe sheafs and open-ended postulate
systems?--the notion that everything is possible--and I mean
everything--and everything has happened. _Everything._"

--Heinlein

THE POSSIBILITY-BINDERS

An hour later, I was nursing a weak highball and a black eye in the
sleepy-time darkness on the couch farthest from the piano, half watching
the highlighted party going on around it and the bar, while the Place
waited for rendezvous with Egypt and the Battle of Alexandria.

Sid had swept all our outstanding problems into one big bundle and,
since his hand held the joker of the Minor Maintainer, he had settled
them all as high-handedly as if they'd been those of a bunch of
schoolkids.

It amounted to this:

We'd been Introverted when most of the damning things had happened, so
presumably only we knew about them, and we were all in so deep one way
or another that we'd all have to keep quiet to protect our delicate
complexions.

Well, Erich's triggering the bomb did balance rather neatly Bruce's
incitement to mutiny, and there was Doc's drinking, while everybody who