Feb. 25, 65:
MEMO TO CAPTAIN OF POLICE:
I tell you THEY'RE NOT THERE. Come on over and look for yourself if you don't believe me.
(signed) Lictus,
CAPTAIN OF THE ARENA
Feb. 25, 65:
Listen, Lictus:
I don't know what kind of a game you think you're playing, but I haven't time to bother with it right now. Whether you know it or not, the Games load a lot of extra work on the police. I'm up to my ears in details connected with them, and I won't put up with having you on my neck, too. I've got the receipt signed by your jailer, on delivery. Any more noise from your direction and I'll turn it, together with your recent memos, over to the Emperor himself and you can straighten it out with him.
Papirius
Feb. 25, 2631:
Dear Diary:
What shall I do? How like that sneaky, underhanded physicist to be studying historical force lines in the Roman era, without mentioning it to me. Myers came into lunch today fairly frothing with what can only be described as childish excitement and alarm. It seems he had discovered a hole in the time-fabric in the year 65, although he hasn't so far been able to place its exact time and location (this is, of course, my sixteen Christians) and he tried to frighten us all with lurid talk about a possible time collapse or distortion that might well end the human race—if the hole was not found and plugged. This is, of course, the most utter nonsense. Time collapse, indeed! But I can take no chances on his discovering what actually happened, and so I realized right away that I had to plug the hole.
The idea of putting back my Romans is, of course, unthinkable. They are beginning to respond in a most interesting manner to some spatial relationship tests I have been giving them. Therefore I cleverly sounded out Myers to find the necessary factors to plug the hole. I gather that any sixteen men would do, provided they conformed to the historically important characteristics of the Roman group. This sounded simple when he first said it, but since then the problem has been growing in my mind. For the important characteristics are clearly that they be all Christians who are willing to die for their faith. I might easily find such a group in Roman times but in order to hide the gap my replacements will make I will have to take them from some other era—one Myers is not studying. I have only a day or two at most. Oh, dear diary, what shall I do?
Thanks to Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders for providing the text for this work of public domain literature - and many, many others.