"The common snowflake," Schwarz said.

"Think of the fundamental order of atomic structure as seen in the periodic table. Think of the laws of planetary motion. Consider the fact that, relative to their respective diameters, the average distance between stars is roughly the same as the average distance between atomic particles in interstellar space. Is this mere 'coincidence'? From the Medieval Latin. To happen together. Something and its shadow. Think of the secretion patterns of red ants. The shell of a chambered nautilus. The cubic crystals in ordinary table salt. The honeycomb, the starfish, the common snowflake-all so stunningly reasoned in surface configuration. But not nearly final enough to soothe our disquiet. However, there's always the view that an ultimate symmetry is to be avoided rather than sought, the reason being that this structural balance represents not victory over chaos and death but death itself or what follows upon death. A logarithmic spiral. The polyhedral cohesion of virus crystals."

"The wiggle," Schwarz said.

"The star is a common G dwarf. It's called Ratner's star. It lies away from us a bit toward the galactic center. We've analyzed the variation or wiggle in its path and we believe the object in question is a low-mass planet that occupies the star's habitable zone. If you can decipher what the residents of this planet are saying, it may mark the beginning of an exchange of information that could eventually tell us where we are and what the universe looks like. It's safe to assume the Ratnerians are superior to us. They may help us draw a picture. A seamless figure no less perfect than its referent. I'd personally rejoice, although it's hardly likely I'd still be here for the receipt of such information. I think I'm finally tired of being made to journey from speculation to accepted fact and from there to sudden doubt, denial and contention. Does the red shift, for example, really mean what it seems to? I visualize an eight-column headline in the newspaper. UNIVERSE SAID TO CEASE EXPANDING; BEGINS TO FALL BACK ON ITSELF; MILLIONS FLEE CITIES. Of course if evidence of universal blueshifting is ever found, it will merit the smallest note. This is documentary void. Not void whose essence is terror. Not the human sensorium streaked with darkness."

Nyquist put his free hand to his mouth, quickly, as though to stifle a giggle. All along he had seemed to be staring at the tilted glass in Schwarz's hand but now he turned his head toward the boy. His eyes appeared to be surmising the existence of an optical path along which might travel any number of topics neither generated nor perceived in the usual manner. Billy couldn't recall ever having seen a blind man laugh and wondered whether there was usually an element of grotesquerie involved-the salivating laughter of someone who has forgotten how it's done or what it's supposed to look like to others. He waited for Nyquist's next remark, hoping it would include something humorous, an epic quip or two that would make Nyquist himself flash his fizzing teeth and gums in the sort of uncontrollable expectorating glee that Billy associated with the handicapped. What Nyquist did in fact was to extend his long cane and begin to tap it gently on the metal leg of the vinyl chair that held his colleague.

"Fortunate, aren't we, to be alive in enlightened times," he said. "It was often the case" tap "that enemies of science" tap tap "could only be circumvented through allegory and indirection. Now there are no enemies for us to circumvent. When I was a boy in the old country I heard stories of a woman who used her father's skull as a drinking cup. The man was long dead, needless to say, but whether this qualifies as a mitigating circumstance is open to question. She was said to have witch's grip, one of the lesser manifestations of the forbidden arts. Or should I say sciences? In any event I was obsessed with such stories for many years, imagining the smoke rising from crisscrossed sticks, the first ultraviolet tick of pain. Today our science is such that the only thing we need to fear is the substance in the drinking cup. And now I think it's time" tap "I went away."

With that, Nyquist moved sideways out of the small room and headed across the open area, apparently laughing in suppressed spurts as he approached the elevator. It occurred to Billy that U.F.O. Schwarz seemed to be sitting in his own lap.

"That was a little background there."

"Nobody's seen the planet. Is that what I understand was being said?"

"We know there's an orbiting body because of perturbation in the star's path."

"How much do you weigh?"

"It's a condition I have."

"I'd like to be able to see the figure on a scale."

"If I felt I could trust you, I'd ask you to guess," Schwarz said. "Most people underestimate when they guess. To try to make me feel good. Knowing I have a starch bloat condition. But I don't think I can trust you to do that."

"Three forty-eight."

"I'm suggesting you adjust downward."

"One guess is all I give myself. Figured I might as well lead with my best punch."

"A strategist in our midst," the man finally said, his tongue scratching at that opaque glaze in which it was adrift.

Billy had agreed to a tour of Zoolog Comp and when he got off the elevator he followed an arrow to the pisciculture lab. He went inside, pausing before a formula-fed baby dolphin. The area was blue and silent. Everywhere were tanks of newly born fish and marine mammals. In the eyes of the dolphin was a dreamy sense of dislocation, its dimension of remembrance perhaps, the chemical arrest of transient land-history. Billy watched a sari-clad woman approach. She was Rahda Hamadryad, a dimpled Hindi. Her smile fluttered down to him. As he admired the way the sari was draped over one shoulder, she told him that Zoolog's director was eager to meet him. Before they left the area he looked back in the general direction of the dolphin, seeing instead an octopus in quadruple squat.

Rahda led him to a smelly room where they sat at a table covered with lunchtime debris. Around them were tiers of reptiles and long slender egg-sucking mammals. It was clear that news of the special nature of his mission had already begun to spread. Rahda didn't seem to know exactly what was involved but she gave the impression that his body was outlined in luminous smog. She told him most of the people in this sector were doing research in animalalia.

"Our rats have a synthetic vocabulary of nearly fifty words."

"Who'd want to talk to a rat?"

"They have remarkable conceptual abilities," she said. "We communicate with them through a series of color-coded shock mechanisms."

"With me and rats, it's stay out of each other's way."

"They sort items. They subdivide different classes of the same item. They choose correctly from among several linguistic shock alternatives. Perhaps our toads may be more to your liking. Our toads count dead flies all day long. It was Aristotle who maintained that man's rationality is based on his ability to count. The toads no doubt use the same prelinguistic thinking we used eons ago. Wordless flash-thinking. Of course they have yet to utter a single human word, rat or toad. We've used color, rote learning, computer syntax, shock, prolonged shock, sign language, many kinds of stimulus response gadgetry."

"What about apes?" he said. "Maybe apes would make some talk with the right training."

He was watching her bend the edges of a paper plate someone had left on the table. Again and again she folded the plate so that a different point on the circumference of the circle touched the same ketchup speck every time, a small stain located well off-center. She kept studying the resulting creases. Her eyes were large and deep. She had relaxed flesh, he could tell, trying to catch her eye in order to reassure himself of her continued willingness to smile at him. He rarely expected smiles, even from people he liked. But there were times when being smiled at seemed important.

"Apes don't have the anatomical structure for our kind of talking," she said. "However, we are even now in the process of restructuring. We are looking forward to a new kind of phonetic performance from our apes. Something much more significant than tapping out symbols on a console."

A man walking by advised Rahda that the director was now ready to see the visitor. She led Billy through a series of laboratories and "post-scrutiny habitats." These latter areas were set up for the benefit of research animals recuperating from arduous projects, each habitat quite small and easily convertible from desert to marshland to jungle surroundings, depending on the need.

"I would like to hear more about your work," she said. "Research with animals is very satisfying. But sometimes I wish for a more abstract pursuit. Something lonely and distant. Perhaps you could tell me what you do at this remarkable institute I've heard so much about."

"I'd like to, sincerely would, seriously, but it's the kind of work nobody can talk about unless they know the language."

"You know the language surely."

"But you don't," he said.

"You talk. I will listen."

"I'll talk if you let me do one small thing. I just want to touch your leg behind the knee. Nothing personal. The soft place behind the knee. In return for talk."

"You want to touch me."

"If we could do it without anyone taking it personally."

"I am harijan," she said.

"What's that?"

"Untouchable."

"What happens if you're touched?"

"I am an outcast. There are millions and millions of us. We are considered unclean. I could not use the public well in my village. In university I could not live with upper-caste students. But I think you're a very special individual. I would not object if you touched me."

"Does something happen to a toucher of the unclean?"

"Nonsense," she said. "Just behind the knee. We will slow down to make it easy. I lift the garment."

"Why do untouchables have that name?"

"I have halted and am waiting."

"Is something supposed to happen if you're touched?"

"You cannot think that, surely."

"They wouldn't give you that name without a reason, would they? I'm not saying it's a good reason. They're probably too sensitive to dirt on others. I just want to know in my own mind what I'm doing."

"There is the office," she said.

Peregrine FitzRoy-Tapps pointed out an enormous armchair beneath a photograph of a pair of elephant tusks. All the pictures in the room were of tusks, horns, stuffed heads and rifles in trophy cases. FitzRoy-Tapps was vaguely diagonal in shape. Those visible parts of him that came in twos, like eyes, ears, shoulders and hands, seemed to be arranged at slightly varying elevations, each to each.

"The animals are here to learn but no less than to teach. Animalalia in particular is a learn-and-teach operation. It wasn't this way in Croaking-on-Pidgett, I can tell you. That's spelled, incidentally, as if it were pronounced Crutchly-on-Podge. But it's pronounced Croaking-on-Pidgett. A lovely old village and even older river. But the animals tended to be uncooperative. We let them mix in a large enclosure not far from the local vicarage. What went on was often ambiguous. How nearly like sex, I found myself thinking. Mornings were a revelation, however. Most mornings I walked past the vicarage and through the formal garden over to Muttons Cobb, which is spelled as if it were pronounced Maternity St. Colbert. But it's pronounced Muttons Cobb, as those not privy to the idiosyncrasies of the region learn to their eternal discomfiture. Afternoons I strolled through the arboretum and then carried a picnic basket full of cakes and ale out past the snuff mill to the embankment along the Pidgett. I took my evening meals in the refectory at the manor house. Afterward I sometimes took port with the others in the common room. I liked to smoke my pipe in the deanery garden before retiring. The night creatures were just beginning to scream then."

The armchair was so large that Billy's feet didn't even come close to touching the floor. He felt helpless and wished he could think of a good excuse for leaving.

"Life was so much simpler there and then. When someone did something well, I simply said: 'Well done.' When things came apart, I said: 'Bad luck, bad luck.' When someone's work fell markedly short of that individual's abilities, I felt compelled to say: 'Get cracking.' And so in the normal course of events there was little else one had to say. 'Well done.' 'Bad luck.' 'Get cracking.' To this day I find it difficult to imagine a situation that couldn't be fully resolved with one of these phrases. Of course, times have changed and so have words. People expect more these days. It's not enough to utter the suitable phrase. But it was enough in Croaking-on-Pidgett; yes, more than sufficient, I believe. It was enough in Little Whiffing as well, now I think of it. It made no difference how bleak a particular situation appeared to be. The apt phrase tended to settle matters. No action is more suitable than the apt phrase. Of course, one addresses such a phrase only to suitable people. 'Well done, sir.' 'Bad luck, bad luck.' 'Get cracking now.' Surprising how well these sufficed."

He spent all afternoon in the solarium near the top of the armillary sphere. It was a cloudy day and there was only one other person on hand, an extremely old woman reading a book that seemed no less venerable a specimen than she was. He closed his eyes for a while, thinking and turning, dulled by the prospect of the work ahead. Boredom was summer pavement on a Sunday, the broad empty glare of regimented concrete. He decided to give the message a couple of days of his time. If he found no evidence that the transmission was a genuine mathematical statement, he would go back to the Center and resume work on zorgal theory.

"I know who you are," the woman said.

He opened his eyes, not bothering to force a polite smile. She gestured him forward. He went to sit next to her among tall plants and scattered magazines. He had never been so close to anyone this old. It occurred to him that when he was a child he wouldn't have thought twice about this episode, having viewed old people as static forms of theater, even less changeable than he was. But now the simple act of sharing a sofa with this woman filled him with distant suspicions. He was alert to sour odors or the possible grossness of the inside of her mouth. He didn't like the idea that she was striking in appearance, feeling that people her age should travel in groups in order to melt into each other's presence. Rouge seemed to be baked into her hands, face and arms. A black silk scarf was wound tightly around her head, making him think she might be bald. She wore a full cape with fur collar.

"Do you say yes to life?"

"I guess so," he said. "Sure, why not."

"In the science of subjective mind-healing, both cause and effect exist in the full and perfect idea that the mind is Mind. Everything depends on mental typography. This is why we use capital letters so often. Not only in the pamphlets in our reading rooms but in the way we picture our thoughts. Fear-Chains of Asthma. Dominant Drift. Ether of Timeless Being. My name is Viverrine Gentian. Who are you?"

"You said you knew."

"And so I do," she said. "I was simply wondering if we agreed."

"What's that book?"

"It's a story called Somnium. A beautiful and extremely rare book. Written in Latin with a smidgen of Hebrew and Greek."

"What's it about?"

