第3章

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment:

But I say unto you, That whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council; but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.

CHAPTER 1

THE sudden heat was like a sodden, muffling blanket that weighed so heavily he could hardly breathe.

Jōao de Sagres gasped and felt sweat streaming from every pore of his body as they struggled through dense jungle foliage. Fronds slapped at his face. Birds cawed and shrilled overhead. The ground was spongy, squelching underfoot. His expensive silk suit was drenched in seconds, stained and ruined. He dared not even to glance at his muddy shoes. Yet the man Stoner seemed perfectly at ease in this dripping, raucous, sweltering tropical forest. Hardly a gleam of perspiration showed in his intense, dark-bearded face.

"Where are we?" de Sagres asked in a whisper.

"Almost there," said Stoner.

"How did …"

Stoner silenced him with an upraised hand. On a branch high above, a long-tailed monkey stared solemnly at them, then disappeared among the leaves in a blur of motion.

"Get down," Stoner hissed.

Dazedly, de Sagres did as commanded and dropped to his knees in the bushes. The grass was alive with insects. De Sagres saw ants the size of his thumbs crawling busily across the leaves a few centimeters in front of his face. He shuddered and began to itch all over.

"I don't understand …"

"Shh!"

He wanted to get up and run away, but to where? What was he doing in this strange dank oven of a jungle? How did this man Stoner bring him here? We should be in my office, speaking politely to each other over a civilized drink, with the air conditioning and ice cubes at hand, with my aides and servants and security guards protecting me.

Yet he was kneeling in the mud of a tropical forest, bedraggled and sticky with sweat, certain that poisonous insects were devouring his flesh, trembling with fear. And totally unable to get away. It was as if he were chained to Stoner, shackled to the man like a prisoner.

Stoner was peering intently through the dense foliage. De Sagres studied the big man carefully. A fierce, uncompromising face, like an Old Testament patriarch. Patrician nose, strong cheekbones, a full dark beard that now showed drops of sweat in it, dark hair trimmed neatly. Powerful body, tall and lean and flat-bellied as an athlete's beneath the simple khaki jacket and whipcord slacks that he wore.

It was Stoner's eyes that unsettled de Sagres. They were gray, as gray as a distant thundercloud or the tossing stormy sea. Yet his eyes did not look troubled at all. Rather, they were as serene as any saint's, and terribly, terribly deep; there were depths in them that seemed infinite. When de Sagres had first looked at Stoner he had been startled by those strangely fathomless eyes; it was like the first time he had peered into a telescope and seen the universe of stars beyond counting.

For all his broad-shouldered build and fierce appearance, it was Stoner's compelling gray eyes that held de Sagres in an unbreakable grip of steel. The eyes of a madman. Or a mystic. They had fastened onto de Sagres's soul and they would not release him. De Sagres had received no hint, when he had welcomed Stoner to his private office in the capitol, that he would end up in this rotting infested jungle. Stoner had led and he had followed, as helpless as a lamb.

The forest went suddenly silent.

Stoner turned toward him. "Look. They're coming."

Despite himself, de Sagres hunched closer to Stoner and leaned on his strong back as he stared out through the concealing foliage at a sun-dappled clearing in the thick tropical forest. Massive rough-barked trees rose all around the clearing, their boles soaring like the pillars of a cathedral, their canopies a solid green carpet as far as the eyes could see. But this clearing, about the size of a football field, was open to the hazy, searing sunlight.

A line of grotesque dark-skinned men was forming on the farther side of the clearing. Naked except for scraps of dirty cloth covering their groins, each man was elaborately painted in garish designs that covered face and body. Each man carried a long, sharp-tipped spear.

Another line of forty-some men appeared on the opposite side of the clearing. Also naked and painted and armed with spears.

"Where are we?" de Sagres pleaded.

Stoner shook his head. "Does it matter? Watch."

The two lines of warriors confronted each other, separated by the width of the clearing. They waved their spears and stamped their feet, chanting and yelling back and forth.

"Notice the ground between them," whispered Stoner.

"It is worn down to bare dirt," de Sagres saw.

Grimly Stoner nodded. "This isn't the first time warriors have faced each other at this spot."

"They're going to fight?"

"They are from two different villages. One of the men from one village has kidnapped a woman from the other village. Her kinfolk have raised this army to recapture her. And to steal as many of the other village's women as they can. The kidnapper's village has brought their own army here to defend themselves. If they kill enough of their enemy they can raid the enemy village itself and steal pigs as well as more women."

"How do you know all this?"

Stoner merely shook his head slightly and whispered, "Wait … I think-yes. The elders have arrived."

Half a dozen wizened old men, bent and grizzled with age, stepped into the sunlight between the two armies. Their naked bodies were unpainted; they bore no weapons. They walked slowly, with great dignity, to the middle of the clearing and stood for many minutes, speaking earnestly among themselves.

"What are they doing?"

"Trying to prevent the war," said Stoner.

One of the white-haired men raised his hands above his head and spoke in a loud quavering voice to the line of warriors at one side of the field. Then he turned and spoke to the other side. The warriors shuffled their feet, looked at the ground, glanced at one another.

Another of the old men spoke to each side. Then a third.

Finally the two groups of warriors turned and disappeared into the jungle as silently as snakes. The old men waited several minutes more, then they broke into two smaller groups and went their separate ways, each group following the path of the warriors.

The birds began to call and whistle once more.

Stoner's bearded face broke into a broad smile. "They did it! They talked the warriors out of fighting. They prevented the war."

