“We’re about ready to begin,” Tim announced. “Everybody get comfortable and I’ll be coming to each of you in turn, so be patient. Tonight,” he added, “will be a little different, as many of you already know, because the laboratories have finally sent me an adequate sample of Delysid, which, believe me, will enrich and extend the sort of experience you’ve had during the Psilocybin Project—which we’re not abandoning, not by any means, just expanding.”

Everyone in the room was focused on Tim. It was so quiet Fitz could hear the hiss and snap of the fireplaces and, somewhere in the distance, the faint moan of a siren. “It’s one pill only this time, standard dose, two hundred fifty micrograms, the merest fraction of the psilocybin dose, but this drug—lysergic acid diethylamide—is far more potent. And revelatory. As you’ll see.”

There was a sudden thump overhead and in the next moment Tim’s son, Jackie (slim, dark, the generic crew cut, Keds, blue jeans, twelve and a half years on this earth) was pounding down the stairs, across the room and out the front door and into the night while thirty pairs of eyes watched him go. The door slammed and everyone turned back to Tim.

“That was Jackie,” he said, “off on an urgent mission,” and he paused, grinning, to show that this was a joke and give people time to reward him with a rueful chuckle, the icebreaker, but Fitz wasn’t laughing: he was frozen in place by what he’d just heard. LSD? He’d barely had time to absorb his impressions of the last session and now Tim expected him—them—to try something infinitely more powerful, no matter how small the dose? The thing that had made Hollingshead Hollingshead? And where was he anyway? You’d think he wouldn’t miss this for the world.

“All right,” Tim said, “is everybody with me? As usual, I’ll be here throughout the session as your guide, and Walter—Walter, where are you?” Fitz saw now that Pahnke was there, all the way in the back of the room, wearing his leather motorcycle jacket and looking less like a licensed M.D. and Ph.D. candidate in the Divinity School than a juvenile delinquent, as if that would inspire confidence. Of course, he did drive a motorcycle, but to Fitz’s mind the jacket and engineer boots were less about practicality than affectation. And ridiculous too, as if he were embracing academia and rejecting it at the same time. “And Walter’s here also to act in that capacity in case any of you should experience any rough patches—and you will, or you might, who can say, but my advice is to ride them out, that’s all, because you are in for the experience of your lives.”