"They'd save us all a hell of a lot of trouble if they just opened everything up to everybody," Carrolson said. "I despise secrecy." But she enforced her orders.

"So who's handling the science team while you're here with me?" Patricia asked.

Carrolson smiled. "I put Rimskaya on it. He's snarly, but efficient. And people will certainly think twice before coming to him with complaints. Me, I'm just a pussycat. I need this kind of vacation."

Lanier's memory block specified precisely whom she could talk to, and whom not, about her studies. If she wished to discuss the library, she could only speak with Rimskaya, Lanier and one science team member she hadn't met yet—Rupert Takahashi. He was on the current corridor expedition.

Patricia ate lunch with Carrolson and the three Chinese, napped for half an hour, then took her slate and a camp stool across the flat to the dwarf forest, where she sat and began to make her own notes. Carrolson joined her an hour later, carrying a thermos of iced tea and a couple of bananas.

"I'll need some tools," Patricia said. "A compass, a ruler, some pencils, or. . . I've been thinking. Is it possible that one of the engineers or electronics people could make a tool for me?"

"Name it."

"I'd like to know what the value of pi is in the corridor." Carrolson pursed her lips. "Why?"

"Well, so far as I've read, the corridor is definitely not made of matter. It's something else entirely. Last night—I mean, last sleep, Farley and I talked and she explained what she knew. This morning I peeked at some of the papers Rimskaya and Takahashi put together before my arrival."

"Back in the amateur days of superspace mathematics," Carrolson said wryly. "Rimskaya probably should have stuck to his expertise."

"Perhaps, but he made some interesting suggestions. Tomorrow, Karen is going to take me to the bore hole." She pointed up at the plasma tube and the southern cap axis. "If I can have a pi-meter by that time, maybe I can learn some things."

"Done," Carrolson said. "Anything else?"

"I don't know if it's even possible, but as long as we're measuring pi, I'd like to measure slash aitch and the gravitational constant, whatever else they can think of pertaining to the qualifies of the universe. A kind of multi-meter."

"You think the constants will vary here?"

"Some of them, at least."

"Slash aitch, the quantum of momentum? We wouldn't even exist."

"There could be a difference in ratio. I'd just like to know."

Carrolson stood, picked up the empty thermos and the banana skins and returned to the tent. Minutes later, she and Wu left in the truck, taking the tunnel back to the sixth chamber.

Patricia stared down the corridor, frowning slightly.

She had very real, if limited, power. She had just made a Nobel laureate jump to do her bidding.

For much of her life, Patricia had spent her most important moments in her head, lost in a world that would have been completely incomprehensible to the vast majority of people on Earth. Now, sitting by the dwarf forest, listening to the Mozart Jupiter Symphony and staring down the length of the corridor, she felt at first nervous, then irritated that the state wasn't coming fast enough.