De Sagres realized his legs were cramping painfully, he had been kneeling for such a long time. He let himself fall back on his buttocks-

-and found himself sitting in his own office chair, behind his imposing, immaculately gleaming desk.

CHAPTER 2

"HYPNOTISM!" snapped Jōao de Sagres.

Stoner made a wintry smile. "Something like that."

De Sagres glared at his visitor as he peeled off his sopping, stained silk suit jacket and pulled his once-immaculate tie loose from his shirt collar. His hands still trembled, even though he was safely back in his spacious office. Through the long windows he could see the reassuring gleaming towers of Brasilia.

I am the president of the most powerful nation of Latin America, he told himself. And this man before me is a nobody. But he avoided Stoner's eyes.

He felt better, although his mind was still in turmoil. He was a smallish man, with a high forehead and round face that would have been bland except for the luxuriant black mustache and his probing dark brown eyes. This office was his sanctuary, where he could sit on his elevated platform and look down on the supplicants and schemers who came to beg favors from him.

"You tricked me," he accused.

"Not really," Stoner replied. "I showed you something very important."

"A band of savages in the Mato Grosso," de Sagres sneered.

Stoner, sitting in the leather armchair in front of the president's imposing desk, replied, "They are men. And they are in New Guinea, not the Mato Grosso."

"New Guinea! Impossible! One moment we are here in my office, and then suddenly ten thousand kilometers away? And then back here again? It was a trick! Admit it!"

"I wanted to show you that even so-called primitive men have ways of preventing war. Those elders, they are called 'the Great Souls' by their people. They talked the warriors out of fighting."

De Sagres reached toward the intercom.

But Stoner suggested mildly, "Don't you think you could make your own drink?"

He pulled his hand back as if scalded. For a moment he simply sat in his high-backed swivel chair, looking troubled, undecided, almost frightened. Then he rose and walked shakily across the thick carpeting to the mirrored cabinet that served as a bar.

"If you have some Jamaican dry ginger ale," said Stoner, "I'll have it with brandy. On ice."

By the time de Sagres mixed the drinks and returned to his desk he had pulled himself together somewhat. His hands barely trembled; the ice in the glasses clinked hardly at all.

"You somehow talked your way into my private office, past all my staff and security. Why? Merely to show me a conjuring trick?"

Stoner sipped at his brandy and dry. "Not entirely."

"Then what it is that you want?"

"I want you to become one of those 'Great Souls.'"

De Sagres's dark eyes flashed. Then he threw his head back and laughed. "You want me to live naked in the jungle with those savages? No thank you!"

But Stoner was deadly serious. "I want you to prevent your military from intervening in the civil war in Venezuela."

The president's mouth dropped open.

"Your general staff thinks they are clever enough to move their troops across the border without having the Peace Enforcers intervene. Perhaps they are right. I can't predict how the Peace Enforcers will react. The political situation is murky, after all."

"We have no intention …"

"Don't lie to me. Your army has been supplying the Venezuelan insurgents for more than a year. It was your army's agents who fomented the civil war in the first place."

"That's not true!"

Stoner said nothing. He merely stared at de Sagres.

The president felt like a little boy under the awesome presence of a sternly uncompromising priest. "We merely … the Venezuelan insurrection was a genuine movement, we did not create it."

"You armed those farmers. Trained them. Led them to believe they could accomplish more with guns than they could with negotiations."

"The government of Venezuela has ignored their farmers for generations!"

"And to rectify that injustice you are helping those farmers to slaughter one another."

De Sagres ran out of arguments. He felt strangely empty, hollow. He tried to turn away from Stoner's infinite gray eyes and found that he could not.

"You must exert your authority over your own military," Stoner said. His voice was soft, almost a whisper, yet there was implacable iron in it.

"You don't understand how difficult that would be."

Stoner smiled slightly. "Yes I do. Would I be here otherwise? Would I have taken you to that jungle if a simple request would have been sufficient?"

"The military …"

"The military will take over your government unless you stop them now. Their plans include not merely annexing Venezuela. They want their chief of staff to sit in your chair."

De Sagres's heart constricted with fear. He realized that he had known it all along, but had never found the courage to admit it, even to himself.

"What can I do?" he whimpered.

"Stop them now," said Stoner. "The people of Brazil will support you. The Peace Enforcers and World Court will support you."

"But the army is too powerful."

"Only if you are too weak." Stoner leaned forward in his chair, stretching a hand over the desk to grasp de Sagres's wrist. It was like being held in an inhumanly powerful vise.

"You can become a 'Great Soul,'" Stoner said urgently. "You can save your people untold grief and pain. And the people of Venezuela, too. If you don't, the military will take over your government and you will be lost and forgotten."

De Sagres wanted to run away and hide. But Stoner had him pinned down like a helpless insect. His arm began to tingle.

"You have the power to do it," Stoner insisted. "Do you have the strength?"

The president wanted to admit that he did not, but he heard himself saying, "I can try."

Stoner's smile beamed at him. "Good! That's all that anyone can do."

"If I fail …"

"You won't be any worse off than you are now. The army won't kill you; they'll keep you as a figurehead for their puppet government."

"A figurehead? Me? Never!"

Stoner considered the Brazilian president for a long, silent, solemn moment. De Sagres felt as if his soul was being stripped bare and examined, atom by atom.

"Will you do me a favor?" Stoner asked at last.

De Sagres arched his brows. It always comes down to a favor, he told himself.

But Stoner extracted a small straight pin from the breast pocket of his khaki jacket and pricked the tip of his thumb. A drop of blood welled up.

