Forever Peace

"Not here." She laughed. "My place. And we can file for a two-bedroom."

I cleared off a chair and steered her to it. She sat down warily.

"Look. You know how much I'd like to move in with you. It's not as if we hadn't talked about it."

"So? Let's do it."

"No ... let's not make any decisions now. Not for a couple of days."

She looked past me, out the window over the sink. "I, you think I'm crazy."

"Impulsive." I sat down on the floor and stroked her arm.

"It is strange for me, isn't it?" She closed her eyes and kneaded her forehead. "Maybe I'm still medicated."

I hoped that was it. "I'm sure that's all it is. You need a couple of days' more rest."

"What if they botched the operation?"

"They didn't. You wouldn't be walking and talking."

She patted my hand, still looking abstracted. "Yeah, sure. You have some juice or something?"

I found some white grape juice in the refrigerator and poured us each a small glass. I heard a zipper and turned around, but it was only her leather suitcase.

I brought her drink over. She was staring intently, slowly picking through the contents of the suitcase. "Think something might be missing?"

She took the drink and set it down. "Oh, no. Or maybe. Mainly I'm just checking my memory. I do remember packing. The trip down. Talking to Dr., um, Spencer." She backed up two steps, felt behind her, and sat down slowly on the bed.

"Then the blur-you know, I was sort of awake when they operated. I could see lots of lights. My chin and face were in a padded frame."

I sat down with her. "I remember that from my own installation. And the drill sound."

"And the smell. You know you're smelling your own skull being sawed open. But you don't care."

"Drugs," I said.

"That's part of it. Also looking forward to it." Well, not in my case. "I could hear them talking, the doctor and some woman."

"What about?"

"It was Spanish. They were talking about her boyfriend and ... shoes or something. Then everything went black. I guess it went white, then black."

"I wonder if that was before or after they put the jack in."

"It was after, definitely after. They call it a bridge, right?"

"From French, yeah: pont mental."

"I heard him say that – ahora, el puente – and then they pressed really hard. I could feel it on my chin, on the cushion."

"You remember a lot more than I did."

"That was about it, though. The boyfriend and the shoes and then click. The next thing I knew, I was lying in bed, unable to move or speak."

"That must have been terrifying."

She frowned, remembering. "Not really. It was like an enormous ... lassitude, numbness. As if I could move my arms and legs, or speak, if I really had to. But the effort would have been tremendous. That was probably mood drugs, too, to keep me from panicking.

"They kept moving my arms and legs around and shouting nonsense at me. It was probably English, and I just couldn't decipher their accents, in my condition."

She gestured and I handed her the grape juice. She sipped. "If I remember this right... I was really, really annoyed that they wouldn't just go away and let me lie in peace. But I didn't say anything, because I wouldn't give them the satisfaction of hearing me complain. It's an odd thing to remember. I was really being infantile."

"They didn't try the jack?"

She got a faraway look. "No ... Dr. Spencer told me about that later. In my condition it was better to wait and have the first time be with someone I knew. Seconds count, he explained that to you?"

I nodded. "Exponential increase in the number of neural connections."

"So I lay in a darkened room then, for a long time; lost track of time, I suppose. Then all the things that happened before we... we jacked, I thought it was a dream. Everything was suddenly flooded with light and a couple of people lifted me and bit me on the wrists – the IVs-and then we were floating from room to room."

"Riding a gurney."

She nodded. "It really felt like levitation, though-I remember thinking, 'I'm dreaming,' and resolving to enjoy it. An image of Marty floated by, asleep in a chair, and I accepted that as part of the dream. Then you and Dr. Spencer appeared-okay, you were in the dream, too.

"Then it was all suddenly real." She rocked back and forth, remembering the instant we jacked. "No, not real. Intense. Confusing."

"I remember," I said. "The double vision, seeing yourself. You didn't recognize yourself at first."

"And you told me most people don't. I mean you told me in one word, somehow, or no words. Then it all snapped into focus, and we were ..." She nodded rhythmically, biting her lower lip. "We were all the same. We were one ... thing."

She took my right hand in both of hers. "And then we had to talk to the doctor. And he said we couldn't, he wouldn't let us ..." She lifted my hand to her breast, the way it had been that last moment, and leaned forward. But she didn't kiss me. She put her chin on my shoulder and whispered, voice cracking: "We'll never have that again?"

I automatically tried to feed her a gestalt, the way you do jacked, about how she might be able to try again in a few years, about Marty having her data, about the partial re-establishment of neuron connection so we might try, we might try; and a fraction of a second later I realized no, we weren't connected; she can only hear something if I say it.

"Most people never even have it once."

"Maybe they're better off," she said, muffled, and sobbed quietly. Her hand moved up to squeeze my neck and caress the jack.

I had to say something. "Look... it's possible you haven't lost it all. There might be a small fraction of the ability still there."

"What do you mean?" I explained about some of the neurons homing back into the jack's receptor areas. "How much might be there?"

"I don't have the faintest idea. I'd never even heard of it until a couple of days ago." Though I knew with sudden certainty that some of the jills must be that way, unable to make a really deep connection. Ralph had brought back memories of some who had hardly seemed jacked at all.

"We have to try. Where could we ... could you bring the equipment back from Portobello?"

"No, I'd never get it off the base." And be court-martialed, if I tried.

"Hmm ... Maybe we could find a way to sneak into the hospital – "

I laughed. "You don't have to sneak anywhere. Just buy time at one of the jack joints."

"But I don't want that. I want to do it with you."

"That's what I mean! They have double unis-two-person universes. Two people jack in and go someplace together." That's where the jills took their customers. You can screw on the streets of Paris, floating in outer space, riding a canoe down rapids. Ralph had brought us back the weirdest memories.

"Let's go do it."

"Look, you're still beat from the hospital. Why not get a day or two rest and then – "

"No!" She stood up. "For all we know, the connections might be fading while we sit here and talk about it." She picked up the phone off the table and punched two numbers; she knew my cab code. "Outside?"

I got up and followed her to the door, afraid I'd made a big mistake. "Look, don't expect the world."

"Oh, I don't expect anything. Just have to try it, find out." For someone who didn't expect anything, she was awfully eager.

It was infectious. While we waited for the cab, I went from thinking Well, at least we'll find out one way or the other to being sure that there would be at least something there. Marty had said there would be a placebo effect, if nothing more.

I couldn't give the cab a specific address, since I'd only been there once. But I asked whether it knew where the block of jack joints was, just outside the university, and it said yes.

We could have biked there, but it was the neighborhood where that guy had pulled a knife on me – it had started pretty low and gone downhill-and I figured it might be dark by the time we finished our experiment.

It was a good thing the cab turned off the meter while we went through security. The shoe in charge saw our destination and jerked us around for ten minutes, I supposed to watch Amelia's discomfort. Or try to get some sort of rise out of me. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

We had the cab let us off on the near end of the block, so we could walk the length of it and check the menus in each joint. The price was important; payday was two days away for both of us. I made three times as much as she did, but the Mexican excursion had brought me down to less than a hundred bucks. And Amelia was flat.

There were more jills than pedestrians. Some of them offered to join us in a three-way. I hadn't known that was possible. It sounded more confusing than alluring, even under good conditions. And being more intimately linked to the jill than to Amelia would be a disaster.

The place with the best double uni deal was also one of the nicest, or the least sleazy. It was called Your World, and instead of car crashes and executions, it offered a menu of explorations-like the French tour I'd taken in Mexico, but more exotic.

I suggested the underwater tour of the Great Barrier Reef.

"I'm not a good swimmer," Amelia said. "Would that make a difference?"

"Me neither; don't worry. It's like being a fish." I'd done this one. "You don't even think about swimming."

It was a dollar a minute, cash, or two minutes for three dollars, plastic. Ten minutes up front. I paid cash; keep the plastic for emergencies.

A stern-looking fat lady, black with a springy forest of white hair, led us to the booth. It was a small cubicle just over a meter high, with a padded blue mat on the floor, two jack cables hanging from the low ceiling.

"Time start' when the first one plug in. You all want to take your clothes off first, I s'pose. Place been sterilized. You-all have a good time, now."

She turned abruptly and bustled away. "She thinks you're a jill," I said.

"I could use a second income." We entered the place on our hands and knees and when I shut the door the air conditioner started to whir. Then a white-noise generator added a steady hiss.

"Does the light make a difference?"

"It goes off automatically." We helped each other undress and she lay down the right way, on her stomach facing the door.

She was rigid and trembling slightly. "Relax," I said, kneading her shoulders.

"I'm afraid nothing will happen."

"If nothing happens, we'll try it again." I remembered what Marty had said-she really should start off with something like jumping off a cliff. Well, I could tell her that later.

"Here." I slid over a diamond-shaped pillow that supports your face on the chin, cheekbones, and forehead. "This'll help your neck relax." I stroked her back for a minute, and when she seemed looser, I moved the jack interface into place over the metal socket in her head. There was a faint click and the light went out.

Of course after thousands of hours, I didn't need the pillow; I could jack standing up or hanging upside down. I groped for the cable and stretched out so we were touching, arm and hip. Then I jacked in.

The water was warm as blood and it tasted good, salt and seaweed, on my lips, as I breathed it in. I was in less than two meters of water, bright coral formations all around, tiny fish with brilliant colors ignoring me until I came close enough to be a danger. A small green moray eel, face like a cartoon villain, stared at me from a hole in the coral.

Volition is strange when you're jacked like this. I "decided" to go off to the left, although there was nothing obvious there, just a plain of white sand. Actually, the person who had recorded the trip had a good reason to check it out, but the customer wasn't in contact with him or her at that level; nothing but the sensorium, amplified.

Sunlight refracting through the ripples on the surface made a pleasant shimmering pattern on the sand, but that wasn't why we had come here. I hovered over two eye-stalks that poked out of the sand, twitching, agitated. Suddenly the sand exploded underneath me, and to the left and right, and a tiger-striped manta ray flew out from where it had been hiding, under a few centimeters of sand. It was huge, easily three meters wide. I shot forward and grabbed a wing, before it had time to gather speed.

One powerful flap of the wings and we surged forward; another, and we were going faster than any merely human swimmer, the water churning smoothly down my body...

And hers. Amelia was there, definitely but faintly, like a shadow inside me. The turbulence from the fast water made my genitals flutter, but part of me didn't have that; for that part of me the water flowed smoothly tickling between her legs.

Intellectually, I knew that they'd had to merge two strings to create this, and wondered how hard it had been to find a large manta for both the man and the woman or how they'd gotten around it. But mainly I focused on that particular dual sensation and tried to make contact with Amelia through it.

I couldn't, quite. No words, no specificity; just a vague "isn't this thrilling" gestalt that I felt reflected with a different twist, Amelia's personality. There was also a faint different excitement that must have been her realization that we were in contact.

The sand surface fell away in an underwater cliff and the manta dived, the water suddenly cool and the pressure increasing. We lost our grip and went tumbling alone in the dark water.

As we slid slowly upward I felt little butterfly flutterings that I knew were Amelia's hands on me, back in the cubical, and as I became erect it was wetness that wasn't the imaginary ocean around me, and then the ghostly clasp of her legs and a faint pulsing up and down.

It wasn't like Carolyn, where I was her and she was me. It was more like a compelling sexual dream that possessed you while you were half awake.

The water above was like beaten silver, and three sharks scudded there as we floated up. There was a little shiver of fear, though I knew they were harmless, since the string wasn't rated D or I; death or injury. I tried to project to Amelia not to be scared, but I didn't feel any fear from her. She was preoccupied. Her physical presence grew stronger in me, and she wasn't exactly swimming.

Her orgasm was faint but long, radiating and pulsating in that strange-but-familiar way that I hadn't felt in the three years since I lost Carolyn. The ghosts of her arms and legs rocked me left and right as we rose up toward the sharks.

It was one large nurse shark and two dogfish, no danger. But as we passed them I felt myself go soft and slip out of her. It wasn't going to work, not this time, not for both of us.

Her hands on me were like feathers, coaxing, pleasant but not enough. There was a sudden faint loss of something, dimensionality, that meant she had come un-jacked, and then she was using her mouth, cool and then warm, but it still wouldn't work. Most of me was still in the reef.

I felt for the cable and unjacked myself. The lights went on and I immediately started to respond to Amelia's ministrations. I slipped my arms around her slipperiness and rested my head on her hip and didn't think about Carolyn, and worked a couple of fingers between her legs from behind, and in a minute we both came at once.

We were allowed about five seconds' rest, and then the lady was pounding on the cubicle door, saying we had to get out or pay rent; she had to clean it up for the next customers.

"The meter stops running when we both unjack, I guess," Amelia said. She nuzzled me. "I could pay a dollar a minute for this, though. You want to tell her that?"

"Nah." I reached for our clothes. "Let's go home and do it for free."

"Your place or mine?"

"Home," I said. "Your place."

JULIA AND AMELIA SPENT the next day moving and cleaning house. Since it was Sunday, they couldn't get any paperwork done, but they didn't expect any problems. There was a waiting list for singles who qualified for Julian's efficiency, and Amelia's place was rated for two, or even two adults and a child.

(A child was something that was never going to happen. Twenty-four years before, after a miscarriage, Amelia had opted for voluntary sterilization, which gave her a monthly cash-and-coupon bonus until age fifty. And Julian's view of the world was so sufficiently dark that he wasn't eager to bring a new person into it.)

When they had everything boxed, and Julian's apartment clean enough to satisfy the landlord, they called Reza for his car. He scolded Julian for not calling him earlier so he could have helped, and Julian said, honestly, that it hadn't occurred to him.

Amelia listened to the conversation with interest, and a week later would point out that there had been a good reason for them to do it alone, a kind of sacramental labor-or something even more elemental, nest-building. But what she said when Julian hung up was, "It'll take him ten minutes to get here," and hurried him to the couch, one last quick time in this place.

It only took two trips to move all the boxes. On the second trip Reza and Julian were alone, and when Reza offered to help unpack, Julian said well, you know, maybe Blaze wants to go to bed.

In fact, she did. They collapsed exhausted and slept until dawn.

ONCE OR TWICE a year, they don't bring the soldier-boys in between shifts; they just immobilize us one by one and have the mechanic's second move straight from barber chair to cage, a "hot transfer." It usually meant something interesting was going on, since we don't normally work the same AO as Scoville's hunter-killer platoon.

But Scoville had been grouchy because nothing had happened. They'd gone to three different ambush sites in nine days with nothing but bugs and birds showing up. It was obviously a make-work assignment, marking time.

He crawled out of the cage and it sealed shut for its ninety-second cleaning cycle. "Have fun," Scoville said. "Bring something to read."

"Oh, I think they'll come up with some little chore for us to do." He nodded morosely and hobbled away. They wouldn't do a hot transfer if there was a choice. So it was something important that the hunter-killers weren't supposed to know about.

The cage popped and I wiggled into it, quickly setting the muscle sensors and plugging in the orthotics and blood shunt. Then I closed the shell and jacked.

It was always disorienting for a moment, but a lot more so with a hot transfer, since being platoon leader, I went first, and was suddenly jacked with a bunch of relative strangers. I did know Scoville's platoon vaguely, since I spent one day a month lightly jacked with him. But I didn't know all the intimate details of their lives, and really didn't care to know. I was plopped in the middle of this convoluted soap opera, an interloper who suddenly knew all the family secrets.

Two by two, they were replaced by my own men and women. I tried to concentrate on the problem at hand, which was to keep guard on the pairs of soldierboys as they spent their couple of minutes of immobile vulnerability, which was easy. I also tried to open a vertical link to the company commander and find out what was really going on. What were we going to do that was so secret Scoville was kept in the dark?

There was no answer until all of my people were in place. Then it came in a gestalt trickle while I automatically scanned the morning jungle for signs of trouble: there was a spy in Scoville's platoon. Not a willing spy, but somebody whose jack was tapped, real time.

It might even have been Scoville himself, so he couldn't be told. Brigade had set up an elaborate manipulation, where each member of the platoon was misinformed as to the location of their ambush. When an enemy force showed up in the middle of nowhere, they'd know which one was the leak.

I had a lot more questions than the company commander had answers. How could they control all the feedback states? If nine of the people thought they were at point A and one thought they were at point B, wouldn't there be conspicuous confusion? How could the enemy tap a jack in the first place? What was going to happen to the mechanic who was affected?

That last one, she could answer. They would examine him and take out his jack, and he would serve out the rest of his term as a tech or a shoe, depending. Depending on whether he could count to twenty without taking off his shoes and socks, I supposed. Army neurosurgeons made a lot less than Dr. Spencer.

I cut off the thread to the commander, which didn't mean she couldn't eavesdrop on me if she wanted to. There were some large implications here, and you didn't need a degree in cybercomm to see them. All of Scoville's platoon had spent the last nine days in an elaborate and tightly maintained virtual-reality fiction. Everything each one saw and felt was monitored by Command, and fed back instantly in an altered state. That state included nine other tailor-made fictions for the rest of the platoon. A total of a hundred discrete fictions, constantly created and maintained nonstop.

The jungle around me was no more or less real than the coral reef I'd visited with Amelia. What if it bore no relation to where my soldierboy actually was?

Every mechanic has entertained the fantasy that there is no war at all; that the whole thing is a cybernetic construction that the governments maintain for reasons of their own. You can turn on the cube when you get home, and watch yourself in action, replaying the news-but that could be faked even more easily than the input-feedback state that connects soldierboy to mechanic. Had anybody actually been to Costa Rica, any mechanic? No one in the military could legally visit Ngumi territory.

Of course, that was nothing but a fantasy. The piles of shattered bodies in the control room had been real. They couldn't have faked the nuclear flattening of three cities.

It was just a place to retreat from your own responsibility for the carnage. I suddenly felt pretty good, and realized my blood chemistry was being adjusted. I tried to hold on to the thought: how could you, how could you justify ... well, they actually did ask for it. It was sad that so many Ngumi had to die for their leaders' lunacy. But that's not the thought; that's not the thought...

"Julian," the company commander thought down, "move your platoon northwest three kilometers for a pickup. As you approach the PZ, you want to home in on a twenty-four megahertz beeper."

I rogered. "Where we headed?"

"Town. We're going to join up with Fox and Charlie for a daytime thing. Details on the way."

We had ninety minutes to get to the pickup zone, and the jungle wasn't thick, so we just spread out in echelon, maintaining about twenty meters between each soldier-boy, and picked our way northwest.

My uneasiness faded in the mundane business of keeping everybody in line and moving. I realized that my train of thought had been interrupted, but wasn't sure whether it was anything important. No way to write a note to myself, I realized for about the hundredth time. And things sort of fade when you get out of the cage.

Karen saw something and I froze everybody. After a moment she said false alarm; just a howler monkey and its baby. "Out of the branches?" I asked, and got a nod back. I projected uneasiness to everybody, as if that were necessary, and had us split into two groups and move in file, two hundred meters apart. Very quietly.

"Animal behavior" is an interesting term. When an animal misbehaves, it's for a reason. Howler monkeys are more vulnerable on the ground.

Park sighted a sniper. "Got a pedro at ten o'clock, range a hundred ten meters, in a tree blind about ten meters up. Permission to fire."

"Not granted. Everyone stop and look around." Claude and Sara got the same one, but there weren't any others obvious.

I put all three images together. "She's asleep." I got the gender from Park's olfactory receptors. The IR pattern gave me almost nothing, but her breathing was regular and sonorous.

"Let's drop back about a hundred meters and circle around her." I got a confirm from the company commander and an angry "?" from Park.

I expected others-people don't just wander out into the woods and climb a tree; she was protecting something.

"Possible she knew we were coming?" Karen asked.

