He nodded.

“We could fry Earth’s cities. You’ve brought back the horror of the twentieth century.”

He grimaced. “That’s melodramatic,” he said.

“Do you think Freechild Dauble would have hesitated to abuse such power?”

Charles said, “I know that you will use it wisely. We would not have told you if I thought otherwise.”

For a moment, I was speechless. I waved my hands and finally pointed a finger at him, not knowing whether to laugh or scream. “My God, Charles, I’m glad I made such an impression on you! Maybe I am a saint. But what about those who come after — for generations?”

“Long before then, everybody will know. There will be a balance. Look, Casseia, this is irrelevant — ”

“I don’t see that,” I muttered.

“It’s irrelevant because the knowledge is here and it won’t go away.” His face fell into an expression of weariness. “There is no peace, no end to the new and frightening in this life.”

I bit my tongue to keep from saying, Philosophy comes late, Charles.

“I know,” he continued. “I’ve thought about this for years. What happens if we complete the theory, I asked myself, and find a way to get into the Bell Continuum. To manipulate descriptors. We all worried about it.”

Leander came back and sat, looking between us. “Do we have any agreement?” he asked.

I laughed weakly and shook my head. “Bad dreams,” I said.

Charles said, “ ‘O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.’ ”

“We think of that quote a lot,” Leander said, settling into his seat. “The universe is bounded in a nutshell. Distance and time mean nothing, except as variations in descriptors. Knowing that, we could be kings of infinite space.”

“And the bad dreams?”

Leander’s expression abruptly grew stern, even sad. “Charles put me up front because I look the part and because bureaucrats respond to me better. That doesn’t mean I can be circumspect all the time. We’re in this together, Miss Majumdar. You can stand on your high mountain and accuse us of naiveté and intellectual hubris and tell us nothing we haven’t pondered a thousand times in private.”

“Don’t assume, Stephen,” Charles said. “Casseia isn’t so simplistic.”

Leander controlled himself with visible effort, smiled brightly and falsely, and said, “Sorry. I happen to think that focusing on ‘bad dreams’ points to a lack of imagination.”

“Why didn’t the President come with you?” Charles asked. “This should have taken precedent.”

“There’s a major problem. If she doesn’t solve it, the cloth might unravel, and there will be no constitutional government to decide what to do with your work. She trusts me to tell her what happens.”

“She’s afraid, isn’t she?” Charles said.

I sniffed.

“I saw it in her eyes,” Charles said. “She’s human-scale. She’s not comfortable with this kind of immensity.”

I nodded. “Perhaps.”

“What about you? Can you overcome your fear and look with a child’s eyes?”

“Don’t expect too much, too soon, Charles,” I said.

The test area had been equipped with a temporary shelter for twenty people, built by arbeiters the day before. Four of the Olympians — Leander, Charles, Chinjia, and Royce — were present, Chinjia and Royce having flown in even before the shelter was finished to prepare their apparatus.

The landscape around the site was as barren as I remembered from vids seen in areological studies in second form. Melas Doras had none of the drama of the sulci, none of the color of Sinai, no fossils, no minerals…

An hour after we arrived, the scientists we had chosen to witness the demonstration flew in on yet another shuttle. Ulrich Zenger and Jay Casares were avid supporters of the constitution, with impeccable academic credentials. They were professors of theoretical physics from the University of Icaria , an independent research school funded by six BMs. We were introduced in the shelter, and Charles immediately briefed them on the experiment.

The test bed itself lay beneath an unpressurized tent-dome. In suits, Charles, Chinjia, Royce, Zenger, Casares and I walked from the shelter to the dome. Charles removed a cylinder of pure hydrogen prepared and delivered by Zenger and Casares, and carefully placed it in a sling hanging from the apex of the dome. Zenger and Royce then brought forward a neutron counter and other equipment. Arbeiters recorded the preparations on vid.

“What are we doing to see?” Casares asked Charles as the final arrangements were made.

“You’ve studied our theory papers, and you understand what we claim we’ve done?” Charles asked in turn.

Casares nodded.

“Are you convinced?”

Casares shook his head. “It’s fascinating, but I resist switching paradigms.”

“Is there any way your hydrogen-filled cylinder can produce energy?”

“In its present state, no,” Casares said.

“We’re going to make it produce a great deal of energy.”

We returned to the shelter, removed our suits, and joined Leander and Zenger in the equipment room. Here, once again, waited a broad steel table and the white thinker with no affiliation. Several small black boxes were connected to the thinker by optical cables.

Leander asked the thinker whether all the equipment was working properly. It replied, in a young man’s voice, that all was well.

Charles sat on a stool beside the table. “Our thinker provides an interface with a Quantum Logic thinker, also contained within the box. Both were grown on Mars, by Martians.”

“Who?” Zenger asked, clearly interested in this development.

“Myself,” Leander said, “and Danny Pincher. At Tharsis Research University .”

“This by itself is worth the trip,” Zenger said. “If the thinkers are stable and productive.”

“They’re dedicated and not very powerful,” Leander said. “Danny and I are growing better ones now. We’ve probably violated several laws by building them the way we have, but we needed QL control of the apparatus, and we exhausted all legal means of procuring a QL thinker.”

Zenger nodded. “Please go on,” he said.

“Some of our work was inspired by a pretty famous scientific mystery. We’ve all studied the Ice Pit accident. That was almost fifty years ago. A Lunar scientist named William Pierce tried to reduce the temperature of a small sample of copper atoms to absolute zero. He succeeded, with disastrous consequences. Pierce and his wife were killed. One observer managed to escape, but he was badly injured. The Ice Pit cavern became an incomprehensible void.”

Zenger seemed unimpressed. “So what are you going to do with our hydrogen?” he asked. “Send it to Wonderland?”

“We’ve never duplicated his experiment,” Casares said. “It’s never been proven that absolute zero was reached. Something else may have happened.”

“We know that zero temperature was achieved,” Charles said.

Zenger turned down his lips and thumped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “How do you know?”

“No details for now,” Leander said.

“We’re going to convert some of the hydrogen in the cylinder to mirror matter,” Charles said. “The reaction between normal hydrogen and mirror hydrogen will produce neutrons, gamma rays, and heat.”

“Let’s do it,” Casares said impatiently.

Charles sat beside the thinker. A control panel was projected above the white box. “The thinker is fixing the descriptor coordinates for the sample,” he said. “The descriptors do not use absolute measures or coordinates. Every space-time descriptor is relative to the descriptors of the observer. In some ways, that makes our job easier. When we’ve located our sample, we can confirm by querying other descriptors, which will tell us what the sample is made of… And we’ll know we’re tweaking what we want to tweak.”