Elixir

1

Quentin took a sip of his champagne. "My best offer is three million dollars, take it or leave it."

"Leave it," said Antoine Ducharme, not missing a beat.

You son-of-a-bitch! Quentin thought. "Then we have a problem."

"No, my friend, you have a problem. The fee is five million per ton."

Quentin Cross, Chief Financial Officer at thirty-seven and future CEO of Darby Pharmaceuticals, sat in uneasy silence on the rear deck of Reef Madness, a long sleek cruiser that Antoine's girlfriend, Lisa, maneuvered around the coral heads. Working the mooring line from the bow was Marcel, one of Antoine's security guards, who wore a snub-nosed revolver and pair of handcuffs on his belt.

They were inside the barrier reef on the northern coast of Apricot Cay, a palm-fringed island fifteen miles southeast of Jamaica and owned by Antoine Ducharme, an elegant and highly educated yachtsman, entrepreneur, and drug trafficker. Antoine, who looked to be in his mid-forties, was a tall, solidly built man with short salt-and-pepper hair, and an open face that appeared scholarly behind his rimless eyeglasses. It was a face that was used to making substantial decisions and one that could turn to stone in an instant.

Dressed in a green lounging suit, Antoine had arranged for his ten associates a sunset dinner of lobster tail, sautéed breadfruit, and French cheeses topped off with a dessert of fresh apricots, of course.

Quentin knew very little about the other men except that they were all part of an international group of very wealthy power brokers given to secret capital ventures and extravagances. But their association with Antoine Ducharme suggested that they had no ethical qualms about getting dirty. There were no introductions. The men ate separately, speaking French and German, then moved into the inner cabin to watch a soccer game beamed from a satellite dish. To Quentin they were simply "the Consortium."

Sitting with Quentin and Antoine was an American of about thirty-five named Vince Lucas, Antoine's "financial security officer." He was lean and attractive in a feral kind of way. He had smooth fleshy lips, a tanned, V-shaped face, and shiny black hair combed straight back to expose a deep widow's peak. His eyebrows were perfect black slashes, and his eyes were so dark that they appeared to be all pupil. On his forearm was a tattoo of a bird of prey with a death-head skull. He looked like no financial officer Quentin had ever met.

"If you ask me, five million is a bargain," Vince Lucas said.

"Five million dollars is out of the question," Quentin repeated. But he knew that they had him by the proverbial throat.

Lisa cleared the dishes. She was clad in a scant black bikini, a yellow headband, and a rose tattoo on her shoulder. She was a stunningly exotic woman in her early twenties with cocoa skin and deep, uninhibited eyes-eyes which when they fell on Quentin made him self-conscious of his large pink face, thinning hair, and pot belly swelling over his shorts. When she was finished, she gave Antoine, who was twice her age, a long passionate kiss and went below, Marcel tailing her to leave the men to their business.

"Listen to me, my friend," Antoine said, "We have over two thousand acres of mountain rainforest, another thousand acres of orchards with mountain streams for irrigation, protected harbors, your own airstrip, storage buildings-'the works,' as you Americans say. And most important: total privacy."

Quentin had heard all this before. He had toured the island including the rainforest. But biological diversity was not what interested him. Nor the acres of cannabis hidden in the orchards. Nor the camouflaged sheds where imported cocoa leaves were processed into cocaine for easy shipment northward-an operation which made Apricot Cay the Delmonte of dope in the Western Hemisphere.

What Quentin Cross wanted was apricots-and a particular species, Prunus caribaeus, unique to Apricot Cay. And he was willing to pay $3 million a ton for them.

No, Darby Pharms was not diversifying into the produce market. What made the species unique was the pits: They contained cyanogentic compounds highly toxic to cancer cells. In fact, the apricot toxogen had an astounding 80 percent success rate in the treatment of Mexican patients with malignant tumors. The FDA had not yet approved clinical testing in the U.S., but for Quentin the compound-with the potential trade name Veratox-promised to become the world's first cancer wonder drug.

Darby Pharms had kept the toxogen secret for two key reasons. First, they had not yet secured FDA approval; but that was no problem since Ross Darby was an old college buddy of Ronald Reagan. The second reason was Antoine Ducharme. Nobody at Darby but Quentin knew that he was an international drug baron, including Ross Darby, Quentin's father-in-law and current CEO-a man of impeccable scruples. If word got out, Darby Pharmaceuticals would not only lose its license to manufacture drugs, but it could end up in a criminal investigation that could put Quentin Cross and Ross Darby behind bars for years.

Antoine knew that and, thus, was asking for blood. What gnawed at Quentin's mind was the entrepreneur's unpredictability. Should Veratox turn out to be the world's hottest pharmaceutical, Antoine might double the price of subsequent shipments. Or he might set up an auction for bidders with limitless resources, such as Eli Lilly or Merck. The only solution was a commercially viable synthesis. But in spite of months of all-out efforts by Christopher Bacon, Darby's chief medical chemist, the toxogen was proving difficult to reproduce. The process required so many steps that the yield was infinitesimal. So far, Prunus caribaeus was an apricot that only nature could build.

"Let me remind you that it grows only on Apricot Cay. And do you know why?" Antoine flashed another toothy smile. "Because a particular fungus that blights only Prunus caribaeus mysteriously wiped out all the apricot crops on the other islands."

Quentin was about to ask where the blight came from, but something in Antoine's eyes said he could guess the answer. The son-of-a bitch was even more cunning than he had guessed.

"What prevents the blight from being introduced here?"

"The fact that nobody is allowed to disembark here without my permission."

That was true. He had ringed its beaches with elaborate electronic security systems-cameras, motion detectors, barbed-wire fences-not to mention armed guards on constant surveillance in towers and jeeps. He had even pushed old cars into the shallows of the bay for coral to build upon, making boat passage perilous. Apricot Cay was a tropical fortress.

"You're asking too much."

"Not according to the Wall Street Journal," Vince Lucas said. From his briefcase he pulled out a copy of the paper. "Darby Pharms' profitability increased 30 percent over the last year-some 50 million dollars. Barron's cites you as a growth company of choice. Besides, your Mr. Darby is an old friend of Ronald Reagan. Once you get FDA approval, Darby will be on the Fortune 500, n'est-ce pas?"

Quentin wished he had never mentioned the White House connection. In a moment of bravado he once boasted how Ross Darby and Reagan played football together at Eureka College and that Darby had contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Reagan's campaigns and raised millions more hosting Republican fund raisers. Ironically, Ross had even generously supported Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" anti-drug initiative. That boast had probably doubled the cost of the apricots.

Quentin walked to the gunwale. The sun had set on the unbroken horizon, enameling the sea in burnt orange. Even with Reagan pressing the FDA Commissioner, it could take two years to win approval. Then another two before Veratox was on the market. Meanwhile, Darby would be another $25 million in debt to a Caribbean crook. Worse still, their ace microbiologist, Dexter Quinn, had retired two months ago, leaving only Chris Bacon and a couple of assistants on their premier project. They worked around the clock but had made no progress synthesizing the compound. But something bothered Quentin about Bacon. He seemed distracted all the time-as if he had another agenda just below the surface.

"Of course," said Antoine, joining him at the railing, "it's always possible that another firm would become interested in our fine harvest, no?" Antoine smiled broadly.

The bastard had him by the balls. On the table sat the leather-bound business plans containing all the lease conditions, the numbers, and paragraphs of legalese about the dummy corporation Quentin had established to export tropical fruit. It was all very sophisticated and legitimate, neatly spelled out in French and English and as negotiable as a firing squad.

Quentin felt himself cave in. Veratox was a billion-dollar molecule, and he was next in line to run the company. Once Chris Bacon's group could synthesize the extract, they would have no need of Antoine Ducharme and his island. "You drive a hard bargain."

"No such thing, my friend. Bargains are never hard."

Quentin shuffled back to the table and signed the contract. By November first, he would have to wire two and a half million dollars to a bank in Grand Bahamas as advance. A second payment of the same amount was due next June. And nobody would know because Quentin kept double books, siphoning funds from foreign sales of other products.

Antoine poured more champagne and they sat and watched the sky turn black while inside the others hooted over the game. After several minutes, Antoine stood up. "Trust, my friends. It is very important, no?"

The question threw Quentin. Vince Lucas just shrugged.

"More important than love." A strange intensity lit Antoine's eyes.

Quentin's first thought was that Antoine was drunk. But he moved purposefully to a wall unit by the boat's instruments and slid back a panel to reveal a small television screen. He hit a couple buttons and a color picture emerged. For a moment Quentin thought it was some kind of adult video. Two people were having sex. Antoine muttered something in French in a tone of harsh resignation, then turned a knob. The camera zoomed in on Lisa in the throes of an orgasm, Marcel, his red shirt still on, driving her from above.

Antoine's expression was a strange neutrality. He flicked off the set then picked up the phone and said something in French. Within a minute, Marcel climbed up from below. He was fully dressed, the bolstered gun still belted around his waist.

Quentin could feel his heartbeat kick up.

"Everything okay below?" Antoine asked.

"Yes, of course," Marcel said, looking nervous.

"Good." Then he turned to Quentin. "Because my American associate here is joining us. He will be investing very heavily in our enterprise here, and we must assure him of flawless security, n'est-ce-pas?"

"But of course."

Antoine approached Marcel and raised a finger like a teacher making a key point. "Trust," he said, then reached around and unclipped the pistol from his holster. Marcel did not move. "See? Perfect trust." Marcel made an uncertain grin. Antoine raised a second finger. "Perfect security," he continued. "Essential ingredients for success, yes?"

Vince Lucas smiled and made a toasting gesture, encouraging Marcel to go along with the classroom charade.

Then Antoine motioned for Marcel to hold out his hands. The man looked perplexed, but Antoine was his boss making a point to impress his guest. So Marcel complied as Antoine removed the handcuffs from his belt and snapped one on his wrist. "Perfect trust, yes?"

Marcel nodded, then Antoine indicated for Marcel to turn around, which he did, half-proudly presenting his other hand behind him in perfect obedience. Antoine snapped on the second cuff, still keeping up his patter, while Quentin watched in anxious fascination. "Without trust friendship fails, families dissolve, empires crumble."

He led Marcel to the portside edge. Across the water, Antoine's villa glowed like a jeweler's display. Above them spread an endless black vault fretted with a million stars and a crescent moon rocking just above the horizon. "And it is for all this," Antoine continued. "A paradise island in a paradise sea under a paradise sky-the stars, the moon, the air. All the moments we steal from the gods. We are as close to immortality as one can get."

"Yes, monsieur."

"Yes, monsieur," Antoine echoed. He directed Marcel to look straight down into the water. "But not the face of deceit."

Before Marcel could respond, Antoine nodded to Vince Lucas who in one smooth move heaved Marcel over the side.

Marcel bobbed to the surface, coughing and choking.

"You guarded the wrong body, my friend." Antoine said.

Marcel shouted pleas to Antoine to drop a rope or ladder, aware that they were half a mile out with an offshore wind pushing him toward where the surf pounded the jagged reef to foam.

Vince pulled a pistol from under his shirt and aimed it at Marcel's head to finish him off.

"No, let nature take its course," Antoine said, "and prolong the pleasure."

From below, Lisa climbed onto the deck. She had heard Marcel's cries. "What happened? What did you do to him?"

Antoine turned to her with fierce intensity. "He wanted to get his dick wet."

She looked at him in horror, then at the two other men standing with champagne glasses, the Consortium inside celebrating a goal. She started away when Antoine pushed her to the side. He was about to hurl her overboard when Quentin cried out. "No, please, Antoine. Don't do this. Please!"

Antoine's face snapped at him, furious at the intrusion. But he caught himself and released the woman. "You can go," he hissed. "But you won't make the same mistake twice, will you?"

She stood gasping in hideous disbelief as Marcel choked for his last few breaths of air.

"Will you?" Antoine repeated.

"No," she whined, then backed down the stairs to her cabin.

Frozen in horror, Quentin looked for help to Vince who just winked and pointed out a shooting star, while Antoine poured himself more champagne then returned to the gunwale to watch Marcel die.

For two wicked minutes he choked and begged for his life-his words gurgling through the night waves, his legs kicking with all he had to keep his head above night surf-until totally exhausted he sank into the black.

Quentin was too stricken with horror to say anything else. He hid in his glass, wondering at the cruel justice of Antoine Ducharme, at the casualness of Vince Lucas as if he'd witnessed murders all the time, at what miseries Antoine had in store for Lisa-but knowing with brilliant clarity that he was dealing with a species of people who lived in a dark and gaudy world-a world whose principles were alien to the rest of civilized society.

But what bothered Quentin Cross almost as much as watching the young man drown was knowing that he was now part of that world-an accomplice and partner who had signed his name in blood.

And that the only way out was Christopher Bacon.

Or his own death.

2

Karen Kimball couldn't put her finger on it, but the guy in the tan sportcoat looked vaguely familiar.