I paused ... Why else would she be here? "If so, she's pretty calm about it, to be able to sleep. No, it's a coincidence. She's guarding something. We don't have time to look for it, though."

"We have your coordinates," the commander said. "Flyboy coming in, in about two minutes. You want to be elsewhere."

I gave the platoon the order to move out fast. We didn't make too much noise, but enough: the sniper woke up and fired a burst at Lou, who was bringing up the rear on the left flank.

It was a pretty sophisticated anti-soldierboy weapon, explosive rounds with depleted-uranium punchers, probably. Two or three rounds hit Lou about waist-level and blew out his leg control. As he fell over backward, another one blew off his right arm.

He hit the ground with a jarring crash, and for a moment everything was still, the high leaves over him rustling in the morning breeze. Another round exploded into the ground next to his head, showering his eyes with dirt. He shook his head to clear them.

"Lou, we can't do a pickup. Get out of there except for eyes and ears."

"Thanks, Julian." Lou jacked out, and the warning-signal pains from his back and arm stopped. He was just a camera pointed at the sky.

We were most of a kilometer away when the flyboy screamed overhead. I linked to her through Command and got a strange double view: from above the forest canopy, a spreading blossom of napalm shot through with glittering streaking sparkles, hundreds of thousands of flechettes. On the ground, a sudden sheet of fire overhead that dripped down through the branches, loud splintering crackle as the flechettes tore through the forest. Sonic boom and then silence.

Then a man screaming and another one talking to him in low tones, and one shot that ended the screaming. A man ran by, close but out of sight, and threw a grenade at the soldierboy. It bounced off the chest and exploded harmlessly.

The napalm dripped and flames from the underbrush licked up toward it. Monkeys screamed at the fire. Lou's eyes flickered twice and went out. As we moved away from the inferno, two more flyboys came in low and dropped fire retardant. It was an ecological preserve, after all, and the napalm had done all we wanted it to.

As we approached the PZ, Command said they'd calculated a body count of four-our sniper and both of the men plus one for whoever else might have been there-and gave three of them to the flyboy and split one among us. Park didn't like that at all, since there wouldn't have been a sortie if he hadn't spotted the sniper, and she would've been an easy kill if I hadn't ordered otherwise. I advised him to hold that in; he was on the verge of a public tantrum that would leak up to command and force an Article 15-pro forma company-level punishment for petty insubordination.

As I shot that warning to him, I had to think how much easier it must be to be a shoe. You can hate your sergeant and smile at him at the same time.

The PZ was obvious without the radio beacon, the denuded dome of a hill that had been cleaned up recently with a controlled burn-and-blast.

As we picked our way up the muddy ashes of the hillside, two flyboys came in and hovered protectively. Not a normal fast snatch.

The cargo helicopter came in and landed, or at least hovered a foot off the ground while the rear door slammed down to form an unsteady ramp. We scrambled aboard to join twenty other soldierboys.

My opposite number in Fox platoon was Barboo Seaves; we'd worked together before. I had a double-weak link to her, through Command and through Rose, who had replaced Ralph as horizontal liaison. By way of greeting, Barboo projected a multisensory image of came asada, a meal we'd shared at the airport a few months ago.

"Anybody tell you anything?" I asked.

"I am but a mushroom." That military joke was old when my father heard it: They keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit.

The chopper was rising and tilting as soon as the last soldierboy dove in off the ramp. We all sort of crashed around, getting acquainted.

I didn't really know Charlie platoon's leader, David Grant. Half of his platoon had been replaced in the past year-two stroked out and the others "Temporarily reassigned for psychological adjustment." David had only been in command for two cycles. I hello'ed him, but at first he was busy with his platoon, trying to calm down a couple of neos who were afraid we were going into a kill situation.

With luck, we wouldn't be. When the door slammed shut I got an outline of the general order, which was basically a parade, or show of force, in an urban area that was due for a reminder that we See All, Know All. It was the el Norte section of Liberia, which, oddly enough, had both guerrilla activity and a high concentration of Anglos. They were a mixture of older Americans who had retired to Costa Rica and the children and grandchildren of earlier retirees. The pedros thought that the presence of a lot of gringos would protect them. We were supposed to demonstrate otherwise.

But if the enemy stayed out of sight, there wouldn't be any problems. Our orders were to use force "only reactively."

So we were to be both bait and hook. It didn't look like a good situation. The rebels in Guanacaste province had been faring badly and needed their own demonstration. I supposed Command had taken that into account.

We picked up some riot control accessories-extra gas grenades and a couple of tanglefoot projectors. They spray out a skein of sticky string that makes it impossible to walk; after ten minutes, it suddenly evaporates. We were also issued extra concussion grenades, though I'm not sure they're a good idea with civilians. Blow out somebody's eardrums and expect him to be grateful you didn't do worse? None of the riot control weapons are pleasant, but that's the only one that does permanent damage. Unless you're staggering around blinded by tear gas and get run over by a truck. Or breathe VA and choke on vomit.

We came in over the city at treetop level, lower than many of the buildings, helicopter and two flyboys in tight slow formation, loud as three banshees. I suppose that was good psychology, show we're not afraid and at the same time rattle their windows. But again I wondered whether we weren't set out as tempting bait. If somebody fired at us, I had no doubt the sky could be full of flyboys in a few seconds. The enemy must have figured that out, too.

Once on the ground and out of the chopper, the twenty-nine soldierboys could easily destroy the city themselves, without air support. Part of our show was going to be a "public service" demonstration: a block of tenements to be razed. We could save the city a lot of construction, or deconstruction, expense. Just walk in and pull things down.

We set down gently on the town square, flyboys hovering, and disembarked into a parade formation, ten by three, minus one. Only a scattering of people were there to watch us, which surprised no one. A few curious children and defiant teenagers and old people who live in the park. Only a few police; most of the force, it turned out, was waiting down by our demonstration area.

The buildings surrounding the square were late colonial architecture, graceful in the shadow of the glass-and-metal geometries that hovered over them. The blind reflective windows of those modern buildings could conceal a city full of watchers, maybe snipers. As we marched off in robotic lockstep I was more than ever aware of the fact that I was a safe puppeteer a couple of hundred miles away-if rifles did appear in each window and started firing, no actual people would be killed. Until we retaliated.

We broke step into a carefully random rolling gait as we crossed an old bridge, so as not to be embarrassed by shaking it apart and falling into the noisome trickle below, and then went back to the slam-slam-slam that was supposed to be so intimidating. I did see a dog run away. If any humans were being terrorized along our route, they were doing it indoors.

Past the postmodern anonymity of downtown, we went through a few blocks of a residential neighborhood, presumably upper-class dwellings, all hidden behind tall whitewashed walls. Watchdogs howled at our echoing steps, and in several places we were tracked by surveillance cameras.

Then we got into the barrios. I always felt a kind of referred sympathy for the people who lived in these circumstances, here and in Texas, so similar to the American black ghettos that I had avoided by accident of birth. I also knew that there were sometimes compensations, family and neighborhood bonds that I never experienced. But I could never be sentimental enough to consider that a reasonable trade-off for my longer life expectancy; higher life expectations.

I turned down my olfactory receptors a notch. Smell of standing sewage and urine starting to steam in the morning sun. There was also the good smell of corn baking, and good strong peppers, and somewhere a chicken roasting slowly, maybe a celebration. A chicken was not an everyday menu item here.

You could hear the crowd several blocks before we got to the demonstration site. We were met by two dozen mounted police-mounted on horses-who formed a protective V, or U, around us.

It made you wonder who was demonstrating what. Nobody pretended that the party in power represented the actual will of the people. It was a police state, and there was no question whose side we were on. I suppose it didn't hurt to reinforce that every now and then.

There must have been two thousand people milling around the demolition site. It was obvious we were moving into a pretty complicated political situation. There were signs and banners proclaiming actual people LIVE HERE and ROBOT PUPPETS OF RICH LANDOWNERS, and so forth-more signs in English than in Spanish, for the cameras. But there were a lot of Anglos in the crowd, too, retirees showing support for the locals. Anglos who were locals.

I asked Barboo and David to halt their platoons in place for a minute, and sent a query up to Command. "We're being used here, and it looks like a potentially bad situation."

"That's why you were issued all the extra riot gear," she said. "This crowd's been gathering since yesterday."

"But this isn't our job," I said. "It's like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly."

"There are reasons," she said, "and you have orders. Just be careful."

I relayed that to the others. "Be careful?" David said. "Of us hurting them or of them hurting us?"

"Just try not to step on anybody," Barboo said.

"I'd go further," I said. "Don't injure or kill anybody to save the machines."

Barboo agreed. "That's a corner the rebels may try to back us into. Stay in control of the situation."

Command was listening. "Don't be too conservative. This is a show of force."

It started out well. A young Ender who'd been standing on a box, haranguing, suddenly jumped off and ran over to stand in the way of our progress. One of the mounted police touched him on the bare back with a cattle prod, which knocked him down and threw him into a trembling seizure at David's feet. David stopped dead and the soldierboy behind him, distracted by something, ran into him with a crash. It would have been perfect if David had fallen over and crushed the helpless fanatic, but at least we were spared that. Some of the crowd laughed and jeered, not a bad response under the circumstances, and they spirited the unconscious man away.

That might protect him for a day, but I'm sure the police knew his name, address, and blood type.

"Straighten up the ranks and files," Barboo said. "Let's keep moving and get this over with."

The block we were supposed to demolish was identified with a girdle of orange spray paint. Hard to miss, anyhow, since a solid square of police and sawhorses kept the crowd a neat hundred meters away on all four sides.

We didn't want to use explosives more powerful than the two-inch grenades; with the rockets, for instance, individual fragments of brick could go a lot farther than a hundred meters, with the force of a bullet. But I queried for a calculation and got permission to use the grenades to weaken the buildings' foundations.

They were six-story concrete slab constructions with crumbling brick facades. Less than fifty years old, but the work had been done with inferior concrete-too much sand in the mixture-and one building had already collapsed, killing dozens.

So it didn't sound like a big deal to bring them down. Grenades to jar things loose at the foundation, then put a soldierboy at each corner to push and pull, putting torsion on the framework structure, and jump back as it falls-or don't jump back; demonstrate our invulnerability by standing there unaffected by the rain of concrete and steel.

The first one went perfectly-a textbook demonstration, if there were a textbook on bizarre demolition techniques. The crowd was very quiet.

The second building was recalcitrant; the front facade fell away, but the steel frame wouldn't twist enough to snap. So we used lasers to cut through a few exposed I-beams, and then it came down with a satisfying crash.

The next building was a disaster. It came down as easily as the first, but it rained children.

More than two hundred children had been squeezed into one room on the sixth floor, bound and gagged and drugged. It turned out that they were from a suburban private school. A guerrilla team had come in at eight in the morning, killed all the teachers, kidnapped all the children, and moved them into the condemned building in crates covered with UN markings, just an hour before we had gotten there.

None of the children survived falling sixty feet and being buried by rubble, of course. It was not the sort of political demonstration a rational mind might have conceived, since it demonstrated their brutality rather than ours-but it did speak directly to the mob, which collectively was no more rational.

When we saw all the children, of course we stopped everything and called for a massive medevac. We started clearing away rubble, numbly looking for survivors, and a local brigada de urgencia crew came in to help us.

Barboo and I organized our platoons into search parties, covering two thirds of the building's "footprint," and David's platoon should have done the other third, but the shock had them badly disorganized. Most of them had never seen anyone killed. The sight of all those children mangled, pulverized-concrete dust turning blood into mud and transforming the small bodies into anonymous white lumps-it unhinged them. Two of the soldierboys stood frozen, paralyzed because their mechanics had fainted. Most of the others were wandering aimlessly, ignoring David's orders, which were barely coherent, anyhow.

I was moving slowly, myself, stunned by the enormity of it. Dead soldiers on a battlefield are bad enough – one dead soldier is bad enough-but this was almost beyond belief. And the carnage had just started.

A big helicopter sounds aggressive no matter what its actual function is. When the medevac chopper came beating in, someone in the crowd started shooting at it. Just lead bullets that bounced off, we ascertained later, but the chopper's defenses automatically acquired the target, a man shooting from behind a billboard, and fried him.

It was a little too impressive, a large spalling laser that made him explode like a dropped ripe fruit. The cry "Murderers! Murderers!" began, and in less than a minute the crowd broke through the police lines and attacked us.

Barboo and I had our people move quickly around the perimeter, spraying tanglefoot, curling threads of neon that quickly expanded to finger thickness, then to ropes. It was effective at first, sticky as Superglue. It immobilized the front couple of ranks of people, bringing them to their knees or flattening them. But that didn't stop the ones behind them, who eagerly crowded over their comrades' backs to get to us.

In seconds the mistake was apparent, as hundreds of them, immobilized, were crushed under the weight of the screaming mob that charged us. We popped VA and CS gas everywhere, but it barely slowed them down. More fell and were trampled.

A Molotov cocktail exploded on one of Barboo's platoon, turning him into a flaming symbol of staggering helplessness-in reality, he was just blinded for a moment-and then weapons came out all over, machine guns chattering, two lasers lancing through the dust and smoke. I watched a row of men and women fall in unison, swept down by a misaimed spray of their own machine gun fire, and relayed the order from Command, "Shoot anyone with a weapon!"

The lasers were easy to spot, and went down first, but people would pick them up again and keep firing. The first man I ever killed, a boy actually, had scooped up the laser and was firing offhand, standing up. I aimed for his knees, but then somebody knocked him down from behind. The bullet struck the center of his chest and blew his heart out his back. On top of everything else, that pushed me over the edge, into paralysis.

Park went over the edge, too; the other edge, berserk. A man got to him with a knife, and tried to climb up and poke out his eyes, as if that were possible. Park grabbed an ankle and swung the man like a doll, spattering his brains on a concrete slab, and tossed his twitching body into the mob. Then he waded into the crowd like an insane mechanical monster, kicking and punching people to death. That snapped me out of my shock. When he wouldn't respond to shouted orders, I asked Command to deactivate him. He killed more than a dozen before they complied, and his suddenly inert soldierboy went down under a pile of enraged people, pounding it with rocks.

It was a truly Dantean scene, bloody crushed bodies everywhere, thousands of people staggering or crouching, blinded, gagging and spewing as the gas swirled around them. Part of me, vertiginous with horror, wanted to leave the place by fainting, let the crowd have this machine. But my crew was in bad shape, too; I couldn't desert them.

The tanglefoot suddenly dissipated in a cloud of colored smoke, but it didn't make any difference. Everyone who had been immobilized by it was lying dead or crippled.

Command told us to clear out; go back to the square as quickly as possible. We could have done an extraction right there, while the crowd was subdued, but didn't want to take the chance of more helicopters and flyboys setting them off again. So we picked up four immobilized soldierboys and rushed off in victory.

On the way, I told Command that I was going to file a recommendation that Park be given a psychological discharge, at the very least. Of course, she could read my actual feelings: "You really want him tried for murder, for war crimes. That isn't possible."

Well, I knew that, but said that I wouldn't have him as part of my platoon anymore, even if my refusal meant administrative punishment. The rest of the platoon had had enough of him, too. Whatever the idea had been that prompted them to insert him into our family, today's action proved it wrong.

Command said that every factor would be taken into consideration, including my own confused emotional state. I was ordered to go directly to Counseling when we jacked out. Confused? How are you supposed to feel, when you precipitate mass murder?

But the mass death, I could rationalize away the blame for that. We had tried everything our training had given us to minimize loss. But the single death, the one I shot myself-I couldn't stop reliving that moment. The boy's determined look as he pointed and fired, pointed and fired; my own aiming circle dropping from his head to his knees, and then just as I pulled the trigger, his annoyed frown at being jostled. His knees hit the pavement just as my bullet ripped his heart out, and for an instant he still had that annoyed expression. Then he pitched forward, dead before his face hit the ground.

Something in me died then, too. Even through the belated stabilizing soup of mood drugs. I knew there was only one way to get rid of the memory.

JULIAN WAS WRONG ON that score. One of the first things the counselor told him was "You know, it is possible to erase specific memories. We can make you forget killing that boy." Dr. Jefferson was a black man maybe twenty years older than Julian. He rubbed a fringe of gray beard. "But it's not simple or complete. There would be emotional associations we can't erase, because it's impossible to track down every neuron that was affected by the experience."

"I don't think I want to forget," Julian said. "It's part of what I am now, for better or worse."

"Not better, and you know it. If you were the type of person who could kill and walk away from it, the army would've put you in a hunter-killer platoon."

They were in a wood-paneled office in Portobello, bright native paintings and woven rugs on the walls. Julian obeyed an obscure impulse and reached over to feel the rough wool of a rug. "Even if I forget, he stays dead. It doesn't seem right."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I owe him my grief, my guilt. He was just a kid, caught up in the – "

"Julian, he had a gun and was firing all over the place. You probably saved lives by killing him."

"Not our lives. We were all safe, here."

"Civilians' lives. You don't do yourself any good by thinking of him as a helpless boy. He was heavily armed and out of control."

"I was heavily armed and in control. I aimed to disable him."

"The more reason for you not to blame yourself."

"Have you ever killed anybody?" Jefferson shook his head, one short jerk. "Then you don't know. It's like not being a virgin anymore. You can erase the memory of the event, okay, but that wouldn't make me a virgin again. Like you say, 'emotional associations.' Wouldn't I be even more fucked up? Not being able to trace those feelings back to their trigger?"

"All that I can say is that it's worked with other people."

"Ah ha. But not with everybody."

"No. It's not an exact science."

"Then I respectfully decline."

Jefferson leafed through the file on his desk. "You may not be allowed to decline."

"I can disobey an order. This isn't combat. A few months in the stockade wouldn't kill me."

"It's not that simple." He counted off on his fingers.

"One, a trip to the stockade might kill you. The shoe guards are selected for aggressiveness and they don't like mechanics.

"Two, a prison term would be disastrous to your professional life. Do you think the University of Texas has ever granted tenure to a black ex-con?

"Three, you may not have any choice, literally. You have clear-cut suicidal tendencies. So I can – "

"When did I ever say anything about suicide?"

"Probably never." The doctor took the top sheet from the file and handed it to Julian. "This is your overall personality profile. The dotted line is average for men

Af Ag Am Anx Dp Dz Fa Int Pr So Su SxA SxI

at your age when you were drafted. Look at the line above 'Su.' "

"This is based on some written test I took five years ago?"

"No, it integrates a number of factors. Army tests, but also various clinical observations and evaluations made since you were a child."

"And on the basis of that, you can force me into a medical procedure, against my will?"

"No. On the basis of 'I'm a colonel and you're a sergeant.'"

Julian leaned forward. "You're a colonel who took the Hippocratic oath and I'm a sergeant with a doctorate in physics. Can we talk for just a minute like two men who've spent most of their lives in school?"

"Sorry. Go ahead."

"You're asking me to accede to a medical treatment that will drastically affect my memory. Am I supposed to believe that there's no chance that it will hurt my ability to do physics?"

Jefferson was silent for a moment. "The chance is there, but it's very small. And you sure won't be doing any physics if you kill yourself."

"Oh, for Christ's sake. I'm not going to kill myself."

"Right. Now what do you think a potential suicide would say?"

Julian tried not to raise his voice. "Do you hear yourself? You mean that if I said, 'Sure, I think I'll do it,' you'd pronounce me safe and let me go home?"

The psychiatrist smiled. "Okay, that's not a bad response. But you have to see that it could be a calculated one, from a potential suicide."

"Sure. Anything I say can be evidence of mental illness. If you're convinced that I'm ill."

He studied his own palm. "Look, Julian. You know I've jacked into the cube that recorded how you felt when you killed that boy. In a way, I've been there. I've been you."