"This is as primitive as those 'Great Souls,'" he said, "but I'd like to make a blood bond with you, to seal the understanding between us."

Unwilling, but unable to resist, de Sagres held out his trembling hand and allowed Stoner to grasp it in his own warm, firm grip. The touch of the pin was painless, and then they were pressing their thumbs together like little boys sharing a solemn, sacred oath.

"You have the strength to stop your military adventurers," Stoner said. "You have greatness in you. One day you may even win the Nobel Prize for Peace."

The president of Brazil sank back in his chair as his unannounced visitor strode purposefully to the door and disappeared from his sight.

CHAPTER 3

THE island of Cyprus, once torn by bloody conflict between Greeks and Turks, basked in the Mediterranean sunshine and the money spent by ten thousand members of the International Peacekeeping Force who made the island their Middle East headquarters. Clerks, computer specialists, missile technicians, sensor analysts, bureaucrats, warriors by remote control, each of the ten thousand men and women who wore the sky-blue uniform of the Peace Enforcers was paid well and regularly.

They had brought peace to strife-weary Cyprus, as Greeks, Turks, and even the descendants of displaced Palestinians found more to be gained by earning Peace Enforcers' money than by shooting at one another. Prosperity did not end hatred and long historical grudges; it merely put them to one side while everyone put their best energies into the scramble for steady money.

Banda Singh Bahadur, commandant, IPF Cyprus, was a huge Sikh, still strong and fierce-looking despite his eighty-odd years. His proud curly beard was as white as the immaculate turban wound around his leonine head. His back was unbent, his shoulders wide and square as a castle gate. In bygone eras he would have wielded a heavy curved sword against his foes, or fired a high-powered rifle with merciless, deadly accuracy.

Now he sat in a padded leather chair, surrounded by younger officers in a comfortable air-conditioned office as they pored over satellite pictures of poppy fields in Turkey. The picture table was one large horizontal display screen, and the false-color imagery he studied was being relayed in real time from an IPF surveillance satellite several hundred miles above the Earth's surface. Four young men and one woman officer were hunched around the table, bending over, scrutinizing the imagery.

The entire span of the table top glowed with harsh colors that showed steep jagged ravines deep in the Taurus Mountains, near Lake Van. The face of an old man, thought Bahadur as he studied the seamed craggy display. Much like my own.

"Papaver somniferum," said Bahadur's imagery analyst, a blonde young woman from California. "I'd recognize that signature anywhere."

Bahadur looked up at her with eyes of cold steel. The young officer touched a few buttons on the keypad built into her side of the display table. A spectral analysis of the region they were examining appeared in a box at one corner of the horizontal screen. Alongside it appeared a laboratory spectrum that matched it so closely Bahadur could not tell the difference.

"It's poppy fields, all right," said the intelligence chief, a stocky oriental. "And illegal as sin."

Bahadur nodded a ponderous agreement, yet still brought up the display that showed all the legal poppy fields in the region. They were small and under the relentless control of the Turkish government. The fields in the satellite views twined through tortuous valleys far from the eyes of government inspectors.

"They even tried to overgrow them so the satellite sensors would miss them," said the blonde imagery analyst.

"We'll have to move against them."

Bahadur said, "Standard procedure. Notify the Turkish authorities after we have sterilized the fields. Offer our assistance in arresting and interrogating the farmers."

One of the young officers stepped swiftly across the office to a red command phone.

To his intelligence chief the Sikh said, "Trace the method of processing."

"Probably minimal," said the Asian. "Just enough to make some potent opium. They wouldn't dare to try to operate a sophisticated processing plant."

"They could have made arrangements with a legal medical house to produce extra, unregulated amounts of heroin," said Bahadur, his voice heavy, slow, weary.

"That is possible," the intelligence chief admitted. "I will check on it."

The younger officers left after straightening up to attention and making casual but correct salutes. Bahadur leaned back tiredly in his chair, alone with his thoughts.

In his mind he saw Peace Enforcer planes swooping low over those rugged valleys, spraying a nearly invisible mist of biological agents that specifically killed the poppy species and nothing else. He saw poor Turkish farmers running from the IPF helicopters and paratroopers that dropped out of the sky to round them up and turn them over to their government police. He saw smug men in expensive business suits suddenly arrested for their part in processing illegal heroin.

After all these years they still have not learned, Bahadur thought. The money is irresistible. The lure of enormous amounts of money, if only they can avoid the notice of the Peace Enforcers. But they cannot. Year after year, decade after decade, they continue to try. We find them, we catch them, we kill their crops and destroy their factories and put them in jail for life. And still others try.

The world is at peace, and even the lowest of the low are getting richer instead of poorer. Yet people still turn to drugs. Bitterly the old Sikh realized that global economic growth provided a larger market for the forbidden pleasures. The wealthier the world becomes, the more people can afford to play with narcotics. How the gods must weep at our folly.

Is there no end to it? he asked himself. Will fools and devils always attempt to make themselves rich by crushing the lives of their brothers and sisters?

The old Sikh got up slowly from his chair and walked to the window, where the port of Larnaca gleamed in the high Mediterranean sun, white and clean and prosperous. The streets were crowded with businessmen and women striding along purposefully, while others ambled more casually through the shaded shopping arcades. Down on the docks, laborers worked half-naked and sweating. How many of you, Bahadur asked them all, would sell your futures for the chance to make illegal millions?

Too many, he knew. There were always more, every year, every generation. Selling their souls to the path of evil.