It was the eyes. The heavy lids, the dark blue flecked with stars. It's hard to forget eyes, no matter what happens to the rest of the face. These were eyes she knew from long ago. And the way they followed her. Not leering, not lewd, just a kind of warm speculation. But he was too young to be making eyes at her.

She mopped the table in the booth across from his and chided herself. Here she was an overweight fifty-nine-year-old divorcee with three kids and a grandchild-not some teeniebopper flushing at each foxy guy who passed her way.

She dried her hands and pulled out her pad. "Would you like something to drink, sir?"

He eyed her waitress outfit. "Aren't you the owner?"

Everyone in town knew that. "One of my girls called in sick, so you're going to have to settle for me. What'll it be?"

"I think I'll have a black cow."

"A what?"

"Guess you stopped making them. Make it a Heineken instead."

For a moment Karen felt a blister of irritation rise. He was putting her down for not having a bar that made fancy mixed drinks. But as she headed away, it occurred to her what he had asked for-a black cow: root beer and vanilla ice cream. She hadn't heard that name for years. Not since the days she had worked at the Lincoln Dairy, when she was a junior in high school.

Karen got the beer and returned, now feeling a low-grade uneasiness. She took his order, all the while studying his face. A good face: open and pleasant, with a thin, slightly crooked mouth, sharp cleft chin, thick brown hair, and those blue starburst eyes.

Jesus, I know this face, she told herself. And that look: Each time their eyes met she could feel something pass between them-something that went beyond customer and waitress.

She moved into the kitchen, and through the small window of the swing door she again studied the guy. She knew he knew her, though she could not place him in any context. And he seemed to enjoy his mystery. He looked to be in his thirties, so maybe he was the son of some friend, a guy she hadn't seen since he was a child. She called Freddie over. "You know that guy in booth seven?"

Freddie peered through the door. "Never saw him before. Why, he giving you trouble or something?"

"No, just looks familiar."

"Whyn't you ask him?"

She nodded, and for several moments let her mind rummage for a connection, watching him look around as if for familiar faces. The way he moved his head and ran his hand through his hair, and the slant of his chin. And those eyes. Those eyes.

Jesus! It was driving her to distraction. Maybe she'd seen him in the movies or on TV. But what would he be doing in the Casa Loma? It was a nice family place, but not the Ritz.

She stared through the glass concentrating as hard as she could, feeling it almost come to her-like a bird swooping in out of the dark, then just before landing turning sharply and flapping away.

This is ridiculous, she told herself. She delivered other orders, trying to look neutral but checking him out from the corner of her eye. By the time his meal was ready she had worked up the nerve to ask. "I don't mean to be impolite, but do I know you?"

The man smiled coyly. "You might."

"You from around here?"

"Not anymore." That same teasing smile. He sipped his beer.

"It's just that you look familiar."

"Well," he began, but decided to continue playing coy, letting her twist in the breeze.

"I guess not," she said and walked away, thinking, The hell with this! If he was somebody she was supposed to know, then, damn it, let him fess up. No way she was going to get into a mind game with some jerk looking for a little action before he blows back out of town.

Karen delivered his order without a word or a glance. She placed it on the place mat and turned on her heels just as cool and professional as she could be. But as she moved away, the man began to softly sing a refrain: "Sometimes I wonder why I spend the lonely nights dreaming of a song. The melody haunts my reverie…"

Karen pretended not to hear and headed across the floor and into the kitchen without looking back.

Freddie glanced up from the stove at her. "Hey, you okay? You look like you seen a ghost."

Karen was leaning against the wall staring out through the window. The eyes. That slightly crooked mouth. The little scar at the corner of his left eyebrow.

"Can't be," she said aloud.

"What 'can't be?'"

She shook her head to say it was nothing.

That song. "Stardust." Suddenly she was in the gym at Alfred E. Burr Junior High school dancing to Helen O'Connell and the Jimmy Dorsey Band. It was their favorite. She had said his eyes were like Stardust.

Impossible! He's too young. Too young!

"That guy giving you some crap?"

"No, for chrissakes!" She didn't know why she flared up, but suddenly she felt upset and disoriented. She went out the back door and lit a cigarette trying to find her center again.

The parking lot was beginning to fill up. In the eastern sky, trees had lost their leaves and made scraggly patterns against the street lights. As she stared she was suddenly in a wooden backyard swing set on Brown Street in Canton 's south end. He was beside her, smiling that silly crooked smile. And those Stardust eyes. He was saying something about going to college and becoming a scientist someday, and how the next moment he was kissing her.

It came back to her in such a rush she felt faint.

She went back inside, crossed through the kitchen. Freddie asked her something, but she dismissed him with her hand and went into the staff toilet. Inside she fixed her hair and put fresh lipstick on. The face in the mirror looked at best five years this side of its age. And he looked like a kid.

It couldn't be him. So why was she shaking all of a sudden and fixing her face and gargling with mouth-wash?

This was nuts!

She passed through the service door.

He had finished his meal, but was still sitting there and facing her. The same eyes. Same cleft in the chin. Same scar. She felt a strange fright, because it didn't make any sense. He looked half her age. While she tried to find the right words, she spotted something in his hand.

Then she realized that he wasn't smiling. And his eyes were huge and round. His mouth opened and a string of saliva poured oud onto his shirt. And rising from his throat was a deep wet groan. Suddenly his chest began to heave.

Karen's first thought was he was choking, that he couldn't catch his breath, that she had to apply the Heimlich maneuver because his face was draining of color.

But then his body began to convulse as if experiencing electric shock. In a clean sweep of his hands, the dishes scattered to the floor, as his feet kicked in some awful reflex. But what made Karen scream was how his face tensed in agony and his head jerked back as if trying to free itself from his neck.

"Somebody get a doctor. Hurry."

My God! she thought, he's having a heart attack. She shouted to one of the waiters to call an ambulance.

Instantly the place was in a commotion, people shouting and jumping up to help, one man saying he was a physician.

While people swirled around her and the doctor tried to loosen the man's tie, Karen was frozen in place. Something was happening to the man's face.

As he weaved and bobbed his head, Karen could swear that the skin of his face was changing, shifting, beginning to darken with splotches. But more than that, it appeared to be moving, buckling, as if loosening from the inside-as if there were suddenly too much skin to cover his skull.

At first she couldn't believe what she was seeing, all too distracted by the convulsions and gurgling from his chest. Then she noticed his hands. The skin was changing-wrinkling and withering as if the flesh inside were dissolving, leaving a translucent parchment through which veins made long blue vees across the backs of his hands. Others noticed also, and their voices hushed as they stopped to take in the spectacle. Then people began to scream, calling for the doctor to do something.

But this was not a heart attack, nor a stroke, nor an aneurysm, nor anything else Karen could imagine. Nor anything any of the others who pressed against her could imagine, including the doctor. Futilely he had loosened the man's tie, knowing he was witnessing nothing he had seen before, nothing that his medical texts ever prepared him for-nothing that had anything to do with normal human pathology. What disease could reduce a human body to such a stage of debilitation and with such brutal virulence? No virus, bacteria, or plague he knew of. Whatever had struck the man had blitzed his cells at the DNA level.

While others gasped and shouted, Karen stood nailed to the floor, a scream bulbed in her throat as she watched the man age half-a-century before her eyes, simultaneously fleshing out and withering into a bloated mummy of his former self. Just minutes ago he had sat here a big handsome young guy. Now he was collapsed into the corner of the booth, his shoulders hunched forward, neck sunk into his frame, sightless rheumy eyes gaping at the onlookers, his mouth rimmed with cracked flesh frozen in a silent scream.

Then a long thin cry rose from Karen's lungs as she plied open the withered claw clutched around the black-and-white photograph he had brought her-one she knew so well, a bit faded and cracked but not enough to conceal the image of them in tuxedo and gown at their junior prom, "Stardust Night-1948"-a duplicate of which she had in her scrapbook at home with the inscription on the back: With love forever, Dexter.

3

Half-consciously Chris Bacon plucked a white hair from his eyebrow in the rearview mirror. "How old would you say you are if you didn't know how old you are?"

"Is this some kind of trick question?" his wife Wendy asked.

"No."

"Well, some days I feel about ninety," she chuckled.

"You know what I mean."

"I don't know, honey… Thirty-something, I suppose." Today was her forty-second birthday, although she looked at least ten years younger. She was slim and attractive, and her skin was smooth and fair. She had shiny chestnut-colored hair and large intelligent eyes of almost the same color. Her full expressive mouth, high cheekbones, and V-shaped chin gave her a regal quality that helped preserve her youthfulness. It also helped that Wendy took good care of herself and jogged regularly. "Why?"

"What if you could feel thirty-something the rest of your life?"

"I guess it depends on how long the rest of my life is."

"What if you could live, say, another hundred years and still feel thirty?"

Something in Wendy's expression said she was becoming uncomfortable with the subject. "But that's not going to happen."

"Let's say it could."

Wendy thought for a moment. Then she said, "Why would I want to live another hundred years?"

"Why? You mean you'd prefer three score and ten instead of twice that?"

"Well, only because everybody else I ever knew would be dead. I'd be a living anachronism. What kind of a life would that be?"

"How about if everybody had the same privilege?"

"Wouldn't that be worse? By the end of the century, there'd be ten billion people on the planet."

"What if it weren't accessible to everybody? I mean, just the people you love."

Wendy shifted restlessly in her seat. "Chris, can we please change the subject? None of what you're asking can happen."

"Honey, just pretend for the sake of argument: If you had the option to add another, say, fifty years onto your lifespan without aging, with me and your sister…"

"And how would you explain it to your neighbors when they grew old and you didn't?"

"We'd just move someplace else."

She started to laugh. "You mean every ten or fifteen years while everybody else is turning gray, we just pack up and go to another city?"

"Something like that."

"We'd be living like fugitives."

"Say we moved to your family place in the Adirondacks?"

"You mean live the last eighty years of our lives hiding in the woods? Frankly, I think I'd rather die young."

They were on their way to Logan airport to pick up Wendy's sister Jenny and her new baby who were visiting for the weekend. While they were in for Wendy's birthday, Chris was privately celebrating the birthday of a mouse.

Not Mickey. That was two years ago-and, Wendy swore, never again. No, this was a real mouse.

Although mus musuclus sextonis could be mistaken for any other laboratory rodent, it was a rare mutant with the dubious distinction of being the shortest-lived mouse-a mere eleven months compared to twenty-three for most others. Located at a breeder in Maine, Chris had ordered some five hundred of the animals over the years. Of the original batch, over 60 percent had defied their DNA clock by a factor of four. And one, a slender albino agouti male with pink eyes, had outlived them all as the sole survivor of years of secret experimentation-the one Chris had named Methuselah because he had exceeded his life expectancy by a factor of six, and today was celebrating his sixty-sixth month.

The best-laid plans of mice and men had not gone awry: Iwati's flower had worked!

Chris had been as good as his vow. For six years only one other person at Darby Pharms knew of his research. They had worked on the sly-nights and weekends-isolating, purifying, synthesizing, then testing the flower extract. And Chris got away with it because as senior researcher he had complete autonomy in the lab and could mask requisitions for material and animals. No one else from top management down had any inkling that during downtime on the apricot toxogen Chris was at work on the tabukari elixir. To the casual observer Dr. Christopher Bacon was the ideal employee-a man dedicated to his science, his company, and his fellow human beings.

Like the apricot toxogen, synthesis of tabukari was a complex process, but unlike Veratox the yield was very high. The active ingredient contained forty-six molecules, including a slight molecular variation of a steroid, fluoxymesterone, a hormonelike compound which Chris had never seen in a plant before-what he named tabulone.

In addition to testing tabulone on mice, Chris also applied it to cell cultures with astounding effects. From the medical literature he knew that normal, noncancerous animal cells reproduced a finite number of times between birth and death. For mice, it was an average of six replications; for chickens, twenty-five; for elephants, one hundred ten. For humans, about fifty. In a Petri dish four years ago, Chris had made a breakthrough discovery. He had taken two different batches of mouse brain tissue. One he treated with fluid nutrients and a nontoxic blue stain and incubated the mixture at body temperature. He did the same with the other but added tabulone. After five days, the first batch went through its full six replications, then died. Under the microscope, the walls of the cells had deteriorated to let the blue stain seep through. However, the cell batch treated with tabulone remained perfectly clear and healthy as on Day One. For all practical purposes, tabulone had stopped the biological clock. Today those same cells were still alive and thriving.

Somehow, tabulone had produced a protective shield around the test cells. Chris didn't understand what was happening on the molecular level, and he wished he could consult a geneticist. But six years and three hundred mice later he knew he had developed the closest thing to biological perpetuity. What started out as a quest for the perfect human birth control had, ironically, produced an eternal mouse. And Darby Pharms Inc. never knew. Nor would he tell them until he had worked out some nasty limitations of the compound.

