第2章 HAWAII

Death, be not proud, though some

have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so

CHAPTER 1

Slowly, reluctantly, Keith Stoner awoke. The dream that had been swirling through his mind over and over again wafted away like drifting smoke, evaporated, until the last faint tendrils of it vanished and left him straining to remember.

Faintly, faintly the dream sang to him of another life, another world, of beauty that no human eye could see. But as he reached out with his mind to recapture the joy of it, the dream disappeared forever, leaving only a distant echo and the inward pain of unfulfilled yearning.

He opened his eyes.

A smooth gray expanse encompassed him. He was lying on his back. He could feel the weight of his body pressing down on a soft, flat surface. Instead of the deathly cold of space, he felt comfortably warm. Instead of the sealed pressure suit and helmet he had worn, he was naked beneath a smooth clean white sheet.

I'm back on Earth, he realized. I'm alive again.

He reached a hand upward. His outstretched fingertips touched the cool smooth curve of gray a scant few inches above his face. It felt like plastic, or perhaps highly polished metal. Something went click. He jerked his hand away. A series of high-pitched beeps chattered, like a dolphin scolding. The gray eggshell slid away, silently.

For long moments Stoner lay unmoving, his eyes focused on the white ceiling overhead. It looked like a normal ceiling of a normal room. It glowed faintly, bathing the room in pale light. Turning his head slightly, he saw that he was not lying on a bed, but on a shelflike extension built into a massive bulk of intricate equipment. A whole wall of gleaming metal and strange, almost menacing machinery, like the cockpit of a space shuttle combined with the jointed arms and grasping metal claws of robot manipulators. The machinery was humming faintly, and Stoner could see a bank of video display screens clustered at the far end of it. He recognized the rhythmic trace of an EKG on one screen, patiently recording his heartbeat. The wriggling lines of the other screens meant nothing to him, but he was certain that they were monitoring his body and brain functions, also. Yet he felt no electrodes on his skin. There were no wires or probes attached to him, not even an intravenous tube.

It was a hospital room, but unlike any hospital room he had ever known. No hospital smell, no odor of disinfectants or human suffering. More electronics and machinery than an intensive care unit. Stoner felt almost like a specimen in a laboratory. Propping himself on his elbows, he saw that the other half of the room was quite normal. The ceiling was smooth and creamy white, the walls a cool pale yellow. Sunlight slanted through the half-closed blinds of a single window and threw warm stripes along the tiled floor. An ordinary upholstered armchair was positioned by the window, with a small table beside it. Two molded plastic chairs stood against the wall. The only other furniture in the room was a small writing desk, its surface completely bare, and a walnut-veneer bureau with a mirror atop it.

Stoner looked at himself in the mirror.

None the worse for wear, he thought. His hair was still jet black, and as thick as ever. His face had always been longer than he liked, the nose just a trifle hawkish, the chin square and firm. But there was something strange about his eyes. They were the same gray he remembered, the gray of a winter sea. But somehow they looked different; he could not pin down what it was, but his eyes had changed.

He sat up straight and let the covering sheet drop to his groin. No dizziness. His head felt clear and alert. His naked body was still lean and well muscled; in his earlier life he had driven himself mercilessly in the discipline of tae kwan do.

In my earlier life, he echoed to himself. How many years has it been?

He gripped the sheet, ready to pull it off his legs and get out of bed. But he stopped and looked up at the ceiling. The smooth white was translucent plastic. There were lights behind it. And video cameras, Stoner knew. They were watching him.

He shrugged. Take a good look, he thought.

Yanking the sheet away, he swung his long legs to the floor and stood up. The machinery on the other side of the bed emitted one small, faint peep. Stoner flinched at it, startled, then relaxed into a grin. His legs felt a little rubbery, but he knew that was to be expected after so many years. How long has it been? he wondered again as, naked, he padded to the door that had to be the bathroom.

It was. But when he came out and surveyed his room again, he saw that there was no other door to it. Half stainless-steel laboratory, half cozy bedroom-but there were no closets, no connecting doors, no door anywhere that led out of the room.

CHAPTER 2

"I am not going into a board meeting until the experiment is decided, one way or the other."

Jo Camerata said it quietly, but with an edge of steel. The two men in her office glanced at each other uneasily.

The office was clearly hers. The textured walls blazed with slashing orange and yellow stripes against a deep maroon background, the dramatic colors of the Mediterranean. The carpet was thick and patterned in matching bold tones. If she wished, Jo could change the color scheme at the touch of a dial. This morning the fiery hues of her Neapolitan ancestry suited her mood perfectly.

Two whole walls of the office were taken up by floor-to-ceiling windows. The drapes were pulled back, showing the city of Hilo and, off in the distance, the smoldering dark bulk of Mauna Loa. Through the other window wall the Pacific glittered alluringly under a bright cloudless morning sky.

Although she was president of Vanguard Industries, Jo's office held none of the usual trappings of power. It was a modest-sized room, not imposing or huge, furnished with comfortable chairs and sofas and a small round table in the corner by the windows. No desk to form a barrier between her and her visitors. No banks of computer screens and telephone terminals. No photographs of herself alongside the great and powerful people of the hour. There was nothing in the room to intimidate her employees, nothing except her own dominant personality and unquenchable drive.

Jo sat in an ultramodern power couch of butter-soft leather the color of light caramel. Designed to resemble an astronaut's acceleration chair, it held a complete communications console and computer terminal in its armrests. Within its innards, the chair contained equipment for massage, heat therapy, and biofeedback sessions. It molded itself to the shape of her body, it could swivel or tilt back to a full reclining position at the touch of a fingertip.

But Jo was sitting up straight, her back ramrod stiff, her dark eyes blazing.

The two men sitting side by side on the low cushioned sofa both looked unhappy, but for completely different reasons. Healy, chief scientist of Vanguard Industries, wore a loose, short-sleeved white shirt over his shorts. Archie Madigan, the corporation's top lawyer, one of Jo's former lovers and still a trusted adviser, was in a more conservative shirt jacket of navy blue and soft pink slacks: the business uniform of the twenty-first-century executive male.

Jo was in uniform, too. For nearly twenty years she had worked and schemed her way to the top of Vanguard Industries. She had brains and energy and a driving, consuming ambition. And she never hesitated to use her femininity to help climb the corporate ladder of power the way some men use their skill at golf or their willingness to lick boots. She was wearing a one-piece zipsuit with tight Velcro cuffs at the ankles and wrists and a mesh midriff. Chocolate brown, it clung lovingly to her tall, lush figure. The zipper that led down the suit's front was opened just enough to suggest how interesting it would be to slide it down the rest of the way.

Healy ran a hand through his thinning sandy hair. "It's been a week now and he-"

"Six days," Jo snapped.

The biophysicist nodded. "Six days. Right. But he shows no signs of awakening."

"We've postponed the board meeting twice now, Jo," said Madigan. He was a handsome rascal with a poet's tongue, eyes that twinkled, and a grin that could look rueful and inviting at the same time. This morning it was almost entirely rueful.

"I won't go before the board until we know," she insisted.

"Mrs. Nillson," Healy said softly, "you've got to face the possibility that he may never wake up."

Jo frowned at him, as much from being called by her husband's name as from his pessimism.

"He is physically recovered, isn't he?" she demanded.

"Yes…."

"And the EEGs show normal brain activity."

With a shake of his head, Healy replied, "But that doesn't mean anything at all, Mrs. Nillson. We're dealing with a human being here, not just a bunch of graphs. All the tests show that he is alive, his body is functioning normally, his brain is active-but he remains in a coma and we don't know why!"

Jo saw that the scientist was getting himself upset. She made herself smile at him. "Back when I was a student at MIT, we used to say that hell for an engineer is when all the instruments check but nothing works."

Healy raised his hands, as if in supplication. "That's where we are. This is the first time anybody's ever brought a human being back from cryonic suspension-"

Madigan broke in, "The chairman of the board isn't going to sit in cryonic suspension. You can't dip your darling husband in liquid nitrogen and put him on hold."

Fixing him with a grim-faced stare, Jo said, "Archie, I'm getting tired-"

A chime sounded softly from the padded armrest of her couch. Jo cut off Madigan's reply with a quick movement of one hand as she touched a pad on the armrest's keyboard with the other.

"I told them not to disturb us unless he showed some change."

On the wall across the room, the glareless plastic cover over a Mary Cassatt painting of three women admiring a child turned opaque and then took on the three-dimensional form of Jo's secretary. The young woman was open-mouthed with excitement.

"He's awake!" she said breathlessly. "He just opened his eyes and got up and started walking around his room."

Jo could feel her own heart quicken. "Let me see," she demanded.

Instantly the secretary disappeared, and the three of them saw a view of Keith Stoner standing naked as a newborn by the window of his small room, staring intently out at the view.

"My God, he really is awake," Healy whispered, almost in awe.

"I didn't realize he was so big," said Madigan.

Jo shot him a glance.

"Tall, I mean."

She suppressed the urge to laugh. He's alive and awake and just like he was all those years ago. I've done it! I've brought him back!

She studied Keith Stoner intently, wordlessly, eyes picking out every detail of the face and body that she had known so intimately eighteen years ago.

Eighteen years, Jo thought. Suddenly her hands flew to her face. Eighteen years! He hasn't aged a moment and I'm eighteen years older.

CHAPTER 3

Stoner searched the drawers of the little bureau and found neat stacks of underwear, shirts, and slacks. No shoes, but several pairs of slipper socks.

Without even bothering to look at the size markings, he pulled on a pair of tan slacks and slipped an open-necked, short-sleeved buff-colored shirt over them. He did not bother with the socks. The floor felt comfortably warm.

Then he went to the window again and sat in the little armchair. The glass was all one piece; there was no way to open the window, and Stoner instinctively knew it would be too tough to shatter, even if he threw the chair at it.

Outside he saw lovely green landscaped grounds, dotted with gracefully swaying palm trees. In the distance, a highway busy with traffic, and beyond it a glistening white sand beach and a gentle surf rolling in from the blue ocean.

It did not look like Florida to him. California, possibly. Certainly not Kwajalein.

There were comparatively few automobiles on the highway, but those that Stoner saw looked only a little different from the cars he remembered. A bit lower and sleeker. They still ran on four wheels, from what he could see. He had not been asleep so long that totally new transportation systems had come into being. The trucks looked more changed, shaped more aerodynamically. And their cabs seemed longer, much more roomy than Stoner remembered them. He could not see any sooty fumes belching from them. Nor any diesel exhaust stacks. The trucks seemed to have their own lanes, separated from the automobile traffic by a raised divider.

It was quiet in his room. The highway sounds did not penetrate the window. The glistening bank of equipment that loomed around his shelf bed was barely humming. Stoner could hear himself breathing.

He leaned back in the chair and luxuriated in the pedestrian normality of it. Solid weight. The warmth of the sun shining through the window felt utterly wonderful on his face and bare arms. He watched the combers running up to the beach. The eternal sea, the heartbeat of the planet.

He closed his eyes. And for the briefest instant he saw a different scene, another world, alien yet familiar, vastly different from Earth and yet as intimately known as if he had been born there.

Stoner's eyes snapped open and focused on the enduring sea, unfailingly caressing the land; on the blue sky and stately white clouds adorning it. This is Earth, he told himself. The vision of an alien world faded and disappeared.

This is Earth, he repeated. I'm home. I'm safe now. Yet the memory of the flashback frightened him. He had never seen an alien landscape. He had never even set foot on Earth's own moon. But the vision in his mind had been as clear and solid as reality.

He shook his head and turned in the chair, away from the window. He saw that the curves of every monitoring screen had turned fiercely red and jagged. He took a deep breath and willed his heart to slow back to normal. The sensor traces smoothed and returned to their usual soft green color.

A portion of the solid wall between the bureau and the bank of electronic equipment glowed briefly and vanished, creating a normal-sized doorway. Through it stepped a smiling man. Behind him the wall re-formed itself, as solid as it had been originally.

"Good morning," said the man. "I'm Gene Richards."

Stoner got to his feet and stretched out his hand. "You must be a psychiatrist, aren't you?"

Richards's smile remained fixed, but his eyes narrowed a trifle. "A good guess. An excellent guess."

He was a small man, slight, almost frail. Thick curly reddish-brown hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. Thin face with small bright probing eyes and strong white teeth that seemed a size too large for his narrow jaw. He looked almost rodentlike. He wore a casual, brightly flowered shirt over denim shorts. His feet were shod in leather sandals.

Stoner dropped back into his chair while the psychiatrist pulled one of the plastic chairs from the wall and straddled it backward, next to him.

"Where the hell are we, anyway?" Stoner asked. "Hawaii?"

Richards nodded. "The big island, just outside of Hilo."

"This isn't a hospital, is it? It feels more like some big laboratory complex."

Again Richards bobbed his head up and down. "Right again. That's three in a row. Want to try for four?"

Stoner laughed softly. "I have no idea of how long I've been-suspended."

"Eighteen years."

"Eighteen? …" Stoner felt the psychiatrist's eyes probing him. Past the man's suddenly intense face, he could see the row of display screens flickering their readout curves.

The silence stretched. Finally Richards asked, "How do you feel about returning from the dead?"

"I thought they'd bring me back a lot sooner than this."

"The alien spacecraft was recovered almost twelve years ago. You've been kept in cryonic suspension until the biotechnicians figured out how to thaw you without killing you."

"And the spacecraft?"

Richards's eyes shifted away slightly. "It's in orbit around the Earth."

"The alien himself …"

"He was quite dead. There wasn't a thing anybody could do about that."

Stoner leaned back in the chair and glanced out at the sea again.

"I'm the first man ever to be revived from cryonic suspension?" he asked.

"That's right. The scientists wanted to try some human guinea pigs, but the government wouldn't allow it."

"And the doorway you came in through, you learned that trick from the spacecraft."

Richards nodded again. "That … trick-it's revolutionizing everything."

"The ability to transform solid matter into pure energy and then back again," Stoner said.

"How would you …" Richards stopped himself. "Oh, sure. Of course. You're a physicist yourself, aren't you?"

"Sort of. I was an astrophysicist."

"So you know about things like that," the psychiatrist assured himself.

Stoner said nothing. He searched his mind for the knowledge he had just given words to. The alien's spacecraft had opened itself to him in the same way: a portion of the solid metal hull disappearing to form a hatchway. But he had never thought about the technique for doing it until the words had formed themselves in his mouth.

"How much do you remember?" Richards asked. "Can you recall how you got to the alien spacecraft?"

It was Stoner's turn to nod. "The last thing I remember is turning off the heater in my suit. It was damned cold. I must have blacked out then."

"You remember Kwajalein and the project to contact the spacecraft? The people you worked with?"

"Markov. Jo Camerata. McDermott and Tuttle and all the rest, sure. And Federenko, the cosmonaut."

Richards touched the corner of his mustache with the tip of a finger. "When you got to the alien's spacecraft, you deliberately decided to remain there, instead of returning to Earth." It was a statement of fact, not a question.

"That's right," said Stoner.

"Why?"

Stoner smiled at him. "You want to know why I chose death over life, is that it?"

"That's it," Richards admitted.

"But I'm alive," Stoner said softly. "I didn't die."

"You had no way of knowing that…."

"I had faith in the people I worked with. I knew they wouldn't leave me up there. They'd bring me back and revive me."

Richards looked totally unconvinced. But he forced a smile across his face. "We'll talk about that some more, later on."

"I'm sure we will."

"Is there anything I can do for you?" Richards asked. "Anything you want to know, anyone you want to see?"

Stoner thought a moment. "My kids-they must be grown adults by now."

The psychiatrist glanced up toward the ceiling, like a man trying to remember facts he had learned by rote. "Your son, Douglas, is an executive with a restaurant chain in the Los Angeles area. He's thirty-three, married, and has two children, both boys."

Thirty-three, Stoner thought. Christ, I've missed half his life.

"Your daughter, Eleanor," Richards went on, "will be thirty in a few weeks. She's married to a Peace Enforcer named Thompson; they make their home in Christchurch, New Zealand. They have two children, also. A girl and a boy."

"I'm a grandfather."

"Four times over." Richards smiled.

A grandfather, but a lousy father, Stoner told himself.

Richards's smile faded. Slowly, he said, "Your ex-wife died several years ago. A highway accident."