"I know that."

He put Julian's file away and brought out a small white jar of pills. "This is a mild antidepressant. Let's try it for two weeks, a pill after breakfast and one after dinner. It won't affect your intellectual abilities."

"All right."

"And I want to see you" – he checked a desk calendar – "at ten o'clock on July ninth. I want to jack with you and check your responses to this and that. It'll be a two-way jack; I won't hold anything back from you."

"And if you think I'm nuts, you'll send me to the memory eraser."

"We'll see. That's all I can say."

Julian nodded and took the white jar and left.

I WOULD LIE TO Amelia; say it was just a routine checkup. I took one of the pills and it did help me fall asleep, and sleep without dreams. So maybe I would keep taking them if they didn't affect my mental acuity.

In the morning I felt less sad and conducted an internal debate regarding suicide, perhaps in preparation for Dr. Jefferson's invasion. I couldn't lie to him, jacked. But maybe I could bring about a temporary "cure." It was easy to argue against the act-not only the effect on Amelia and my parents and friends, but also the ultimate triviality of the gesture, as far as the army was concerned. They would just find somebody else my size and send the soldierboy out with a fresh brain. If I did succeed in killing a few generals with my exit, they would likewise just promote some colonels. There's never any shortage of meat.

But I wondered whether all the logical arguments against suicide would do anything to conceal the depth of my own resolution. Even before the boy's death I knew I was only going to live as long as I had Amelia. We've stayed together longer than most people do.

And when I came home, she was gone. Gone to see a friend in Washington, the note said. I called the base and found I could fly out to Edwards as a supernumerary if I could get my butt down there in ninety minutes. I was in the air over the Mississippi before I realized I hadn't called the lab to arrange for someone else to monitor the scheduled runs. Was that the pills? Probably not.

But there was no way to call from a military plane, so it was ten o'clock Texas time before I was able to phone the lab. Jean Gordie had covered for me, but that was pure luck; she'd come in to grade some papers, seen I wasn't in, and checked the run schedule. She was more than slightly pissed off, since I couldn't offer a really convincing excuse. Look, I had to take the first flight to Washington to decide whether or not to kill myself.

From Edwards I took the monorail into old Union Station. There was a map machine on the car that showed me I'd be only a couple of miles from her friend's address. I was tempted to walk over and knock on the door, but decided to be civilized and call. A man answered.

"I have to talk to Blaze."

He looked at the screen for a moment. "Oh, you're Julian. Just a moment."

Amelia came on, looking quizzical. "Julian? I said I'd be home tomorrow."

"We have to talk. I'm here in Washington."

"Come on over then. I was just about to fix lunch."

How domestic. "I'd rather... we have to talk alone."

She looked offscreen and then back, worried. "Where are you?"

"Union Station."

The man said something I couldn't quite overhear. "Pete says there's a bar on the second floor called the Roundhouse. I can meet you there in thirty or forty minutes."

"Go ahead and finish lunch," I said. "I can – "

"No. I'll be down as fast as I can."

"Thanks, darling." I thumbed off and looked into the mirror of the screen. Despite the night's sleep, I still looked pretty haggard. I should've shaved and changed out of my uniform.

I ducked into a men's room for a quick shave and comb and then walked down to the second floor. Union Station was a transportation hub, but also a museum of rail technology. I walked by some subways of the previous century, with their makeshift bulletproofing all pitted and dented. Then a steam-powered locomotive from the nineteenth that actually looked to be in better shape.

Amelia was waiting at the door to the bar. "I took a cab," she explained as we embraced.

She steered me into the gloom and odd music of the bar. "So who's this Pete? A friend, you said?"

"He's Peter Blankenship." I shook my head. The name was vaguely familiar. "The cosmologist." A serving robot took our iced tea orders and said we had to spend ten dollars to take the booth. I got a glass of whiskey.

"So you're old friends."

"No, we just met. I wanted to keep our meeting secret."

We took our drinks to an empty booth and sat down. She looked intense. "Let me try to – "

"I killed somebody."

"What?"

"I killed a boy, a civilian. Shot him with my soldier-boy."

"But how could you? I thought you weren't even supposed to kill soldiers."

"It was an accident."

"What, you stepped on him or something?"

"No, it was the laser – "

"You 'accidentally' shot him with a laser?"

"A bullet. I was aiming for his knees."

"An unarmed civilian?"

"He was armed-it was him with the laser! It was a madhouse, a mob out of control. We were ordered to shoot anyone with a weapon."

"But he couldn't have hurt you. Just your machine."

"He was shooting wildly," I lied; half-lied. "He could have killed dozens himself."

"You couldn't have shot for the weapon he was using?"

"No, it was a heavy-duty Nipponex. They have Ablar, a bulletproof and antispalling coating. Look, I aimed for his knees, then somebody jostled him from behind. He pitched forward and the bullet hit him in the chest."

"So it was sort of an industrial accident. He shouldn't have been playing with the big boys' toys."

"If you want to put it that way."

"How would you put it? You pulled the trigger."

"This is crazy. You don't know about Liberia yesterday?"

"Africa? We've been too busy – "

"There's a Liberia in Costa Rica."

"I see. That's where the boy was."

"And a thousand others. Also past tense." I took a long drink of whiskey and coughed. "Some extremists killed a couple of hundred children, and made it look like we'd been responsible. That was horrible enough. Then a mob attacked us, and ... and ... the riot control measures backfired. They're supposed to be benign, but they caused the death of hundreds more, trampled. Then they started shooting, shooting their own people. So we, we..."

"Oh, my God. I'm sorry," she said, her voice trembling. "You need real support, and here I come all edgy with fatigue and preoccupied. You poor... have you been to a counselor?"

"Yeah. He was a big help." I plucked an ice cube from the tea and dropped it in the whiskey. "He said I'd get over it."

"Will you?"

"Sure. He gave me some pills."

"Well, be careful with the pills and the booze."

"Yes, doctor." I took a cool sip.

"Seriously. I'm worried."

"Yeah, me too." Worried, wearied. "So what are you and this Pete doing?"

"But you – "

"Let's just change the subject. What did he want you for?"

"Jupiter. He's challenging some basic cosmological assumptions."

"Then why you? Probably everyone from Macro on down knows more about cosmology-hell, I probably do."

"I'm sure you do. But that's why he chose me-everyone senior to me was in on the planning stages of the Project, and they have this consensus about... certain aspects of it."

"What aspects?"

"I can't tell you."

"Oh, come on."

She touched her tea but didn't drink it; looked into it. "Because you can't really keep a secret. All your platoon would know as soon as you jacked."

"They wouldn't know shit. Nobody else in that platoon can tell a Hamiltonian from a hamburger. Anything technical, they might pick up on my emotional reaction, but that's it. No technical details; they might as well be in Greek."

"Your emotional reaction is what I'm talking about. I can't say any more. Don't ask me."

"Okay. Okay." I took another drink of whiskey and pushed the order button. "Let's get something to eat." She asked it for a salmon sandwich and I got a hamburger and another whiskey, a double.

"So you're total strangers. Never met before."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Only what I asked."

"I met him maybe fifteen years ago, at a colloquium in Denver. If you must know, that's when I was living with Marty. He went to Denver and I tagged along."

"Ah." I finished the first whiskey.

"Julian. Don't be upset about that. There's nothing going on. He's old and fat and more neurotic than you."

"Thanks. So you'll be home, when?"

"I have to teach tomorrow. So I'll be home by morning. Then come back here Wednesday if we still have work to do."

"I see."

"Look, don't tell anyone, especially Macro, that I'm here."

"He'd be jealous?"

"What is this with jealousy? I told you there's nothing ..." She slumped back. "It's just that Peter's been in fights with him, in Physics Review Letters. I may be in a position where I have to defend Peter against my own boss."

"Great career move."

"This is bigger than career. It's ... well, I can't tell you."

"Because I'm so neurotic."

"No. That's not it. That's not it at all. I just – " Our order rolled up to the booth and she wrapped the sandwich in a napkin and stood. "Look, I'm under more pressure than you know. Will you be all right? I have to get back."

"Sure. I understand about work."

"This is more than just work. You'll forgive me later." She slid out of the booth and gave me a long kiss. Her eyes were wet with tears. "We have to talk more about that boy. And the rest of it. Meanwhile, take the pills; take it easy." I watched her hurry out.

The hamburger smelled good but it tasted like dead meat. I took a bite but couldn't swallow it. I transferred the mouthful to a napkin, discreetly, and drank up the double in three quick swallows. Then I buzzed for another, but the table said it couldn't serve me alcohol for another hour.

I took the tube to the airport and had drinks in two places, waiting for the flight back home. A drink on the plane and a sour nap in the cab.

When I got home I found a half-bottle of vodka and poured it over a large mug of ice cubes. I stirred it until the mug was good and frosty. Then I emptied out the bottle of pills and pushed them into seven piles of five each.

I was able to swallow six of the piles, one mouthful of icy vodka apiece. Before I swallowed the seventh, I realized I should write a note. I owed Amelia that much. But I tried to stand up to find some paper and my legs wouldn't obey; they were just lumps. I considered that for awhile and decided to just take the rest of the pills, but I could only make my arm swing like a pendulum. I couldn't focus on the pills, anyhow. I leaned back and it was peaceful, loose, like floating in space. It occurred to me that this was the last thing I would ever feel, and that was all right. It was a lot better than going after all those generals.

AMELIA SMELLED URINE WHEN she unlocked the door eight hours later. She ran from room to room and finally found him in the reading alcove, slumped sideways in her favorite chair, the last neat pile of five pills in front of him, along with the empty prescription vial and half a large glass of warm watered vodka.

Sobbing, she felt his neck for a pulse and thought maybe there was a slight thread. She slapped him twice, hysterically hard, and he didn't respond.

She called 9-1-1 and they said all units were out; it might be an hour. So she switched to the campus emergency room and described the situation and said she was bringing him in. Then she called a cab.

She heaved him out of the chair and tried to pick him up under the arms, staggering back out of the alcove. She wasn't strong enough to carry him that way, though, and she wound up dragging him ignominiously by the feet through the apartment. Backing out through the door, she almost ran into a large male student, who helped her carry him to the cab and went along with her to the hospital, asking questions that she answered in monosyllables.

He wasn't necessary at that end, it turned out; there were two orderlies and a doctor waiting at the ER entrance. They swung him up onto a gurney and a doctor gave him two shots, one in the arm and one in the chest. When he got the chest one, Julian groaned and trembled, and his eyes opened but showed only whites. The doctor said that was a good response. It might be a day before they knew whether he would recover; she could wait here or go home.

She did both. She took a cab with the helpful student back to the apartment building, picked up the notes and papers for her next class, and returned to the hospital.

There was nobody else in the waiting room. She got a cup of coffee from the machine and sat at the end of a couch.

The papers were all graded. She looked at her lecture notes but couldn't concentrate on them. It would have been hard to go through the teaching routine even if she had come home to a normal Julian. If Peter was right, and she was sure he was, the Jupiter Project was over. It had to be shut down. Eleven years, most of her career as a particle physicist, down the drain.

And now this, this strangely reciprocal crisis. A few months ago he had sat this deathwatch for her, brain-deathwatch. But she had caused both of them. If she had been able to put the work with Peter aside-put her career aside-and give him the kind of loving support that he needed to work through his guilt and anguish, he wouldn't have wound up here.

Or maybe he would. But it wouldn't have been her fault.

A black man in a colonel's uniform sat down next to her: His lime cologne cut through the hospital smell. After a moment he said, "You're Amelia."

"People call me Blaze. Or Professor Harding."

He nodded and didn't offer his hand. "I'm Julian's counselor, Zamat Jefferson."

"I have news for you, The counseling didn't take."

He nodded the same way. "Well, I knew he was suicidal. I jacked with him. That's why I gave him those pills."

"What?" Amelia stared at him. "I don't understand."

"He could take the whole bottle at once and survive. Comatose, but breathing."

"So he's not in danger?"

The colonel put a pink laboratory form on the table between them, and smoothed it out with both hands. "Look where it says 'ALC The alcohol content of his blood was 0.35 percent. That's more than halfway to suicide by itself."

"You knew he drank. You were jacked with him."

"That's just it. He's not normally a heavy drinker. And the scenario he had for suicide ... well, it didn't involve either alcohol or pills."

"Really? What was it?"

"I can't say. It involved breaking the law." He picked up the form and refolded it neatly. "One thing ... one thing you might be able to help with."

"Help him or help the army?"

"Both. If he comes out of this, and I'm almost certain he will, he'll never be a mechanic again. You could help him get through that."

Amelia's face narrowed. "What do you mean? He hates being a soldier."

"Maybe so, but he doesn't hate being jacked with his platoon. Quite the contrary; like most people, he's become more or less addicted to it, to the intimacy. Perhaps you can distract him from that loss."

"With intimacy. Sex."

"That." He folded the paper twice again, creasing it with his thumbnail. "Amelia, Blaze, I'm not sure you know how much he loves you, depends on you."

"Of course I do. The feeling's mutual."

"Well, I've never been inside your head. From Julian's point of view, there's some imbalance, asymmetry."

Amelia sat back in the couch. "So what does he want of me?" she said stiffly. "He knows I only have so much time. Only have one life."

"He knows you're married to your work. That what you do is more important than what you are."

"That's harsh enough." They both flinched when someone in another room dropped a tray of instruments. "But it's true of most of the people we know. The world's full of proles and slacks. If Julian were one of them, I would never have even met him."

"That's not quite it. I'm in your class, too, obviously. Sitting around consuming would drive us crazy." He looked at the wall, reaching for words. "I guess I'm asking that you take a part-time job, as therapist, in addition to being a full-time physicist. Until he's better."

She stared at him in a way she sometimes stared at a student. "Thank you for not pointing out that he's done the same thing for me." She stood up suddenly and crossed over to the coffee machine. "Want a cup?"

"No, thank you."

When she came back she hooked a chair around so that the table was between them. "A week ago I would have dropped everything to be his therapist. I love him more than you, or he, seem to think, and of course I owe him, too."

She paused and leaned forward. "But the world has gotten a lot more complicated in the last few days. Did you know he went to Washington?"

"No. Government business?"

"Not exactly. But that's where I was, working. He came to me with what I see now was obviously a cry for help."

"About killing the boy?"

"And all the other death, the tramplings. I was properly horrified, even before I saw the news. But I... I..." She started to take a drink of coffee but put it down and sobbed, a startling, racking sound. She knuckled away sudden tears.

"It's all right."

"It's not all right. But it's bigger than him or me. Bigger than whether we even live or die."

"What, wait. Slow down. Your work?"

"I've said too much. But yes."

"What is it, some sort of defense application?"

"You could say that. Yes."

He sat back and pressed on his beard, as if it were pasted on. "Defense. Blaze, Dr. Harding ... I spend all day watching people lie to me. I'm not an expert in much, but I'm an expert in that."

"So?"

"So nothing. Your business is your business, and my interest in it begins and ends with how it affects my patient. I don't care if your job is saving the country, saving the world. All I ask is that when you're not working with that, you're working with him."

"I'll do that, of course."

"You do owe him."

"Dr. Jefferson. I have one Jewish mother already. I don't need one with a beard and a suit."

"Point well taken. I didn't mean to be insulting." He stood up. "I'm misdirecting my own sense of responsibility onto you. I should not have let him go after we jacked. If I'd admitted him, put him under observation, this wouldn't have happened."

Amelia took his offered hand. "Okay. You beat yourself up over this, and I'll beat myself up over it, and our patient will have to improve, by osmosis."

He smiled. "Take care. Take care of yourself. This kind of thing is a terrible strain."

This kind of thing! She watched him leave and heard the outer door close. She felt her face redden and fought the pressure of tears behind her eyes, then let it win.

WHEN I'D STARTED TO die it felt like I was drifting through a corridor of white light. Then I wound up in a big room with Amelia and my parents and a dozen or so friends and relations. My father was the way I remember him from grade school, slim and beardless. Nan Li, the first girl I was ever serious about, was standing next to me with her hand in my pocket, stroking. Amelia had an absurd grin, watching us.

Nobody said anything. We just looked at each other. Then everything faded out and I woke up in the hospital with an oxygen mask over my face and the smell of vomit deep inside my nose. My jaw hurt, as if someone had punched me.

My arm felt like it belonged to someone else, but I managed to drag my hand up and pull the mask down. There was someone in the room, out of focus, and I asked for a Kleenex and she handed it to me. I tried to blow my nose but it triggered retching, and she held me up and put a metal bowl under my chin while I coughed and drooled most attractively. Then she handed me a glass of water and said to rinse, and I realized it was Amelia, not a nurse. I said something romantic like "oh, shit," and started to black out again, and she eased me back to the pillow and worked the mask over my face.

I heard her calling for a nurse and then I passed out.

It's strange how much detail you recall from some parts of an experience like this, and how little of others. They told me later that I slept a solid fifteen hours after the little puking ceremony. It felt more like fifteen seconds. I woke up as if from a slap, with Dr. Jefferson drawing a hypo gun away from my arm.

I wasn't wearing the oxygen mask anymore. "Don't try to sit up," Jefferson said. "Get your bearings."

"Okay." I was just able to focus on him. "First bearing, I'm not dead, right? I didn't take enough pills."

"Amelia found you and saved you."

"I'll have to thank her."

"By that, you mean you're going to try again?"

"How many people don't?"

"Plenty." He held out a glass of water with a plastic straw. "People attempt suicide for various reasons."

I drank a cold sip. "You don't think I was actually serious about it."

"I do. You're pretty competent at everything you do. You'd be dead if Amelia hadn't come home."

"I'll thank her," I repeated.

"She's sleeping now. She stayed with you for as long as she could keep her eyes open."

"Then you came."

"She called me. She didn't want you to wake up alone." He weighed the hypodermic gun in his hand. "I decided to help you along with a mild stimulant."

I nodded and sat up a little. "It feels pretty good, actually. Did it counteract the drug? The poison."

"No, you've already been treated for that. Do you want to talk about it?"

"No." I reached for the water and he helped me. "Not with you."

"With Amelia?"

"Not now." I drank and was able to replace the glass by myself. "I guess first I want to jack with my platoon. They'd understand."

There was a long silence. "You're not going to be able to do that."

I didn't understand. "Of course I can. It's automatic."

"You're out, Julian. You can't be a mechanic anymore."

"Hold it. Do you think any of my platoon would be surprised by this? Do you think they're that dumb?"

"That's not the point. It's just that they can't be made to live through it! I'm trained for it, and I can't say I look forward to jacking with you. Do you want to kill your friends?"

"Kill them."

"Yes! Exactly. Don't you think it's possible you might push one of them into doing the same? Candi, for instance. She's close to clinical depression most of the time, anyhow."

I could see the sense in that, actually. "But after I'm cured?"

"No. You'll never be a mechanic again. You'll be reassigned to some – "

"A shoe? I'll be a shoe?"

"They wouldn't want you in the infantry. They'll take advantage of your education, and put you in a technical post somewhere."

"Portobello?"

"Probably not. You'd jack socially with members of your platoon, your ex-platoon." He shook his head slowly. "Can't you see? That wouldn't be good for you or for them."

"Oh, I see; I see. From your point of view, anyhow."

"I am the expert," he said carefully. "I don't want you to be hurt and I don't want to be court-martialed for negligence-which is what would happen if I let you go back to your platoon and some of them couldn't handle sharing your memories."

"We've shared the feelings of people while they died, sometimes in great pain."

"But they didn't come back from the dead. Come back and discuss how desirable it might be."

"I may be cured of that." Even as I said it, I knew how false it sounded.

