A low boom echoed from the home domes.

Dom stared, and heard again in his inner ear the thin crack of a stripper shot in the transparent air around Joker Tower. Images flooded into his mind, with fragments of speech that joined and became coherent, and the memory of the hot pain and the cool green relief of the swamp water ...

A dot in the air grew rapidly. He heard his mother cry out, a long way off.

Korodore dived with his clothes smouldering. Raw blisters were his hands, blood was his face.

He landed heavily by Dom and shouted incoherently at him. Dom nodded, lost in a dream.

The man in the blue robe stepped lightly towards them, and took his theatrical stance. Ig shrilled.

Korodore lurched forward, raised the stripper in both hands, and gave a growl and dropped its smoking butt. In the same motion he flung himself towards the outstretched arm.

The ball of non-light spun up above the blackened lawn and the landscape twisted. See-Why was a bright sun. In the painfully light sky it showed now as a darker speck.

3

'Understanding is the first step towards control. We now understand probability.

'If we control it every man will be a magician. Let us then hope that this will not come to pass. For our universe is a fragile house of atoms, held together by the weak mortar of cause-and-effect. One magician would be two too many.'

Charles Sub-Lunar, Cry Continuum.

'The fish swims - vsss!The bird flies - rsss!The fungi-squirrel run - gsrss!The wheel turns andAll is one. 'I must scream yet I have no mouth.I must run yet I have no feet.I must die yet I have no life.The wheel turns andAll is one.'