"It's an experimental novel, an allegory, a lunar geography, an artful autobiography, a cryptic scientific tract, a work of science fiction. A man goes to sleep and dreams he is reading a book. In the book is a boy whose mother makes a living by selling goatskin pouches to sailors as charms. When the boy is fourteen she sells him to a sea captain who leaves him on an island. Here he learns astronomy from the famous Tycho Brahe. In five years he returns to his mother, who announces her intention of calling forth, or stating as a proposition, her demon-teacher, the spirit of knowledge. Mother and son sit with robes over their heads and hear a voice. It delivers a veiled narrative of the moon. Only certain people are fit to undertake a journey to the moon, says the voice, and here I quote verbatim: 'Especially suited are dried-up old crones who since childhood have ridden over great stretches of the earth at night in tattered cloaks on goats or pitchforks.' The voyager must make his journey during a lunar eclipse, traveling along the axis of the cone of the shadow cast by the earth on the moon."

"So far I like it."

"The year of the dream was sixteen aught eight and the dreamer's sleep was dissolved in wind and rain, as was the book he was reading. Perhaps you'd like to feel it in your hands."

Her smile was a ghastly pressed rose. Carefully he turned the shaky pages, all so old they appeared on the verge of self-granulation. His respect for the antiquity of the volume was secondary to a swarming fear of the woman's reaction if the book should in fact crumble in his hands. She might lash out or spit. (K.b.i.s.f.b.) Speak a phrase so devastatingly apt he would never be able to forget it. Taunt him with logical paradox.

"Here."

Viverrine Gentian took back the book. Sunlight was everywhere now, a late-afternoon profusion, the air bursting with musical dust. She appeared to withdraw slightly, sinking further into the cape.

"When must the voyager make his journey?"

"During a lunar eclipse," he said.

"What was the year of the dream?"

"Sixteen aught eight."

"True prayer is scientific," she said. "The answer to a prayer is in the prayer when it is prayed. This is called Mind Science Unity. Cap M, cap S, cap U. When you touch yourself in the male or female region, you dementalize the secular prayer. This is important for someone your age."

"What about washing?"

"When did you last wash?"

"This morning."

"How do you know those were your parts you washed?"

"Who else's would they be?"

"Can you be absolutely certain those weren't female privates you were washing?"

"I ought to know my own by now."

"The genitals are famous for the tricks they play on the brain. It's merely a question of genus, isn't it? Shape-changing, I mean. A question of numbering one's holes. Did you look carefully at the items you washed?"

"I know my own."

"When you touch yourself too often, you change the shape."

"What shape?"

"It's no longer pleasant here," she said. "I much prefer the solarium when the sun's not shining."

He sat with feet well apart and arms not only extended but lifted slightly above the arms of the chair. He was fairly sure nothing would happen to him if his arms touched the arms of the chair but what worried him slightly was the fact that the arms of the chair were called "arms" and that his arms were also called "arms" and it was just barely possible that this business of self-touching applied not only to parts of the body but to parts of the body and parts of other objects that happened to have the same names. Arms of chairs, legs of tables, hands of clocks, eyes of needles. He knew that what the old woman said would not have permanent effect but for the time being he was determined to be alert, particularly careful of where he sat and how he conducted himself in the bathroom. He took comfort in the properties of sunlight and in sunlight's negative print-the shadow cast by the armillary sphere. He couldn't see the shadow from his chair in the solarium but he knew the figure it made on the earth below could be one shape and only one, that of a pristine ellipse.

 

4 EXPANSION

 

Slowly he pivoted, careful to note every square foot of floor space. It was definite. Someone had dismantled and removed the cubicle in which U.F.O. Schwarz had told him about the radio message from outer space. Nothing in particular had replaced it. Around him, everywhere he looked, were the component parts of Space Brain itself, far from dormant now. The computer extended to the ends of the complex, coded along the way by various colors, lights, bells and strange arrays of symbols. Technicians were at work, perhaps a hundred of them, tending the huge machine. There were several levels of noise, people in shifting groups, rotary units turning, a sense of hypertrophia, something growing outward toward a limit. A small industrial vehicle came to a stop alongside him. It was equipped with a sidecar and carried a sticker on its front bumper that read BEEP BEEP. Behind the wheel was Shirl Trumpy, a woman who often laughed right through her own words (he was soon to learn), making it hard at times to understand what she was saying and therefore why she was laughing.

"You're late," she said. "I'm on my third lap of the day."

"I forgot the appointed time."

He climbed into the sidecar and they moved off. As she steered around objects and people, Trumpy explained that Space Brain was beginning to spread beyond its own hardware. Originally they'd used the smallest crystals in existence and the result was a stored-program sequential machine-of unprecedented sophistication-weighing only fifty pounds. But it was too successful. It began to solve problems that couldn't be posed without new components and new housing. The problem board had to be expanded. This led to additions elsewhere. Space Brain helped with the additions and was therefore self-designed, at least in part.

"Ridiculous, of course, to refer to it as a brain," she said. "But we had a contest to name the machine and 'Space Brain' was the winning entry. So we're stuck with it. Tremendous excitement over your presence. Word's been getting around. We all feel this is finally it."

"Where are we driving?"

"Code analysis checkpoint."

"What for?"

"To show you what we've come up with so far in the way of statistical analysis. One notion everybody agrees on. We're the only ones who picked up the signal from the planet that's orbiting Ratner's star because we're the only ones in the world who are tuned to the secret frequency. It's our frequency and it's secret. Obviously they're a super-technical civilization. It's up to you to tell us what they're saying."

"Other telescopes have picked up signals. This has been taking place for years. They all claim it's outer space making contact. Everybody thinks they're hearing from some superior beings. What makes these beings so superior?"

"Relax, Mr. T."

"Have they proved Fermat's Last Theorem?"

Speaking and laughing simultaneously, Shirl Trumpy headed the vehicle to a remote part of the complex, stopping finally behind a series of blank display screens that were part of the computer's graphics unit. He had a little trouble getting out of the sidecar and she annoyed him by offering to help. She was a lanky woman with prominent bones and when she laughed he had the feeling her skeletal structure would crack in a dozen places. It irritated him when people enjoyed themselves with such intensity. They looked ugly laughing. If they could see what they looked like, they'd probably learn how to restrict themselves to a smile. She led him to a lone console near the display screens and asked him to press a button. A card dropped from a slot and he took it in his hand to study. It was about eight inches long and six wide, covered with vertical and horizontal lines forming small squares of equal size, most of them blacked in, the demarcating lines being pale blue in color. This was a sequence grid, Trumpy explained. The pulses from Ratner's star were represented as black squares, the gaps or intervals as white squares. Many such grids had been devised, both by Space Brain and by the people who had tried to decipher the message. These diagrams were meant to help the searchers ascertain whether or not the message had been intended as a two-dimensional picture. Using such a picture, she pointed out, the extraterrestrials might convey an enormous amount of information even though they'd transmitted nothing more than ninety-nine pulses interrupted twice-a total of one hundred and one units of binary information. She pressed the button a dozen times, getting that many sequence grids from the slot and explaining why a statistical analysis had failed in each case to confirm that the pattern was indeed an attempt to convey an intelligible picture or a series of coded symbols that might tell us something about the senders' physical characteristics, the chemical composition of life on their planet and so forth. The fact that there were only two gaps (or white spaces) led most people to conclude that the message was numeric in character rather than pictorial.

The small squares made him think of graph paper. Early days of compass and straight-edge. Thin blue lines intersecting to the ends of the page. Horizontal x and vertical y. Numbers as points, as positions on a surface, and equations as sequences of points, as geometric shapes, and shapes as sequences of numbers sifted through the intersecting lines and represented as equations. He remembered exploring those otherworldly curves from one degree to the next, lemniscate and folium, progressing eventually to an ungraphable class of curve, no precise slope at any point, tangent-defying mind marvel.

Trumpy described how Space Brain had investigated the possibilities of explaining the message in terms of wavefront reconstruction, contour mapping, a simulation response program that was part of their (the Ratnerians') computer universe. None of these inquiries yielded the slightest evidence that the message was of intelligent origin.

"So you think it's pure numbers or nothing," he said.

"Exactly."

"I think it's nothing."

"True, the signals weren't repeated. But we're confident this is genuine contact."

"What happens next?"

"You talk to LoQuadro," she said. "He used to do your kind of mathematics before he had the first of his attacks, so maybe the two of you between you can figure out the star code and then I can go back to programming a search for what's true after the computer has declared everything false."

"What's this about attacks?"

"Sleep attacks," she said. "Attacks of deep sleep."

"What happens, he falls down?"

"Sleep spells. Recurring and uncontrollable."

"And you really think we're in contact."

"Is Ratner's star an illusion? Of course not. It's out there and everyone knows it. Is the planet's existence a hoax? Ridiculous. There's clear evidence of a planet in orbit around the star. Is someone transmitting signals? Absolutely. Is our synthesis telescope receiving on the secret frequency? Nods of affirmation."

"But isn't it possible to give instructions to the computer to make it print out a wrong series of zeros and ones?"

"A child could do it."

"Then maybe that's why Endor or nobody else could find a pattern. There is no pattern. Everything got jumbled up between the telescope and the computer."

"Theoretically it's possible. I don't deny it. But it would take an awfully clever child."

"That almost makes sense."

"An awfully clever child or a very psychotic adult."

"So it's possible this whole thing might be a waste of time is what you're saying."

"Many things are a waste of time," she said. "How can we learn from the past unless we repeat it? Time for me to go, Mr. T. Stay at code analysis checkpoint."

She laughed, said something, got into the little vehicle and drove off. He dragged a chair to the console and sat down. His mind blunted by the cybernating drone in the distance, he leaned toward the console and put his head on his arms just as he'd done so many times in first grade during the ten-minute rest period every afternoon, nicks in the wood desk, sleep pulling, chalk trails in the air. From a series of three dreams had evolved a life fulfilled in mathematics and philosophy. The dreams occurred within a single night. The first two concerned the terror of nature not understood and the last of them harbored a poem that pointed a way to the tasks of science. The world was comprehensible, a plane of equations, all knowledge able to be welded, all nature controllable. These were dreams generated by the motion of a straight line, a penciled breath of linear tension between day and night, the limit that separates numbers, positive from negative, real from imaginary, the dream-edge of discrete and continuous, history and prehistory, matter and its mirror image. The dreamer, a soldier in repose, applied the methods of algebra to the structure of geometry, bone-setting the measured land, expressing his system in terms of constants, variables and position coordinates, all arranged in due time on the scheme of crossed lines forming squares of equal size. Compass and straight-edge. His periodic segregation from the other children. Private time to plot coordinates on pale blue lines. Then rest at last. Head settled on well-notched wood. Fingers identifying every penknifed name and date. He loved a girl who squinted, Billy did, but this was just the first grade and he knew he'd love again.

When LoQuadro touched the back of his neck, he nearly leaped from the console. With his foot the man moved a chair across the floor and sat next to the boy, who wasn't sure how long LoQuadro had been standing behind him. The latter wore steel-rimmed spectacles and a gray suit and tie. He was nervously alert, seeming to be engaged in self-espionage, ever attentive to the fluctuations of electric potential in his brain.

"We can discover the truth or falsehood of our own final designs only if we teach ourselves to think as a single planetary mind. This is the purpose of Field Experiment Number One."

"So I hear."

"True or false. Yes or no. Zero or one. Data is processed in. Current travels through the core magnets in the memory unit. The problem is transistorized and solved. The answer is processed out on cards, tapes or sheets of paper. Computers are like children. Yes-no, yes-no, yes-no. Space Brain is a superhybrid. A little bit of yin in yang. A microdot of yang in yin. This machine is a science in itself. Bi-Levelism, I call it. I'd like very much to take you into void core storage. It may help you see the message in a new perspective."

"What do you mean by take me into?"

"Physically."

"The woman before said it's stretching out past its own hardware. That doesn't sound like something I want to get taken into physically."

"The problem concerns the true nature of expansion," the man said. "Consider science itself. It used to be thought that the work of science would be completed in the very near future. This was, oh, the seventeenth century. It was just a matter of time before all knowledge was integrated and made available, all the inmost secrets pried open. This notion persisted for well over two hundred years. But the thing continues to expand. It grows and grows. It curls into itself and bends back and then thrusts outward in a new direction. It refuses to be contained. Every time we make a breakthrough we think this is it: the breakthrough. But the thing keeps pushing out. It breaks through the breakthrough."

"What thing?"

"Our knowledge of the world. The world itself. Each, the other and both. They're one and the same, after all. It's been said that philosophy teaches us to talk with an appearance of truth about all things and to make ourselves admired by the less learned. There's one branch of philosophy this definition doesn't cover. Bi-Levelism. Bi-Levelism teaches us to talk with an appearance of truth and falsity about all things and to make ourselves admired by the more learned. True-false. Zero-one. Yes-no. On-off. Come, we'll visit the void core."

"How about holding it for later?"

"Let me allay your fears."

"The woman said to tell you I should stay at code analysis checkpoint."

"Trumpy writes programs. That's all she does and all she knows. The void core isn't part of the computer's reasoning assembly. Trumpy is concerned with routes of language and logic. She hasn't been to the void core and in fact has no direct knowledge of its existence. Space Brain contains a deeper electronic route than Trumpy ever dreamed of. The void core is at the hypothetical center of this route. I think you should spend some time here. It will help you understand the implications of bi-level coding in its latest form."

