However, with the revised countdown on to the Lord’s Return (the original Miller prediction had put it in 1843) Hephaestus was forced to admit that the technical issues were still troubling. In the evenings when he sat watching the fireflies blinking in the pea patch-his wife, Rapture, brewing some extract of wolf mint, dressing buckskins, or working at her spinning wheel; his son, Lloyd, cataloguing his trilobites or dreaming of his twin sister, Lodema, who had died at birth-doubts would overcome Hephaestus. It was when these doubts took their darkest form that the sphere grew hopelessly heavy. Gleaming in the sunshine now, it appeared to him to be cumbersome beyond all description-ridiculous-so that all his reckonings, all his research, shone back in mockery from the surface of the hot metal.

“It needs to move,” a boy’s voice announced. “Time is a vibration. So the Ark must vibrate in time with Time-to become transparent.”

As remarkable as it may seem, the speaker was none other than his five-year-old son, Lloyd, and as the boy spoke a wishbone and paper airship wafted around the door of the barn. Powered by miniature spindlewood propellers and guided by rudder wings of dried bluegill fins, the delicate machine floated above the goat pasture, then around the barn, and finally over the peppergrass that surrounded their corncrib house, landing intact just beside the man’s mangled foot. Hephaestus looked at the airship in dismay and then over at Lloyd, the craft’s designer and fabricator, knowing that the ingenious trinket had been constructed in but a matter of minutes.

The child’s inventive life had begun in the cradle (or so it seemed to Hephaestus). In addition to a hyper-accelerated acquisition of language skills, although small physically, the boy’s manual dexterity was unnaturally adept while he was still theoretically confined to the old kindling scuttle that had been converted into his bassinet.