After a lot of protests from his parents and a lot of screaming from him, his father had drawn over to the side of the road, letting Hunter lurch outside and pace along the hard shoulder, with the traffic rushing by dangerously close, trying to see if he could make any difference to his confusion by penetrating space with his own motive force, but although he eventually calmed down and got back resentfully into the car, he knew that it was futile and that there was something unresolved lurking at the root of his panic, something he simply tried to ignore from then on. Hunter could feel it again right now; the memory was so vivid that it had managed to replicate that old British motorway angst from thirty-four years ago. If anything, it had gotten worse. He had learnt more about science since then, especially from Saul and his other advisers during the two years they had been collaborating on Digitas acquisitions, but there was still no way of escaping his root confusion; in fact it had grown worse as he became more knowledgeable. The tension could only be resolved if he could conceptualise absolute motion, motion relative to nothing else. That, however, could only exist in absolute space, a vacuum containing an immaterial grid of mathematical coordinates. And how would that be measured, except by the very thing he was trying to measure in the first place: the motion of a solitary particle, not subject to any forces – since gravity, for instance, would require another massive object – from one coordinate to another, along a grid that itself could only be measured by motion, since it needed to stretch in at least two directions in order to exist? Jesus, he really needed some rest.

This latest trip may have been a mind-fuck, but it had been a business bonanza. Saul had beaten the competition by securing the new ceramic armour patented by a brilliant French inventor. It was not only stronger and lighter than other ceramic armours, with a unique visor which was a transparent version of the same material, but the suit also drew inspiration from snakeskin to create a set of overlapping scales that provided total flexibility. A filter system ensured protection against chemical and biological weapons. Once you were inside that armour, the only thing you could die from was a heart attack, a stroke, an aneurysm, a pre-existing condition or a systems failure.