The pain surprised Stoner. He had expected to feel nothing. The open wound that their divorce had ripped out of his soul had been numbed long ago, covered with emotional scar tissue as thick as a spacecraft's heat shield. Or so Stoner had thought. Yet the news of Doris's death cut right through and stabbed deep into his flesh.

"Are you all right?" Richards asked.

Stoner turned away from his inquisitive face and looked through the window, out at the sun-sparkling sea.

"It's a lot to take in, all at once," he replied to the psychiatrist.

"Yes," Richards said. "We'll take it as slow as you like."

Stoner turned back toward him. The man was trying to keep his emotions to himself, but Stoner could see past his eyes, past the slightly quizzical smile that was supposed to be reassuring. I'm a laboratory specimen to him; an intriguing patient, the subject of a paper he'll deliver at an international conference of psychiatrists.

He looked deeper and realized that there was more to it. Richards truly wanted to help Stoner. The desire to be helpful was real, even if it was underlain by the desire to further his own career. And even deeper than that, buried so deeply that Richards himself barely knew of its existence, was the drive to learn, to know, to understand. Stoner smiled at the psychiatrist. He recognized that drive, that urgent passion. He himself had been a slave to it in his earlier life.

Richards misinterpreted his smile. "You feel better?"

"Yes," Stoner said. "I feel better."

The psychiatrist got to his feet. "I think that's enough information for you to digest for the time being."

"How long will I be here?"

Richards shrugged. "They'll want to run tests…."

Stoner pulled himself up from his chair. He towered over the psychiatrist. "How long?"

"I really don't know."

"Days? Weeks? Months?"

Richards put on his brightest smile. "I truly can't say. Weeks, at least. Probably a couple of months." He started for the spot on the wall where the portal had opened.

Stoner asked, "Can I at least get out of this room and walk around the place?"

"Oh, sure," Richards said over his shoulder. "In a day or so."

"They're going to guard me pretty closely, aren't they?"

The wall glowed and the portal in it opened. "You're a very important person," Richards said. "The first man to be revived after cryonic suspension. You'll be famous."

Glancing around the bare room, Stoner asked, "Can you get me something to read? I've got eighteen years of news to catch up on."

The psychiatrist hesitated a moment. "Okay," he said. "I'll see that you get some reading material. But probably you ought to go slowly-there's a certain amount of cultural shock that you're going to have to deal with."

"Cultural shock?"

"The world's changed a lot in the past eighteen years."

"That's what I want to find out about."

"In due time. For the first few days, I think we ought to confine your reading to entertainment, rather than current events."

A sudden question popped into Stoner's mind. "Markov," he blurted. "Kirill Markov, the Russian linguist I worked with. How is he?"

Richards made a small shrug. "As far as I know, he's fine. Living in Moscow again. I believe he sent a message asking about you recently."

He stepped through and the wall became solid again. Stoner stood in the middle of the room, thinking that the first use of the alien's technology had been to make a jail cell for him.

CHAPTER 4

Jo Camerata did not sit at the head of the conference table. Vanguard Industries had long ago dispensed with such archaic hierarchical formalities. The president of the corporation sat at the middle of the table, flanked on either side by members of the board of directors, most of them male. A dozen muttered conversations buzzed around the table as Jo took her seat. Directly across from her sat the chairman of the board, Everett Nillson, her husband.

Nillson was a tall, rawboned Swede whose thinning blond hair and bushy eyebrows had been bleached nearly white by the Hawaiian sun. His eyes were such a pale blue that they seemed nearly colorless. His skin was so fair that strangers often assumed he was an albino. He was slow in speech and in movements, which led many an unwary adversary into believing Nillson's mind worked slowly, too. It did not.

He smiled across the polished mahogany table at his wife, his prized ornament, knowing that he had won her away from several of the other men seated in this plush, paneled boardroom. He had a long, bony, unhandsome face and a smile that looked more pained than pleasured. His hands were big, powerful, with lumpy, irregular knuckles and long, thick fingers. If it weren't for the perfectly fitted gray summer-weight suit and opulently decorated silk shirt he wore, he could easily have been mistaken for a farmer or a merchant seaman.

Jo smiled back at him, as much to discomfit some of the men seated around the table as to please her husband. She had dressed herself for this meeting in a demure starched white blouse with a high collar and a navy-blue knee-length skirt. Her only jewelry was a choker of black pearls, a diamond-studded pin shaped in Vanguard Industries' stylized V, and the plain platinum wedding band that Nillson had given her.

As chairman of the board, Nillson called the meeting to order. The room fell silent.

He let the silence hang for a long moment. All eyes were focused on him. Pungent smoke from several cigars and a half-dozen cigarettes wafted up to the ceiling vents. Nillson fixed his gaze on the computer screen set into the table top before him.

Finally, in his surprisingly deep, rich baritone he said, "The first item on our agenda this morning is a report on the cryonic project." He looked up at his wife. "Darling, if you will be so kind."

Jo said, "I have a videotaped presentation from Dr. Healy and several of his staff members…."

"But he's actually awake and doing well?" asked one of the older board members, a heavyset, red-faced man who had received a heart transplant several years earlier.

"Yes," Jo said, not allowing herself to smile. "He is alive and as healthy as he was eighteen years ago. As far as the medical tests can ascertain, he has not suffered any detectable damage from being frozen."

She touched a button on the keypad in front of her with a manicured finger. The overhead lights dimmed slightly, and the wall to her left became a three-dimensional video screen. Everyone around the table turned to see.

Keith Stoner stood before them, life-sized and naked.

"This is when he first woke up," Jo told them.

One of the women board members whispered something. Jo could not catch the words, but the tone was carnal.

Stoner's image was quickly replaced by Healy's. The corporation's chief scientist began to explain, with charts and graphs, that Stoner's physical condition was so close to his condition as recorded eighteen years ago that the differences were undetectable. Then Richards, the psychiatrist, appeared and said that although Stoner's reactions appeared normal, he needed further study to "get deeper into the subject."

A male voice rumbled in the semidarkness, "The shrink's gay, is that it?"

"Maybe he's fallen in love with his patient," someone replied.

A few scattered laughs, most of them self-conscious.

The screen now showed Richards and Stoner strolling together along the grounds behind the building where Stoner was being kept. No walls or fences were in sight, only brightly flowering shrubs of hibiscus and oleander, which hid the lasers and electronic sensors of the security system. The area looked like a university quadrangle, bounded by multistory glass-and-chrome laboratory buildings. But no stranger or lab employee could get within a hundred yards of the carefully screened area where Richards and Stoner walked.

While the board members eavesdropped on their conversation, Jo sank back in her chair and studied Keith Stoner's handsome face. He had not changed at all. Or had he? His eyes seemed different, somehow. Nothing she could put her finger on, but different.

She had read every word of every transcript of every conversation Keith had taken part in. Not once had he asked about Jo Camerata. Not once had he spoken of the nights they had shared together, so long ago.

She turned slightly in her chair and saw her husband. He was not watching the screen. He was staring directly at her.

The videotape ended and the ceiling lights automatically came back up to full brightness as the screen turned opaque once more.

Jo tore her gaze away from Nillson's deathly pale eyes.

"Stoner appears perfectly willing to cooperate with us," she told the board. Then she added, "For the time being."

"What do you mean?"

"Sooner or later he's going to want to get out of our lab complex. He's going to want to see the world-after all, for him it's a new world. He's been asleep for eighteen years."

"He's much too important to let go," said the corporation's executive vice-president, a vigorous-looking man in his early forties, tanned and athletically trim.

"He's a vital asset," agreed the older woman sitting next to him.

"We've invested an enormous amount of money in this program," the corporation's treasurer added, waving his black cigar. "He can't just go wandering off where we can't keep him under study."

"What about the publicity aspects of this project?" Nillson asked, looking down the table to the new director of corporate public relations.

She was a stunningly beautiful Oriental, more than ten years younger than Jo. A face of hauntingly fragile delicacy, almost childlike except for the knowing eyes. A childlike body, too, slim and boyish, which Jo knew attracted her husband more than her own womanly figure. She was a protégée of Archie Madigan's. By rights she should not have been sitting in on a board meeting; but the chairman had invited her, and Jo knew better than to argue the point.

"The first man to be revived from cryonic suspension," she said, looking directly back at Nillson, "will be an instant global celebrity. Not only is he a former astronaut and scientist, and the man who went into space to meet the alien starship-he's the first man to be brought back from the dead. Properly handled, he can be worth billions in publicity, worldwide."

Jo nodded to show that she agreed with them all. "But I know the man. We worked together, before he …"

She hesitated just the barest fraction of an instant, her mind whispering silently, Before he went off into deep space and chose death rather than returning to me.

"Before he was frozen," she continued aloud. "Sooner or later he's going to want the freedom to come and go as he pleases."

"He's our property, dammit!" snapped the treasurer. "We spent the money to go out there and rescue him. He owes us his life."

"And there's the security question," the public relations director said, ignoring him and still looking straight at Nillson.

"Competitors like Yamagata or Eurogenetics or even Avtech would love to get their hands on him. Until we're ready to reveal him to the world, we'd better be very careful with him."

Jo replied mildly, "But we don't own the man." Turning to the corporation's chief counsel, she asked, "Do we, Archie?"

Madigan smiled his poet's rueful smile. "Of course we can't be going against the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. But …" He let the word dangle before the board members.

"But what?" the executive vice-president demanded.

The lawyer made a slight shrug. "He's been frozen alive for eighteen years. He's been out of touch with civilization, out of contact with the world, for eighteen years. I think we could make a case that he's not fully competent to be responsible for himself. I think a friendly judge might allow us to maintain custody of him for a while."

The board members looked pleased at that.

"How long?" asked Nillson.

"Oh, a few months, I should think," Madigan replied. "Maybe a year."

"And how long will it be," Nillson asked slowly, "before the news media discover that he's awake?"

"There will be no announcement," Jo responded. "Not yet."

"Security has been airtight," Madigan added. "Only the staff scientists who work directly with him know that he's been revived. To the rest of the personnel he's just another volunteer subject for the pharmaceutical division."

Nillson shook his head. "This news is much too big to keep quiet for long."

The florid-faced heart transplant recipient nodded gravely.

"The first man to be brought back from the dead. By God, the reporters will swarm all over him."

"And our competitors," the treasurer repeated.

"We'll move him to a more remote site as soon as the medical tests are finished," Jo said.

"That might be a very good idea," her husband agreed.

Jo touched the memo pad on her keyboard. The computer would automatically highlight the previous ten lines of conversation when it printed up the transcript of this meeting.

The discussion moved on to other topics: Vanguard's pharmaceutical processing plant in orbit was conspicuously over budget; Avtech Corporation had hired away two of Vanguard's plant managers, one in Karachi and one in Rio: the corporation's interdivisional communications codes were being changed as a routine security precaution; terrorists from the World Liberation Movement had bombed the biotechnology factory in Sydney, nobody killed but half a million dollars' worth of damage to the organ-cloning production line; the European division's construction unit had run into unexpected snags in its contracts to build airports and civil improvements in Bulgaria ("Damned Commie bureaucrats want their bribes increased," groused one board member); angry crowds had staged a violent demonstration at the former corporate headquarters in Greenwich, insisting that Vanguard had developed a cure for cancer that it was keeping secret ("I only wish," Nillson murmured, drawing a big dollar sign on his scratch pad); the airline division was being sued in the World Court for its refusal to fly its scheduled routes into the countries involved in the Central African War.

In all, the corporation's profits for this quarter would be down some 8 to 10 percent, even though total sales volume from all its divisions appeared to be nearly 12 percent higher than the same quarter the previous year.

"Too much money being spent unproductively," Nillson said mildly.

The public relations director turned her most feminine smile on the board chairman. "And we don't really have any new products to show, to take the attention off the lower profits. Not unless we make a major effort on the frozen astronaut."

"It's too early for that," Jo snapped.

"Then the media's going to ask why our profits are down, and why R and D isn't producing."

Research and development was Jo's special area. She realized that the public relations director was openly challenging her.

Very sweetly, Jo said, "When you get old enough to be stricken by a terminal disease-like maybe cancer or a sudden stroke-you'll be willing to spend everything you have for the products of our unproductive R and D. Maybe you'll even want to have yourself frozen for a few years, until the medical people can work out a cure for whatever is killing you. Then the money we've spent on our cryonics and other R and D programs will seem like a good investment to you."

The Oriental girl's lips pressed into a colorless line. But before she could answer Jo, Nillson said, "R and D has been very important to this corporation's growth, we all know that. But we must keep a careful watch on expenses. No one in this organization has a blank check."

Murmurs of assent spread around the table.

Jo smiled at her husband and realized that the woman was making a brazen play for him-and he seemed willing to see how well she could do. Looking around the table, Jo saw at least three people who would soon have a vital personal interest in being frozen until a terminal illness could be reversed. If it came to a real fight with the public relations director, Jo knew she would win.

But it won't come to that, she told herself. I'll have the little bitch out of here without anyone in this room knowing what happened to her. Or caring.

The meeting finally ended, and Jo started back toward her office. Nillson fell in beside her, and together they walked along the glass-walled corridor back to her executive suite.

They made a striking couple. She was dark fire, a long-legged beauty with the deep suntan, midnight-black hair, and stunning figure of a classic Mediterranean enchantress. He was pallid ice, taller than she, lean and spare, cold where she was fiery, wan where she was vibrant, a pale distant frosty Northern Lights compared to the blazing intensity of the tropical sun.

"You're not going back to your office?" Jo asked as they strode in unison down the corridor.

"I want to ask you something."

"Where we can't be overheard," she realized.

He dipped his chin slightly in acknowledgment. Offices can be bugged. Secretaries can be bribed. A busy corridor connecting the president's suite with the offices of the chairman of the board and the board's meeting room could be more private than any sanctum sanctorum.

"Did Healy tell you that he doesn't sleep?"

Jo looked up sharply at her husband. His face was perfectly controlled, no hint of any emotion whatsoever.

"What did you say?"

"He doesn't sleep," Nillson repeated. "Your man Stoner has not slept at all in the four days since he has been revived."

Jo said nothing. There was no need. Nillson knew full well that the scientist had not told her. Her thoughts swirled wildly. Keith doesn't sleep! Why? What's gone wrong? And why did that sonofabitch Healy tell my husband instead of me?

CHAPTER 5

Stoner and Dr. Richards strolled casually across the lawn outside his building. The late afternoon sun baked through Stoner's light open-weave shirt; he reveled in the warmth of it. The breeze from the sea was filled with the fragrance of tropical flowers. Since nine that morning Stoner had endured still another battery of physical examinations. Now he and the psychiatrist were out in the open air.

Like a prisoner taking his compulsory exercise, Stoner thought.

Richards was good, a smooth performer who seemed to be engaged in nothing more than relaxed conversation while he deftly probed his patient's innermost thoughts. Stoner smiled at him and nodded in the right places, keeping his end of the chatter going. But his eyes were focused on the space between two of the four-story lab buildings; he could see open ground stretching out to a high-wire fence. Beyond the fence was the highway and, beyond that, the beach and the ocean.

What would Richards do if I just sprinted off, ran between the buildings and jumped that fence and raced out to the highway? What would I do: flag down a passing car, or keep going into the surf and plunge in?

He thought about swimming in the ocean and remembered nights on Kwajalein when he and Jo had swum in the lagoon.

"Jo Camerata is here, isn't she?" he suddenly asked Richards.

The psychiatrist blinked in the slanting rays of the sun, his train of questioning derailed.

"Ms. Camerata? Yes, she's here."

"She must be pretty important," Stoner said.

"Would you like to meet her?"

"Of course."

Richards fingered his mustache. Stoner laughed and told him, "You're wondering why I never asked about her before this, aren't you?"

Trying to suppress a troubled frown, Richards said, "You have a way of telling me what I'm thinking."

Stoner lifted one hand in an apologetic gesture. "You wouldn't make a good poker player. I can read your face."

"It seems to me you can read my mind."

"No, nothing so …" The breath caught in Stoner's chest. He saw Richards's searching, inquisitive face, the dark eyes probing him. He saw the laboratory building behind the psychiatrist and the bright blue Hawaiian sky and the grass and graceful palms out by the beach.

