 Pretending to be foreign philosophers, they establish themselves in Athens as they attempt to unravel the mystery, and begin to discover that all is not as it seems; the wife of the playwright Euripides, for instance, appears to be Thalia, though she does not recognize Flin and has no memory of her former life.After meeting the astronomer Meton, Flin and Bulnes discover that the north celestial pole is where it is expected to be in the twenty-seventh century, proving that they cannot really be in ancient Greece.Bulnes discovers a hidden subterranean building containing modern machinery and people speaking twenty-seventh century language.