"You want to take me to the actual place."

"Yes."

"I wouldn't be good at it."

"It's not a question of skill," LoQuadro said. "The only thing you're doing is coming with me to another part of the area."

"It's a physical event. I wouldn't be good at it. Physical things are something I'm not used to doing in my work, being a pure mathematician."

"So was I."

"She told me."

"I was a mathematician."

"She said."

"I missed the world," LoQuadro said. "The seas and beaches."

"Is that why you switched?"

"I was, oh, better than some. But no hope of true greatness. Mathematics is the wrong discipline for people doomed to nongreatness. However, that's not why I switched. I didn't switch to computers because I missed the world or because I was haunted by my own inadequacy per se. It was all too occult for me. I'm the type of person who's willing to confront moderately awesome phenomena. Beyond that I lose my bearings. Chipping away at gigantic unproved postulates. Investigating the properties of common whole numbers and ending up in the wilds of analysis. Intoxicating theorems. Nagging little symmetries. The secrets hidden deep inside the great big primes. The way one formula or number or expression keeps turning up in the most unexpected places. The infinite. The infinitesimal. Glimpsing something, then losing it. The way it slides off the eyeball. The unfinished nature of the thing."

"There may be a lot of crazy things in the world that scare you and me but mathematics is the one thing where there's nothing to be afraid of or stupid about or think it's a big mystery."

"Did you find that carved on a temple wall somewhere?"

"I'm just saying."

"Because it has a ring of lyrical antiquity."

"Make remarks."

"And I am stirred beyond all imagining."

"Go ahead, say things, I don't care."

After giving Billy a long searching steel-rimmed look, LoQuadro explained that a visit to the void core would provide the boy with a chance to observe bi-level coding procedures firsthand (enabling him perhaps to adapt such methods to his own attempts to decipher the transmission from Ratner's star) and might also furnish an insight into the glitch problem. Glitches, he said, were irritating little kinks in a computer, often difficult to locate and straighten out. He went to one of the display screens nearby and with the index finger of his left hand tapped several times at the keyboard that occupied the bottom third of the unit. The screen went white. Then a series of alphanumeric characters appeared, shimmering a bit before going still.

 

LoQuadro returned to the padded chair next to the console. He continued to give the impression that he was a clandestine witness to his own thoughts.

"Every so often it turns up while we're scanning some graphics material," he said. "It just turns up. It's just there. I can't find it in the routing system. It's too well integrated. Trumpy claims she can't find it either. But I suspect she's the one who put it there. It's her glitch. What's more, it seems to be a double glitch. First it interrupts other visual data. Then it interrupts itself. It's a six-bit hollerith double glitch. Do you know what I just realized about you?"

"No."

"You never say anything clever."

"Why should I?"

"Kids are always saying clever things. They're famous for it. People are always quoting their kids' clever remarks."

"I'll write home. Maybe they keep a scrapbook."

"Not now," LoQuadro said. "I have to leave for a while. Important appointment. Wait for me here. I'm meeting with representatives of a Honduran cartel. They're flying in from Germany. They want to lease computer time."

"That must be Elux Troxl."

"You know?"

"Just his name."

"How do you know?"

"This person Hummer who's on a committee to define the word 'science' said something about a person with that name being from Central America who rents computer time and is hiding out in Germany."

"Except that's not his name. Nobody knows his name. It could be anything. I don't even know if they're Hondurans. The cartel is Honduran but the agents, I suppose, could be something else."

"What's your part in this?"

"I market excess time," LoQuadro said. "Don't tell anyone I told you. Not a soul knows this. The cartel wants to take advantage of Space Brain's tremendous versatility. Computer time-sharing usually benefits everyone in the long run. If time is available, someone might as well market it and that someone might as well be me. Computers are like children."

"What happens if I'm not here when you get back?"

"Day-night, play-sleep, on-off."

 

Within the series one, two, four, seven, eleven, he was quick to discover the buried series one, two, three, four. He could walk but not talk. He didn't talk until he was past the age of three. His mother used to look directly into his mouth and urge him to say something. She would speak to his mouth and beg it to answer. It was his father's opinion that the boy knew words but simply didn't want to say them. His mind knew words. He spoke with his mind and to his mind. To and with his mind. In time he will speak to his mouth with his mind and then from his mouth to the room and the people in the room.

"Soon as he talks I'm taking him into the subways," Babe said. "I'm taking him down into the tunnels. I'm anxious to show him what the tunnels are like. But not until he talks. I want to hear his reaction."

The attack dog was given no name at first. It was simply called "puppy." As the dog grew bigger and blacker, this means of identification became by default the animal's official name, at least as far as Faye and Babe were concerned. Billy didn't call the dog anything and never had. He tried to stay out of its way and remembered most of the time to keep his books at a level that the dog-up-on-hind-legs could not reach. This meant he had to stand on a chair to put his books away and then again to get them down. This was part of the normal course of events on Crotona Avenue. Faye, defrosting the refrigerator, would hurl potfuls of hot water into the freezer compartment. A cooking mitt on each hand, she would hold the large pot well away from her body and then slowly ease back, dipping like a discus thrower, before uncoiling in a grimacing vortex to splash water all over the icebound walls of the freezer. Babe sometimes walked through the apartment with the TV set in his arms. Whenever the rabbit ears failed to deliver a clear picture he would pick up the unwieldy set and take it to another room. On hot summer nights, during the three-hour span of a ballgame, he sometimes touched down twice at each room in the apartment, getting a better picture with every maneuver but then losing it a short time later. The set was heavy enough to force his legs into an occasional stagger-spasm. On the set, as he carried it, were several empty bottles of Champale, a pack of Camels, an ashtray, an enormous cigarette lighter and ten or twelve of Faye's movie magazines. On many such nights, as Babe made his silent bulky passage through the rooms and as Faye sat by the window commenting on events below, Billy and his friend Ralphie Buber stood in the kitchen spitting in each other's face. Whoever ran out of saliva first was declared the loser. However, the game was not discontinued at this point. The winner went on spitting until dry, at which time both boys, not ready to end the contest, were reduced to mere simulation, their lips and tongues going through the motions with nothing of consequence being expelled besides the recurring sound: two two two two.

"That's about the dumb-assest thing I've ever seen," Babe said.

The car he owned was an officially defunct Ford model called the Urban Eco-Pak. It was an extremely bland automobile, too lacking in distinction to be called homely, and it had recently become infested, as though to compensate for its utter dullness, with several forms of insect life, roaches predominating. During the winter months Babe rarely used the car, being content to look it over every time he walked the dog. Any vandalism short of flagrant didn't bother him and on most nights he circled the small lump of metal just once and continued on his way. In the summer he took family and friends to the beach. Leaving the car to bake in the huge crowded parking lot he accompanied Faye, Billy and the two Seltzers (Izzy, from the subways, and his small daughter Natasha) past rows of automobiles and through the handball courts and onto the boardwalk and across the tract of hot sandy stone to the rail above the beach itself, the teeming strand, that long radiant curve endlessly submissive to the bleak waters of the Sound. Midsummer Sundays at Orchard Beach were like troop maneuvers on desert terrain with every man using live ammunition.

"They have a religious problem," Faye said of a married couple in the building. "They're both Irish Catholic."

Often it ended incoherently. There were stabbings, riots, thunderstorms. Faye would wrap Billy in a large towel and he would take off his bathing suit and then sit down to squirm into his pants. On the boardwalk they'd watch the police come sweeping across the beach in full uniform, nightsticks held at chest level, legs pumping high. In dis-stant tidal flats male swimmers wearing religious medals did gymnastic exercises. Lightning tore across the dark sky and the boy felt an overwhelming sense of urgency, of odd tense giddiness, an emotional voltage in the air, something coming, more than storm or violence, something to run from laughing, fear and expectation together, and he was soaked through with rain now but feeling lighter, more sentient, brushing away his matted hair to see a group of men and women attacking a few individuals and then a second group charging into the first, slash and batter, a lone enormous woman sitting in the sand trying to get her shoes on and being rocked back by her own shifting weight, foot eluding hand, the high-stepping cops beginning to knock people down, everywhere this ever sweetening tension, people bleeding, thunder going whomp, a squad car bouncing over the sand, gunfire in section seven, wind and rain, a raw sundering in the impetus of bodies, people fleeing into the water, death and sheepish laughter, whomp, dark sky and life.

Billy had been told Natasha squinted because her mother ran away from home. She was extremely frail, her body quivering as though suspended from the end of an eyedropper. Her father often took the kids to the botanical gardens. Together Izzy and Natasha expressed the unfocused sadness of love divided. On notably sad days Billy sometimes felt obliged to whisper in their presence as a way of deferring to their mutual loss. Natasha squinted at many different speeds, depending on the situation.

"Girls have three armpits," Ralphie Buber said. "The extra one's between their legs."

Across the airshaft the scream lady cursed the universe. During movie nights, as Faye and Billy sat laughing in the cave-glow of the TV set, the woman shrieked and rattled, none of her words seeming to belong to any known language. One day Billy and two friends were being chased by the janitor through a series of passageways and alleys that ran under and between several adjacent buildings. With the route to his own building sealed off, he climbed the first set of stairs he found. It took him eventually to the fourth floor of the building behind his own. A door was partly open and there the woman stood. Although he had never seen her before, he knew it couldn't be anyone but her. The scream lady. She was standing about five feet away from him in the dark doorway of her apartment. A white paper napkin was pinned to her hair. She wore two or more bathrobes. The outer robe was opened, revealing another beneath it, and judging by the unwarranted mounds and ridges in this second and tightly belted robe, there may have been one or more beneath that. The woman's feet were bare and this more than her curious way of dressing, this even more than the fact that she was the scream lady, this really worried him. Old people's bare feet had always caused him some concern. It was not in the order of things for old men and women to go around barefoot and it made him want to throw lighted matches at their feet to teach them a lesson. He stood watching her now, ready to dash away, already leaning, one second from all-out flight. She took something from the pocket of her outer robe, a piece of paper with writing on it. He kept his eyes on her pitted face, abysmally collapsed, looking as though it had been blown in by some natural force. She rubbed the paper against her forehead in a circular motion over and over. Then she bit it fiercely and extended it in his direction, producing sounds all the while, acoustic interference so random it seemed to come not from her jawless sucking mouth but from a small hole in her throat. He leaned toward the staircase, all his weight on one leg, and then suddenly and without forewarning even to himself he propelled his body in the opposite direction, snatching the paper from the scream lady's hand. He read it on the roof five minutes later, teethmarks still indenting its surface, tinges of pearly spittle evident in these jagged spaces, while a few feet away a man with a long stick guided a flock of pigeons in training arcs of gradually increasing length.

 

Stockmark ave/rage 549.74 (29/1929) grim pill

of pilgrim welfare (fare/well) scumsuckers inc.

& brownshirt king/pres. (press/king) of U.S. of

S/hit/ler & secret (seek/credit) dung of U.S.

Cong/Viet Cong & Christ/of/fear Columbus discovered

syph/ill/U.S. 1492 + 1929 = 3421/1234/4321 astro/bones buried

under ever/grin tree in Rock/fooler Center 50 St. +

5 Ave. = 55 St/Ave/Stave (Cane Abe/L/incoln 1865 +

1492 +1929 = 5286/PANCA DVI ASTA SAS

 

Settled in front of the TV set with a lapful of muscatel grapes, Faye pointed out to Billy why certain performers were considered classic. "I like to watch him work," she'd say of a particular actor. "Watch the way he does this bit with the water glass. Watch this now. See it, see it, the way he rubs the edge of the glass against his lower lip before he drinks. Nobody else could get away with that. It's a classic bit. I like to watch him work." Other times she spoke of growing. Certain performers were interested in growing as artists. Others were not, either because they were too dumb to grow or because they were classic and not only had no use for growth but would be diminished by it.

Sitting on the blanket at the beach he studied his father's belongings. The sawed-off poolstick was there, brought along for riot protection. The stainless-steel cigarette lighter was there, nearly the size of a deck of cards. The flame it made was immense. Every time his father put his thumb to the rickety wheel, Billy moved away. With the huge bluish flame would come a surge of furious air, an effect he associated with something being put out rather than something kindled, the last breath of a body hardly formed, heat and light sucking at an ultimate moment. Walking through slush outside the supermarket he asked his mother why they'd named him William Jr.

"We didn't think you'd live."

"What do you mean?"

"You were born early, mommy. They rushed you into an incubator. You were so itty-bitty we didn't expect you to last the weekend."

"What's that got to do with being named after my father?"

"We didn't want to waste a new name."

"Big joke."

"We thought we'd save the new names for a healthier kid."

"Fun-nee."