But like a double exposure on a piece of film, Stoner also saw another scene, a completely different scene from a different world. A smooth, graceful tower, impossibly slim, incredibly tall, soared endlessly into a softly glowing sky of pale yellow. Stoner craned his neck painfully and still could not see the top of the tower. It rose heavenward against all the laws of gravity and sense, up and up until it was lost to his sight. He was standing at its base, atop a low, gently sloping hill. His feet were shod in metallic boots, and the ground was covered with brilliant orange blades of grass that seemed to shrink away from him and leave the ground where he was standing bare and sandy. He dropped to one knee, and as he did so, the individual blades of grass scurried out of his way, like frightened little creatures with wills of their own.

Stoner smiled at the strange orange blades, trying to see how they managed to move themselves. He put out a hand and saw that it was gloved in the same gleaming silvery metal as his boots. The motile grass backed away from his extended hand. He smiled. "I won't hurt you. Honestly, I won't…."

The chanting made him look up. Far across the open orange field, a long procession was winding its way up the slope of the hill toward him. The grass was parting itself, making an open path for the people, a path that led straight to the spot where Stoner was standing. He could not make out the words they were singing, but the tone was mournful, sad. He saw they were carrying a body stretched out on a bier.

"That's me," Stoner realized. "It's my funeral procession."

He looked up again and saw Richards staring down at him. Stoner realized he was kneeling on the thick green grass of the laboratory lawn, the afternoon sun burning hotly behind the psychiatrist, framing his curly mop of hair with a halo of radiance.

Feeling almost foolish, Stoner got to his feet. A few of the employees walking some distance away were staring at them.

"Your funeral?" Richards asked. He was almost quivering with anticipation, like a hunting dog who had just scented its quarry.

His stomach fluttering, Stoner asked, "What did you say?"

"You said something about a funeral procession."

"Did I?" he stalled.

"What happened to you? What did you see?"

With a shake of his head, Stoner answered, "I don't know. I blanked out…."

Richards's eyes were trying to pry the information out of him. "You went completely out of focus. You looked up at the sky, then you dropped down on your knees and muttered something about a funeral procession."

Stoner said nothing.

"You were hallucinating," the psychiatrist said.

"I've never done that before."

Abruptly, Richards turned back toward the building where Stoner's quarters were. "Come on, I want to see what the EEG looks like."

Stoner caught up with him in two long strides. "You've been recording me out here?"

Nodding, Richards said, "Every second. The equipment can monitor you anywhere in the complex-as far as the beach, maybe farther."

"You implanted sensors inside me?"

"Sprayed them on your skin. The technology's improved since you took your sleep. You can't feel them or wash them off, but they're there."

Instead of returning to Stoner's quarters, Richards hurried to a windowless room halfway down the antiseptic-white corridor. To Stoner it looked like a spaceflight control center: banks of monitoring display screens tended by a handful of young men and women in white lab smocks. The lighting in the room was dim, the people monitoring the screens looked like shadowy wraiths condemned to study the flickering green and orange glowing screens until they had atoned for the sins of their earlier lives.

Stoner remembered a similar room, on Kwajalein, where he and others had tensely watched radar screens that showed the approach of the alien spacecraft. That room had been cramped, hot, sweaty with fear and anticipation. This room was cool, spacious, relaxed, and so quiet that Stoner could hear the hum of electricity that fed the display screens.

No one bothered to turn around or look up as they came in. Richards went straight to the nearest unoccupied station and slid into the empty chair there. He touched the keyboard, and a convoluted set of ragged lines spread themselves across the screen.

For several moments he studied the display, touching the keyboard to bring up new data, then staring intently at the screen. Finally he gave a heavy sigh, punched a single button, and the screen went dark.

"What is it?" Stoner asked in a whisper as Richards got up from the chair. Whispering seemed the proper tone in this quiet, darkened chamber.

"What … Oh, nothing," the psychiatrist answered. "The EEG seems normal enough."

But even in the shadowy lighting Stoner could see that Richards was not telling the truth. His eyes avoided Stoner's.

"Nothing unusual?" he asked.

"I'm not a psychotech," Richards evaded. "Maybe somebody who's more expert than I will be able to see something in the EEG that I missed."

A single word pronounced itself in Stoner's mind, a word that seemed to flow from Richards's mind to his own.

Schizophrenia.

CHAPTER 6

Jo leaned back in her softly yielding leather chair and studied the faces of the two men. Healy looked distressed, like a freckle-faced little boy who had been caught doing something naughty. But Richards looked really troubled, a man with a frightening weight on his shoulders.

She had spent an hour in the office by herself, combing the walls, the ceiling, the furniture, the computer and phones, the windows and draperies, searching for bugs that might have been planted by an ambitious young rival such as the public relations director, or a suspicious board member, or an agent for a competing company, or by her husband. She remembered enough of her MIT training to feel that she could clean her own nest, but it bothered her that she had found nothing. Nothing at all.

Still, she had to have this showdown with Healy. It suddenly struck her that maybe her chief scientist was actually disloyal to her. Maybe he was the leak in her security.

She reset the office's colors to cool greens and blues, and selected just a hint of salt tang for the room scent. She lowered the air temperature several degrees: she was blazing hot enough. Then she waited, in a plain gray blouseless business suit adorned only by her corporate logo pin. The two of them arrived at her outer office exactly on time. Jo did not keep them waiting; she had her secretary usher them in immediately.

"I learned yesterday that Stoner has not slept since he's been revived," she said once the two men had taken chairs facing her.

Richards flicked a glance at Healy, who looked thoroughly miserable.

"I learned that information from the chairman of the board," Jo went on. "Why didn't I learn it from you?"

Healy replied, "We haven't put it into any of our reports yet…."

"I know that," she snapped.

"We're still not sure of the significance of it," he said, squirming in his chair.

"A man doesn't sleep for five straight nights and you're not sure that it's significant?" Jo kept her voice low and icy calm.

"We … we're studying it," Healy said weakly.

"And how did the chairman of the board find out about it?"

Healy spread his hands. "I don't know! Somebody in the lab must have talked…."

"Did you know that there was a disturbance at the outer fence last night?"

"A disturbance?"

"Security thinks somebody tried to break into the labs. World Liberation Movement terrorists, perhaps."

"How would they …"

She silenced him by raising one finger. "How many people are working with Stoner now?"

"Directly?" Healy's little-boy face pulled itself into a momentary frown of concentration. "There's Dr. Richards, here, and the medical team that's monitoring him … that makes seven-no, nine people."

"And indirectly?"

"There's the commissary crew, they prepare his meals and bring them to his room. And the data processing people, the electronics maintenance people, the-"

"Stop," Jo commanded. "I want the monitoring crew cut down to three people, one for each shift. Send me the files on the people who're working there now and I'll select the three I want. They will bring his meals to him when they start their shifts. All data processing will be done by our branch in Geneva, I'll clear a satellite channel for you. If there's any need for electronic repairs or maintenance, do it yourself."

"But I-"

"This is a burden on you, I understand," Jo said, her voice still steel-edged. "But security is absolutely imperative. The fewer people who are involved, the easier it will be to maintain security."

"But the whole board of directors knows about him!" Healy bleated.

"That can't be helped. They recognize his importance to the corporation, though. If they're smart, they'll stay quiet." She smiled, almost to herself. "At least long enough to grab as much Vanguard stock as they can without pushing the price sky high."

Healy looked unconvinced. Richards, on the other hand, was watching Jo intently.

She went on, "You've got to understand what we've got here. The man has been brought back from the dead. The technique for reviving him is worth billions-hundreds of billions. Do you have any idea how many people will want to have themselves frozen when they discover they have an inoperable cancer, or they're waiting for a replacement heart?"

"Yes, I know."

"If he's not sleeping, then there's something wrong, something not normal. We can't allow that information to leak outside these walls."

Healy nodded. Then, in a near whisper, he said, "But it was only the chairman of the board. He's entitled to know, isn't he? After all, he's the company's top man. And your own husband."

Jo stared at him for a long moment before replying. "If somebody's leaking information to him, out of channels, without your knowledge or mine, who else might they be talking to?"

"But I don't think-"

"I do! Now get back to your office and implement the procedures I just outlined. I want those personnel files on my screen within fifteen minutes."

Healy's face went white, as if Jo had slapped him. Dumbly he pushed himself out of his chair. Richards got to his feet beside him.

Jo let them get as far as her door before calling, "Dr. Richards, I almost forgot. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about Stoner. Could you come back here a moment, please?"

Richards turned back toward her. Healy hesitated, then opened the door and stepped out.

Jo indicated the chair nearest her own.

Sitting in it, Richards said, "If he wasn't your enemy before we came in here, he certainly is now."

Raising an eyebrow at him, Jo asked, "You think so? I'm not sure he has the guts."

The psychiatrist shrugged. "You emasculated him."

She laughed. "And you're assuming he had some balls when he came in here."

Richards smiled and ran a finger across his mustache.

"What do you make of Stoner's not sleeping?"

"I don't know. It doesn't seem to be affecting him physically. Of course, I never saw him before he was frozen, so it's a little difficult for me to say." His eyes shifted away from her.

Jo said, "What else?"

"I'm not sure what to make of it," the psychiatrist said. "He had a hallucinatory session yesterday. It was brief, but for a minute or so he was totally out of reality."

Jo felt her breath catch in her throat.

"It may be just the lack of sleep catching up with him. But there's a definite problem, and until we know what it is and what's causing it …"

"What does he do all night?"

"He reads. He sits around his room and reads everything that I give him. He's devoured half the books in my library-in less than a week."

"You're not giving him books about recent history or current affairs, are you?" Jo asked.

"No. I still think that he has to be introduced to the modern world gradually. But he's certainly catching up on the classics! He's like a student doing all his required reading for English lit. High school and college, all at once."

"What does he say about his not sleeping?"

Richards grimaced good-naturedly. "I asked him about it, and he said he'd been sleeping for eighteen years so he didn't feel the need for sleep now."

Jo nodded. "That sounds like him. He's good at covering himself."

"There's something more."

"What?"

"He's shown no interest in sex. Doesn't mention it at all. No nocturnal emissions. He doesn't even seem to pay any attention to the women who've been on the monitoring team. And there are a couple of very pretty ones. No come-ons, no joking with them, no preening for them."

Jo fell silent. As driven as Keith had been in his earlier life, he had still found time for sex. Not love, perhaps, but in bed he could unloose all the fiery passion that he had held in check through his tight-lipped, tension-filled days.

Richards asked, "You two were … close, weren't you?"

"We were lovers, for a short while." An image of herself as a star-struck student madly in love with the moody, brooding scientist-astronaut almost made Jo blush. What a fool, she scolded herself. What a fool!

"You were with him during the project to make contact with the alien spacecraft?"

"Yes, at Kwajalein. And I went with him to Tyuratam."

"And he flew off to rendezvous with the spacecraft and didn't come back."

"He chose not to come back," Jo said, her mind filling with the memory of it. "He chose to let himself freeze in the spacecraft with the dead alien's body instead of returning safely to Earth."

Richards said nothing, and Jo finally realized that he was asking the questions, not she.

She smiled at him. "Your first name is Gene, isn't it?"

"Yes." He smiled back.

"You realize that we're going to have to move him from here. Too many prying eyes-and blabbing mouths."

"I was wondering if you would come to that conclusion."

"Will you go with him, Gene?"

"If you want me to."

"I need you to," Jo said urgently. "Gene, I need your loyalty. I need a man I can trust."

"You can trust me," he said.

She leaned forward and put her hand on his bare arm. "Can I, Gene? Not as employer and employee, but as friends? I need a friend. Desperately."

"Your husband …"

"We don't see eye to eye on this. For the first time since I've known him, he's opposing me. Not openly. Not yet. But I don't think I can count on him, not on this project."

Richards said nothing. Jo pulled her hand away.

He reached out to take it in his. "You have a reputation, you know."

With a grin, she admitted, "I suppose I do."

"I don't want to get in trouble with the chairman of the board."

"I don't blame you."

"I'm still a married man."

"I've seen your file. You've been separated for six months now. Divorce proceedings started last week."

Richards gazed at her for a long, silent moment. Jo could see the mental calculations going on behind his bright brown eyes.

"Where will you take him?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I haven't decided yet. I have a house in Maine that's pretty secluded. Perhaps there." It was a deliberate ploy. If her people in Maine discovered a sudden new surveillance of the house in the next few days, she would know that Richards could not be trusted.

The psychiatrist let go of her hand. "I'll go with him, wherever it is," he said. "He's my patient, after all. And-I'd like to be your friend."

Jo smiled at him. "Thank you, Gene. You won't regret it."

"I'm going strictly on a professional basis, as Stoner's doctor. Any personal relationship between you and me … well, let's just allow nature to take its own course, shall we?"

"Go with the flow," Jo agreed, thinking silently, He's enough of a male to want to think that he'll pick the time and place. The male ego! How wonderfully predictable!

"And what happens to Healy?" Richards asked.

Jo looked into the psychiatrist's eyes, wondering, Is he asking out of loyalty or out of ambition? Is he trying to show me that he's loyal to Healy or that he wants the chief scientist's job?

"He'll stay here," she answered. "He's a competent administrator, even though I can't trust him with anything really sensitive."

"I see." Richards tugged at his mustache for a moment, then, "Can I ask you one more question? It's personal."

"Go ahead."

"Stoner has barely mentioned you, and he hasn't shown any burning desire to see you."

Jo felt ice chilling her blood. "I know that."

"Yes. But you haven't asked to see him, either. Why not?"

"I see the videotapes."

"But you haven't tried to meet him."

"Would you allow it?"

"I think he could handle it. It might even help to bring whatever he's suppressing up to the surface. But can you handle it?"

She finally saw the point he was driving toward. "You mean because we were lovers once, do I still have a feeling about him?"

Richards nodded.

"That was eighteen years ago," Jo said. "I was a kid, a student, and he was a very handsome, very glamorous, very important man."

"But you were in love with him then, weren't you?"

She hesitated, wondering what she should say. Then, "Frankly, I was using him to get ahead in what was then a highly male-dominated field. He wasn't very deeply attached to me, and I certainly wasn't madly in love with him."

It was a lie, and she thought she could see in Richards's eyes that he didn't believe her.

But he said, "I see."

They both let it go at that.

CHAPTER 7

The new Director of Corporate Public Relations for Vanguard Industries was An Linh Laguerre. To her, the frozen astronaut was more than a news story, more than a company project. It was a personal quest.

She had been born twenty-eight years earlier in a refugee camp in Thailand, a few miles from the border of Kampuchea, where Vietnamese troops and hard-eyed Communist administrators were turning the former Cambodia into an unwilling, starving colony of Vietnam. Millions had been killed in the years of fighting and massacres, and millions more had been driven from their homes, struggling desperately over shattered highways and tortuous jungle trails toward the relative safety of independent Thailand.

Relative safety. The camps were bursting with refugees, sick, wounded, dying. Their rickety, makeshift cabins and improvised tents overflowed with the tide of human misery. Rats fought human beings for scraps of food and often won. People died of simple infections, their bodies too malnourished to fight off the fevers that swept through the pitiful, ragged refugees.

In the torrid sun and paralyzing humidity of the jungle, amid the squalor and filth, the buzzing flies, the loud voices arguing over a cup of rice, the screams of a woman dying even as she gave birth-in such a camp was An Linh born. Her mother died of malnutrition and exhaustion before the sun set on her first day. A young French Red Cross worker, a harried, overworked volunteer, took that one baby out of the hundreds that she had seen orphaned at the camp, because the infant girl looked so pretty to her. Her husband, a surgeon who never volunteered for refugee work again after putting in three months at the camps, reluctantly allowed his wife to bring the baby home to Avignon with them. Eventually they adopted the girl, when it became clear that they could not have babies of their own. But he never allowed her to use his family name. He gave her an invented surname-Laguerre, the child of war.

An Linh's earliest memories were of Avignon, the medieval stone city with the bridge that had collapsed centuries ago and had never been rebuilt; it still went only halfway across the peaceful Rhone River. She spent many an afternoon at the crumbling edge of the old bridge, in the shadows of the chapel built upon it, straining her eyes to study the farther bank of the river. To her child's understanding, the other side of the river was her other life. Her Asian mother was there, she imagined.

She saw her French father as cold, aloof, unbending. As she grew older she realized that he treated her with formal propriety but never regarded her as his daughter. Slowly, An Linh began to understand that he had allowed her into his home because of his wife, An Linh's French mother. He loved the woman and could deny her nothing that was in his power to give. He simply did not have the power to love a child who was not his own.