Even then Chris was not sure. What staggered his mind was the magnitude of the implication: If tabulone could work the same for humans, he was at the threshold of the most astounding breakthrough in medical science-one that would redefine the very concept of life.

"You mean they don't die?" Wendy asked.

"No, they'll die eventually, but not from diseases associated with age-kidney failure, heart and liver diseases. Theoretically they could go on for a few more lifetimes."

"But a few mice outliving their life span doesn't mean you've discovered the fountain of youth for humans. You're a scientist, Chris. You know better than to make wild speculations."

"What about Iwati?"

"You want me to believe that some New Guinea bush-man who claims to be a hundred and twenty three and doesn't look a day over thirty? Give me a break."

"What if he is?"

"Then I'd pity him because he'd be forced go on long after the people he loved grew old and died. He'd be a freak alone with his secret."

A freak alone with his secret.

The phrase stuck in Chris's mind like a thorn.

Maybe that was why Iwati had returned to the bush. It was the one place where time didn't move, where he could live to a hundred and fifty or more and never feel the press of change. In Port Moresby or Sydney or any other city, the future was happening by the moment. But in the Stone Age Papuan highlands, he had found indefinite life and exalted status. He was the Tifalmin's Constant Healer, dispensing balms for this ailment and that while keeping to himself the ultimate balm-the taboo to which only his offspring would be privy. And the ultimate bequest of a father to his firstborn son.

"Chris, death is what makes us human," Wendy said. "I want to live only long enough to become old."

They emerged from the Callahan tunnel to a line of traffic and turned right, toward the entrance of Logan Airport.

"Wendy, most of the people in these cars won't be here in thirty years. They'd kill to double or triple their stay. You're an English teacher: Imagine what Shakespeare could have created had he lived another fifty years. Or Michelangelo or da Vinci or Einstein. The mind boggles. Just imagine how much more writing you could do, how much more life you could enjoy."

"'Death is the mother of beauty,'" she quoted. Her voice was now flat, the earlier efforts to play along had vanished.

"Maybe, except that Wallace Stevens saw no alternative."

"Chris, we die for a reason. You're tampering with Nature-with processes refined over billions of years. And there's something dangerous in that. Besides, have you considered any of the social problems if the stuff actually worked on people-such as who could afford it? Or the population nightmare? Or if the stuff fell into the hands of criminals or a Hitler? The good thing about death is that it gets the bad guys too."

Chris made a dismissive gesture with his hand. "Precautions could be taken against all that. The point is, I like being alive. I like the moments of my life. And in thirty years I'll be dead forever. You know what forever means? It means never being conscious again. It means never waking up the next morning and seeing the world, of thinking, of being aware of colors and sounds. It means never seeing you again, and that sickens me."

"You've got at least another forty years ahead of you, maybe fifty given the way you take care of yourself."

It was true that he ate healthily and worked out regularly, jogging three miles each morning before going to work. And he had been doing that since his days at Yale where he competed on the wrestling team. At forty-two, and with a full head of sandy hair, he looked like a man ten years his junior-a young Nick Nolte, Wendy had once remarked. But his athletic good looks would pass sooner than later, and, at the moment, he refused to be placated.

As they continued into Logan, Chris asked, "What if Ricky could have been saved?"

Instantly Wendy's voice turned to gravel. "He wasn't!"

"No, but if he had been, you'd feel a lot different, right?"

"But he wasn't. And I don't want to talk about this anymore." Her voice began to crack.

They rode in prickly silence. Chris had opened that dreadful black box again. He hadn't wanted to, but he couldn't stop himself. He had to know. And as he drove into the airport with his wife trying to recompose herself, he thought of how he had multiplied the lifespan of a goddamn mouse but he couldn't save his own son by a day.

Mickey. The other mouse, and Ricky's favorite companion.

Mickey had been with him the day he died, along with Chris and Wendy who had sat on either side of his bed in Boston 's Children's Hospital, each holding a hand. It was how he had left them. For two years they had tried everything including bone marrow transplants from Chris and a battery of experimental drugs. It was what kept Chris working on Veratox-hoping for a successful synthesis, hoping for a breakthrough that would win FDA approval and save his son before cancer cells claimed him.

It was what kept Chris going on tabulone. But time ran out. Ricky had died at the actuarial prime of life-the age when the fewest people in the nation die. The age when the statistical likelihood of living another day is higher than at any other time of human life: five years, eight months. Eaten by cannibals-minute and immortal.

When it was clear that no hope was left but life in a state of suspended decay, they asked that the respirator be removed so Ricky could pass away on his own. It took less than two hours. At his death, he had as much hair as he had at birth. But unlike his birth hair, this was wispy and dead looking, and his scalp was scaly, his face emaciated, his eyes sunken and slitted open and frozen in a blank stare. The cancer had ravished his little system, reducing him to a shriveled, bird-faced old man. They didn't know if at the end he was aware of their presence, but Wendy kept whispering in his ear that the angels would take care of him in heaven.

Three years later, the pain still throbbed, but they had grown hard around it. They both went through a period of anger-at the universe, at death for having claimed their baby. At God. Wendy, who had been brought up Roman Catholic, could not forgive Him on this one. After two miscarriages and Ricky's death, He had killed her will to ever have another child.

Chris pulled onto the United ramp thinking about Ricky and Wendy and Methuselah.

Thinking about the bedroom with the cowboy wallpaper and the Pee Wee League trophy Ricky had won and the preschool class pictures on his bureau, Ricky's cherubic face beaming at the camera. How Wendy could not get herself to enter his room for weeks. How in a fit she tore the place apart, packed what she couldn't part with, gave clothes to Goodwill, and stripped the walls of every reminder of the son who would never grow up.

Thinking about his father in a Connecticut nursing home withered by arthritis and Alzheimer's disease. Thinking how that cruel predisposition might be etched in his own genes.

Thinking about Methuselah full of life-eating, drinking, running his wheels and mazes like Mighty Mouse, a perpetual motion machine.

Thinking how he had the keys to the kingdom.

"When are you going to tell them?" Wendy asked. "I mean, it's been six years you've been skulking around the lab."

"I'm not sure I am."

"Why not?"

"It scares the hell out of me."

Six years of ingenious fraud was enough to get him fired, prosecuted, and blackballed in the industry. But what filled him with fear was not being caught, but the thought that once the genie was out of the lamp there was no getting him back in.

And behind that fear was Quentin Cross. Although Quentin would replace Ross Darby next year, Chris did not trust him. He took foolish risks and cut corners with FDA regulations. It was his idea to test Veratox on human subjects in Mexico, circumventing U.S. protocol. Quentin hadn't actually violated the law, just ethical practice. And that worried Chris. He couldn't predict what Quentin would do with tabulone.

The other problem was protocols for human testing. Even if it worked on higher species, the average rhesus monkey lived twenty-five years. Chris would be an old man by the time he had viable results for the next step. Not only did he lack the resources-financial and otherwise-he didn't have the time. Nice irony, he thought: Not enough time to see if you could live forever!

Worse still, he was now on his own. His sole assistant, a trusted and talented microbiologist, had retired from Darby Pharms a few months ago following a mild heart attack. He had said he wanted to make up for lost time while he still had some left.

They entered the United arrival area where Jenny was waiting for them with her luggage and baby daughter. Taxis and cars were moving helter-skelter. As Chris pulled up to the curb, he wondered what his only confidant at Darby was doing in his retirement. He had always been a nostalgic kind of guy, so he was probably back in Canton, Ohio, whooping it up with his old girlfriend.

Jesus, he missed Dexter Quinn!

4

"Oh, look, it's Auntie Wendy and Uncle Chris," Jenny chortled to the baby bundled in her arms.

It was their first time meeting Abigail, now four months old. As usual, Jenny was in high spirits despite air turbulence that had kept the baby fussing all the way from Kalamazoo. Jenny was just what Wendy needed to jump start her spirits. With Chris working around the clock, she had become bored and lonely. What she couldn't predict was how it would feel to have a baby in the house again.

Traffic was light, so they made it back to Carleton in half an hour. Chris and Wendy lived in an eight-room central-entrance colonial with a wide front lawn that was now covered with snow. The interior was decorated for Christmas, and while Jenny carried on about how festive the place looked, Chris brought her luggage up to the guest room. When Jenny was out of earshot he announced that he was going back to the lab.

"Back to the lab! They just arrived," Wendy said. "I thought we were going to have nice relaxing evening." A fire was going in the living room hearth beside the tree, and she had bought some good wine, cheeses, and pâtés.

"Honey, I'm sorry, but something critical's come up. I've got to get back."

Chris had two different colored eyes-one brown, the other green-that, someone once said, gave him the appearance of two different faces superimposed. At the moment, they appeared to be pulling apart by the distraction in them. It was a look Chris had gotten too often, and one that Wendy had come to resent.

"Can't it wait? You haven't seen her for a year. Besides, it's my birthday in case you forgot."

He had. "Oh, hell, I'm sorry. It completely slipped my mind, really."

But Wendy didn't care about that. Nor did she care how critical things were at the lab. At times she wished the place would blow up for how it had consumed him. And for what? Some foolish delusions about changing the course of human biology. She took his arm. "Chris, I don't want you to go." Her voice was beginning to tremble. She had envisioned a nice warm reunion around the fire. The three of them and the baby. "Please."

Chris slipped his gloves back on. "Honey, I can't. I'm sorry, but I have to. Quentin's been riding my ass to get a good yield."

"That's not why."

But Wendy stopped because Jenny had wandered into the living room with the baby in her arms. Instantly Jenny sensed the tension because she chortled something about how pretty the room was, then began straightening out sofa pillows and lining up the Christmas knick-knacks on a table. That was Jenny: She had an abnormal craving for neatness-emotional and otherwise. At all costs she would avoid conflicts, even if it meant forcing down hurt and anger with smiles and endless bubbles of chatter. There was a flip side to her obsession, however: You almost never knew when something troubled her.

Chris turned to Jenny. "Please don't be insulted, but I've really got to get back to the lab. We've got some time-sensitive tests, and my assistant is home in bed with the flu. It's lousy timing, I know."

If Jenny was offended, she didn't let on. In a good-natured voice, she said, "No-o-o problem. You go attend to your tests or whatever. We're here until Sunday. You'll get enough of us. Besides, you're going to save the world from cancer, right?"

"We're hoping."

Bull! Wendy thought. The apricot synthesis was a bust. It was that damned New Guinea flower that he was running back to.

"That's much more important than sitting around chewing the fat," Jenny continued. "Besides, your wife and I have a lot of boring sisterly stuff to catch up on."

"Jenny, listen, I'm sorry. Really. And Abby." He gave her a hug and kissed the baby on the head.

Then he turned and kissed Wendy on the forehead. "Happy birthday," he whispered. "Sorry."

Wendy looked into those impossible eyes and nodded, but she said nothing.

"Get going, get going. You're wasting precious time," Jenny sang out. "And she prefers Abigail."

Artfully, Jenny had let him off.

After a second glass of wine; Wendy felt better, although she was still disappointed and a little hurt that Chris had cut out on her birthday. No other project at the lab had consumed him so much. Nor had given him such profound satisfaction. And that's what bothered her even more than his absence. It was as if he were having an affair with some dark half-sister of Mother Nature.

When the baby was ready to go down, Wendy led them upstairs. She always felt a little self-conscious about her house when Jenny visited. It had that "lived-in" look, while Jenny kept her place obsessively neat-so much so that you felt as if you'd offend the furniture by using it. As they headed to the guest room, Jenny unconsciously straightened out pictures on the wall or rearranged table items. It was more than an aesthetic reflex. Jenny was positively harassed when things were out of place. Even as a child she had manifested an inordinate obsession for order. She would spend hours arranging things in her room-dolls, books, toys. One day when Jenny had nothing to do, Wendy found her at her desk lining the hundreds of seashells they'd collected over the years into a perfect spiral-the smallest ones in the center moving outward to the largest ones.

On the way Wendy showed Jenny the office she had made for herself out of the spare bedroom. Beside a new IBM PC and printer lay the nearly completed manuscript of a mystery novel she was writing. Her dream was to write herself out of Carleton High's English Department where she had been for eighteen years. By now she was burned out and tired of explaining things to kids.

"If I Should Die. Good title," Jenny said, riffling through the manuscript.

It was the first of a trilogy centered on a feisty forensic psychologist. Wendy hadn't thought out the plot of the sequels, but she had the titles: Before I Wake and My Soul to Take.

"You amaze me, Wendy. I can't tell a story at gunpoint."

Wendy chuckled. "I've had those days."

She watched as Jenny flipped through the manuscript. It had been over a year since they had last visited each other. Since her pregnancy, Jenny had put on weight. Yet unlike Wendy, who was still a size eight, Jenny had always been inclined toward plumpness. Because she avoided the aging effects of the sun, her skin was remarkably pale and creamy. She had their mother's deep brown eyes and dark hair which she wore in bangs and straightly cropped about her neck. With her bright round face and green-and-red plaid jumper, she looked like a Christmas pageant choirgirl.

