Scudamour survives by playing on his authority, his only card, while he tries to learn. He discovers to his amazement that there is a chronoscope in the Unicorn's room where he stung victims — but it is now broken. He refrains from stinging Camilla, and tries to plan their escape. It appears there is some sort of war (being waged by the "White Riders", who want to remove the stingers from the "unicorns") against the Othertime government. He reads in a library about the Othertimer's time-science. A theory is given of multiple timelines; these do not seem to split off from different outcomes, like quantum realities, but simply proceed separately. However, they can be controlled, and contact between them can be made. References are made to the changeling myth. The law is stated that "Any two time-lines approximate to the exact degree to which their material contents are alike," and it is revealed that an experiment with a replica railway shed in the right place had already been successful in allowing a controlled transfer of minds. The text ends with Scudamour still reading. Origin In his introduction to The Dark Tower and Other Stories, Hooper states that he rescued an untitled manuscript in Lewis' handwriting of the story from a bonfire of the author's writings early in 1964, several months after Lewis' death. The 64-page manuscript appears to have originally had at least 66 pages, two of which are now missing. If the text did at one time continue past the 66th page, these additional pages are also lost. As it stands, the narrative contains two gaps and comes to an abrupt end. The Dark Tower is an unfinished work. Hooper surmises, based on its internal setting, that Lewis wrote it immediately after he finished Out of the Silent Planet, in about 1939. Hooper reports that the late Gervase Mathew told him that he heard Lewis read The Dark Tower to the Inklings around that time. Anne Paxch posted in MERELEWIS that many who never attended any Inklings meetings heard Lewis read his unpublished works elsewhere, and that she recalls Gervase Mathew and others discussing passages which later appeared in The Dark Tower. Inklings scholar John D. Rateliff suggests that the story could have been written some years later, in about 1946, pointing to a reference in a 1944 letter by Lewis's friend J. R. R. Tolkien to a story