But as distant as her adopted father was, her French mother was warm and close. To An Linh, she was the woman Monet painted, the mother who personified love and safety and happiness, the slim lady smiling tenderly in the afternoon sunshine of summer. She was Canadian by birth, a Quebecoise who had fled from the convent in which her parents had enrolled her and spent her life atoning for the guilt she felt at abandoning God. She had met the man she would marry, the proud, handsome son of a wealthy vintner, while she was at nursing school in Aix-en-Provence and he was an intern. They honeymooned in Paris while she talked him into volunteer work in Indochina.

To be a beautiful Oriental child growing up in Avignon was not without pain. When An Linh started school, the French children called her Arabe or Africaine. The Algerian and Moroccan children called her Chinoise.

She was ten years old when the American astronaut flew out to meet the approaching alien spacecraft and somehow stayed aboard it instead of returning home with his Russian cosmonaut pilot. An Linh watched the rocket's takeoff on television, but within a few days the story disappeared from view, just as the American himself drifted farther and farther away from Earth on the alien's retreating ship.

As An Linh grew into her teen years and began to menstruate, she suddenly saw her adopted father in a different way. He was a man, and she realized that now he was watching her as a man watches a woman. She was terrified, and all the more so because she could not bring herself to tell her French mother about this shocking secret.

She realized also that her mother was aging. While her father grew more handsome and distinguished with each year, her mother was visibly fading. Her golden-brown hair was turning dull, mousey. The sparkle in her eyes dimmed. She seemed tired, slow, withdrawn.

They sent her to the university at Aix, where An Linh studied journalism and quickly learned that sex was the greatest equalizer in the world. Among the students she was no longer the stranger, the outsider, the alien creature who did not belong. Even her nickname of La Chinoise became a term of admiration instead of mockery. She traded boyfriends with the other girls, eager to make them like her. She did well in her classes, so well that she could afford to avoid the male faculty members who pursued her.

By the end of her first year, as she rode the bus back toward Avignon, through the gentle hills dotted with nuclear power plants and neatly planted vineyards, she thought that she could at last face her adopted father as an adult, an equal, no longer afraid of the unspoken emotions that surged between them.

Her father was dead. He had been killed that very afternoon in an auto accident, senselessly, as he drove to meet her at the bus station. An Linh's mother collapsed. She had to take charge of the funeral arrangements herself, while her mother was taken to the same hospital where her father had worked.

There they found the cancer that was eating away at her body. And there they began the years of desperate therapies to save her life. Chemicals, radiation, lasers, heat, ice, diet-the doctors tried them all. To An Linh it seemed as though the woman she had known as a mother had been transformed into a haggard, passive, weak, and helpless experimental animal, melting away, visibly shrinking with each passing day. But deep within the woman's body, too deeply enmeshed with her vital organs for surgery or even X-ray laser beams to reach, cancerous tumors were growing. The body that could not conceive a baby created its own grotesque parody of life, cancer cells that multiplied endlessly. Like soldiers facing hopeless odds, the doctors slaughtered the enemy cells ruthlessly. But each tumor they killed gave rise to other tumors.

Her mother was dying. The chief internist of the hospital put it as gently as he could, but in the end he told An Linh that there was nothing more they could do except try to make the final days as painless as possible.

"But all the new medicines that have been discovered," she said, feeling a wild anger taking control of her. "The genetic techniques that have been developed …"

"Useless," said the physician. "We have tried everything." Fighting down the fury that was making her heart pound so hard she could feel it in her chest, An Linh said, "Then freeze her."

The man's silver brows rose several millimeters.

"I want her frozen, like that astronaut was, years ago."

The chief internist's office was spacious and impeccably neat. He was not a man who tolerated slovenliness, not even sloppy thinking.

"But my dear child," he said softly, "that would be pointless. And quite expensive."

"I want her frozen as soon as she is pronounced clinically dead." An Linh had studied the possibilities for a school assignment. "I will sign the necessary releases."

"No one has ever been successfully revived after cryonic immersion. Neuromuscular function … the cytoplasm …" The physician was falling back on jargon in an unconscious effort to intimidate this willful, utterly beautiful but determined young lady.

"As long as she remains frozen there is always the hope that one day she can be revived and cured."

The internist shook his head sadly. "The cost …"

"I will pay," An Linh said flatly.

And she did. Her university days were finished. She applied the small legacy her adopted father had left to her mother's maintenance, then headed for Paris and took a job as a television news researcher. Within a year she had reached the bed of the company's chief executive and wangled an assignment to Indochina. She gained brief worldwide fame for her poignant, passionate story of her homecoming to that troubled part of the world and how it was finally taking the first timid, tentative steps toward peace and human kindness.

The Indochina story got her an offer from a Canadian news agency. An Linh accepted, partly because the pay was very good, partly because it got her away from the executive in Paris, mainly because it brought her closer to the United States, where the frozen astronaut was hidden away by the corporation that had rescued his body and returned it to Earth. After a year in Quebec, though, she longed for a warmer climate. And she had heard persistent rumors that the frozen astronaut was in a laboratory somewhere in the Hawaiian Islands.

She was too dedicated and too photogenic not to be noticed by the major news corporations. The offers started flooding in after only a few months of her being on-camera in Quebec. She stubbornly refused them all and set herself the task of getting to the frozen astronaut. It was not difficult for her to gain a job in the public relations department of Vanguard Industries' aircraft manufacturing division in California. The woman heading the personnel department there said she was overqualified, but the male division manager took one look at her and, grinning, hired her on the spot.

Within six months she met Archie Madigan. She had been able to fend off the division manager, but to get herself promoted to corporate public relations, she went to bed with the smiling, seemingly sensitive lawyer. Once she started working in Hilo, she made certain that the chairman of the board noticed her. Nillson made no sexual advances, but An Linh rose rapidly to become director of corporate public relations.

It was in her sparkling new office that she met Cliff Baker of Worldnews, Inc. And he introduced her to Father Lemoyne.

Baker was the complete cynic, a journalist who believed in no one and nothing except himself and his own talents. He was nearly ten years older than An Linh, a ruggedly handsome Australian with golden-blond hair and a lean, muscular body. He could have been a video deity, except for the broken nose that marred his otherwise perfect face. His smile was irresistible, his sky-blue eyes disarming. For the first time, An Linh fell helplessly in love. It was not the first time for Baker.

He casually mentioned the frozen astronaut to her, once she told him about her mother waiting in a cylinder filled with liquid nitrogen in Avignon. An Linh searched her office data banks for every shred of data about the astronaut: his past history, the details of how he flew aboard a Russian Soyuz to rendezvous with the alien spacecraft, his decision to remain aboard it with the dead alien, and finally the recapture of the spacecraft. Vanguard Industries had spent a considerable fortune to reach the alien vehicle; it was the farthest manned space mission in history. But once Vanguard's team had brought the alien spacecraft back to an orbit around the Earth, an impenetrable blackout descended. The file stopped dead. Every attempt An Linh made to dig further was met by the computer screen displaying RESTRICTED INFORMATION, PER ORDER J. CAMERATA NILLSON, PRESIDENT, VANGUARD INDUSTRIES.

An Linh soon realized that the marriage between Vanguard's president and the chairman of the board was a strange one. She had a reputation for sleeping her way to the top and apparently did not care who knew about it. Nor did he, it seemed. Nillson's own reputation was the subject of whispers and strange rumors that hinted at odd tastes but offered no real facts. An Linh kept her own amorous liaisons as quiet as possible, maintaining a delicate balance between discreetness and desirability. She owed a debt to Archie Madigan, but he seemed content to leave her alone. Perhaps he was waiting for the debt to accrue interest, An Linh thought.

In a way, Jo Camerata Nillson became a role model for her, and she knew that sooner or later they would become deadly enemies, both seeking power through the same man: Everett Nillson.

Then came the board meeting, and the revelation that the astronaut had been successfully revived. An Linh's heart pounded inside her; she could see her mother being revived, recovering, returning to life.

That evening she told Baker. She knew she shouldn't, but she was bursting with the good news and she had to share it with someone.

"So he's alive," Baker said, his voice hollow with awe. "They've actually brought him back."

He was stretched out naked on the rumpled bed of his apartment, his body deeply tanned except for the narrow stretch that his briefs usually covered. An Linh lay beside him, still moist and warm from their lovemaking. A tropical downpour drummed at the bedroom's lone window.

"Cliff," she said, stroking his bare chest, "this is strictly between the two of us. Totally off the record. If you try to make a story out of it, I'll have to deny it."

Baker sat up abruptly, pulling his knees to his chin and locking his arms around them. He stared at his own image in the mirror above the bureau against the wall across from the bed.

"We'll release the story in a few months," An Linh went on, "and I'll make certain that you're-"

"Shh!" Baker hissed. "Genius at work."

She smiled up at his fiercely scowling face. Then, glancing at the digital clock on the dresser, she saw that she was running late for her dinner engagement. Leaving the Aussie to his own machinations, An Linh got up from the bed and walked lightly to the bathroom.

She was luxuriating in the steamy enveloping warmth of the shower when she felt his hands on her.

"Soap my back, will you?" she murmured.

Baker complied, then slid his hands down her hips, her thighs. She turned to face him, and he sank to his knees, his hands reaching behind her now, grasping her slim buttocks, his tongue searching between her legs. The hot water throbbed against An Linh's shoulders and back. The steam swirled and caressed them both. She dug her fingers into his golden hair and tilted her head back, eyes closed against the delicious hot shower. Her back arched, and she spasmed and gave out a long, wrenching sigh.

With a knowing grin, Baker got to his feet and held her in his arms for long silent moments. She twined her arms around his neck and kissed him passionately, thankfully.

His grin widened. "My turn," he said.

An Linh smiled back at him. A small voice deep inside her mind told her that he never gave without taking, but she dismissed its warning and knelt before her handsome, smiling lover.

CHAPTER 8

It was still raining by the time An Linh was dressed and ready to leave for dinner. Standing in the apartment's living room, she looked out through the windows at the rain drenching the parking lot.

"Going to dinner?" Baker asked her.

She had not heard him approaching her. He had the knack of moving noiselessly, like a shadow.

"I'm meeting Father Lemoyne, remember?"

He nodded. "Yeah, I know. How's he doing?"

"That's what I'm going to find out. He's just come back from Boston, the medical people at Harvard."

"I've been thinking," Baker said, looking away from An Linh toward his ghostly image reflected in the rain-washed windows. "The priest might be the way for you to get me inside the Vanguard labs."

"I'll get you inside the labs, when the time comes. I'll make certain that-"

"Not 'when the time comes,' " Baker said. "I want to get in there now. As soon as possible."

"What do you mean?"

"You could arrange for me to do a story about Father Lemoyne, if he's really terminal."

An Linh felt the blood rising to her cheeks. "Cliff, you sound as if you want him to … to be terminal!"

He shrugged carelessly. "If he's not, that's wonderful. Of course. But if he is, then he could be a big help to us."

"That's awful!"

He clasped her wrist in his strong grip. "Now don't get sentimental on me, love. We're talking a big story here. You do want me to get the inside track on this frozen astronaut story, don't you?"

"Yes, but-"

"And once we get in among the scientists, we might even get a line on the cure for cancer they've developed."

"But they haven't!"

"Haven't they?" He smirked.

"Cliff, when you introduced me to Father Lemoyne, I didn't think it was for … for something like this."

"Now listen to me, love. There's a lot at stake here, and the least you can do is try to keep a professional attitude. After all, we're not making him sick, you know."

Pulling away from him, An Linh replied, "No, but you seem pretty damned quick to think of how we can use his illness for your own benefit."

"It's a big story, this frozen astronaut," Baker insisted. "It's important to the whole world, pet. They're going to sit on it, you know. They're going to keep it a secret for as long as we let them."

She shook her head. "No, they wouldn't."

"Wouldn't they?" Baker smiled at her like a grown man pitying a foolish child. "From what you told me about the board meeting, all they're interested in is keeping him under wraps."

"That's just for the time being."

"Really? I'll tell you what's going through their minds, love. They're going to keep this all to themselves, like their cure for cancer. They want to have the secret of immortality for their own use. Not for you or me, pet. Not for the bleeding masses. For themselves and their friends. For the rich, who can pay millions. Not for us. Not for your mother."

That was the magic word, and he knew it. An Linh listened numbly as Baker told her what he wanted her to do.

Minutes later she dashed out to the parking lot, wrapped in a monolayer raincoat and hood, so light and porous that it hardly hindered her hurried stride, yet totally impervious to the rain sweeping along the rows of parked automobiles. Her boots were similarly waterproof as she splashed through the puddles on the cement lot.

The apartment building had been built on a scenic hilltop overlooking the city. Even in the gray, driving rain, Hilo's soaring white towers and sprawling swirls of houses looked beautiful to An Linh. It was still a green city, despite the row of massive hotels that lined the beach like the wall of a fortress built to repel invaders from the sea. Flowers blossomed everywhere, and stately palm trees lined street after street.

But the city's charms were not uppermost in An Linh's mind. She ducked inside her car and slammed the door shut. Cliff wanted to use Father Lemoyne to get himself inside the labs and onto the inside track of the frozen astronaut story. He had introduced her to the priest months ago-was he thinking about this moment even back then? Was he thinking about it when he met me? she asked herself. Is Cliff using me, as well as the priest?

The answer was, Of course he is. But is that why he sought me out? Does he really love me, or am I merely a way to the story he's after?

But if he's right, she thought, if Vanguard really has developed a cure for cancer … and now they've revived the astronaut … Her thoughts spun. She saw her mother, alive again, young and vibrant and cured.

Cliff doesn't care about her, though. He doesn't care about Father Lemoyne, either. All he really wants are his big stories-the cure for cancer, and immortality through freezing. The biggest news stories of a lifetime.

An Linh shook her head as she tapped out the ignition code on the keyboard set into the console between the two bucket seats. I love Cliff, she told herself. That means I must trust him. He can go after the biggest news stories of the century, that's only natural. That's his profession. It doesn't mean that he's not in love with me. It doesn't. It can't!

The electric motor whined complainingly and then hummed to life. Frowning at her inner thoughts, An Linh flicked on the guidance computer, punched in the address of the restaurant downtown where she was to meet Father Lemoyne, then studied the route that the computer marked in red on the street map its screen displayed.

An Linh had to drive the car manually all the way, since the computer's route avoided the electronically controlled freeways with their usual crush of homewardbound traffic. She parked as close as she could to the restaurant, then ran a block and a half through the spattering rain.

Pushing open the door of the Japanese restaurant, An Linh stepped into a haven of warmth and pungent, tantalizing aromas. She slipped out of her raingear and accepted a plastic token from the hat-check robot. A human ma?tre d', a middle-aged Japanese man who looked slim and ascetic enough to have come recently from Japan, made a bow to An Linh that was low enough to be polite but quick enough to be obviously reluctant. He is from Japan, she thought. No American-born would be so uptight about bowing to a woman.

"Father Lemoyne's table, please," she told him.

He blinked once, then understood. "Ah, the priest. Yess. This way, prease."

He waved a kimono-clad waitress to him and left her to guide An Linh to her table. The restaurant was long and narrow, as if it had been built into a hallway separating two buildings. Heads turned as she followed the waitress through the closely packed tables. She still wore her board meeting "business clothes," a simple long-sleeved Chinese red silk blouse and light gray skirt, modestly adorned with accents of costume jewelry. Yet she looked strikingly beautiful, her short-cropped black hair like an ebony helmet framing the ivory complexion of her high-cheeked face. Her body was slight, almost boyish, her almond eyes wide, a tantalizing conjugation of innocence and knowledge, of youth and worldliness, that made her look somehow vulnerable, in need of protection, utterly desirable. Men followed An Linh with their eyes. Women stared openly.

Father Lemoyne was already seated at the very last table in the place, his back solidly planted against the rear wall. Above him hung a cheap reproduction of a fine Japanese silk print showing beautiful ladies in blue-and-white kimonos against a background of snow-topped mountains.

Lemoyne looked like the ex-football player that he was. Ruddy face gone to jowls and creases, reddish hair fading to gray, big shoulders beginning to sag. He squeezed up from behind the table as An Linn approached. Even in his black clerical suit it was clear to see that his once powerful body had gone to fat.

"I'm sorry to be late," she said as the waitress held her chair for her.

"I only just arrived a moment ago myself," the priest said. A tumbler of whiskey sat before him.

