I feel for one character in this story: Humphrey, who wants no more than to figure out the various goings on—past, present and possibly future—in this out-of-the-way place where Andrew Thornton comes to fish and write a geology text. Andrew’s friend Neville Piper finds a cube with a hologram of the Battle of Marathon alongside the bear-mauled body of the mysterious Stefan from the even more mysterious Lodge, and that long-lost mine that Humphrey has been researching is finally found without Humphrey ever being told of it.
Humphrey did mind, naturally, but there was nothing he could do about it. Here was the chance to go up to the Lodge, probably to go inside it, and he was being counted out. But he did what he had to do with fairly good grace and said that he would stay.

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  1. “The Marathon Photograph” by Clifford D. Simak, in Threads of Time, edited by Robert Silverberg (Thomas Nelson, 1974).
    2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Clifford D. Simak