Walter and Tim passed round the envelopes, Walter recording the number of the envelope beside each name, then everyone dissolved the contents in water, and after a brief prayer, ritually drained the glasses and settled in to wait for the effects to take hold. Half an hour later Fitz began to feel a familiar stirring or buzzing, as if his body were hooked up to an electric current, but he couldn’t be sure yet whether this was the effect of the drug or the placebo. He’d been seated on a bench in the back of the room with Ken, talking, of all things, about baseball (Ken was a Sox fan and convinced the team was going to have a mediocre season; he himself didn’t have much to say about it except that his hometown Yankees were the ordained power and Ken should just get used it), when all at once he felt restless and got up to pace round the room. His skin began to prickle. He felt hot, so hot in fact that he pushed through the door and went out into the fresh air, depressed all of a sudden because the overheating and prickling were indications that he’d got the nicotinic acid when what he wanted—what he’d been craving, he realized—was the real thing. If he was going to give up his morning and afternoon in a good cause—and this was an eminently good cause, not just for science or Tim or Walter or the project, but for him too, as a participant, as a guide—then he figured he might as well enjoy the experience.

He was standing there on the lawn in the shade of an oak glistening with minuscule new leaves when all at once the leaves turned to scales and the oak wasn’t an oak but one of the dinosaurs from Wells’s fantasy and he knew he’d got the real thing. It was only a glimpse—the tree was a tree again—but it made him laugh aloud. He was at the beginning of a journey, just strapping himself in, and now there were the colors too, so intense he had to reach for his sunglasses, which didn’t help at all. He was wondering about that, enjoying himself by pushing the sunglasses up and down the bridge of his nose, now you see it, now you don’t, when he heard a voice call out behind him and turned round to see Tim standing just outside the door of the seminary. “Hey, Fitz, time to go,” Tim said, and here was the whole group filing out the door and into the cars parked along the street.