He went back to his comfortable old chair and sat slowly in it, scarcely noticing its groan beneath his weight. Still, he thought, there are other young men and women who join the Peace Enforcers, who dedicate their lives to the path of righteousness.

Bahadur was glad that younger men and women were willing to take up the challenge, to bear the burden that he had borne almost all his long life. For a moment his memory flickered back fifteen years to Africa and the day he had met Keith Stoner. A strange man, mysterious, powerful in spirit. Bahadur smiled and leaned his head back and closed his eyes. His last thought was of Stoner.

When his aide found Bahadur dead, the smile was still on the old Sikh's face.

Paulino Alvarado knew there was trouble when he saw little Ramón racing down the village street as fast as his nine-year-old legs could carry him, straw hat clutched in one hand, face red with exertion.

"Soldiers!" Ramón bleated. "Soldiers coming to the village! I saw them from the hilltop! Coming up the valley road!"

A lightning bolt of fear hollowed Paulino's chest, took the air from his lungs. Throwing down his half-smoked cigarette, he leaped up from the chair on which he had been sitting, his mouth suddenly as dry as the Moondust he had taken only half an hour earlier.

The village looked perfectly normal. Perched on a hillside at the base of the Andes, it looked down on la ceja de selva, the edge of the tropical rain forest, the valley where once coca had been cultivated to the exclusion of all other crops. Its one curving street was quiet in the late morning sunlight. The houses, built of solid stone from the mountains, stood silent and enduring as they had for centuries. A few women in black shawls gossiped idly by the well in the square. Children played up by the church yard. Most of the men were in the fields with the yellow tractors and other implements the Peace Enforcers had given the village.

And soldiers were coming up the valley road.

What we are doing is not illegal, Paulino repeated to himself. There is no law against Moondust. But he remembered his father's bitter anger when he had first brought the strangers into their village.

"They will bring ruin down on our heads!" his father had warned.

"But Papa," Paulino had replied, "this is not like growing coca. All these men want is a place where they can manufacture their pills."

"The soldiers will come and kill us all!"

Paulino had gotten very angry with his father and called him terrible names. There was money to be made, much money, more money than the whole village had ever dreamed of. More money than Paulino had ever seen in his entire twenty-three years of life. Money enough to buy a beautiful new automobile and an apartment in the city. Money for women and good restaurants.

But his father saw through him. "I labored all my life so that you could go to the university and become an engineer," his father had said. "And you come back a drug addict. I am ashamed of my son."

Paulino had cursed his father and screamed that he was not going to spend his whole life tinkering with computers while others made millions. His father, worn thin and coffee-brown from a lifetime of laboring over potatoes and corn in the Andean sun, bent and old before his time, bore the proud aquiline nose and strong cheekbones of the true Inca. But in the end he swallowed his pride and allowed Paulino, his firstborn and his only son, to have his way.

Strangers came to the village, six men in tee shirts and faded jeans and dark glasses. They brought truckloads of chemicals in big jars, cartons of evil-smelling powders, and crates of odd-looking equipment made of glass and shining metal.

Paulino's father shook his gray head. "The soldiers will come, you'll see."

His son snorted contempt for the old man's fears.

"Many years ago," his father said, "in my own father's time, Norte Americano soldiers came out of the sky in their noisy helicopters and burned the whole valley, everything, coca, potatoes, corn, everything. As a punishment for growing the coca."

Paulino had heard the story many times.

"Growing coca was against the law, they said. We were bewildered. Since time immemorial we had grown coca. The men from the capital who bought it told us that they sold it to Norte Americanos. Now Yankee soldiers had destroyed the year's crop and the men from the capital said growing coca was illegal."

"That was years ago," Paulino said impatiently.

But his father went on, "Within one month other men from the capital came and told us that the Gringo soldiers had gone home and we could resume growing coca next season. In the meantime we nearly starved."

"But then …"

"But then we were told to plant the whole valley in coca. So we did, and for years all was well. Until the day the Peace Enforcers arrived."

Paulino felt the inner trembling that signalled the need for another hit of Moondust.

His father droned on, oblivious, "The Peace Enforcers carried no weapons. Not even pistolas. There were even women among them! They told us that the coca crop was going to die, and it would never grow in this valley again. In its place, they would help us to plant the valley in corn and potatoes and squash, food crops they said were needed by hungry people thousands of kilometers away.

"The Peace Enforcers kept their word. The coca withered, blackened, and died. No matter what we did, coca refused to grow in our valley anymore. The Peace Enforcers gave us tractors and tools and the generator that turns sunlight into electricity."

"I need to go," Paulino said. His hands were beginning to shake.

"One moment," said his father. "Today we live in peace …"

"You live dirt poor!" Paulino spat. "Those men from the city, they take your crops and give you so little you can barely stay alive!"

"We live simply, the way we have always lived, since the time when the Great Inca ruled all the world."

"That's not good enough for me," Paulino said.

His father saw how the young man shook and sweated.

"Yes. I understand. Because you cannot control yourself, one day the soldiers will come and destroy us all."

Now Paulino stood rooted by the closed wooden door of the old stone barn, staring in the direction of the valley road, as if he could make the soldiers go away if he stared hard enough. In the distance the Andes rose to snow-capped magnificence. The sun burned hot in the cloudless sky, but the wind from the mountains was cool and dry.

And Paulino saw a cloud of dust rising above the valley road. He wanted to run.

