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Herjellsen, “of utility as a guide to truth?”
    “It is still,” said William, “the best we have.”
    “Yes,” said Herjellsen, “I think that is true.” He smiled at William. “Only I do not find your `science’ too useful. There are many things I find of interest which it does not explain.”
    “You refer, perhaps,” said William, “to reputed psychic phenomena, extrasensory perception; psychokinesis, and such?”
    Herjellsen shrugged, neither admitting anything nor disagreeing with William.
    “Such phenomena do not exist,” said William.
    “Perhaps not,” said Herjellsen, “but it is interesting to note that, even did they exist, science as it is presently constituted could not explain them.”
    “So?” asked William.
    “So we must be wary,” said Herjellsen, “that we do not take as our criterion for existence what science can explain. At one time science could not explain the functioning of a magnet, at another time the falling of a stone, the digestion of food, the circulation of the blood.”
    “That is different,” said William.
    “Surely it is an obvious fallacy to argue from the inexplicability of a phenomenon to its lack of existence.”
    “Not always,” said William.
    “Explain to me,” said Herjellsen, “the fact of consciousness, the fact that when I wish to move my hand, my hand moves.”
    William said nothing.
    “Of these things,” said Herjellsen, “I am more certain than I am of the existence of the world, and your science cannot explain them.”
    “Do you demean science?” asked William.
    “I only require it,” said Herjellsen, “to be adequate to the whole of experience.” Then he looked at William. “I am confident,” he said, “that whatever may be the nature of the reality it cannot be as our science maintains it to be.”
    “Why not?” asked William.
    “Because of the radical discontinuity of mind and matter,” said Herjellsen.
    “I do not understand,” said William.
    “I am confident,” said Herjellsen, “that the same power that causes water to flow moves in the dreams of a sleeping lion, that causes fire to burn and worlds to turn guides the equations of Descartes, the stick of Archimedes, drawing its circles in the sand, that causes a seed to germinate and a flower to open its petals to the sun moves in your mind and mine.”
    “Perhaps,” said William.
    “The reality and the power is one,” said Herjellsen.
    “What do you propose to do about it?” asked William.
    “The power is in me,” said Herjellsen, “as much as in any seed, in any leaf, in any tree, in any world.”
    “But what are you going to do?” asked William.
    “I am going to touch the reality,” said Herjellsen.
    William was silent. Then he said, “And with what tool are you going to do this?”
    “With the only tool I have,” said Herjellsen, “with that which is most akin to it, most unexpected, most alien to science’s accustomed modalities.”
    “And what tool is that?” asked William, skeptically.
    “My mind,” said Herjellsen. “My mind.”
    Hamilton could not take her eyes from the cubicle.
    It was some seven feet in height, and some seven feet in length and breadth.
    The walls were of clear, heavy plastic. Access to the cubicle was by way of a small, sliding panel, some eighteen inches in width, some four feet in height. It was closed now.
    It seemed very primitive, somehow. But Hamilton understood its primitiveness as one might have understood the primitiveness of the first steam engine. It was simple, and crude, and yet the wonder of it was what was herein, per hypothesis, harnessed. It would have been simpler, more reassuring, could one have seen a wheel turn, a valve lift and fall, but there was little to note within save an odd play of light, a photic anomaly, now at the fringes of the cubicle, now like beads of bright water at its edges, pulsating, corruscating, then in small threads darting across the heavy plastic to join other threads, other