"One day, I'm sure you will be." That didn't sound too convincing, either.

JULIAN ENDURED ONE MORE day of bed rest and then was transferred to an "observation unit," which was like a hotel room, except that it only locked from the outside, and was always locked. Dr. Jefferson came in every other day for a week, and a kindly young civilian therapist, Mona Pierce, talked to him daily. After a week (by then, Julian was convinced he was going to go insane) Jefferson jacked with him, and the next day, he was released.

The apartment was too neat. Julian went from room to room trying to figure out what was wrong, and then it hit him-Amelia must have hired someone to come in and clean. Neither of them had any instinct or talent in that direction. She must have found out when he was going to be released and squandered a few bucks on it. The bed was made with military precision-a dead giveaway-and on it was a note with today's date inside a heart.

He made a pot of coffee (spilling both water and grounds but scrupulously cleaning them up) and sat down to the console. There was a lot of mail stacked up for him, most of it awkward. A letter from the army giving him one month's leave at reduced pay, followed by a posting right on campus, not a mile from where he lived. The title was "senior research assistant"; it was TOY, so he could live at home, "hours to be arranged."

If he was reading between the lines correctly, the army was pretty well through with him, but on principle wouldn't just discharge him. It would be a bad example, being able to get out of the army just by killing yourself.

Mona Pierce had been a good listener who asked the right questions. She didn't condemn Julian for what he did-was angry at the military for not seeing it and discharging him before the inevitable happened-and didn't really disapprove of suicide in an absolute way, giving Julian tacit permission to do it again. But not over the boy. A lot of factors caused the boy's death, but Julian had been present against his will, and his part in it had been reflexive and appropriate.

If the personal mail had been awkward to write, it was doubly awkward to answer. He wound up with two basic replies: One was a simple "Thanks for your concern; I'm okay now" brush-off, and the other was a more detailed explanation, for those who deserved it and wouldn't be too bothered by it. He was still working on that when Amelia came in, carrying a suitcase.

She hadn't been able to see him during the week he was incarcerated in the observation unit. He'd called as soon as he was released, but she wasn't at home. The office said she was out of town.

They embraced and said the obvious things. He poured her a cup of coffee without asking. "I've never seen you look so tired. Still going back and forth to Washington?"

She nodded and took the cup. "And Geneva and Tokyo. I had to talk with some people at CERN and Kyoto." She looked at her watch. "Midnight flight to Washington."

"Jesus. What is it that's worth killing yourself over?" She looked at him for a moment and they both laughed, an embarrassed giggle.

She pushed the coffee away. "Let's go set the alarm for ten-thirty and get some rest. You feel up to going to Washington?"

"Meet the mysterious Peter?"

"And do some math. I'm going to need all the help I can get, convincing Macro."

"Of what? What's so damned ..."

She slipped out of her dress and stood up. "First bed. Then sleep. Then explanations."

WHILE AMELIA AND I sleepily dressed and threw together some clothes for the trip, she gave me a rough outline of what to expect in Washington. I didn't stay sleepy long.

If Amelia's conclusions about Peter Blankenship's theory proved correct, the Jupiter Project had to be shut down. It could literally destroy everything: the Earth, the solar system; the universe itself, eventually. It would recreate the Diaspora, the "big bang" that started everything.

Jupiter and its satellites would be consumed in a fraction of a second; Earth and the Sun would have a few dozen minutes. Then the expanding bubble of particles and energy would muscle its way out to consume every star in the Galaxy, and then go on to the main course: the rest of everything.

One aspect of cosmology that the Jupiter Project had been designed to test was the "accelerated universe" theory. It was almost a century old, and had survived in spite of inelegance and a prevailing skepticism over its "ad hoc" – ness, because in model after model, the theory seemed to be necessary in order to account for what happened the tiniest fraction of a second after creation – 10.35 of a second.

Simply stated, during that tiny period, you either had to temporarily increase the speed of light or make time elastic. For various reasons, the elasticity of time had always been the more likely explanation.

All of this took place when the universe was very tiny, growing from the size of a BB to the size of a small pea.

In the cab to the airport and during the flight, Amelia slept while I skimmed the field equations and tried to attack her method, using pseudo-operator theory. Pseudo-operator theory was so new I'd never applied it to a practical problem; Amelia had only heard of it. I needed to talk to some people about applying it, and to do it right required a lot more computing power than my notebook could muster.

(But suppose I did demonstrate they were wrong, and the Jupiter Project went ahead, but it turned out to be me and my new technique that were in error. A guy who couldn't live with killing one person would wind up destroying all life, everywhere.)

The danger was that the Jupiter Project would focus furious energies into a volume much smaller than a BB. Peter and Amelia thought that this would re-create, in reverse, the environment that characterized the universe when it was that small, and, an infinitesimal fraction of a second later, precipitate a tiny accelerated universe, and then a new Diaspora. It was bizarre to realize that something that happened in an area the size of a para-mecium could trigger the end of the world. Of the universe.

Of course the only way of really checking it would be to do the experiment. Sort of like loading a gun and testing it by putting the muzzle in your mouth and pulling the trigger.

I thought of that metaphor while I was setting up operator conditions, typing on the plane, but didn't pass it on to Amelia. It occurred to me that a man who had recently tried to kill himself might not be the ideal companion for this particular venture.

Because of course the universe does end when you die. From whatever cause.

Amelia was still asleep, her head against the window, when we landed in Washington, and the change in vibration didn't wake her. I touched her awake and took down both our bags. She let me carry hers without protest, evidence of how tired she was.

I bought a pack of speedies at the airport newsstand while she called to make sure Peter was up. As she suspected, he was up and speeding, so we put the patches behind our ears and were wide awake by the time we got to the tube. Great stuff if you don't overdo it. I asked, and she confirmed that Peter was living on it.

Well, if your mission is saving the universe, what's a little sleep deprivation? Amelia was taking a lot of it, too, but coming down (with sleepies) to sleep three or four hours a day. If you don't do that, sooner or later you'll crash like a meteorite. Peter needed a complete and ironclad argument ready before he could allow himself to sleep, and knew he would pay for it.

Amelia had told him I was "sick," but hadn't elaborated. I suggested we call it food poisoning. Alcohol is a sort of a food.

He never asked. His interest in people began and ended with their usefulness to "the Problem." My credentials were that I could be trusted to keep my mouth shut and had been studying this new corner of analysis.

He met us at the door and gave me a cold damp handshake while he stared at me with pinpoint speedie pupils. As he led us to the office he gestured at an untouched tray of cold cuts and cheese that looked old enough to give you actual food poisoning.

The office was a familiar-looking mess of papers and readers and books. He had a console with a large double screen. One screen was a fairly straightforward Hamiltonian analysis and the other was a matrix (actually one visible face of a hypermatrix) full of numbers. Anybody familiar with cosmology could decode it; it was basically a chart of various aspects of the proto-universe as it aged from zero to ten thousand seconds old.

He gestured at that screen. "Identify ... can you identify the first three rows?"

"Yes," I said, and paused long enough to gauge his sense of humor: none. "The first row is the age of the universe in powers of ten. The second row is the temperature. The third row is the radius. You've left out the zero-th column."

"Which is trivial."

"As long as you know it's there. Peter... should I call you – "

"Peter. Julian." He rubbed two or three days' worth of stubble. "Blaze, let me freshen up before you tell me about Kyoto. Julian, familiarize yourself with the matrix. Touch to the left of the row if you have any questions about the variable."

"Have you slept at all?" Amelia asked.

He looked at his watch. "When did you leave? Three days ago? I slept a little then. Don't need it." He strode out of the room.

"If he got one hour of sleep," I said, "he'd still be down."

She shook her head. "It's understandable. Are you ready for this? He's a real slave driver."

I showed her a pinch of dark skin. "It's in my heritage."

My approach to the Problem was about as old as physics, post-Aristotle. First, I would take his initial conditions and, ignoring his Hamiltonians, see whether pseudo-operator theory came to the same conclusion. If it did, then the next thing, probably the only thing, we had to worry about was the initial conditions themselves. There were no experimental data about conditions close to the "accelerated universe" regime. We could check some aspects of the Problem by instructing the Jupiter accelerator to crank up energies closer and closer to the critical point. But how close to the edge of a cliff do you want to push a robot when it might be forty-eight minutes between command and response? Not too close.

The next two days were a sleepless marathon of mathematics. We took a half hour off when we heard explosions outside and went up to the roof to watch the Fourth of July fireworks over the Washington Monument.

Watching the crash-bang of it, smelling the powder, I realized it was kind of a dilute preview of coming attractions. We had a little more than nine weeks. The Jupiter Project, if it went on schedule, would produce the critical energy level on September 14.

I think we all made the connection. We watched the finale silently and went back to work.

Peter knew a little about pseudo-operator analysis, and I knew a little about microcosmology; we spent a lot of time making sure I was understanding the questions and he was understanding the answers. But at the end of two days, I was as convinced as he and Blaze were. The Jupiter Project had to die.

Or we all had to die. A terrible thought occurred to me while I was twanging on speedies and black coffee: I could kill both of them with two blows. Then I could destroy all the records and kill myself.

I would become Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, to paraphrase a nuclear pioneer. With a simple act of violence, I could destroy the universe.

A good thing I was sane.

It wouldn't be difficult for the Project engineers to prevent the disaster; any random change of the position of a few elements of the ring would do it. The system had to line up just so in order to work: a circular collimation over a million kilometers in circumference that would last for less than a minute before gravity from Jupiter's moons pulled it apart forever. Of course that minute would be eons long compared to the tiny interval that was being simulated. And plenty of time for the accelerating surge to make one orbit and produce the supercharged speck that would end it all.

I WAS GROWING TO like Peter, in spite of himself. He was a slave driver, but he drove himself harder than he did me or Amelia. He was temperamental and sarcastic and blew up about as regularly as Old Faithful. But I've never met anyone so absolutely dedicated to science. He was like a mad monk lost in his love of the divine.

Or so I thought.

Speedies or no, I'm still blessed and cursed with a soldier's body. In the soldierboy I was exercised constantly, to keep from cramping up; at the university I worked out every day, alternating an hour of running with an hour on the gym machines. So I could get along without sleep, but not without exercise. Every morning at dawn I'd excuse myself from the proceedings and go off to run.

I was systematically exploring downtown Washington during my morning jogs, taking the Metro down and going in a different direction each day. I'd seen most of the monuments (which might be more moving to someone who'd actually chosen to be a soldier) and ranged as far afield as the Washington Zoo and Alexandria, when I felt like doing a few extra miles.

Peter accepted the fact that I had to have the exercise to keep from cramping up. I also contended that it cleared my head, but he pointed out that his head was clear enough, and the only exercise he got was wrestling with cosmology.

That was not entirely true. On the fifth day I got almost all the way to the Metro station and realized I'd left my card behind. I jogged on back to the apartment and let myself in.

My street clothes were in the living room, by the fold-out bed that Amelia and I shared. I took the card out of my wallet and started back to the front door, but then heard a noise from the study. The door was partly open; I looked in.

Amelia was sitting on the edge of the table, naked from the waist down, her legs scissored around Peter's bald head. She was gripping the edge of the table so hard her knuckles were bone-white, her face to the ceiling in a rictus of orgasm.

I closed the door with a quiet click and ran out.

I ran as hard as I could for several hours, stopping a few times to buy water and choke it down. When I got to the border gate between D.C. and Maryland, I couldn't get through because I didn't have my interstate pass. So I stopped running and slid into a dive called the Border Bar, icy air sharp with tobacco smoke, legal in D.C. I drank down a liter of beer and then sipped another liter with a shot of whiskey.

The combination of speedies and alcohol is not entirely pleasant. Your mind goes off in all directions.

When we first started going together, we talked about fidelity and jealousy. There's a kind of generation problem: When I was in my teens and early twenties, there was a lot of sexual experimentation and swapping around, with the defendable basis that sex is biology and love is something else, and a couple could negotiate the two issues independently. Fifteen years earlier, when Amelia had been that age, attitudes were more conservative-no sex without love, and then monogamy afterward.

She agreed at the time to go along with my principles-or lack of same, her contemporaries might say – even though we both thought it was unlikely we would exercise our freedom.

So now she had, and for some reason it was devastating. Less than a year ago, I would have jumped at the opportunity of having sex with Sara, jacked or not. So what right did I have to feel injured because she had done exactly the same thing? She'd been living with Peter more closely than most married couples live, for quite a while, and she respected him enormously, and if he asked for sex, why not say yes?

I had a feeling it was she who had asked, though. She certainly had been enjoying it.

I finished the drinks and switched to iced coffee, which tasted like cold battery acid, even with three sugars.

Did she know that I'd seen? I had closed the door automatically, but they might not remember having left it slightly open. Sometimes the current from the airco cycling on and off would ease a door shut.

"You look lonely, soldier." I did my running in fatigue uniform, in case I wanted an unrationed beer. "You look sad." She was pretty, blond, maybe twenty.

"Thanks," I said, "but I'm all right."

She sat down on the stool next to me and showed me her ID, professional name Zoe, medical inspection only one day old. Only one customer had signed the book. "I'm not just a whore. I'm also a professional expert on men, and you're not 'all right.' You look like you're about to jump off a bridge."

"So let me."

"Huh-uh. Not enough men around to waste one." She lifted up the back of her wig. "Not enough jacked men, anyhow."

Her off-white shift was raw silk, hanging loosely on her graceful athletic body, revealing nothing and everything: This merchandise is so good I don't have to advertise.

"I've used up most of my entertainment points," I said. "Can't afford you."

"Hey, I'm not doing any business. Give you one for free. Got a dime for the jack?"

I did have ten dollars. "Yeah, but look. I've had too much to drink."

"No such thing, with me." She smiled, perfect hungry teeth. "Money-back guarantee. I'll refund your dime."

"You just want to do it jacked."

"And I like soldiers. Was one."

"Come on. You're not old enough."

"I'm older than I look. And I wasn't in for long."

"What happened?"

She tilted toward me so that I could see her breasts. "One way to find out," she whispered.

There was a jack joint two doors down. In a few minutes I was in the dark humid cube with this intimate stranger, memories and feelings crashing together and mingling. I felt our finger slide easily into our vagina, tasted the salt sweat and musk of our penis, sucking it rigid. Breasts radiating. We shifted around so we were two mouths working together. There was a slight distracting ache from two of her molars that needed work. She was terrified of dentists and all of her beautiful front teeth were plastic.

She had thought about suicide but never attempted it, and our sexual rhythm faltered while she relived my memory-but she understood! She had spent one day as a mechanic, assigned to a hunter-killer platoon by a clerical error. She watched two people die and had a nervous breakdown, her soldierboy paralyzed.

She knew nothing of science or mathematics, physical education major, and although she felt my end-of-the-world anxiety, she just linked it with the suicide attempt. For several minutes, we stopped the sex and just held on to each other, sharing sorrows at a level that's hard to describe, independent of actual memory, I suppose body chemistry talking to body chemistry.

There was a two-minute warning chime and we re-coupled, hardly moving, slight internal contractions bringing us to a slow-flowing orgasm.

And then we were standing in the lemon heat of the afternoon sun, trying to figure out what to say.

She squeezed my hand. "You aren't going to do it again-kill yourself?"

"I don't think so."

"I know what you think. But you're still 'way too upset about him and her."

"You helped with that. Having you, being you."

"Oh." She handed me her card and I signed on the back.

"Even when you don't charge?" I said.

"Except for husbands," she said. "Your own, that is." Her brow furrowed. "I got a little ghost of something."

I felt a sudden new sweat break out. "Of what?"

"You jacked with her. Only once? Once and a... another time that, that wasn't really the real thing?"

"Yeah. She had a jack put in, but it didn't take."

"Oh. I'm sorry." She came close and plucked at my shirt. She looked up at me and whispered, "The stuff I was thinking about you being black, you know I'm not a racist or anything."

"I know." She was, in a way, but not malicious and not in a way she could control.

"The other two..."

"Don't worry about it." She'd had only two other black customers, jacked, full of anger and passion. "We come in all flavors."

"You're so cool, so thoughtful. Not cold. She ought to hang on to you."

"Can I give her your phone number? For a reference?"

She giggled. "Let her bring it up. Let her talk first."

"I'm not sure she knows I saw them."

"If she doesn't know, she will know. You got to give her time to work out what she's gonna say."

"Okay. I'll wait."

"Promise?"

"I promise."

She stood up on tiptoe and kissed me on the cheek. "You need me, you know how to get me."

"Yeah." I repeated her number. "Hope you have a good day."

"Ah, men. Never get any real action before sundown." She waved with two fingers and walked away, the silk artfully revealing and concealing with every step, a flesh metronome. I had a sudden backflash and for a moment I was in her body again, warm with afterglow and hunting for more. A woman who enjoyed her work.

It was three o'clock; I'd been gone for six hours. Peter would throw a fit. I took the Metro back and got an armload of groceries at the station store.

Peter didn't say anything, and neither did Amelia. Either they knew that I'd seen them, and were embarrassed, or they'd been too busy to worry about my absence. Whichever, this week's bundle of data had come in from Jupiter, and that meant a few hours of painstaking sorting and redundancy checks.

I put away the groceries and told them chicken stew tonight. We alternated cooking-rather, Amelia and I alternated cooking; Pete always called out for pizza or Thai. He had some private source of money, and got around the rationing because he'd wangled a reserve commission in the Coast Guard. He even had a captain's uniform hanging in plastic in the front hall closet, but he didn't know whether it fit.

The new data gave me plenty to do, too; pseudo-operator analysis requires some careful planning before you actually start to grind numbers through it. I tried to put the disturbing events of the day behind me, and concentrate on physics. I was only partly successful. Whenever I glanced over at Amelia I had a flash of her face lost in ecstasy, and a pang of reactive defiance and guilt over Zoe.

At seven I put the chicken into a pot of water and dumped the frozen vegetables on top; sliced up an onion and added it with some garlic. Zapped it to a quick boil and then left it to simmer for forty-five minutes, while I put on headphones and listened to some of this new Ethiopian stuff. The enemy, but their music is more interesting than ours.

Our custom was to eat at eight and watch at least the first part of the Harold Burley Hour, a Washington news distillation for people who could read without moving their lips.

Costa Rica was quiet today; fighting in Lagos, Ecuador, Rangoon, Magreb. The Geneva peace talks continued their elaborate charade.

It had rained frogs in Texas. They actually had amateur footage of that. Then a zoologist explained how it was all just an illusion caused by sudden local flooding. Nah. Secret Ngumi weapon; they'll go hopping all over the country and then suddenly explode, releasing poison frog gas. I'm a scientist; I know these things.

There was a consumer "demonstration" in Mexico City, which would have been called a riot if it had happened in enemy territory. Someone had gotten hold of the three-hundred-page manifest that detailed what was actually created last month with their "most favored nation" nanoforges. To everyone's surprise, most of it had been used to make luxuries for the rich. That was not what the public record had said.

Closer to home, Amnesty International was trying to subpoena the strings recording the activities of a 12th Division hunter-killer platoon that had been accused of torture, in an operation in rural Bolivia. Of course it was all pro forma; the request was going to be held up by technicalities until the heat death of the universe. Or until the crystals could be destroyed and convincing fakes synthesized. Everybody, including Amnesty International, knew that there were "black" operations whose existence was not even recorded at the division level.

A potential terrorist had been stopped at the Brooklyn Bridge customs point and summarily executed. As usual, no details were available.

Disney revealed plans for a Disneyworld in low Earth orbit, first launch scheduled to go up in twelve months. Peter pointed out that that was significant because of the inside information it implied. The area around the half-completed Chimborazo spaceport had been "pacified" for more than a year. Disney wouldn't start building if they hadn't had a guarantee that there would be a way of getting customers up there. So we were going to have routine civilian spaceflight again.