His father's shoes were also there, scuffed and monumental, located between the cigarette lighter and the newspaper. It was hard to believe that creatures with feet large enough to be suitable for these containers actually walked the earth and that one of these creatures was his own pop, his flesh and blood, Babe of the subway tunnels. Are we really of the same race of people? Did I really come from him and her or is it all some kind of story they tell to kids? Ovulation, intercourse, fertilization, pregnancy, labor, delivery. It can't be that simple. There must be more they aren't telling us. A circling bird, a dream, a number whispered in the night. At his side Natasha seemed to look directly into the sun. Izzy Seltzer cautioned her, semitragic in his faded swimming trunks, hair everywhere on his body, white-tipped clusters curling from his nose and ears.

Billy at four still thought of himself as something that would never be altered. "Small boy." He did not yet perceive the special kinship between humans of different sizes and failed to realize he was destined for other categories. This part of childhood then was a brief chapter of immortality that would be recognized in due time as having been set between biological states reeking of deathly transformation. Some years later, sitting in the bathtub, he would bounce in prepubescent rage on the smooth porcelain as his mother's head appeared in the doorway.

"Is you is or is you ain't my baby?"

"Drop dead please."

At four, however, completely in accord with the notion of forever being this thing called "small boy," he lived in a deep sunny silence unthreatened by a sense of his own capacity for change. There was no doubting the fact he was exactly what he was meant to be. He was sure he met the requirements. It was all so totally fitting. He was native to a permanent inner environment just as certain fish as a species never stray from coastal waters. His shape was carved in the very air, body and mind forever.

 

LoQuadro led him back across the complex, seeming to take the same route and make the same small detours that Shirl Trumpy had taken and made when earlier she'd driven him in the opposite direction. Shadows were cast on the walls and floors by hulking computer units.

"Did they lease?"

"They leased."

"What do they need Space Brain for?"

"Didn't say."

"I guess if someone's in hiding, it figures he won't tell you what he wants your computer for."

"Quite the modern master of sarcasm, aren't you?" LoQuadro said. "Anyway he wasn't in hiding. He was in isolation. There's a big difference."

"I heard hiding."

"We're going to the outer void core. From there we can work our way down between the augment interrupt mechanism. In theory there isn't the slightest obstacle in our path."

"Wait."

"That's where the dream originates."

"Wait please."

"In an unnamed sector at the center of the void core."

LoQuadro made a sudden turn and led the boy past a group of workmen installing tape drive units at a frenzied pace. He didn't remember passing this area with the woman in the funny truck. He wanted to heed his own words ("Wait please") but he kept right on moving as if he were being drawn into LoQuadro's wake through natural enforcement of some low-lying aerodynamic law. They walked through a blinking corridor and into a semicircular storeroom full of folding chairs partially folded. LoQuadro approached a small door at the far end of the curved wall. The door was no more than three feet high, leading Billy to think it was some kind of emergency escape panel similar to the metal grating in his canister. There was no doorknob in evidence but he noticed a small white circular device set into the door. Maybe a bell or buzzer. Sliding door leading to an elevator maybe. There were no printed warnings or coded symbols. Only the small inscription: OMCO RESEARCH. Looming above the door LoQuadro turned to face him.

"Forgot the goggles," he said. "Have to go back for them. Can't go in there without goggles. You'll have to wait here. You're not authorized to draw equipment or even to enter the area where equipment is drawn. Am I correct? You have limited access."

"Nobody told me one way or the other."

"Your canister has what kind of module?"

"Limited input."

"Then you have limited access. The two go together. Promise me you'll be here when I get back with the goggles."

"I definitely promise."

"But will you definitely be here?"

"I didn't go away last time you left."

"I'd like some further assurance. All my life people have been making promises to me and consistently breaking them. What further assurance can you give me?"

"I give you my word."

"Not nearly enough," LoQuadro said.

"I'll swear on a stack of Bibles."

"Forget Bibles."

"Any stack."

"What about a stack of books of my choosing?"

"What will you put in there?" Billy said. "Give me some titles."

"First say you'll swear."

"First tell me what you meant when you said that thing about the dream."

"What did I say?"

"It originates in the void core."

"Actual fact."

"Because if you're saying the computer has dreams, I saw that movie on 'Hollywood Ghoul School' a long time ago."

"D-r-e-a-m."

"Which is what?"

"Discrete retrieved entry-assembled memory," LoQuadro said. "A series of data flashes in mnemonic code form tend to occur in certain nonoperational phases and are later retrieved."

"The guy ends up going crazy after his father and the girl take apart the computer and they find little pieces of baby human brain tissue grafted onto the circuits, which explains why the hospital was missing all those kids."

LoQuadro's right foot was tapping uncontrollably. Its movements did not seem related to any other part of him. Tapping in this manner he resembled a wildly impractical household robot designed to step on passing insects. Seconds later he toppled into a cluster of partly folded chairs. Billy thought the fall would wake him but it didn't. Neither did the noise of crashing chairs. Nevertheless the boy backed quietly out of the room. He didn't try to imagine what was on the other side of the little door. It didn't occur to him to peek inside or even knock. Void core. The name was enough to send him in the other direction.

In his canister he thought about the message from Ratner's star. One hundred and one total characters. As U.F.O. Schwarz had pointed out, one hundred and one was the first three-digit prime-indivisible except by itself and the number one. Possibly important. He thought for a moment about the pulses or ones. Fourteen. Twenty-eight. Fifty-seven. This, in digits, was a recurring decimal. One four two eight five seven. Worth thinking about.

The answer, assuming there was a question, had to be simple. He tried to think along the lines of the simplest arithmetic. One zero one. Ninety-nine ones and two zeros. One four two eight five seven. Fourteen gap twenty-eight gap fifty-seven. He knew the others who'd worked at decoding the message had started out the same way but there was always a chance they'd overlooked something obvious. He thought of Softly wobbling in a rocker on his front porch in Pennyfellow. What would Softly do? Crack a joke and whistle through his pinky fingers. Which is about what this whole thing deserves.

There was a light knock on the door, a sort of loose-knuckled frolicsome blow. He found a woman standing outside and remembered to move back so she could enter. Her clothes were of the freely swirling type that might be classified either as terribly dramatic evening wear or out-and-out pajamas. She was tall and silvery, her expression one of painstaking animation, as if she didn't realize it was no longer necessary to be vivacious. A ribbon was awry in her hair and there were specks of confetti on her shirt and pants.

"I'm Soma Tobias."

"H'o."

"Were you at my party?"

"I don't think so. Be seated anywhere. What party?"

"My going-away party."

"When was it?"

"It started last night and it's still going on. I just wandered away for a while. Saw the light under your door and knew you were up."

"It's only afternoon," he said. "Sure I'm up."

"But don't you love to languish in bed all day long? To grow more feeble by the hour like so many French geniuses of the arts and sciences. Don't you think there's a wistful tenderness attached to those brilliantly apathetic periods of time we tend to spend in bed during the day? I fully expected to find you a-dawdle in your twofold."

"Are you drunk?"

"It's my going-away party," she said. "I'm going away."

"What were you here for in the first place?"

"Checking the structural soundness. Making sure they did justice to my concept."

"Are you the woman architect?"

"Some years ago I abandoned myself to the rhythms of the cycloid. Most gorgeous curve in nature. A figure of magical properties. It was then I resolved to apply that shape to a building, a city, a giant tombstone if need be-whatever kind of commission I could wangle."

"Tombstone?"

"Pascal became seriously ill the same year he did important work on the cycloid. They found a lesion on his brain."

"I just read something about that."

"What do you think of my design?"

"It's good from a distance."

"What about close up or inside?"

"I'm nodding."

"The Jesuits oppose the cycloid form. Did you know that? There's an old man named Verbene who's been after me ever since I got here."

"How could anybody be against a geometric shape?"

"The Jesuits oppose anything that can be turned upside down and still give pleasure. The cycloid of course is one such thing. Stunning gravitational wedding bowl. Marvelous pendulum properties. This priest Verbene has been at me hammer and tongs."

"What do you call that outfit you're wearing?"

"His red ants give me a pain," Soma said.

"What do you mean, red ants?"

"He studies red ants. He's founded a whole system of learning based on red ants. It's called red ant metaphysics. Met him yet?"

"He studies red ants?"

"Red ants and their secretions."

"And you think he's after you because things upside down shouldn't give pleasure?"

"The cycloid is geometry. I don't know why they have to get sex mixed up in it. Really I can't get over my surprise at not finding you in bed. Mathematics and pain. Bed-rest and meditation. Growing feebler by the hour. Puling and moaning in the iridescent fatigue of your genius."

He listened to her talk about the going-away party. It was like a monologue on insomnia. Or insomnia itself. Not that he minded. He had no special desire to resume work on the code. And it was nice having a woman around, even if she was all partied out, too weary to make dissolute history on his behalf. Beyond Soma Tobias's presence, however; beyond her voice; beyond the objects in the room, the room itself; beyond all these was the picture of a pale blue line, the locus of a point having one degree of freedom, Blue on white, Figures and movements. Pulses humming through the anesthesia of coordinate four-space. Was he meant to seek an equation and stretch its variable frame across an interstellar graph? Might be worth exploring. Axiomatic method. One fleeting motion true of another. The coordinate system had made calculus imaginable and this study of fluid nature's nonsequential sum had fueled the growth of modern mathematics. He saw it crowding its boundaries. Coordinates numbering n. Nature's space and his. To increase in size by the addition of material through assimilation. To become extended or intensified. What did mathematics grow against? Not nature but imagination. Yet when it poured through the borders, did it return to the physical world? Fundamental laws. Pebbles racing in vain down the slopes of an inverted cycloid. All minds meet in equal time at the bottom of the geometric hole.

"There he was," Soma mumbled. "Fourteen years old. Spending entire mornings in bed. Thinking how utterly useless were all those demonstrations of the authoritarian mind. All those sophistries and subtle equivocations. Frail of body, fond of bed."

"Who, Pascal?"

"You weren't listening."

"I was thinking," he said.

She rose and moved toward the door, so tired she sagged, defeated cheer still painted on her face. He followed along urbanely, managing to dodge her elbow when she opened the door.

"You're very spry for your age," she said.

"I almost understand that remark."

In seconds she was gone. He noticed the emblem sketched on the teleboard screen, a star pentagram drawn with the unbroken motion of the hand, and he knew Endor wanted to see him.

 

5 DICHOTOMY

 

Through the night there had been a competition in the topiary garden, people flying box kites adorned with paper lanterns. Prizes for design, color, maneuverability, speed of ascent, time in the air. Several kites had fluttered into soft flame, every such event accompanied by sounds of pleasurable regret from below. The burning frameworks remained briefly aloft, no longer parts of flying toys but in the lazy breezes of that perfect night resembling a class of mythical invertebrates determined to burn themselves away rather than return to the porous earth, where they'd earlier shed the silk of transfiguration.

In the morning the bulletproof Cadillac headed due east. Billy once again had the back seat to himself. The driver was a man named Kid-der. The road was very straight and he barely had to move his hands on the wheel. He was so motionless in fact that Billy was reminded of LoQuadro's body disrupted by the human glitch. Reverse dissociation.

"We're not too far from the silos."

"What silos?"

"You must be a city boy," Kidder said.

"That's right."

"You never find silos in cities. That's true no matter where you travel in the world. You never find a silo in or near a city."

"How far is it, where we're going?"

"Ten miles hole to hole. That's supposed to be a joke. Door to door. Hole to hole. Get it?"

"I only get half of it."

"I'll settle for that," Kidder said.

"Door to hole. That's the part I get."

"Let's not talk for a while. I'm concentrating on the road. I can't drive on straightaways unless I really bear down. Even as I talk, I'm paying no attention to what I say for fear of losing my concentration. I have no idea whether I'm making sense or not. For all I know I'm speaking in a foreign language. Or even crazier than that. If I lose my concentration, I veer. It's like something's grasping at the car."

"The last time I was in this car there were two other people where you're sitting."

"Then you weren't in this car," the man said. "You were with different people in a different car."

"How fast does it say you're going?"

"A jack rabbit could keep up with this car the way I'm driving right now."

"Never."

"Do you know how fast our friend the rabbit travels at top speed?"

"No."

"Seventy-four feet."

"Per second?"

"Per second per second."

"I don't even get half of that one."

"Maybe there's nothing to get," Kidder said.

"I thought we weren't talking."

"Cute as a tack, aren't you?"

The driver gradually eased off on the accelerator. There wasn't much scenery in the area. The morning was clear and mild. Billy had made double knots with the long laces of his low-cut sneakers. He wore jeans and a pullover shirt. Something hit the windshield now, leaving a melancholy gob on the tinted glass. Endor. What does he want? Why is he behaving this way? A famous person for thirty years and he's living in the ground. One failure and he gives up everything? Maybe it's not even genuine contact. Just some radio waves traveling through space. Coming from a hydrogen cloud or all somebody's idea of a joke. Playing tunes on the computer. Endor had married three times, suffered injuries in two wars, flown jet aircraft to nearly record-breaking altitudes to do photographic research in astronomy. He had written several books of a speculative nature, best-sellers every one. He was an accomplished cellist and founder of an all-mathematician chamber group. Heads of state had honored him in marble halls.

