At the top of the third pole Arthur stopped for a breather. He was very hot and out of breath, since each pole was about fifty or sixty feet high. The world seemed to swing vertiginously around him, but it didn't worry Arthur too much. He knew that, logically, he could not die until he had been to Stavromula Beta 4, and had therefore managed to cultivate a merry attitude towards extreme personal danger. He felt a little giddy perched fifty feet up in the air on top of a pole, but he dealt with it by eating a sandwich. He was just about to embark on reading the photocopied life history of the oracle, when he was rather startled to hear a slight cough behind him.

He turned so abruptly that he dropped his sandwich, which turned downwards through the air and was rather small by the time it was stopped by the ground.

About thirty feet behind Arthur was another pole, and, alone amongst the sparse forest of about three dozen poles, the top of it was occupied. It was occupied by an old man who, in turn, seemed to be occupied by profound thoughts that were making him scowl.

'Excuse me,' said Arthur. The man ignored him. Perhaps he couldn't hear him. The breeze was moving about a bit. It was only by chance that Arthur had heard the slight cough.

'Hello?' called Arthur. 'Hello!'

The man at last glanced round at him. He seemed surprised to see him. Arthur couldn't tell if he was surprised and pleased to see him or just surprised.

'Are you open?' called Arthur.

The man frowned in incomprehension. Arthur couldn't tell if he couldn't understand or couldn't hear.

'I'll pop over,' called Arthur. 'Don't go away.'

He clambered off the small platform and climbed quickly down the spiralling pegs, arriving at the bottom quite dizzy.

He started to make his way over to the pole on which the old man was sitting, and then suddenly realised that he had disoriented himself on the way down and didn't know for certain which one it was.

He looked around for landmarks and worked out which was the right one.

He climbed it. It wasn't.

'Damn,' he said. 'Excuse me!' he called out to the old man again, who was now straight in front of him and forty feet away. 'Got lost. Be with you in a minute.' Down he went again, getting very hot and bothered.

When he arrived, panting and sweating, at the top of the pole that he knew for certain was the right one he realised that the man was, somehow or other, mucking him about.

'What do you want?' shouted the old man crossly at him. He was now sitting on top of the pole that Arthur recognised was the one that he had been on himself when eating his sandwich.

'How did you get over there?' called Arthur in bewilder– ment.

'You think I'm going to tell you just like that what it took me forty springs, summers and autumns of sitting on top of a pole to work out?'

'What about winter?'

'What about winter?'

'Don't you sit on the pole in the winter?'

'Just because I sit up a pole for most of my life,' said the man, 'doesn't mean I'm an idiot. I go south in the winter. Got a beach house. Sit on the chimney stack.'

'Do you have any advice for a traveller?'

'Yes. Get a beach house.'

'I see.'

The man stared out over the hot, dry scrubby landscape. From here Arthur could just see the old woman, a tiny speck in the distance, dancing up and down swatting flies.

'You see her?' called the old man, suddenly.

'Yes,' said Arthur. 'I consulted her in fact.'

'Fat lot she knows. I got the beach house because she turned it down. What advice did she give you?'

'Do exactly the opposite of everything she's done.'

'In other words, get a beach house.'

'I suppose so,' said Arthur. 'Well, maybe I'll get one.

'Hmmm.'

The horizon was swimming in a fetid heat haze.

'Any other advice?' asked Arthur. 'Other than to do with real estate?'

'A beach house isn't just real estate. It's a state of mind,' said the man. He turned and looked at Arthur.

Oddly, the man's face was now only a couple of feet away. He seemed in one way to be a perfectly normal shape, but his body was sitting cross-legged on a pole forty feet away while his face was only two feet from Arthur's. Without moving his head, and without seeming to do anything odd at all, he stood up and stepped on to the top of another pole. Either it was just the heat, thought Arthur, or space was a different shape for him.

'A beach house,' he said, 'doesn't even have to be on the beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate,' he went on, 'at boundary conditions.'

'Really?' said Arthur.

'Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other.'

Arthur got terribly excited. This was exactly the sort of thing he'd been promised in the brochure. Here was a man who seemed to be moving through some kind of Escher space saying really profound things about all sorts of stuff.

It was unnerving though. The man was now stepping from pole to ground, from ground to pole, from pole to pole, from pole to horizon and back: he was making complete nonsense of Arthur's spatial universe. 'Please stop!' Arthur said, suddenly.

'Can't take it, huh?' said the man. Without the slightest movement he was now back, sitting cross-legged, on top of the pole forty feet in front of Arthur. 'You come to me for advice, but you can't cope with anything you don't recognise. Hmmm. So we'll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh? Well, business as usual I suppose.' He sighed and squinted mournfully into the distance.

'Where you from, boy?' he then asked.

Arthur decided to be clever. He was fed up with being mistaken for a complete idiot by everyone he ever met. 'Tell you what,' he said. 'You're a seer. Why don't you tell me?'

The old man sighed again. 'I was just,' he said, passing his hand round behind his head, 'making conversation.' When he brought his hand round to the front again, he had a globe of the Earth spinning on his up-pointed forefinger. It was unmistakable. He put it away again. Arthur was stunned.

'How did you– '

'I can't tell you.'

'Why not? I've come all this way.'

'You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.'

'Hang on, can I write this down?' said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.

'You can pick up a copy at the spaceport,' said the old man. 'They've got racks of the stuff.'

'Oh,' said Arthur, disappointed. 'Well, isn't there anything that's perhaps a bit more specific to me?'

'Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.'

Arthur looked at him doubtfully. 'Can I get that at the spaceport, too?' he said.

'Check it out,' said the old man.

'It says in the brochure,' said Arthur, pulling it out of his pocket and looking at it again, 'that I can have a special prayer, individually tailored to me and my special needs.'

'Oh, all right,' said the old man. 'Here's a prayer for you. Got a pencil?'

'Yes,' said Arthur.

'It goes like this. Let's see now: «Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.» That's it. It's what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.'