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known an almost divine unity of spirit and matter, of purpose and consequence: was it this that men were searching after now, across strange
seas, in the infinite silent spaces of pure thought?
    Well, if such harmony had ever indeed existed, he feared deep down, deep beyond admitting, that it was not to be regained.
    *
    He took humanities, and also theology, as Uncle Lucas had directed. His studies absorbed him wholly. His ways became the set ways of the scholar. Old before his time, detached,
desiccated and fussy, he retreated from the world. He spoke Latin now more readily than German.
    And yet it was all a deeply earnest play-acting, a form of ritual by which the world and his self and the relation between the two were simplified and made manageable. Scholarship transformed
into docile order the hideous clamour and chaos of the world outside himself, endistanced it and at the same time brought it palpably near, so that, as he grappled with the terrors of the world, he
was terrified and yet also miraculously tranquil. Sometimes, though, that tranquil terror was not enough; sometimes the hideousness demanded more, howled for more, for risk, for blood, for
sacrifice. Then, like an actor who has forgotten his lines, he stood paralysed, staring aghast into a black hole in the air.
    He believed in action, in the absolute necessity for action. Yet action horrified him, tending as it did inevitably to become violence. Nothing was stable: politics became war, law became
slavery, life itself became death, sooner or later. Always the ritual collapsed in the face of the hideousness. The real world would not be gainsaid, being the true realm of action, but he must
gainsay it, or despair. That was his problem.
    *
    Amongst the things he wished to forget from Cracow was his encounter with Professor Adalbert Brudzewski, the mathematician and astronomer. The memory of that mad mangled
afternoon, however, was the ghost of a persistent giant with huge hairy paws that for years came at him again and again, laughing and bellowing, out of a crimson miasma of embarrassment and shame.
It would not have been so bad if only Andreas had not been there to witness his humiliation. By rights he should not have been there: he had shown no interest whatever in Brudzewski or his classes
until, after weeks of wheedling and grovelling, Nicolas had at last won a grudging invitation to the Professor’s house—to his house !—and then he had announced in that
languid way of his that he would go along too, since he had nothing better to do that day. Yet Nicolas made no protest, only shrugged, and frowned distractedly to show how little he cared in the
matter, while in his imagination a marvellously haughty version of himself turned and told his brother briefly but with excoriating accuracy what a despicable hound he was.
    *
    Professor Brudzewski’s classes were rigorous and very exclusive, and were, as the Professor himself was fond of pointing out, one of the main bases on which the
university’s impeccable reputation rested. Although he was of course a Ptolemeian, his recent cautious but by no means hostile commentary on Peurbach’s planetary theory had raised some
eyebrows among his fellow academics—brows which, however, he immediately caused to knit again into their wonted, lamentably low state by means of a few good thumps in defence of Ptolemaic
dogma, delivered with malicious relish to the more prominent temples of suspect scholarship. The Peurbachs of the present day might come and go, but Ptolemy was unassailable on his peak, and
Professor Brudzewski was there to say so, as often and as strenuously as he deemed it necessary so to do.
    Nicolas had read everything the Professor had ever written on the Ptolemaic theory. Out of all those weary hours of wading through the dry sands of a sealed mind there had been distilled one
tiny precious drop of pearly doubt. He could no longer remember where or when he had found the flaw, along