Hot Sky at Midnight

13

the annunciator said, “Dr. Van Vliet is calling on Line Three, Dr. Rhodes.”

Quarter to nine in the morning. It was never too early for Van Vliet to start in on the day’s toil and trouble. A lot too soon, though, for Rhodes to start in on the day’s drinking. “Later,” he said. “I don’t want to take any calls just now.”

Rhodes had been in the office since just after eight, early for him. At the end of yesterday’s workday his desk had still been littered with unfinished items, and both virtual extensions had been loaded as well; and, as usual, things had come pouring in all night long for his urgent attention in the morning. The weather had taken a turn for the worse too: sweltering heat, well beyond the norms even of modern times, and scary Diablo winds blasting down out of the east, bringing once again the threat, now practically a weekly event, of stirring up devastating fires along the bone-dry grassy ridges of Oakland and Berkeley. The winds were carrying with them, also, an oppressive shitload of toxic fumes out of the valley stagnation pool, potent enough to cut acne-like pockmarks into the facades of stone buildings.

Aside from that, Rhodes had had a lousy night with Isabella the night before, and maybe three hours of sleep. It was an all-around wonderful morning. He was restless, irritable, swept by bursts of rage and confusion and occasionally something close to panic. For almost an hour now he had been spinning his wheels, accomplishing nothing.

Time to get to work, finally.

“Open, sesame,” Rhodes said stolidly, and Virtual One began to disgorge streaming ribbons of data into the air.

He watched it all come spilling out, aghast. Reports, reports, reports. Quantitative stuff about enzyme absorption from the Portland lab; a long stupid screed from one of the sub-departments dealing with a foredoomed project to provide senior citizens with lung implants instead of genetic retrofits; a formidable batch of abstracts and preprints from Nature and Science that he would never have time in this present life to deal with; a horrendous pile of crap about some employee arbitration hassle involving third-floor janitorial androids overstepping their stipulated spheres of responsibility; the minutes of a meeting at the Sao Paulo office of a Samurai subsidiary he had never heard of, the work of which evidently impinged in some unspecified way on his department’s area of operations. And on and on and on and on.

Rhodes felt like sobbing.

Somehow his job had become all administration, very little actual doing of science any more. The science around here was done by kids like Van Vliet, while Rhodes coped with the inundation of reports, budget requests, strategic analyses, dead-end schemes like the lung-implant business, et cetera, et cetera, all the while attending an infinity of petrifyingly dull meetings and killing the occasional evening trying to fend off the troublesome curiosities of Israeli spies. For after-hours amusement he engaged in bewildering corrosive strife with the woman he supposedly loved. Somehow this was not the life he had intended for himself. Somehow he had veered off course, that was obvious.

And the unthinkable heat today—the hard, malignant, abrasive air—the hot howling wind—

Van Vliet—

Isabelle—

Isabelle—

Isabelle—

Wild unfocused sensations swept him like a sudden fever. Some kind of explosion seemed to be building up within him. He found that frightening. It was days like this, Rhodes thought, that led otherwise peaceable men to jump off bridges or commit random acts of murder. Diablo winds could do that to you. They were famous for that.

My life is in need of fundamental change, he told himself. Fundamental change.

What kind of change was in order, though? The work? The Isabelle relationship? Paul Carpenter had told him to break up with her and to take a job with some other mega-corp. There was a lot of sense in both those suggestions.

But he simply wasn’t capable of the first, he thought, and the other was tempting but terrifying. Change jobs? Where would he go? How would he break free from Santachiara and Samurai? He was immobilized, tied hand and foot—to the Company, to Isabelle, to the adapto project, to the whole bloody mess.

He put his head in his hands. He sat listening to the wind.

Isabelle—

Oh, Jesus. Isabelle.

Last night, after dinner, at Isabelle’s place. Always trouble, when he stays there. He is sitting in the kitchen, by himself, sipping a Scotch. Isabelle has been very distant, cool, all evening, mysteriously so. Rhodes has never been able to understand what sends her into these periods of withdrawal, nor does she give him much help in figuring things out. Now she is busy in her little office off the living room with a memorandum she is dictating to herself about a consultation that day, one of her patients who is in deep shit.

He makes a critical mistake when she comes back in for a glass of water: trying to break through her reserve, Rhodes asks her a question about the particular problem she’s dealing with, wants to know if there’s some kind of special complication.

“Please, Nick.” Shoots him a basilisk glance. “Can’t you see I’m trying to concentrate?”

“Sorry. I thought you were taking a break.”

“I am. My mind isn’t.”