For an instant they stood facing each other: the heavyset, florid priest in his collar and black suit; the Asian beauty who seemed as fragile as a porcelain flower across the table from him.

An Linh sat and ordered a sake, Lemoyne stared at his own drink, waiting.

"Welcome home," An Linh said. "I'm sorry it's such a rainy day."

"Better than the weather in Boston," answered the priest. "To think that I spent the first forty years of my life there."

"You got back this morning?"

He nodded, still eyeing the whiskey. "I've got a fine case of jet lag. They can fly your body to Hawaii in two hours, but your stomach's still in Boston."

She smiled at him. "You must have called me from the airport, then."

"I did. I was thinking about you while I was away."

"And the specialists … did they have good news for you?"

Lemoyne's face made a strange little half smile. "No, not really. To get at the tumor they'd have to cut away so much of my brain that I'd be a vegetable."

An Linh stared into his eyes. She saw no pain there, but no resignation, either. Lemoyne's eyes flamed with raw animal fear.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

He grabbed for the whiskey and gulped at it. "Nothing to be done about it. God's will and all that."

"How long? …"

"I have a few months." He was trying to keep his voice from trembling and not succeeding. "Maybe as much as a year."

"They could be wrong, couldn't they?"

"Anything is possible if God wills it so. There could be what the medical people call a spontaneous remission. I could make a pilgrimage to Lourdes. The world might end tomorrow…."

She reached out and touched his sleeve. Her hand looked frail as a child's next to his beefy clenched fist.

"It's painless," he said. "I'll just … lose my faculties as the tumor grows." Another gulp of whiskey. An Linh prayed silently that her own drink would come. She felt the need of something that could burn inside her, the need to join this dying man at least in the act of drinking.

"Imagine me in diapers," he joked feebly. "But it won't hurt. They assured me of that much. I won't feel any pain. Toward the end I won't even know what's happening to me."

Tears were blurring An Linh's vision as the waitress finally placed a ceramic bottle and tiny cup in front of her. "Another for you?" the waitress asked the priest cheerfully.

He nodded, then drained the last of his drink.

"There's nothing that the doctors can do?" An Linh asked, remembering the calm, grave face of the chief internist at her father's hospital in Avignon.

"It's God's will," Lemoyne said, just a hint of bitterness in his tone. "We all have to go to Him sooner or later. He just chose to make mine sooner."

"But …"

He patted her outstretched hand. His fingers were damp from clutching the glass.

"It's in God's hands," he said, trying to sound resigned. "There's not a thing we can do about it. Not a damned thing."

"But there is-"

"No, no. It's in God's hands. No more of it. It's too good to see you again, after all these weeks. I don't want to spoil it.

An Linh lapsed into silence.

"And how are things going with your new position?" he asked.

"Very well," she replied. "It's much easier to be the director of the department than one of the workers. All I have to do is give orders and let others do the work."

"That's great!" He actually laughed.

The waitress brought Lemoyne's second whiskey, and while she was at their table they both ordered sukiyaki. Another waitress, her kimono slightly stained and her hair a bit disheveled, cooked it at their table. An Linh enjoyed the pungent heat as the woman stirred in the vegetables and the sizzling slices of beef. After the waitress left them to their steaming bowls, An Linh and the priest ate in silence for several moments.

Then, "There is something that we can do about your … condition," she said.

He was struggling doggedly with his chopsticks. For a heartbeat or two An Linh thought he might not have heard her words, or that he was ignoring them. But he looked up at her finally, his blue eyes still wide with fear.

"And what would that be? A novena?"

It was meant to be a little joke, so she smiled at him. "We could have you frozen."

He frowned at the idea. "Like your mother?"

"Like my mother."

Waving the chopsticks almost angrily, Lemoyne said, "No, none of that for me. If I have to die, I'll die when my appointed time comes. I'll not have myself popped into some tin can filled with liquified air."

"The tumor in your brain," An Linh said gently, "will not always be inoperable. Someday medical science will learn how to kill the tumor cells without damaging your brain."

Maybe they already know, she added silently, unable to speak the suspicion aloud. Maybe they already have the cure but are keeping it to themselves.

Lemoyne was shaking his head slowly, unconsciously refusing to accept the possibility of hope.

"If they can keep an astronaut frozen for years and then bring him back …"

"They've brought him back?" he asked sharply.

An Linh hesitated. "I can't say it officially, but … yes, they have."

"They've brought him back to life? Really?"

She did not trust herself to repeat it. She merely gave the barest suggestion of a nod.

"There's been no news story about it; none that I've seen."

"There won't be," she said, thinking of Cliff. "Not for some time."

"But they've brought him back. Actually revived a man who'd been frozen for years and years."

She watched his face as the idea of it sank into his awareness. Lemoyne took another long pull on his whiskey, then attacked the sukiyaki with clumsy gusto. She said nothing more but returned to her dinner, too.

At length he looked up and asked, "Did you … miss me while I was away?"

"Of course I did."

"Did you go to anyone else?"

"No."

"Three months. You went without confession for three months?"

She made herself smile for him. "I haven't done anything I should confess."

"You're living with that Baker fella, aren't you?"

"Not living with him," she said. "I keep my own apartment."

"But you're sleeping with him."

"As often as I can."

"The Church still regards that as a sin, you realize."

"Do you?"

He closed his eyes. "An Linh, you are the one woman in the whole of my life who's ever made me feel a regret at having taken my vows. For me, you are a near occasion of sin."

"Your virtue is safe with me," she teased.

"I'm sure," he replied. "Too bad. Such a pity."

Inwardly, An Linh rejoiced. He was bantering with her, the pall of desperate fear that had hung over him had lifted, at least for a while. The idea of being frozen and then revived to be cured of his tumor had raised the cold hand of death from the priest's shoulder.

And from my mother's, An Linh told herself.

CHAPTER 9

Keith Stoner closed the book he had been reading, clicked off the tiny light clamped to its cover, and placed the book atop the stack next to his waterbed. He stretched out on the utterly comfortable, softly yielding surface, sending gentle waves across it. Stoner's room had changed. The waterbed took up a good deal of the floor space. The bed he had awakened in had been removed from the bank of sensors and monitoring instruments. Bookshelves lined the wall on either side of the waterbed, crammed with volumes of all sizes. Richards had offered Stoner an electronic reader, but Stoner preferred the paper-leafed books he was familiar with.

It had been the psychiatrist's idea to bring in a waterbed; he said he thought it might help to relax his patient. To Stoner, the waterbed was the nearest thing to the weightlessness of orbit that could be found on Earth. He wondered if the psychiatrist hadn't thought of the bed for that reason.

It was nearly midnight; pale moonlight slanted through the window and made a pool of silver on the tiled floor. The only other light in the room came from the ceaseless flickering curves wriggling across the display screens in the monitoring equipment that made up the room's farther wall.

Clasping his hands behind his head, Stoner stared intently at the screens. Slowly, slowly, he smoothed the ragged curves. Heartbeat, body temperature, breathing rate, even the EEG that recorded the electrical activity of his brain-he made them slow and smooth to the point where they were reporting that Keith Stoner had at last fallen asleep.

He smiled to himself. I should have thought of this sooner. Richards is going to be pleased to see that I've finally had some sleep.

The only thing that had surprised him about his sleeplessness was his lack of alarm over it. It seemed totally natural for him to stay awake constantly; the need for sleep struck him as archaic, primitive. Stoner knew this was not natural, but even though he felt he should be worried, or at least concerned, he found that he was perfectly calm. Even content. There were years' worth of books that he had always meant to read. Now he finally had the time to read them.

Hands still clasped behind his head, he looked up through the darkness at the ceiling, and the cameras behind the paneling, watching him. Darkness is no hindrance to them, he knew. They can see me as clearly as if it were daylight.

Maybe I can do something about that, too.

He got up from the bed and dressed quickly, silently, all the while concentrating on the display screens. They remained as calm as a sleeping infant's.

He went to the section of the wall where the portal was. After watching Richards and the younger assistants who brought his meals so many times, he knew that the doorway was activated by a heat sensor set into the wall. It would be turned off now, the portal closed for the night unless there was an emergency that overrode its computer command to remain closed.

Stoner made an emergency. The screens showing his heartbeat and blood pressure suddenly sprouted jagged, urgent peaks that turned blazing red. A chorus of electronic beeps wailed as Stoner stood patiently in the middle of the room, bathed in moonlight.

The portal glowed and opened, and a flustered young technician in a white lab coat rushed in, then skidded to a stop when he saw Stoner standing there.

"Wh … what the hell's goin' on?" the young man sputtered. He was tall and skinny, his hair a dark unruly mop, his coat open and flapping, pockets bulging. An intern, Stoner knew at once, stuck with the midnight-to-eight-a.m. shift.

"Looks like a glitch in the monitoring equipment," Stoner said calmly.

The youngster peered at the wildly fluctuating screens. "Jesus Christ! There's a crash wagon on its way."

With a grin, Stoner said, "You'd better tell them to relax and forget it."

"Yeah … yeah…." The intern pulled a pencil-sized black cylinder from his shirt pocket and spoke into it. "Campbell, this is McKean. No sweat. He's okay. The goddamned electronics are screwed up."

Stoner heard a tinny voice squawking angrily. The intern frowned as he said into the slim communicator, "Well, then wake Healy up and tell him to check it out himself. I'm here with him and he's perfectly okay."

Stoner smiled back at the youngster and slid an arm around his skinny shoulders. "You got here damned fast."

"That's what I get paid for."

Together they stepped through the open portal, into the corridor outside.

"I'm going out for a swim," Stoner said. "I'll be back in an hour or so."

The intern blinked several times and knitted his brows, as if trying to remember something that kept slipping away from him.

"Why don't you just erase the videotapes and the monitoring records for the past half hour and the next hour or so," Stoner told him. "They'll just be botched up anyway."

"Yeah … I guess I should…."

"Of course. That will be the best thing to do. No need to bother Dr. Healy."

"Right."

Stoner left him standing there in the corridor, looking befuddled, and walked swiftly to the nearest door that led outside.

It was a beautiful night, warm and scented with flowers. The tropical breeze sighed softly as Stoner strode alone across the lawn, through the gap between two lab buildings, and out to the fence that surrounded the Vanguard complex. He scaled the fence easily, crossed the highway-deserted except for a pair of huge tandem-trailer trucks barreling along almost silently-and sprinted out onto the beach.

The moon grinned down at him lopsidedly.

Stoner took off his slipper socks and rolled up the legs of his pants to the knee. He waded calf deep in the gentle surf, feeling the cool, delicious touch of the world ocean.

The eternal sea, he thought, bending down to scoop up a handful of salt water. It glowed slightly in his palm, reflecting the moonlight. Life began in the sea, Stoner said to himself. Did it begin that way on your world, too? Are there oceans on the planet of your birth?

He let the water drain from his hand as he turned his face, up toward the heavens. There were few stars to see in the moon-bright sky. But several very bright ones hovered almost straight overhead. Space stations, Stoner realized. Looking back at the moon, he saw dots of light here and there on its mottled face. They've built bases on the moon. Big ones.

After a few minutes of stargazing he splashed back onto the sand and sank to his knees. The ocean stretched out before him, murmuring its eternal message, and beyond the horizon was the infinite span of the universe. Stoner knelt and waited, a worshiper, a supplicant, waiting for-for what?

He did not know.

Years ago he had seen the tropical sky of Kwajalein shimmering with the delicate hues of the Northern Lights. The alien's message, the announcement of its approach. But to-night the sky was exactly the way it should be: serene and lovely, everything so precisely in its ordained place that Isaac Newton could have predicted the location of each star and planet and moon.

How did I get that boy to let me roam free outside my room? he wondered. Hypnotism? Intimidation? Magic?

Clearly it had something to do with the alien. He was different now, Stoner knew. He could feel the difference within him. He had spent more than six years frozen in that spacecraft with the dead body of the alien. In that time, something-something-had gotten into him, seeped through his frozen flesh, enmeshed itself deeply inside his sleeping brain.

"I am Keith Stoner," he whispered to himself. "I am still the same man I was eighteen years ago."

But he knew that he was not only that same man. Not anymore.

For nearly an hour he waited, kneeling, on the beach. Nothing happened. The surf curled in ceaselessly. The warm wind caressing his cheek carried a delicate trace of the night-blooming cereus flowers from the shrubbery up near the highway. Behind him Stoner could hear the softly powerful thrumming of occasional trucks speeding along the road. But nothing more.

He got to his feet and walked slowly, reluctantly, back to the laboratory. I've spent most of my life locked into one sort of cell or another, he thought.

He clambered over the fence again and trotted back toward his room. He waved to the intern, sitting sleepily in front of his monitoring screens, arms hanging from his shoulders, eyes half-closed. The portal to his room was still open. He stepped in, and the doorway glowed and became solid wall again. Stoner wondered if the intern would actually erase the tapes as he had told him to.

He almost wished he wouldn't.

But in the morning they brought him breakfast as usual and Richards showed up almost at the instant Stoner finished his last sip of coffee.

"Good news," the psychiatrist told him as he drew up one of the little plastic chairs. "We're moving."

Seated at the chair by the window, his breakfast tray resting on a rolling cart in front of him, Stoner searched the psychiatrist's face. There was no sign that he knew about the night's little adventure.

"Moving? Where? When?"

Touching his mustache, Richards said, "Soon. A couple of days, I should think. I'm not sure where yet, but it'll probably be to the mainland."

"My son lives in Los Angeles, you said. I'd like to see him."

Richards nodded. "That can be arranged." But his eyes were saying, later. Much later.

"Have you told them I'm … alive?" Stoner asked.

"Your children? No, not yet."

"Don't you think they'd like to know?"

"I'm sure they would."

"So?"

Trying hard not to frown, Richards said, "Well … there are complications."

"What do you mean?"

"You don't sleep. And you hallucinated."

"Even if I'm crazy, my kids have a right to know that I'm alive again."

The psychiatrist lapsed into silence.

"Where is Jo?"

"Jo Camerata? She's right here."

"Yesterday you said she's pretty important to this operation."

"Very."

"I'd like to see her. Today."

"I'm not sure …"

Stoner leaned forward slightly, nudging the cart that held the remains of his breakfast. "I'd like you to call her. Now."

Richards looked puzzled for a moment, then lifted his left arm and touched his wrist communicator. "Mrs. Nillson, please."

Stoner felt a pang of surprise. "She's married."

The psychiatrist ignored his remark. He spoke to several underlings, then finally:

"Jo, he wants to see you. Today, if you have the time."

A long hesitation. Then Stoner heard Jo's voice reply, "Impossible today. Tomorrow. Lunch."

Jo touched the keypad that turned off the phone. He's finally gotten around to asking for me, she thought. I shouldn't have agreed to see him so easily.

She leaned back in her chair and touched the controls that gently warmed and massaged her. She needed to relax, to ease the tension that had suddenly made her neck as taut as steel cables.

The morning reports had troubled her. There had been some sort of glitch in the equipment monitoring Keith. The whole system had gone haywire for nearly two hours; everything had blanked out, as if somebody had erased all the tapes. The intern on duty was being interrogated by security, but not even the polygraph had turned up anything. Jo wondered briefly about the PR director; was she up to something? Then there had been a routine entry in the perimeter security log: something or someone had brushed the outer fence. Not once. Twice. Guards had searched the area and found nothing. Probably an animal, they concluded. There had been no sign of an unauthorized entry into any of the lab buildings themselves. An animal. A dog left to wandering by itself. Or a stupid nene bird with a hurt wing.

Or Keith Stoner.

The reports had troubled her. Someone had tested the security system from the outside two nights ago. Terrorists? Kids looking for drugs? A team sent to spirit Stoner away? The system had held; whoever it had been was scared away by the time the guards got to the fence. But then last night there had been another disturbance.

And now Keith suddenly wanted to see her.

He had gotten out last night. Jo was certain of it. How he did it, she had no idea. But she knew Keith, knew what he was capable of. If he wanted to get out, he would. No one she had ever met in her life could be so determined, so utterly single-minded.

But he had returned. And now he was demanding to see her.

Two things were clear to Jo. Keith had made a mockery of this facility's security. He would have to be moved to someplace much safer. And to keep him there, wherever she decided to put him, she would have to go with him. He would stay with her, she was sure of that. At least, for a while.