Something on a page caught her eye. "Ceren Evadas! You put that in here."

"The old line about writing what you know."

When they were girls, Wendy would spin stories for Jenny at bedtime. It was how she forged her big-sister role while polishing her storytelling craft. One of the stories was about two girls who invented a secret hideaway where they could go to escape monsters. She named it "Ceren Evadas"-pronouncing it "serene evaders"-an anagram of Andrea's Cave near their summer lodge at Black Eagle Lake in the Adirondacks. Whenever they got the urge, they would whisper "Ceren Evadas," then take off to the cave. At the end of her novel, the heroine took refuge from the bad guys in such a childhood hideaway.

"What a pleasure it must be creating stories and characters and situations. You have complete control-like playing God."

And the good guys win, and bad guys don't, Wendy said to herself. And children don't die of cancer.

"Too bad real life's not like that." Jenny's face seemed to cloud over and she lay the page down.

"Are you okay?" Wendy asked.

"Me, of course, I'm wonderful. Oh, look at all the pictures." Something was bothering her, but Wendy didn't push.

Jenny moved to a small group of old family photos and picked up the one of Sam, Chris's father. He was posed beside Dwight Eisenhower. "How is he doing?"

Wendy shook her head sadly. "He's fading."

Samuel Adam Bacon-onetime American ambassador to Australia, professor of history at Trinity College, and great raconteur-was now living out the rest of his life in a nursing home in West Hartford, Connecticut. Two years ago he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. His mind, once strong and lucid-a mind that had helped draft important trade policies between the United States and the Pacific nations-had begun to bump down the staircase to nothingness.

"Such a shame. How's Chris handling it?"

"As well as can be expected. Sam is only sixty-four." What she didn't mention was that behind Chris's grief lay fear of the same fate. Every time a name slipped his memory or he misplaced his keys he was certain his own mind was going.

They moved into the guest quarters-what used to be Ricky's room. Chris had dug up the old crib from its hiding place in the cellar, reassembled it, and moved it back in for Abigail. While Wendy watched, Jenny changed the baby and tucked her in. Her hair was like fine silk, and she had big, round, inquisitive blue eyes. Wendy took one of Abigail's naked feet and chuckled lightly. "Her toes look like corn niblets," she said, and let her mind trip over the possibilities.

Jenny seemed to read her thoughts. "Why don't you have another one?"

"Because I don't think I'm ready for another baby. I'm not sure I even want another one."

"Wendy, it's been three years. It's time to move on. Time to start afresh. Chris would love to be a father again."

That was true. Since Jenny had gotten pregnant, he had suggested they do the same. "But I am forty-two, you recall."

"That's not old. A woman up the street from us had her first at forty-five. Look what you're missing. Abigail's the best thing that's happened to me."

Of course, Jenny hadn't always felt this way about children, because her first daughter, Kelly, now fifteen, had had problems since age five when her father died. By seven she required professional help. Today she was being treated for depression and drug abuse. Abigail was a second start for Jenny, who for years had declared that she would never have another child. "They just grow up and break your heart," she had said. Then, by accident, she got pregnant and would have sought an abortion had her second husband Ted not protested. For nine months she was nearly dysfunctional with anxiety. Then Abigail was born, and something magically snapped as Jenny embraced motherhood with pure joy.

The baby made a little sigh as she fell asleep. Then while they stood silently over the crib and watched, Jenny said in a voice barely audible, "Kelly tried to kill herself."

"What?"

"She tried to commit suicide."

"Oh, God, no."

"She took an overdose. But she's in a good hospital where they've got a special ward for young people. It's clean and the staff is very professional." Tears streamed down her face. "We talk freely. And I guess it's good…" Her mood suddenly changed. "Wendy, she hates me. She says I made her crazy. She says she's going to grow up to be like me, living on pills and trying to stay sane." She let out a mirthless laugh. "She's a chip off the old block. She's got my crazy gene. Every family has one, I suppose, and I'm ours."

"Jenny, that's ridiculous! You're not crazy, for godsake."

"I sometimes feel crazy. I do."

"We all do at times. That's human. But you're not crazy, and you didn't make Kelly crazy."

"But something went wrong. I lost control. She's in a mental institution and I can't reach her. Something went wrong. I didn't watch her closely enough."

"Stop blaming yourself. Jim died and left you with a baby."

"Other single mothers manage. I lost control. I should have protected her better. I'm a nurse, for heaven's sake." She took a deep breath and adjusted the blanket around the baby. "But things will be different with her. She gives me strength to go on. She really does."

Wendy hugged Jennifer. "I know, and thank God you have her."

"Which is why I think you should have another."

"Nice how you circled back," Wendy laughed.

But Jenny did not respond as expected. As if talking to herself, she said, "Of course, we still have the 'terrible twos' around the corner, then the 'horrible threes' and 'furious fours.' Frankly, I think five's the best age. You're still the center of their universe, and they're not old enough to be influenced by others or reject you. Five. That's when they're most manageable. Don't you think?"

Jesus! Wendy thought. Had she forgotten when Ricky had died? But Wendy just said, "Yes."

Still in a semi-trance, Jenny gazed at her daughter. "I wish it could last forever." Then, as if at the snap of a magician's fingers, Jenny was back. "Oh, gosh, what's the matter with me?"

Wendy said nothing, suspecting that Jenny had had one of her spells.

When she was younger doctors had diagnosed her as mildly schizophrenic because she would occasionally recede into herself, unaware of her behavior. Medication had helped; so did the passage of time. By adulthood, her condition had stabilized, although she still had occasional blank-out spells.

Out of big-sister protectiveness, Wendy let it pass. "Even if I wanted to get pregnant," she continued as if nothing had happened, "Chris isn't around long enough to get down to business."

"Even big-time scientists have to go to bed on occasion." Jenny took Wendy's arm and headed for the door. "You have to be understanding. He's brilliant, and one day they'll give him a Nobel Prize for his cancer drug." Because it was all so secret, Wendy could not tell her about his real research. Nor could she explain how obscene she found it. Nobel Prize: If only his aspirations were so modest, Wendy thought and turned off the lights.

Quentin's stomach leaked acid when he heard the voice.

Vince Lucas didn't have to explain why he had called. The $2.5 million for the apricot pits was supposed to have been wired to a Bahamian bank by November 1, and here it was the middle of December-two extensions later-and the next payment of equal amount was due in six months.

He had explained to Antoine his problems collecting debts from European jobbers. But the real reason was that Quentin was buying time for Chris Bacon to synthesize the toxogen. All else was in place-the chemical patent, fabulous clinical results, the marketing strategies. And with Ronald Reagan's help, FDA approval was just around the corner. All that was left was a commercially viable yield and he could pay what he owed and be out from under Antoine Ducharme, his Consortium, and his lousy apricots which were costing them nearly thirty dollars per pit-a rate which would make the toxogen astronomically expensive.

But that hadn't happened because Bacon said he needed more time-months more. The fucking golden boy with the youngest Ph.D. from M.I.T. in decades, and he couldn't come up with a decent yield!

What nearly stopped Quentin's heart was that Vince Lucas was in town. His message was brief: Meet him at nine that evening in the parking lot of Concord 's Emerson Hospital which was a few miles from the lab. No mention of money or deadlines. But it would not be a social call. Nor was it like being indebted to legitimate creditors or the IRS. Quentin was beholden to men whose penalty for duplicity was execution.

But they couldn't do that to him, he assured himself. They needed him because he was the only link to the money. Ross knew nothing about Antoine. His sole concern was that his company not be ruled by the whims of Nature-invasion by some apricot-loving caterpillar or a tropical hurricane. If anything happened to Quentin, all deals were off.

Quentin's eyes drifted to the photo on the far wall-the 1932 Eureka football team with Ross standing behind Ronald Reagan who had signed it, "Win one for the Gipper." Two weeks ago, Quentin had pushed Ross to fly to Washington to get Reagan to expedite FDA testing. Ross first refused to exploit his friendship, but Quentin reminded him that Reagan prided himself on helping his friends. It was people like Ross who had put him in the White House-raising millions to support Nancy 's White House decorations including all the fancy china.

Ross had conceded, but he lacked the Darwinian edge. He was not the opportunist Quentin was. Just as well he was retiring soon. He had become soft. He was an obstacle to progress.

A little before nine Quentin pulled his Mercedes into a slot under a lamp post. Only a handful of cars sat in the lot. A solitary ambulance was parked by the emergency room, its lights turned off. Christmas lights in a few upper windows gave the scene a comforting glow. To ease his nerves, he found a station playing Christmas carols. At about nine fifteen, midway through "Here Comes Santa Claus," Vince Lucas rolled up beside Quentin's Mercedes. He nodded for Quentin to get into his car. Quentin went over to the passenger door and opened it hesitantly.

"You're letting the heat out," Vince said.

His heart jogging, Quentin got in and closed the door. "Good to see you, Vince," he chirped and offered his hand like an old business colleague. Vince was wearing leather gloves but did not remove them, nor did he take Quentin's hand.

"Bullshit," Vince said. "It's not good to see me," and peeled onto the road.

Quentin's chest tightened. This was not going to be a good night. The car turned onto Route 2 then cut up a side street toward Concord center.

"Where're we going?" Quentin tried to affect an easy manner.

"For a ride."

"Uh-huh." After a long silence, Quentin said, "Look, Vince, I know why you're here. I explained to Antoine that I need until the turn of the year. There's money coming in from Switzerland. It's just taking more time than expected."

Vince still said nothing. From Concord they crossed into Lincoln not far from Quentin's neighborhood. Houses along the way were lit up with Christmas lights. Quentin tried again. "Vince, we're businessmen. We've got a contractual arrangement which I intend to fulfill, but these things happen around the end of the year, and Antoine knows all that. You'll get the money-"

Vince pulled the car over with a jerk. To Quentin's horror, they had stopped in front of his own house. The Christmas tree was visible through the family room window. The upper floor was dark except for the master bedroom where Margaret was in bed reading or watching television.

"Now, we talk," Vince said, turning in his seat to face Quentin. His face was half in shadows, making his teeth flash white as he spoke. "Antoine Ducharme is two thousand miles from here. The last time you talked, he gave you an extension until December first, twelve days ago. You missed it, which makes you my responsibility now. And I don't do extensions."

"Look, Vince, please… It's all the red tape with money transfers. I swear on my life."

"Your life doesn't have weight." He pointed to the dark upper corner of the house. "Just behind that 'TotFinder' sticker is a pretty pink bedroom with a pretty pink bed where your pretty pink daughter Robyn is asleep." Before Quentin could ask, Vince handed him three photographs, all of Robyn: at her bedroom window that morning, being dropped off at school, at recess.

"Listen, Vince-" he began.

Vince clamped his gloved hand on Quentin's jaw. "No, you listen." He pressed his face so close that Quentin could smell garlic on his breath from his dinner. In a feather-smooth voice he said, "You have until Friday. Understand? The day after tomorrow. If you renege again I look bad, and that I can't live with. Neither can your daughter." He squeezed so hard Quentin's jaw felt crushed. "Two days. Two-point-five million dollars. Plus another two hundred thousand visitation fee which you'll wire to another account. The number's on the back." And he stuffed one of his business cards into Quentin's pocket.

Quentin started to protest, but thought better. He grunted that he understood, and Vince snapped his face away. In dead silence they drove back to the Emerson, as Quentin massaged his jaw and wondered how to manipulate Darby funds, thinking how his daughter's life hung in the balance.

"This is me here," Quentin said as they rolled by his Mercedes. But they continued all the way to the emergency room. "But I'm back there."

When Vince stopped the car, he extended his gloved hand. Quentin took it, gratified that it would end with a gesture of civility. Except that Vince didn't let go. Instead, his other hand closed over Quentin's.

"This is closer."

"I don't follow."

Still holding Quentin's hand, Vince said, "You're going to need to see a doctor."

"What?"

Vince then clamped one hand onto his index finger and bent it all the way back until it broke at the joint with a sickening crack. Quentin jolted in place with a hectoring scream which Vince instantly caught in his glove. Pain jagged through Quentin like a bolt of lightning, searing nerve endings from his hand to his crown and through his genitals to the soles of his feet.

While Quentin yelled and squirmed in his seat, Vince kept his viselike grip on Quentin's mouth. For several minutes he held him until the cries subsided to whimpers.

Quentin's hand had swollen to twice its size, while his finger hung at a crazy angle like a dead root.

Vince then opened the passenger door, and in the same silky voice he said, "The next time it will be your daughter's neck."

And he shoved him out and drove off.

