To the postmodern  cosmologists of Michael Kearney’s generation, entrapped by self-referential mathematical games, habitually mistaking speculation for science, the Tract had presented as the first of a new class of conundrums:  the so-called Penfold Object, the singularity without  an event horizon. To Kearney himself it was just another artefact of the 24-hour news cycle, data massaged into fantasies for media consumption,  less science than the public relations  of science. The day NASA/ESA revealed its Tract composites – great hanging towers like black smokers in an ocean trench,  luminous  rose-coloured  fans and pockets of gas, shock- fronts with an aluminium sheen, looping through the gaseous medium as sounds 50 or 60 octaves below middle C, all layered-up from a year’s observations by half a dozen space-based instruments, not one of them  operating  in the wavelengths of visible light – he had stiffened like a cat which thinks it sees something through a window; then relaxed equally suddenly and murmured, ‘Never fall for your own publicity’; later adding with a grin, ‘They might as well have had it announced  by a man in a cloak and a top hat.’

A generation later in Dr Alpert’s office, Anna asked herself out loud, as if the two ideas were related, ‘What are dreams anyway?’

What indeed? thought the doctor, after Anna had gone. Sometimes the client beggared belief. Helen Alpert studied  her notes; laughed; switched the voice recorder  to Play, so that  she could listen for a sentence or two which had intrigued her.