His body still ragged and unrested, Rund hunched over an electronic drawing table, staring at doodles and magnetic lines on the flat screen. Scrolling down the list of his notes, using the few Mentat memory-recovery tricks he had learned a long time ago, he had reconstructed, in exact order, every question the Bene Gesserit had asked, every detail he had seen of the wrecked ship.

Now that he knew such an invisibility field could exist, he had only to find the path to recreate it. The challenge was formidable.

Talis Balt and Director Kinnis stood to one side of the austere laboratory room. “Director, I have been pondering for hours,” Balt said. “Haloa’s claims sound… correct to me, though I can’t say exactly why.”

“I don’t remember anything,” the Director said.

Rund said without looking up, “My mind has been through the rigors of Mentat training. Maybe I have some ability to resist Bene Gesserit mind tricks.”

“But you failed as a Mentat,” Kinnis reminded him, his voice heavy with skepticism.

“Nevertheless, it changed the neural pathways in my brain.” He remembered an adage from the school: Patterns tend to repeat themselves, for success or failure. “My mind developed pockets of resistance, mental muscles, auxiliary storage areas. Perhaps that is why their coercion didn’t take hold completely.” His kindly old uncle would be proud of him.

Balt scratched his scalp, as if trying to dig up any remaining roots of hair. “I suggest we take the time to go over Chobyn’s laboratory again.”

The Director looked impatient. “We already did that after he defected. Chobyn was just a low-level researcher, from an unimportant family, so he did not have a very large space. We have used it for storage since his departure.”

Rund erased the sketches on his drawing screen. Without asking Kinnis for permission, he hurried toward the old work area….

Inside the long-abandoned laboratory, he stared at a list of requisitioned parts and fragments of notes. He went over administrative-surveillance holophotos taken of Chobyn— but nothing important presented itself.

The renegade inventor had been altering classic Holtzman equations developed millennia ago. The most brilliant modern scientists didn’t completely understand how Tio Holtzmann’s esoteric formulae worked— only that they did work. Rund couldn’t understand what Chobyn had done, either.

His brain was afire, operating at a higher efficiency than he had imagined possible. Flinto Kinnis stood amidst the activity, doing his best to supervise, while Rund went over the entire laboratory space, ignoring the other people. He tapped floorplates, walls, and ceilings. Every square centimeter.

Kneeling at a juncture between the floor and the outer hull of the orbiting station, he noticed a crack that flashed in and out of view, a camouflaged portion, no more than a tiny flicker, a dust grain in the eye. Rund stared until his eyes ached, remembering how a stern Mentat teacher had taught him to observe. He sped up his perceptions, slowing down time, and caught the next flicker.

At the precisely correct moment, Rund stepped through the wall.

He found himself inside a claustrophobic alcove, smelling of metal and stale air. With another flicker, the wall sealed itself behind him. He could barely turn around in the tight room. Darkness crashed down, as if he had gone blind. His breathing became labored. Every surface was frosty.

Fumbling in the blackness, he found thin sheets of ridulian crystal, plan screens, shigawire spools packed with data. He called out, but his words bounced back at him. He could not hear or see anything of the main room.

When the wall flickered again, Rund stumbled out, unnerved but excited. Director Kinnis stared at him. “It is a secret, shielded room, but the field seems to be breaking down. Chobyn has left much information inside.”

Kinnis squeezed his hands together. “Excellent, we must retrieve it. I intend to get to the bottom of this.” He turned to one of the tall technicians. “The moment another flicker occurs, go inside and bring out anything you find.”

The technician poised like a hunting cat, chose his time perfectly, and jumped forward to vanish into the wall. The room disappeared again.

But as Rund and Kinnis waited in the old lab for minutes, then half an hour, the man did not come back out. They could hear no sound, nor could they pry open the alcove again, despite repeated pounding on the white structural plates.

A work crew came in with cutting tools and ripped through the wall, but they found only the standard airspace between the station walls. Even scanners showed nothing unusual in the area.

While the technicians grew more desperate, Haloa Rund stared off, his mind lost in a near-Mentat projection. Based on a variation of the Holtzman equations, he assumed that the invisibility field had folded space itself in a ripple around the hidden chamber.

When the opening flickered again and stayed open, the technician slumped back out through the opening, his face pale and eyes flat, his fingernails torn and bleeding, as if he had tried to claw his way out. Two men rushed forward to help him, but the technician was dead, apparently suffocated or frozen from his strange journey. Where had the “flicker” taken him?

Afraid, no one moved to retrieve the data inside the still-open alcove, until Rund shouldered his way forward as if in a trance. Kinnis made only token protests, his eyes hungry for the cache of information.

Expecting the barrier to phase back into place at any second, Rund tossed out plan screens, shigawire spools, sheets of ridulian crystal, while technicians scrambled to retrieve them. As if mentally attuned to the weird field generator, Rund stepped back into the safety of the laboratory only moments before the wall phased back again, as solid as before.

Talis Balt stared at the hoarded notes. “It will require quite an investment to exploit this work properly.”

The dead technician already forgotten, Director Kinnis looked as if he might be trying to decide how to take credit for the work. “I will convince Premier Calimar that we need extensive funding. Very extensive. Rund, you speak to Count Ilban. Between them, they should be able to figure out how to obtain a great deal of money.”