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head, but she sensed something, and it captivated her. At night, she would suddenly wake, look at me, and exclaim, “How strange!” Thinking I was asleep, she would run her fingers over my face and whisper almost inaudibly, “Where did you get all this? How do you do it?”
    Threads of fine energy streamed from her fingers. She was all lit up like a sensitive live wire, and I was happy for a short while. Then, about six months later, her interest dried up. She grew tired and common – a quarrelsome, lazy soul. I was in despair and suffered like I never had before. Later, I threw her out. And I lost faith in everything.
    Even living molecules became loathsome to me. I submitted to sloth, then I quit before bringing what I had started to a conclusion. There was no one to carry on after me, so my work was for naught. I loafed about for an entire month, almost never leaving the house. Then I suddenly came to my senses – and felt ashamed, embarrassed, and guilty. So I decided to start it all afresh.
    This turned out to be easier than could have been expected. My passion for fulfillment formed and intensified. For four short years I followed it with redoubled effort as I polished my procedures and methods. I wandered from lab to lab, never staying in one place long, choosing my projects carefully, without being lured by either prestige or money. I latched onto whatever was most difficult, amorphous, or fragmentary and forced it into formal frameworks, imagined the unimaginable, and programmed what no other would attempt to program. I worked side by side with physicians and chemists, climatologists and pharmacists, astronomers, linguists, navy sea captains… All of them deserve my thanks. They broadened my range of vision. I learned the underlying rationale for the most varied things – no textbook could have helped me in this. A multitude of separate pieces coalesced like a giant puzzle. Something like a complete picture promised to appear in the immediate future. Of course it was an illusion. No such picture existed in the approximations I used in my work. But my grasp kept becoming tighter.
    The School had trained me to poke persistently into the very depth of things. Again and again I attacked problems for which no solution existed – scorning simplicity, setting “correct” linearized systems aside. Now and then my colleagues whispered behind my back, assuming I was wasting my time. They had been told in their worthless schools that “correct” systems were what the world was composed of. Their worthless teachers taught them that whatever is unstable, not subject to analytics, is an exotic that can be ignored. Yet I saw: that’s not how it is at all. The real world consists of the nonlinear; it is rough, irregular, asymmetrical. The slightest deviations in the initial data often lead to unpredictable swings. And one must never close his eyes to that.
    I learned the connection between cardiac arrhythmia and the strange music of high-voltage networks, understood the fundamental unpredictability of cyclones and the reasons for sudden “madness” in the webs of telephone lines. It turned out not everything can be disassembled and then put back together – no matter how hard you try. I saw how simple algebra, disrespected by any graduate student, suddenly gives rise to chaotic monsters with an immeasurably complex character. Activity itself, once it was over, often changed the rules by which it was supposed to be accomplished. The consequences could not be forecast by even the most powerful computer. This was a genuine challenge – the challenge of chaos on a cosmic scale. It confounded me, but did not stop me. It made me alert, but did not pull the rug from under my feet. I still believed in the power of the mind, annoyed only with the imperfection of reality.
    Gradually, I was getting accustomed to the role of Creator, to drawing the boldest of analogies. What was it like in the quantum microverse that I had so