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puzzles, LEGOs, action figures, Happy Meal prizes, Rubik’s Cubes, spheres, and dodecahedrons. Edward never understood what they saw in them. Zeph said they were good for his spatial visualization skills, though having seen Zeph’s senior thesis on low-dimensional topology, Edward thought his spatial visualization skills might already be morbidly overdeveloped.
    On his way back Edward was surprised to find a small man standing in the hallway outside Zeph’s study. He was studying Zeph’s collection absorbedly. Edward had never seen him before.
    â€œHey,” said Edward.
    â€œHello,” the man said in a calm, liquid voice. His head was perfectly round, and he had fine, straight dark hair like a child’s.
    Edward held out his hand.
    â€œI’m Edward.”
    The small man put the pink plastic pyramid he was playing with back on the shelf. Edward belatedly withdrew his hand.
    â€œAre you a friend of Zeph’s?” he hazarded.
    â€œNo.”
    The man-child, who really was tiny, barely five feet tall, looked up at him patiently, without blinking.
    â€œSo—”
    â€œI used to work with Caroline. As a sysop.”
    â€œOh, yeah? Like in an office?”
    â€œExactly.” He beamed, as if he were delighted at Edward’s success. “Exactly. I kept the e-mail server and the local network running. Very interesting.”
    â€œWas it.”
    â€œYes, it was.” He seemed to have no sense of irony whatsoever. “Consider the example of packet data. The moment you click SEND on an e-mail, your message splits up into a hundred separate pieces—we call them ‘packets.’ It’s like mailing a letter by ripping up a sheet of paper and tossing the pieces out the window. They wend their separate ways over the Internet, moving independently, wandering from server to server, but they all arrive at the same destination at the same time, where they spontaneously self-assemble again into a coherent message: your e-mail. Chaos becomes order. What is scattered is made whole.
    â€œYou learn a lot about human nature, too. It’s amazing what some people will leave on their hard drives, completely unencrypted.”
    The man looked up at Edward and quirked an eyebrow at him meaningfully. Edward considered the possibility that he might be hitting on him. He was suddenly gripped with a burning desire to be back in Zeph’s study with his beer.
    â€œExcuse me for just a moment,” he said. He sidled carefully past the man, avoiding physical contact as he would with a dog of uncertain provenance, and slipped back into Zeph’s study. He closed the door and stood with his back to it.
    â€œYou know there’s a gnome in your hallway.”
    Caroline was there, sitting on Zeph’s knee. She was a small woman with a round face surrounded by a corona of curly, honey-brown hair. She had tiny, squinty eyes behind round steel glasses.
    â€œI see you met our friend the Artiste,” she said. Her voice was the opposite of Zeph’s: a breathy, baby-doll, Blossom Dearie voice.
    â€œHe followed her home one day,” said Zeph. “Now he shows up and hangs around sometimes. He’s pretty harmless.”
    Edward looked from one to the other.
    â€œYou just let him wander around your house like that?”
    â€œHe’ll leave eventually,” Caroline explained. “It freaked me out at first, but after a while I figured out that you don’t have to pay any attention to him. He’s mildly autistic, something called Asperger Syndrome. He’s pretty functional. It doesn’t interfere with his intelligence—he’s probably smarter than all three of us put together—but it means he has trouble dealing with people. And he gets obsessive about certain things, like computers. Actually, it’s good to have him around. He’s an unbelievable programmer. He works freelance.”
    â€œSometimes he slips into machine