“Sorry,” he says again. “I didn’t know.” Smiles. Shrugs goodheartedly. Tries to make it all nice again. It seems to him that he spends at least half his time with Isabelle just trying to make it all nice again, patching things up after some misunderstanding that is mostly beyond his comprehension.

Instead of returning to the other room, she stands stiffly by the sink, hefting her water glass without drinking from it, as though measuring the specific gravity of its contents.

Says, after a bit, doom-and-gloom voice, “Yes, there is a complication. I’m starting to think that the girl is genuinely suicidal.”

So she wants to talk about it after all. Or else is just talking to herself out loud.

“Who is?” Rhodes asks, gingerly.

“Angela! Angela! Don’t you ever pay any attention?”

“Oh,” he says. “Right. Angela.” He had thought the patient in question was a certain Emma Louise. Isabelle can be extremely nonlinear sometimes.

He summons up what little he knows about Angela. Sixteen, seventeen years old, lives somewhere at the northern end of Berkeley, father a professor of history, or something, at the university. Under treatment by Isabelle for—what? Depression? Anxiety? No, Rhodes thinks: the girl has Greenhouse Syndrome. The new trendy thing. Total environmental paranoia. God knows why it should be setting in only now: it sounds very late-twentieth-century to him. But all the kids are getting it, it seems. A sense not just that the sky is an iron band around the planet, but that the actual walls are closing in, that the ceiling is descending, that asphyxiation is not very far away.

“Suicidal? Really?” Rhodes says.

“I’m afraid that she may be. She was wearing two face-lungs today, when she showed up for her session.”

“Two?”

“Convinced that one’s not enough. That the air is absolute poison, that if she takes a deep breath it’ll turn her lungs to mush. She wanted me to write a prescription for Screen for her, double the usual dose. I told her I’m not allowed to write any sort of prescriptions and she went into hysterics.”

“Sounds like the opposite of suicidal,” Rhodes says mildly. “Hyperconcerned about protecting herself, yes, but why would that mean—”

“You don’t get it. You never do, do you?”

“Isabelle—”

“She thinks that whatever precautions she takes will be entirely futile. She thinks she’s doomed, Nick. That we are on the threshold of the final apocalyptic environmental collapse, that she is living in the last generation of the human race, and that some hideous kind of gigantic eco-disaster is about to sweep down and destroy us all in the most awful possible way. She’s full of anger.”

“She has a right to be, I suppose. Though I think she’s a hundred years ahead of the time. But still—suicide—”

“The ultimate angry gesture. Spitting in the face of the world. Throwing her life away as a demonstration of protest.”

“You really think she will?”

“I don’t know. She very well might.” A new expression comes into Isabelle’s tense face: doubt, fear, uncertainty. Not her usual mode. She tugs unthinkingly at her hair, tangles it into knots. Pacing around the room, now. “What worries me, basically, is that this may be getting beyond my zone of professional capability. I’m a therapist, not a psychiatrist. I wonder if I should pass her along.”

She is debating entirely with herself. Rhodes is convinced of that now. But there is always the possibility that she may be expecting him to offer some indication that he’s listening.

“Well, certainly if you think there’s any risk—”

A softer voice. The therapist voice. “It would be a betrayal of trust, though. Angela and I have a covenant. I’m here to guide her. She has faith in me. I’m the only human being she does have faith in.” Then the tone hardens again. Instant switch: pure steel. Furious glare. Isabelle swings at the speed of light from mood to mood. “But why am I even talking to you about this? You couldn’t possibly understand the depth of her insecurities. Don’t you see, to send her for an outside consultation, to hand her off to some stranger at this delicate moment—”

“But if you’re afraid that she’ll kill herself, though—”

His mild words only heap more fuel on the fire. Isabelle is ablaze. “Look, Nick, this is for me to decide! There’s a transaction here that doesn’t involve you, that is utterly beyond your limited powers of comprehension, a complex personal transaction between this troubled girl and the one human being on Earth who genuinely cares for her, and you have no goddamned business sticking your uninformed opinion into—” She pauses, blinking like one who has suddenly awakened from a trance, drawing deep breaths, gulping the air in, as if even she has realized that she has gone a little too far around the bend with him.

A moment’s silence. Rhodes waits.

“This is all wrong,” she says.

“What is?”

“What we’re doing, you and I. We shouldn’t be getting into a fight over this,” Isabelle says, with a welcome softness coming into her voice.

“No.” In vast relief. “Absolutely right. We shouldn’t be getting into fights over anything, Isabelle.”

She seems genuinely to be trying to back off from her fury, her raging hostility. He can almost see the wheels shifting within her head.