The morning after Jenny and Abigail returned home, Wendy stood naked before the full-length mirror and felt her heart slump. She looked all of forty-two. In her younger days she was a slender size six, and 120 pounds. Now she was two sizes and fifteen pounds heavier. Her waist and thighs were getting that thick puddingly look. Crows' feet were starting to spread around her eyes and mouth, and the smiles lines were becoming permanently etched.

Worse still, she could see herself as an old woman: a hunched and wrinkled thing with flabby skin, thinning hair, teeth chipped and gray, creasing eyes, a neck sunken into the widow's hunch of osteoporosis, her legs whitened sticks road-mapped with varicose veins, her hands patched and knobbed. It was the image of her mother staring back at her, a woman who had died of breast cancer at sixty-eight yet who looked fifteen years older because of a crippling stroke. The image was jolting.

While she had come to accept the grim inevitability, it was no less shocking to apprehend it in her own face. What Chris had dubbed the death gene-that nasty little DNA switch that never failed to click on the long slide to the grave.

But, damn it! Wendy told herself, Jenny was right: Forty-two is still young. And she was still healthy. What benefit was there to wasting the good years left wringing her hands over mortality? No, she couldn't reverse gravity or cellular decay, but she could at least slow the progress.

"The wine is sweet whenever you drink it."

Chris's phrase hummed in her mind.

Feeling a surge, she put on her running suit and sneakers. A few minutes later she was pounding the pavement around Mystic Lake and debating with herself. You're forty-two years old. Twenty years from now you'll be sixty-two. In thirty years, seventy-two. It didn't make sense, not at her age.

But why not? And why not her?

She splashed through shafts of sunlight, thinking that the choices she made now would determine how she lived out the rest of her life: Her grief from Ricky's death would never leave her, but it was time to end the habit of mourning.

Half-consciously she rubbed her hand across her breast as she jogged along. As Jenny said, women over forty had babies all the time.

It was her visit that had done it-seeing Jenny's unequivocal joy. And hearing a baby in the house again-sounds that took her back to happier days. Jenny had given Wendy a pair of earrings, but the real birthday gift was leaving Wendy yearning for the same joy and feeling almost startled into the hope of it. Why not? She was still healthy.

"The wine is sweet whenever you drink it."

Yes! she told herself. YES! And she glided down the path thinking of baby names.

That night Chris peered through the eyepiece of his microscope and saw the landscape of eternity. And it took his breath away.

He was looking at the cells of his own body-cells that contained all the information that made him Christopher Bacon. Cells that should be turning bright blue, dying under his eye-but were thriving.

Eight weeks ago, he had scraped off some flesh from the inside of his cheek. He liquefied the sample and divided it into equal batches, one treated with nutrients-growth factors, hormones, vitamins, insulin, and a lot of other stuff-that sped up replication, collapsing the remaining life of his own forty-two-year-old cells into two weeks. The other he treated with the same nutrients plus tabulone. Within twenty-four hours the surface of each dish was covered with newly replicated cells. From those batches he made subcultures. He kept that up for four weeks until the untreated cells stopped subdividing and died. Meanwhile, the tabulone-treated cells continued to thrive. Two months later they were still replicating. If he had kept that up, he would have produced endless tons of his own cells.

The realization was staggering: The cells of his own flesh were reproducing indefinitely.

That could only mean that human death was not programmed in the genes but the result of a program of cell divisions-a finite process that climaxed in the eventual breakdown of cell walls. In other words, we lived as long as our cells kept replicating. But why did they stop at fifty?

He did not understand the genetics, but it confirmed his suspicion that aging had no clear evolutionary purpose. Traditional textbook reasoning about making room for the next generation made no sense since most animals never made it to old age. They were eaten by predators or died from disease. There was no reason for natural selection to genetically favor demise, Chris told himself. No purpose served.

His eye fell on the wall clock as the second hand made its circuit. Like all his clocks and watches, it was set ten minutes fast, a silly little habit to allow himself to pretend that it wasn't as late as it was-that he had a few more minutes free of charge.

While the radio played softly in the background, Chris watched the clock move inexorably around its course.

And he thought: During the next hour, ten thousand people would die-some by fire, some by floods, some by famine, some by accident, some by another's hand. But most deaths would be from "natural causes" brought on by aging-people over sixty-five. And nobody over 112. But who was to say that the upper limits couldn't be pushed? Or that people shouldn't die but by accident alone?

His eye slipped to the workbench where sat a solitary vial containing tabulone.

As he stared at it, a thought bulleted up from the recesses of his mind: When are you going to try it, huh? When are you going to slip a couple ccs into your syringe and shoot up?

Chris stiffened. Dangerous thoughts, he told himself. Very dangerous.

The kind of speculations he and Dexter Quinn would entertain after the third pint of Guiness. Mental idling that seemed okay when you were feeding a fine buzz-though he still recalled that weird gleam in Dexter's eyes, as if Dexter were giving the notion serious consideration. Chris could understand that: Dex was twenty years his senior and hated the thought of becoming old because he had never married and had no family to carry on. He also had an impaired heart.

"You want to know when you're old?" Dexter once said. "When you can't get it up and you don't care anymore that you can't get it up."

Chris had begun to chuckle when a look of sad resignation in Dexter's face stopped him.

It's when a tooth falls out and you don't go to the dentist. When you stop coloring your hair. When you don't bother about that lump under your arm.

It's when you give up trying to do anything about it. What's called despair: When all that's left is the countdown.

Dexter was closer to the countdown than Chris, but Chris understood the mindset of defeat. He also understood the beer-soaked hankering for eternity. He had felt it himself. Every time he visited his father, it nipped at his heels: the groping for common words, the sudden confusion and bewilderment, the repetition of phrases and simple acts, the fading of memory. A man who once advised Eisenhower could not recall the current president. A man of trademark wit who now muttered in fragments. A man who last Memorial Day had to be reminded who Ricky was. What chilled Chris to the core was the thought that the same double-death was scored on his own genes.

It was too late for Sam, but not for him.

While he sat at his microscope, the realization hit him full force:

Admit it! The real reason you don't want anybody to know about tabulone is that you want it for yourself, good buddy. All that stuff about social problems, Frankenstein nightmares, and getting yourself canned-just sweet-smelling bullshit you tell your wife and pillow. You're playing "Beat-the-Clock" against what stares back at you every time you look in the mirror-the little white hairs, the forehead wrinkles getting ever deeper, the turkey wattle beginning to form under the chin. The spells of forgetfulness.

The only thing between you and what's reducing Sam to a mindless sack of bones is that vial of colorless, odorless liquid on the shelf. Your private little fountain of youth.

Those were the thoughts swirling through Chris Bacon's head when Quentin Cross stormed into his lab.

His face looked chipped out of pink granite. He snapped off the radio in the middle of a news story about Reagan pledging an all-out war on drugs at home and abroad. "What's the latest yield with the new whatchamacalit enzymes?"

Quentin had a talent for irritating Chris. He was pompous, officious, and often wrong. And for Chief Financial Officer and the next CEO, he had the managerial polish of a warthog. "Not much better than ethyl acetate or any other solvent."

"Christ!" he shouted, and pounded the table with his good hand. His other was in a cast from a fall, he'd said. Quentin's eyes shrunk to twin ball bearings. "I'm telling you to increase the yield or this company and its employees are in deep shit."

"Why the red alert?"

"I asked what kind of yield."

Quentin was a soft portly man with a large fleshy face, which at the moment seemed to take up most of his space. Chris opened his notebook. "A kilo of starting material yielded only five milligrams of the toxogen."

"Five milligrams?" Quentin squealed. His left eye began to twitch the way it did when he got anxious. "Five milligrams?"

At that rate, they would need nearly half a ton to produce a single pound of the stuff-which, Chris had calculated, would cost a thousand dollars a milligram after all the impurities had been removed. It was hardly worth the effort.

"Try different chiral reagents, try different separation procedures, try different catalysts, different enzymes. Anything, I don't fucking care how expensive."

Quentin wasn't getting it. They had their best people working on it, following state-of-the-art procedures, and spending months and millions. "Quentin, I'm telling you we have tried them and they don't work." He had never seen Quentin so edged out. Something else was going on. Or he was suffering pathological denial. "Quentin, the molecule has multiple asymmetric centers-almost impossible to replicate. We can produce its molecular mirror image but not the isomer."

"Why the hell not?"

"Because nature is asymmetrical and organic chemistry isn't. It's like trying to put your right hand into a left-handed glove. It can't be done."

For a long moment Quentin stared at Chris, his big pink face struggling for an expression to settle on. He looked as if he were about to burst into tears. It didn't make sense. "Quentin, I'm sorry, but it's beyond our technology, maybe even our science."

"Then invent some new technology and science. You're the golden boy here. We're paying you sixty grand a year-fifteen thousand more than you'd get at Merck or Lilly. So, you better find a more efficient synthesis or we'll get somebody who can."

"Quentin, I'm not very sophisticated in the intricacies of international trade, but we're killing ourselves to manufacture a molecule that comes ready-made on trees. And we've got an endless supply of pits and exclusive rights. Please tell me what I'm missing here, because I don't get it."

"Just that we don't want to be dependent on raw materials from foreign sources."

Chris was about to respond when a small alarm went off in the rear lab.

"What's that?"

"It's nothing," Chris said vaguely, but the sound passed through his mind like a seismic crack. "Just one of the connectors." He wanted Quentin gone. The alarm was rigged to each of his control mice. An infusion tube had failed, which meant that an animal had been cut off from tabulone. He couldn't explain the potential consequences because Quentin Cross knew nothing of what Chris was doing back there. Nobody did. But he had to reconnect the animal immediately.

"What kind of connectors?"

"One of the animals." Chris made a dismissive gesture hoping Quentin would take the hint and leave. But he moved toward the back lab door.

Jesus! Of all times. Chris could be fired, even prosecuted for misuse of company equipment. And by the time Quentin got through, nobody in North America would hire him. "It's nothing." He tried to sound casual. But Quentin was at the door. Chris played it cool and pulled out his keys.

Inside were rows of glass cages with eighteen of his longest-lived animals. Each had a metal cannula permanently cemented to its skull with a feedback wire connected to an alarm should there be a rupture. After years of continuous supply, they were totally dependent on the serum, like diabetics or heroin addicts.

Quentin followed Chris inside to where a small red light pulsed.

Methuselah.

He had bitten through the tubing, and the stuff was draining into sawdust. Had it been one of the younger mice, there would be no problem. But Methuselah, the oldest, had been infused for nearly six years.

Chris shut off the alarm and auto-feed and gave the mouse an affectionate stroke with his finger. He still looked fine, but he needed to be reattached immediately. "I have to get him rehooked, so if you don't mind…"

But Quentin did mind. "What are you doing with all the mice?"

"Testing toxicity."

"Toxicity from what?"

"Veratox."

"That's preclinical. We're testing the stuff on people."

"I know that, but these animals have cancers."

"You mean you're trying to cure them?"

God! Why doesn't he leave?

"Look, I've really got to hook him up." But Quentin stayed as Chris reattached the tubing.

He was nearly finished when he saw something odd in Methuselah's movement. The animal sashayed across the cage as if drunk.

"What's his problem?"

Before Chris could answer, Methuselah stumbled into the corner, his eyes bulging like pink marbles.

Then for a long moment, Chris and Quentin stood paralyzed, trying to process what their eyes took in.

Methuselah flopped onto his back as his body began to wrack with spasms. His mouth shuddered open and a high-pitched squeal cut the air-an agonizing sound that seemed to arise from a much larger animal. Suddenly one of his eyes exploded from its socket, causing Quentin to gasp in horror. Methuselah's body appeared to ripple beneath the pelt, at the same time swelling, doubling in size with lumpy tumors, some splitting through his fur like shiny red mushrooms growing at an impossible rate.

"Jesus Christ!" Quentin screamed. "What the hell's happening to him?"

Chris was so stunned that he no longer registered Quentin's presence. Methuselah's body stopped erupting almost as fast as it began, only to shrivel up to a sack of knobbed and bloodied fur as if its insides were dehydrating at an wildfire rate. Its head withered to a furry cone half its original size, the contents draining from the mouth and eye socket. At the same time his feet curled up into tiny black fists. When the spasms eventually stopped, Methuselah lay a limbless, shapeless, dessicated pelt crusted with dark body fluids. A demise that would have taken weeks had been compressed into minutes.

"What happened to him?"

"I don't know." Chris had seen his mice die before, but never like this. Never.

"What do you mean, you don't know?" Quentin squealed. "What the hell were you pumping into him? What is that stuff?"

"The toxogen."

Quentin didn't believe him for a moment. "We animal-tested Veratox for a year and nothing like this ever happened."

Quentin's eyes raked Chris for an answer. "I guess the pathology somehow accelerated."

"Accelerated? There's nothing left of him. It's like he died on fast forward."

