“I think,” said Pig, “that you fail to grasp the importance of the disk. No one bothered to tell you where it came from, or what it means.”
“I don’t even know if we are both talking about the same disk,” said Alice, bracing for a jolt that never came.
Pig noticed that the machine failed to punish this answer and leaned back in his chair to mop his face. He seemed genuinely puzzled by this evidence of truth. Perhaps he was wondering if there were really two disks.
“There is time enough, I suppose,” he spoke carefully, sensing that there was more to this situation than he suspected. “I’ll tell you as much as you need to know. Later you can tell me what I want to know.”
He made a pious tent of his fingers, like a good shepherd calling his flock to prayer.
“Once upon a time, science met m