"We're there," Kidder said.

"Why don't you stop?"

"What do you think I'm doing? It takes time to stop. You don't just stop. I have no idea what I'm saying to you at the present time because I'm engaged in bringing this car to a complete stop and my attention is so focused that I'm not aware of my own conversation. So you'll excuse me if I make a foolish remark or two. Even now, with the car almost totally brought to a stop, I couldn't tell you what words I'm in the process of saying."

Billy walked thirty yards to the edge of the hole. Endor was standing at the bottom of the hole, exactly where everyone had said he'd be. The hole was about fifteen feet long, eight wide and twelve deep. There seemed to be another hole inside the first, a tunnel gouged out of the dirt at one corner of the original hole, the hole proper. Endor's shirt and trousers were well shredded. The five-rayed star he'd always worn on a chain around his neck was no longer there. His sage face was sunburned and muddy. Several small crawling things moved about in his white beard. Hands on hips he looked up at the boy, who was reluctant to sit at the edge of the hole (with legs dangling in suitably youthful fashion) for reasons he did not care to articulate to himself.

"You're the only one I'll talk to, lad."

"I'm ready for anything you have to say."

"I sneaked up to the computer area yesterday to get one last look at all the sequence grids and radio maps and print-outs and other crapola. The whole stinking computer universe. Hoping it would all come together in this one last look. But it stayed apart. It definitely did not come together. Back to your hole, Endor. Get back before they see you and start moving their lips. Expecting you to react to their idiot phonemes. Talk to the boy. The boy's done pure work in the pure field. Am I right, Big Bill? You'll find the answer. It's yours for the asking. You're the right mind in the right body. Wouldn't surprise me if you've found it already. Am I right? You've deciphered the message?"

Without waiting for a reply he lowered himself to his knees and crawled across the floor of the hole into the second hole. Billy didn't try to see what he was doing in there. Couldn't possibly result in anything beneficial. He turned to make sure the Cadillac was still in the area. Kidder leaned on the front door, flipping a coin. About ten minutes passed. Endor crawled out of the lateral hole. He appeared to be chewing on something. He looked up at the boy but didn't bother standing.

"If all matter possesses one nature and seeks to unite with all other matter, why are things flying apart?" he said. "Answer me that."

He crawled back into the second hole and remained concealed there for several more minutes. When he emerged this time he got to his feet.

"Our galactic center is leaking gas like crazy. What does it mean?"

"I don't know."

"Colossal explosion, methinks. It's so dense in there. A million times denser than where we are. Planets get torn out of orbit in that kind of density. Too many stars. Too much force and counterforce. In just our galaxy alone, do you know how many stars there are?"

"No."

"That's just our galaxy alone. It's just too much, too big. There's no need for everything to be so spread out. Why is the universe so big? And why despite the billions and billions of stars and hundreds of millions of galaxies is there so much space left over? They say things are still fleeing from the original explosion. Things flee, eventually to come together again, blue instead of red. What do they say about me, Big Bill? Do they say I eat worms?"

Endor crawled into the second hole again. He was gone for about half an hour this time. The boy sat crosslegged on the grass, flicking his index finger at the tips of his shoelaces. The famous scientist returned and got slowly to his feet. Strips of clothing hung loosely from his lean body. Everywhere on his face was a sense of the wailing contradiction that lives along the edges of science and time. He scratched at his beard and spat some rusty stuff into the mud.

"Mathematics is the only avant-garde remaining in the whole province of art. It's pure art, lad. Art and science. Art, science and language. Art as much as the art we once called art. It lost its wings after the Babylonians fizzled out. But emerged again with the Greeks. Went down in the Dark Ages. Moslems and Hindus kept it going. But now it's back bright as ever. I got too careless for mathematics. Forgot how swift and deadly it can be. I turned in my panic to empty-field sources and black-body radiation. It was fascinating for a time. You could peer and count and measure and sigh. You could ponder the heavens. You could say: 'Ahhhhh, there it is, look and see.' But the size of the universe began to depress me. I thought the Ratnerians might be offering us a simple declarative sentence or a neat cluster of numbers that would tell us why the universe is so big. When I failed to interpret the message, there was no recourse but the hole. You're lucky, Big B. Right mind in right body. Insect larvae. That's what I eat. Tell them when you get back. Endor eats insect larvae. He doesn't eat worms as such. Larvae. Quasi-worms. Worms pro tem. Furry little items fresh from the earth."

He crawled back into the second hole. The sun was directly overhead. Billy stretched out on the grass, being sure to keep his feet away from the edge of the hole and yet unable to explain to himself why he'd taken this curious precaution. He conjectured from one to three: 1) Endor would grab his ankles, drag him into the hole and eat him.

This made no sense, of course. It was stupid. Endor was respected throughout the world. On the other hand he was a man who had chosen to live in a hole. No, it made no sense. People didn't do things like that. It was stupid. But people under stress did do things like that. Endor was under severe stress. Endor was a person. Yet this was logical thinking and the last thing he wanted to do was trap himself with words and propositions. He knew a logical trap was the worst kind. Numbers had two natures; they existed as themselves, abstractly, and as units for measuring distances and counting objects. Words could not be separated from their use. This fact made logical traps easy to fall into and hard to get out of.

2)   Endor ate insect larvae and might pull him into the hole and force him to do the same. This was more frightening than number one because it was more likely. It was just as stupid but a lot more likely and therefore warranted fear. He had no objection to other people eating larvae as long as he could watch from a safe distance. Endor might not physically force him to eat baby insects but could possibly make the eating of these things seem an invigorating pastime. He had the ability and experience to set a language trap, using scientific persuasiveness and his knowledge of large words and the spaces between such words.

3)   Endor had access to a second hole of unknown dimensions and might grab Billy's ankles and drag him across the first hole and into the second. This was worst of all. The second hole was a concealed entity, a truer than usual pit, a repository for all the disfigured outgrowths of the morbid imagination. People liked to arrange encounters for him with holes, tunnels, sightless eyes, artificial limbs, models of computerized maw. Of these forms of experimental terror he had directly experienced only one. This was the subway tunnel, a region less dreadful than it might have been only because of the word "subway," which was familiar and specific, evoking sound, color, scent and shape. Endor's second hole evoked none of these. It evoked only: second hole. Un-traveled territory. Nothing to picture. No noise to imagine in anticipation of the real thing. It was only twenty feet away from him, the entrance to the hole's hole, but it wasn't the real thing, or the fake thing, or the thing. Who knew what it was? The power of logic, so near to number and so distant, filled his body with warped vibrations, as of a harp string plucked by monkeys.

Endor reappeared. The boy, still frozen to the grass in a state of propositional dream-shock, heard the great man clawing against the sides of the hole proper. This, it turned out, was his way of getting to his feet. Billy knelt at the rim. Endor began to urinate into the second hole, adjusting his stance so that the long feeble arc terminated at the point where the second hole commenced. Although he redeposited his scaly old dangle, he didn't bother fastening his pants and so the zipper just sagged there, fatigued and silver in the sun.

"It tugs hard, lad. I feel it in the bottoms of my feet. There is want at the center of the earth. Never mind impressed force and inverse proportion. There is sheer wanting to contend with. Every day I feel it more. It reaches higher in my body. Everything is want. Everything wants. To be a scientist. Do you know what it's like to be a scientist? I am asking you and telling you these things because these are things you would otherwise have to ask and tell yourself in the years and decades to come. My books on science sold well. But I didn't know until recently what it means to be a scientist. It means the opposite of what people believe it to mean. We don't extend the senses to probe microbe and universe. We deny the senses. We deny the evidence of our senses. A lifetime of such denial is what sends people into larva-eating rages."

Endor crawled into the second hole, returning moments later.

"Science requires us to deny the evidence of the senses," he said. "We see the sun moving across the sky and we say no, no, no, the sun is not moving, it's we who move, we move, we. Science teaches us this. The earth moves around the sun, we say. Nevertheless every morning we open our eyes and there's the sun moving across the sky, east to west every single day. It moves. We see it. I'm tired of denying such evidence. The earth doesn't move. It's the sun that moves around the earth. It's maggots that are generated spontaneously in rotten meat. It's the wind that causes tides. If the earth moved we'd get dizzy and fall off. If the moon and sun cause tides in oceans, why don't they cause tides in swimming pools and glasses of water? There's no variation in the microwave background. Why is this? Because we're at the center of the universe, that's why this is. Don't forget maggots. Whenever you see rotten meat you see maggots. In the meat. In and of the meat. Born of meat. Meat-engendered. Maggots come spontaneously from meat. If not, from where?"

"Flies lay eggs," Billy said.

"Flies lay eggs."

"Flies land on the meat and lay eggs. Isn't the maggot just an early stage in the fly cycle or whatever it's called? Flies lay eggs."

"Flies lay eggs," Endor said.

He snatched at something and put it quickly in his mouth. Something from the hard mud at the side of the hole. Something soft-bodied, wingless, elongate and probably very much alive. Vivid slime dripped through his beard. Fresh green larval fluids. After half a minute he stopped chewing. Billy turned to check on the availability of the Cadillac.

Endor returned to the second hole, remaining there for fifteen minutes this time. Billy tried to ignore the fact that the elderly scientist had quite recently urinated into that very area. Was it before this visit or the previous one? Either way there was bound to be a chemical residue. When Endor returned, part of his shirt was sticking out of the crotch-opening in his pants.

"Men shrink in space," he said. "We have X-ray silhouettes and stereoscopic photographs to prove it. The heart of an astronaut actually shrinks. So do his limbs and torso. Nothing tugs at the man in space. There is no want. None of that universal suck and gulp. His muscles lose tone. His blood accumulates in the wrong places. Chemicals in his body become deranged. In short there is none of the poetry of falling matter. Want is everything. Everything wants. Without want, the bones lose calcium. Without want, potassium vanishes. It used to be thought that matter was falling. In the beginning matter fell. It fell uniformly. It was in the nature of matter to fall. The uniform motion of falling matter meant there was no interaction between particles. No force intervened to disrupt the uniform and utterly beautiful matter-fall of all things everywhere. But then there was a swerve, it was thought. Something, or everything, was nudged into the most imperceptible of swerves. Two particles lightly touched, adhering for the most imperceptible of seconds. This random interaction was the origin of the universe as we know it and fear it today. But nothing in this ancient poem of matter falling precludes the notion that matter continues to fall. Matter is now thought to be organized, interactive and guided by well-defined forces and yet nowhere in the scientific canon is there evidence to dispel the poetic impression that matter-now-organized is constantly falling, which is what I said in the previous sentence if you were listening. It's in the nature of objects to fall. The whole universe is falling. This is the meaning of dreams in which we plunge forever."

He crawled out of sight. When he returned this time he had difficulty getting to his feet. His face and arms were crusted with mud. Mud had accumulated under his fingernails. There was a chunk of dry mud in what remained of the breast pocket of his disintegrating shirt. He finally straightened up. Mudless things with segmented bodies moved through his hair.

"We begin to see how lawless everything is. Once we go beyond planar surfaces we see how mysterious a subject is the geometry of space and time. Who is turning the laws of the universe upside down and were they true laws to begin with? How to explain unexplained energy. Where to find the standard candle. The universe is falling. Yes or no. That's the single pre-emptive riddle. Mull it over and tell me what you think."

Before Billy could say anything, Endor crawled into his tunnel, if that's what it was. The boy didn't mind because he had nothing to say on the subject of falling matter as it pertained to the riddle of the universe. In sixty seconds Endor was back.

"Einstein and Kafka! They knew each other! They stood in the same room and talked! Kafka and Einstein!"

He crawled back into the hole's hole and remained there for a very long time. The hole proper was now in shadow. Billy wondered how Endor survived the nights. Never mind the nights, he then thought. The days. The diet. The boredom. Good weather and bad. Fear and despair. Outrage, loneliness, memory and death. When Endor returned this time, Billy was first to speak.

"What do you eat besides larvae?"

"When I'm feeling hale enough I claw my way up to the rim of the hole and eat the grass or whatever I find growing within arm's length. Some intense little plants in the vicinity."

"I guess there's nothing you can do about drinking except wait for it to rain and drink the rainwater."

"I drink the mud," Endor said. "There's rainwater and earthwater in the mud. I suck and gulp at the mud. Suck and gulp are the activating principles behind the abstract idea of want."

"What do you do in that other hole every time you go in there?"

"I dig, I claw."

"Just with your fingers?"

"There's a clothes hanger. I keep a clothes hanger in there. It's the only thing I brought with me to the hole. I thought I'd need something for my clothes. Something to hang my clothes on. But it turns out I use the clothes hanger to dig. That is, when I dig. Mostly I just claw. I use my fingers to claw."

"I don't see how you can get very far with a hanger. I could have brought you a spoon or fork."

"I never claw without uttering sounds. Otherwise what's it all for? Never underestimate the value of clawing. But never simply claw. As you claw, utter whatever sounds seem appropriate. Nonverbal sounds work best, I find. Otherwise why bother? This is a cruel brand of work."