"I'll do a postmortem," Chris mumbled. "Maybe he had a prior condition, or maybe it's some unknown virus." He didn't know if Quentin would buy that or not, but he played it out and put on rubber gloves, put the remains of Methuselah into a plastic bag, and deposited it in the refrigerator for a necropsy when he was alone.

"I don't know what you're doing in here, but let me suggest you put your efforts into synthesizing Veratox-which is what the hell we're paying you for, and not saving a few goddamn mice."

Then he turned on his heal and stomped out, leaving Chris standing there frozen, the words echoing and reechoing in his head: It's like he died on fast forward.

5

Chris arrived home around nine, still badly shaken. Methuselah's death was like nothing he had seen before. Other animals had experienced accelerated senescence before dying, but over a period of days or weeks-not minutes, and never so extreme. Held in submission for six years, cancer had apparently invaded healthy cells and replicated with explosive vengeance. To make things worse, Quentin was surely questioning Chris's dedication to Veratox.

As Chris stretched out on their big double bed, he knew his days at Darby Pharmaceuticals were numbered. Quentin had all but said he'd replace him, no doubt with some younger talent with hot new strategies on creating synthetic pathways. Now he'd been caught red-handed in his own private project, using company materials, time, and funds. How the hell at forty-two was he going to find a new job when the industry was hiring fresh grad students? How the hell were they going to live on an English teacher's salary?

Chris tried to compose his mind to rest. His eyes fell on the framed plaque on the opposite wall of their bedroom. It was an old Armenian wedding toast etched in beautiful calligraphy in the original language and English-a gift from a college friend on their marriage day.

"May both your heads grow old on one pillow."

For a long moment he stared at the words, then he closed his eyes.

Wendy was taking a shower, and the hush of the water filled his mind like whispered conversations. On the inside of his forehead he watched a closed-loop video of Methuselah erupting in cancerous growths, then shriveling up to a burnt-out pelt.

Who'd want to dip a needle into that?

Just ten wee minutes was all it took.

Like he died on fast forward.

It could take years to work out that limitation-first on mice, then rabbits and dogs, then primates. And that was assuming he could determine the genetic mechanism. Sadly, he had neither the expertise nor the equipment to do what was required. No way to do it alone and undercover.

No way.

No time…

Chris didn't know how long he had dozed-probably just a few minutes, but in that time his brain had dropped a few levels to dream mode. He was at the door of the nursing home, and Sam was sitting in his wheelchair, but everything had an Alice in Wonderland absurdity to it. The wheelchair was too big for Sam, who was the size of a child, sitting in diapers and grinning but still an old man in wispy hair and sad loose flesh. A little boy and old man at once. And he was waving. "Bye Bye, Sailor."

"Hey, sailor, wanna party?"

Chris's eyes snapped open.

Wendy was standing by the bed, naked but for a flimsy negligée.

The room was dimmed and from the tape deck Frank Sinatra filled the room with "Young at Heart."

"I said, you want to party?" She was grinning foolishly.

Suddenly Chris was fully awake. Wendy climbed onto the bed and straddled his thighs.

"My God!" he whispered. "It's the Whore of Babylon."

She laughed happily and kissed him.

"What's the occasion? Fancy meal, expensive French wine, now Playboy After Dark." He had bought the negligée as a Valentine's gift several years ago but had all but forgotten it.

The light from the bathroom gilded her features. "How about I'm in love with you."

"Even though I'm a madass Frankenstein trying to fool Mother Nature?"

"Love is blind."

"Thank God."

She smiled and brought his hands to her breast. He undid her negligée and dropped it on the floor. At least they could joke about it, he thought.

In a moment, he pushed away all the muck in his mind. And while Wendy fondled him, Chris lost himself in loving her. In the amber light, he studied the beautiful fine features of her face and large liquid eyes, her long arms and swanlike neck outlined in a fine phosphorescent arc.

Wendy guided his hands across her body from her breasts to her stomach and pubis. Gently he caressed her as she lowered her face to his, moving her hips in slow deliberate cadence to the music. She hadn't been this romantically aggressive in years.

The scent of her perfume filled his head. He kissed her and felt himself flood with sensations that rose up from a distant time. Suddenly he was back in their cramped little apartment in Cambridge where they had settled after marriage. She had just gotten her masters in English at Tufts, and he had finished his postdoc at Harvard. Greener days, when their passion seemed endless, and the sun sat idle in the sky.

"You're not wearing a diaphragm."

"That's right."

"Is it safe?"

"No."

"Isn't that taking a big chance?"

"Yes." She took his face in her hands. "Let's have a baby."

"What?"

"You heard me."

"Wendy, a-are you sure, I mean…?"

She put a finger to his mouth. "Yes, I'm sure. Very."

"But we should maybe think about it, talk it over. I mean, we're forty-two. Aren't we a little long in the tooth?"

"But young at heart."

She was smiling and her eyes were radiant-as if a light had gone on inside of them, one long-extinguished. He wanted to ask what had brought on the change of heart, what magical snap of the fingers had ended the dark spell. Maybe it was four days of Abigail in the house.

"I want another baby. I do. Really."

His mind raced to catch hold of any objections but found none. For years he had wanted another child, but two miscarriages and Ricky's death had the effect of a long-acting poison. Wendy had refused to take another chance; he had complied, and had fallen into the mindset of remaining childless the rest of their lives.

She kissed him warmly and grinned. "What do you say?"

"Yeah, sure," he whispered.

"I love you."

He slipped himself into her and pulled her face to his. "I love you. Oh, do I ever!"

A moment later, they were in tight embrace and moving in rhythm to an all-but-forgotten love song.

"Christ!"

Quentin sat in his office hunched over the computer. Everybody else had gone for the day.

Three weeks ago he had wired Antoine $2.5 million for a single ton of apricot pits, and another two hundred thousand to Vince. He felt sick. He had juggled the books to disguise profits from a neuropeptide and other products sold to a Swiss firm. But his problems weren't over. In six months he'd have to pay another $2.5 million unless Chris Bacon's lab had some kind of breakthrough, which didn't seem likely. The only good news was that Ross's press on Reagan had paid off with the FDA giving top priority to expediting Veratox.

For nearly an hour Quentin had been studying financial records on the toxogen, nearly sick at how they had spent millions of research-and-development dollars for a compound too expensive to manufacture.

But as he scrolled the figures, something caught his eye that made no sense.

Over a six-year period, they had purchased some nine hundred mice from Jackson Labs in Maine -most for Chris Bacon's group. What bothered Quentin were the dates and prices. According to the catalogue he found in the office library, Jackson raised hundreds of different hybrid mice bred with any number of genetic mutations or biomedical conditions-diabetes, leukemia, hepatitis, etc.-including certain cancers.

There had to be some mistake. The average price for a mouse with malignant cancers was about four dollars-the price paid for some three hundred over the years. However, Darby's records showed that they had also ordered a breed listed as "special mutant" which at $170 each was the most expensive mouse in the catalogue by a factor of five. And over a six-year period they had purchased 582 of them, totaling nearly $99,000.

The signature on each was Christopher Bacon's.

But what held Quentin's attention was the catalogue notation: "Shortest-lived breed-Gerontology studies."

It was a quiet Friday morning a few weeks later when the envelope arrived. Chris had taken the day off because he was burned out. In seven months, sometimes working twelve hours a day, he had increased the yield of Veratox by a thousandth of a percent. The synthesis could not be done-not with the science he and his team knew. Wendy was seeing her doctor. She had missed her period, but she wanted to be sure because drugstore kits were not foolproof.

The envelope, whose postmark said Canton, Ohio, contained a small card and a newspaper clipping dated last month.

Canton, Ohio. Medical authorities are baffled by the unexplainable death of a former Ohio man, Dexter Quinn, who died while eating at the Casa Loma restaurant.

According to eyewitnesses, Quinn, 62, a recent retiree from a pharmaceutical company in Massachusetts, was just finishing dinner when he apparently experienced convulsions. Patrons and staff tried to aid the man, but Quinn appeared to rapidly age. "When it was over, he looked ninety years old, all wrinkled and scrunched up," reported Virginia Lawrence, who had sat in a nearby booth. "It was horrible. He just shriveled up like that."

Even more bizarre, several witnesses say that before the strange affliction, Quinn looked considerably younger than his age. "I thought he was about forty," said waiter Nick Hoffman. Karen Kimball, proprietor of the Casa Loma, who had served Mr. Quinn was too distraught to take questions.

According to George Megrich, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy, "no unusual chemicals signatures" were found in Quinn's system. But he did say that his internal organs resembled those of the elderly. "His prostate gland was greatly enlarged, and his liver and kidneys had the color and density associated with dysfunctions of older people."

Baffled, Megrich speculated that Quinn had died of some virulent form of Werner's syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes victims to age abnormally fast. "Fifty years of aging can be compressed into fifteen years," Megrich said, "but not fifteen minutes. Frankly, I have no idea what happened to this man. It's very very weird…"

"A medical card in his wallet had your name on the back." The card was signed: "Karen Kimball, an old friend of Dexter's."

Chris felt himself grow faint. He thought about flying out to consult with the doctor and medical examiner. But he knew what had happened.

No virus, no plague, no known diseases.

It was tabulone. Dexter Quinn had tried it on himself.

Veratox was the lead story on the eleven o'clock news. With Wendy beside him, Chris tried to lose himself in the report, but his mind was elsewhere-stuck in a booth in a restaurant in Canton, Ohio. He had told her how he had just learned of Dexter's death, but did not show her the news clipping. He simply said it was a heart attack.

You want to know when you're old? When all that's left is the countdown.

Chris tried to convince himself that he just wanted to spare Wendy the horror. But deep down he knew the real reason. Wendy was dead set against the tabulone project. The truth would only confirm her revulsion.

What bothered him even more was how he had let his life split into a kind of dual existence-one open, the other hidden. Like Jekyll and Hyde.

The Channel 5 anchor announced that the FDA had approved a new and highly successful treatment for cancer called Veratox to be marketed by Lexington 's own Darby Pharmaceuticals. It went on to describe the unprecedented results with malignant tumors. The report jumped from supermarket shots of apricots to cancer patients at the Massachusetts General Hospital to an interview with the head of oncology holding forth on what a miracle compound Veratox was.

But Chris could barely concentrate, and not just because all the TV hoopla was hollow-FDA approval notwithstanding, they still couldn't synthesize the toxogen to make it marketable. What clutched his mind was that Dexter had died like Methuselah. He had probably absconded with undetectable amounts of tabulone and saved it to administer to himself after retiring. But something had gone horribly wrong. Maybe he had run out of supply. Maybe he missed a treatment. Maybe he had miscalculated the dosage. Maybe none of the above.

While physicians on the TV screen recommended hospitals everywhere give Veratox usage top priority, something scratched at Chris's mind.

"I thought he was about forty." How was a sixty-two-year-old man mistaken for one two-thirds his age, especially since Dexter was not a young-looking sextarian? He had a bad heart, so he couldn't exercise much. At best he could pass for the late fifties. Not forty. It was as if he had somehow rejuvenated.

Ross Darby beamed at the camera from his office desk. "I have every confidence that Veratox could prove to be a turning point in the battle against what is surely the greatest threat to human health and longevity…"

Maybe Dexter's death is a dark little godsend, Chris told himself. Maybe this is a warning to keep in mind the next time you think about jabbing a needle in yourself.

"Congratulations." Wendy squeezed Chris's hand and snapped him back into the moment.

"You knew about this last week."

"I'm not talking about Veratox, silly." Wendy's eyes were wide and intense, and she wore a huge grin, the kind that was just this side of erupting into giggles.

"What are you telling me?"

"Dada, mama, goo-goo."

Chris bolted upright. "What?"

"We are with child, my love-preggers, knocked up, all of the above." She was beaming happily.

"Yahooooooo!" And he pulled her to him.

"When's it due?"

"November third."

She wrapped her arms around him.

"I don't believe it," he said, and rocked her in his arms.

In a few moments the lights were out and they were naked under the covers, arms embraced. Chris let himself dissolve into the warm joy of the moment, as he made love to his wife and reveled in the thoughts of being a father again.

And through the window, a crescent moon smiled down on them through a bank of fast-moving clouds.

The same crescent moon smiled down on Antoine Ducharme, fifteen hundred miles to the south.

He woke with a start. Everything was still, including Lisa asleep in the big round bed beside him. The ceiling fan hummed, the only sound other than that of the Roman shades swaying gently in the breeze. If there had been an intruder, the security guards would have heard, and the dogs would be barking their brains out.

At forty-six years of age, Antoine had become a light sleeper; the slightest disturbance aroused him. But that was all right, since he would take a catch-up nap tomorrow. Besides, he loved the night from the balcony. It gave him a chance to reflect on his fortunes. And if he was still alert he would open a good book. Antoine was an avid reader of mystery novels, particularly women writers, both the classics-Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers-and American contemporaries. He liked how women treated crime with such delicate sensibilities, driven by a greater urgency for order than male writers.