He waits to see what’s coming next.

And then, without warning, what comes is a manic change of subject:

“Let’s talk about something else, all right? Did you know that Jolanda has been dating that Israeli? I thought that you had fixed her up with your friend Paul.”

Rhodes shifts his own gears as quickly as he can, happy to be released from contemplation of the despondent Angela. “Paul was just looking for a little amiable company that one night. Anyway, he’s off at sea now. —The Israeli, eh? How often has she been seeing him?”

“Every couple of nights ever since the Sausalito evening.”

Rhodes considers mat. He doesn’t care, basically, except that Jolanda and Isabelle are good friends, and this brings up the possibility that another disagreeable evening in Enron’s company may soon be forced upon him.

Isabelle says, “He’s invited her to take a trip with him, you know.”

“A trip? Where?”

“Some space habitat. I don’t remember which one.”

Rhodes smiles. “He’s a shrewd one, isn’t he? Jolanda’s been dying to go to the L-5s for years now. I thought that guy she knows in LA. was going to take her up there, but here’s Enron making his move first. —Of course, it’s never very hard for a man to get Jolanda’s attention.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Isabelle asks crisply.

Oh-oh.

The voice of cold steel has abruptly returned, and the basilisk eyes. Rhodes sees that he has stepped in things again.

He hesitates. “Well—that Jolanda is a hearty, healthy girl, full of robust appetites—”

“An easy lay, is that what you’re saying?”

“Look, Isabelle, I didn’t intend—”

“But that’s what you think she is, don’t you?” She’s off as fiercely as before, glaring, pacing, tugging. “That’s why you set her up with your old buddy Paul. A sure thing, a night’s fun for him.”

Well, of course. And Isabelle knows it too. This is a group of adults; Jolanda is no nun, and neither is Isabelle. It’s a lot too late to start praising Jolanda for her chastity. Isabelle, in defending her friend, is only looking for a fight. But Rhodes doesn’t dare say any of that.

He doesn’t dare say a thing.

Isabelle says it for him. “She’ll sleep with anybody, that’s what you told Paul. Right?”

“Not in so many words. But—for Christ’s sake!—listen, Isabelle, you know as well as I do that Jolanda gets around a lot. A lot.”

“Has she slept with you?”

“Isabelle!”

“Well, has she?”

In fact, she has. Rhodes isn’t sure whether Isabelle knows that Jolanda tells Isabelle all sorts of things, but perhaps has not told her that. He wonders what to say, not wanting events to escalate into real wildness tonight, but not wanting to get caught in a lie, either. He decides to temporize.

“What has that got to do with anything?” he asks.

“Has she or hasn’t she, Nick?”

A deep breath. All right, give her what she wants to know.

“Yes. Once.”

“Christ!”

“You were out of town. She came over. I don’t remember when this was. The day was really hot, a record breaker, and we went to the beach, and afterward—”

“All right. You don’t have to play back the whole video for me.” She has turned her back on him, and is standing like a marble statue by the window.

“Isabelle—”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“You want me to leave?”

“What do you think?”

“Are we going to break up over this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”

He senses a wavering in her voice, a softening. The old approach-avoidance thing, one of her specialties. Rhodes goes to her sideboard and pours himself a drink, a stiff one. Only then does he realize that he already has an unfinished one on the table. He takes a deep pull from the new drink and sets it down beside the other one.

“You can stay if you like,” she says indifferently, from very far away, no energy in her voice. “Or not, whichever you prefer.”

“I’m sorry, Isabelle.”

“About what?”

“Jolanda.”

“Forget it What difference does it make?” He is afraid for a moment that Isabelle now is going to confess some outside affair of her own. Intending, by telling him about it, either to punish him or to help him ease his guilt. Either way, he doesn’t want to hear anything like that from her, if there is anything to hear. As for him, Jolanda had been his only lapse. Going to bed with her that time had been almost automatic, unthinking: she had seemed to regard it as no more than a nice thing to do at the end of the evening, that one time, a cheerful little social grapple, meaning nothing, leading nowhere. And he had gone tumbling right along.

“Listen, Isabelle—”

Rhodes goes across the room to her and reaches toward her, letting his fingers come lightly to rest on her shoulders.

His hands are trembling. The muscles of her back are knotted. They feel like slabs of cast iron.

“I’d like to stay,” he tells her.

“Whatever you want.” Same distant tone.

“You knew, didn’t you? About Jolanda and me?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Then why—”

“To see what you’d say.”

“I get a gold star for being honest, at least.”

