"I understand," said Modi, nodding. "What I am getting at, however, is the nature of the work. I have no desire for you to mention details, which are necessarily confidential. By the nature of your work, I mean...how shall I put it?" He paused, then said, "Does it deal with aspects of reality perhaps? With areas that go beyond the merely mechanical into zones of, shall we say, more nebulous reality? Where, perhaps, the senses need to be transcended?"

Chris had no answer for that. He thought about it hard. It was true that the areas he'd been dealing with were certainly beyond the senses, nebulous. Still --

"Well, I am a mathematician," he said.

"Ah." Modi nodded. "and your work, I much suspect, does not involve adding columns of figures."

Chris smiled. "No."

Modi was silent for almost a minute before he said, "In India, as you have sensed, we are more intimate with concepts of reality and unreality. We know full well that the tissues of what we say is real are thin indeed. That they can be torn asunder with more ease than people realize. And if your work -- your mathematics -- seeks to deal with elements beyond the senses, well..." He gestured vaguely. "Perhaps you have -- how shall I put it? -- trespassed."

Amused, he let his mind have its way. That was how it functioned best. He would consciously "stand back" and let it generate on its own. Numbers and symbols fluttered across the screen of his awareness. He often visualized his brain as a computer screen operated by his subconscious. Or was it his superconscious? Whatever it was, when things were clicking and the "computer" was on, he had only to watch -- sometimes bedazzled, even amused -- as the formulas appeared on the screen as though entered by his autonomous operator.

X_m both a_x (s,y,z). He "saw" the symbols. The words scattering effect. More symbols: I_x (x,y,z). More words: due to significant extinction. More symbols, more equations.

"Wait a second," he muttered, superimposing his will on the "readout". "Run that through again."

The screen flickered backwards like a VCR picture being rewound while played. He reviewed the numbers and symbols. Interesting, he thought. He'd never noticed that before.

He had taken it for granted that there were multiple mathematicians everywhere noodling with the turbulence problem, some of them better than he was. The idea that he was so important to the project that he'd become a victim of some interational cabal seemed just too farfetched...

It appears that the movie, "The Game" starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn is loosely based on this book (though I don't recall seeing such an attribution and the story setting in The Game involves a banker and his brother).

Having seen the visually stuning and quite movingly made movie "What Dreams may come" based on Matheson's novel, I had high hopes for "7 steps". I have to admit that on the literary quality, this book is an utter failure. It is full of breathless italics designed to create tension without serving that purpose. On every second page, the protagonist on the run keeps talking to himself (about the same thing, repetitiously) and exclaiming, "Oh Shut Up!" I lost count of the number of "Oh God!", "God Almighty!" and "Jesus Christ!" (I groaned every time the mathematician groaned). While the idea is very good, the writing left a lot to be desired and you can see the conclusion coming a mile away.