Antoine padded through the French doors onto the veranda off the master bedroom-a balustrade marble structure that overhung the northern peak of the island. His villa-named La Dolce Vita after the movie-was a palatial structure nestled high on a hilltop with a three-quarter view of the sea. The daytime vista was particularly splendid: voluptuous green slopes sweeping down to turquoise water edged by a white sand beach to the left and the small protected harbor to the right where night lights illuminated the flanks of Reef Madness. It was a view that could make the hardest man ache.

His watch said 3:12. On a chaise lounge he stretched out under an outrageously starry sky. As usual the midnight air was comfortably cool and laced with spices and apricot perfume. He poured himself some brandy and let the sweet miasma fill his head.

He knew the realities. Once Veratox was synthesized, Darby would have no need for his apricots. But he also knew that the synthesis was very difficult and could take years. Meanwhile, Antoine had Darby Pharms over the barrel, as the Americans liked to say. It had cost Quentin a finger, but he paid up. That was the nice part of being on top. You got others to do the enforcement. Not that Antoine had lost his stomach for it. He had killed eighteen people in his day, most when he was an upstart. He had even taken pleasure in killing. But he was in his middle years now and could afford others to do that, leaving him more time for more genteel pleasures. Life was good.

Out at sea a freighter blinked along the horizon. A few shooting stars streaked across the Pleides in the constellation of Taurus, which was unusual for this time of year. A portent, he thought. As he stared at the heavens, he thought about Lisa asleep inside, about waking her and making love. She had a goddesslike body which was a source of great physical pleasure for him-the key reason he had spared her life. After discovering her infidelity with Marcel, he had hired a homosexual guard who did not let her out of sight. She had begged Antoine to forgive and forget what had happened. He agreed to half her request. The day would come when she would get fat and he would tire of her-and retribution would need be redressed. But, now, things were in place. The center held.

At about 30 degrees northeast he could just make out Kingston airport. A few degrees further east the freighter's lights rippled in the air. Behind it, flashes of heat lightning. There would be rain tomorrow, but it would be short, then the sun would come out and dry things up-a pattern of nourishment and splendor, the natural rhythms of paradise. And he was part of them. In fact, he owned some of them.

He closed his eyes and thought about how rich life was. He thought how wonderful it would be to freeze his life at such moments to live them out forever. A pity man could not stop the clock. With all his millions, he was just as mortal as a pauper.

Antoine's eyes snapped open.

A strange sound. Beyond the crash of the waves against the shore. Beyond the chirping of tree frogs. Beyond the whispers of the Antilles trade winds through the bougainvillea. For a moment he thought it was the brandy playing tricks on him.

Engines. But not a security vehicle. Nor a boat. A persistent rumbling drone. From inside he returned with a powerful pair of binoculars. The sound grew louder.

No freighter. Too many lights and getting larger. Antoine felt his heart kick up. Airplanes were heading directly toward the island from the northeast. But no flights were scheduled tonight. And no planes ever approached from that direction. Nor so low. They couldn't be flying more than a hundred feet above the water. And so many. There must have been half a dozen in tight formation bearing down on Apricot Cay. Small planes, and moving fast.

Somewhere the dogs began barking. Then guards were shouting. The security phone rang inside, but before he could get it, eight jet planes rocketed up from the water's surface about a mile off shore and fanned out over the island.

Suddenly there was a volley of explosions that shook the villa and lit up the heavens. The planes were bombing his island with napalm. In a matter of minutes the forests were ablaze with jellied fire and filling the sky with thick black smoke.

He could barely hear Lisa scream for the noise. Security alarms wailed and guards fired automatic weapons helplessly as bombs continued to rain across the island, filling the night with choking fumes from incendiaries and burning orchards of apricots and marijuana.

To the south two direct hits destroyed the marina and the processing plant as drums of ether sent flaming mushrooms into the sky. Another sweep took out the airstrip where three of his own planes were blown to shrapnel. When a bomb hit the road behind the villa, Antoine dashed inside. Lisa was on the floor crying hysterically, but no rockets had hit them. Antoine Ducharme's death was not the object of the raid. Just his operation-to destroy it now and forever.

It took less than thirty minutes for eight F-14 fighters to set ablaze half the island and every processing building and storage shed, including, Antoine would later learn, a small barge containing a load of apricot pits destined to leave tomorrow for Boston Harbor. And what the napalm didn't kill, a solitary B-52 bomber did in three passes over the southern slopes, spewing Agent Orange.

When it was all over one fighter jet peeled off from formation and sent two rockets into Reef Madness.

Crouched behind a window, Antoine Ducharme watched the boat explode. As his rainforests raged with fire, all Antoine Ducharme could think was that this was not supposed to happen. That his man had a friend in the White House. That his man's father-in-law was "bosom buddies" with Ronald Reagan.

That weasely little bastard, Quentin Cross. He would pay for this with all he had.

6

Ronald Reagan sat in his bathrobe in the private quarters of the west wing breakfasting on scrambled eggs and stewed apricots when his secretary called to say that Ross Darby was on the line with an urgent call. It was 6:55 A.M.

The President punched the lighted button. "I've got a seven-thirty meeting with Cap Weinberger, what's your excuse?"

"Sorry to call at this hour, Mr. President, but I have something of a problem."

Even though they had known each other for nearly half a century, Ross Darby just could not address his old pal by first name, because this was official business.

"I just got a call from an associate that U.S. naval jets bombed Apricot Cay in the Caribbean. I'm sure you're aware of that fact since you no doubt gave the orders."

There was a long pause as Darby waited for the president's response. Then Reagan cleared his throat and said, "Well, you put me in kind of a funny position, Ross. Frankly, these are matters of national security."

"National security?"

"Yes. What's the problem?"

"Mr. President, I don't know if you were aware that Apricot Cay was the sole habitat of the very species of apricot which our new cancer drug comes from. We just got FDA approval the other day, as you well know."

"The same island?"

"Yes, and from what I understand the entire crop and orchards have been incinerated. They were napalmed, every last tree, and it appears they finished off the place with some kind of defoliant."

More gaping silence as the president measured his words. "And you're calling to ask why."

"Ron, I invested millions in that island and staked the future of the company on that harvest, not to mention that we had a cure for many cancers in those trees."

"Hell, I'm sorry, Ross," Reagan's voice was low and scratchy. "But why in God's name did you pick the same island?"

"Same as what?"

"Ross, it's seven in the morning and I've got a long day ahead of me, so let's please stop playing games."

"I don't know what you are driving at."

"That Apricot Cay was trafficking ten to twenty billion dollars of cocaine and marijuana each year, and all of it heading for the American streets."

"What?"

"Ross, they had shipments moving in and out of there every day, by land and air, like it was New York Harbor. What I want to know is how you could have risked investing in such a place, especially given our anti-drug campaign. I don't know how to say it without saying it, but frankly I feel personally betrayed, as will Nancy."

"Ron, I didn't know."

"How in hell could you not know, for God's sake? You must have visited the place before you invested. You did, didn't you?"

"No."

"Well, whoever set up the deal for you must have known. They had to. Intelligence says the place was a fortress."

Darby listened in numbed silence as the president continued. Before he hung up, Reagan said, "Ross, I'm going to forget this call ever took place."

"Thank you, Mr. President," Ross said, and hung up.

For a long moment, Ross stared out the window into the gray light. He was shaking as if there were a brick of ice at the core of his body. Eighteen years ago he was Associate Professor of Pharmacology at Middlesex State University, and Darby Pharmaceuticals was a makeshift lab in his basement where he developed new compounds, selling the patents to companies such as Pfizer and Merck. Over the years he had turned Darby Pharms into a $70 million business because of his knack for developing pharmaceuticals with prestige, profit, and universal application, such as synthetic estrogenic hormones, cholesterol lowering drugs, and-Veratox. Yet he suddenly saw himself as a foolish old man everybody goes about humoring but never letting on with the truth that the sky is beginning to fall.

Quentin sat across from him studying the carpet, his eye twitching uncontrollably. Sometime around 4:30 that morning he had telephoned Ross with the news of the bombing. When pressed to explain the military's action, Quentin had no answer. That was when Ross dialed the White House.

"He said that the island was the major drug distribution center of the western hemisphere. Did you know that?"

Quentin could not raise his eyes to his. "You think I'd do business with a drug lord?"

"That's what the hell I'm asking you."

"I was there to buy apricots, period. I had no idea he was dealing in dope. None whatsoever."

Darby nodded, thinking what a miserable goddamn liar his son-in-law was. "We're ruined, I hope you know."

Quentin studied his cuticles without a word. Then he got up and walked to the window."

It was late November, and most of the trees had lost their leaves. A fine rain fell and glazed his gray Mercedes coupe in the executive lot. Quentin could just make out the Nantucket sticker on the windshield. Last month workmen had finished constructing their summer home on an oceanside bluff in Siasconset-a big sprawling place, called NewDawn, that put him in enormous debt in anticipation of taking over the pharmaceutical company with a patent for the world's first cancer cure.

"I didn't know."

"Turn around!" Darby's voice was like a gunshot.

Quentin turned.

"Look me in the eyes and say that again."

"I-I…," he trailed off, stuck on Darby's stare.

"Just what I thought," Ross said. He took a deep breath and hissed through his teeth. "According to your records we're half a million dollars in the hole to your drug buddy. Half a million for all the charcoal we could ever ask for." He slammed down his coffee cup. "He said the son-of-a-bitoh was the Don Corleone of the Caribbean. He said he had a fortress down there with his own army, a fleet of planes, processing plants, and shipping docks. And you didn't know. The goddamn DEA's been watching him for a year from spy satellites three hundred miles up, and you couldn't tell from ground level. What the hell do you take me for?"

Quentin looked away. The real figure was $2.5 million, but Ross would never know. He would also not ask him to resign because there was nobody else in line. Besides, how would Ross explain that to Margaret and the kids?

"Not to mention another $2.8 million trying to synthesize the stuff for the last two years. That's another dead end. You've ruined us, Quentin, and you made me look like a blue-ribbon ass to the president of United States. It's probably out of pity I'm not facing federal prosecution.

"But I suppose there's a silver lining in everything: I can spend my retirement in financial ruin instead of financial ruin and federal prison." Darby flopped into his chair and closed his eyes and rubbed his temples.

A hush fell on the room, all but for the pattering of the rain against the windows.

"Maybe not," Quentin said.

Darby looked up. "'Maybe not' what?"

While Ross glowered at him, Quentin picked up the phone and punched seven numbers.

Chris was in a deep sleep when the phone rang. He caught it, but not before Wendy woke up. It was Quentin Cross. His message was terse: Meet him and Ross in the office at eight-thirty.

"It's Saturday, for God's sake." She craned her neck to see the clock. It was a little after seven. "What did he say?"

"Just that it was urgent." He got up to get dressed. "Probably another hare-brained scheme to synthesize the toxogen."

"You don't believe that. They never call on Saturdays." His face had that fistlike tightness it got when something was bothering him. "Honey, what's going on?"

She could see that he didn't want to upset her, but it was time to fess up. "I think they're firing me."

"Firing you for what?"

"For not getting a better yield."

"That's ridiculous. They can't fire you if it can't be done."

"I didn't say it can't be done. It's just that I can't do it. So they'll find somebody who can."

"They can't do that," Wendy said. Tears sprung to her eyes. Chris was a decent man and brilliant scientist whose entire professional life had been dedicated to benefiting the human race. For two years he had labored tirelessly to synthesize the stuff. If they were terminating him, it was grossly unjust.

"It's their company. They can do what they want."

"Can't you fight them? Get a lawyer?"

"It's not against the law to get rid of somebody who's not doing his job."

"But you've been doing your job. It's not your fault you can't get the goddamn stuff to yield. Is there anybody you can call? Somebody who knows new techniques?"

"I've tried them all. If it can be done, it's beyond me." He got his clothes together.

"You're the best they've got."

"Maybe that's the problem." Chris wiped the tears from her face and kissed her. Then he took his insulin shot, got dressed, and left.

Darby Pharms was located in a small complex of buildings fashioned in a red brick Tudor motif. The original building was once a private residence that had since been expanded over the years as the company grew to sixty employees, creating a series of buildings handsomely landscaped to look like a small English village.

At 8:20 Chris pulled into his slot. In the Executive area sat two cars: Ross Darby's big black Mercedes sedan and Quentin's gray 450 SL Coupe. The colors of power and wannabe power.

Chris went inside. The interior was eerily quiet, as if holding its breath. He could sense the tension from the foyer. He cut through the maze of offices. Quentin was at the door of Ross's office suite holding a coffee mug. He was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and looked as if he'd been up all night.

"Have a seat," Darby said as Chris entered. He was also casually dressed-a blue shirt and black V-neck sweater. His face looked ashen and haggard. From their grim appearances, Chris was certain that this was his dismissal.

