Khalid was most helpful. Bellingham was quite impressed by him; said
he was a wonderful man, and a fine scholar. Why would anybody want to
kill a man like that?"

He explained in general terms. Pottgeiter nodded understandingly:
assassination was a familiar feature of the medieval political
landscape, too. Chalmers went on to elaborate. It was a relief to talk
to somebody like Pottgeiter, who wasn't bothered by the present
moment, but simply boycotted it. Eventually, the period-bell rang.
Pottgeiter looked at his watch, as from conditioned reflex, and then
rose, saying that he had a class and excusing himself. He would have
carried his cigar with him if Chalmers hadn't taken it away from him.

After Pottgeiter had gone Chalmers opened a book--he didn't notice
what it was--and sat staring unseeing at the pages. So the moving
knife-edge had come down on the end of Khalid ib'n Hussein's life;
what were the events in the next segment of time, and the segments to
follow? There would be bloody fighting all over the Middle East--with
consternation, he remembered that he had been talking about that to
Pottgeiter. The Turkish army would move in and try to restore order.
There would be more trouble in northern Iran, the Indian Communists
would invade Eastern Pakistan, and then the general war, so long
dreaded, would come. How far in the future that was he could not
"remember," nor how the nuclear-weapons stalemate that had so far
prevented it would be broken. He knew that today, and for years
before, nobody had dared start an all-out atomic war. Wars, now, were
marginal skirmishes, like the one in Indonesia, or the steady
underground conflict of subversion and sabotage that had come to be
called the Subwar. And with the United States already in possession of
a powerful Lunar base.... He wished he could "remember" how events