He worked his way through them and went into the extension where yesterday morning, which seemed an aeon ago, he had first seen Silvia's incredible glass mosaic screen. The studio was empty. Diffuser lamp’s were shining behind the trefoil panels, providing a patchy illumination which obscured the design of the three universes, shading them off into a mysterious darkness suggestive of the vast tracts of the cosmos beyond the limits of human vision. Dallen found the entire construct beautiful beyond words, and again he was awed by the sheer amount of labour that it represented. His appreciation of art was untutored, a chief criterion being that a piece should appear difficult, to have taxed the artist's powers, to have been hard work — and by that standard alone the screen, with its hundreds of thousands of varicoloured glass chips, had to be the most impressive and soul-glutting creation he had ever seen.

"It's not for sale," Silvia London said from close behind him.

"Pity — I was going to commission a dozen." He turned and found himself warmed by her presence. Everything about her seemed right to him — the humorous intelligence in the brown eyes, the determination of the chin, the strength combined with the utter femininity of the fuli bosomed figure sheathed in a pleated white dress.

"Perhaps I could make you a little suncatcher," she said.

"It wouldn't be the same. Being little, I mean. It's the size of this thing — all those separate pieces of glass — which helps make it what it is."

Silvia's lips twitched. "You're a dialectical materialist."

"Step outside and say that," Dallen challenged. Silvia laughed and this time his arms, unbidden, actually opened a little to receive her. He froze in a turmoil of guilt and confusion. Silvia seemed to catch her breath and her eyes became troubled. "I was talking to Rick a little while ago," she said. "He told me what happened to your family. I'd heard about it before, but I didn't realise… I didn't connect you…"

"It's all right. It's my problem."

She nodded thoughtfully. "I’ve heard of people making a full recovery."

"It depends on how close they were to the gun. If only the memory cells are affected it's possible for a person to be re-educated, recreated almost, in a year or so, because all the connecting networks that person built up are still intact. But if the cell connections have been damaged…"

Dallen hesitated, shocked at finding himself discussing the subject with an outsider, and even more so by what he was about to admit to himself. "Cona and Mikel were hit at very close range. I think they're gone,"

"I'm so sorry." Silvia stared at him for a moment, shoulders slightly raised, as if coming to a decision. "Carry, I'm not trying to push Karal's ideas at you, but there's something I'd like you to see. Will you come and look?"

"I don't mind," He said, setting his glass down.

"Through here." Silvia led the way to the back of the studio, into a workshop which was equipped with a range of machine tools, and from there into a short corridor. At the end of it was a heavy door which she opened by thumb printing the lock. Revealed was a large square chamber which was dominated by a rectangular transparent box resembling a display case in a museum. Suspended inside the box on near-invisible wires were six spheres of polished alloy roughly a metre in diameter. Dallen went closer to the case and saw that each sphere was surrounded by a cluster of delicate needle-like probes, all of them impinging in a direction normal to the surface. Wires from the bases of the probes converged on instrument housings on the floor beneath the case.

"Impressive," Dallen said. "I've seen a Newton's cradle before, but not his double bed."

"My husband and five other volunteers are surrendering their lives for this experiment," Silvia replied, making it clear that flippancy was not welcome. "The probes are not actually touching the spheres, though it looks that way. The tip of each one is ten microns from the surface. They're kept at that distance by sensors and micro controls even if the spheres are disturbed by local vibrations or earth tremors or temperature changes. The system compensates for all natural forces."

"What's the point of it?"

Silvia's face was solemn. "It won't compensate for supranatural forces. Karal is planning to move the first sphere in the line when he becomes discarnate. If he is successful, as he fully expects to be, the sphere will make contact with one or more probes, and there'll be a signal."

"I see." Dallen sought a way to conceal his instinctive scepticism. "Proof of life after death."

"Proof that what we call death is merely a transition."

Dallen realised that he had to be honest. "Haven't other people tried to send signals back from the quote other side unquote?"

"They weren't physicists with a full understanding of quantum non-location and the forces involved."

"No, but… I never heard of mindons before tonight, but 1 gather that if they exist at all their interaction with matter is very, very weak. How could a… discarnate entity composed of mindons hope to move a thing like that?" Dallen flicked his thumb to indicate the nearest of the massive spheres.

"Karal teaches that mindons are somehow related to gravitons."

"But we don't even know that gravitons exist."

"But, but, but!" Silvia's smile was sadly messianic. "Has it ever struck you how onomatopoeic that word is?"

"I'm in a constant state of wonderment over it," Dallen said and immediately cursed the verbal reflex which often tricked him into hurting those he had no wish to hurt, but Silvia was unaffected.

She went straight into a discourse on nuclear physics, the gist of which was that not all fundamental interactions are common to all particles — a neutrino having just one — which opened the theoretical door for mindons having only the mental interaction plus another, as yet undemonstrated, with gravitons. The picture Dallen received was one of a dead Karal London somehow riding herd on a swarm of gravitons and guiding them across interstellar space to collide with one of the six spheres. He also gleaned that there were five other elderly disciples — one on Orbitsville, one on the planet Terranova, three in various parts of Earth — who had similar visionary plans, each with a separate sphere as his target. It was a scenario which Dallen found quite preposterous" I'm sorry," he said. "It's too much for me. I can't believe it."

"Belief isn't necessary at this stage — all you have to do is accept that it's all conceivable in terms of present day physics." Silvia spoke as one repeating a creed. "A personality is a structure of mental entities, existing in mental space, and it survives destruction of the brain even though it required the brain's complex physical organisation in order to develop."

"My brain is getting a bit overheated," Dallen said, dabbing imaginary sweat from his brow.

"All right — here endeth the first lesson — but I warn you you'll get more of the same when you come back." Silvia walked to the door of the chamber and paused for him to join her. "If you come back,"

"I don't scare easily." You liar, he told himself, you're going weak at the knees. He was acutely aware as he walked towards her that a clearly delineated "business" phase of the encounter had ended, that they were alone, and that she was waiting in the actual doorway, which meant there would be a moment in which it would be almost impossible to avoid contact. He went to her and an instinct prompted him to extend his hands, palm outwards and fingers slightly apart, in a gesture which had meaning only for the two of them and only for that unique instant. Silvia put her hands against his, interlocking their fingers, and the warmth of her entered him and changed him. He tried to move closer, but she checked him with a slight increase of pressure.