Before very long, he was spending most of his time on that davenport, and hardly any at all down on State Street. His wife, who never questioned anything, moved vaguely through the rooms, discussing only household affairs, sometimes getting an answer if Bland happened to be inside his body, but most often not. Odd-looking people began to show up at the door, without phoning. Creeps, foreigners with tinted, oily skin, wens, sties, cysts, wheezes, bad teeth, limps, staring or—worse—with Strange Faraway Smiles. She let them in the house, all of them, and the study doors were closed gently behind them, in her face. She could hear nothing but a murmur of voices, in what she guessed to be some foreign tongue. They were instructing her husband in techniques of voyage.

There have happened, though rarely, in geographical space, journeys taken northward on very blue, fire-blue seas, chilled, crowded by floes, to the final walls of ice. Our judgment lapsed, fatally: we paid more attention to the Pearys and Nansens who returned—and worse, we named what they did “success,” though they failed. Because they came back, back to fame, to praise, they failed. We only wept for Sir John Franklin and Salomon Andrée: mourned their cairns and bones, and missed among the poor frozen rubbish the announcements of their victory. By the time we had the technology to make such voyages easy, we had long worded over all ability to know victory or defeat.

What did Andrée find in the polar silence: what should we have heard?

Bland, still an apprentice, hadn’t yet shaken off his fondness for hallucinating. He knows where he is when he’s there, but when he comes back, he imagines that he has been journeying underneath history: that history is Earth’s mind, and that there are layers, set very deep, layers of history analogous to layers of coal and oil in Earth’s body. The foreigners sit in his parlor, hissing over him, leaving offensive films of sebum on everything they touch, trying to see him through this phase, clearly impatient with what they feel are the tastes of a loafer and vulgarian. He comes back raving about the presences he has found out there, members of an astral IG, whose mission—as indeed Rathenau implied through the medium of Peter Sachsa—is past secular good and evil: distinctions like that are meaningless out there… .

“Yess, yess,” all staring at him, “but then why keep saying ’mind and body’? Why make that distinction?”

Because it’s hard to get over the wonder of finding that Earth is a living critter, after all these years of thinking about a big dumb rock to find a body and psyche, he feels like a child again, he knows that in theory he must not attach himself, but still he is in love with his sense of wonder, with having found it again, even this late, even knowing he must soon let it go… . To find that Gravity, taken so for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth’s mindbody… having hugged to its holy center the wastes of dead species, gathered, packed, transmuted, realigned, and rewoven molecules to be taken up again by the coal-tar Kabbalists of the other side, the ones Bland on his voyages has noted, taken boiled off, teased apart, explicated to every last permutation of useful magic, centuries past exhaustion still finding new molecular pieces, combining and recombining them into new synthetics—“Forget them, they are no better than the Qlippoth, the shells of the dead, you must not waste your time with them… .”