Professor Aylmer Arbuthnot Abercrombie looked up irascibly from the chore of tidying up his notes as the call tone sounded from his desk terminal. He moused the screen's cursor to the Call Accept icon and clicked on it. "Yes?"
A window opened showing the head of a youth aged twenty or so, with collar-length, studentish hair, a wispy attempt at a beard, and shoulders enveloped in a baggy sweater. "Oh, er, Jeremy Qualio here, Professor." He was a post-graduate that Abercrombie had assigned a design project to, in one of the labs below in the building. "We were expecting you here at ten-thirty, sir."
"You were?"
"To review the test of the transcorrelator mixing circuit. You were going to help us set the power parameters for the output stage."
"I was?"
"We've completed the runs with simulated input data and normalized the results. They're here ready for you to check through now."
"They are?" Abercrombie's brow knitted into a frown. He cast around the littered desk for his appointments diary on the offchance that it might give him a way out, but couldn't see it. He was cornered. "Very well, I'll be there shortly," he replied, and cut off the screen.
Abercrombie left his "public" office at the front of the lab area, which he used for receiving visitors and dealing with routine day-to-day affairs. On the way out, he stopped by the open cubicle and reception desk from where the stern, meticulous, and fearsomely efficient figure of Mrs. Crawford, the departmental secretary and custodian of all that pertained to proper procedures, commanded the approach from the elevators.
"Do you have my appointments diary, by any chance?" Abercrombie inquired. "I appear to have mislaid it."
"You took it back this morning."
"Did I?"
)
A time machine can make things so complicated.
