Mitzi shook her head despairingly. "As if this whole business wasn't getting crazy enough already. I want to know what Vic thinks has been happening on Thurien. Can we call them when you get back, and ask him?"

"He's not ready yet."

Mitzi sighed with obvious impatience.

Caldwell stopped. There was a glass vase on a ledge above Mitzi's desk, containing a cluster of rose buds just starting to open. Caldwell gestured at it. "Things happen in their own time," he said. "The job descriptions call us managers, but you can't manage creative people. What we really are is gardeners. We put them in a place where the soil is right, make sure they get enough water and sun, and then wait for them to do their own thing. Vic and Chris may not have Thurien depth know-how, but put 'em together and they can think sideways. That's what they've got going for them in this. But only if you give them their own space, far away from where people like me might be tempted to meddle." He nodded toward the vase again. "It would be like pulling the petals of those open to try and help things along."

Mitzi's eyes narrowed as a pattern became clearer. "That was why you sent them to Jupiter when the Charlie business needed a new angle, wasn't it?… Then Jevlen. And now Thurien. It's all the same style."

"You know what the two worst inventions were?" Caldwell asked.

"What?"

"The telephone and the airplane. Because they made it too easy for Head Office or the General Staff to go messing around in details that the people on the spot should know how to handle. So they ended up with mediocrities out there. But the Romans managed to do pretty well for six hundred years without any of that. You gave the general his objectives and the wherewithal to carry them out, and after his baggage train or his boats disappeared over the horizon that was the last you knew until a messenger came back. So you had to make sure the guys you picked were good. We have to be careful that we don't make the same mistakes just because we've got Thurien h-space communicators, eh?" Caldwell glanced at the clock display on Mitzi's terminal. "Anyhow, here the lesson endeth. I gotta go."

"Hey, Gregg," Mitzi called after him as he reached the door. He stopped and looked back as he opened it.

"What?"

"How come you're just attending this thing about Machiavelli? Why aren't you giving it?

Eesyan ordered the cessation of further experiments until there were at least the beginnings of some understanding of what was going on. On the day following Calazar's visit, Chien sought out Hunt in the office that he and Danchekker shared in the tower. Hunt was alone, contemplating a wall display showing the results of some calculations that he had been running with VISAR. Danchekker was embroiled in a discussion with the Thuriens in their larger office. Sandy, who had recovered to the point of feeling little more than a mild queasiness, was with him.

"I've been having some thoughts about yesterday," Chien said.

"All of us have been having thoughts about nothing else," Hunt replied. He swivelled in one of the human-scaled chairs that the Thuriens had provided and leaned back. Chien was looking neat and trim in a scarlet, high-necked, oriental style trouser suit, eyes and lips tinted, her hair tied high. "So what's your take?" He gestured invitingly to one of the other chairs but Chien perched herself on the edge of a desk and rested her hands in her lap, fingers interlaced.

"Actually, I thought of it yesterday, but I wanted to let it sit for at least one night." She made a brief motion indicating vaguely the direction of the building housing the Multiporter. "The discrepancies all occurred with people who were in the vicinity of the machine. When you disagreed with Professor Danchekker and his cousin over the Thurien couple at Vranix, you were in the coupler located next to the monitor station; the professor and Mildred were elsewhere. Your account was the one that differed."

"Go on."

"That silly falling out that I had with Josef Sonnebrandt. Going back over it, the things we argued about were all to do with events that took place around the machine while it was running; never about anything that happened when it was quiescent, or while we were away from it. Sandy and Duncan had no such experiences, and they were in this building the whole time. And then yesterday, all the anomalies happened over there around the machine, during the demonstrations. The Thuriens have been comparing their own recollections of odd things that have been happening, and checking the records. It shows the same pattern. I've made a list."

Hunt crossed a foot over his other knee, rested his chin on a hand, and regarded her curiously. "So what do you make of it?"

"Will you promise to put it down to Oriental eccentricity and no more if this sounds just a little bit crazy?" Chien asked him.

"Well, I'll say I will, even if it's not true," Hunt offered.

"How gallant. I'm impressed."

"Breeding and all that. You know the English."

"No, that's the carefully cultivated English image."

"I refuse to get into politics. So what about the Multiporter?"

Chien opened her hands briefly. "The machine is affecting its surroundings somehow. It induces inconsistencies in the events taking place around it." She hesitated. "How can I put this?… When everyone was disagreeing with each other yesterday, Professor Danchekker said we were all living in different realities. I think he was right… well, in a sense. Obviously we were all in the same reality then. But the pasts we were talking about were different." She eyed Hunt questioningly for a moment. He made a gesture inviting her to continue. "The normal Multiverse structure that we're used to thinking about consists of paths branching apart toward different futures. But perhaps it's possible for things to be otherwise. Suppose instead that…" Chien stopped and frowned to herself. She seemed unsure of how to proceed. "We've been wondering what these 'convergences' were."

Hunt said it for her. "Timeline lensing." It was as he had suspected: Chien had arrived at the same conclusion he'd been nursing since yesterday. The description seemed as good a term for it as any.

Chien's eyebrows lifted in surprise. "You're saying that you think so, too?"

"Instead of diverging, they can come together," Hunt said. "That's what my other self was trying to tell me. In his universe, they discovered that it was the single most important thing to understand before they could make any real progress. And it's easy to see why. Instead of a single point in the present leading to multiple alternate futures, you have got the opposite: a present that's a composite of people, memories, even physical objects, that arrived there from different pasts. How could you get anywhere with the kind of insanity that would generate? The gist of it occurred to me yesterday too. But I wanted to mull over it before mentioning it to anyone-like you did."

"Have you made any kind of a start toward explaining it?" Chien asked.

Hunt waved at the wall behind him, half filled with tensor differentials and M-wave propagation equations. "There are some guesses that I've been asking VISAR to look into out of curiosity. It's going to need Eesyan and his people to really make a dent in it. I just wanted to feel I was halfway toward knowing what I was talking about before putting it to them. But it is starting to make a weird kind of sense-if that's the correct word. After all, convergence is just a special case of bending time lines away from their normal direction. And that's what cross-Multiverse propagation is. It's what the Multiporter was designed to do."

"But you just said a moment ago, we'll never get anywhere with the kind of confusion it can produce. How could any complex piece of equipment ever work?" Chien made a helpless gesture. "Is there some way of stopping it, do you think?"