Quentin began. "Chris, we called you in because, quite frankly, we have something of a problem with your work here. You have been with us for fifteen years, and in those fifteen years we counted on you-"

Chris cut him off. "Quentin, if you're firing me, please just say it and save us a lot of trouble."

Quentin's face filled with blood. "I don't like your attitude."

"And I don't like you calling me at seven o'clock on Saturday morning without explanation."

"It's about your mice," Quentin said.

"We've been through this already."

"I want Ross to hear."

Ross got up. It took him a moment to straighten up. He walked to the coffee machine, stretched a kink out of his lower lumbar, then poured himself another cup. In spite of chronic back problems, he looked good for a man over seventy. He was tall and still quite trim, and his face usually radiated with a rich, healthy luster-the product of regular games of tennis. It was easy to imagine the dashing young quarterback from Eureka. Today Ross Darby looked his age. They had probably been up for hours mulling over the terms of dismissal.

"Chris, I want to apologize for all the mystery, but I preferred to talk with you in person. Quentin told me what you said, but I'd like to hear it firsthand if you don't mind."

Chris liked Darby because he was classy at managing people. He always treated you with respect and patience, and never had to raise his voice. He made you feel that when you talked there was nothing else in the universe he wanted more to do than to listen. Unlike Quentin, he was never petty; if something bothered him, he never let on unless it was important. "As I explained, I tried to save us time by testing toxicity."

"We moved beyond animal testing over a year ago."

"I didn't want to see the animals die."

"So, for two years you played mouse doctor at our expense," Quentin said.

It was just like him to jawbone Chris about costs to impress Ross before announcing he was canned. When little men cast long shadows, you knew the sun was setting. "Yeah," Chris said.

"That's horseshit."

"Quentin, get on with it," Darby said.

Quentin removed a packet of papers and handed it to Chris. "Look familiar?"

"An inventory of some sort?" Chris said.

"That's right, and you know of what?"

Darby cut in again. "Quentin, this isn't Perry Mason."

"It's an inventory of requisitions from your lab," Quentin continued. "And maybe you can explain a few items."

"Like what?"

"Like how over a five-year period from 1980 you placed orders for 582 exotic mutant mice at $170 each-five times the next most expensive mouse, I should add-for a grand total of $98,940. I called Jackson Labs and they told me that mus musculatus sextonis stock number JR 004134 is an albino mutant Amazonian agouti-whatever the hell that is-with a lifespan of eleven months. What we'd like to know is what the hell you were doing with $100,000 worth of short-lived mutant mice."

"I was doing life-cycle studies."

"Really? For nearly one fiftieth the price you could have gotten mice with twice the life span. What the hell was the rush?"

"You're the one who insisted we couldn't depend on raw stock and needed to find a synthesis."

"Uh-huh. Then what about these chemical orders? You purchased organics that have nothing to do with apricots or any other interests of this lab. Like on September 23 five years ago, eighteen liters of acetonitrile."

"It's a solvent for extracting the toxogen out of the apricot pits."

"Is that right? Well, my chemistry's a little rusty, so I checked. And everybody and his brother said that the solvent of choice is ethanol, not acetonitrile-which, as you well know, is used in organic procedures." He adjusted his glasses, feeling very clever. "Then in December '84, seventy-five grams of L-N5 iminoethyl ornithine, and three months later a total of twenty liters of hexamethylphosphamide. And before you try and fudge up another answer, I checked and, lo and behold, nobody has a fucking clue why you'd need such fancy organics. In fact, HMPA is a goddamn carcinogenic which, by the way, cost us two thousand dollars." He slapped down the inventory. "In fact, you've been ordering some rather strange materials ever since we sent you to Papua New Guinea back in 1980. You want to tell us just what the hell you've been doing in this lab for the last seven years while nobody was looking?"

They both stared at him for an explanation.

After a long moment, Chris said, "Nothing that matters." He got up to leave.

But Quentin continued. "Then what about that conference on neurology and gerontology at Yale last November? Two days you were supposedly taking as sick days?"

"You've been spying on me. I don't believe it."

"Believe it," Quentin said. "And believe it that misuse of company property and the misappropriation of funds is a criminal offense tantamount to stealing."

Chris moved to the door.

"Well, maybe this will tell me." Quentin was holding a black, bound ledger containing Chris's notes on the tabukari elixir and its effect on his animals all the way back to 1980. He had broken into locked files in Chris's office.

"And before you declare it's personal property, let me remind you of your contract which reads: 'All research material including equipment, animals, procedures, patents, inventions, discoveries, and notes are private property of Darby Pharmaceuticals.' Do I make myself clear?"

A photocopy of Chris's notes sat in front of Ross, who stared at Chris silently and without expression.

"And by the way," Quentin continued, his face all aglow, "that mouse that died horribly a few weeks ago? Well, I checked the files and found he was purchased over six years ago-I repeat, six years ago. Now, I don't know much about mice, but that struck me as unlikely, so I called Jackson and they confirmed that the original order of twenty such mice was placed in 1980. When I told them it was the same mouse, they said that was outright impossible because its life span was eleven months. There had to be some mistake because no mouse under the sun-no matter what breed or hybrid-lives six friggin' years."

They stared at him for an answer. "So what do you want?"

"What we want is for you to sit down and tell us all about your tabukari elixir."

7

"Am I being fired or not?"

They had read everything in his log. The entire medical history of his mice was in those notes, including Methuselah's-six years of secret employment at Darby. If they wanted to, he could be out the door and facing charges of grand larceny.

"Fired?" Ross Darby stood up and came around his desk. "If you've developed something that's multiplied the lifespan of mice, I want to know what it could do for humans. And I want you to find out. In fact, I'd like you to work on it full time."

Christ! The genie was out of the lamp, and they wanted him to dance with it. "What about Veratox?"

"It's quite clear the synthesis won't work, and we've spent more than enough money to find out. We appreciate your efforts, but these things happen."

"We still have another shipment of raw stock coming, no?"

"I need not get into it, but we don't." Ross was being evasive.

That explained the stoical attitude. Veratox was a bust, and Chris's elixir had fallen into their laps to make up the losses.

"So," Ross sang out, "what can it do for humans?"

Chris glanced at Quentin, who sat back waiting for him to spill. If he resisted or protested, they could still fire him, retaining his notes and the contents of his lab. Which would mean his genie would be dancing with someone else. "I don't know."

"Then how did you know about its longevity powers?"

"Rumors from New Guinea villagers."

"Such as?"

He measured his words. The exposure was too sudden. "That it can retard the aging process."

But Chris said nothing about Iwati. Neither did his name appear in the notes nor speculations about how the stuff might double or triple human lifespan or more. Only pharmacological and biological history of his mice-dosages, procedures, vital signs, blood and tissue chemistry, neurophysiology, and so forth.

"Well, I'm curious why all the secrecy," Darby said. "You worked on it since 1980 and never breathed a word."

"It didn't strike me as profitable research given the limitations."

"Not while you were here, that is," Quentin said.

"Pardon me?"

Quentin's face had a look of cagey cleverness he used to impress Darby. "I'm just wondering if you kept everything under wraps so you could perfect the stuff, then jump ship with the patent to start your own company."

"Quentin, I'm a biologist, not a crackerjack entrepreneur like yourself."

"I'm not interested in motives," Ross interjected. "You've developed a compound that's multiplied the lifespan of mice. That's one hell of a breakthrough. And that's what I'd like you to develop for us. Are you interested?"

To Chris, Ross Darby was the kind of businessman Ayn Rand would have swooned over. In less than twenty years he had taken his company out of his garage and into this multimillion-dollar complex. "Sure."

"You mentioned limitations."

"Accelerated senescence, rapid aging-what afflicted Methuselah."

"Then its elimination should be a prime objective," Ross said. "I have to admire you for pulling it off without notice. What bothers me is what that says about the quality of our bookkeeping." He glanced at Quentin. "I'd like to see these mice, if you don't mind."

Chris took them to the back lab and the cages of mice, each hooked up at the skull to supplies of tabulone.

"You've invested half a dozen years and increased the lifespan of mice by a factor of six, so you must see hope for the human race."

"Find the right chemicals," Chris said, "and there's no reason we can't extend our warranties without limit-like these guys."

Ross studied the mice as if he were glimpsing magical creatures. "An appealing prospect, especially when you're my age."

"We've got a huge baby boomer generation out there eating their oat bran and jogging their asses off," Quentin piped in. "We're talking about a billion-dollar molecule." His face glowed red at the prospect.

"What's the composition?" Ross asked.

Chris opened his log notes to a ring diagram he had drawn.

Ross studied it. "A steroidal structure, except the C and D rings are reversed. I've not seen anything like it before."

"I doubt anybody has," Chris said. What made the compound unique was the spiral ring system-two rings coming off a common carbon atom, something not found in steroidal structures.

"What's the plant?"

"A vine with small orchidlike flowers. I'm told it grows nowhere else in the world."

"That's what they said about the apricots," Ross muttered. He studied the diagram.

"Where did you get the elucidation and synthesis done?" Ross was concerned that outside labs could compromise Darby's exclusive patent on the compound, especially if the molecular profile got out. But Chris had anticipated all that. Without revealing its potentials, he had gotten analyses done at MIT, Northeastern University, and private labs without incurring interest. In his favor was the fact that nobody did steroid research anymore.

Darby stared at the clear liquid in the feeder tubes. "You've discovered a molecule that puts the cellular clock for mice on slow-mo. If you make it work for human beings, you'll have the fountain of youth."

"The operative word is if. Disconnect those tubes, and they'll age to death before your eyes."

Ross eyed a mouse in the nearest cage, its skull sporting electrodes like a tiny diver's helmet. "How old is this one?"

"Chronologically, sixty-two months. Biologically, I haven't got a clue. Like most animals, mice don't age in any noticeable way. They just get bigger. And smarter. Their cognitive powers have measurably heightened."

And in his mind Chris saw his father in two different shoes, tearing up as he struggled to find the right word… to recall his son's name. To block the fog that was slowly closing in.

"What do you think triggers this accelerated senescense?"

"I don't know, but my gut feeling is that it's in the molecule itself. It's huge, which means the problem might be in the binding sites. Maybe something in the compound attaches to neuroreceptors and blocks the natural process of aging, and once it's withdrawn the conditions causing senescence are heightened. Or maybe it works directly on the DNA sequence."

"Any rumors of people rapidly aging in New Guinea?"

"None I know of."

The intensity on Ross's face said he was becoming convinced of grand possibilities. "The first step will be to get a patent on it. That's essential."

Because secrecy was essential they would have to apply for a "composition of matter" patent rather than a "use" patent to avoid stipulating the compound's application as an anti-aging drug. Chris knew that the senescence effects would never pass FDA.

"What will it take to do the job?" Ross asked.

Chris was ready for him, and he ticked off the contents of his fantasy lab: High-speed computers with elaborate imaging software, nuclear magnetic resonance equipment, mass spectrometers, and so on. Ross snapped his fingers for Quentin to take it all down.

"Also, geneticists, pharmacists, physical chemists with pharmacology backgrounds. I can give you names. And test animals, especially rhesus monkeys-very old ones and virus-free."

When he finished, Quentin looked at the list he had taken down. "You're talking major capital investment."

"And it may not be successful," Chris added.

"But I think you're on to something extraordinary," Ross said. "So we'll do whatever it takes. I want you to put together the best team and lab that money can buy."

Chris nodded, amused how in less than two hours he had passed from company crook to messiah. "I'll do my best."

"And the sooner the better," Darby said. "I'm just a couple years this side of my own warranty. You get it to work on old monkeys, and I'm next in line."

"If this works," Quentin said, "you'll be more famous than God and twice as rich."

Chris smiled. Fame and personal wealth were the least of his interests. He was by nature a private person and making enough of a salary to afford his and Wendy's needs. Yes, it would be nice to have a few extra thousand, what with a child on the way and Wendy's decision to take an extended maternity leave from teaching. But sudden wealth would only add an unnecessary edge of anxiety, like what put those Rocky Raccoon rings around Quentin's eyes. Maybe it was no longer fashionable, but he was a scientist motivated solely by intellectual challenges, not financial ones. Even if he could afford otherwise, he preferred L. L. Bean to Armani, a Jeep to a Mercedes, and vacations at Wendy's family lodge in the Adirondacks to chateaux on the Riviera.

Ross had one more question before they left. "Does anybody else know about this? Colleagues or friends?"

"Just my wife."

"Good," Darby said, "and let's keep it that way because if word leaks that we're putting our resources into an anti-aging drug, the media will be on us like vultures and competitors will be scrambling to learn what we've got. Think of this as our own Manhattan Project."

Later, while driving home, Darby's words buzzed in Chris's head. It wasn't the demand for secrecy that bothered him-he was used to that. It was recollection of the first words of Robert Oppenheimer moments after the original Manhattan Project made a ten-mile-high column of radioactive smoke over Almagordo: "I have become Death."