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sharpshooter.
        Considering that he might be engaged in meditation and averse to interruption, I said nothing.
        The monks of St. Bartholomew's are encouraged to cultivate silence at all times, except during scheduled social periods.
        The silence during the day is called the Lesser Silence, which begins after breakfast and lasts until the evening recreation period following dinner. During Lesser Silence, the brothers will speak to one another only as the work of the monastery requires.
        The silence after Compline-the night prayer-is called the Greater Silence. At St. Bartholomew's, it lasts through breakfast.
        I did not want to encourage Brother John to speak with me. He knew that I would not have visited at this hour without good reason; but it would be his decision to break silence or not.
        While I waited, I surveyed the room.
        Because the light here was always low and restricted to the center of the chamber, I'd never had a clear look at the continuous wall that wrapped this round space. A dark luster implied a polished surface, and I suspected that it might be glass beyond which pooled a mysterious blackness.
        As we were underground, no mountain landscape waited to be revealed. Contiguous panels of thick curved glass, nine feet high, suggested instead an aquarium.
        If we were surrounded by an aquarium, however, whatever lived in it had never revealed itself in my presence. No pale shape ever glided past. No gape-mouthed denizen with a blinkless stare had swum close to the farther side of the aquarium wall to peer at me from its airless world.
        An imposing figure in any circumstances, Brother John made me think now of Captain Nemo on the bridge of the Nautilus, which was an unfortunate comparison. Nemo was a powerful man and a genius, but he didn't have both oars in the water.
        Brother John is as sane as I am. Make of that what you wish.
        After another minute of silence, he apparently came to the end of the line of thought that he had been reluctant to interrupt. His violet eyes refocused from some far landscape to me, and in a deep rough voice, he said, "Have a cookie."

CHAPTER 6
        
        IN THE ROUND ROOM, IN THE CARAMEL LIGHT, beside each armchair stood a small table. On the table beside my chair, a red plate held three chocolate-chip cookies.
        Brother John bakes them himself. They're wonderful.
        I picked up a cookie. It was warm.
        From the time I had unlocked the bronze door with my universal key until I entered this room, not even two minutes had passed.
        I doubted that Brother John had fetched the cookies himself. He had been genuinely lost in thought.
        We were alone in the room. I hadn't heard retreating footsteps when I entered.
        "Delicious," I said, after swallowing a bite of the cookie.
        "As a boy, I wanted to be a baker," he said.
        "The world needs good bakers, sir."
        "I couldn't stop thinking long enough to become a baker."
        
        "Stop thinking about what?"
        "The universe. The fabric of reality. Structure."
        "I see," I said, though I didn't.
        "I understood subatomic structure when I was six."
        "At six, I made a pretty cool fort out of Lego blocks. Towers and turrets and battlements and everything."
        His face brightened. "When I was a kid, I used forty-seven sets of Legos to build a crude model of quantum foam."
        "Sorry, sir. I have no idea what quantum foam is."
        "To grasp it, you have to be able to envision a very small landscape, one ten-billionth of a millionth of a meter-and only as it exists within a speck of time that is one-millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second."
        "I'd need to get a better wristwatch."
        "This landscape I'm talking about is twenty powers of ten below the level of the proton, where there is no left or right, no up or