He swore. Perfidion!
So that was why the man had broken with tradition and invited a common time-thief to a game of golp!
If he had been anyone but Perfidion he would have gimmicked the controls of the Yore so that Mallory would have wound up directly in the fifteenth century sans sojourn in the sixth. But being Perfidion, he had wanted Mallory to know how completely he was being outsmarted. The chances were, though, that if the man had anticipated the near-coincidence of the two visits to the chamber of the Sangraal he would have seen to it that Mallory had never gotten a chance to use his Sir Galahad suit.
Returning to the control room, Mallory saw that the lumillusion panel had been pre-programmed to materialize the Yore as a fifteenth-century English castle. Apparently it had been in the books all along for him to become a fifteenth-century knight, just as it had been in the books all along for Perfidion to become the proprietor of a misplaced hot-dog stand.
Mallory laughed. He had gotten the best of the bargain after all. At least there was no smog in the fifteenth century.
Who was he supposed to be? he wondered. Had his name gone down in history by any chance?
Abruptly he gasped. Was he the Sir Thomas Malory with estates in Northampshire and Warwickshire? Was he the Sir Thomas Malory who had compiled and translated and written Le Morte d'Arthur? Almost nothing about the man's life was known, and probably the little that was known had been assumed. He could have popped up from nowhere, made his fortune through foreknowledge, and been knighted. He could have been a reformed time-thief stranded in the fifteenth century.
But if he, Mallory, was Malory, how in the world was he going to get five hundred chapters of semi-historical data together and pass them off as Le Morte d'Arthur?
Suddenly he understood everything.