"Why are you digging and clawing? Why do you claw?"

"Let me see if I'm up to answering that question. There are any number of ways I might reply. Could say the larvae are tastier the deeper I dig. Could answer naturalistically and say I am creating a shelter from the elements. Could, if I cared to, make a series of enigmatic remarks concerning man's need for metaphysical burrows that lead absolutely nowhere. But I believe I'll stick to the answer I gave before you asked the question."

He crawled away again. Billy wasn't on the verge of leaving but he was very close to thinking about leaving. Endor finally returned. This time he neither got to his feet nor remained on all fours. Instead he sat back against the side of the hole, forearms resting on raised knees.

"You're the only one I've talked to, lad. I've had a strong conviction for quite some time. Both before and since the hole. Better light out for a hole, Endor. Find yourself a hole and light out fast. That was my conviction. I still have it. Things here aren't what they seem, Big B. I don't think I'm any closer to dying than I was before the hole. Excluding pure chronology, of course. In other words I didn't come here to meet a quick end. Another thing. The sorrow of simply being is no greater here than it was in pre-hole environments. When you talk about simply being, you're talking about things like holes and rusty mud. My mind is the same, my eyesight, the way I dream, the way I smell to myself. It's surprisingly easy to adjust to living in a hole. Out there, in other words, there's just as much holeness and mudness. Almost time you were leaving, lad."

"Right away."

"Want to watch me eat some more larvae?"

"That's the best part of being here. The eating. I like the sound it makes."

"Keep down, Endor. Don't take any crapola from those mongers."

"What's a monger?"

"Someone who traffics in, peddles to and deals with."

"Am I going yet?"

"It's time now to tell you why I summoned you to this place, this hole."

"You already told me."

"What did I say?"

"You said you were telling me these things because they were things I'd have to tell myself in the years to come. So you're telling them to me now. I guess to get me ready."

"That's not it," Endor said. "This is it."

He crawled into the second hole and remained for about half an hour. Then came out talking.

"There's a dark side to Field Experiment Number One. Now listen. If you've ever heeded anything, heed this. This is it. An outright warning. There is a dark side to it. The importance of the message from Ratner's star, regardless of content, is that it will tell us something of importance about ourselves. That's it, you see. The importance. But there are people and things I want to warn you about. Nameless danger. Be alert for nameless danger. Pending developments, you're the big little man. That makes you important. You are pivotal to the schemes of the mongers. The importance of the code. The namelessness of the danger."

"Is that it for now? Because the car's been ready."

"Visit my room at Field Experiment Number One. It's not one of those shimmery canisters. I designed it myself. Had things shipped in special. It's a room that may comfort you in the time of your inevitable terror, much as I hate to use that kind of defeatist's terminology. It's a room in and of time. Nice place to sit and think. I am special blessed. You are blessed. This is our joint curse. Visit with my blessing."

"I'd like to be excused now."

"My books sold well," Endor said. "I popularized the secrets of the brotherhood all too obligingly. But never a nonverbal word passed my pen. Light out for the hole, Endor. Claw your way down through the silicates to the core iron. Rest in that darkness safe from larvicide. Then start to claw again."

A helicopter went beating past the hole. Billy watched it circle once and then touch down not far from the Cadillac, the blades stirring up dust and leveling tall grass, a state of disturbance created, the emotion that sweeps across the bow of a storm, more than natural agitation. It was as though the afternoon had been fine-sliced into altered rates of movement. A different kind of pace asserted itself, traced in frame-by-frame instants of urgency, expedience, stress, wind-whipped news carried from a very official location. It was an executive helicopter but the man who emerged wore a laboratory smock and red and white basketball sneakers. He gestured to Kidder, who immediately got into the Cadillac and drove off. Billy looked into the hole, hoping Endor would have an explanation for the appearance of the helicopter and departure of the limousine. But Endor had disappeared into the second hole. The man waved to Billy, who got to his feet and headed in the direction of the small aircraft. Since the blades still rotated loudly, the conversation that ensued was at a near shout.

"My name is Hoad. I work on the star project. Hoad. We were in the air when we got word about the star. They told us where you were. We came here to give you the word and get you back to headquarters at once."

"What word?"

"The star is part of a two-star system. Space Brain has just confirmed it. Two-star system. We've suspected this but weren't sure. Now we know. The star is binary."

"Ratner's star?"

"There are two of them," Hoad shouted. "Binary star. Two-star system."

"What does this mean? How does this affect things?"

"It doesn't affect things at all and in practical terms it means next to nothing."

"Does it mean there's less chance of life on any planet that's in orbit in that kind of system?"

"There's less chance, yes, but it's far from impossible. There can be one or more planets in a multiple stellar system capable of supporting life. It's a three-body problem. Suitable orbits, equal mass, temperature variations. But the chance of life as we know it or don't know it is certainly better if the planet in question orbits a single star."

"So it's bad news then."

"What?"

"It's bad news."

"It doesn't negate the message. The message exists. Someone or something sent the message from the neighborhood of Ratner's star."

"There's one thing I don't get."

"What's that?" Hoad shouted.

"Why bother telling me this kind of news? My job is supposed to be the code, break the code. What's the difference to me whether Ratner's star is one star or two stars? The message exists. That's all that matters to me."

"Exactly what I just said."

"I didn't hear."

"Exactly what I said. The message exists. Your job is the code, not the star. But we wanted to tell you about the star because we thought it might help you with the code. Now that you know there are two stars instead of one, you might want to alter your calculations. Or at least view the transmission in a different light. I don't know. We don't pretend to know. We hope you'll know. Come on-Poebbels is waiting in the chopper."

"I'm not sure I want to ride in that thing."

"I've logged I don't know how many hours in spiral-wing aircraft," Hoad yelled. "It's safer than your own two feet."

"Who is Poebbels?"

"Who?"

"Poebbels, who's waiting in the chopper."

"Poebbels," Hoad shouted. "Senior to me. Respected and feared. Supervises plausibility studies. The transmission. The telescope. The computer. The star system and planet. Othmar Poebbels. I hope he dies."

"You hope he dies?"

"You weren't supposed to hear that."

"Why are you wearing that outfit?"

"Poebbels insists we dress this way. Come on, let's get going. Whatever you do, don't act frightened. Even if you're terrifically scared of being aloft in a small aircraft, don't, whatever you do, show it. Poebbels hates to fly. If he knows you're scared, he'll be doubly scared. I don't think I could bear that."

The only good thing about the trip, from Billy's viewpoint, was the part where he approached the helicopter with ducked head and unnatural scuttling steps. Although he wasn't wearing a hat he put his right hand to his head as he proceeded importantly to the aircraft. Despite his bent-over shoulder-first approach, he didn't feel foolish. He liked getting on the helicopter; it was, after all, an executive helicopter and he felt as he imagined six-figure executives probably feel when they duck under the blades and fly off to lavish spas for rub-downs and hard bargaining.

He was seated behind the two men. Hoad at the controls manipulated switches. The noise inside the aircraft reached a punishing intensity, all conversation edging gradually toward the level of an outright scream. Poebbels was about twice Hoad's age, Hoad twice Billy's. The boy had noticed, as he climbed aboard, that Poebbels had very heavy eyes. They gleamed in his head like die-cut precision parts. Hard to imagine eyes like that ever slipping out of focus. Above the eyes was a single broadband eyebrow and above that was dark vigorous hair growing downward into Poebbels's forehead. The noise level brought about contorted looks on all three faces, an automatic shrinking inward.

"We agree the message exists," Hoad cried. "One star or two, the message is not negated. The kid agrees on this. We agree. The pulses and gaps exist. We have contact. There is transmission. Something intelligent lives in the vicinity of Ratner's star."

"Get this zombie ship in the air," Poebbels screamed.

As the helicopter abruptly rose, Poebbels's entire body became taut. Billy felt his own fear uncurl from his stomach (a slick veneer of freak tissue) and dissolve into artless vapors. Poebbels, unclenching a bit, turned slightly in his seat and, although his mouth was only inches from Hoad's right ear, began to direct to Billy a series of high-volume remarks.

"I have work-ed in many fields," he shouted. "I have done work with discrete things. I have done other work with continuous things. How do discrete things relate each to the other? I have wish-ed to answer this question. In the final resolve, all there is to do with discrete things is to count them. One two three four five. There is to count them and there is to use them in a universal logical language, which I hope one day to live to see. I am individually distinct. The individual Hoad is equally distinct. There is unbroken space between us. Of the continuous, I have also done good work. Flow and grow. This is my way to put this work in a short rhyming phrase. Flow and grow. To help me remember. This is what we do right now in this zombie ship. Rate of change every little instant. Move, movement, motion. All together in one smooth whoosh. We have broad wings and soar in untrammel-ed way through the sky of creatures of scant mass. If I give the order to suspend and float on air, then we are all of a sudden a discrete thing and good only to be counted. I make second order and we are continuous again. Flow and grow. I believe this is the meaning giv-ed by the star people. How to join together discrete with continuous. I have hope in your methods, smart fellow. To be sure, this is purely theoretical hope, since it is a fact that my studies in plausibility lead without escape to the conclusion that all events thus far pertaining to the star are lacking in verisimilitude, acceptability and likelihood."

In the distance, beyond the main structure, Billy could see the synthesis telescope-hundreds of tiny dish antennas. A fear bubble traveled upward through his respiratory system. The eye-narrowing mouth-tensing expressions remained unchanged on all three faces. The sun was low now in the western sky. Othmar Poebbels, resuming his address to the boy, once again began screaming in his assistant's ear.

"Simultaneous great men of history," he said. "Ideas bred in two scientific minds at one and the same time. Many examples. Two men thousands of miles away. Speak unsame languages. Differ in all respects. Twin theory phenomena. The dance of two radiant minds in the endless night. But always some conflict sneaks in. Dichotomy. Clash and coun-terclash. You have seen Endor. A sight to see. Digging in the ground. Endor and Poebbels. In the early days we did much good work together. I have progress-ed little by little to the belief that all thought can be put in scientific language which we then manipulate according to strict laws. Submit all reasoning to calculation. Throw in symbolic structure. In this way we end man-made error in the universe. The purest of pure science. This is my hope for the future of everything. Endor meanwhile is trapped in matter. I have talk-ed in this intimate way to show you my respect of your career, small American colleague."

The aircraft began its slow passage down. Immediately all tension vanished. The noise and screaming, the vibrations, the grimaces, the fear bubbles, the lack of sufficient space-all were forgotten at once. Billy watched the horizon correlate itself with the helicopter's flickering descent. Evening peace was settling over the land in patterns of startling visibility. It was a time of precise and unimpelled delight, plain lines of blue and gray, things taken in, men returning, all scattered creatures come together from their day of tumbling in the sun. Units glided into place, every level of descent opening to the fall of the toy-bright object. There seemed no force in nature. All motion was uniform motion occurring in a straight line. Shadows of departed figures themselves departed. To fall in this way, uniformly, equal to but never influenced by other falling things, seemed almost to dispel the sorrow of ponderous being. Free, unswerving and independent of friction, the plunge was like a childhood sigh, devoid of obedience and rote, never evolving, nowhere close to the boned-out howl of those voices departed to the edge of the pure word, evident in the sequence of related sounds only as a timeless sigh-not of this woman in murmurous bliss or that man half leaping in her arms in a spangled blaze of bird-fish symmetry and delicate brute creation, but of a child, only that, a child is all, his sigh a knowing contemplation of time and place and all those darker energies that constitute his peril.

"The craft is down," Hoad cried. "I've brought the craft to earth."

He flipped switches and then jumped out and circled the helicopter in an analytic manner, appearing in his smock and high sneakers to be a doctor of parked cars. As Billy began to rise from his seat, Poebbels put a hand to his forearm and looked carefully into his face.

"I will accompany you to the outskirts of the lobby," he said. "Yes, I will be honor-ed to walk at your side, mathematical phenomenon."

"Where's the lobby? I never saw any lobby."

"Fourteenth floor."

"What's it doing there?"

"Whatever lobbies do," Poebbels said. "Your face is notably clean. This is most important in one's overt conduct. In my group I insist that all subordinates devote themselves to being neat, clean and quick. In order to win their fear, I am often irrational on the subject. Plausibility studies demand the utmost in these areas. We discover this empirically time and again in our daily work. I see you wear sneakers. Very excellent boy-model. I am happy at this moment. I abound with joy. The zombie ship is down and still we live. I have many times remark-ed to my colleagues that the only miracle attach-ed to human flight is that the human heart does not cease to beat in midair. You are happily an exemplar of neatness despite your time in or near the hole and I am glad to accompany you, transcendent intellect, to a point within sight of the lobby. But beyond that I have no wish to go, for I must hurry down to the first floor or I fear I will miss the arrival of the vaunted black fanatic from Australia."

"Who's that?"

"He is said in words to be a dervish, fiend, deity and seer. On other occasions he is referr-ed to in purely scientific terms."

"As what?"

"Master of space and time," Poebbels said.

