There is a fourth and final philosophy by which some of us live our lives, and it boils down to this: do not go quietly into that dark night. Draw a fourth circle on that now-crowded Venn diagram and you'll see that while it intersects the greedy and authoritarian circles, and even has a tiny overlap with the greedy authoritarian bit, it doesn't quite intersect with the third circle, the worshipers. It holds up a mirror to their self-destruction. Call it the circle of the necromantic apostates. That's where I stand, whether I'm greedy or authoritarian or both. (I don't think I'm either, but how can I be sure?)

I may believe in mind-eating horrors from beyond spacetime, but they'll have to break my neck before I bend it to their yoke.

Keep telling yourself that, Bob.

MO CARRIES HER VIOLIN AND FOLLOWS DR. WILLIAMS AS HE picks up a chipped plywood tea tray and backs through a swinging door, carrying the jar of paper clips and the stapler. The glass window in the door is hazed by a fine wire mesh, and the edges of the door are lined with copper fingers that close against a metal strip inside the frame. Williams places the tray on one end of an optical workbench, then bolts the door and flips a switch connected to a red lamp outside his office.

"You've worked with one of these before?" he asks.

"Of course." Mo shrugs out of her jacket and hangs it on a hook. "It's the entanglement-retrieval bit I'm unfamiliar with. That, and I may need a lab report. I know my limits."

"Good." Williams's smile is humorless. "Then if I tell you to stay in the isolation grid over there you know what the consequences are for getting things wrong."

"Indeed." She opens the violin case and removes her bone-white instrument and its bow. Williams stares at it for a moment.

"Do you really need that?"

"When I said they're targeting me, I wasn't exaggerating. Besides, the document they stole was a report on this very instrument. If they're trying to backtrack from it to find the original, then when you bring up the Adams-Todt resonance it might lead them here."

Dr. Williams snorts. "I'm sure the front desk will be very happy to see them." He turns to the bench and unclamps a swinging arm, uses it to position a glass diffraction grating in a path defined by a set of curious pentagonal prisms positioned at the ten vertices of an irregular pentacle. "Would you pass me the data logger? It's the second one along on the top shelf . . ."

It takes Dr. Williams a quarter of an hour to set up the forensic magician's workbench. Apart from the odd geometric layout it doesn't resemble the popular imagination's picture of a sorcerer's laboratory. Colored chalk lines and eye of newt are gone, replaced by solid-state lasers and signal generators: pointy hats and robes have given way to polarized goggles and lab coats. The samples, stripped of their containers, are transferred to windowed containers using perspex tongs. Williams slots them into place in the observation rig. "Okay, stations," he says conversationally. "I haven't modified the beam line so there should be no overspill, but I'll run a low power test first just in case."