“Yes,” she says. “I guess you do. Look, I’m going inside to finish what I was doing, okay?”

She walks away from his touch. Rhodes returns to the middle of the room, to his two drinks, finishes one, then the other, and after a while pours himself a third. It is terrible rotgut: Isabelle has some perverse fondness for the worst brands. But he drinks what she has, anyway. No doubt this is one of the cheap algae-mash kinds, a real scandal that they dare to call it Scotch. Still, though: given a choice between bad liquor and no liquor, he will uncomplainingly drink bad, and plenty of it. Sometimes his own capacity amazes him, these days. He hears Isabelle getting ready for bed, eventually, and goes in to join her. It is past midnight and he is exhausted. Despite the air-conditioning the hot, stale night air from outside somehow has invaded her apartment, ghostly tendrils of smelly crud gliding right through the walls, filling every room from floor to ceiling with a heavy choking fug.

She faces away from him in the darkness. Rhodes strokes her back.

“Don’t” Sepulchral voice.

“Isabelle—”

“No. It’s late.”

He lies there stiffly, wide-awake. He can tell that she remains awake too. Time goes by: half an hour, an hour. A siren wails somewhere along the freeway. Rhodes thinks back over the evening, wondering why it had worked out this way.

She’s upset about the girl, Angela. That’s it. A threat to her sense of professional competence. And she’s probably fond of the girl, too. Countertransference, they call that. Not surprising. But then, the whole Jolanda business—

He reaches for her, touches her again.

Iron muscles. Rigid body.

He wants her desperately. Always does, every single night. His hand curves around past her arm and comes to rest on the soft mound of her right breast. Isabelle’s breasts are the only soft things about her: her body is lean, taut, athletic. She doesn’t move. Gently he caresses her. Breathes on the nape of her neck. No response. She could almost be dead.

Then she says, finally, “All right, if you want it so badly. Let’s get it over with!”

Rolls over, turns around. Glares at him, spreads her legs.

“Isabelle, for God’s sake—”

“Come on! What are you waiting for!”

Of course he doesn’t want it to be like this, not at all. Except that he is helpless with her, and when she tugs him brusquely into place on top of her, he is unable to resist. Quickly, miserably, he enters her—despite everything, she is lathered and ready—and her hips begin to move, driving him remorselessly onward toward a speedy finish. He covers her face with grateful kisses; but at the same time he is shocked, horrified, stunned by what they are doing. It is an angry, murderous fuck, the death of love. When he comes he bursts into tears.

She embraces him then, cradles him against her breasts, strokes his hair, whispers soft words. Making it all good again. My God, he thinks, my God, my God.

Rhodes hears Paul Carpenter’s voice, suddenly, in his mind.

—She’s a disturbed woman, Nick.

—No, she’s simply deeply committed to—

—Listen to me. She’s emotionally disturbed. So is her friend Jolanda, who you were kind enough to toss into my bed the other night. These are very sexually gifted women, and we who wander around looking for the solace of a little nookie are highly vulnerable to the mysterious mojo that throbs out at us from between their legs.

Right. Right. If he had any courage, he’d flee. He knows that. But such things have never come easily to Rhodes. He is fiercely retentive, desperately eager to hang on to anything that gives even the promise of some sort of solace.

Eventually Rhodes drifts off into troubled sleep. About five he awakens, kisses the sleeping Isabelle lightly on the tip of her nose, and goes home.

By a couple of minutes after eight he is in the office. The miasma of the night still hovers over him, but he hopes somehow to lift himself out of grim depression through a hard day’s work. At least, Rhodes thinks, in all of last night’s horrors they hadn’t gotten into yet another brawl over his research. But that was a very small comfort at best.

He held off Van Vliet as long as he could, well into mid-morning. Van Vliet gave him a headache in his gut. The authorization for upgrading of Van Vliet’s hemoglobin-research budget had gone along to New Tokyo four days ago, and in all likelihood it would sail through without any objections, given Rhodes’ high standing with upper-level Company management.

Until it did, though, Van Vliet would just have to sit tight. But the kid didn’t seem capable of sitting tight. Two or three times a day he was on the horn to Rhodes, wanting to tell him about this or that exciting new corollary to his preliminary theoretical statement. Rhodes didn’t have much appetite for another dose of that just now, not after last night, at least not so early in the day.

He killed as much time as he could, rummaging doggedly through both his virtual desks and all the clutter on his real one, signing papers without even reading them, flipping some documents down into dead storage unsigned, working mindlessly, shamelessly. Gradually Rhodes began to feel some of the newer abrasions in his soul starting to heal a little.