Amelia and I had shared a bottle of wine with dinner. I declared that I wanted to get a few hours' sleep before I pasted a new patch, and Amelia said she'd join me.

I was lying under the covers, wide awake, when she finished in the bathroom and slid in next to me. She held herself still for a moment, not touching.

"I'm sorry you saw us," she said.

"Well, it's always been part of our arrangement. The freedom."

"I didn't say I was sorry I did it." She turned on her side, facing me in the darkness. "Though maybe I am. I said I was sorry you saw us."

That was reasonable. "Has it always been like this, then? Other men?"

"Do you really want me to answer that? You'll have to answer the same question."

"That's easy. One woman, one time, today."

She put her palm on my chest. "I'm sorry. Now I feel like a real shit." She stroked me with her thumb, over my heart "It's only been Peter, and only since you ... you took the pills. I just, I don't know. I just couldn't stand it."

"You didn't tell him why."

"No, as I said. He just thought you were sick. He's not the kind of man to press for details."

"But he is the kind of man to press... for other things."

"Come on." She scrunched over so her body was long against my side. "Most unattached men constantly radiate their availability. He didn't have to ask. I think all I did was put a hand on his shoulder."

"And then surrender to the inevitable."

"I suppose. If you want me to ask for your forgiveness, I'm asking."

"No. Do you love him?"

"What? Peter? No."

"Case closed, then." I rolled over on my side to embrace her and then tipped her onto her back, pressing against her lightly. "Let's make some noise."

I was able to start, but not finish; I wilted inside of her. When I tried to continue with my hand, she said no, let's just sleep. I couldn't.

THE CASE WAS NOT closed, of course. The encounter with Zoe kept coming back to him, resonating with all the complicated emotions he still felt for Carolyn, dead more than three years. Sex with Amelia was as different as a snack is from a feast. If he wanted a feast every day, there were thousands of jills in Portobello and Texas who would be more than willing. He wasn't that hungry.

And although he appreciated Amelia's directness, he wasn't sure he quite believed her. If she did feel some love for Peter, under the circumstances she could justify lying about it, to spare Julian's feelings. She certainly hadn't looked casual, his face buried in her womanhood.

But there was time for all that later. Julian finally fell asleep some seconds before the alarm went off. He groped around for the box of speedie patches and they both took a paste. By the time they were dressed, the cobwebs were melting away and Julian was one cup of coffee away from math.

After they ground the fresh data through the mill, Julian's modern method and Peter's tried-and-true, all three were convinced. Amelia had been writing up the results; they spent half a day cutting and fine-tuning it, and zapped it to the Astrophysical Journal for peer review.

"A lot of people will want our heads," Peter said. "I'm going to go away for about ten days, and not take a phone. Sleep for a week."

"Where to?" Amelia asked.

"Place down in the Virgin Islands. Want to come?"

"No, I'd feel out of place." They all laughed nervously. "We have to teach, anyhow."

There was a little discussion over that, optimistic on Peter's part and exasperated on Amelia's. She already had been missing one or two classes a week, so why not a few more? Because she had already missed so many, she insisted.

Julian and Amelia flew back to Texas thoroughly exhausted, still running on speedies since they didn't dare come down until the weekend. They went through the motions of teaching and grading, waiting for their world to fall apart. None of their colleagues was on the Aph. J. review board currently, and apparently no one was consulted.

Friday morning, Amelia got a terse note from Peter: "Peer review report due this afternoon. Optimistic."

Julian was downstairs. She buzzed him up and showed him the message. "I think we might want to make ourselves scarce," he said. "If Macro finds out about it before he leaves the office, he'll call us up. Just as soon wait till Monday."

"Coward," she said. "Me, too. Why don't we go out to the Saturday Night Special early? We could kill some time at the gene zoo."

The gene zoo was the Museum of Genetic Experimentation, a place that was regularly closed by animal rights groups and reopened by lawyers. Ostensibly, the privately owned museum was a showcase for groundbreaking technology in genetic manipulation. Actually, it was a freak show, one of the most popular entertainments in Texas.

It was only a ten-minute walk from the Saturday Night Special, but they hadn't been there since the last time it was reopened. There were lots of new exhibits.

Some of the preserved specimens were fascinating, but the real attraction was the live ones, the actual zoo. They had somehow managed to contrive a snake with twelve legs. But they couldn't teach it how to walk. It would step forward with all six pairs at once, and lurch in one rippling flop after another-not a conspicuous advance over slithering. Amelia pointed out that the legs' connection to the animal's nervous system must be the same as goes to a normal snake's ribs, which undulate together to make it move.

The value of a more mobile snake might be questionable, and the poor creature obviously was made just as a curiosity, but another new one did have a practical application, besides scaring children: a spider the size of a pillow that spun a thick strong web back and forth on a frame, like a living loom. The resulting cloth, or mat, had surgical applications.

There was a pygmy cow, less than a meter tall, that wasn't touted as having any practical purpose. Julian suggested that it could answer the dairy needs of people like them, who liked cream in their coffee, if you could figure out how to milk it. It didn't move like a cow, though; it waddled around with earnest curiosity, probably gene-jumped with a beagle.

TO SAVE CREDITS AND money, we went to the zoo snack machines for some bread and cheese. There was a covered area behind the place with picnic tables, new since the last time we'd been there. We got a table to ourselves in the afternoon heat.

"So how much do we say to the gang?" I said, slicing cheddar in crumbling chunks with a plastic knife. I had my puttyknife but it would make a raclette out of the stuff, or a bomb.

"About you? Or the Project?"

"You haven't been there since I was in the hospital?" She shook her head. "Let's not bring it up. I meant should we talk about Peter's findings; our findings."

"No reason not to. It'll be common knowledge tomorrow."

I stacked an uneven pile of cheese on a slab of dark bread and passed it to her on a napkin. "Rather talk about that than me."

"People will know. Marty, for sure."

"I'll talk to Marty. If I have a chance."

"I think maybe the end of the universe might upstage you, anyhow."

"It does put things into perspective."

The half-mile walk to the Saturday Night Special was hot and dusty, even with the sun setting; a chalky kind of dust. We were glad to step into the air-conditioning. Marty and Belda were there, sharing a plate of appetizers. "Julian. How are you?" Marty said with careful neutrality.

"All right now. Talk about it later?" He nodded. Belda said nothing, concentrating on dissecting a shrimp. "Anything new on the project with Ray? The empathy thing."

"Quite a bit of new data, actually, though Ray's more up to date on it. That terrible thing with the children, Iberia?"

"Liberia," I said.

"Three of the people we were studying witnessed that. It was hard on them."

"Hard on everybody. The children, especially."

"Monsters," Belda said, looking up. "You know I'm not political, and I'm not maternal, either. But what could have been in their minds, to think that something so terrible could help their cause?"

"It's not just a warrior mentality," Amelia said. "Doing that to your own people."

"Most of the Ngumi thinks we did it," Marty said, "and just manipulated things to make it look like they did... as you say, no one would do that to their own people. That's proof enough right there."

"You think it was all a cynical plan?" Amelia said. "I can't imagine."

"No, the word we have-this is confidential and unsupported-is that it was one lunatic officer and a few followers. They're all disposed of now, and Ngumi Psychops, such as they are, are doing a lot of smoke and mirrors, proving that for some reason we would want to destroy a school full of innocent children, to make a point. To show how ruthless the Ngumi are, when of course everyone knows they're the army of and for the people."

"And they're buying it?" I asked.

"A lot of Central and South America is. You haven't been watching the news?"

"Off and on. What was the thing with Amnesty International?"

"Oh, the army let one of their lawyers jack into any string he wanted, on condition of confidentiality. He could testify that everyone was genuinely surprised by the atrocity, most people horrified. That's pretty much gotten us off the hook in Europe, and even Africa and Asia. Didn't make the news down south."

Asher and Reza came in together. "Hey, welcome back, you two. Run off and get married?"

"Ran off," Amelia said quickly, "but to work. We've been up in Washington."

"Government business?" Asher said.

"No. But it will be, after the weekend."

"Can we wheedle it out of you? Or is it too technical?"

"Not technical, not the most important part." She turned to Marty. "Is Ray coming?"

"No; he had a family thing."

"Okay. Let's get our drinks. Julian and I have a story to tell."

Once the waiter had delivered the wine and coffee and whiskey and disappeared, Amelia started the tale, the threat of absolute intergalactic doom. I added a few details here and there. Nobody interrupted.

Then there was a long pause. There had probably not been that many consecutive seconds of silence in all the years this group had been getting together.

Asher cleared his throat. "Of course the jury's not in yet. Literally."

"That's true," Amelia said. "But the fact that Julian and Peter got the same results-down to eight significant figures! – using two different starting points and two independent methods ... well, I'm not worried about the jury. I'm just worried about the politics of shutting down such a huge project. And a little worried about where I'll be working next year. Next week."

"Ah," Belda said. "You've done a good job with the trees. Surely you've thought about the forest as well."

"That it's a weapon?" I said, and Belda nodded slowly. "Yes. It's the ultimate doomsday weapon. It has to be dismantled."

"But the forest is bigger than that," Belda said, and sipped her coffee. "Suppose you don't just dismantle it-you destroy it without a trace. You go through the literature and erase every line that relates to the Jupiter Project. And then you have government goons go out and kill everyone who's ever heard of it. What happens then?"

"You tell me," I said. "You're going to."

"The obvious. In ten years, or a hundred, or a million, somebody else will come up with the idea. And they'll be squashed, too. But then in another ten or a million years, somebody else will come up with it. Sooner or later, somebody will threaten to use it. Or not even threaten. Just do it. Because they hate the world enough they want everything to die."

There was another long silence. "Well," I said, "that solves one mystery. People wonder where physical law comes from. I mean, supposedly, all the laws governing matter and energy had to be created with the pinprick that began the Diaspora. It seems impossible, or unnecessary."

"So if Belda's right," Amelia said, "physical law was all in place. Twenty billion years ago, someone pushed the 'reset' button."

"And some billions of years before that," Belda said, "someone had done it before. The universe only lasts long enough to evolve creatures like us." She pointed a V of bony fingers at Amelia and me. "People like you two."

Well, it didn't really solve the first-cause mystery; sooner or later there had to be an actual first time.

"I wonder," Reza said. "Surely in all the millions of galaxies there are other races who've made this discovery. Thousands or millions of times. They evidently have all been psychologically incapable of doing it, destroying us all."

"Evolved beyond it," Asher said. "A pity we haven't." He swirled the ice in his whiskey. "If Hitler had had the button in his bunker... or Caligula, Genghis Khan..."

"Hitler only missed the boat by a century," Reza said. "I guess we haven't evolved past the possibility of producing another one."

"And won't," Belda said. "Aggression's a survival characteristic. It put us at the top of the food chain."

"Cooperation did," Amelia corrected. "Aggression doesn't work against a saber-toothed tiger."

"A combination, I'll grant you," Belda said.

"Cooperation and aggression," Marty said. "So a soldierboy platoon is the ultimate expression of human superiority over the beasts."

"You couldn't tell that by some of them," I said. "Some of them seem to have devolved."

"But allow me to keep this on track." Marty steepled his fingers. "Think of it this way. The race against time has begun. Sometime within the next ten or a million years, we have to direct human evolution away from aggressive behavior. In theory, it's not impossible. We've directed the evolution of many other species."

"Some in one generation," Amelia said. "There's a zoo full of them down the road."

"Delightful place," Belda said.

"We could do it in one generation," Marty said quietly. "Less." The others all looked at him.

"Julian," he said, "why don't mechanics stay in soldierboys for more than nine days?"

I shrugged. "Fatigue. Stay in too long and you get sloppy."

"That's what they tell you. That's what they tell everybody. They think it's the truth." He looked around uneasily. They were the only people in the room, but he lowered his voice. "This is secret. Very secret. If Julian were going back to his platoon, I couldn't say it, because then too many people would know. But I can trust everyone here."

"With a military secret?" Reza said.

"Not even the military knows. Ray and I have kept this from them, and it hasn't been easy.

"Up in North Dakota there's a convalescent home with sixteen inmates. There's nothing really wrong with them. They stay there because they know they have to."

"People you and Ray worked on?" I asked.

"Exactly. More than twenty years ago. They're middle-aged now, and know they'll probably have to spend the rest of their lives in seclusion."

"What the hell did you do to them?" Reza said.

"Eight of them stayed jacked into soldierboys for three weeks. The other eight for sixteen days."

"That's all?" I said.

"That's all."

"It drove them crazy?" Amelia asked.

Belda laughed, a rare sound, not happy. "I'll bet not. I'll bet it drove them sane."

"Belda's close," Marty said. "She has this annoying way of being able to read your mind without benefit of electricity.

"What happens is that after a couple of weeks in the soldierboy, you paradoxically can't be a soldier anymore."

"You can't kill?" I said.

"You can't even hurt anybody on purpose, except to save your own life. Or other lives. It permanently changes your way of thinking, of feeling; even after you unjack. You've been inside other people too long, shared their identity. Hurting another person would be as painful as hurting yourself."

"Not pure pacifists, though," Reza said. "Not if they can kill in self-defense."

"It varies from individual to individual. Some would rather die than kill, even in self-defense."

"Is that what happens to people like Candi?" I asked.

"Not really. People like her are chosen for empathy, for gentleness. You would expect being jacked to enhance those qualities in them."

"You just used random people in the experiment?" Reza asked.

He nodded. "The first one was random paid volunteers, off-duty soldiers. But not the second group." He leaned forward. "Half the second group were Special Forces assassins. The other half were civilians who had been convicted of murder."

"And they all became ... civilized?" Amelia said.

"The verb we use is 'humanized,' " Marty said.

"If a hunter-killer platoon stayed jacked for two weeks," I said, "they'd turn into pussycats?"

"So we assume. This was done before hunter-killers, of course; before soldierboys were used in combat."

Asher had been following this quietly. "It seems to me absurd to assume that the military hasn't duplicated your experiment. Then figured out a way around this inconvenient aberration, pacifism. Humanization."

"Not impossible, Asher, but unlikely. I'm jacked, one-way, with hundreds of military people, from private to general. If anyone was involved in an experiment, or had even heard a rumor of one, I would know."

"Not if everyone in authority was also jacked oneway. And the experimental subjects isolated, like yours, or disposed of."

That was worth a moment of silence. Would military scientists have inconvenient subjects killed?

"I'll admit the possibility," Marty said, "but it's remote. Ray and I coordinate all the military research on soldierboys. For someone to get a project approved, funded, and implemented without our being aware ... possible. But it's possible to flip a coin and come up heads a hundred times in a row."

"Interesting that you bring up numbers, Marty," Reza said. He'd been scribbling on a napkin. "Take a best-case scenario, where you have everyone agreeing to become humanized, and lining up to get jacked.

"First of all, one out of ten or twelve dies or goes crazy. I'm already trying to figure ways to get out of it."

"Well, we don't know – "

"Let me go on just a second. If it's one out of twelve, you're killing six hundred million people to ensure that the rest of them won't kill anybody. You're already making Hitler look like an amateur, by two orders of magnitude."

"There's more, I'm sure," Marty said.

"There is. What do we have, six thousand soldierboys? Say we build a hundred thousand. Everybody has to spend two weeks jacked-and that's after they spend five days getting their brains drilled out and recovering. Call it twenty days per person. Assuming seven billion survive the surgery, that's seven thousand people per machine. It sounds like a hundred forty thousand days to me. That's almost four hundred years. Then we all live happily ever after-the ones who live at all."

"Let me see that." Reza handed the napkin to Marty. He traced the column of figures with his finger. "One thing that's not in here is the fact that you don't need a whole soldierboy. Just the basic brain-to-brain wiring, and IV drips for nourishment. We could set up a million stations, not a hundred thousand. Ten million. That reduces the time scale to four years."

"But not the half-billion deaths," Belda said. "It's academic to me, since I only plan on living a few more years. But it does seem a high price to ask."

Asher pushed the button for the waiter. "This didn't come off the top of your head, Marty. How long have you been thinking about it, twenty years?"

"Something like that," he admitted, and shrugged. "You don't really need the death of the universe. We've been on a slippery slope since Hiroshima. Since World War One, actually."

"A secret pacifist working for the military?" Belda said.

"Not secret. The army tolerates theoretical pacifism – look at Julian-so long as it doesn't interfere with work. Most of the generals I know would call themselves pacifists."

The waiter shambled in and took the order. When he left, I said, "Marty's got a point. It's not just the Jupiter Project. There are plenty of lines of research that could ultimately lead to the planet being sterilized, or destroyed. Even if the rest of the universe is unaffected."

"You're already jacked," Reza said, and finished his wine. "You don't get a vote."

"What about people like me?" Amelia said. "Who try to be jacked and fail? Maybe you can put us in a nice concentration camp, where we can't hurt anybody."

Asher laughed. "Come on, Blaze. This is just a thought experiment. Marty's not seriously proposing – "

Marty slapped the table with his palm. "Damn it, Asher! I've never been more serious in my life."

"Then you're crazy. It's never going to happen."

Marty turned to Amelia. "In the past, it's never been imperative that any one person be jacked. If it became an effort on the order of your Jupiter Project-the Manhattan Project-all the work that's been begging to be done would be done!" To Reza: "The same with your half-billion dead. This isn't something that would have to be implemented overnight. A lot of cautious, controlled research, refinement of techniques, and the casualty rate would dwindle, maybe to zero."

"Then to put it in the least kind terms," Asher said, "you're accusing the army of murder. Granted, that's what they're supposed to do, but it's supposed to be people on the other side." Marty looked quizzical. "I mean, if you have thought all along that jacking installation could be made safe, why hasn't the army held off on making new mechanics until it is safe?"

"It's not the army who's a murderer, you're saying. It's me. Researchers like me and Ray."

"Oh, don't get dramatic. I'm sure you've done your best. But I've always felt the human cost of the program was way too high."

"I agree," Marty said, "and it's not just the one-in-twelve installation casualties. Mechanics have an unacceptably high death rate from stroke and heart attack." He looked away from me. "And suicide, during their enlistment or after."

"The death rate for soldiers is high," I said. "That's not news. But it's part of the argument: get rid of soldiering as an occupation.

"Suppose we could develop a way that jacking was a hundred percent successful, with absolutely no casualties. There's still no way you could get everyone to do it. I can just see the Ngumi lining up to have their heads drilled by a bunch of Alliance demon-scientists! Hell, you couldn't even convert our own military. Once the generals found out what you were doing, you'd be history. You'd be compost!"

"Maybe so. Maybe so." The waiter was bringing our drinks. Marty looked at me and stroked his chin. "You feel up to jacking?"

"I suppose."

"Free at ten tomorrow?"

"Yeah, until two."

"Come by my place. I need your input."

"You guys are going to hook up together and change the world?" Amelia said. "Save the universe?"

Marty laughed. "That's not exactly what I had in mind." But it was, exactly.

JULIAN HAD TO BICYCLE a mile through much-needed rain to get to Marty's lab, so he didn't arrive in too festive a mood.

Marty found him a towel, and a lab coat against the airco chill. They sat on a couple of straight-back chairs by the test bed, which was literally two beds, equipped with full-face helmets. There was a nice view of the sodden campus, ten stories down.

"I gave my assistants the Saturday off," Marty said, "and routed all my incoming calls to my home office. We won't be disturbed."

"At doing what?" Julian said. "What do you have in mind?"

"I won't know for sure until we're linked. But I'd just as soon keep it between ourselves, for the time being." He pointed to the data console on the other side of the room. "If one of my assistants was here, she could patch in one-way and eavesdrop."

