It may sound absurd now, but walking through walls was the trick du jour in 1974, in Addis Ababa quite as much as in Boston or Madrid. Just as aliens lined the hedgerows and made love to strayed Brazilians, so psionic studies were the currency of high science and popular passion. The capacity of our minds to effect direct change to the physical realm was a known truth only awaiting pro forma empirical confirmation, and no spoon was safe from the determined psychokinetic stares of mothers and postmen, rock stars and thieves. LSD and parapsychology were transforming our understanding of ourselves, unleashing capacities far beyond those conventionally attributed to mortal men—even if those capacities were more widely spoken of than observed. In the far future, all humans would become like gods, and perhaps we were from that atemporal state already reaching back to our own early, larval selves and teaching the skills we would need to reach our potential: causality, after all, was an artefact of the limited mind, not the boundless one, and so the most enlightened among us now might in great need reach for and find the coming godhead somewhat early in our evolution. Timothy Leary had done it, to the consternation of the FBI, and even worse so had the inventor of the orgone accumulator, that accursèd post-Freudian who had had the temerity to try to teach good American boys and girls about sex—and worse yet, to encourage them to talk about it as if there was in all the world nothing wrong with the casual discussion of fellatio. Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion Manual was going to teach soldiers to be more than human, and—because Channon served not Eros but the Pentagon—how to kill with their minds and levitate over the Iron Curtain. The Russians for their part claimed they’d had agents who could do all that and other things stranger and more alarming since the days of the tsars, and they mocked the feeble efforts of an arriviste West now set on catching up in the magical arms race. Baba Yaga was Russian, and so were Rasputin and Kalugina, and the East had always understood, wrapped in the icy wind of the Steppes, that there was more to the mind than a robot and a poet fighting for control of a beast. The whole world, in other words, was in the grip of the most marvellous psychic bullshit, and we were primed to believe in almost anything, so long as it was terrible and wondrous and might conceivably be done by force of will alone.