Instead he pushed through the creaking barn door. Inside, six men in goggles, breathing masks, and stained plastic aprons were bending over a complex apparatus of glass and heavy metal levers.

"Put on a mask!" yelled one of the men.

"Soldiers!" shouted Paulino. "Soldiers coming to the village!"

All six men froze for an instant. Then they rushed for the door, throwing their masks and goggles to the floor of the barn.

Outside in the sunlight their leader, a wiry hard-faced Frenchman, dashed across the village street to the ramshackle shed where they kept their truck. He came back with a pair of binoculars in his hands. And a heavy black pistol jammed into the waistband of his pants.

Clambering up the rough stones of the barn like a monkey, he flattened himself on the roof and peered through his binoculars.

"Merde! It must be a whole battalion of them! Armored cars and everything!"

The others raced to the truck and jammed themselves into it. The motor coughed twice and then roared to life as their leader scampered down from the roof.

"But you said what you're doing is not illegal!" Paulino clawed at the Frenchman as he hurried across the road.

"You knew that was not true," the Frenchman snarled, twisting free of Paulino's grasp and climbing into the truck's crowded cab.

"But you told me …"

Paulino found himself staring into the muzzle of the gun.

"Get away, you stupid fool, before we run you down."

The truck lurched out of its hiding place and down the street, coughing and sputtering, throwing up a little storm of dust and grit as it raced for the road that led out of the valley. Paulino stood in a daze, wondering what he should do. By the time he heard the engines of the approaching government troops, he had made his decision. He ran.

Just as he had done when he was a child hiding from his mother's wrath, Paulino dashed up the slope of the hillside behind the village's houses, scrambled past the terraced gardens where the women grew their kitchen vegetables and the men cultivated a few wine grapes, and hid in the secret cave beneath the lip of the moss-covered hilltop.

It was no more than a low niche in the hillside, but from that hiding place he could see the entire village and all the valley. As a child he had spent long hours there, flat on his belly, watching the villagers at their work while he daydreamed whole afternoons away. Now he lay in the low narrow cave, trembling in the damp darkness as the soldiers entered the village in their trucks and armored cars. The trucks stopped in the village's only plaza and the troops jumped to the ground. These were not Peace Enforcers, they were troops from the capital. Their uniforms were ugly brown battle dress and they carried automatic rifles, deadly looking with their curved magazines and flash suppressors on their muzzles.

Paulino watched as two of the armored cars sped down the road after the Frenchman's truck. Watched as a squad of troops raced straight to the old stone barn, kicked in the door, and tossed in half a dozen grenades. The ancient stone walls held, but the explosions blew out the roof and started a fire that sent oily black smoke bubbling into the pristine sky.

Then the soldiers went to every house and pulled out every person. Truckloads of soldiers trundled out into the fields and rounded up the men working there. Paulino watched in sickening shame as the fields went up in smoke, the yellow tractors were blown to pieces, and a dozen of the elder men of the village put against a wall and shot before the horrified eyes of the whole village. One of the old men was Paulino's father.

Then the looting began. And the raping. Paulino cried bitterly and clawed at the grass until his fingertips bled. It was all his fault. He had brought this destruction down upon the village just as his father had warned.

But he did not move from the safety of his cave until long after dark night had fallen and the soldiers had left the wailing, bloody, burning, sorrowful village.

CHAPTER 4

THREE months later the Brazilian ambassador to the United States gave a lavish dinner party at the embassy's newly-finished complex of buildings in suburban Bethesda.

Ambassador Branco, a cousin of the president and a more distant relative of a general who had overthrown the government of Brazil half a century earlier, graciously accepted compliments from the stream of guests flowing past him in the reception line. The men were in traditional black dinner clothes, the women in the most expensive gowns and jewels they possessed. The ambassador himself wore a conservatively-tailored tuxedo with the sash of his office bearing merely a few of his huge collection of medals and decorations.

Jo Camerata, tall and stunning in a low-cut strapless gown of midnight black, reached the ambassador and allowed him to take her hand in his.

"A beautiful new embassy, Miguel," she said, in a carefully modulated voice. "You must be very proud of what you have accomplished."

"Its beauty pales to insignificance now that you have graced us with your presence," said the ambassador, in English.

Jo smiled at him and moved to the next flunkey in line. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, a centimeter or two taller than the ambassador, with dark hair to her bare shoulders and even darker eyes. The lush figure of a Mediterranean empress. Her fingers and wrists and throat flashed with gemstones and precious metals; over her heart was a diamond pin in the shape of a stylized V.

The crowd mixed and milled as Jo, unescorted but never alone for very long, wandered through the opulent rooms admiring the rich draperies, the exquisite furniture, the paintings and sculptures that adorned every wall, every corner. Brazil was a rich nation, and this new embassy proudly proclaimed its nation's wealth and newfound power.

"Don't you think the ambassador looks tremendously relieved?"

Jo turned to find Sir Harold Epping standing beside her: lean, dignified, bushy white eyebrows, trim white mustache and ruddy cheeks. He held two slim crystal flutes of champagne. Jo deftly handed her empty one to a passing waiter and accepted Sir Harold's.

"Thank you, Harold."

"You're quite welcome. It's good to see you here."

"Bored already?"

Glancing at her cleavage, "Quite the contrary, dear girl. Quite the contrary."

Sir Harold was one of the few men on Earth who could call Jo "girl" without risking emasculation.

"You said you thought Miguel looked relieved?"