Julian got up and inspected the test bed. "Where's the interrupt button?"

"You don't need one. You want out, just think 'quit' and the link is broken." Julian looked doubtful. "It's new. I'm not surprised you haven't seen it before."

"Otherwise, you're in control."

"Nominally. I control the sensorium, but that's trivial for conversation. I'll change it to whatever you want."

"One-way?"

"We can start out one-way and go limited two-way, 'stream of conversation,' on mutual consent." As Julian knew, Marty couldn't jack deeply with anyone; he'd had the ability removed for security reasons. "Nothing like you and your platoon. We can't really read each other's minds. Just communicate more quickly and clearly."

"Okay." Julian hiked himself up on the bed and let out a long breath. "Let's get on with it." They both lay down and worked their necks into the soft collars, slipped the plastic sleeves off the water tubes and moved their heads around until the jacks clicked. Then the front half hinged shut over their faces.

An hour later the masks sighed open. Julian's face was slick with sweat.

Marty sat up, looking refreshed. "Am I wrong?" "I don't think so. But I'd better go to North Dakota anyhow."

"It's nice this time of year. Dry."

IT WASN'T RAINING WHEN I left Marty's lab, but that turned out to be temporary. I saw a squall line coming at me down the street, but was providentially right by the Student Center. I locked up the bike and got through the doors just as the storm hit.

There's a bright and noisy coffee place under the dome on the top of the building. That felt right. I'd spent too long cooped up in two skulls, contemplating skullduggery.

It was crowded for a Saturday, I guess because of the weather. It took me ten minutes to get through the line and negotiate a cup of coffee and a roll, and then there was no place to sit. But the inside of the dome had a ledge at the proper height for parking against.

I reviewed what I'd taken from Marty's brain:

The 10 percent casualty figure for jacking didn't tell the whole story. The raw figures were that 7.5 percent die, 2.3 percent are mentally disabled, 2.5 percent are slightly impaired, and 2 percent wind up like Amelia, unharmed but not jacked.

But the classified part is that more than half of the deaths are draftees who were slated to be mechanics, killed by the complexity of the soldierboy interface. Many of the others are due to undertrained surgeons and bad operating conditions in Mexico and Central America. On the large scale Marty was talking about, you wouldn't use human surgeons at all, except for oversight. Automated brain surgery, Jesus. But Marty claimed it was a couple of orders of magnitude simpler when you didn't have to wire into a soldierboy.

And even if it were ten percent death, the alternative is one hundred percent, chasing life all the way out to Hubble's Wall.

Still, how do you get normal people to do it? Civilians who do it fit pretty narrow profiles: empaths, thrill-seekers; the chronically lonely and the sexually ambiguous. A lot of people who are in Amelia's position: someone they love is jacked, and they want to be there.

The basic strategy is, first, you don't give it away. One thing we've learned from the Universal Welfare State is that people devalue things they don't pay for. It would cost a month of entertainment credits-but as a matter of fact, you'd be spending most of that month unconscious, anyhow.

And the empowerment factor will become compelling after a very few years: people who aren't humanized will be less successful in the world. Maybe less happy, too, though that's harder to demonstrate.

Another little problem was what to do with people like Amelia? They couldn't be jacked, and so they couldn't be humanized. They would be handicapped and angry-and able to do violence. Two percent of six billion is 120 million people. One wolf for every forty-nine sheep is another way of looking at it. Marty suggested that initially we relocate all of them onto islands, asking all the humanized islanders to emigrate.

Anybody could live comfortably anywhere, once we use the nanoforges to make other nanoforges and give them out freely to everyone, Ngumi or Alliance.

But the first order of business was to humanize the soldierboys and their leaders. That meant infiltrating Building 31 and isolating the high command for a couple of weeks. Marty had a plan for that, the War College in Washington ordering a simulation exercise that required isolation.

I was to be a "mole." Marty had had my records modified, so that I'd just had an understandable episode of nervous exhaustion. "Sergeant Class is fit for duty, but it is recommended that Portobello take advantage of his education and experience, and transfer him to the command cadre." Prior to that, he would do some selective memory transfer and storage: I would temporarily forget the suicide attempt, the takeover plot, and the apocalyptic results of the Jupiter Project. I would just go in and be myself.

My old platoon, as part of another "experiment," would stay jacked long enough to become humanized, and I could be inside Building 31 to open the door for them when they came in to replace the security platoon.

The generals would be treated well. Marty would have temporary attachment orders cut for a neurosurgeon and her anesthesiologist from a base in Panama; together they have a phenomenal success rate of ninety-eight percent in jack installation.

Today, Building 31; tomorrow, the world. We could work outward from Portobello, and downward from Marty's Pentagon contact, and quickly have all of the armed forces humanized. The war would end, incidentally. But the larger battle would just be beginning.

I stared out at the campus through the blurring sheets of water while I ate the sweet crab-apple roll. Then I leaned back against the glass and surveyed the coffee shop, coming back down to earth.

Most of these people were only ten or twelve years younger than me. It seemed impossible, an unbridgeable chasm. But maybe I was never quite in that world – chatter, giggle, flirt-even when I was their age. I had my head in a book or a console all the time. The girls I had sex with back then were in the same voluntarily cloistered minority, glad to share quick relief and get back to the books. I'd had terrible earthshaking loves before college, like everybody, but after I was eighteen or nineteen I settled for sex, and in that era there was plenty of it. Now the pendulum was swinging back to the conservatism of Amelia's generation.

Would that all change, if Marty had his way-if we had our way? There's no intimacy like being jacked, and a lot of the intensity of teenaged sex was fueled by a curiosity that jacking would satisfy in the first minute. It remains interesting to share experiences and thoughts with the opposite sex, but the overall gestalt of being male or female is just there, and is familiar a few minutes after you make contact. I have physical memories of childbirth and miscarriage, menstruation and breasts getting in the way. It bothers Amelia that I share cramps and PMS with my platoon; that all the women have been embarrassed by involuntary erections, have ejaculated, know how the scrotum limits the ways you sit and walk and cross your legs.

Amelia got a taste of that, a whisper, in the two minutes or less we had in Mexico. Maybe part of our problem now was rooted in her frustration at having had just a glimpse. We'd only had sex a couple of times since the abortive attempt the night after I saw her with Peter. The night after I jackfucked with Zoe, to be fair. And there was so much happening, the end of the universe and all, that we hadn't had time or inclination to work on our own problems.

The place smelted kind of like a gym crossed with a wet dog, with an overlay of coffee, but the boys and girls didn't seem to notice. Searching, preening, displaying-a lot more outright primate behavior than they revealed in a physics class.

Watching all that casual mating ritual simmering, I felt a little sad and old, and wondered whether Amelia and I would ever completely reconcile. It was partly that I couldn't get the picture of her and Peter out of my mind. But I had to admit that part of it was Zoe, and all her tribe. We'd all felt kind of sorry for Ralph, his endless harrying after jills. But we'd also felt his ecstasy, which had never diminished.

I shocked myself by wondering whether I could live like that, and in the same instant shocked myself again by admitting I could. Relationships emotionally limited, temporarily passionate. And then back to real life for awhile, until the next one.

The undeniable lure of that extra dimension-feeling her feeling you, thoughts and sensations twining together-in my heart I'd built a wall around that, labeled it "Carolyn," and shut the door. But now I had to admit that it had been pretty impressive just with a stranger; however skilled and sympathetic, still a stranger, with no pretending about love.

No pretending: that was true in more than one way. Marty was right. Something like love was there automatically. Sex aside, for several minutes she and I had been closer, in terms of knowing, than some normal couple who'd been together fifty years. It does start to fade as soon as you unjack, and a few days later, it's the memory of a memory. Until you jack again, and it slams back. So if you kept it going for two weeks, it would change you forever? I could believe that.

I left Marty without discussing a timetable, which was literally an unspoken agreement. We wanted time to sort through each other's thoughts.

I also didn't discuss how he was able to have military medical records altered and have pretty high-ranking officers shuffled around at will. We hadn't been jacked deeply enough for that information to come through. There was an image of one man, a longtime friend. I wished I didn't even know that much.

I wanted to postpone any action, anyhow, until I had jacked with the humanized people in North Dakota. I didn't really doubt Marty's veracity, but I wondered about his judgment. When you're jacked with someone, "wishful thinking" has a whole new meaning. Wish hard enough and you can drag other people along with you.

JULIAN WATCHED THE RAIN for about twenty minutes and decided it was not going to let up, so he splashed on home through it. Of course, it stopped when he was half a block from the apartment.

He locked the bike up in the basement and sprayed the chain and gears with oil. Amelia's bike was there, but that didn't mean she was home.

She was sound asleep. Julian made enough noise getting his suitcase to wake her.

"Julian?" She sat up and rubbed her eyes. "How did it go with – " She saw the suitcase. "Going somewhere?"

"North Dakota, for a couple of days."

She shook her head. "Why on earth ... oh, Marty's freaks."

"I want to jack with them and check for myself. They may be freaks, but we may all be joining them."

"Not all," she said quietly.

He opened his mouth and shut it, and picked out three pairs of socks in the dim light. "I'll be back in plenty of time for the Tuesday class."

"Be getting a lot of calls Monday. The Journal doesn't come out till Wednesday, but they'll be calling everybody."

"Just stack 'em up. I'll tap in from North Dakota."

Getting to that state was going to be harder then he thought. He found three military nights that would zigzag him to the water-filled crater Seaside, but when he tried to reserve space he was informed by the computer that he no longer had a "combat" flag, and so would have to fly standby. It predicted that he had about a fifteen percent chance of making all three flights. Getting back on Tuesday would be even more difficult.

He called Marty, who told him he'd see what could be done, and called back one minute later. "Give it another try."

This time he got all six flights booked with no comment. The "C" for combat had been restored to his serial number.

Julian carried his armload and the suitcase into the living room to pack. Amelia followed him, shrugging into a nightgown.

"I might be going to Washington," she said. "Peter's coming back from the Caribbean so that he can do a press conference tomorrow."

"That's a change of heart. I thought he'd gone down there to avoid publicity." He looked up at her. "Or is he coming back mainly to see you?"

"He didn't exactly say."

"But he is paying for the ticket, right? You don't have enough credit left this month."

"Of course he is." She folded her arms on her chest. "I'm his coresearcher. You'd be welcome there, too."

"I'm sure. Better that I investigate this aspect of the problem, though." He finished packing the small suitcase and looked around the room. He stepped over to an end table and picked up two magazines. "If I asked you not to go, would you stay here?"

"You would never ask me that."

"That's not much of an answer."

She sat down on the sofa. "All right. If you asked me not to go, we would fight. And I would win."

"So is that why I don't ask you?"

"I don't know, Julian." She raised her voice a little. "Unlike some people, I can't read minds!"

He set the magazines inside the suitcase and carefully sealed it shut, thumbprinting the lock. "I really don't mind if you go," he said quietly. "This is something we have to get through, one way or another." He sat down next to her, not touching.

"One way or another," she repeated.

"Just promise me that you won't stay permanently."

"What?"

"Those of us who can read minds can also tell the future," he said. "By next week, half the people involved in the Jupiter Project will be sending out resumes. I'm only asking that if he offers you a position, don't just say yes."

"All right. I'll tell him I have to discuss it with you. Fair enough?"

"That's all I ask." He took her hand and brushed his lips across her fingers. "Don't rush into anything."

"How about... I don't rush and you don't rush."

"What?"

"Pick up the phone. Get a later flight to North Dakota." She rubbed the top of his thigh. "You're not going out that door until I convince you that you're the only one I love."

He hesitated and then picked up the phone. She knelt on the floor and started unbuckling his belt. "Talk fast."

THE LAST LEG OF my flight was from Chicago, but it overshot Seaside by a few miles so we could get a glimpse of the Inland Sea. "Sea" is a little grandiose; it's only half again as big as the Great Salt Lake. But it's impressive, a perfect blue circle sketched inside with white lines of wakes from pleasure craft.

The place I was headed was only six miles from the airport. Taxis cost entertainment credits but bikes were free, so I checked one out and pedaled there. It was hot and dusty, but the exercise was welcome after being stuck in airplanes and airports all morning.

It was a fifty-year-old building style, all mirror glass and steel frame. A sign on the frizzled lawn said ST.BARTHOLOMEW'S HOME.

A man in his sixties, wearing a priest's collar with everyday clothes, answered the door and let me in.

The foyer was a white box devoid of ornament, except for a crucifix on one wall facing a holo of Jesus on the other. Uninviting institutional couch and chairs with inspirational literature on the table between them. We went through double doors into an equally plain hall.

Father Mendez was Hispanic, his hair still black, his lined dark face scored with two long old scars. He looked frightful, but his calm voice and easy smile dispelled that.

"Forgive us for not coming out to greet you. We don't have a car and we don't go out much. It helps maintain our image of being harmless old loonies."

"Dr. Larrin said your cover story contained a grain of truth."

"Yes, we're poor addled survivors of the first experiments with the soldierboy. People tend to shy away from us when we do go out."

"You're not an actual priest, then."

"In fact I am, or rather, was. I was defrocked after being convicted of murder." He stopped at a plain door that had a card with my name on it, and pushed it open. "Rape and murder. This is your room. Come on down to the atrium at the end of the hall when you've freshened up."

The room itself wasn't too monkish, an oriental carpet on the floor, modern suspension bed contrasting with an antique rolltop desk and chair. There was a small refrigerator with soft drinks and beer, and bottles of wine and water on a sideboard with glasses. I had a glass of water and then one of wine while I took off my uniform and carefully smoothed and folded it for the return trip. Then a quick shower and more comfortable clothes, and I went off in search of the atrium.

The corridor was featureless wall along the left; on the right were doors like mine, with more permanent nameplates. A frosted-glass door at the end opened automatically as I reached for it.

I stopped dead. The atrium was a cool pine forest. Cedar smell and the bright sound of a creek tumbling somewhere. I looked up and, yes, there was a skylight; I hadn't somehow been jacked and transferred to somebody's memory.

I walked down a pebbled path and stood for a moment on the plank bridge over a swift shallow stream. I heard laughter up ahead and followed the faint smell of coffee around a curve into a small clearing.

A dozen or so people in their fifties and sixties stood and sat around. There was rustic wooden furniture, various designs arranged in no particular order. Mendez separated himself from a small conversational group and strode over to me.

"We usually gather here for an hour or so before dinner," he said. "Can I get you a drink?"

"Coffee smells good." He led me to a table with samovars of coffee and tea and various bottles. There was beer and wine in a tub of ice. Nothing homemade and nothing cheap; a lot of it imported.

I gestured at the cluster of Armagnacs, single-malts, anejos. "What, you have a printing press grinding out ration cards?"

He smiled and shook his head, Ming two cups. "Nothing so legal." He set my cup down by the milk and sugar. "Marty said we could trust you enough to jack, so you'll know eventually." He studied my face. "We have our own nanoforge."

"Sure, you do."

"The Lord's mansion has many rooms," he said, "including a huge basement, in this case. We can go down and look at it later on."

"You're not kidding?"

He shook his head and sipped coffee. "No. It's an old machine, small, slow, and inefficient. An early prototype that was supposedly dismantled for parts."

"You're not afraid of making another big crater?"

"Not at all. Come sit over here." There was a picnic table with two pairs of black-box jacks. "Save a little time here." He handed me a green jack and took a red one. "One-way transfer."

I plugged in and then he did, and clicked a switch on and off.

I unjacked and looked at him, speechless. In one second, my entire world view was changed.

The Dakota explosion had been rigged. The nanoforge had been tested extensively in secret, and was safe. The Alliance coalition that developed it wanted to close off potentially successful lines of research. So after a few carefully composed papers-top-secret, but compromised-they cleared out North Dakota and Montana and supposedly tried to make a huge diamond out of a few kilos of carbon.

But the nanoforge wasn't even there. Just a huge quantity of deuterium and tritium, and an igniter. The giant H-bomb was buried, and shaped in such a way as to minimize pollution, while melting out a nice round glassy lake bed, large enough to be a good argument against trying to make your own nanoforge out of this and that.

"How do you know? Can you be sure it's true?"

His brow furrowed. "Maybe ... maybe it is just a story. Impossible to check by asking. The man who brought it into the chain, Julio Negroni, died a couple of weeks into the experiment, and the man he got it from, a cellmate in Raiford, was executed long ago."

"The cellmate was a scientist?"

"So he said. Murdered his wife and children in cold blood. Should be easy enough to check the news records, I guess around '22 or '23."

"Yeah. I can do that tonight." I went back to the serving table and poured a splash of rum into the coffee. It was too good a rum to waste that way, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I remember thinking that phrase. I didn't yet know quite how desperate the times were.

"Cheers." Mendez raised his cup as I sat back down. I tipped mine toward him.

A short woman with long flowing gray hair came over with a handset. "Dr. Class?" I nodded and took it. "It's a Dr. Harding."

"My mate," I explained to Mendez. "Just checking to make sure I got here."

Her face on the handset was the size of my thumbnail, but I could see she was clearly upset. "Julian-there's something going on."

"Something new?" I tried to make that sound like a joke, but could hear the shakiness in my voice.

"The Journal jury rejected the paper."

"Jesus. On what grounds?"

"The editor says they 'decline to discuss it' with anyone but Peter."

"So what does Peter – "

"He's not home!" A tiny hand fluttered up to knead her forehead. "He wasn't on the flight. The cottage in St. Thomas says he checked out last night. But somewhere between the cottage and the airport he ... I don't know..."

"Have you checked with the police on the island?"

"No ... no; that's the next step, of course. I'm panicking. I just wanted to, you know, hoped he had talked to you?"

"Do you want me to call them? You could – "

"No, I'll do it. And the airlines, too; double-check. I'll get back to you."

"Okay. Love you."

"Love you." She switched off.

Mendez had gone off to refresh his coffee. "What about this jury? Is she in trouble?"

"We both are. But it's an academic jury, the kind that decides whether a paper gets published."

"Sounds like you have a lot tied up in this paper. Both of you."

"Both of us and everybody else in the world." I picked up the red plug. "This is automatically oneway?"

"Right." He jacked in and then I did.

I wasn't as good at transmitting as he was, even though I was jacked ten days a month. It had been the same with Marty the day before: if you're used to two-way, you wait for feedback cues that never come. So with a lot of blind alleys and backtracking, it took about ten minutes to get everything across.

For some time he just looked at me, or maybe he was looking inward. "There is no question in your own mind. It's doom."

"That's right."

"Of course I have no way to evaluate your logic, this pseudo-operator theory. I take it that the technique itself is not universally accepted."

"True. But Peter got the same result independently."

He nodded slowly. "That's why Marty sounded so strange when he told me you were coming. He used some stilted language like 'vitally important.' He didn't want to say too much, but he wanted to warn me." He leaned forward. "So we're walking along Occam's razor now. The simplest explanation of these events is that you and Peter and Amelia were wrong. The world, the universe, is not going to end because of the Jupiter Project."

"True, but – "

"Let me carry this along for a moment. From your point of view, the simplest explanation is that somebody in a position of power wants your warning to be suppressed."

"That's right."

"Allow me the assumption that nobody on this jury would profit from the destruction of the universe. Then why, in God's name, would anyone who thought your argument had merit want to suppress it?"

"You were a Jesuit?"

"Franciscan. We run a close second in being pains in the ass."

"Well... I don't know any of the people on the review board, so I can only speculate about their motivations. Of course they don't want the universe to go belly-up. But they might well want to put a lid on it long enough to adjust their own careers-assuming all of them are involved in the Jupiter Project. If our conclusions are accepted, there are going to be a lot of scientists and engineers looking for work."