A couple of drinks helped him get through the bad time. The first one tasted strangely tinny—some residue from the evening before, he thought, damage to his palate from drinking too much of Isabelle’s God-knows-what brand of algae-mash Scotch—but the second drink made things better. And the third went down without any problems at all.

Finally, feeling reasonably well fortified and aware he could duck his meeting with the younger man no longer, Rhodes thumbed the annunciator and said, “I’m available to talk with Dr. Van Vliet, now.”

“Does that mean you’ll be taking calls again, Dr. Rhodes?”

“I suppose. Have there been any for me?”

“Just one,” the android said.

Isabelle! She’s sorry that everything became such a mess last night!

No. Not Isabelle. “A Mr. Nakamura called,” said the android.

“Who?”

“Mr. Nakamura, of East Bay Realty Associates. About the house in Walnut Creek that you are interested in buying.”

Rhodes didn’t know anyone named Nakamura. He wasn’t planning to buy a house in Walnut Creek or anywhere else.

“It must have been a wrong number,” Rhodes said. “He’s looking for some other Nicholas Rhodes.”

“He said that you were likely to think so. But he said to tell you that it was no mistake, that you would understand the terms of the offer right away and would be very pleased by them if you spoke to him.”

Nakamura?

Walnut Creek?

It made no sense. But all consideration of the matter would have to wait. Van Vliet was on the line again, now.

He wanted to bring some new charts to Rhodes’ office, right away. Big surprise, Van Vliet coming up with yet another batch of charts.

Rhodes sighed. “Charts of what?”

“Some new atmospheric extrapolations, the projected hydrogen cyanide levels and how we plan to cope with their special implications.”

“I’m terrifically stacked up here, Van. Can’t this wait a little?”

“But it’s tremendously exciting stuff.”

“Having to breathe hydrogen cyanide is exciting?” Rhodes asked. “Yes, I guess it would be. But not for very long.”

“That’s not what I mean, Nick,” said Van Vliet. He had suddenly begun calling Rhodes “Nick,” ever since the budget requisition had gone up to New Tokyo a few days before. Rhodes didn’t like it much. “You see, Nick, we’ve come up with a really awesome set of equations that indicate the likelihood of oceanic amino-acid formation. New amino acids. If I could just have five minutes to show you what I’m talking about—”

“Okay,” Rhodes said. “Five minutes.”

Van Vliet took fifteen. Mostly that was Rhodes’ fault: he let himself get interested. What Van Vliet’s projections seemed to show was that the upcoming chemical configuration of the ocean might be going to duplicate, to some small and largely unpredictable degree, certain aspects of the nutrient-soup composition of the primordial sea. After hundreds of years of cheerfully filling the whole biosphere with all manner of deadly waste, mankind apparently was about to generate still another terrific surprise for itself that had to do with life instead of death: a mixed package, unexpected biogenesis along with the expectable morbidity, a seaborne reprise of the original chemical forces that had initiated the appearance of Earth’s first living things, a hodgepodge of purines and adenylates and aminos stirring around and rearranging themselves into intricate polymers, some of them self-replicating, out of which might come—

Almost anything.

A shitstorm of random genetic information brewing in the depths of the twenty-fourth century’s seas.

“Do you see it?” Van Vliet cried. “The potential for new life-forms emerging, Nick? Creation starting all over again!”

Rhodes summoned a hearty chuckle from some recess of his soul. “A second chance for the trilobites, eh?”

Van Vliet didn’t seem amused. He gave Rhodes a reproachful look. “I mean one-celled organisms, Nick. Bacteria. Protozoa. An unpredictable pelagic micro-biota spontaneously evolving that could raise hell with the life-forms already present on the planet Such as us.”

Right, Rhodes thought. A load of strange evolutionary garbage hauling itself up out of the waters to plague an already quite adequately plagued planet.

It was an interesting speculative jump, and Rhodes said so, in all sincerity. In all sincerity, though, he didn’t understand what any of this had to do with the work of Santachiara Technologies’ Survival/Modification Program, at least not right away. Carefully he said, “I admire the care with which you’re working out all the implications of the situation, Van. But I’m not sure I could get budgetary approval for a study dealing with diseases caused by microorganisms that haven’t evolved yet.”

A cool, almost supercilious grin from Van Vliet. “On the contrary, Nick. If we can project the potential consequences of a quantum jump in natural evolutionary processes, we might be able to build in defenses against new and hostile kinds of—”

“Please, Van. One step at a time, okay? Okay?”