The English diplomat smiled and dabbed at his white mustache. "You are the only person I know who can get away with calling everyone by their first name. I've known you for years, yet I never know if I should call you Ms. Camerata, or Mrs. Nillson, or perhaps Josephine. Or is it Josette? Are you descended from Frenchmen?"

Jo laughed. "You may call me Jo," she said graciously. "I haven't been Mrs. Nillson for more than fifteen years."

"Widowed?"

"Divorced," Jo answered stiffly, "although my first husband died shortly after."

"Can't say I blame him. Probably broken-hearted."

"Hardly!"

"And you never remarried? There's hope for me?"

Laughing again, "I'm afraid not. I remarried almost fifteen years ago."

"Really? I had no idea. Who's the lucky fellow?"

"No one you'd know."

"H'mm." Sir Harold sipped at his champagne. The dinner guests drifted from room to room, chatting, laughing, telling each other stories they had all heard at similar parties, but pretending they were amused and amusing. Jo wondered why Sir Harold was showing interest in her marital status. Surely he has access to all the information he wants. Is he trying to get to Keith?

"The Brazilians have done themselves proud with this place," Jo said as she and Sir Harold paused before a marble fireplace with a huge portrait of President de Sagres above it. "It must have cost half their gross national product."

"Hardly. But did you observe that there's not a military uniform to be found anywhere among our hosts? And how relieved the ambassador appears to be?"

"You mentioned that before."

"Yes. De Sagres thwarted the army's coup attempt in Brasilia, you know."

"So I heard."

"The president appears to have gained the upper hand over the generals. His cousin seems happy about it."

"Shouldn't he be?"

"I had always wondered about him," said Sir Harold. "Which way he would jump when the fire got hot."

Jo gave him a sly smile. "Miguel doesn't jump at all. He merely stays here in Washington and waits for the smoke to clear in Brasilia. Whoever is in power, that's who he supports."

"You think so?"

Jo nodded.

"I suppose you have better sources of information than I do," Sir Harold admitted. "You have the farflung operations of Vanguard Industries at your beck and call. All I have is British Intelligence."

A series of musical tones chimed out over the hubbub of conversations.

"They're calling us to dinner," Jo said. "Just like on a cruise ship."

"How gauche!"

The crowd streamed in to the formal state dining room with its three magnificent chandeliers, where a dozen circular tables had been set with flawless damask, sparkling crystal, and beautiful figured chinaware from Coimbra. Liveried servants showed the guests to their tables. Jo was placed next to the ambassador and his wife, an overweight former video star in a grotesquely green gown with a plunging neckline and enough emeralds to make a maharajah jealous. Seeing that Sir Harold was being seated several tables away, Jo spoke briefly with the ambassador, and the Englishman was asked to change places with one of the Brazilian flunkies at the ambassador's table.

Senora Branco glared at Jo, who ignored her and welcomed Sir Harold to their company.

* * *

Less than twenty kilometers away, but more than thirty meters below ground, three technicians sat at their monitoring stations, exchanging exaggerated tales of their daring and bravery to pass the long hours.

"So there I was," said the youngest of the three, traces of acne still blemishing his jovial round face, "at the top of the jump with a busted fitting on my right ski and nowhere to go but down the chute."

On the other side of the steel walls that enclosed their station, a thermonuclear fusion generator quietly converted isotopes of hydrogen and helium to energy. Deep in the heavily shielded heart of the fusion generator blazed a man-made star, a core of plasma a hundred million degrees hot that duplicated the unimaginable forces existing in the heart of a star. Incredibly powerful magnetic fields held the fierce blazing plasma in a cage of energy. The forces at play inside the fusion generator, if let loose, could have destroyed the city of Washington in an eyeblink.

But the monitor screens showed that everything was under control: more energy than the entire power grid of the United States had been able to produce a mere generation earlier was routinely created and used while the three technicians swapped stories.

"There were three of 'em," the second technician was saying, unconsciously toying with his thick red mustache. "Mako sharks, and man did they look hungry!"

A fraction of the energy generated by the fusion reactor was converted into the electricity that powered most of the government buildings in Washington. The White House, the Capitol, the Library of Congress, the office buildings for the House and Senate and all the administrative departments from Agriculture to Space, all the agencies from FBI to IRS-their lights, their air conditioners, their coffee makers and paper shredders and computers and even their pencil sharpeners were all powered by electricity from the man-made star.

The largest part of the fusion-generated energy, however, powered a strangely small device that made no noise, no vibration, and seemed to be doing nothing. Energy went in, but to the unappreciative eye, it seemed that absolutely nothing came out. The device, little more than a hemisphere of polished metal gleaming in the overhead lights, seemed to swallow the energy and give nothing in return.

Except that the city of Washington, and all its suburbs out to a twenty-kilometer radius, were shielded by an invisible, impalpable bubble of energy. Airplanes could fly through it. Cars could drive through it. People could even walk through it without feeling a thing, except perhaps a slight momentary tingling along the skin, as if the tiny hairs on the back of one's neck had been stirred.

But a nuclear bomb could not pass the energy bubble. It would explode, and the protective screen would absorb the heat and blast and radiation the way a sponge soaks up water, only more efficiently. Much more efficiently. The best physicists on Earth still did not completely understand how the energy screen worked. It was a gift from the stars, from the alien spacecraft that had entered the solar system more than thirty years earlier. As was the fusion generator.

Together, the fusion generator and the energy screen had ended the Cold War. Removing the threat of nuclear holocaust and providing cheap, abundant energy had changed the world enormously. Gifts from the stars.

