“Number 21.” The door was framed by two bushes covered in velvety purple flowers. She unlocked it and handed the key to Matt.

The single room smelled oddly of orange peel, some cleaning fluid, he supposed, and reflected on how far away the nearest orange tree must be. Which implied a thousand-mile chain of interstate commerce.

It looked comfortable. A large bed and bentwood rocking chair. An open rolltop desk with a padded office chair. On the desktop, an inkwell and a potato with two pen nibs stuck into it. What passed for a word processor in this place and time.

She handed him a folded-over piece of paper. “My schedule, Professor. I have Faith Enhancement twice a day, and directed reading in Alien Faiths three times a week. If you need me in those times, step outside and ring the bell in the yard. Another graduate assistant will go find me.”

He looked at the schedule, then his watch. She was due at Faith Enhancement in twenty minutes. “Well, you go on. I’ll settle in here. Then what, dinner?”

“At six. I’ll take you over there.”

She hurried off and he poked around the room. A covered chamber pot under the bed, how convenient. A small closet held stacks of sheets and blankets and a wooden box of candles, along with a red metal box that held matches, handmade and presumably dangerous. A cupboard held a loaf of bread, some hard cheese, and corked bottles of wine and water.

There was one window, with a gauze curtain, and a skylight. So he could read, after and before certain hours, without squandering candles and matches.

Next to the door a strongbox was bolted to the wall. Its padlock used the same key as the door. He unloaded the black bag into it. He held the porn notebook up to the window, but there wasn’t enough light to activate it. Having to go out into the sun would make its utility as an adjunct to masturbation questionable.

A single shelf for books had a Bible and a prayer book, along with a water carafe and glass. He poured a glass and longed for coffee, and realized that the dull ache at the base of his skull was caffeine withdrawal. He stifled a strong urge to go back to that place on Inman Square and squander $20 for a cup of “real coffey.” It would be better to invest it in aspirin and learn to do without.

He sat in the rocker and leafed through the natural science book. He could teach this stuff, second nature, but would he be able to stomach all the religion that kept cropping up?

Out of an obscure impulse, he went to the desk and took out a sheet of paper and duplicated an exercise that had been part of the final exam in undergraduate modern physics: derive the Special Theory of Relativity from first principles—there is no uniquely favored frame of reference and the speed of light is constant in any frame of reference. It took him two pages of scratching out blind alleys, but he wound up in the right place, with equations describing the distortion of measurements when one frame of reference regards another one that’s in motion relative to it.

Time dilation. Saint Albert, you should see me now!

He allowed himself a few moments of fantasy. What would happen if he worked through these equations in front of a classroom here? God does not favor any one position; everything is relative.

Martha came back just before six, to escort him to the faculty dining hall. He was nervous about it, ready for an inquisition. Could he be convincingly polite about religion? Would he have to lie outright, and pretend to believe? Would being honest lead to ostracism, loss of tenure, or burning at the stake? Polite silence was probably the best strategy, and intense observation.

The faculty dining hall was a block away from the student one, with its separate kitchen and, according to Martha, much superior food. (She had a friend who worked there, and occasionally snacked on leftovers.) She handed him over to Father Hogarty and went off to the student trough.

They sat at a table with six others, two of them addressed as “Father” and the rest professors. The Fathers were older, and all had horizontal scars on the forehead; the professors only had cheek scars.

They all treated Matthew with a kind of gravity that had nothing of deference in it. It took him a while to realize that most of them thought he was mad. Divine madness, perhaps, but still crazy. They were conspicuously incurious about the past he claimed to have come from.

It seemed odd that not even one wanted to quiz him about the past—as if they had time travelers drop by for dinner all the time—but then he realized the obvious. Their uniform lack of interest was prearranged; they’d been warned to keep the conversation on safe grounds.

So a lot of it was talk about students and subjects unrelated to Matt’s experience, which was a relief. He could just respond with conventional politeness and safe generalizations.

Hogarty and a younger man, Professor Mulholland, did mention Matt’s future at MIT. The new semester would start in a couple of weeks. He would monitor various natural philosophy classes with the intention of teaching next year. Mulholland would lend him copies of all the course outlines, and he could have Martha copy out the ones he was interested in teaching.

The meal was good, a thick stew of beef and vegetables with dumplings, and included wine with an MIT label, a weird scuppernong flavor that wasn’t bad. It was a 67, four years old.

Martha was waiting for him outside, totally absorbed in reading the Bible under a guttering torch. When he approached, he saw it was actually the Koran; she slapped it shut with a guilty start.

“I brought you some toilet things,” she said. “I don’t know what you have.” It was a wooden box with soap wrapped in a cloth, a handmade toothbrush, a jar of tooth powder, and a straight razor with a sharpening block. Maybe he’d grow a beard. “Do you know where the men’s necessary is?”

“No, in fact.” He’d used the one across from his office, but that had been a while ago, and “necessary” did describe it. She led him down an unmarked path to two buildings that had remarkably unambiguous pictures as to which was which. How Puritan were these people?

There were oil lamps in sconces dimly illuminating the place. A row of open toilets, two of which were occupied by men sitting with their robes pulled up, talking quietly. There was an obvious urinal, a thick pipe sunk diagonally in the ground, filled with gravel. He used it and went to a basin between two of the lights, with a mirror and a large water urn with a faucet. He brushed his teeth and put off the issue of the beard.

Martha was waiting for him, and they walked together back toward his cottage. “They told me you’re going to see the dean tomorrow.”

“Ten o’clock,” Matt said. “Do you know him?”

“Not to speak to. He’s very old and wise.”

“I guess a dean has to be,” he said lamely. “He’s the overall dean? I mean, there’s no one over him?”

“No one but Jesus. He’s the Dean of Theosophy.”

Matt thought of his own Dean of Science, Harry Kendall, dead now more than a century. A fellow Jewish atheist, how he’d roll his eyes at being under Jesus.

“I still have only a vague idea of what theosophy is.” He knew the word was adopted, or invented, by an obscure sect in the nineteenth or twentieth century, but there was no obvious connection to that, since it was dead as a doornail before he was born.

“You’ll find the way, Professor,” she said cheerfully. “Or the way will find you.”

He was getting a little annoyed at that assumption, but kept his peace for the time being. “Did you grow up here, Martha?”

“Not in Cambridge, no. Newton, south of here. My family sent me into Boston to find work, but I became a student instead.”

“Were they unhappy about that?”

“They pretended not to be. It would be sacrilegious.” That was interesting. “Where were you from, back in the past?”