 

6 CONVERGENCE INWARD

 

The blandishments of Softly's hands, Billy recalled, had made the small animal seem to frown, lap-pampered though it was, whispered to and courted in the pedagogic manner children use with pets (although Softly, of course, had left childhood far behind), and it was afternoon and very green on Softly's porch, immersed in spiral vines and bordered by trees and uncut shrubs, and they'd been talking of this and that, Billy recalled, when Softly plucked from nowhere the speculation: "I wonder if an object too dense to release light is any purer for the experience. Does it rank as a sort of Everyobject? Are catatonic people setting a standard for the rest of us? Is the electromagnetic spectrum a model for the perceptual limitations implicit in any nonblind species of life? And other related questions."

One zero one.

Not only the lowest three-digit prime but the smallest three-digit palindrome. Not only reads the same forward and back but rightside up and upside down. And not only when looked at directly but also when reflected in a mirror. Continues to yield palindromes not only when squared and cubed but when raised to even higher powers.

Thus he passed the time, in regressive play, feeling certain there was nothing to be found anyway, no code to break. He glanced from time to time at the manuscript just to his right. Something about eighteenth-century men working in the service of kings and dowager queens. Court mathematicians of Russia and Prussia. "Only a small fraction of the work that shaped their art was devoted to the dim practicalities of the day. Every new paper, memoir, volume broadened the scope of mathematics itself. Ironic that this amplitude of class should be accompanied by such grim individual funneling of effort, convergence toward an existential center. And curious to find two men doing interrelated work and suffering for it so differently. Both of them were productive well beyond the inner margins of old age. Genial cyclops with a weakness for children. Detached gentleman content to die." It was odd to sit at a desk called a module inside a room known as a canister and to read, under such conditions, of a man who had begun his work before the birth of Catherine the Great and who did not end it until nearly nine hundred books and articles had been published in his name. It was doubly odd to be engaged in trivial calculations based on a series of radio pulses believed to have been transmitted by living things in another part of the galaxy and to reflect, in such circumstances, on a man whose genius had been acclaimed by Napoleon but who was drawn into star-ponds of such inertia that he left his greatest work unopened on his desk for two full years.

The videophone chimed.

"It was as though no experience could escape such minds. The neural center was intent on total concentration. At the bottom of it all dwelt a collapsed object, fallen into its own fundamental being, model of the mathematician himself, invisible except in madness and final pain."

The videophone chimed. He pressed a button and listened as a small male head, calling itself Simeon Goldfloss, announced the existence of a shortcut to the amphitheater in the armillary sphere. Billy didn't know why the man was giving him this information but he was grateful for the excuse it provided to shun further work on the code, at least for the time being, and so he followed Goldfloss's directions, although not with much enthusiasm. A few people were scattered around the amphitheater. Goldfloss stood, nodding, and Billy walked slowly over there, trailing his lack of interest like a baby sister. Then he sat, arms folded across his chest. In the narrow aisle the man maneuvered himself into semi-erect posture, facing the boy, one foot up on the seat adjacent to Billy's.

"A lot of people think this might finally be the answer to the secret of Ratner's star. But before the hall fills up and we get started, I'd like to summarize our findings up to now."

"What might finally be the answer?"

"The aborigine," Goldfloss said.

"Summarize what findings? I didn't know there were any findings. I thought that's what I was here for. To make the findings."

"There have been and will continue to be findings. In the next ten minutes about eighty people working on various aspects of the star project will fill this little theater. They've all made findings of one kind or another. That's why we have the computer universe. To simulate events in order to reach conclusions."

"Who's this aborigine?"

"We hope to answer that question here today."

"How can an aborigine help out on a scientific project?"

"It's not inconceivable that some things exist beyond the borders of rational inquiry. Most everyone will come here to gibe and twit. Fair enough. I may decide to join the fun. But it's important to remember that we haven't gone into this without first investigating every shred of evidence concerning the aborigine's totemic powers."

People were entering the amphitheater. The chatter began to spread in intersecting lines as men and women turned in their seats, moved from tier to tier, stage-whispered improbable rumors up and down the gallery. The sense of festivity, however, was never really total. Across the spaces between bodies a secondary communication seemed to be developing, a secret accompaniment to words and gestures, and it was simply the mass suspicion that through every level of hearsay and high delight there might eventually pass the shaft of a primitive spear.

"We're on the verge," Goldfloss said. "I've never sensed this kind of excitement. I have the feeling something sensational is going to come out of this operation in a matter of days. A new way of viewing ourselves in relation to the universe. A revolutionary human consciousness. And you're at the very center of events."

"Me and the aborigine."

Goldfloss sported dundreary whiskers and wore a silvery denim suit.

"Ratner's star is a main sequence star and its sister star is a black hole. We can't see it but we know it's there because of the pattern of X-ray emissions. So what we're dealing with is a planet in an orbital situation that involves a yellow dwarf, namely Ratner's star, and a supermassive invisible object, or gravitational singularity if you will, or black hole, to use the popular term. That concludes our summary."

A woman wearing an eyepatch entered the chamber. Billy had never seen a woman with an eyepatch. Wondering why, he decided men get in more fights. It was a black patch and covered the right eye. He watched her climb to the fourth or fifth row across the aisle, where she sat alone, a well-shaped woman in her forties, hair cut short, complexion pale, idle lilac scent humming in the air about her.

"Ratner's star is our future," Goldfloss said. "What we've received is most likely the key to their language and to every piece of knowledge they possess. Once you break the code we'll have no trouble reading future messages. We'll know everything they know. In that sense the star is our future. The message itself is probably boring. 'Eight squared is sixty-four.' 'We have twisted molecules.' Typical cosmic announcement. What follows, however, will alter the very core of our being."

A man appeared on the floor of the amphitheater. Silence was instantaneous. Goldfloss, still semi-erect in the aisle and with his back to the man, reacted to the sudden hush by turning slowly and then easing into the seat next to Billy.

The man standing below them, although obviously accustomed to wilderness and excessive sun, was just as obviously white; that is, he was clearly Caucasian, pink-tinged in some spots, ruddy in others, merely freckled elsewhere. He wore old khaki shorts, bark sandals and a string headband ornamented with eucalyptus nuts. His bare sunken chest was scarred and pigmented-three linked circles in red and black. He gazed up one tier of seats and then across the top row and slowly down the second tier.

"Most of you know me, if at all, by the name Gerald Pence. However, I haven't used that name for a very long time. I am called Mutuka now. I arrived, you see, among the nomadic people of the outback in a motor car. Mu-tu-ka, you see. I've been given this name and use no other. Those of you who know me are probably aware of the extensive work I once did in futurology. This is no longer part of my dreamtime, or tjukurpa. I use stone tools now. I eat lizard and emu. I find peace in the contemplation of rock art. Since deciding to live among the foragers, I've learned the language, wangka nintiri, and have begun slowly to understand the higher reality of nonobjective truth. The secrets of the bush are extraordinary indeed. Hard to unravel, harder to explain. Yet with the passage of time, they become less and less extraordinary and soon appear to be nothing more than the natural schemeless flow of nonevents. I don't intend to reveal the secrets of the bush. My role here is a very limited one. The man, the extraordinary individual who grows less extraordinary by the day, the forager and seer whom, it is fitting to say, I am privileged to accompany to this point in geographical history-his role is to accomplish nothing less than the creation of an alternative to space and time."

This second silence was extremely fragile. The sense of something vast produced from something very small-an explosion of laughter, for instance, from a tiny bubble at the end of someone's tongue- seemed to threaten the carefully woven equilibrium in the hall. An alternative to space and time. The phrase was so neatly pre-emptive, so crisp in its implication that the coordinates of all human perception might be not only less reliable than had been thought but completely disposable as well; the sheer efficiency of the phrase, its self-assurance -these were probably enough to guarantee that any laughter of sufficient duration would eventually find its way to the hysterical end of the spectrum. But the silence held and tightened.

"The nomadic family I live with has no name even in its own language. Its language has no name. The secrets of the bush have no name. The man himself, the aborigine, has neither name nor descriptive title, even among his people, most especially among his people. The few white men, walypala, who know of his existence call him variously seer, demon, traveler, god. He doesn't wish to be given a name. He doesn't wish to be seen. Indeed there's been some question as to whether there is anything to see. It's not a simple matter to talk of someone who has no name or title and does not wish to be given any. One could try to get around it by referring to such a person as 'he who has no name.' But this description then becomes his name. The names of the various dialects spoken by the desert nomads are usually descriptive in precisely this way. Let me offer an example: 'the language having the words foot and hand but not feet and hands.' This is the actual name of a dialect. For obvious reasons those who speak the dialect don't refer to it this way. My own nomadic family are a noncounting people. They forage and make throwing spears. Some have blond hair. This is fairly common among desert aborigines. Our visitor's hair, so it's said, is completely white. My people can count only as far as one. They don't understand the multiple form at all. Beyond one, everything is considered a heap. What we call a boomerang has no name in their dialect except on its return trip to the person who hurled it. Stuck in the dust it is nameless. Held in hand, nameless. Released, it remains nameless. Returning, however, it acquires a name-a name so sacred that even if I knew what it was I could not speak it here. A colleague of mine in the early days in the bush was clever enough to ask what the boomerang was called as it pivoted in midair. This was Beveridge Kettle, as some of you may have guessed by the cleverness of the remark-dear man, never found. Happily, the foragers have adopted me. I drink from their billabongs. I see their ghosts-I see their mamu. When a boy was circumcised recently I was among those chosen to eat the foreskin. I hunt their kangaroo. I help care for their dingo dogs. I throw their barbed spear- I throw their kulata."

Billy shifted in his chair. He was tired of Mutuka and wanted to see the real aborigine, if there was one. If not, he wanted to go to his room and spend a few moments mentally dwelling on the ingestion of the foreskin. This was new to him. He'd heard about puberty rites and he knew about circumcision but the idea of concluding such antics by eating the kid's foreskin was completely new to him. Something that novel and disgusting deserved consideration in an atmosphere of total solitude. He looked across the aisle toward the eyepatched woman but someone had taken the seat to her left, effectively blocking his view.

"In the dreamtime there is no separation between man and land. The people act out events in the lives of the dreamtime beings. We become the dingo, the eagle, the bush turkey, the one-one-one-eyed man, the man of beating stick-stick, the man who forages in nameless space. People visit the places of their dreaming-a rockpile, for example, that contains the spirit of the lizard, snake or bandicoot from which they've descended. And they address the rockpile as 'my father, my father'- ngayuku mama, ngayuku mama. People wail at the places of their dreaming. The kangaroo novice performs his dance. Human and animal forms are considered as one. Time is pure and all place is birthplace, the dreamtime site. The bandicoot, incidentally, is a ratlike marsupial."

A man got wearily to his feet and left the amphitheater. Across the aisle another man leaned forward for a moment, giving Billy an unobstructed view of the woman with the eyepatch. She happened to be writing something in a notebook. He watched her tear out the page and pass it down to the man in front of her.

"The bush abounds with tektite," Mutuka said. "These glassy objects are found elsewhere in the world but only in our particular strewn field are they used so successfully in the conduct of magic. Tektite, as all of you must know, is possibly of meteoric origin. The white-haired aborigine, our visitor, uses an uncommonly smooth tektite object for magical purposes that transcend anything ever known in the bush and, I would venture to say, beyond the bush as well. This curious juxtaposition of the primitive and the extraterrestrial is hardly a recent development. Among the desert aborigines, sorcerers have been using tektite in their magic for unnumbered generations. It is almost certain that the white-haired aborigine's magic object, his tektite, his mapanpa, is what enabled him to travel to the radio star in the timeless time of the dream-time."

Mutuka scratched his forehead under the eucalyptus nuts. To Billy he no longer looked strange in his shorts and body paint. There was something almost noble in the unsuitability of his dress. Comedy and nobility were interchangeable among some people. Noble or not, what he said was pretty boring and Billy hoped the aborigine would soon appear. He noticed a piece of note paper being passed across the aisle. Three people got up and walked out. He didn't know whether they were leaving out of boredom or because Mutuka had claimed that the aborigine was capable of traveling into outer space. Both circumstances were equally believable. Monotony and nonsense. Comedy and nobility. Mutuka appeared not to notice the people leaving.

"The dream-being known as the one-one-one-eyed man is in fact a three-eyed man. Their difficulty with multiple forms is what leads the foragers into somewhat awkward terminology. Nevertheless there is reason to believe not only that some animals of the archaeological past on planet Earth had three eyes but also that man himself possessed a third eye and that the pineal gland is a vestige of such an eye in the middle of the forehead, the human forehead. Our visitor himself may or may not possess a third eye. Such are the secrets of the bush."

Ten people walked out.

