The rohorse emitted several realistic whinnies, backed out of its "stall", trotted smartly over to his side, and nuzzled his right pauldron. Mallory mounted--not gracefully, it is true, but at least without the aid of the winch he would have needed if his armor had been manufactured in the sixth century--and inserted the red pommel of his spear in the stirrup socket. Then, activating the _Yore's_ lock, he rode across the imaginary drawbridge that spanned the mirage-moat, and set forth into the forest. As the "portcullis" closed behind him, symbolically bringing phase one of Operation Sangraal to a close, he thought of Jason Perfidion. * * * * * Standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall fireplace in the big balconied room, Perfidion said, "Mallory, you're wasting your time. Worse, you're wasting mine." The room climaxed a vertical series of slightly less sumptuous chambers known collectively as the Perfidion Tower, and the Perfidion Tower stood with a score of balconied brothers on a blacktop island in the exact center of Kansas' largest golp course. A short distance from the fraternal gathering stood yet another tower--the false tower into which Mallory had lumillusioned his TSB upon his arrival. On the Golp Terrace, as the blacktop island was called, everyone and everything conformed--or else. The room itself was known to time-thieves as "Perfidion's Lair". And yet there was nothing about Jason Perfidion--nothing physical, that is--that suggested the predator. He was Mallory's age--thirty-three--tall, dark of hair, and strikingly handsome. He looked like--and was--a highly successful businessman with a triplex on Get-Rich-Quick Street, and he gave the impression that he was as honest as the day was long. Just the same, the predator was there, and if you were alert enough you could sometimes glimpse it peering out through the smoky windowpanes of his eyes. It wasn't peering out now, though. It was sleeping. However, it was due to wake up any second. "Then you're not interested in fencing the Holy Grail?" Mallory asked. Annoyance intensified the slight swarthiness of Perfidion's cheeks. "Mallory, you know as well as I do that the Grail never really existed, that it was nothing more than the mead-inspired daydream of a bunch of quixotic knights. So go and get your hair cut and forget about it." "But suppose it _did_ exist," Mallory insisted. "Suppose, tomorrow afternoon at this time, I were to come in here and set it down on this desk here? How much could you get for it?" Perfidion laughed. "How much _couldn't_ I get for it! Why, without even stopping to think I can name you a dozen collectors who'd give their right arm for it." "I'm not interested in right arms," Mallory said. "I'm interested in dollars. How many Kennedees could you get for it?"