It took an hour and a half for Isaac to realize that what he had thought might be a useful mental model was vastly more exciting. He set out in a systematic attempt to prove himself wrong. He constructed scenario after mathematical scenario with which he tried to rubbish his tentatively scrawled sets of equations. His attempts at destruction failed. His equations held firm.

It took Isaac two days before he began to believe that he had solved a fundamental problem of crisis theory. He enjoyed moments of euphoria, many more of cautious nervousness. He pored over his textbooks at a crushingly slow pace, searching to make sure he had not ignored some obvious error, had not replicated some long-disproved theorem.

Still, his equations held. In terror of hubris, Isaac sought any alternative than to believe what was looking more and more like the truth: that he had solved the problem of mathematic representation, quantification, of crisis energy.

He knew that he should immediately converse with colleagues, publish his findings as “work in progress” in The Review of Philosophical Physics and Thaumaturgy, or the Unified Field. But he was so intimidated by what he had discovered that he avoided that route. He wanted to be sure, he told himself. He had to take a few more days, a few more weeks, maybe a month or two . . . then he would publish. He did not tell Lublamai or David, or Lin, which was more extraordinary. Isaac was a garrulous man, prone to spouting any old tosh, scientific, social or obscene, which came to his mind. His secretiveness was profoundly out of character. He knew himself well enough to recognize this, and to realize what it meant: he was deeply disturbed, and deeply, deeply excited by what he had found.

Isaac thought back on the process of discovery, of formulation. He realized that his advances, his incredible leaps of theory in the last month, which eclipsed his previous five years’ work, were all in response to immediate, practical concerns. He had reached an impasse in his studies of crisis theory until Yagharek had commissioned him. Isaac did not know why it was so, but he realized that it was with applications in mind that his most abstract theories were advancing. Accordingly, he decided not to immerse himself totally in abstruse theory. He would continue to focus on the problem of Yagharek’s flight.