"Scientists would be that venal? I'm shocked."

"Sure. Or it could be a personal thing against Peter. He probably has more enemies than friends."

"Can you find out who was on the jury?"

"I couldn't; it was anonymous. Maybe Peter could wheedle it out of someone."

"And what do you make of his disappearance? Isn't it possible he saw some fatal flaw in the argument and decided to drop out of sight?" "Not impossible."

"You hope something bad happened to him." "Wow. It's almost as if you could read my mind." I sipped some coffee, now unpleasantly cool. "How much did I let slip there?"

He shrugged. "Not a lot."

"You'll know everything minutes after we jack two-way. I'm curious."

"You don't mask very well. But then you haven't had much practice."

"So what did you get?"

"Green-eyed monster. Sexual jealousy. One specific image, an embarrassing one."

"Embarrassing for you?"

He tilted his head to about ten degrees of irony. "Of course not. I was speaking conventionally." He laughed. "Sorry. I didn't mean to be patronizing. I don't suppose anything just physical would embarrass you, either."

"No. The other part is still hanging there, though. Unresolved."

"She's not jacked."

"No. She tried and it didn't take."

"Wasn't long ago?"

"Couple of months. May twentieth."

"And this, um, episode was after that?"

"Yeah. It's complicated."

He took the cue. "Let's go back to ground zero. What I got from you-assuming that you're right about the Jupiter Project-is that you and Marty, but Marty more than you, believe that we have to rid the world of war and aggression right now. Or the game is up."

"That's what Marty would say." I stood up. "Get some fresh coffee. You want something?"

"Splash of that rum. You're not as certain?"

"No ... yes and no." I concentrated on the drinks. "Let me read your mind, for a change. You think that there's no need for haste, once the Jupiter Project's deactivated."

"You think otherwise?"

"I don't know." I set the drinks down and Mendez touched his and nodded. "When I jacked with Marty I got a sense of urgency that was completely personal. He wants to see the thing well in process before he dies."

"He's not that old."

"No, sixty-some. But he's been obsessed with this since you guys were made; maybe before. And he knows it will take a while to get going." I searched for words; logician's words. "Marty's feelings aside, there's an objective rationale for urgency; the black-and-white one of scale: anything else we do or don't do is trivial if there's the slightest chance that this could come to pass."

He sniffed the rum. "The destruction of everything."

"That's right."

"Maybe you're too close to it, though," he said. "I mean, you're talking about a huge project here. It's not something that a Hitler or a Borgia could cook up in his backyard."

"In their own times, no. Now they could," I said. "You of all people should see how."

"Me of all people?"

"You've got a nanoforge in your basement. When you want it to make something, what do you do?"

"Ask it. We tell it what we want and it goes into its catalogue and tells us what raw materials we have to come up with."

"You can't ask it to make a duplicate of itself, though."

"They say no, it would melt down if you did. I'm not inclined to try."

"But that's just part of the programming, right? In theory, you could short-circuit it."

"Ah." He nodded slowly. "I see where you're heading."

"That's right. If you could get around that injunction, you could say, in effect, 'Re-create the Jupiter Project for me,' and if it had access to the raw materials, and the information, it could do it."

"As an extension of one person's will."

"That's right."

"My God." He drank the rum and set the glass down hard. "My God."

"Everything," I said. "A trillion galaxies disappear if one maniac says the right sequence of words."

"Marty has a lot of faith in the monsters he created," Mendez said, "to let us share this knowledge."

"Faith or desperation. Guess I got a mixture of both from him."

"You hungry?"

"What?"

"You want dinner now, or should we all jack first?"

"That's what I'm hungry for. Let's do it."

He stood up and brought his hands together in two explosive claps. "Big room," he shouted. "Marc, you stay out and keep watch." We followed everyone to a double door on the other side of the atrium. I wondered what I was getting myself into.

JULIAN WAS USED TO being ten people at once, but it was stressful and confusing at times, even with people you had grown close to. He didn't really know what to expect, linking with fifteen men and women he'd never met, who had been jacked together for twenty years. That would be alien territory even without Marty's pacifistic transformation. Julian had used his horizontal liaison to weakly link with other platoons, and it was always like breaking in on a family discussion.

Eight of these had been mechanics, at least, or pro-tomechanics. He was more nervous about the others, the assassins and murderers. More curious about them, too.

Maybe they could teach him something about living with memories.

The "big room" held a ring-shaped table surrounding a holo pit. "Most of us get together here for the news," Mendez said. "Movies, concerts, plays. Fun to have all the different points of view."

Julian wasn't sure about that. He'd mediated too many firestorms in his platoon, where one person came up with a strong opinion that divided the ten into two bickering camps. It took about a second to start, and sometimes an hour to sort out.

The walls were dark mahogany and the table and its chairs were fine-grained spruce. A slight whisper of linseed oil and furniture polish. In the pit, an image of a forest clearing, dappled sunlight on wildflowers.

There were twenty seats. Mendez offered Julian a chair and sat down next to him. "You might want to plug in first," he said, "let people come in one at a time and introduce themselves."

"Sure." Julian realized this had all been rehearsed. He stared at the wildflowers and plugged himself in.

Mendez was the first one, waving a silent hello. The link was strange, powerful in a way he'd never come close to experiencing. It was startling, like seeing the sea for the first time-and it was like a sea in a literal way; Mendez's consciousness floated in a seemingly endless expanse of shared memory and thought. And he was comfortable with it the way a fish is comfortable with the sea, moving through its invisibility.

Julian tried to communicate his reaction to Mendez, along with a sense of rising panic; he wasn't sure whether he could manage two such universes, let alone fifteen. Mendez said it actually gets easier with more, and then Cameron plugged in to prove it.

Cameron was an older man, who had been a professional soldier for eleven years when he volunteered for the project. He had gone to a sniper school in Georgia, and trained for long-distance murder with a variety of weapons. Mostly he had used the Mauser Fernschiesser, which could target people around a corner or even over the horizon. He had fifty-two kills, and separate grief for each of them, and a single large pang for the humanity he had lost with the first shot. He also remembered the exhilaration the kills had given him, at the time. He had fought in Colombia and Guatemala, and automatically made a connection with Julian's jungle days, absorbing and integrating them almost instantly.

Mendez was still there, too, and Julian was aware of his immediate connection with Cameron, casually sorting through what the soldier had taken from his new contact. That part was not so alien, except for the speed and completeness of it. And Julian could understand why the totality could become more clear as more people joined: all the information was already there, but parts of it were better focused now that Cameron's point of view had combined with Mendez's.

Now Tyler. She was one of the murderers, too, having remorselessly killed three people in one year for money, to support a drug habit. That was just before cash became obsolete in the States; she had been captured in a routine check when she tried to emigrate to a country that had both paper pesos and designer drugs. Her crimes were older than Julian was, and although she didn't deny legal or moral responsibility for them, they literally had been done by a different person. The DD doper who lured three pushers into bed and killed them there, as a favor for their boss, was just a vivid melodramatic memory, like a movie you saw a few hours ago. For the peaceful part of her day, Tyler was part of the Twenty, as they still called themselves in their minds, even though four had died; other times she worked as an arbitrageur, bartering and buying commodities in dozens of different countries, Alliance and Ngumi. With their own nanoforge, the Twenty could survive without wealth-but then if the machine asked for a cup of praseodymium, it was nice to have a few million rupees close to hand, so Tyler could buy it without having to go through a lot of tiresome paperwork.

The others came in more rapidly, or seemed to, once Julian got over the initial strangeness.

As each of the fifteen presented himself or herself, another part of the vast, but now not endless, structure became clear. When they all had logged in, the ocean was more like an inland sea, huge and complex, but thoroughly mapped and navigable.

And they sailed together for what seemed like hours, in a voyage of mutual exploration. The only one they had ever jacked with outside the Twenty was Marty, who was a sort of godfather figure, remote because he only jacked one-way with them now.

Julian was a vast treasure of quotidian detail. They were hungry for his impressions of New York, Washington, Dallas-every place in the country had been drastically changed by the social and technological revolution, the Universal Welfare State, that the nanoforge had wrought. Not to mention the endless Ngumi War.

The nine who had been soldiers were fascinated with what the soldierboy had become. In the pilot program they had been taken from, the primitive machines were little more than stick men with one laser finger. They could walk around and sit or lie down, and open a door if the latch was simple. They all knew from the news what the current machines were capable of doing, and in fact three of them were warboys, after a fashion. They couldn't go to the conventions, but they followed units and jacked into soldierboy crystals and strings. It was nothing like being jacked two-way with an actual mechanic, though.

Julian was embarrassed by their enthusiasm but could share their amused feedback at his embarrassment. He was familiar enough with that from his platoon.

A lot of it became more and more familiar-feeling as he grew used to the scale of it. It wasn't only that the Twenty had been together so long; they had also been around a long time. At thirty-two, Julian was the oldest in his platoon by several years; all together, they had less than three hundred years of experience. The aggregate age of the Twenty was well over a thousand, a lot of that time spent in mutual contemplation.

They weren't exactly a "group mind," but they were a lot closer to that state than Julian's platoon. They never argued, except for amusement. They were gentle and content. They were humane ... but were they quite human?

This was the question that had been in the back of Julian's mind from the time Marty first described the Twenty: maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.

The others picked up on this worry and said no, we're still human in all the ways that count. Human nature does change, and the fact that we've developed tools to direct that change is quintessentially human. And it must be a nearly universal concomitant to technological growth everywhere in the universe; otherwise, there would be no universe. Unless we're the only technological intelligence in the universe, Julian pointed out; so far there's no evidence to the contrary. Maybe our own existence is evidence that we're the first creatures to evolve far enough to hit the reset button. Someone does have to be first.

But maybe the first is always the last.

They caught the hopefulness that Julian was protecting with pessimism. You're much more idealistic than us, Tyler pointed out. Most of us have killed, but none of us was driven to attempt suicide by remorse over the act.

Of course there were a lot of other factors, which Julian didn't have to explain. He was cushioned by wisdom and forgiveness-and suddenly had to get out!

He pulled the plug and was surrounded but alone, fifteen people staring down at the wildflowers. Staring into their collective soul.

He checked his watch and was shocked. Only twelve minutes had actually passed during all those seeming hours.

One by one they unjacked. Mendez kneaded his face and grimaced. "You felt outnumbered."

"That's part of it... out-gunned. All of you are so good at this, it's automatic. I felt, I don't know, out of control."

"We weren't manipulating you."

Julian shook his head. "I know. You were being very careful that way. But I felt like I was being absorbed anyhow. By... by my own willingness. I don't know how long I could stay jacked with you before becoming one of you."

"And that would be such a bad thing?" Ellie Frazer said. She was the youngest, almost Amelia's age, beautiful hair prematurely white.

"Not for me, I think. Not for me personally." Julian studied her quiet beauty and knew, along with everyone else, exactly how desperately she desired him. "But I can't do it yet. The next stage of this project involves going back to Portobello with a set of false memories, infiltrating the command cadre. I can't be as ... obviously different as you are."

"We know that," she said. "But you could still spend a lot more time with us – "

"Ellie," Mendez said gently, "turn off the goddamned pheromones. Julian knows what's best for him."

"I don't, actually. Who would? Nobody's ever done anything like this before."

"You have to be cautious," Ellie said in a way that was reassuring and infuriating: we know exactly what you think, and though you're wrong, we'll go along with it.

Marc Lobell, the chess master and wife murderer who had stayed out of the circle to answer the phone, ran pounding over the little bridges and skidded to a stop in front of them.

"A guy in uniform," he said, panting. "Here to see Sergeant Class."

"Who is it?" Julian said.

"A doctor," he said. "Colonel Zamat Jefferson."

MENDEZ IN ALL THE authority of his own black uniform, came along with me to meet Jefferson. He stood up slowly when we walked into the shabby foyer, setting down a Reader's Digest half his age.

"Father Mendez; Colonel Jefferson," I said. "You went to some trouble to find me."

"No," he said, "it was some trouble to get here, but the computer tracked you down in a few seconds."

"To Fargo."

"I knew you'd take a bicycle. There was only one place to do that at the airport, and you left them an address."

"You pulled rank."

"Not on civilians. I showed them my ID and said I was your doctor. Which is not false."

"I'm okay now. You can go."

He laughed. "Wrong on both counts. Can we sit?"

"We have a place," Mendez said. "Follow me."

"What is 'a place'?" Jefferson said.

"A place where we can sit." They looked at each other for a moment and Jefferson nodded.

Two doors down the corridor, we turned into an unmarked room. It had a mahogany conference table with overstuffed chairs and an autobar. "Something to drink?"

Jefferson and I wanted water and wine; Mendez asked for apple juice. The bar wheelie brought our orders while we were sitting down.

"Is there some way we can help each other?" Mendez said, folding his hands on his small paunch.

"There are some things Sergeant Class might shed some light on." He stared at me for one second. "I suddenly made full colonel and had orders cut for Fort Powell. Nobody in Brigade knew anything about it; the orders came from Washington, some 'Medical Personnel Redistribution Group.'"

"This was a bad thing?" Mendez said.

"No. I was gratified. I've never been happy with the Texas and Portobello posting, and this move took me back to the area where I grew up.

"I'm still in the middle of moving, settling in. But I was going through my appointment calendar yesterday, and your name came up. I was scheduled to jack with you and see how well the antidepressants are working."

"They're working fine. Are you traveling thousands of miles to check up on all your old patients?"

"Of course not. But I punched up your file out of curiosity, almost automatically-and what do you know? There's no record of your having contemplated suicide. And it seems you have new orders cut, too. Authorized by the same major general in Washington who cut my orders. But you're not part of the 'Medical Personnel Redistribution Group'; you're in a training program for assimilation into command structure. A soldier who wanted to commit suicide because he killed someone. That's interesting.

"And so I trace you down to here. A rest home for old soldiers who aren't so old, and some of whom aren't soldiers."

"So you want to lose your colonelcy," Mendez said, "and go back to Texas? To Portobello?"

"Not at all. I'll risk telling you this: I didn't go through channels. I don't want to rock the boat." He pointed at me. "But I have a patient here, and a mystery I'd like to solve."

"The patient's fine," I said. "The mystery is something that you don't want to be involved in."

There was a long, thick silence. "People know where I am."

"We don't mean to threaten you, or frighten you," Mendez said. "But there's no way you have the clearance to be told about this. Julian can't let you jack with him, for that reason."

"I have top-secret clearance."

"I know." Mendez leaned forward and said quietly: "Your ex-wife's name is Eudora and you have two children – Pash, who's in medical school in Ohio, and Roger, who's in a New Orleans dance company. You were born on 5 March 1990 and your blood type is O-Negative. Do you want to know your dog's name?"

"You're not threatening me with this."

"I'm trying to communicate with you."

"But you're not even in the military. Nobody here is, except Sergeant Class."

"That should tell you something. You have top-secret clearance and yet my identity is concealed from you."

The colonel shook his head. He leaned back and drank some wine. "There's been time enough for somebody to find out these things about me. I can't decide whether you're some kind of super-spook or just one of the best bullshit artists I've ever come across."

"If I were bluffing, I'd threaten you now. But you know that, and that's why you said what you just said."

"And so you threaten me by making no threat."

Mendez laughed. "Takes one to know one. I will admit to being a psychiatrist."

"But you're not in the AMA database."

"Not anymore."

"Priest and psychiatrist is an odd combination. I don't suppose the Catholic Church has any record of you, either."

"That's harder to control. It would be cooperative of you not to check."

"I don't have any reason to cooperate with you. If you're not going to shoot me or throw me in a dungeon."

"Dungeon's too much paperwork," Mendez said. "Julian, you've jacked with him. What do you think?"

I remembered a thread from the common mind session. "He's completely sincere about doctor-patient confidentiality."

"Thank you."

"So if you left the room, he and I could talk patient-to-doctor. But there's a catch."

"There is indeed," Mendez said. He remembered the thread as well. "A trade you might not want to make."

"What's that?"

"Brain surgery," Mendez said.

"You could be told what we're doing here," I said, "but we'd have to make it so that no one could learn it from you."

"Memory erasure," Jefferson said.

"That wouldn't be enough," Mendez said. "We'd have to erase the memory of not only this trip and everything associated with it, but also your memories of treating Julian and people who knew him. That's too extensive."

"What we'd have to do," I said, "is take out your jack and fry all the neural connections. Would you be willing to give that up forever, to be let in on a secret?"

"The jack is essential to my profession," he said. "And I'm used to it, would feel incomplete without it. For the secret of the universe, maybe. Not for the secret of St. Bartholomew's Home."

Someone knocked on the door and Mendez said to come in. It was Marc Lobell, holding a clipboard over his chest.

"May I have a word with you, Father Mendez?"

When Mendez left, Jefferson leaned over toward me. "You're here of your own free will?" he said. "No one's coerced you?"

"No one."

"Thoughts of suicide?"

"Nothing could be farther from my mind." The possibility was still back there, but I wanted to see how this turned out. If the universe ceased to exist, it would take me with it anyhow.

I suspected that that would be the attitude of someone resigned to suicide, and that realization may have shown on my face.

"But something's bothering you," Jefferson said.

"When did you last meet someone with nothing bothering him?"

Mendez came through the door alone, carrying the clipboard. A lock on the door clicked behind him.

"Interesting." He asked the bar for a cup of coffee and sat down. "You've taken a month's leave, Doctor."

"Sure, moving."

"People expect you back in what, a day or two?"

"Soon."

"What people? You're not married or living with anyone."

"Friends. Colleagues."

"Sure." He handed the clipboard to Jefferson.

He glanced at the top sheet and the one under it. "You can't do this. How could you do this?" I couldn't read what was on either sheet, but they were some sort of signed orders.

"Obviously, I can. As to how," he shrugged. "Faith can move mountains."

"What is it?"

"I'm TDY'ed here for three weeks. Vacation canceled. What the hell is going on?"

"We had to make a decision while you were still in the building. You've been invited to join our little project here."

"I decline the invitation." He tossed the clipboard down and stood up. "Let me out of here."

"Once we've had a chance to talk, you'll be free to stay or go." He opened a box inlaid in the table's surface and unreeled a red jack and a green one. "Oneway."

"No way! You can't force me to jack with you."

"Actually, that's true." He gave me a significant look. "I couldn't do anything of the sort."

"I could," I said, and pulled the knife out of my pocket. I pushed the button and the blade flicked out and then began to hum and glow.

"Are you threatening me with a weapon? Sergeant?"

"No, I'm not. Colonel." I raised the blade to my neck and looked at my watch. "If you aren't jacked in thirty seconds, you'll have to watch me cut my own throat."

He swallowed hard. "You're bluffing."

"No. I'm not." My hand started to tremble. "But I suppose you've lost patients before."

"What is so goddamned important about this thing?"

"Jack and find out." I didn't look at him. "Fifteen seconds."

"He will, you know," Mendez said. "I've jacked with him. His death will be your fault."

He shook his head and walked back to the table. "I'm not sure of that. But you seem to have me trapped." He sat down and slid the jack in.

I turned off the knife. I think I was bluffing.

Watching people who are jacked is about as interesting as watching people sleep. There was nothing to read in the room, but there was a notepad and stylus, so I wrote a letter to Amelia, outlining what had been going on. After about ten minutes, they started to nod regularly, so I finished the letter quickly, encrypted it and sent it.

Jefferson unjacked and buried his face in his hands. Mendez unjacked and stared at him.

"It's a lot to assimilate all at once," he said. "But I really didn't know where to stop."

"You did right," Jefferson said, muffled. "I had to have it all." He sat back and exhaled. "Have to link with the Twenty now, of course."

