At ten, a boy's too old to cry--before company, at least. So he'd clenched his fists behind his back, and blinked back the tears, and held his mouth to a stiff white line till he could be alone, face pillow-muffled, behind the closed door of his room. And from that moment he'd known that sometime, somehow, he himself would find his way to Crete. School became a place where he greedily snatched up crumbs of mythology and history between dreary hours spent battling his way through all the other subjects his teachers demanded that he learn. High school brought a broader view. He began to see the interrelatedness of learning. Literature, chemistry, physics, Latin--of a sudden he found he loved them all. Yet always, always, there ahead lay Knossos, beckoning. How old had he been when, avidly, he plowed his way through Sir Arthur Evans' "Palace of Minos", groping his way by context past all the unfamiliar words? Thirteen? Fourteen? By high school commencement time, he no longer cared that his parents couldn't understand his passion for things Cretan. College, then. Major in anthropology, minor in classics. Greek now, as well as Latin. Linguistics, too. Comparative cultures, technical photography, ethnological methods, archaeological methods, museum methods. Year after year, course after course. And always, the same goal. Let others weigh and choose between Yucatan and Oceania, Murdering Beach and the Valley of the Kings. For him--ever; always--there was only Minos and Knossos and Bronze Age Crete. Dion Burke, B.A., now, Dion Burke, M.A. * * * * * Then, the last step; the final goal: the onward, upward march to Doctor of Philosophy, Ph.D. Or rather, not quite: not quite Ph.D. And that was where The Director came in. Burke cursed the day he'd met him. A kindly soul, The Director, by his own statement, in spite of his scowl and beetling brows and jutting, heavy-boned, prognathous jaw. So fascinated by all things Minoan. So happy such a brilliant student had selected this most benign of all universities as the one at which to work for his doctorate. It was only a step from there to casual acquaintance with The Research Professor. The Professor was the first universally-acknowledged-as-authentic genius Burke had even known. Even the man's colleagues on the staff of the university's Science Institute agreed that he knew more about certain aspects of electronics than anyone alive. The Professor, it developed, wanted Burke's collaboration on a project--a device he termed a "computational translator" which he felt might solve the riddle of the mysterious Minoan language, if only its hieroglyphics could somehow be reduced to sound. That was when Burke brought out his own idea, his madman's dream for the ultimate archaeological tool. An inverter, he called it; a time inverter, designed to carry researchers back bodily into the past. The Professor scoffed openly when Burke first told him about it.