"Extrasensory perception is the least of his gifts. With his tektite object he is able to sit in time and then whirl faster and faster until this very motion becomes a sort of nth dimension, as the mathematicians say. When word reached me in my brush hut of the apparent contact between Ratner's star and this installation, I went immediately to the revered totemic site where the white-haired one sits, as we say, in time. My informant, your own Dr. Glottle, had given me stellar notations, schematic diagrams, an evolutionary track profile and so on. With my own tektite object I asked the aborigine, who was hidden from my view inside a shell-like rock formation-I asked by striking the object on the most sacred stone of his dreamtime site-I asked whether there was life as we know it in that part of the universe or great undulating desert-sea of light and dark, as it's often called. I do hope you'll bear with me as I try to recount what happened next and at the same time seek to avoid referring to him, him, by any name or designation. This is the most sacred part of the narrative. It must be free of naming. Circumlocution is absolutely essential. The narrative must be pure. Direct naming on my part from this point forward would surely cause me to be excluded from any further participation in whatever is destined to happen here today."

These last few sentences, which seemed sincere enough to Billy, led to a nearly general exodus. Mutuka simply paused in his recitation until the movement ceased. About twenty people remained of the original eighty or ninety. Next to Billy, Goldfloss sat nodding, his eyes totally blank, a picture of dignified fatigue.

"Augury is the least of his powers," Mutuka said. "The answer to me at the dreamsite indicated in ways I am not permitted to recount that yes, yes, yes, there may well be totemic dream creatures living on more than one of the more than one worlds that revolve around the star that sits in time in the part of the desert-sea that speaks by radio to the walypala at Field Experiment Number One. There then occurred the gyration that invariably follows the sitting in time. I heard but did not see the gyration. When it ended I was informed that yes, yes, there is without doubt a dreamtime of creature beings on that world. The journey taken during the gyration is what we have come here to repeat, although the word 'journey' is just as inadequate in this instance as it would be if we used it to describe the way electrons change positions in nuclear space without actually moving through this space. Time and space will be replaced by the nameless dimension of the whirl. They will be purified, if you will. Pure time. Pure space. There will be sitting in time. There will be tektite manipulation. There will be whirl. There will be journey, although that word is inadequate, to the area of the radio star. Then we'll have a question and answer period."

An attendant wheeled a miniature flatcar onto the floor of the little theater. It was about eight feet square, apparently a freight-loading device of some kind. In the middle of it was someone or something covered in white canvas. The shape of the canvas indicated that the person beneath it, if it was a person, was probably sitting with legs crossed and head slightly bowed. That's all there was, a white canvas mound in the middle of a little flatcar. The attendant left the hall. Billy waited for Mutuka to say something. But he simply stood there, waiting, apparently no more useful at this stage of the demonstration than the twenty spectators who remained in the hall. For a long time everyone waited. Then Mutuka left his spot at the side of the flatcar and took a seat in the first row of the section that Billy was in. In less than a minute twelve people left the chamber. The fact that Mutuka no longer had any influence on matters seemed to have no effect on those who remained. Maybe they had nowhere else to go. Goldfloss had degenerated to a splayed position, limbs extended, head flung back in a profound swoon. The others were sprawled in their seats and in several cases across two seats; all but Mutuka, who sat erect with legs formally crossed, hands resting on upper knee. Billy thought there were few things less appealing than the sight of a man's bare legs in a crossed position. Twenty minutes passed. The canvas mound sat on the flatcar. A man up front stood and yawned, turning as he did so, his arms spread like the wings of a banking plane. His face was empty of everything but the yawn itself. A tender grimace. A photograph of time-drams ingested by the human mouth.

Slowly the canvas began to move. Yes. There was movement in the specific area of the white canvas mound that sat in the middle of the loading device. The yawning man took his seat. Aside from that, response to the movement was slight. Mutuka's head may have gained several degrees of arc in a tiny rightward sweep. Billy nudged Simeon Goldfloss, who reacted slowly, as though unaligned with the landscape, expecting to find himself on a Mexican bus.

The canvas was clearly whirling now. In a matter of seconds it had picked up a good deal of speed. Billy couldn't believe that a man sitting with his legs crossed was capable of whirling that fast. His hands and arms would be doing all the work and it just wasn't possible for human hands to move that quickly or for human arms to take that much stress.

If Mutuka had said that the whirler was a holy man from India, an expert in gyrational body-control, Billy would have had less trouble believing what he saw. But the person under the canvas, if it was a person, was supposedly an aborigine. The answer had to be a rotary mechanism that the person was sitting on. The person simply sat on a disk that turned when a button was pushed. Either that or it wasn't a person. The entire thing was mechanical, an oversized model of the agitator in an automatic washer. Those were the two best answers: 1) a large disk and someone sitting on it; 2) a large agitator and no person at all. He thought of two other possibilities. One ridiculous: a small individual running in very tight circles. The other intriguing: an aborigine with white hair and possibly three eyes who had recently finished sitting in time and was now in the process of whirling into the nth dimension, where he would come upon Ratner's star.

The white canvas no longer seemed to be turning. There was a distinct sense of motion but he now realized that the canvas itself was relatively still. Occasionally it would flutter a bit as though being influenced by the moving thing inside. The bottom edges of the canvas were now and then lifted off the flatcar, indicating that the thing beneath it was moving at speeds so tremendous that a hovering factor had been introduced into the relationship between canvas, flatcar and moving object. The canvas, which looked fairly heavy, was definitely being lifted into the air and at times dented by the centripetal action within. Even if he'd been able to time the little hops made by the canvas and to tilt his head accordingly, Billy was much too high in the gallery to get a good view of events taking place beneath the canvas.

For the first time since the whirling began, a sound became evident. The thing or person was apparently moving fast enough to cause sound to be emitted. The sound was faint and remained so, a distant whimper too stylized to be called childlike or animal but never less than terrible to hear, a process sustained at the edge of nonentity. He found it hard to believe that the friction or vibration produced by physical forces alone could bestow such emotion to sound.

A long time passed. The whirling beneath the canvas continued. The low moan delivered itself, neither rising nor dropping in volume. The canvas was lifted more frequently and showed further evidence of the incredible speeds attained by the thing beneath it in the suddenness and depth of the indentations that appeared on its surface. Nobody in the audience spoke. There was no movement aside from an occasional shifting of weight. A good show, he thought. A good performance and maybe more than good and maybe more than a performance. A man below him picked a sheet of paper off the floor, read it without interest and then handed it up to Billy, who assumed it was the note written earlier by the woman with the eyepatch. She had left long ago but the note paper had evidently been making the rounds.

Without warning the noise stopped. A long moment passed. He was in the midst of framing the thought: something is about to happen. Before he could finish, it happened. The canvas shroud leaped violently, not unlike a living thing responding to a terminal instinct. It was quickly sucked out of the air in a broken-back spasm, snapped inside out by some horrible inhaling natural trap.

Deep silence ensued. Nothing stirred. The canvas lay flat on the loading device. Whatever it had once covered was no longer there. It had vanished completely and only a canvas puddle remained. Sitting in time. Tektite manipulation. Nameless dimension of the whirl. This latest development no doubt meant the aborigine was embarked on phase four, the "journey" to Ratner's star. Billy sat immobilized, pondering the vastness of what he'd seen and hadn't seen. No one else seemed very interested. After a while Mutuka rose from his seat, went to the flatcar and carefully lifted the shroud. There was nothing under it that could be seen by the unaided eye. It wasn't until this point that Billy realized he was holding the note in his hand. It took a conscious effort to raise the paper to his face and read it.

 

It's done with an isometric graviton axis.

I saw it twice in a nightclub act in Perth.

Pass it on.

 

He was certain she had written the note before the flatcar had been wheeled in. How had she known what was going to happen? Had she guessed it from something Mutuka said? Or had Mutuka himself been part of the nightclub act? Maybe that was it. She'd not only witnessed this kind of trick; she'd seen it done by the very same man. Billy imagined this Gerald Pence guy, an ex-futurologist, going from town to town in the outback with his space-and-time disappearing act, fooling the half-breeds and superstitious miners. But what was an isometric graviton axis? And could he be sure that the note found on the floor was the same one written by the woman with the eyepatch?

He went down to the floor of the amphitheater. First he inspected the canvas and flatcar, finding nothing, certainly no trace of a large disk or agitator. Then he got on his knees and peered under the flatcar, even reaching in with his hand to feel for trap doors or soft spots. Nothing interesting. He stood up for a closer look at the' canvas shroud, shaking it out and then fingering along the seams. Affixed to one corner was a small tag that read: PROPERTY OF OMCO RESEARCH. Nothing else anywhere. He turned toward the six or seven people in their seats, well spread through the gallery, and simply shrugged, palms up. Mutuka was sitting at the edge of the loading device, facing a blank wall. Billy decided to approach.

"So where's the aborigine?"

"I don't know," Mutuka said. "Who are you?"

"A mathematician who works on the star project and who wonders if the aborigine is now on his way to the star."

"No, no, no, no."

"Why no?"

"You see, he sits in time. Then he whirls, you see."

"Then he goes to the star."

"No, no," Mutuka said. "He's never done it that way. You see, the whirl is the journey. The journey takes place during the gyration. He's not supposed to disappear. He's never done it that way."

"Then the whirl itself is the nth dimension. He doesn't whirl and then become invisible and then come back. He just whirls."

"Yes, of course, absolutely."

"He makes the journey while he's whirling."

"Yes, yes, of course."

"He makes the journey while he's whirling," Billy said to the others. "This wasn't supposed to happen."

He shrugged again. The other people made their way out, dazed and sated, a collection of volunteers roused from prolonged experimental sleep. Goldfloss was the last to depart. Billy walked with him to the elevator outside.

"It was very ambiguous. I feel ambivalent about it. All I really remember is somebody named Motor Car talking about boomerangs. I guess I dropped off once or twice."

Goldfloss patted his side whiskers. The elevator door opened and he stepped in, yawning. Billy headed back to the amphitheater, where Mutuka was still seated at the edge of the little flatcar.

"So then he hasn't come back yet."

"Who are you?"

"I was here for the demonstration. I was one of the ones who stayed for the whole thing."

"I believe he's still here," Mutuka said. "Somehow he's compressed himself. He hasn't actually gone away. He's here but we can't see him."

"What's a graviton isometric axis?"

"You've got it backwards."

"Maybe I reversed the words purposely to see if you'd let on to knowing."

"Odd if I didn't know," Mutuka said. "I spent twenty-three years in futurology before going into the bush. I was a futurologist before the word was even coined."

"How were things in Perth last time you were there?"

"Exactly who are you?"

"Just wondering about the nightlife in Perth."

"I spent two days there. Never been back. My home is the bush."

"Two days and two nights?"

"They usually go together," Mutuka said.

"So you think he's compressed himself."

They sat without speaking for a long time. This period of waiting began to take on the character of a vigil. The feeling between them grew nearly fraternal, drawing them to the subject of their ritual observation. Of course, there was also something comic about the watch they kept. They were watching over something that wasn't there. The aborigine wasn't there and neither was the tektite object. Nothing was there but the idea of an nth dimension. They watched over this idea until well past dinnertime.

"One last thing I'd like to ask," Billy said, "before one of us gets tired and goes. My question is why did you give up your whole career that you spent twenty-three years in to go live in the empty desert with these aborigines?"

"They're fun to watch."

An attendant entered the amphitheater. There was a hawser tied to a ring at one end of the flatcar and the attendant took the line and pulled the flatcar out the door with Mutuka still seated at one end, his legs held straight out to keep his feet from bumping on the floor.

On his way back Billy got lost in the play maze. He knew he was very close to his canister but there wasn't much he could do about it, since nobody was around to give directions. He kept walking between the Masonite panels, up one row and down another, wondering whether the array of zeros and ones might be the equivalent of a single number. It was easy to imagine a system in which every common whole number is composed of one hundred and one subnumbers, all of which have to be arranged in proper order and then counted before the person doing the counting is allowed to proceed to the next number. An extraterrestrial programming code maybe. Could be that what they've transmitted is really one unit of information-not one hundred and one. More to come maybe. The rabbit in the hat on Softly's lap.

He hadn't been through the maze since the day he'd arrived. He tried to recall the arrangement of panels, shifting his perspective so that he viewed the maze from above. His memory of events wasn't exceptional. Where he rarely failed was in a spatial framework. He was able to recall entire pages of complicated text by summoning the pages themselves-typography, space between lines, degree of airiness, the visual personality of words or numbers. Density of text discouraged him slightly. Breezy sort of pages were memory's wading place. What he saw were relationships, the design and arrangement of type-metal shapes. When he had trouble remembering something related to mathematics he usually turned off the lights. He'd tried simply closing his eyes but an unlighted room seemed to work better. He liked the feeling of being surrounded by dark objects and hazy shapes. It wasn't memory they contained but their own sprawling shadows, the only perfect death. Porcelain cats and glass figurines of little girls. Sitting in darkness seemed to him a totally natural act, a minimal process subject to the calculus of variations. It was the favored way of nature itself. States of equilibrium. Principle of least action. Point of minimum energy. Zero rate of change. He wasn't sure at what moment he first became aware that the woman with the eyepatch was walking with him stride for stride. She wore an armful of jade bangles. Black silk shirt and pants. Her name, she said, was Celeste Dessau.