One step at a time, obviously, wasn’t the Van method. And plainly Rhodes’ failure to whoop with enthusiasm over this new angle was, for Van Vliet, one more example of the associate director’s hopeless conservatism. Rhodes pacified him, though, by congratulating him heartily on the new line of work, asking to see further studies, promising to take the topic of renewed biogenesis up at the very next meeting of the directors. And smoothly showed him to the door.

When Van Vliet was gone, Rhodes had one more drink, just a small one, to ease him through the transition into the day’s next problem.

Which was to ponder the Nakamura call again. Rhodes was still certain that Mr. Nakamura, whoever he might be, had called the wrong number. But how odd that Nakamura would have thrown in that business about there being no mistake, exactly as though he was anticipating Rhodes’ puzzled response. Something in that nagged at him, demanding resolution.

About that house in Walnut Creek that you are interested in buying.

The thought flashed through Rhodes’ mind that that might be some sort of code phrase—that it referred to some secret enterprise into which Nakamura meant to inveigle him, the sale of corporate secrets, or an intricate counterespionage ploy, something like that. Things like that went on in the megacorp world all the time, Rhodes knew. Though he had never had any firsthand experience of them.

Rhodes put through a call to Ned Svoboda in Imaging and Schematics.

Svoboda was an occasional after-hours drinking companion of his, who had the rare distinction of having worked for three different megacorps in a dozen years or so: not only Samurai Industries but also Kyocera-Merck and before that the somewhat less formidable IBM/Toshiba bunch. Svoboda was shrewd, Svoboda was about as trustworthy as anyone Rhodes could think of, and Svoboda had been around the block a couple of times. If anybody knew about corporate codes, industrial espionage, whatever, Svoboda was the one.

“You mind if I cruise over and talk to you for a couple of minutes?” Rhodes asked. “Something odd has come up and I need a little advice.” And, Rhodes did not explicitly need to add, it was something best not discussed over the Company communications net. The wires had ears. That was common knowledge.

Svoboda didn’t mind. Rhodes descended eight floors to Imaging and met Svoboda on the bubble-enclosed leisure terrace outside his office. He was a short, heavyset man of about forty, with dark rumpled hair and emphatic Slavic features.

Rhodes said, “I had a peculiar phone call this morning. Fellow with a Japanese name out of Walnut Creek—a realtor, he says. Says he’d like to talk to me about the house I’m interested in buying out there.”

“I didn’t know you were planning to move over the hill.”

“I’m not. I don’t know this Jap from Adam.”

“Ah so.”

“But he realizes that. When he phoned, he went out of his way to tell my annunciator that regardless of what I might think, this wasn’t a mistaken call, that I was the Rhodes he was trying to reach and that I would really be interested in the property he had to offer. So I began to wonder, Ned—”

Svoboda’s eyes widened. “Yeah, I bet you did.”

“And I thought maybe it’s more complicated than it appears at first glance—something that you might be able to explain to me, some kind of cryptic message that I ought to understand but don’t quite see the—”

“Shhh!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Just don’t say anything more, okay?” Svoboda held his left arm out and let his right hand go crawling quickly across the back of it in the funny little crab-walk gesture that universally meant, There probably are bugs here. The Company had its spy eyes everywhere—even on leisure terraces, it seemed. Svoboda said, “You have a pen and a piece of paper on you?”

“Sure. Here.”

It was a very small piece, but it was all that Rhodes could find. Svoboda clamped his lips together and wrote with exaggerated care, running his words across and down the side of the page in his effort to get down everything he wanted to say. He kept it covered with his other hand as he wrote, to prevent any hidden camera from seeing. When he was done he folded the piece in half, and in half again, and pressed it into the palm of Rhodes’ hand.

“Go for a little walk and read it,” Svoboda said. “Then maybe call me at home tonight if you want to talk about it any more, okay?”

He grinned and touched two fingers to the side of his head in a quick salute, and went back inside.

Rhodes, frowning, returned to his own area of the building. He thought of going into the washroom to read Svoboda’s note, but on reflection he considered that there was no place in the building more likely to have a secret scanner eye mounted in the wall than in a washroom. Instead he simply leaned against the wall outside his office and opened the folded scrap, cupping it in his hand, and held it up in front of his face, very close, as if trying to read his own palm.

It said, in heavy block letters:

Instantly Rhodes felt adrenaline beginning to surge. His heart was thumping with frightening force. What the hell was this?

From whom? Why?

He read the note again, read it two or three times, and then balled it up and stuffed it deep into his pocket.

They? Who were they?

There had been a pretty good earthquake in the Bay Area three years ago, six-point-something on the Richter scale. The whole building had swayed for two and a half minutes then. This felt like that.

