Half an hour later, half-reassured that he was not going to die immediately, he sat up and finished his second shot of bourbon. He wished Saul had picked up. He had questions about matter and space that he needed answered by someone who knew what he was talking about. For instance, thought Hunter, even now unable to crush his undermining speculations completely, there wasn’t supposed to be any space before the Big Bang, so what had that super-hot singularity expanded into? It made space as it expanded, it made space with matter in motion, it came into existence by having an edge that was not in the same place as its origin: by being relative. Of course! He could ring Lucy. She might be able to help, and it was deep into the working day in the UK, and anyhow it would be great to have an excuse to talk to lovely Lucy.

Her phone, like Saul’s, went straight to voicemail. ‘Fuck!’ he shouted, ending the call, not sure whether he had shouted ‘Fuck’ before or after ending it. Whatever. He was going to give a huge Christmas bonus to someone who could tell him what space and matter and motion were in themselves, their intrinsic nature and not just their mathematical relationships to each other, but now perhaps the time had come to get a little rest, to lay some coins on the eyelids of the nearly dead, to invest in a long and dreamless sleep, to weave his frayed nerves back into cables strong enough to carry the surging current, the sheer juice of being Hunter Sterling. With a show of belated puritanism, he poured himself a glass of his own carbon-filtered water – according to his nutritionist, most mineral water was pure poison. With the downers he had taken, he knew that he could achieve his ideal, which was to wake up late tomorrow afternoon, fully refreshed and ready for the next set of challenges with which he packed his life, like a man loading more and more brushwood on to a camp fire to keep the hyenas of boredom and triviality at bay. His fear of a heart attack, psychosis and the other discouraging footnotes to his gargantuan lifestyle was trivial compared to his horror at the idea of doing anything ordinary.

Experience had taught him that eighteen hours of heavily drugged sleep could deforest his memory overnight, and he wanted to focus one more time on what it was, or more economically, on what it wasn’t, that had disturbed him about the world view that had shot past the window of his mental bullet train over the last few hours of reflection, and perhaps record a memo for Jade to type up tomorrow.