"Look, down there." Bartlett was projecting through the din around them and pointing toward the wide expanse of New York Harbor. "This McDonnell Douglas is my Zendo, my monastery, and the world below is my contemplative garden. I come up here to find peace. This is an intersection of the great forces of nature, one of a finite number on earth, where a mighty river returns to the salt sea from which it came. These waters have flowed in the same cycle for millions, billions of years, mingling, evaporating, separating again--just as life on this planet continually replicates itself, growing and aging and dying, but not before producing the seeds of its replacement. How can something be at once both timeless and constantly changing? I ponder that a lot and I always end up thinking of this river meeting the sea. Down there, nature is a force unto itself, oblivious to good or evil, to human desires or human laws." Bartlett was doing a riff on some obsession of his own, Stone decided. Or maybe it was some of the Zen philosophy that went along with acquiring a world-class collection of samurai swords (if you believed the published profiles). All the same, looking down at the sprawling city and the harbor full of ships, it was hard not to feel omnipotent and humble at the same time. The thing Bartlett seemed to be getting at, though, was that nature could not be told what to do. And he seemed to be on the verge of declaring himself a part of that unbridled natural force, also powerful enough to do whatever he pleased. Now they were heading up the Hudson, teeming with early bird tourist cruises and small single-masted sailboats. Bartlett paused to take in the view with satisfaction. Finally he continued his monologue. "I know we've had our differences, but I'm prepared to try to get past that. I want to talk to you about something I always think of when I fly across this river. Time. I call my obsession Time and the River. Physicists will tell you that time should be thought of as a kind of fourth dimension. Things are always at a certain place in three dimensions, but when you describe the location of a subatomic particle, for example, you also have to say when it was there. To locate it accurately, you need four dimensions. We think of them all as rigid but what if one of them could be made fluid? What if you could alter the character of time?" In spite of himself, Stone took the bait. "I don't know what this has to do with anything. Nobody can alter the pace of time." He found himself recalling a snippet of verse by John Donne: _O how feeble is man's power, That if good fortune fall, Cannot add another hour, Nor a lost hour recall! _