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who had no sense for the aid they may provide the community they supposedly served. He glared and muttered past them all.
     
     
    At the little church in Torksey, Father Taylor held a less charitable view of things. He had not yet been to the Thane’s manor and felt some relief that this new turn of events would, if briefly, overshadow the finding of the dead swan and thus his task of bringing such tidings. He was angered at what he knew would be the response of characters such as the old Draper woman, who would make much of the connection and create a renewed superstition that he himself sought always to undermine to only meagre avail. He despised the small-mindedness about him, and sympathy or sensitivity deserted him as usual, as he knew it would. And he disliked his own heart, for he wished above all to be more charitable, but could not find it in himself.
     
     
    At the village of Nocton Fen, several miles directly the other side of Lincoln from Torksey, young Timothy Watson made his first really noticeable acquaintance with an Angel.
    Hello, Timmy . We’ll start soon. Are you ready?
    Timmy looked at the light. He liked the light. It made him laugh. So he started looking for it as often as he could. It was very playful with him, hiding and then coming back out again.
    He’d seen the light before – often in fact – but today it was brighter than usual, and he eyed a reflection of himself in the angles the light struck, and along which he liked to stare. Tim wondered how he might get that particular light to play with him; it didn’t seem too hard because after a while he could tell that it very much wanted to.
    Not that he knew it, but with this exchange Timmy had just taken part in the most important scientific discovery of the twentieth century.
     
     
     
     

2
     
    Don’t be afraid to see what you see.
    Ronald Reagan, fortieth US president (1911–2004)
     
    If Faith was the essential element of religion, so it was also with science.
    Dr Alicia Watson lived on what she liked to refer to as the dark side of physics. Her bright office walls were a testament to it. Two vivid blue walls, two crisp white ones, with low bookcases all around, all evidenced a desire to clear the rubble of the true theoretician in favour of newness and clarity – a blank slate.
    Alicia felt any inspiration that came to her in her work came from a universal ether of scientific truth, not from within her own head. She disliked the terminology of discovery. She knew all science already existed; hers was only to come to know it herself. That knowing came in part from experimentation, but more from her thoughtfulness about information known and consideration of other information that may be lying just beyond the known. She thus claimed her work not entirely as her own, although this was not a view she shared with those other devotees about her. She would never have said she had any belief in a god, but her own studies and research indicated the reality of a universal energy underpinning all things, that had will of its own and existed outside the minds of men. Some may have called this God, but Alicia was never so foolish as to cross over entirely from the dark side and into sheer quackery. She believed in what she saw, and what she saw was more than just particles and more than just light, and it did not conform to most of recent known science. She wondered at times that it had more to do with the ancients of Aristotle and Plato and Pythagoras whose science at least connected them with the universe instead of putting them apart from it, and whose search was one of heart and soul as well as mind. That they were philosophers as well as scientists – and philosophers first, and that these two departments were separated by most of the rest of the university – was an irony of history not lost on Alicia.
    Alicia’s science required an open-mindedness that would surely have been a prerequisite for any self-respecting scientist, except