“May I interrupt you, Yugo?”

“Of course, Dors,” said Yugo Amaryl with a large smile. “You are never an interruption. What can I do for you?”

“I am trying to find out a few things, Yugo, and I wonder if you would humor me in this.”

“If I can.”

“You have something in the Project called the Prime Radiant. I hear of it now and then. Hari speaks of it, so I imagine I know what it looks like when it is activated, but I have never actually seen it in operation. I would like to.”

Amaryl looked uncomfortable. “Actually the Prime Radiant is just about the most closely guarded part of the Project and you aren’t on the list of the members who have access.”

“I know that, but we’ve known each other for twenty-eight years—”

“And you’re Hari’s wife. I suppose we can stretch a point. We only have two full Prime Radiants. There’s one in Hari’s office and one here. Right there, in fact.”

Dors looked at the squat black cube on the central desk. It looked utterly undistinguished. “Is that it?”

“That’s it. It stores the equations that describe the future.”

“How do you get at those equations?”

Amaryl moved a contact and at once the room darkened and then came to life in a variegated glow. All around Dors were symbols, arrows, lines, mathematical signs of one sort or another. They seemed to be moving, spiraling, but when she focused her eyes on any particular portion, it seemed to be standing still.

She said, “Is that the future, then?”

“It may be,” said Amaryl, turning off the instrument. “I had it at full expansion so you could see the symbols. Without expansion, nothing is visible but patterns of light and dark.”

“And by studying those equations, you are able to judge what the future holds in store for us?”

“In theory.” The room was now back to its mundane appearance. “But there are two difficulties.”

“Oh? What are they?”

“To begin with, no human mind has created those equations directly. We have merely spent decades programming more powerful computers and they have devised and stored the equations, but, of course, we don’t know if they are valid and have meaning. It depends entirely on how valid and meaningful the programming is in the first place.”

“They could be all wrong, then?”

“They could be.” Amaryl rubbed his eyes and Dors could not help thinking how old and tired he seemed to have grown in the last couple of years. He was younger than Hari by nearly a dozen years, but he seemed much older.

“Of course,” Amaryl went on in a rather weary voice, “we hope that they aren’t all wrong, but that’s where the second difficulty comes in. Although Hari and I have been testing and modifying them for decades, we can never be sure what the equations mean. The computer has constructed them, so it is to be presumed they must mean something—but