Richard was halfway through the New Yorker article when he started to doze off. Rousing himself, he set the magazine aside and turned on the Zenith. One of the 24-hour cable news channels was in the middle of yet another harangue about the lost-cause economy. A clock graphic at the bottom the screen read “11:57 p.m.”

He turned off the TV, yawned, stretched, yawned again, facial muscles contorting in an effort to evict the tension that had been squatting in the twin alcoves behind his eyeballs since the day (how long ago? September?) Otto had spilled the Arrangements beans to Richard and his staff: “Triple-A priority title for an upscale market. Her fan base has been clamoring for something like this for a while now, and we have to deliver. Bertha is counting on us!”

But … but …. Two hundred pages. Multiple contributions by multiple authors, who, if Mrs. Mittenthorpe-Cruz was indeed a harbinger, were quite possibly illiterate. Hundreds of color illustrations with captions and callouts. And no development schedule. No design samples. No budget. No strategy. No time.

Richard was about to go up to bed when he noticed a faint shimmer at the edge of his vision. He whirled around and beheld … something.

In the crawlspace beneath the stairs, hovering over a cedarwood trunk half-buried under old books, photo albums, and jigsaw puzzles, was a glowing white sphere.

Instant armpit sweat. He eased himself out of the wingback and took two tentative steps forward. He inched closer.

The diameter of a basketball, the sphere glowed with an iridescent light. A softball-sized nucleus swam within the larger sphere’s interior, now and then blurring or disappearing altogether in the milky cytoplasm. Despite the energy it seemed to be generating, the sphere did not radiate heat or waver in its suspension. It made no sound.

Richard did not dare to rub his eyes, wipe his brow, scratch his head. Stonehenge-still, he neither breathed nor blinked.

At this moment of truth, so to speak, did Richard ask himself whether what he was seeing was real in a concrete sense, or simply the hallucinatory by-product of eleven unbroken hours agonizing over Bertha-proofs? No, his first cogent thought was strictly scientific: What’s holding it up? He checked for wires or other means of support (being careful not to touch it), but there was nothing.

Only after several minutes of gazing dumbly at the phenomenon did he begin to wonder what the sphere might be, where it had come from, and why it was here, in his house, in his basement.

When a plausible explanation did not present itself (and why would it?), he decided to try an experiment. He looked around and took up one of his father’s old golf clubs. It had once been a 3-wood, but the clubhead had snapped off, leaving behind a naked steel shaft attached to a rubber grip.

The only sane action, Richard knew full well, would be to sprint upstairs, pop a Valium (make it two), burrow under the covers, and put this disagreeable day behind him.

But a debate raged within the Parliament of Richard’s divided mind. Arguments were presented, rejected; opinions expressed, ridiculed; courses of action proposed, scrapped. Screaming matches broke out, ultimatums were delivered, fists were vigorously shaken as the proceedings deteriorated into a fractious back-and-forth. But then a steady, assertive voice, Richard’s own, rose above the din: “This … whatever it is … is frightening and strange, on that we can agree, but it is also the most interesting thing to have happened to you in quite some time.” A vote was called. The It’s Been a Long Day, Go to Bed party was defeated by a sound margin.

What you are about to do is either inspired brilliance or utter madness, Richard cautioned himself. There is no middle ground.

With a swift thrust, he penetrated the levitating blue-white mystery-orb with Ivan’s headless 3-wood.

He half-expected the sphere to shriek in pain, an interdimentional alien’s death-howl. But there was no reaction whatsoever; no change in luminosity or color, no movement, no sound, nothing. Richard was prepared to chock the whole thing up to a glitch of eye and brain (and perhaps schedule a long-overdue appointment with his physician), when he noticed something astonishing. Though the club shaft had penetrated the sphere, it had not reappeared on the other side.

He yelped and withdrew the shaft. It was intact. He ran a finger along the steel: freezing cold.

“What … the …”

To neutralize the rude awareness that he was scared shitless (adrenaline shivers, bowels beginning to curdle), Richard did something irrevocably stupid.

He placed his hand on the sphere. At first, he wasn’t sure what was happening. An indiscriminate deadening—of nerve tissue, thought, time. Numbness shocked his fingertips, then shimmied upward, incapacitating wrist, elbow, shoulder. The numbness shifted. Pricks and needles. Slow heat. Burning. Burning.

His arm was on fire.

Next Chapter: Part One: The First Sphere, Chapter IV