«Needs?»
«Don't be thick. Each night, as many nights as you wish, to your heart's content, you can ride that wheeled demon round and round, past the Rembrandts and Turners and Fra Angelicos, through the Grecian statues and Roman busts, careful of porcelains, minding the crystals, but pumping away like Lucifer all night till dawn!»
«Oh, dear God,» murmured Wetherby, «why didn't I think?»
«If you had you would've been too shy to ask!»
«The only place in the world with roads like future roads, paths like tomorrow's paths, boulevards without cobbles, pure as Aphrodite's cheeks! Smooth as Apollo's rump!»
And here Wetherby unlocked his eyes to let fall tears, pent up for months and long hilltop years.
«Don't cry,» said Dr. Goff.
«I must, with joy, or burst. Do you mean it?»
«My good man, here's my hand!»
They shook and the shaking let free at least one drop of rain from the good doctor's cheek, also.
«The excitement will kill me,» said Wetherby, wiping the backs of his fists across his eyes.
«No better way to die! Tomorrow night?»
«But what will people say as I lead my machine through the streets to your museum?»
«If anyone sees, say you're a gypsy who's stolen treasure from a distant year. Well, well, Elijah Wetherby, I'm off.»
«Be careful downhill.»
«Careful.»
Half out the door, Dr. Goff tripped on a cobble and almost fell as a farmer said:
«Did you see the lunatic?»
«I did.»
«Will you take him to a madhouse?»
«Yes. Asylum.» Dr. Goff adjusted his cuffs. «Crazed. Worthless. You will see him no more!»
«Good!» said all as he passed.
«Grand,» said Goff and picked his way down the stone path, listening.
And uphill was there not a final, joyful, wheel-circling cry from that distant yard?
Dr. Goff snorted.
«Think on it,» he said, half aloud, «no more horses, no more manure! Think!»
And, thinking, fell on the cobbles, lurching toward London and the future.