Of course, he couldn’t publish it. Wouldn’t publish it. Anatoli didn’t want it published, and if Denton did publish he’d get another visit from Mr. Edwards. But… he wasn’t going to think about that. Life was long. He had money. He would think of something. The real fly in the ointment was that Anatoli, his lone eyewitness, was more than a few cards shy of a full deck. Heck, the deck was gone and the old man had been left holding the joker.

What Denton hadn’t figured out yet was how the others were involved. There was the rabbi—whom Denton couldn’t help but take an immediate dislike to vis-à-vis Schwartz. And the other two… Nate seemed cool, the sort of guy Denton would get along with usually, but he was protective of the woman. Obviously, he had a big thing for her. For her part (Denton sized her up, since no one was paying attention), she wasn’t bad. She had the librarian thing going, could use a serious salon day, but she had a cute figure and sexy freckles. Of course, she was snotty as hell, but that was standard in the brainy type. Ice queen. Nate was nuts if he thought he was getting anything off her.

“Kobinski opened my eyes,” Anatoli was saying. “I had been fervent about Marx. Now I became fervent about Yosef Kobinski. I made him teach me; I wouldn’t leave him alone.” Anatoli’s eyes were hazy with memory and more than a little unhinged. “I had some science, you see. It was a favorite of mine in school. But what he knew… He could have moved Heaven and Earth.”

“What were his ideas—can you give us a summary?” Dr. Talcott asked.

Anatoli sighed. “A summary… First, he founded everything on the kabbalistic Tree of Life, on the sephirot. Kobinski believed that the highest spiritual path was to balance your sephirot, to come into perfect alignment right down the center of the tree. It is like a stick, he said, which is all crooked. It cannot go through a narrow hole. In the case of the soul, there is also a narrow opening, at the navel, and the soul must be perfectly straight and smooth—without a bend or a bump—to pass through.”

“To pass through into what?” Denton asked, his interest picking up.

“To escape the lower five dimensions—the dimensions of good and evil.”

“You mean, to escape the cycle of reincarnation? Like achieving nirvana?” Denton had once written an article for Mysterious World on past lives.

Anatoli shrugged enigmatically. “In kabbalah it is called tikkun, the reclaiming of the sparks.”

“Can we get back to the physics part of it?” Dr. Talcott asked impatiently. Binah, definitely.

“It is all physics.” Anatoli’s voice trembled.

“Maybe what we’ve discovered will help,” Nate suggested.

He ran the group through an account of their experiments. Denton couldn’t follow everything, despite the fact that Nate was obviously simplifying quite a bit. But he followed enough. The physics side of Kobinski’s work came into focus with the force of an explosion. It wasn’t kabbalah magic at all… Jeez, how could he have been so stupid? It was math.

“Yes,” Anatoli agreed, excited. “That is the law of good and evil. The law of good and evil states that there is a force that influences everything. It tempers both the bad and the good. And the fifth dimension is where these energies interplay. The fifth dimension is vast; it stretches across all the multiverse.”

“What about the potential for a weapon?” the rabbi asked Anatoli. “Did Kobinski discuss that with you?”

Anatoli opened his mouth to speak and then sat still for several minutes, staring into space. Denton saw the two scientists glance at each other. Dr. Talcott rose to her feet, but Denton had seen Anatoli do this before and motioned her back.

Anatoli began, suddenly, like a skipped record finding a groove. “He did recognize the danger, but only at the end. At first he wanted to make certain the work would be saved. We spent months—him writing and us burying it for the future. But after Isaac… the rebbe was so brokenhearted, he no longer trusted humanity to have it. The night he left he made me promise to dig up the manuscript and destroy it. For many years I couldn’t bring myself to come back here. But twenty years ago I arrived and I have been here ever since. Many, many nights I broke into the grounds of the camp, trying to remember where we put the pages. Most nights I would dig and find nothing. But slowly, as you see, the whole thing has been recovered.”

“It’s all there,” Denton commented, looking jealously at the pages in Aharon’s lap. Trust the rabbi in the group to end up with his grubby hands all over it.

Anatoli nodded, lip quivery. “The last of it was in the hands of a Nazi family. Denton bought that for me.”

That wasn’t quite how it happened, but Denton didn’t sweat it.

“But how did Kobinski come up with his equation and the… the ‘law of good and evil’?” Dr. Talcott asked. “He didn’t have access to the technology necessary to even begin to—”

“Meditation,” Anatoli interrupted. “He used to say meditation provides the insight and physics enables you to make sense of it.”

Dr. Talcott was looking at Anatoli like he’d just sprouted horns. “You said the fifth dimension stretches across the multiverse. Did Kobinski have proof that ours was not the only universe? Mathematical proof?”

Denton thought he knew. “Kobinski mentions a vision in the manuscript. He saw a whole continuum of universes, which he called Jacob’s ladder, and our universe was in the middle.”

“There have been theories that there are other universes,” Nate said, leaning forward eagerly.

“Pure speculation,” Dr. Talcott tsked.

Anatoli’s voice rose, upset. “There are other universes, and they have different balances of good and evil. The rebbe said this is where the religious traditions got the idea of ‘heavens’ and ‘hells.’ Mystics get visions of these other universes, or maybe we remember having lived there, down deep in our soul.”

Dr. Talcott opened her mouth to protest, but Nate spoke up, his face alight. “Cool! Think about it, Jill. The one-minus-one we discovered is exactly matched, crest and trough. But why couldn’t there be universes that had different one-minus-one waves, different balances of crests and troughs, creative and destructive urges?”

Dr. Talcott actually considered it. She spoke slowly, thoughtfully. “Even if there are other universes, any other balance of the one-minus-one may be physically impossible. Or such a universe might exist, but it might never have experienced a big bang. Or it may have expanded but not have stars or planets.” One eyebrow peaked with interest. “The fifty-fifty balance might be necessary to create any meaningful universe.”

“No,” Anatoli said simply. “There are universes with other balances of good and evil. And they have stars and planets and intelligent life. Kobinski worked all of that out in his book.”

Dr. Talcott glanced at the manuscript. She looked, Denton could swear to god, intimidated! That look told him all he needed to know about the legitimacy of Kobinski’s physics. But the rabbi was still hoarding the manuscript in his lap like a freaking Pekingese.

“This is all fascinating,” Rabbi Handalman said. “An inexhaustible mine of wisdom, no doubt. But for one moment, if it’s not too much trouble, can we get back to this universe? Did Reb Kobinski work out the implications of a weapon using this technology? Because the Mossad has some of the manuscript.”

Nate nodded, looking worried. “I think I can answer that. At least, I have an idea what could be done with our work—”

“Nate!” Jill warned.

Nate put a hand on hers in the vee of her lap, which, Denton noticed with a smirk, shut her up quite nicely, since it sent her absolutely rigid.