She got up from the chair and went to the bathroom adjoining her office. In the mirror over the marble sink, Jo examined herself pitilessly. Almost forty. Her face was leaner than it had been eighteen years earlier. The baby fat had been boiled away by the tough battles that had brought her to the top of Vanguard Industries. It would be a while before she needed a face lift, but there were lines at the corners of her eyes that not even cosmetics could completely hide.

She had gone to Vanguard Industries when the U.S. government failed to move swiftly enough to recover the alien spacecraft. It was coasting away from Earth, out of the solar system altogether, with Keith Stoner frozen alive aboard it.

In those days, when she had loved Keith with the wild fury of youth, she had wanted to be an astronaut. Just as he was. She would become an astronaut and lead the mission to rescue him. He was alive, she knew he was alive. He had to be returned to Earth before the spacecraft bearing him and the dead alien swept so far away on its blind wandering that it could never be recovered.

She learned soon enough that a would-be astronaut had no power, and it would take power, a great deal of power, to move the people and machines necessary for the task of rescuing Keith.

Jo learned about power. How to get it, how to use it. The dream of leading the space mission faded as she devoted her blazing energies and ruthless drive to the task she had set for herself. Through the years, as she climbed over the bodies of friends and strangers, enemies and allies, lovers and rivals, her goal remained the same, but her reasons for pursuing it subtly changed.

She began to understand that power has its own rewards. Yes, returning Keith and the alien would be a staggering coup for Vanguard Industries. The alien spacecraft was a treasure house of technology. Who knew what secrets it would reveal to those who captured it? And if they could revive the frozen astronaut, bring him back to life, that alone would be worth untold billions.

She succeeded. The price of success was marrying Nillson and letting him parade her before former lovers and future possibilities as his possession.

But the rewards! Once they had brought the alien spacecraft back into a safe orbit around the Earth, Vanguard's scientists had dug into it like a swarm of ants stripping a carcass. In the first five years they found enough to change the world several times over, and to make Vanguard virtually an autonomous nation, such was the wealth and power uncovered.

And now, at last, they had brought the frozen human being back to life. Like Sleeping Beauty, they had revived the seemingly dead. Immortality was at hand. For that, the world would pay anything that Jo wanted.

But Keith Stoner had to be controlled now. At least for a while. Controlled and kept safe from harm. It wouldn't do for the world's first immortal man to disappear.

Or die.

CHAPTER 10

It was past eleven o'clock and Richards had not shown up yet. Stoner sat patiently in the chair by the window, reading Don Quixote, part of the lifetime's worth of literature that he had never gotten into before. He laughed at the antics of the emaciated old madman and his stout, earthy squire, Sancho. Like all the generations before him, Stoner saw something of himself in the earnest lunacy of the Knight of the Sad Countenance.

But within his mind, it was as though he were discovering facets of the human race that he had never understood before. It's all a sham, a voice within him whispered. Each human being plays a role, presents a mask to the others around him, and the others all hold up their own masks to hide their own vulnerabilities.

No human is ever totally honest, Stoner realized. Not even with himself. He put the book down on his lap and stared out at the ocean. You knew that, he told himself. You've known that almost all your life.

Yet there was a part of him that found the understanding new and fresh and fascinating. A part of him that seemed to be perceiving the human drama for the first time.

When the portal opened it made no sound, but the glow of the wall's transmutation caught Stoner's eye. He turned to see Richards stepping through.

The psychiatrist stared at the book in Stoner's lap. "You just started reading that this morning," he said, his tone almost accusing.

"Yes," answered Stoner, getting to his feet.

"You're damned near finished!"

Stoner glanced at the book, still in his hand. He turned and put it down carefully on the windowsill next to the chair. "My reading speed is increasing, I guess."

Richards bustled past him and picked up the book. "Seven hundred and thirty-two pages! You've read it? Without skimming?"

Stoner smiled. "Want to quiz me?"

"Should I?"

"Is it because psychiatry began among Middle European Jews that you tend to answer a question with a question?" Stoner asked.

Richards scowled.

"I'll tell you what I've learned from Cervantes," Stoner volunteered. "And from the other authors I've been reading. All of fiction is basically about one subject, and only one: women choosing their mates."

"Women choosing … ?"

With a nod, Stoner said, "Yep. That's the common denominator of all fiction."

"Not in Don Quixote," Richards objected.

"The don's adventures are just a frame to hold together a lot of little stories," Stoner said. "All of those little stories concern women deciding whom they're going to marry."

"But not all fiction! A lot of it's about men."

Stoner's grin widened. "Some of it seems to be about men and their adventures. But when you look closer, you see that what the men are really doing is trying to get certain women. And it's always the woman who decides. The men are constant, always striving to get the woman. The women are never constant; they're always trying to make up their minds about accepting this particular male or some other one."

"Hamlet?" snapped Richards.

"His mother chose Claudius, and that's what started all the trouble."

"Hemingway!"

Laughing, Stoner said, "I just finished The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls last night. The women make all the decisions."

Richards stood there, frowning and tugging at his mustache.

"Try Jane Austen," Stoner suggested, "or Gone With the Wind."

The psychiatrist shook his head. Returning the book to the windowsill, he said, "I don't really have the time to discuss literature with you. Come on, you're going to lunch with Mrs. Nillson."

"I'm ready," said Stoner.

Richards led him through corridors he had not seen before, out to a parking lot and a sleek, silver, two-seated automobile.

"Alfa Mercedes," Richards muttered. "My sublimation machine." Stoner folded himself into the front seat as Richards slid behind the wheel and flicked his fingers over the keypad on the dash. The roof glowed briefly and disappeared. Stoner grinned. The same trick that turned a solid wall into an open doorway also turned the hard-topped car into a convertible.

"One of the fringe benefits of being relatively high up on the ladder of Vanguard Industries." Richards grinned back at him. "You get a lot of special features for your car, way ahead of the production models."

The engine purred softly, and the car eased out of the parking lot.

"Electric motor?" Stoner asked.

Richards nodded, swinging the car past the uniformed guards on either side of the parking lot's entrance and out onto the access road to the highway.

"Most vehicles are electrical now. One of the little gifts your dead friend gave us: fusion energy."

The car accelerated smoothly and quietly up onto the broad four-lane highway. Other cars whizzed past, as fast and quiet as a charging cheetah. Trucks rumbled along in their own lanes, passing all but the speediest of the autos.

"The trucks still use internal combustion engines," Richards explained. "Hydrogen fuel, though. No more kerosene."

"Nobody does fifty-five, do they," Stoner shouted over the rush of the wind that was tousling his hair.

Richards pecked out another combination on the dashboard keys, then took his hands off the wheel and leaned back in his chair.

"She's on automatic now. I won't have to pick up the steering again until we turn off the highway."

Stoner lifted his face to the glorious Hawaiian sun. He felt free and fine, the wind whistling by, the sunshine warm, the lovely beach racing past.

"There's no speed limit on the highways anymore," Richards told him. "No need to conserve fuel, so we adapted the European system. Besides, with magnetic bumpers and miniradar warning systems tied automatically to the computer that runs the engine, it's almost impossible to have a collision."

"There's no seat belt."

"Another gift from your friend," Richards shouted into the wind. "An energy shell absorbs any impact forces and keeps you safely in your seat. The car can be totaled, and you'll just get up and walk away from it. This'll go into the production cars next year, they tell me."

"Ought to please the insurance companies!"

Richards nodded happily.

Stoner eyed him for a moment. He could see through the psychiatrist's veneer of self-control. "How fast can this buggy really go?" he asked.

Richards smiled slightly, and his left hand unconsciously snaked toward the steering wheel. "Pretty damned fast."

"A hundred?"

"Miles or kilometers?"

"Miles."

"Easy." He reached into the compartment under the dashboard and pulled out a pair of skin-soft gloves. Stoner saw that they were worn nearly through at the palms and knuckles. Richards wormed them onto his hands, fastened the wrist clasps, then punched a single key on the dashboard. He gripped the wheel and leaned slightly forward. The car surged ahead with barely a murmur from the engine. Stoner felt the acceleration pushing him into the molded seat. But he missed the roar of power that he remembered.

The highway became a blur as Richards, hunching over the steering wheel, swung onto the leftmost lane and leaned on the accelerator. It was eerily quiet: only the rushing wind and the hum of the tires on the road surface. And the sudden, startling whoosh as they zipped past other cars. Fifteen minutes later Richards's silver convertible pulled into a parking area set off the highway, next to the beach.

The psychiatrist was grinning like a kid as he braked the car to a stop. "A hundred and seventy!" he exulted. "How'd you like that?"

"Fastest I've ever traveled on the ground," Stoner said.

Richards nodded happily. "I never had her up to that speed. Wow, she just glides along without a rattle, doesn't she?"

Pulling himself out of the bucket seat, Stoner admitted, "I never thought electric motors could produce such speed."

"Times have changed," Richards said, getting out of the car. "A lot of things have changed."

"I'm beginning to understand that."

They stood by the gleaming silver Alfa Mercedes in the bright noontime sun. Its warmth soaked into Stoner's shoulders and back; it felt good.

"Are we going to have a picnic?" Stoner asked.

Richards made an exaggerated shrug. "Search me. I was told to bring you here." Looking back at his car and grinning again, "We're a little early, of course."

Stoner nodded an acknowledgment and turned to look out at the ocean. It seemed to shimmer like a heat mirage. Concentrating every fiber of his attention on the waves rolling up to the beach, Stoner forced the shimmering to stop. No hallucinations, he told himself. Not while he's watching me. Then he heard the crunching of wheels on the parking lot's macadam. Turning back again, he saw a long black limousine gliding to a stop alongside Richards's sleek silver sports car. The limo's windows were smoky dark; it was impossible to see who was inside it.

He walked through the bright sunshine toward the limousine, Richards beside him. Its roof glittered in the sunlight. Solar cells, he realized. They make enough electricity to run the air conditioner and God knows what else, even when the engine's off.

The chauffeur popped out of the limo as they approached, trotted around the length of it, and opened the rear door.

Jo Camerata stepped out.

She was as excitingly beautiful as Stoner had remembered her. Tall, with the long-legged curvaceous figure of a Hollywood star. Thickly lustrous black hair. Blazing dark eyes and rich full lips. And best of all, a mind, a spirit, as driving and demanding as Stoner's own had been. An intelligence behind those midnight eyes that had made her more challenging than any woman he had ever known.

Eighteen years ago. She had been a child then, a student. Now she was a woman. She stood before Stoner, dressed in a simple sleeveless blouse of light blue and a darker wraparound skirt. Her throat was adorned with a choker of gleaming rubies and diamonds; a matching bracelet on her wrist.

"You've become a woman," Stoner said to her. "You're even more marvelous than I thought you'd be."

For a moment she said nothing, then she turned to Richards. "Thanks for bringing him, Gene. I'll see you back at the lab."

The psychiatrist took her dismissal wordlessly, turned, and started back for his car.

"I thought we would picnic on the beach, Keith," Jo said.

His memory wrenched back to Kwajalein, to the long hot frantic days and cool windswept nights on the beaches there when an eighteen-year-younger Jo Camerata drove the atoll's male population wild in her cut-off jeans and skimpy halter tops, laughing as she splashed into the surf, knowing that every male eye was on her but wanting only the one man who was too busy to pay attention to her: Keith Stoner.

"A picnic would be fine," he said.

The chauffeur was already pulling a wicker hamper from the limousine's trunk. Stoner took it from him and followed Jo to the edge of the hard-topped parking area and out onto the clean white sand.

"Pretty empty for a public beach," he said.

"It's not a public beach. This is Vanguard Industries property," Jo replied.

He looked at her, more carefully this time. In the flat leisure shoes she was wearing, she came just about up to his chin. "There's something different about you, Jo."

She glanced up at him. "Eighteen years. It's a long time."

"No, not that. If anything, you look better than you did then. More sophisticated. More adult."

"You mean older."

"It's your hair," he suddenly realized. "You used to wear it much longer."

She almost grinned. "Long hair is not highly regarded among corporate executives. Keep it short and simple, like a memo."

"You're a corporate executive now."

"I'm the president of Vanguard Industries."

"The president! I'm impressed."

She stopped and turned to face him. Stoner knelt slightly to let the hamper down onto the sand.

"You've changed, too, Keith," she said.

Nodding, "I'm sure I have."

"Your eyes … they're different. The same color and everything, but … different."

"In what way?"

She studied him for a long moment, then shook her head.

"I don't know. It's there, but I can't tell exactly what it is."

They opened the hamper, took the blanket fastened inside its lid, spread it on the sand, and sat down.

"Chilled wine, caviar, sandwiches, brie … you pack quite a lunch," Stoner said.

But Jo took a small black plastic oblong from the pocket of her skirt and ran it over the open hamper.

"You're afraid of being bugged?"

"Goes with the job," she said. "Industrial espionage, corporate politics-it can get pretty cutthroat."

"And the government? The Russians?"

She tucked the electronic device back into her skirt and reached for the wine bottle. "The Cold War's ancient history, Keith. It's a very different world, thanks to you."

"To me?"

"One of the bits of technology we found on the spacecraft transmutes matter into energy and back again quite easily."

"I know. The door to my room … Richards's convertible roof."

She handed him the bottle and a corkscrew. "The same technology has made nuclear bombs obsolete."

"How?"

"We've learned how to create a dome of energy large enough to cover a city. When it's turned on, it protects the area inside from the blast and heat of a nuclear explosion."

"And the radiation?"

Nodding, Jo said, "Radiation, too. All the energy from the nuclear explosion is absorbed by the screen."

Stoner thought for a silent moment as he wormed the corkscrew into the cork, then pulled it out with a satisfactory pop!

"That means that nuclear weapons are useless against American cities…."

"And Russian cities, too," Jo said. "We sold the information to the Russians."

"The American government didn't object?"

She held out a glass that sparkled like crystal in the hot sun. "Lots of people objected. The President who okayed the deal was almost impeached. He lost his bid for reelection-never even got his own party's nomination."

"Jesus," Stoner muttered.

"But the world is safer now," she said. "The U.S., Russia, all of Europe, even the major cities of China and India are protected by energy domes."

Stoner poured the wine. They touched glasses with a pure crystal ring and sipped. The wine was cold and dry, with just a hint of muskiness.

"So we're safe from nuclear war," Stoner said.

"Vanguard's making billions, setting up energy domes all over the world."

"Have you seen Kirill lately?"

"Not for years."

They sat on the blanket spread over the beach sand, facing each other, sipping wine. Thoughts raced through Stoner's mind. Richards had been right: there was a lot he would have to adjust to. He watched in silence as Jo took out the tray of iced caviar and warmed brie, then set out a platter of thin crackers between them.

"If the Cold War is ancient history," he asked, "and we're safe from nuclear attack, what's causing the tensions in the world?"

Jo glanced up sharply at him. "Tensions? What do you mean?"

"It's not a peaceful world, Jo. I can feel it. The way your eyes moved away from me when I asked you about Kirill. The idea of meeting here on the beach. What are you afraid of, Jo? What's wrong?"

She opened her mouth to speak but hesitated. For an instant she had been ready to tell him the truth. But something had stopped her, Stoner realized.

"It's a better world than it was eighteen years ago, Keith," she said. Her voice was low, barely strong enough to hear over the gentle murmur of the surf.

"You mean that in some ways it's better," he replied. "But in some ways it's worse, isn't it?"

"We've almost solved the drug problem."

He felt a ripple of skepticism. "Don't tell me the alien's technology has turned people off drugs."

"No." She smiled slightly. "Our own technology. Although the new political alignments in the world have helped."

"In what way?"

"We're using sensors on satellites to spot the areas where the raw product is grown. You know, poppies and marijuana and all."

"You spot them from satellites."

"Right. And we destroy them. Send in troops and wipe the fields clean."

"You just invade a nation…."

"No, no. The Peace Enforcers do it. They're an international entity."

"And a nation like Turkey or Colombia just allows them to come in and rip up the poppy fields?"

Jo nodded and took another sip of wine. "They finally realized-oh, a half-dozen years ago or more-that the drug trade was destroying their governments. The drug dealers were taking over whole countries, Keith! I think it was to deal with the drug trade that the Peace Enforcers were really created, as much as to deal with stopping wars."

"Peace Enforcers," Stoner murmured. "My daughter's married to somebody who's a Peace Enforcer, according to what Richards told me. Tell me about them."

"I will tell you about them," she said. "But not now. It's too soon."

He smiled. "I'm not a child. I want to know about the world, Jo."

