"This is June 3, 2054. You are still in Louisville, Kentucky. You are standing in a room adjoining the laboratory in the Time Building on 3rd Street at Eastern Parkway. This is the receiving room. My name is Kevin Ilaria. You've come through time. Is that so impossible to grasp? You're a thinking man. Educated!"
He looked up from the floor.
"Well?"
"So I'm a thinking man and an educated man. And what happens? I'm sapped. I'm shanghaied. I'm walking down Confederate Place to my old fraternity house at 1:00 in the morning. I've just had a row with my girl. I'm heading for the fraternity house to see who'll go down to Herman's and get good and drunk with me. And somebody clobbers me. The next thing I remember I'm sitting in a steel chair in a steel room without any windows. Just like this one. There's a man standing there. A man with watery, myopic eyes under bushy brows and his hair parted in the middle. He's Doctor Borley, of the University of Louisville Chemistry Department. There's another man with him. A little fellow with thick glasses and a crew cut and eyes like the slits between closed Venetian blinds. He's Doctor Schink, of the Psychology Department. They're talking about me."
"Umn hmn. Now you're beginning to sound normal. Doctors Borley and Schink are our agents in 1954. Do you know where you were?"
"I told you. In some sort of steel room without win—"
The man made an impatient gesture with his hand. "No, I mean where. You were in a steel chamber in the Daynolds Metals Plant. It stood on this spot in 1954. Two people knew—know—about that room."
"Doctor Borley and Doctor Schink?"
"I'm glad you've calmed down. Now we can talk."
Jay wasn't quite ready to calm down. "You stand there in that Roman outfit and talk about being calm. To me. To me, Jay Welch, a history major who took his AB from the University of Louisville in 1950. Jay Welch, average guy, who got into an average argument with the girl he pinned in 1950 and went for a walk to drown his sorrows and wound up one hundred years from where—when—he started. I—"