“Something is still bothering you,” Yulin noted.

Gil Zinder sighed. “Yes, quite a lot. This is a terrible power, you know, to play god like this. And I don’t like the idea of the Council getting control of it.”

Yulin looked surprised. “Well, they didn’t blow all this money for nothing. Hell! We’ve done it, Gil! We’ve knocked conventional science into a cocked hat! We’ve shown them how easily the rules of the game can be changed!”

The older scientist nodded. “True, true. We’ll win all sorts of awards and all that. But—well, you know what’s the real problem. Three hundred seventy-four human worlds. A lot. But all but a handful are Comworlds, conformist fantasies. Think what the rulers of those worlds could do to those people with a device like ours!”

Yulin sighed. “Look, Gil, our way is no different than the crude methods they use now—biological manipulation, genetic engineering, all those things. Maybe things won’t be so bad after all. Maybe our discovery will make things better. Hell, it can’t make them much worse.”

“That’s true,” Zinder acknowledged. “But the power, Ben! And,” he paused, turned in his swivel chair to face the younger scientist, “there’s something else.”

“Huh? What?” Yulin responded.

“The implications,” the physicist said worriedly. “Ben, if all this, this chair, this office, you, me—if we’re all just stable equations, matter created out of pure energy and somehow maintained as we are, what’s keeping us stable? Is there a cosmic Obie someplace, keeping the primary equations balanced?”

Ben Yulin chuckled. “I suppose there is, one way or another. God is nothing but a giant Obie. I kind of like that thought.”

Zinder didn’t find it amusing in the least. “I think there is, Ben. There must be, if everything else is correct. Even Obie agrees. But who built it? Who maintains it?”

“Well, if you want to be serious about it, I suppose the Markovians built it. For all I know they still maintain it,” Yulin responded.