Peter wore a gray sweat suit of soft fabric, and thick mountaineer’s socks—no shoes or slippers.

We consumed Alpen and coffee in the kitchen. I told him I’d seen him on TV, and we talked about the media frenzy over Kuiper. Peter said it was all to do with positive feedback.

“It’s like that Mars story a few years back. You know, where they found fossil bacteria in a meteorite—”

“Thought they found.”

“And Clinton zipped himself up long enough to pronounce that NASA had discovered life on Mars. Suddenly it was everywhere. The story itself became the story.” It was the nature of the world’s modern media, he told me. “The days when news was controlled by a few outlets, the big networks, are long gone. Now you have CNN, Sky, Internet news sites: thousands of sources of news at local, national, and international level. And they all watch each other. A story sparks into life somewhere. The other outlets watch the story and the reaction to it, and pick up on it . . .” He was overfamiliar with this stuff, and tended to talk too rapidly, using specialist jargon, words like mediasphere. He showed me an editorial he’d clipped from the Guardian decrying the bubble of hysteria over Kuiper. “There’s even news about news, which itself becomes part of the story. It usually finishes with a spasm of self-loathing. ‘What This Hysteria Says About Our Society.’ Pathological, really. But it shows the kind of world we live in now. We’re all densely interconnected, like it or not, and this kind of feedback loop happens all the time.”

Densely interconnected. For some reason that phrase appealed to me. “But the fuss about Kuiper has been good for you,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “It’s been good for me.”

Cradling our second mugs of coffee, Peter led me into his living room. Beyond a big double-glazed picture window, a garden glowed green in the soft light of the autumn morning. The room obviously served as an office. In addition to a music stack and wide-screen TV with various recorders and set-top boxes, there was a large table given over to computer technology: a big powerful-looking desktop, a laptop, various handhelds, a scanner, a joystick, and other bits of gear I couldn’t recognize. The desktop was booted up. There were books and stacks of printouts on the desk and on the floor.

All this looked like the environment of a freelancer working at home. But there was no sense of style, and a certain lack of ornamentation and decoration—no photographs, for instance—a lack of personality.