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