"You're on our side?" I said.

"Sides. I don't think you have a snowball's chance. But yes, I want to be part of it."

"He's more committed than you are," Mendez said.

"Committed but not convinced?"

"Julian," Jefferson said, "with all due respect for your years as a mechanic, and all the suffering you've gone through for what you've seen ... for having killed that boy ... it may be that I know more about war and its evil than you do. Secondhand knowledge, admittedly." He scraped sweat off his forehead with the blade of his hand. "But the fourteen years I've spent trying to put soldiers' lives back together make me a pretty good recruit for this army."

I wasn't really surprised at that. A patient doesn't get too much unguarded feedback from his therapist-it's like a one-way jack with a few controlled thoughts and feelings seeping back-but I knew how much he hated the killing, and what the killing did to the killers.

AMELIA SHUT DOWN HER machine for the day and was stacking papers, ready to go home, long bath and a nap, when a short bald man tapped on her office door. "Professor Harding?"

"What can I do for you?"

"Cooperate." He handed her an unsealed plain envelope. "My name is Harold Ingram, Major Harold Ingram. I'm an attorney for the army's Office of Technology Assessment."

She unfolded three pages of fine print. "So would you care to tell me in plain English what this is all about?"

"Oh, it's very simple. A paper that you co-authored for the Astrophysical Journal was found to contain material germane to weapons research."

"Wait. That paper never got past peer review. It was rejected. How could your office hear of it?"

"I honestly don't know. I'm not on the technical end."

She scanned the pages. "'Cease and desist'? A subpoena?"

"Yes. In a nutshell, we need all of your records pertaining to this research, and a statement that you have destroyed all duplicates, and a promise that you will discontinue the project until you hear from us."

She looked at him and then back at the document. "This is a joke, right?"

"I assure you it is not."

"Major... this is not some sort of gun we're designing. It's an abstraction."

"I don't know anything about that."

"How on God's green earth do you think you can stop me from thinking about something?"

"That's not my business. I just need the records and the statement."

"Did you get them from my co-author? I'm really just a hired hand, called in to verify some particle physics."

"I understand that he's been taken care of."

She sat down and put the three pages on the desk in front of her. "You can go. I have to study these and consult with my department head."

"Your department head is in full cooperation with us."

"I don't believe that. Professor Hayes?"

"No. It was J. MacDonald Roman who signed – "

"Macro? He's not even in the loop."

"He hires and fires people like you. He's about to fire you, if you aren't cooperative." He was completely still, and didn't blink. It was his big line.

"I have to talk to Hayes. I have to see what my boss – "

"It would be better if you just signed both documents," he said mildly, theatrically, "and then I could come by tomorrow for the records."

"My records," she said, "cover the spectrum from meaningless to redundant. What does my collaborator have to say about all this?"

"I wouldn't know. I believe that was the Caribbean branch."

"He disappeared in the Caribbean. You don't suppose your department killed him."

"What?"

"Sorry. The army doesn't kill people." She got up. "You can stay here or come along. I'm going to copy these pages."

"It would be better if you didn't copy them."

"It would be lunacy if I didn't."

He stayed in her office, probably to snoop around. She walked past the copy room and took the elevator down to the first floor. She stuffed the papers into her purse and jumped into the lead cab at the stand across the street. "Airport," she said, and considered her diminishing options.

All of her travel to and from D.C. had been on Peter's open account, so she had plenty of credits to get to North Dakota. But did she want to leave a trail pointing directly to Julian? She would call him from the airport public phone.

But wait; think. She couldn't just get on a plane and sneak off to North Dakota. Her name would be on the passenger list, and somebody would be waiting for her when she got off the plane. "Change destination," she said. "Amtrak station." The cab's voice verified the change and it made a U-turn.

Not many people traveled long distances by train, mostly people phobic about heights or just determined to do things the hard way. Or people who wanted to go someplace without leaving a document trail. You bought train tickets by machine, with the same kind of anonymous entertainment chits you used for cabs. (Bureaucrats and moralists would love to have had the clumsy system replaced with plastic, like the old cash cards, but voters would just as soon not have the government know what they were doing when, and with whom. The individual coupons made barter and hoarding simple, too.)

Amelia's timing was perfect; she ran for the 6:00 Dallas shuttle and it pulled out just as she sat down.

She turned on the screen on the back of the seat in front of her and asked for a map. If she touched two cities, the screen would show departure and arrival times. She jotted down a list; she could go from Dallas to Oklahoma City to Kansas City to Omaha to Seaside in about eight hours.

"Who you runnin' from, honey?" An old woman with white hair in short spikes was sitting next to her. "Some man?"

"Sure am," she said. "A real bastard."

The old woman nodded and pursed her lips. "Best you get some good food to carry while you in Dallas. You don' wanna be livin' on the crap they serve in that lounge car."

"Thank you. I'll do that." The woman went back to her soap opera and Amelia punched through the Amtrak magazine, See America! Not much she wanted to see.

She pretended to nap the half hour to Dallas. Then she said good-bye to the spike-coiffed lady and dove into the crowd. She had more than an hour before the train to Kansas City, so she bought a change of clothing-a Cowboys sweatshirt and loose black exercise pants-and some wrapped sandwiches and wine. Then she called the North Dakota number Julian had left her.

"Jury change its mind?" he asked.

"More interesting than that." She told him about Harold Ingram and the threatening paperwork.

"And no word from Peter?"

"No. But Ingram knew that he was in the Caribbean. That's when I decided I had to run."

"Well, the army's tracked me down, too. Just a second." He left the screen and came back. "No, it's just Dr. Jefferson, and nobody knows he's here. He's pretty much joined us." The phone camera tracked him as he sat down. "This Ingram didn't mention me?"

"No, your name's not on the paper."

"But it's only a matter of time. Even not connecting me with the paper, they know that we live together and will find out I'm a mechanic. They'll be here in a few hours. Do you have to change trains anywhere?"

"Yes." She checked her sheet. "The last one is Omaha. I'm supposed to get there just before midnight... eleven forty-six Central Time."

"Okay. I can get there by then."

"But then what?"

"I don't know. I'll talk it over with the Twenty."

"The twenty whats?"

"Marty's bunch. Explain later."

She went to the machine and, after a moment's hesitation, just bought a ticket as far as Omaha. No need to guide them any farther, if she was being followed.

Another calculated risk: two of the phones had data jacks. She waited until a couple of minutes before the train was going to leave, and called her own database. She downloaded a copy of the Astrophysical Journal article into her purse notebook. Then she instructed the database to send copies to everyone in her address book with *phys or *astr in their ID lines. That would be about fifty people, more than half of them involved with the Jupiter Project in some way. Would any of them read a twenty-page draft that was mostly pseudo-operator math, with no introduction, no context?

She herself, she realized, would look at the first line and dump it.

Amelia's reading on the train was less technical, but severely limited, since she couldn't identify herself to access any copyrighted material. The train had its own magazine on-screen, and courtesy images of USA Today and some travel magazines that were just ads and puffery. She spent a lot of time looking out the window at some of America's least appealing urban areas. The farmland that flowed by in the dusk between cities was peaceful, and she dozed. The seat woke her up as they pulled into Omaha. But it wasn't Julian waiting for her.

Harold Ingram stood on the platform, looking smug. "It's wartime, Professor Harding. The government is everywhere."

"If you tapped a public phone without a warrant – "

"Not necessary. There are hidden cameras in all train and bus stations. If you are wanted by the federal government, the cameras look for you."

"I haven't committed any crime."

"I don't mean 'wanted' in the sense of a wanted criminal. Just desired. Your government desires you. So it found you. Come with me, now."

Amelia looked around. Running was out of the question, with robot guards and at least one human policeman watching the area.

But then she saw Julian, in uniform, half hidden behind a column. He touched a finger to his lips.

"I'll go with you," she said. "But this is against my will, and we're going to wind up in court."

"I certainly hope so," the major said, leading her toward the terminal. "My natural habitat" They passed Julian and she could hear him fall into step behind them.

They passed through the terminal and walked toward the lead cab in line outside.

"Where are we going?"

"First flight back to Houston." He opened the cab door and helped her in, not too gently.

"Major Ingram," Julian said.

One foot in the cab, he half-turned. "Sergeant?"

"Your flight's been canceled." He had a small black pistol in his hand. It fired almost inaudibly, and as Ingram slumped, Julian caught him and appeared to be helping him into the cab. "1236 Grand Street," he said, feeding it a chit from Ingram's book. He pocketed the book and closed the door. "Surface roads, please."

"It's good to see you," she said, trying to sound neutral. "We know someone in Omaha?"

"We know someone parked on Grand Street."

The cab worked its zigzag way across town, Julian watching behind for a tail. It would have been obvious in the sparse traffic.

When they turned onto Grand Street he looked ahead. "The black Lincoln in the next block. Double-park next to it and we'll get out there."

"If I am ticketed for double-parking, you will be liable, Major Ingram."

"Understood." They pulled up next to a big black limousine with North Dakota "clergy" plates and opaque windows. Julian got out of the cab and hauled Ingram into the back seat of the Lincoln. It looked like a soldier assisting a drunken comrade.

Amelia followed them. In the front seat was the driver, who was a rough-looking gray-haired man with a priest's collar, and Marty Larrin.

"Marty!"

"To the rescue. Is that the guy who served you the papers?" Amelia nodded. As the car started, Marty held out his hand to Julian. "Let me see his ID."

He handed over a long wallet. "Blaze, meet Father Mendez, late of the Franciscan order and Raiford Maximum Security Prison." He flipped through the wallet as he talked, holding it up to a small dashboard light.

"Dr. Harding, I presume." Mendez held a hand up in greeting while he steered with the other one, the automobile under manual control. In the next block a chime sounded and Mendez let go of the wheel and said, "Home."

"This is annoying," Marty said, and switched on the overhead light. "Check his pockets and see if he has a copy of his orders." He held up the wallet and scrutinized a photo of the man with a German shepherd. "Nice dog. No family pictures."

"No wedding ring," Amelia said. "Is that important?"

"Simplify things. Is he jacked?"

Amelia felt the back of his head while Julian rifled his pockets. "Wig." She lifted the back of it with a painful ripping sound. "Yes, he is."

"Good. No orders?"

"No. Flight manifest, though, for him and up to three others, 'two prisoners plus security.' "

"When and where?"

"Open ticket to Washington. Priority 00."

"Real high or real low?" Amelia asked.

"The highest. I think you might not be our only mole, Julian. We need one in Washington."

"This guy?" Julian said.

"After he's been jacked with the Twenty for a couple of weeks. It'll be an interesting test of the process's effectiveness." They didn't know how extreme a test it would be.

WE HADN'T BROUGHT HANDCUFFS or anything, so when he started to stir halfway to St. Bart's, I gave him another pop with the trank gun. Searching for his papers, I'd found an AK 101, a small Russian flechette pistol that's a favorite of assassins everywhere-no inconvenient metal. So I didn't want to sit in the back seat and chat with him, even with his gun safe in the glove compartment. He probably knew some way to kill me with his pinky.

It turns out I was close. When we got him to St. Bart-tying him to a chair before administering the antitrank – and jacked him one-way with Marty, we found out he was a "special operator" for Military Intelligence, assigned to the Office of Technology Assessment. But there was little else there, other than memories of his childhood and youth, and an encyclopedic knowledge of mayhem. He hadn't been treated to the selective memory transfer, or destruction, that Marty had said I would need for my own mole burrowing. It was just a strong hypnotic injunction, which wouldn't hold up for long, after he was jacked two-way with the Twenty.

Until then, all he and we knew was what room in the Pentagon he was to report to. He was to find Amelia and bring her back-or kill her and himself if it came to a desperate situation. All he knew about her was that she and another scientist had discovered a weapon so powerful that it could win the war for the Ngumi if it fell into the wrong hands.

That was an odd way of characterizing it. We used the metaphor "pressing the button," but of course for the Jupiter Project to proceed to its final cataclysmic stage, you needed a team of scientists, doing a sequence of complicated actions in the proper order.

The process could be automated, in theory, after the first careful walk-through. But then once you'd done it, there would be no one left to automate it.

So someone on the Astrophysical Journal jury was linked to the military establishment-no surprise. But then was the jury's rejection because of pressure from above, or had they actually found an error in our work?

One part of me wanted to think, well, if they actually had disproved our theory, there would be no reason to go after Amelia, and presumably Peter. But maybe Intelligence thought it would be prudent to get rid of them anyhow. There's a war on, they keep saying.

There were four of us in the plain conference room, besides the jacked couple: Amelia and me, Mendez, and Megan Orr, the doctor who checked out Ingram and administered the antitrank. It was three in the morning, but we were pretty wide awake.

Marty unjacked himself and then pulled the plug out of Ingram's head. "Well?" he said.

"It's a lot to assimilate," Ingram said, and looked down at his bound arms. "I could think better if you untied me."

"Is he safe?" I asked Marty.

"You're still armed?"

I held up the trank pistol. "More or less."

"We could untie him. Under some circumstances he might make trouble, but not in a locked room, observed, under armed guard."

"I don't know," Amelia said. "Maybe you ought to wait until he's had the sweetness-and-light treatment. He seems like a dangerous character."

"We can deal with him," Mendez said.

"It's important to talk with him while he's just had interrogational contact," Marty said. "He knows the facts of the matter, but he hasn't been engaged at a deep emotional level."

"I suppose," Amelia said. Marty untied him and sat back.

"Thank you," Ingram said, rubbing his forearms.

"What I'd like to know first is – "

What happened next was so quick that I couldn't have described it until after I saw the record from the overhead camera.

Ingram shifted his chair slightly, as if half-turning toward Marty as he spoke. Actually, he was just getting leverage and clearance.

In a sudden move worthy of an Olympic gymnast, he twisted out of the chair and up, clipping Marty on the chin with his toe, and then making a complete spin halfway down the table to where I was sitting, the pistol in my hand but not aimed. I got off one wild shot and then he slammed into my chest with both feet, breaking two ribs. He snatched the gun out of midair and shoulder-rolled off the table, landing feet-first with a balletic spin that ended with his foot catching me in the throat as I fell. It was probably intended to kick my brains out, but nobody's perfect.

I couldn't see much from my vantage point on the floor, but I heard Marty say "Won't work," and then I passed out.

I woke up back in my chair, with Megan Orr withdrawing a hypodermic gun from my bare forearm. A man I recognized but couldn't name was doing the same to Amelia-Lobell, Marc Lobell, the only one of the Twenty I hadn't jacked with.

It was as if we'd gone back a few minutes in time and had been given a chance to start over. Everybody was back in their original positions; Ingram safely tied up again. But my chest hurt with every breath and I wasn't sure I could talk.

"Meg," I croaked. "Dr. Orr?" She turned around. "Can I see you when this is over? I think he broke a rib or two."

"You want to come with me now?"

I shook my head, which hurt my throat. "Want to hear what the bastard has to say."

Marc was standing at the open door. "Give me half a minute to get situated."

"Okay." Megan went over to Ingram, the only one not awake now, and waited.

"Observation room next door," Mendez said. "Marc watches what's going on and can flood the room with knockout gas in seconds. It's a necessary precaution, dealing with outsiders."

"You really can't do violence, then," Amelia said.

"I can," I said. "Mind if I kick him a few times before you revive him?"

"We can defend ourselves, actually. I can't imagine initiating violence." Mendez gestured at me. "But Julian presents a familiar paradox-if he were to attack this man, there's not much I could do."

"What if he attacked one of the Twenty?" Marty asked.

"You know the answer to that. It would be self-defense, then. He'd be attacking me."

"Should I go ahead?" Megan asked. Mendez nodded and she gave Ingram his shot.

He came to, instinctively pulling at his bonds, jerking twice, and then he settled back. "Quick anesthetic, whatever it was." He looked at me. "I could have killed you, you know."

"Bullshit. You did your best."

"You better hope you never find out what my best is."

"Gentlemen," Mendez said, "we'll agree that you two are the most dangerous people in this room – "

"Not by a long shot," Ingram said. "The rest of you are the most dangerous people under one roof in the whole world. Maybe in all of history."

"We've considered that viewpoint," Marty said.

"Well, consider it some more. You're going to make the human race extinct in a couple of generations. You're monsters. Like creatures from another planet, bent on our destruction."

Marty smiled broadly. "That's a metaphor I hadn't thought of. But all we're really bent on destroying is the race's capability for self-destruction."

"Even if that could work, and I'm not convinced it could, what good is it if we wind up being something other than men?"

"Half of us aren't men to begin with," Megan said quietly.

"You know what I mean."

"I think you meant just what you said."

"How much does he know," I asked, "about why this is urgent?"

"No details," Marty said.

"'The ultimate weapon,' whatever that is. We've been surviving ultimate weapons since 1945."

"Earlier," Mendez said. "The airplane, the tank, nerve gas. But this one's a little more dangerous. A little more ultimate."

"And you're behind it," he said, looking at Amelia with an odd, avid expression. "But all these other people, this 'Twenty,' know about it."

"I don't know how much they know," she said. "I haven't jacked with them."

"But you will, soon enough," Mendez said to him. "Then it will all become clear."

"It's a federal offense to jack someone against his will."

"Really. I don't suppose they'd be amused about our drugging someone and kidnapping him, either. Then tying him up for interrogation."

"You can untie me. I see that physical resistance is futile."

"I think not," Marty said. "You're just a little too fast, too good."

"I won't answer any questions, tied up."

"Oh, I think you will, one way or another. Megan?"

She held up the hypo gun and turned a dial on the side two clicks. "Just give the word, Marty."

"Tazlet F-3," Megan said, smiling.

"Now that's really illegal."

"Oh my. They'll just have to cut our bodies down and hang us again."

"That's not funny." Obvious strain in the man's voice.

"I think he knows about the side effects," Megan said. "They last a long time. Great for weight loss." She stepped toward him and he shrank back.

"All right. I'll talk."

"He'll lie," I said.

"Maybe," Marty said. "But we'll find out the next time we jack. You said we were the most dangerous people in the world. Going to make the human race extinct. Would you care to amplify that statement?"

"That's if you succeed, which I don't think is likely. You'll convert a large fraction of us, from the top down, and then the Ngumi, or whoever, will step in and take over. End of experiment."

"We'll be converting the Ngumi, too."

"Not many and not fast enough. Their leadership is too fragmented. If you converted all the South American goomies, the African ones would step in and eat them up."

Kind of a racist image, I thought, but kept it to my cannibal self.

"But if we do succeed," Mendez said, "you think that would be even worse?"

"Of course! Lose a war, you can rise up and fight again. Lose the ability to fight..."

"But there would be no one to fight," Megan said.

"Nonsense. This thing can't work on everybody. You have one tenth of one percent unaffected, they'll arm themselves and take over. And you'll just give them the key to the city and do whatever they say."

"It's not that simplistic," Mendez said. "We can defend ourselves without killing."

"What, the way you've defended yourself against me? Gas everybody and tie them up?"

"I'm sure we'll work out strategies well ahead of time. After all, we'll have plenty of minds like yours at our disposal."

"You're actually a soldier," he said to me, "and you go along with this foolishness?"

"I didn't ask to be a soldier. And I can't imagine a peace as foolish as this war we're in."

He shook his head. "Well, they've gotten to you. Your opinion doesn't count."

"In fact," Marty said, "he's on our side naturally. He hasn't gone through the process. Neither have I."

"Then the more fools you both are. Get rid of competition and you're just not human anymore."

"There's competition here," Mendez said. "Even physical. Ellie and Megan play vicious handball. Most of us are slowed down by age, but we compete mentally in ways you couldn't even comprehend."