They worked with the Earth’s magnetic field, using apparatus cribbed from some Nikola Tesla drawings, right up until the night when Failstaff almost flipped the planet’s magnetic poles, whereupon they dropped that whole line of investigation and backed away slowly. Gummidgy spent a sleepless week developing a witheringly abstract hypothesis related to cosmic rays and quantum effects and the Higgs boson, which in the end even she only half-understood. She swore she could prove it mathematically, but the calculations required were so involved that they would have required a computer the size of the universe, running for a length of time that would have taken them past the projected heat-death of the universe, to work them out. It was pretty much the definition of moot.

That’s when they turned to religion.

At this Julia pushed her chair back from the table. She could feel her intellectual gag reflex about to kick in.

“I know,” Pouncy said. “But it’s not what you think. Hear us out.”

Failstaff began unrolling a huge, closely annotated diagram that was almost as big as the table.

Religion had never been a subject that interested Julia. She considered herself too smart to believe in things she had no evidence for, and that behaved in ways that violated every principle she’d ever observed or heard plausibly spoken about. And she considered herself too tough-minded to believe in things just because they made her feel better. Magic was one thing. With magic you were at least looking at reproducible results. But religion? That was about faith. Uneducated guesses made by weak minds. As far as she knew, or thought she knew, her views on this matter were shared by the other Free Traders.

“There was a piece missing,” Pouncy went on. “We thought we’d gone back to first principles. But what if we hadn’t? What if there were principles before the first principles we’d gone back to?

“We were assuming, until it could be proved otherwise, that there were bigger energies out there, far bigger, and that there was a technique by which those energies could be manipulated. Humans have not, so far as we know, in the modern era, gained access to those energies. But suppose there were another class of beings who did have access to them. Maybe not humans.”

“Another class of beings,” Julia said flatly. “You’re talking about God.”

“Gods. I wanted to find out more about them.”

“That’s insane. There’s no such thing as gods. Or God. You know, Pouncy, one of the things I love about the fact that I didn’t go to college is that I didn’t have to sit around a freshman dorm getting high and arguing about shit like this.”

But Pouncy was not withered by her scorn.

“‘Once you’ve eliminated the possible, whatever remains, however impossible, must be the truth.’ Sherlock Holmes.”