Rhodes was trembling. He tried to control it, and failed.

Forget it, he told himself.

You don’t want to mess around with anything like this. You already have a job. It’s a good one. You have a fine department, plenty of good people working for you, nice pay, steady upward slope. You have never worked for anybody but Samurai Industries in your life. You have never wanted to work for anybody but Samurai Industries.

He reached into his pocket and touched the crumpled bit of paper.

Throw it away, Nick. Throw it away.

Rhodes went back into his office. More things were blinking on all the inputs, but he ignored them. He poured himself a drink, a pretty significant one.

He thought about what it might be like to work for another company.

Certainly he was stymied at Samurai by his own ambivalences and hesitations. Just as he was, also, in his relationship with Isabelle. Only a little while ago he had been thinking about the need for change in his life, and all that came roaring back through him now, the great surge of vague resentments, something turbulent, almost explosive, stirring inside him. It hadn’t been very long ago that he had told Paul Carpenter how deeply he feared giving Samurai Industries a monopoly over human adapto technology. And Paul had come right back at him with the solution to that. Quit Santachiara and go over to somebody like Kyocera-Merck. Take your whole department with you. Turn your gene technology over to the competition. Let Samurai and K-M fight it out for world domination.

Was he being handed a chance to do just that?

Then he should grab it, he thought.

At least find out what this is all about, he urged himself. Call Nakamura. Arrange to see him.

“Get me Mr. Nakamura, at East Bay Realty,” Rhodes told the annunciator giddily.

It was like making a date, he thought, that could lead to some kind of adulterous romance.

It took quite a while to get through. You would think realty agents would be eager to talk with potential customers, but evidently returning a call to Mr. Nakamura wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. Then finally lights began to flash and a Japanese face looked back at him from the visor. The standard inscrutability: flat inexpressive gaze, androidal smile. Somehow the face looked Japanese rather than Japanese-American, Rhodes thought, on no evidence at all. That was interesting.

“I am Mr. Kurashiki,” the face said. “Mr. Nakamura is deeply grateful for your response to his call. He is available to see you at any of the following times today or tomorrow.”

A menu appeared on the visor: noon, two P.M., four P.M., nine or eleven in the morning tomorrow.

Rhodes felt a faint chill. He wondered if he ever actually would meet Mr. Nakamura, whether there was a real Mr. Nakamura at all, even whether there was a real Mr. Kurashiki. Mr. Kurashiki looked and sounded more like a simulation than a person.

But then Rhodes told himself that he was being silly. Kurashiki was the appointments secretary, that was all; and he was real, all right, as real as any of these Japs ever could be. Svoboda had called it correctly: this was serious business, an actual job offer coming from an actual rival megacorp.

“Noon today,” Rhodes said. He would have to leave almost at once. But that was one way to keep his legendary unpunctualily from fouling things up. It was probably wisest to be on.time for this one. “If you’ll give me the driving directions—”

“You will be coming from Berkeley? The Santachiara Technologies tower?”

“Yes.”

“The trip will take you fourteen minutes and thirty seconds. As you enter Highway 24, instruct your car that the route module code is H112.03/accessWR52.”

Rhodes tapped for thirty seconds’ worth of data recall and the number came rolling out of the annunciator’s printout slot. He thanked Kurashiki and broke the contact.

“Cancel my afternoon appointments,” Rhodes told the annunicator. “I’m going out.”

The Diablos were still blowing when his car came up from the garage: a tangible wind, a palpable wind, hard and knife-sharp and maybe fifty miles an hour, and he would be driving right into it. You actually could see the wind. It was traveling visibly through the larger continuum of the atmosphere. It had the form of an eerie golden aura, a kind of urinous tint: a fast-moving organic haze, a virulent phosphorescent swirl of airborne industrial contaminants sailing westward out of the factory zone on the far side ofWalnut Creek The air was so full of the stuff that it seemed fertile, capable of impregnating anything it encountered on its way toward the ocean. Rhodes thought of Van Vliet’s new theory, the floating soup of amino acids out of which wondrously virulent bacteria would be generated. Maybe this wind was the key factor that would kindle into life, this very afternoon, the jolly new chemical configuration that Van Vliet said was soon due to take form in the seas.

Rhodes hated to let his car brain do the thinking. But in this case he didn’t know where the hell he was going, only that the route module code was H112.03/accessWR52, somewhere out in the vicinity of Walnut Creek.

“Take me to H112.03/accessWR52,” Rhodes told the car.

The car obediently repeated the numbers.

“And, by the way, where is that, exactly?” Rhodes asked.