And she smiled back, but it was tinged with sadness. "Keith, in many ways you are a child. A newborn. Don't try to gobble down everything at once. Let us help you to learn about this new world that …"

She stopped herself.

"That I've helped to create," he finished for her.

With a nod, she admitted, "Yes, that you've helped to create."

He realized he had been leaning forward tensely. Taking a deep breath, he relaxed and stretched himself out on the blanket, squinting up at the brilliant sky.

"There must be a lot of people out there who want to thank me," he said.

Jo leaned over into his view, blocking out the sun. "Yes, there are."

"And there must be others who hate me."

He heard her breath catch in her throat. But she managed to recover swiftly and say, "There are plenty of others who would like to get their hands on you. You are a very valuable piece of property."

"Property?" He laughed.

She stared down at him. "God, Keith, you have changed."

"In what way?"

"Eighteen years ago you would have gone berserk at the idea that we were keeping you under wraps … that we regarded you as our possession."

He propped himself up on both elbows, his face close enough to Jo's to kiss her. She edged back away from him slightly.

"I'll let you in on a secret, Jo," he said.

"What is it?"

Grinning, "Richards thinks I'm schizzy, doesn't he?"

She tilted her head slightly. "He's worried that you might be."

Stoner's grin widened. "The secret is this: I was a madman-eighteen years ago. I'm sane now. Maybe for the first time in my life, I'm completely sane."

Jo started to reply, but her words were drowned out by the sudden roar of jet engines. A sleek twin-engined plane flashed low across the beach, turned out over the ocean, and as Stoner and Jo watched, came straight back toward them. Its engine pods swiveled and it hovered in midair, then settled slowly down onto the beach, jets screaming, kicking up a maelstrom of gritty sand.

Jo jumped to her feet and yanked at Stoner's hand. "Come on!" she yelled over the noise of the shrieking engines.

Surprised, Stoner got to his feet and ran with her to the plane. It was painted all in white, except for a stylized green V on its tail. A hatch near the rear popped open, and a lean, lithe man in olive-green coveralls jumped down onto the beach. Jo ran to him, almost dragging Stoner behind her.

"Buòn giorno, signora!" said the man.

Jo nodded at him as she motioned Stoner to climb up into the plane. He did, and she followed him.

The crewman got inside and pulled the hatch shut. The screaming noise of the jet engines suddenly dwindled to a muted whine. Stoner had to bend slightly to stand in the aisle, but the interior of the plane was ultraplush: massive leather chairs, deep carpeting, rich paneling along the curving bulkheads.

Jo gestured Stoner to a seat, then sat alongside him. As they clicked their seat belts, the crewman hurried up forward and through the hatch that opened onto the cockpit. Within a second the plane was lifting straight up. Through the window on his left Stoner saw the beach disappearing below them, the chauffeur gathering up the remains of their unfinished picnic lunch and hurrying back toward his limousine.

He turned to Jo. "Where are we going?"

"Where we won't be bothered for a while," she answered without the slightest hint of a smile.

CHAPTER II

"It was very good of you to see me," said An Linn Laguerre.

Everett Nillson's long, high-domed face slowly unfolded into a craggy smile. "I apologize for not having taken the time earlier. As the new director of corporate public relations, you should have ready access to me."

"Oh, really?" An Linh made herself smile back at him. "I was told that you avoid the media-that you're a very secretive person."

Nillson laughed, a surprisingly hearty, booming laughter coming from this pale, lean man. "But that's your job, don't you see? You've got to keep the media away from me."

"Ahh," said An Linh.

"And still keep Vanguard's image shining brightly," Nillson added. "Not the easiest task in the world, I know. But if I didn't think you could do it, you wouldn't have been offered the position."

They traded small compliments for several more moments. Nillson's office was a duplicate of his offices in New York, Berne, and Osaka. Every detail was identical, so that he could reach out a hand and find precisely the same pen or communicator keypad or display screen at precisely the same spot on his desk. It was an imposing room, built large and designed to impress visitors. The walls were paneled in rich dark wood, the floors thickly carpeted. Portraits of placid English ladies by Reynolds and Gainsborough hung in elegant gilt frames, flanking a grotesquely tortured crucifixion scene by an unknown medieval primitive.

To get to Nillson's desk from the outer office, a visitor had to stride past a long marble table bearing gifts presented to Nillson by the chiefs of sovereign nations: an exquisitely carved sperm whale from Norway, a delicate porcelain floral arrangement from China, a miniature golden madonna from Italy, lacquered bowls from Japan, even a crystal American eagle. And many more. There were duplicates of each in Nillson's other offices. No one but he knew which were the originals and which the copies.

Even the windows of the office looked out on the same scenes. At the moment they showed holographic views of a Norwegian fjord: massive stone cliffs dropped precipitously down to deep blue water. Like the owner of this office, the water looked deceptively placid. Beneath its calm surface it was treacherously deep and fatally cold.

His desk itself was a massive fortress of ebony inlaid with ivory and fixtures of highly polished stone from Vanguard's mining operation on the moon. Dressed in a Wall Street cardigan of royal blue, Nillson sat on an elevated platform behind the desk like a general observing approaching visitors from the battlements of his castle. The entire desktop could light up and become a display screen: like a completely modern general, Nillson could survey any battlefield he wished to, at the touch of a finger or the whisper of a command.

An Linh sat in front of the desk, feeling like a wandering beggar at the gates of Nillson's castle. She had carefully chosen her costume: a worker's one-piece jumpsuit of burnt orange, tightly fitted along the torso, loose and blousy along the limbs. Both the sleeves and pantlegs were slitted; when An Linh sat quietly they were demurely modest, but when she moved they revealed bare flesh.

She crossed her legs and leaned back in the comfortable leather chair. It seemed to mold itself to her body, almost as if it were alive.

"Actually," she said to Nillson, "I was going to suggest that you and Mrs. Nillson allow my staff to write an interview of the two of you together-you know, the husband-and-wife team. It's trite, but the viewers like it."

Nillson's face froze for just an instant, then he pursed his thin lips. "That will be impossible."

"Perhaps later? …"

He shook his head. "No. No interviews with either of us, now or later."

An Linh made her best smile. "No one will actually have to ask you questions. We have all the information we need in the files."

He showed his teeth. "No interviews. Not of me. Not of my wife. Ever."

"Is that a rule?"

"Yes. Corporate PR will have to concentrate on the company, not personalities. I won't have it any other way."

She hesitated a moment, then plunged. "I consider it part of my job to explain what works well in public relations and what doesn't. Personalities sell."

"I understand. And I appreciate your persistence," Nillson replied slowly. "But the rule still stands. If you need personalities, concentrate on the division managers' level."

"On the other hand," An Linh said, "some of the work that Vanguard is involved with would be fascinating to viewers."

Nillson closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again. "That's better. I prefer concentrating on what we do, what this company actually accomplishes. Which lines of our work do you think have the best PR potential?"

An Linh tried to keep her voice calm, to betray no emotion whatever. "Oh, I suppose the one that would be of the highest interest to the general audience," she said, "would be the subject of life extension."

Steepling his fingers and resting his chin on their tips, Nillson let her talk. His glacier-blue eyes stayed riveted on her; his face became an immobile, impenetrable mask. As she prattled on, An Linh thought that he might as well be frozen himself, a cold and lifeless slab of ice sculpted into the shape of a man.

Finally she ran out of things to say. She ended with, "And, naturally, we should include some mention of the possibilities of cryonics."

He made a small sound that might have been a grunt or merely the gift of life returning to his body.

"You mean the frozen astronaut business."

She almost bit her lip to keep herself from appearing too eager. "I suppose that's part of the story, yes."

Without any change of expression or tone of voice, Nillson said, "Your mother's been frozen for more than five years now."

Madigan had warned her that Nillson would investigate every aspect of her life before agreeing to promote her.

"Yes. In France," she replied.

"Cancer is on the increase," Nillson muttered, almost to himself. "Despite everything we've done, it's becoming more prevalent, not less."

"Do you think cryonic suspension could become inexpensive enough so that all cancer victims might use it?"

He looked at her for a long moment, peering at her as if he had not really seen her before. A thin smile crept across his lean face.

"May I call you An Linh? I understand that's what your friends call you."

"Yes, of course."

"Good. And you may call me Everett."

An Linh knew that only a handful of older men, his former teachers and mentors, were allowed to call him "Ev." She had done her research, too, and knew that he detested the abbreviation.

"Thank you, Everett," she said.

Nillson got up from the desk and walked around it, his eyes never leaving An Linh. He stretched out his hand and she rose to her feel and allowed him to clasp her hand in his.

"An Linh, I know why you're here. I want to help you."

"Help me?" Alarm tingled through her.

Nillson led her to the wall between two holographic windows. The solid wood paneling glowed and vanished, opening a doorway into a smaller room. They stepped through, Nillson leading her by the hand, and An Linh saw that it was a private dining room, its table set for two. There was a real window, and it looked out onto the beach and the brilliantly sunny afternoon. Somehow that made An Linh feel better: less trapped.

Nillson held a high-backed chair for her, and An Linh sat in it.

"Archie Madigan tells me you're ambitious," he said, pulling up the other chair. "I think he's right, but not in the way he thinks you are. What is it that you really want?"

"To be the best public relations director that you've ever had."

"Really? And what else?"

She said nothing.

"You want help for your mother, don't you?"

She hesitated just long enough to let him think he was forcing the truth from her. "Is there anything that you can do for her that isn't being done in France?"

"She's at the cryonics facility in Avignon, am I correct?"

"Yes."

"According to my information she is as well off there as she would be here."

"Is there …" An Linh looked away from him, to the window and the beach beyond it. "Is there any hope of reviving her?"

Nillson smiled thinly. "You mean, now that we've revived the frozen astronaut."

"Yes."

He replied, "Eventually, I'm sure."

"But not yet."

"I'm afraid that's right. It's too soon to say whether what we did with the astronaut can be done for everybody."

An Linh said nothing, kept her eyes focused on the beach and the sun-glittering sea.

"Besides," Nillson added, his voice slightly tighter, tenser, "there's no point in reviving cancer victims until we can cure their disease."

Turning back to face him, An Linh leaned forward slightly. "There are people who believe you have developed a cure, but are keeping it a secret."

Nillson's face clouded. "Why would we keep it a secret?"

"For power. It would be an enormously powerful tool for Vanguard, to give the cure to those who will help the corporation and refuse it to those who will not."

"Nonsense," Nillson muttered. But he dropped his gaze from her face and stared down at the dish set before him.

"There's something else," An Linh said.

Nillson looked up at her, his pale brows arched.

"A priest that I know. In Hilo. He has an inoperable brain tumor."

Nillson leaned back in the comfortable leather-covered chair. Using a dying priest. Clever of her. He eyed her with new respect.

"If you would allow the labs to take his case, we could tape his final days and his freezing," An Linh went on. "It would make a spectacular documentary."

He nodded and murmured, "I see."

"The public relations value to Vanguard Industries would be enormous. I could make an arrangement with an organization like Worldnews to distribute the documentary to its outlets all around the globe."

Nillson steepled his fingers again and pursed his lips, as though giving her request deep thought.

A human waiter appeared at the far door to the room, pushing a rolling cart bearing dishes covered by silver domes.

Straightening in his chair, Nillson asked, "You do like French cuisine?"

"Oh, yes. Certainly." The aromas were delicate and delicious. An Linh closed her eyes for an instant and saw herself a little girl again in her mother's kitchen.

The waiter placed the dishes before them, poured a light Beaujolais into the tulip wineglasses, then left as silently as a wraith.

Nillson held his glass to the light, then said, "You'll have to spend a lot of your time on such a project, I suppose."

An Linh tried to clamp down on the rush of eager expectation that flooded through her. "Several weeks, at least."

"And bring in a camera crew from outside."

She thought a moment, then answered, "We could use our own company crew, but if you want the absolute best kind of work, a professional documentary team would be best, yes, I agree."

Of course you agree, Nillson said silently. That's what you're after, obviously. An outside camera crew; probably her boyfriend from Worldnews. She's already told him that the astronaut's been revived, no doubt of that. It will be like inviting a team of espionage agents into the laboratory. Still, what better way to fend off spies than to invite them into your parlor and let them think they are seeing everything? But I mustn't appear to give in too easily. She's clever enough to see through that.

"If I agree to what you want," he said slowly, picking up a salad fork and toying with it, "what will you do for me?"

"I don't understand…."

Nillson smiled at her again. "It's very simple, An Linh. A life for a life."

She sat in this preciously appointed private dining room, staring at one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, and hoped desperately that he would not say what she knew he was going to say.

Enjoying the uncertainty in her eyes, Nillson said, "I'm not trying to seduce you, although you are a very beautiful young woman. Surely you're aware of the effect you have on men."

An Linh made herself smile.

"I … need"-the word twisted Nillson's face into a pained scowl-"a woman to bear a son for me."

She felt her mouth gape with shock.

Nillson held up a long, bony-knuckled hand. "It's not what you think. I want a host mother to carry a fertilized zygote which I will provide."

An Linh began to breathe again. "A host mother. Mrs. Nillson does not want to be bothered with an unsightly pregnancy."

"Mrs. Nillson has nothing to do with this, other than providing an ovum."

Forcing herself to be calm, An Linh asked, "But I thought that Vanguard had developed artificial wombs for cases where …"

His white brows knit again. "I will not trust my son to a glorified test tube. I want a human mother to carry him to term."

"I see."

"Naturally, I will see to it that you are taken care of extremely well."

"And if I refuse? What then? Do I get fired?"

"No! Of course not." He gestured with the hand that held the fork. "I'm rather clumsy about these things. I didn't mean to suggest that I expect payment in return for helping your priest."

"Then? …"

"Allow me to take you to dinner now and then. Perhaps we could go sailing together. I'm really a very pleasant fellow, despite what you may have heard."

"And your wife?"

His lips pulled back in a smile, but his eyes went hard. "My wife has nothing to do with this. She leads her life and I lead mine."

An Linh heard herself reply, "I'll have to think about this. I can't make a decision right away."

"I understand."

"I have a very jealous boyfriend," she blurted.

Who wants to bring a Worldnews camera team into my laboratories, Nillson told himself.

"I'm sure you can explain this to him," he said.

"Then you'll accept Father Lemoyne and allow us to tape?"

"How could I refuse such a request?"

"Thank you." It was all she could think to say.

"My pleasure." Nillson smiled. "After lunch, I'll have my legal people work out the details with you."

He turned his attention to the salad, while contemplating the possibilities of the future. An Linh would bring her boyfriend and his camera crew into the labs and they would snoop around for weeks. They would find nothing about the astronaut. Nothing at all. Everyone who had been involved in the matter or even heard that the man had been revived would be moved to other locations. Vanguard would get a very sympathetic documentary out of Worldnews and he would get a woman to carry his son. And undoubtedly he would get the lovely Oriental girl into his bed in the bargain. How could she refuse? He pictured her naked, just a little frightened when she realized what he had in store for her. No, more than a little frightened. He felt tiny beads of perspiration dotting his upper lip as he contemplated the fear he would see in those long-lashed almond eyes.

He watched her eating while he dabbed at his lips with his napkin. If only I could grow a mustache, a full handsome Viking's mustache!

The communicator on his wrist chimed delicately.

"What is it?" he snapped.

The voice from the communicator was a thin, weak piping. "An urgent message, sir. Private."

Nillson forced himself not to frown. To An Linh, he said softly, "Would you excuse me for a moment?"

"Of course."

He got up from the table and went through the open portal to his desk. Taking up the phone handset, he growled, "This had better be important."

The face that appeared on the screen set into the desktop was Archie Madigan's. His normal grin had vanished. He looked worried.

"She took Stoner aboard the jumpjet."

Nillson lowered his voice. "They're headed for Maine, then?"

No reply for the span of a heartbeat, then, "That's what she wants you to think. She switched planes at the refueling stop in Nebraska. Two people who look like her and Stoner will go to the house in Maine, but it won't be them."

Nillson felt anger flaring hot inside him. "Where's she going, then?"

"We're not certain…."

"Then find out, damn you! Find out quickly!"

"Yessir."

He slammed the phone back into its cradle. His breath snorted out of him in furious gasps. She's taken him off to some secret hideaway, has she? The bitch! I knew she'd run off with him. After all I've done for her, she's still got the hots for her childhood sweetheart. Well, she'll regret it. They'll both regret it. By the time I get finished with them they'll both be happy to be dead.

