She listened to the rumble and purr of the OTV machinery. She heard fuel pumps, mystery noises, gurgles like large water bubbles popping behind the passenger cabin, then the sharp tings of the attitude motors driving the craft away from the shuttle.

They began rotating, their axis somewhere near the middle of the cocoon cargo, clamped where a spare hexagonal fuel tank would have otherwise been. The OTV lurched forward with the impulse of its first engine burn. The blond, still not in her seat, landed on her feet against the rear bulkhead, flexed her knees with the impact and finished her sequence on the processor.

Then everyone buckled in.

The second burn took place fifteen minutes later. Patricia closed her eyes, nestled into the couch and resumed work on a problem she had put aside more than two weeks before. She had never required paper during the initial stages of her work. Now, the Fraktur symbols paraded before her, separated by her own brand of sign notation, invented when she was ten years old. There was no music—she usually listened to Vivaldi or Mozart while working—but nevertheless, she became immersed in a sea of abstraction. Her hand went to the pack of music coins and the slate stereo attachment in her small effects bag.

A few minutes later, she opened her eyes. Everyone was in their seats, staring intently at instrument panels. She tried to nap. Briefly, before dozing off, she ran through her Big Question again:

Why had she, in particular, been chosen from a list of mathematicians that must have been meters long? That she had won a Fields Award didn't seem reason enough; there were other mathematicians of far greater experience and stature. . .

Hoffman hadn't really offered an explanation. All she had said was, "You're going to the Stone. All that you'll need to know is up there, and it's classified, so I'm not allowed to give you documents while you're here on Earth. You'll have a hell of a lot of studying to do. And I'm sure it will be glorious fun for a mind like yours."

As far as Patricia knew, her expertise had no practical use whatsoever, and she preferred it that way.

She didn't doubt her talents. But the very fact that they were calling on her—that they might need to know about (as she had expressed it in her doctoral dissertation, Non-gravity Bent Geodesics of n-Spatial Reference Frames: An Approach to Superspace Visualization and Probability Clustering)—made her even more apprehensive.

Six years ago, a Stanford math professor had told her that the only beings who would ever fully appreciate her work would be gods or extraterrestrials.

In the dark, sleepily drifting away from the OTV noises and the sensation of her stomach pressing always upward, she thought of the Stone. The governments involved did not discourage speculation but provided no fuel to feed the fires. The Russians, allowed on the Stone only the last year, hinted darkly at what their researchers had seen.