“I do,” he protested. “Every kid in this house is my kid.” And here they all looked down the table to where the children had abandoned the field, all except for Lori, who didn’t really qualify, though she slept in Nancy’s room and always seemed to be slipping in and out of one doorway or another in the company of Nancy, Suzie or one of the boys. “And that’s another thing,” he went on, “—I just don’t see how we can pretend to be so concerned about the kids, about us as a family, when we keep denying them the sacrament. It’s hypocritical. Why shouldn’t they have that experience, like Susannah said last time? Talk about school, it’ll give them an advantage, that’s what it’ll do. And that’d shut the naysayers up faster than anything.”

It was an idea that had been floated before and she was of two minds about it. On the one hand, she wanted Corey to have that advantage, to see through the veil, enrich his mind—and his IQ; she was sure it would boost his IQ even higher than it already was—but by the same token she was afraid for him, afraid of what a bad trip might do to somebody so young, whose personality wasn’t fully formed yet. “What about Bobby?” she said. “He’s only eight.”

Fitz—he was sitting beside her, sipping from a glass of brandy—said there ought to be a cutoff age. “Just in terms of brain development—the stages of it, I mean. All the literature—”

“Literature,” Hollingshead interjected bitterly. “Textbooks. Papers, articles, The New England Journal of Medicine. All written by academics who wouldn’t know transcendence if it bit them in the ass.”

“I’ll second that,” Charlie said. They were beyond academia now, into a new realm in which they were the pioneers and the masters too, not McClelland and Kellard or even the neurologists in the medical school, who, as Fitz himself liked to point out, knew the brain only as an organ, anatomically, but didn’t have a clue as to what thought was—or what it was capable of either.

Royce—he was Bobby’s father, after all, and so it was his decision, his and Susannah’s—tilted his head and gave Charlie a quizzical look. “I don’t know,’ he said. “He is awfully young. Just a little kid, really . . .”

“Hypocrisy,” Hollingshead said, shaking his head, and Susannah, who was seated between him and her husband, leaned forward so she could look past him to where Tim sat in his usual spot, at the head of the table, and said, “A microdose. A hundred micrograms or even less. What do you think, Tim?”