Richard and Hurley left the rest of the island group behind, celebrating on a beach and made the short walk together back to the Dharma barracks. They didn't have much to say at first. Hurley was thinking they needed a new name for the camp so they could stop referring to it as the Dharma barracks as if it wasn't where they lived now. He could hear laughter and smell the campfire behind them, and realized he wished it were someone else's job to find out what the hell Richard was up to and why he was back.

"I didn't want to ask you in front of the rest, but are you officially in charge now?" Richard adjusted the sling on his right arm as he asked the question, and Hurley wondered how he'd been hurt.

"If you mean did we do the official hand-off ceremony, then yeah. Jack said the magic words and I drank some Island water and that was it. Then he went and fixed the Heart of the Island before he died."

"And Ben, where is he?"

"Off-island. We had to take a chance on using the Orchid station to get him there. We need a sub, and to be in touch with some people who keep this all going financially. Plus, he's picking up my folks for me. I can't decide which job is going to be harder for him: Getting a sub ordered, built, and paid for or getting my mom and dad on it."

Richard looked at him in surprise, but didn't say anything back, and they walked silently again for a few minutes.

"You were second in command of the island for how long?" Hurley asked after awhile.

"Really want to know?" Richard looked over at him and back to the path ahead.

"It was just over 137 years."

"So…. Jacob made you "Forever Forty" and you stayed there until he died? That's pretty awesome. But why didn't you tell him you wanted to go back to being, say, 28 again and stick there?"

It took Hurley a second to realize he was walking alone now; Richard had stopped dead in his tracks with a look of almost complete surprise on his face.

"You know, I never thought about it," he said. "But I'd just been through hell, I was happy to be alive at all. My emotions were all over the place."

"You sure seem to have learned to rein 'em in since then," Hurley said. "You're mister calm, cool and mysterious to us… well, to the group of us who crashed here together. Do I need to learn to be all Super-Zen to be in charge?" They started walking again, and Hurley could see Richard was suppressing a bit of a smile.

"Maybe, Hurley, maybe not. I can't tell you. We were all deadly serious about how we ran things and look how it turned out: Evil nearly won, it came very close. "

They were back at the barracks, and Hurley headed for the picnic table near the gazebo.

"But there is some advice I need to give you, and a lot I need to ask of you even though you don't really know me yet," Richard said.

They sat at opposite sides of the table. The moon was high in the sky and with no campfire and no electric lights the cabins had a chill, silvery glow to them. Hurley got the feeling this would be a conversation he'd remember for a long time to come, and he felt goose bumps running from the top of his scalp to his shoulders.

"Okay, Richard, why are you back? What do you want?"

"I want you to give me money, supplies…. promise you'll make sure no one who saw me tonight will tell anyone else I was here. And I want you to be satisfied with the little bit I can tell you right now about why."

"Oh, is that all?" Hurley started to wave his hand but then slapped it down hard on the table. "No! Not acceptable. But let's start over again. Just tell me first why you're back so soon."

Richard sat in silence for a moment with his closed left hand over his mouth, weighing what to say.

"When we left, I planned to move on and make this place not my problem anymore. I have contacts off-island, I could have made it on my own. But while we were flying and talking about where to land, I found out Jack was severely wounded, and probably wouldn't survive, that Ben had stayed with you both. And Hurley, the first thing I'm here to tell you is not to trust Ben entirely no matter how much you may want his help."

"Oh, isn't that a little obvious? 'Don't trust evil Ben.' Well, he's my second in command now, and I believe he's really helping me. And what are you saying, that if Jack hadn't died you would have just left him to it, but you felt the need to come back just because it's me who's in charge?"

Richard let Hurley go, and waited until he was finished to say anything at all.

"Don't be insulted, I'm not questioning your abilities. Look at it from my point of view: Two of you counter-balancing Ben, with Jack's natural tendency to question everything, that's one thing. But you on your own, Hurley, with no one else around to support you? Honestly, I decided I had no way of knowing if he had even let you live after Jack died. I had to assume the worst, and that the island's fate might be entirely in Ben's hands. So I set it off…. before he could."

"Set what off?" Hurley asked and Richard just shook his head and looked away. Hurley figured this is where things could get difficult. "Richard…. you set what off?"

"Did anything strange happen, the night we all left?" Richard answered the question with a question.

"You mean the earth-shattering bang we all heard just after we buried Jack? And the blinding white light that circled around the island five times?" Yeah, that all happened," Hurley snapped.