"Our command post was being overrun," the third technician was saying, "so I took the automatic rifle from the sergeant who had just been hit and sprayed the bastards a good, long burst. Then somebody threw a grenade …"

She was older than the two males who worked with her; almost a full generation separated them. The two young men listened with envious eyes and mouths hanging agape to her tale of valor in Central America, while the gifts from the stars quietly, unobtrusively protected them all.

Dinner was pretty much of a bore, Jo thought. The ambassador spoke glowingly of a "new era" in Brazil.

"Our president has a unified congress behind him. The army has been purged of its more adventurous elements, and the people support our president totally." Jo knew it was an optimistic view of the situation. The Brazilian congress was far from unanimous and there were still young military officers who harbored dreams of glory.

But, undeniably, Brazil had avoided an army takeover and President de Sagres was starting to move in the direction of devoting the nation's immense wealth to raising the standard of living of the people who created that wealth.

Sir Harold leaned close to Jo and whispered, "What on Earth is so amusing?"

"What do you mean?"

"You're smiling like one of Rubens' pink little cherubs."

"Was I? I had no idea." Jo consciously kept her face straight through the rest of the dinner. She had no intention of telling Sir Harold or anyone else that President de Sagres's newfound strength had been a gift from her husband.

But as she said goodnight to the ambassador and his green-eyed wife and headed down the broad marble steps toward the line of limousines waiting for their owners, Jo was accosted by two other dinner guests.

Li-Po Hsen looked distinctly out of place in a tuxedo. The Hong Kong industrialist, head of Pacific Commerce Corporation, would have been more at home in a flowing silk robe or even in a lightweight tropical suit. The tuxedo was too formal, too western, for his ascetic oriental face with its hollow cheeks and menacing hooded eyes.

Wilhelm Kruppmann, on the other hand, looked more like the bouncer in a rough Hamburg rathskeller than the financial genius behind a multinational banking cartel headquartered in Geneva. His neck bulged out of his collar; his tuxedo jacket seemed to strain across his shoulders and thick chest.

"Do you mind if we ride downtown with you?" asked Hsen. Despite his oriental looks, he was completely westernized; none of the painfully indirect eastern politeness for him.

"Both of you?" asked Jo. "Your drivers on strike?"

They laughed, but it was uneasily, Jo thought as she allowed her chauffeur to help her into the plush rear seat of her limo. Hsen and Kruppmann took the two seats flanking the TV console, facing Jo.

The car pulled smoothly away from the Brazilian embassy and started toward the corporate office towers in the heart of Washington, its electric motor whisper-quiet. For several moments Hsen and Kruppmann remained silent as the limousine whisked down tree-lined Bethesda streets. Jo watched their faces carefully. This was not a social visit.

"You can speak freely," she told them. "There are no recording devices in here and the partition behind you is soundproof. Besides, my chauffeur speaks only Italian." Two of her three assertions were true.

Kruppmann and Hsen glanced at each other. Jo smiled patiently.

"This business of Brazil," the Swiss financier blurted. "It has me very worried."

"We had expected the Brazilians to proceed with their plans of expansion," said Hsen. "Now, suddenly, abruptly, de Sagres has thrown out the military leaders and threatens to invest the better part of his nation's wealth in internal improvements."

"Unbearable," muttered Kruppmann.

"It is something of a surprise," Jo said carefully. "But we can all do business with de Sagres. Brazil will still be a major market …"

"For Vanguard Industries' fusion generators, yes. For Vanguard's electronics and pharmaceutical divisions, yes. But what about the armaments that Pacific Commerce was going to sell them? What about the increase in their exports that would have been necessary to support their expansion program?"

Jo knew that Hsen's term, "expansion program," was a euphemism for the planned invasion of Venezuela.

Slowly she said, "Brazil will still be increasing its exports of coffee, metals, petrochemicals. Pacific Commerce will still carry those cargoes in its ships. The export program will shift emphasis, it will be aimed at different markets, that's all."

A splash of bright glareless light from one of the street lamps at the entrance ramp to the automated highway briefly illuminated Hsen's face. In that flash of a moment Jo saw undisguised fury in the oriental's eyes. Then the shadows concealed him once more.

"They have cancelled the negotiations for new loans," Kruppmann said, his voice heavy and dismal.

"They'll need new loans soon enough, and they'll come to you for them," Jo soothed. To herself she added, But you won't have those greedy generals to fleece; you'll have to deal with people who know something about finance.

"Ja, but when?"

"And when will they need shipping? I have six container ships sitting in Brazilian ports now, idle. Do you realize how much that costs? Every day?"

With a shrug of her bare shoulders, Jo replied, "But these are normal business problems. You didn't hop into my limo just to tell me your everyday troubles."

Another long silence, while the light of the highway lamps flickered among the shadows in the back of the limousine like a stroboscope. Jo saw flashes of the two men's faces: grim, angry, worried. But not uncertain, she decided. They knew exactly what they wanted.

"This business of Brazil," Kruppmann repeated. "All of a sudden de Sagres has become a strong man. His people look up to him. Other leaders in Latin America are seeking his advice, his help."

"Like Nkona in Nigeria," said Hsen. "And the upstart Varahamihara in Bangladesh."

"One minute they are nobodies, and the next they are being called 'Great Souls' and having millions kneel at their feet," Kruppmann grumbled.

"De Sagres was never a nobody," Jo countered.

"He was a malleable politician until a few months ago. Now he is becoming the leader of the continent."

Hsen added, "Nkona came from nowhere and somehow stabilized all of sub-Saharan Africa. Varahamihara was an obscure lama."

