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eager to be taken to see the great man, but Mick kept stalling on it.
    It was hard to tell what had really happened to Andy Silver. They never found his body, so they couldn't be sure he was really dead—or that he had ever really existed. Some claimed that Silver had been a Hollow all along, a fantasy of Phizwhiz. It seemed more likely, however, that Andy was a person who was somehow alive inside Phizwhiz.
    The evidence that he had survived assimilation was indirect. It just seemed that after Andy Silver's disappearance, Phizwhiz's behavior became more radical, more provocative. This could, of course, simply have been the cumulative effect of all the Angels' work; but some of Phizwhiz's aberrations seemed to have Andy's distinctive touch.
    For instance, the next time the Governor made a speech, something "happened" to the sound track and it sounded like he was drunkenly asking the public at large to turn themselves in to be cooked down to oil for Phizwhiz.
    Several days later the USISU newspaper printed the secret locations of Phizwhiz's main components along with detailed descriptions of their mechanized defense systems. Incredible things began appearing on the Hollows, for instance an animated cartoon serial based on the works of S. Clay Wilson, one of the depraved Zap artists of the mid-20th century.
    But Vernor was not fully aware of these events. He had moved back into the library. Alice's last words to him still stung and he was spending less time getting stoned and more time working. He kept meaning to get back in touch with her, but he wanted to be able to impress her with some really solid new discovery when he came back.
    He hardly ever went to Waxy's anymore, but kept in touch with the Angels through Mick Turner, who dropped in occasionally. Inspired by Vernor's industry, Mick even read part of Geometry and Reality , a book on curved space and the fourth dimension which Vernor pressed on him. But more and more, Vernor was alone with his ideas. He had finally worked his way out to the place where science shades into fiction.
    He was getting deeply interested in determining the fundamental nature of matter. The conventional notion is that there is a sort of lower bound to the size of particles. You can break things down through the molecular, atomic, nuclear, and elementary particle levels . . . but eventually you reach a dead end, where you have some final smallest particles, called perhaps quarks.
    There is a certain difficulty with this conventional view that there is such a thing as a smallest particle: What are these particles made of? That is, when someone asks what a rock is made of, you can answer, "a cloud of molecules"; and if someone asks what a molecule is made of, you can answer, "a cloud of atoms"; but if there is nothing smaller than quarks, what is a quark made of?
    Vernor had been toying with the idea of the infinite divisibility of matter. A quark would be a cloud of even smaller things, called, say, darks . . . and darks would be clouds of barks, and barks would be clouds of marks, and so on ad infinitum. In this situation, there would be no matter . . . for any particle you pointed to would turn out, on closer examination, to be mostly empty space with a few smaller particles floating in it . . . and each of these smaller particles would, again, be a flock of still smaller particles floating in empty space . . . and so on. According to Vernor, an object, such as a book, would simply be a cloud of clouds of clouds of clouds of . . . nothing but pure structure.
    Vernor reasoned further that if there was no limit to how small objects could be, then perhaps there was no limit to how large they could be. This would mean that the hierarchy; planet, solar system, star cluster, galaxy, group of galaxies . . . should continue ever upwards, ramifying out into an infinite universe.
    Vernor had studied enough Cantorian set theory to be comfortable with infinity in the abstract, but there