Then he looked up and saw An Linh staring at him from the dining room.

CHAPTER 12

Everett Nillson had lived with fear all his life. Fear, and anger.

As he replaced the phone in its cradle, watching An Linh's eyes following him, he struggled within himself to keep his fury from boiling out, to keep himself under control. From childhood he had fought this battle. Never let the anger show. He knows that the anger is born out of fear.

"You must never be afraid," he heard his father's booming voice. "Fear is a sign of cowardice, and I will not have a coward for my son!"

Nillson had been born to great wealth. Vanguard Industries had been his father's creation, and from long before he had been old enough to understand, he had been told, by his mother, his governess, his tutors, and especially by his father himself, how Lars Nillson had fought his way up from the grimy coveralls of a factory grease monkey to the elegant dinner jacket of a successful industrialist.

"And I did it all for you!" his father constantly reminded young Everett. He would pick up the child in his beefy hands and swing him dizzyingly around the huge, opulent drawing room of their home outside Stockholm. "All for you! Someday all this will be yours!"

Everett was an asthmatic baby, a frail child who preferred hiding in his room and watching videos to playing with the bullies and sadists of his own age. His father raged at his weakness, blamed his silent and suffering mother, and swore that he would never leave the industrial empire he had created to a weakling.

But there was no one else to leave it to, and in the end, when a microscopic blood vessel in Lars Nillson's brain exploded and killed him, Everett Nillson became the chairman of the board of Vanguard Industries. He was barely twenty.

And terrified. But for the first time in his life he held in his thin, bony hands something that almost compensated for his fear: power.

The two were an awesome synergy. The more Nillson feared someone or something, the more he wielded his power against it. He sought power constantly, more power always, to keep the fear that ate at his innards under control. Vanguard Industries was slipping when Everett Nillson assumed control. An economic recession racked the industrial world, and his father's generation of managers seemed unable to fend off the politicians who were intent on nationalizing the company. Everett Nillson bought politicians with money, drugs, women, flattery, and the most dazzling bribes of them all: visions of higher political office. He fired managers ruthlessly and put men his own age in their places. And women.

For the first time in his young life, Nillson found women pursuing him. And he quickly learned that no matter what he wanted from them, no matter how dominating or cruel or outright sadistic he might be, there were always women willing to submit to him.

He watched one woman with a special fascination: an American who burned with an unquenchable determination to reach into space and recover the alien spacecraft that had briefly passed by the ball of dirt and blood called Earth. He watched Jo Camerata climb up the corporate ladder of Vanguard Industries, watched her in her office and in the bedrooms of the men who could help her. He began to help her himself, and finally he married her. He knew that he could not dominate her in bed, or even in the office. She would never willingly submit to him. But he would break her spirit, sooner or later. One day she would drop to her knees before him. And that day was approaching quickly.

But now she had flown off with her former lover, and Nillson felt again the burning fury that was born of fear. Jo was trying to escape him, trying to best him at his own game of power. She was smart enough, and tough enough, to win. That was what frightened Everett Nillson. That, and the gnawing pain that clawed at his innards.

She had to be humbled. Only victory would silence the fear that tortured Nillson. Complete victory. A victory that had to end in death.

An Linh could see that the phone call had enraged Nillson, but he fought to maintain his self-control as he returned to the dining room and finished his lunch with her.

"A business problem?" she asked.

He glared at her momentarily, then composed himself. "Yes. Strictly business."

She thought otherwise. They finished lunch with hardly another word. But as An Linh was leaving Nillson's office, he asked her:

"How familiar are you with the labs?"

She blinked at him, surprised by the question.

"Have you gone through them? Do you know what they're like?"

"Not in any great detail," she admitted. "I've been working at the corporate level, not …"

"Not down at the level where the real work is done," he finished for her.

Picking up his desktop phone, Nillson said, "I'll get someone from the labs' PR department to give you a tour of the place. If you're going to film a documentary, you ought to know what's going on there."

Nillson turned An Linh over to a secretary, who led her through the quiet, paneled corridors of the executive office area to a public relations woman who was to "show her around the labs."

After two hours of being toured around the Vanguard facilities, An Linh felt the numbing dizziness of sensory overload. Chemistry labs sparkling with glass apparatus, bubbling and chuffing, odd smells and wary glances from intense-looking men and women in white smocks. A microsurgery room that looked like the control center for a space mission, crammed with beeping electronics and row upon row of display screens. A full-fledged zoo populated by barking dogs, ponderous minihogs whose bare pink skin looked strangely repulsive, and sad-eyed, pensive chimpanzees and gorillas who looked out through the bars of their cages at An Linh as if they knew what was in store for them.

The tingle of alarm that she had felt during her lunch with Nillson faded from her mind as she walked through corridor after corridor, laboratory after laboratory, through offices and workshops and what seemed to be a small but very modern and highly automated hospital section.

Her guide finally detoured into a minicafeteria, saying to An Linh as she pushed through its swinging door, "I'll bet you could use some caffeine."

"And a pair of roller skates," she replied.

An Linh sank gratefully into the closest chair at the first table in the little cafeteria and let her handbag clunk to the floor. It seemed to have gained half a ton since lunch. The cafeteria was actually nothing more than an extended alcove in the corridor, walled off by translucent plastic partitions and lined with automatic food and drink dispensers. There were only six small round tables, with four plastic chairs at each. The walls were pale green, the floor tiles slightly darker.

Almost like a sidewalk bistro in Avignon, An Linh thought, except that this is indoors and automated and serving preprocessed garbage instead of good coffee and real bread and cheese.

"Coffee or tea?" her guide asked.

"Tea, please. With milk."

The woman was about An Linh's own age, pencil slim, with the kind of tightly curled auburn hair that could only be produced by the cosmetics industry. She wore a mannish suit of gray, the blouse unbuttoned down to where it disappeared behind her vest. Not that it mattered, An Linh thought; her chest was just as skinny as the rest of her. Her face was long and narrow, too. She wore eyeglasses as a decoration; no one her age needed them, not with monolayer lenses that you sprayed on and washed off.

The nametag on her jacket read Rebecca Parker. As she sat down and placed two cheerfully decorated plastic mugs on the little table, she sympathized, "It's a lot to take in the first time around."

An Linh sipped at the tea. It was tepid. "I appreciate your taking the time to show me everything."

Rebecca shrugged. "It's my job."

"You do this all the time?"

"A lot of the time. It's the way I keep my girlish figure."

An Linh nodded and took another swallow of the lukewarm tea.

"It must have been great being on television," Rebecca said.

"It's like anything else. Mostly hard work."

"I suppose you have to have the looks for it."

"Sure." Seeing the question in her eyes, An Linh added, "You could do it. You'd be fine."

"Really?"

"Well … maybe you'd have to think about redoing your hairstyle. I think something longer and more natural would complement your facial structure better."

"Oh, do you think so?"

"Of course."

"But you've got such great looks-you're a real natural beauty."

An Linh broke into a grin. "Then why do I have to spend so much time fixing my face and hair?"

They both laughed.

An Linh took another sip of tea, then said, "There's a professional service in Honolulu, you know. Send them a hologram of yourself and they'll send you a complete analysis of hairstyles, makeup-everything."

"Must be expensive."

"The company should pay for it. After all, it's important for anyone in PR to look their best."

Rebecca frowned sadly. "My boss would never okay it. He's a real … well, he wouldn't okay it, I know he wouldn't."

"Then I will," An Linh said. "You come over to my office tomorrow and I'll approve the request. If your boss complains, tell him to call me."

Rebecca's mouth dropped open. An Linh thought, I'm going to need a friend inside the laboratory complex. This girl could be helpful, especially if she thinks there's a job opening at the corporate level waiting for her.

Now they were friends, and they both leaned forward slightly, toward each other, their heads coming closer as they began to talk about clothes and apartments and, inevitably, men. Slowly, slowly, An Linh steered the conversation toward Rebecca's job, the work she did for the labs, the responsibilities she had, the tours she led for visitors.

"You got the ten-dollar tour," Rebecca told her. "That's just about the best one. Mr. Nillson himself wanted the red carpet rolled out for you."

"He's a very"-An Linh deliberately put a hitch in her voice-"different kind of man, isn't he?"

"Nillson? I've never been privileged to meet him. He's too high up on the totem pole for menials like me to actually be introduced to."

"He seemed kind of …" She let the thought dangle.

"Strange?" Rebecca suggested. "A little on the weird side?"

"I don't know. What do you think?"

"There've been rumors. Stories. They say he's a little kinky."

"Really?"

"Maybe a lot kinky." Rebecca giggled.

An Linh looked down into her tea mug, then back at Rebecca. "Well, anyway, he ordered the ten-dollar tour for me."

Rebecca glanced at her watch. "Yeah. I guess I ought to give you the rest of it before quitting time."

"Will we see the cryonics facility?"

She nodded as she pushed herself up from the table. "That's next on our itinerary."

"And the frozen astronaut?"

Behind her lensless glasses, Rebecca's eyes widened for just the flash of a second. "No, not that. Off limits, even on the ten-dollar tour. You need a special written pass to see him, approved personally by Mrs. Nillson."

Picking up her handbag and getting to her feet, An Linh asked, "But he's well, isn't he? Nothing's gone wrong with him?"

Rebecca gave her a troubled look. "I'm not supposed to say anything about him. Really, I don't know a thing. You must know a lot more about him than I do."

An Linh nodded. She's afraid to talk about him. The word's gone out that the frozen astronaut is to be kept secret. No news is good news, as far as his case is concerned.

She dropped the subject and allowed Rebecca to lead her into the cryonics laboratory. To An Linh, the place looked and felt like a combination of a morgue and the butcher's section at the supermarket. It was cold, the kind of cold that seeps into the bones. Stainless-steel cylinders that they called dewars, big vaults with heavy steel doors, bare tiled floors. The technicians here worked in heavy coveralls and rubberized gloves. All of the bodies An Linh saw were animals, from baby mice to a full-grown chimpanzee lying on a cold slab, faint traces of frost glistening on the hairs of its face.

With a sudden shudder, An Linh thought of her mother lying inside one of those gleaming steel cylinders, frozen, trusting her daughter to watch over her and bring her back to life.

"Have you seen enough?" She felt Rebecca's hand on her trembling arm. The woman's voice was sincerely concerned.

"Yes," An Linh said. "Thanks."

Rebecca led her in silence out of the cryonics lab. They walked slowly down a long corridor. One entire wall of it was windows, and An Linh felt the warmth of the life-giving sun soaking into her.

"One more stop," Rebecca said. "Legal department. They want to talk to you about something; I don't know what."

"I'm going to bring a man here for freezing," An Linh said. "We're making a documentary of it."

"Supersonic!" Rebecca said. "What a great idea!"

"He's a priest," An Linh added.

"Oh, for … You'll get an Emmy easy."

An Linh made herself smile. Easy. To Rebecca the priest was an object, a prop in a TV show, a character to be photographed. Then her smile faded. And what is Father Lemoyne to me? I know him, I even love him like the father who never loved me, and I'm the one who's using him.

"One warning," Rebecca whispered as they turned into a corridor that was suddenly carpeted and decorated with potted plants and paintings on the walls.

"Oh?"

"I'm supposed to bring you in to see Archibald S. Madigan, the head of our legal department."

An Linh waited for the rest of it.

"Be careful with him," Rebecca advised. "He's got a poet's tongue and a policeman's hands."

Grinning, An Linh said, "I know Archie. He's got a lot more than that."

It was late in the evening before An Linh finally got back to her apartment in Hilo. Baker was waiting for her.

She was only slightly surprised when she opened her apartment door and saw him sitting tensely on the sofa. A pair of candles flickered on the coffee table. She saw a bottle of wine and a dish of cheeses and a real baguette already sliced and waiting.

The Australian hopped to his feet and greeted her with a kiss.

"I thought you'd like some real food after a hard day at the office."

She patted his cheek. "You're a mind reader."

An hour later, the wine was gone, the cheeses reduced to a few morsels, and nothing was left of the bread but a scattering of crumbs across the coffee table, sofa, and carpet.

And for some reason, Cliff Baker was as tense as a hunted animal. An Linh could not find out why. She had asked him a half-dozen times why he was so wound up, but he had merely brushed her questions away and asked for more details about her lunch with Nillson.

"He'll let us bring Father Lemoyne in for freezing," she said.

"And tape it?"

"Yes." She did not tell him about Nillson's demand for her to be a surrogate mother and his clumsy, almost halfhearted flirtation.

"That's good. That's really good."

She had never seen his sky-blue eyes look so troubled. If he had been skeptical, even mocking, An Linh could have accepted it. Cliff always played the cynic. But he was strangely tense, almost as if he were terribly afraid of something that he refused to talk about.

"Cliff, you're going to have to be very careful," An Linh insisted. "They're keeping the astronaut under very tight security. They don't want any premature publicity. No leaks…."

"I understand that!" he snapped. "You don't have to repeat it twenty times!"

"But I think they're moving him to another location. That's what Nillson's phone conversation was all about."

"And you don't know where?"

Is that what's bothering him? That they're moving the astronaut, and now it doesn't matter whether they let Father Lemoyne into the labs or not?

"I don't think even Nillson knows where. He seemed terribly angry."

"But that phone call," Baker said. "You think it had something to do with his wife?"

"Yes, his wife," she replied slowly, uneasily. "Every time I mentioned her he sort of bristled. And he was really furious over the phone call. I don't think he'd get that angry over just a business matter; he's not the type. It had something to do with his wife, I'm sure of it."

"His wife worked with the astronaut before he was frozen."

"I know."

Baker ran a finger absently along his broken nose. Then, "Lemme make a phone call."

"To who?"

"Whom." Baker got up from the sofa and went to the delicate escritoire in the corner of the living room. It was the one piece of furniture that An Linh had brought with her from Avignon: her mother's writing desk. Now it served as a base for the phone terminal.

As Baker tapped out the phone number he wanted and lifted the receiver to his ear, An Linh stretched out wearily on the sofa and gazed through half-closed eyes at the view through her terrace window. The moon sat poised above the rim of the Mauna Loa's dark volcanic bulk. A cloud glided across its softly glowing face. An Linh closed her eyes. The excitement of the day had worn off. Fatigue and the wine were catching up with her.

She woke, startled. Baker was tugging at her sleeve.

"Come on, love, we've got to go," he said. His face was set in a strangely determined scowl. He looked grim, frightened.

"You can sleep here…."

"No, you don't understand. We're leaving for London."

"London? When … why? …"

"Tonight. There's a flight leaving at eleven. We can just catch it if we hurry."

An Linh swung her feet to the carpet and stood up. "Tonight? You're going to London now?" She felt stunned, bewildered.

"Wake up!" he snapped almost angrily. "We're both going to London. Right now. Not a moment to lose."

"Cliff, you can't just-"

"Start packing, dammit! I'm not kidding!"

She felt her head swirling.

Baker grasped her by the shoulders as if he wanted to shake her into obedience.

"Listen to me," he said urgently. "I just did some checking with a friend of mine who's got a pipeline into Vanguard Industries. He said you overheard a very sensitive phone conversation he had with Nillson, and now Nillson's afraid that you might have heard too much."

"But what …"

"There's no telling what a man with Nillson's power might do," Baker said. "My source was warning me to get you to someplace safe until Nillson calms down."

An Linh felt stunned. She heard herself arguing, "We can't just run away because of a phone call! I've got my job, you've got yours…."

"We're going," Baker said firmly. "I know some people in London who'll take us in for a while."

He pushed her toward the bedroom and helped her pull a garment bag from her closet. An Linh began stuffing it with clothes, her thoughts spinning madly.

"Aren't you going to pack?" she asked as she rummaged through a bureau drawer.

"Already have. My bag's in the car, downstairs."

"Cliff, are you sure we've got to do this?"

The fear in his eyes was real, but there was something more than fear there. An Linh could not determine what it was.

"I'm sure, pet," he muttered earnestly. "There's no other way."

"But …"

"You've got to trust me, An Linh. Please. It's for your own good."

Filled with foreboding, she finished packing and zipped up the garment bag. Baker took it from her and hurried her toward the door.

"Shouldn't you call the airport?" An Linh asked.

"We're already booked for the flight," he said, opening the front door for her.

He did not mention that their reservations had been made by Archie Madigan's secretary, or that Vanguard Industries was paying for their flight.