This week’s puzzle:

A businessman gets held up on a trip when his customers insist that he stay longer. He ends up leaving something behind, and an old friend goes to pick it up, but by the time the friend comes back he’s already got a replacement.

Last week’s puzzle:

A person concerned with time and a person concerned with mass become engaged in a problem of creation. They worry when a model parallel to theirs begins to collapse, but in the end, despite expectations, their experiment is a success.

And the answer is . . . ▼