"Five times?" Richard smiled a little, and looked relieved. "I'm just glad to not hear double digits." He looked at Hurley and saw his frustration turning to something that looked like real anger, but he went on.

"Part of the reason I told you not to trust Ben is that we've all been lying to you as long as you've been here. What did Ben tell your people about why the purge happened, why we were ordered to kill all the Dharma team in 1992?"

"He said it was because they kept breaking the treaty and going into places they agreed to stay out of."

"That's a lie." Richard said. "What did he tell you about the experiments they were doing?"

"That they were pointless: touchy-feely psychological experiments and transporting polar bears to the desert," Hurley said.

"That's a lie, too." Richard looked him in the eyes. " The Dharma scientists were on a mission to find out when the world would end and to stop human beings from self-destructing. Their experiments were all about hedging against fate. They were playing with time and space to buy the planet a life-insurance policy and we aren't just talking time-travelling bunnies. They were using our island to do it, and in the end, we had to stop them before they used …it."

"You mean this Weather Vane station you mentioned? I guess it does more than help forecast the weather?"

"Yes," was all Richard said back.

"And now you have used it…. to give the island more chances. You created …loopholes?"

"That's one way to put it," Richard nodded.

There was a long pause while the two just looked at each other. Hurley knew Richard had just told him most everything he was willing to for now. He was not going to find out in this sitting what these loopholes consisted of or how Richard was traveling among them. And there were at least a dozen other questions he still really wanted answers to.

"Richard, why shouldn't I have you locked in one of the hatches and toss two meals a day down to you until you tell me everything or die of old age?"

"Because I need to go back to where the Ajira flight landed, and make sure the others all got away cleanly," Richard said calmly. "And if they didn't, I need to fix that so people don't start asking questions. Then I have to make sure that the doors I opened to protect the island … well, that they stay open enough so we can use them but not so much that they kill us all. And there are two things you need to do, too," Richard was on such a roll, Hurley forgot he was the one with the upper hand and just listened. "You need to get Walt back here a.s.a.p…"

"I'm going to bring him back ... but not yet," Hurley said, "I want to wait until things are a little more organized here."

"Sorry, you don't have time to wait," Richard said. "I need his help to manage this. I'll explain why next time, I promise. And last – you need to shut down the Dharma food drops from Guam, but keep the facility. I need it for a go-between station."

"What are we supposed to do for food?" Hurley asked.

"Get in touch with Eloise. Have her set up another warehouse and make the drops from somewhere else- there are plenty of places in the Pacific Rim that'll work and she has the facilities and the people to do it. Just shut the old place down as soon as you can."

In the end, Richard won that whole hand of poker Hurley thought later. But that was because he was holding every card, really. They walked to Ben's old house, where Hurley opened the safe and gave Richard insane amounts of cash, credit cards, letters of transit… everything he would need in the wider world to continue on his mission. Then he took him to a bungalow where he could rest and let the island heal his arm a bit more before he left.

"I'll probably be gone before you're all awake tomorrow," Richard said. "Please, two things: First, write down these names…" He brought Hurley a pen and paper from the desk in the living room of the cabin. "Max Tegmark, Hugh Everett, David Hilburt."

Hurley did as he was told, but then gave Richard a huge shrug, clearly asking for more. Richard rolled his eyes slightly and nodded.

"Google them, Hurley, as soon as you have the Flame back up and running. They're scientists who either helped predict the Weather Vane or build it. One of them interned here in the '80s, early in his career in theoretical physics. If you read up on them our next conversation will be a little less of a shock to your nervous system."

Hurley looked skeptical, but tore the sheet of paper off and put it on the desk under a paperweight.

"Give me a month. If you haven't seen me by then…" Richard looked at the sling on his arm. "Assume I couldn't get back, and tell Ben what we've discussed. But don't tell him about this conversation before then. And… one more question: Did Ben tell you he didn't know what that bang and the light were all about?"

Hurley just nodded.

"That was a lie, too. He knows. And if he had been the one to decide it was time to set it off, he'd be in control of it. But he's not. Remember, Hurley, I am."

For those interested: Links
a href=..edu/a

a href=/2008/jul/16-is-the-universe-actually-made-ofmath/article_view?b_start%3Aint=0&-CIs the Universe Made of Math?/a

a href=.org/wiki/David_HilbertDavid Hilbert/a

a href=.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretationMany Worlds Interpretation/a