The answer Mortimer receives, wherever he goes, is "Go and see Professor Steele".

Professor Isaac Steele is Head of the Linguistics department, and an old, old man, in his late eighties at least. He is bent and shrunken, and looks like nothing so much as a wise old scholar you'd find in a fantastical book, advising a king. On his door is tacked a notice: Don't bother to knock. I won't hear.

The shelves of his office are packed, floor to ceiling, with books of every description. Modern novels and old books in every language – in every alphabet Mortimer's ever seen, plus a few more, and dictionaries between many, many languages. The old professor, dressed in a somewhat shiny smoking jacket, is perusing a manuscript and cross-checking it with a book and a dictionary. He flips the pages and makes corrections with shaking, twiglike hands, murmuring all the while.

"Can I help you, young man?" he says in a surprisingly resonant voice, when he sees Mortimer enter.