Then, without warning, the parties stopped. Moose began to read, grinding his unpracticed eyes against page after page, groaning his way through books with an exertion that made him sweat (he’d read so little in his life), and gradually more ease, reading through the night, returning books to the Rockford Public Library in secretive piles. His fixation was the evolution of technology, wheels and gunpowder and smelting, the ramp device the Romans used to board the Carthaginian fleets, the history of clockmaking, the printing press, the chronometer, longitude. And glass—glass he returned to repeatedly, that magically liquid solid that had made possible eyeglasses, telescopes, microscopes, all manner of visual discovery; glass that in myth had surrounded Alexander the Great in the form of a bubble, allowing him to visit the bottom of the sea. For Moose had sensed that a terrible reversal was in progress, a technological disaster whereby the genius of the Industrial Revolution would be turned on people themselves; whereby human beings would be assembled from parts just as guns and boots and bicycles had been once.