I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat.
His voice trembled with emotion. "Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is—"
"But, John," I said as patiently as possible, "what have these holes got to do with you?"
He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence. "What have they to do with me?" he shrilled. "I can't find the right one—that's what!"
I closed my eyes. "Which particular hole are you looking for, John?"
He was speaking rapidly again now.
"I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark—and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole—I fell through."
I closed my eyes. "Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole—is that why you have to find it?"
"Oh I didn't lose anything important," he snapped, "just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited."
His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. "But there's still time for my plan to work out—with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it."