He heard the clicking of a coasting bicycle, and Lola rolled into view in the driveway. Amelia came shouting up to show off the garland of yellow allamanda blossoms she had constructed and also the dollar earned at the restaurant. Then a kiss for Paz. She looked around, sniffed luxuriously.

“That smells great. You’re being the perfect husband again.”

“Not perfect. I grabbed Yolanda’s butt in the reefer before lunch.”

“Oh, I totally understand about that,” she said. “I know how men are-you haven’t had a piece of ass in what, seven hours?”

“Seven hours and thirty-two minutes,” said Paz, “but who’s counting?” She laughed and went off to shower and change her clothes. Paz drank some more daiquiri and painted more sauce on his meat.

Bob Zwick was a blocky, confident man with a Jewish Afro of some length and an unrepentant New York accent that in social situations he rarely let rest. He had graduated from MIT at sixteen and thereafter had spent five years working on M-theory with Edward Witten at Princeton. Having plumbed the secrets of subatomic structure as far as he wanted, he had surprised everyone by switching fields to molecular biology, had picked up another Ph.D. (Stanford) in that, and then, feeling the need for a little break, had come down to Miami to work on his tan and get an M.D. at the university. There he had met Lola, had hit on her instantly, as he did on very nearly every woman who crossed his path, been laughingly rejected, and become her friend. Zwick, it had to be said, neither pressed his suit beyond the first no, nor held a grudge. Paz would not have picked him off a menu as a pal, but he got along with him, had even taken him out on the boat to fish a time or two. He found Zwick entertaining in a headachy sort of way, like daiquiris.

Dressed this evening in shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt that said PRINCETON COSMOLOGICAL CO.INC.CUSTOM UNIVERSES,WE DELIVER, he strode in, embraced and kissed the hostess, snatched up Amelia and whirled her around to the giggle point, shook hands with Paz, and introduced his current girl, a leggy blonde with a bony sardonic face. She was wearing a sleeveless top and a long skirt of some nubbly clinging stuff, in lavender. Paz felt a little flutter in his belly, but she didn’t bat an eye.

“Beth Morgensen,” she said, extending a cool hand. “You must be Jimmy Paz.”

“I am,” he said and wondered if she had told Zwick, and more important, whether she would let it out this evening.

“What is that, a banana daiquiri?” said Zwick. “I want one. Beth, this guy makes the best banana daiquiris in the galaxy. These are galactic-level daiquiris.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Morgensen, who had, in fact, consumed any number of them during the months eight years ago when she had been one of Jimmy Paz’s many girlfriends. He produced the drinks, along with a salver of boiled shrimps with small pots of various sauces, and avoided her gaze.

They drank around the picnic table and talked, their shoulders swaying helplessly, their fingers tapping to the music, and Paz rose several times to replenish the blender, helped by Amelia, who liked squeezing limes and breaking bananas into the beaker. On the last of these trips, he ran into Beth Morgensen, coming from the bathroom. Paz sent Amelia out with a full blender. Morgensen watched her trot off.

“Well, Jimmy Paz,” she said, looking him over boldly, “all domesticated with a kid and a wife. Who woulda thunk it? I guess I blew my chance.”

“I didn’t know I was in the running. You were aiming for a full professor, as I recall.”

“Silly me, then. How long have you been married?”

“Seven years, around there.”

“Oh, the danger period.”

“I don’t know. I’m pretty happy.”

“She must be a kaleidoscope of delight, then.” She moved closer, placed her arms on his shoulders, did a little hip grind to the music. “It’s hard to believe,” she said, “that you’re into fidelity. Not the Jimmy Paz I used to know.”

“People change, although now that I think of it, you were always a cheap date. A couple of scoops and you were slipping out of your panties.”

“True enough. Would you like me to slip out of them now? Only you would know.”

Paz gave her a false little smile, a faked laugh, and eased away.

More drinking. The shrimp peels piled up in the bowl. Zwick was holding forth on the mystery of consciousness and how he intended to penetrate what he called “the last great unanswered question in science.” Paz said, “I thought that was string theory. I thought it was getting relativity and quantum mechanics to work together, quantum gravity, the Theory of Everything stuff.”

Beth screamed in mock horror. “Oh, no! You asked him about string theory! Wake me when it’s over.”

“Yes, theoretically,” said Zwick, and in a Germanic accent, “tee-or-et-ically, but that’s all it’s ever gonna be, these patzers will be crashing gold nuclei into each other forever, and maybe,maybe, they’ll get hints of something, and maybe, they’ll get something from the telescopes, peek a little at the big bang a zillion light-years away, but they’ll never be able to deliver the confirming experiment. Not like the quantum work, not like relativity, where you have fuckingthousands of confirming experiments.” And he went through several of them in detail, a short course in both quantum electrodynamics and general relativity, using shrimps and utensils as particles (or waves) and napkins to model the Calabi-Yau spaces in which the putative seven extra dimensions of space-time were wrapped in the unimaginably small compass of the Planck length. He was a superb teacher, funny and with a consummate grasp of the subject. Even Amelia seemed to be following the spiel before she drifted off to play with the cat.

“Yes, but you haven’t said why none of it makes sense, why no one can actually generate our sensory world out of all that craziness,” said Morgensen. “Instantaneous action at a distance, time stretching, cats being alive and dead at the same time, all of that. I personally think you guys just made it up.”

“Because you’re a primitive creature and not a scientist,” said Zwick. “A lovely though primitive creature.”

“I beg your pardon: Iam a scientist.”

“No, you’re a pseudoscientist. Sociology is a pseudoscience, using statistical methodology to massage a set of lies. It’s like phrenology. It doesn’t matter how accurate you are with the fuckingcalipers or whatever, the underlying theory is crap, as are the data sets. Science is physics: theory, analysis, experiment. Everything else is dogshit.”

“And see who gets another crack at my milk-white body,” said Morgensen, “probably not Mr. Dogshit here.”

“And yet from another perspective,” said Zwick instantly, “we see that sociology is actually thequeen of the sciences, profound, illuminating, un-dogshitlike…”

“But according to you, string-theory physics is dogshit, too,” said Lola.

“No,” Zwick replied, “it has the shape of real science, it mathematically predicts stuff we know to be true already, but it’s really unlikely to be anything but a kind of, I don’t know,theology, which is why I bailed. It’s gotten absolutely medieval, guys spinning out theory that there’s no hope of ever confirming because there’s not that much energy in the universe, I mean to get down to the strings or the dimensions wrapped up in the Planck length. And the cosmos stuff, yeah, but it’s like looking for a cat in a blacked-out room. Dark matter? Dark energy? Please! But biology, especially neuro, is where physics was a hundred years ago. We’re generating volumes of new, real information just like Rutherford and all of them. We can look inside the brain now, actually watch it thinking, just like they discovered how to look inside the atom. Magnetic resonance imaging technology and the cyclotron are machines of the same order of importance. Plus, we have genomics now, which means we can trace the genetic switching that creates learning, that creates behavior, down to the molecular level. So psychology is out the window. I mean it was always crap, but now we know it’s crap. There’s no psych to ‘ology’ on.”