But all the car could do was give him the route module code all over again. For the car brain, the location of H112.03/ accessWR52 was a place known as H112.03/accessWR52, period.

The vehicle held the road very nicely, considering the velocity of the oncoming wind. It took Rhodes with barely a wobble through the ancient Caldecott Tunnel and into the bleached, torched-looking countryside east of the hills, where the temperature was always twenty degrees warmer because the cool breeze off the Pacific was unable to make it that far inland, even on days when the Diablos weren’t roaring. Today, with the hot east wind blowing, the temperature differential was probably much greater: true desert heat out there, Rhodes thought, hot as a furnace, fry you like an omelet in half a minute. But he was secure inside the cozy sealed bubble of his car, which was taking him swiftly down the freeway, on past the venerable high-rise towers of the old quiet suburban towns, Orinda, Lafayette, Pleasant Valley, toward the sprawling ramshackle metropolis of Walnut Creek—and then, just before the Walnut Creek interchange, a zig and a zag and a departure from the trunk road, the car swinging now up into the hills. It was absolutely empty country up there, amazingly empty, dotted with the occasional gnarly form of an oak tree standing in the midst of sun-scorched grass. The car went onward through a security gate and then another, and then past a checkpoint that made the first two gates look like barriers made of cheesecloth.

Brilliant green sky-glo letters, floating in the air about forty feet up, announced:

So there was his answer, not that he really had any doubts left by this time.

The car, in the grasp of some invisible Kyocera-programmed highway brain, moved through the checkpoint, past a series of Babylonian-looking brick buildings, and into a reception dome.

Mr. Kurashiki was waiting for him there, no simulation at all, a real Japanese human person with a certain reptilian grace. Mr. Kurashiki bowed formally in the Japanese manner, a quick robotic click of his head. A quick robotic smile, too. Rhodes smiled back but did not return the bow. The formalities were done with; Mr. Kurashiki led Rhodes into a transport shaft that conveyed him upward and deposited him in an office that, from its ad hoc furnishings and general appearance of improvisation and barrenness, was obviously used only for just such impromptu conferences as these.

It was exactly noon.

Mr. Kurashiki vanished silently. Rhodes stepped forward. A surprisingly tall Japanese was standing at the precise center of the room, waiting for him. A different kind entirely, this one. He looked like something carved out of yellow-green obsidian: sharp features, shining skin texture, glossy wide-set jet-black eyes with a single dense unbroken eyebrow line above them. Powerful cheekbones, sharp as blades.

No bow from this one. A smile that seemed almost human, though.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Rhodes. I am so extremely glad that you were able to advantage us of your presence here today,” he said. “You will forgive me, I am sure, for our little subterfuge, our pretense of real-estate business. Such things are necessary sometimes, as of course I am certain you know.” His voice was deep and resonant and his accent was perceptibly alien: International Modern Japanese English, the purring accent of the exile race that in its various far-flung places of refuge had begun to develop its own new and characteristic way of speaking the world language. “But I have not introduced myself. I am Nakamura. Level Three Executive.” A business card jumped into his hand as if by a conjuring trick, elegant laminated parchment with gold trim, and he handed it to Rhodes in a smooth, practiced way.

Rhodes stared at the card. Its metallic lettering glowed with talismanic inner light. There was the Kyocera-Merck monogram, and the name HIDEKI NAKAMURA in flaring three-dimensional modernistic script, and a simple numeral 3 in one corner. The mark of status: Nakamura’s place on the corporate slope.

Level Three?

Level Three was puissant managerial material indeed, just one notch below the two practically imperial levels that were occupied almost entirely by the hereditary plenipotentiary ruling families of the great megacorps. In his whole corporate career Rhodes had never laid eyes on, let alone spoken with, anyone higher than Level Four.

A little shaken, he slipped the card into his pocket. Nakamura was now extending his hand again, this time just for a conventional Western handshake, and Rhodes took it. It felt more or less like the hand of any ordinary mortal.

Nakamura was still smiling, too. But behind the smile Rhodes imagined he perceived the cold rage that infested these high-level Japanese: despite all their wealth and power and intelligence, driven from their homeland by the furies of the sea. Forced to take up their lives here and there around the world in the midst of the hairy, ugly, smelly, big-nosed, pallid un-Japanese barbarians. And even to have to shake their hands now and then.

Nakamura said, “If I may offer you something to drink, Dr. Rhodes—I am partial to cognac, myself, and perhaps you would like to join me—”

They’ve really done their research, Rhodes thought admiringly.

“Yes,” he said, perhaps a little too quickly. “By all means. Please.”