The weight lifting was another prominent aspect of Jerry’s oddity. He hadn’t always been that way. She’d seen pictures of Jerry as a teenager—his mother had sent them—and Jerry had been lithe and slender, with a tall kid’s wary stoop. Lots of Troupers were into weights; Jane lifted weights herself, enough to get strong, enough to get the point of doing it. But Jerry was doing weights just because it saved him time. It saved him time and effort to be as big as a house so he could briefly surface out of his abyss of distraction, and snap out something, and have people just jump up and run do it for him. Because he radiated raw physical authority, Jerry didn’t have to slow down to explain very much. Plus, the weights gave Jerry something to do while he was thinking seriously, and Jerry liked to think seriously for about five hours straight, every day. The fact that he was lugging thirty kilos of steel on his legs at the time never seemed to register on him much.