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was something definitely unsettling about a doubly infinite universe. Was there no way to avoid these infinities without baldly claiming that there is nothing smaller than this , and nothing larger than that ? The solution came to him one night when he had the great vision of his life.
    After a good day's work, Vernor smoked a joint one evening and, moved to do something new, went out into the garden behind the library. There was a large tree there, and he was able to climb to its fork some twelve feet up by clinging to the grooves in the tree's bark and inching upwards. Once he was up in the first fork it was easy to move up the fatter of the two trunks to a comfortable perch some forty feet above the ground. He was barefoot and felt perfectly secure.
    The reefer had, as usual, increased his depth perception, and his eyes feasted on the three-dimensionality of the branches' pattern. A fine rain was falling, so fine that it had not yet penetrated the tree's leaves. Set back from the City like this, in his leafy perch in the library garden, it was possible to listen to the incoming honks, roars, and clanks as a single sound, the sound of the City.
    He noticed a hole in the tree some five feet above his head, and inched up, hugging the thick, smooth trunk. It was a bee-hive in there—a wild musky odor came out of the hole along with a steady, highly articulated "Z". A few bees walked around the lip of the hole, patrolling, but they were unalarmed by Vernor's arrival. He felt sure that they could feel his good vibes.
    A soft breeze blew the misty rain in on him, and he slid back down to the crotch he'd been resting in. Closing his eyes, he began working on his head. There seem to be two ways in which to reach an experience of enlightenment . . . one can either expand one's consciousness to include Everything, or annihilate it so as to experience Nothing.
    Exceptionally, Vernor tried to do both at once.
    On the one hand, he moved towards Everything by letting his feeling of spatial immediacy expand from his head to include his whole body, then the tree trunk and the bees, then the garden, the city and the night sky. He expanded his time awareness as well, to include the paths of the rain drops, his last few thoughts, his childhood, the tree's growth, and the turning of the galaxy.
    On the other hand, he was also moving towards Nothing by ceasing to identify himself with any one part of space at all. He contracted his time awareness towards Nothing by letting go of more and more of his individual thoughts and sensations, constantly diminishing his mental busyness.
    The overall image he had of this activity was of two spheres, one expanding outwards towards infinity, and the other contracting in towards zero. The large one grew by continually doubling it's size, the smaller shrank by repeatedly halving it's size . . . and they seemed to be endlessly drawing apart. But with a sudden feeling of freedom and air Vernor had the conviction that the two spheres were on a direct collision course—that somehow the sphere expanding outwards and the sphere contracting inward would meet and merge at some attainable point where Zero was Infinity, where Nothing was Everything.
    It was then that Vernor discovered the idea of Circular Scale. The next few days were spent trying to find mathematical or physical models of his vision—for he wished to fix the flash in an abstract, communicable structure—and he seemed to be getting somewhere. Circular Scale! This could be the big breakthrough he'd hoped for, the discovery that would show Alice he was more than a bum.
    He was on the point of calling Alice, but then it was time to go in for his weekly session with Phizwhiz. Vernor went with mixed feelings. On the one hand, with instant access to all of the scientific research ever done, and with the ability to combine and manipulate arbitrarily complex patterns, it might be possible for him to develop his Circular Scale vision into a testable