"Who averted nuclear war between India and Pakistan," Jo pointed out.

"And now is being compared to Gandhi."

"His political influence is as great as Gandhi's," Kruppmann said. "Greater, even. Both the Hindus and the Moslems revere him. Even the Sikhs follow him!"

"It was Nkona who started the movement to restructure southern hemisphere debt," said Hsen, almost accusingly. "And the Bangladesh lama is leading the struggle for family planning throughout Asia!"

Jo remained silent, but her heart was racing so hard she feared they could hear it in the darkness of the limousine. Did they know that each of these men had been visited by Keith Stoner? Her husband.

Hunching forward, burly arms on heavy thighs, Kruppmann said, "These events are not random. They follow a pattern. They represent nothing less than a deliberate move toward realignment of the world's financial structure."

"A realignment of the international power base," said Hsen.

Realignment. What a bloodless word, thought Jo. She recalled what the world had been like fifteen years earlier, when the great multinational corporations were running roughshod over the world.

Keith had made her see what was happening. And why it had to change. Forests ripped down in Brazil; farmers and even scientists who dared to protest killed by mercenary soldiers. War tearing central Africa apart; whole tribes annihilated, genocide so routine that it was hardly newsworthy. Terrorists striking blindly in a blood lust that seemed endless. Greenhouse effect turning farmlands into deserts, raising sea levels everywhere. Population growing, swelling, bursting beyond the capability of the world to sustain so many human beings. Six billion people. Eight. Ten. Most of them starving, diseased, born in miserable poverty and dying in miserable poverty; surviving only long enough to make still more babies, half a million more each day.

Keith Stoner struggled to change that world. With Jo beside him, he quietly, fiercely, unceasingly worked to save the human race from self-destruction. With the drive of an implacable force of nature, with an intensity and single-minded strength that went far beyond ordinary human abilities, Stoner worked invisibly, beyond the sight of the world's intelligence services and news media, to improve the human condition. Jo helped him, shielded him, put the enormous resources of the world's largest corporation at his disposal.

Thanks to Keith Stoner, and his wife, central Africa was now an interdependent economic zone that sold its natural resources on the world market and invested in raising the standard of living for its people. Terrorism dwindled as true wealth began trickling into the hands of the poorest of the Earth. Fusion energy desalted seawater and pumped it along thousands of kilometers of irrigation channels. Blind exploitation of the planet's resources was slowing, a little more each year, as a new economic balance was painfully attained.

Hardly anyone knew that Stoner was the man behind this monumental change. But have Hsen and Kruppmann found out? Jo wondered. Have they learned the role I've been playing in all this?

If they find out, Jo told herself, they will try to stop Keith. And the only way to stop him will be to kill him. That was why her heart pounded beneath the cool surface she presented to the two angry men riding in her limousine.

With a small nod, Jo said to them, "Your computer forecasts must be telling you the same things mine do. The old days of East-West competition are gone. Today it's the North against the South. The industrialized nations against the nations that hold most of the world's natural resources."

"The rich against the poor, as always," Kruppmann agreed.

"But the poor are making rapid strides," Hsen pointed out.

"Is that so bad?" Jo asked lightly. "The more money they have, the more they can spend on what we have to sell."

"They are moving to create a world government," Kruppmann insisted. "First the Peace Enforcers, then this verdammt International Investment Agency …"

"Which you helped to create," Hsen accused.

Jo arched an eyebrow at them. "The IIA has forestalled god knows how much terrorism by channelling investment money to the nations that need it."

"Extorting blackmail from every major corporation, you mean!" Kruppmann groused. "Blood money!"

"Do you want to go back to the way it was ten or twelve years ago? Would you like to have your factories blown up by terrorists, or be kidnapped and tortured to death?"

"We are not here to argue about the International Investment Agency," Hsen said. "Although it troubles me that you so often vote against us at board meetings, Ms. Camerata."

Masking her fear with a cold smile, Jo replied, "I don't want the IIA board split into two intransigent camps. If every vote comes down to 'us against them,' the Third World and the environmentalist zealots will defeat the corporations every time. A bipolarized board would be very bad for us."

Kruppmann shook his head, making his beefy cheeks waddle. "You are proud of kowtowing to the Greens? Do you know how much the ridiculous ecological constraints your IIA insists upon are costing us?"

"Vanguard complies with those environmental constraints, just like everyone else," Jo replied.

"For how long?" asked Hsen, as softly as a cobra gliding toward its prey.

Jo stared at his shadowed face, its expression hidden in the darkness as the limo sped silently along the highway. So that's what this is all about, she realized. He wants to take over Vanguard.

"For as long as I'm president of Vanguard," she said mildly.

"Which means," Hsen replied, "for as long as you control your board of directors. Some of them are not as pleased with your IIA as you seem to be."

Kruppmann nodded. "This is true. Many of the directors dislike your infatuation with those environmentalists and Third World beggars."

"Do you want to put the matter on the agenda of our next board meeting, Wilhelm?" Jo asked, the sweetness of cyanide in her voice.

Kruppmann glanced at Hsen, then evaded with, "But the IIA is just the tip of the iceberg. These are merely preliminary steps. They mean to form a world government and to tax us into the poorhouse. I know this!"

"Who means to start a world government?" asked Jo.

"They do. The Third World. The Greens. The Arabs and Africans and Latin Americans. I am certain of it."

"But who in the Third World?" Jo insisted. "Which nations? I haven't heard anything at all …"

"It is not a nation that is fomenting this idea," said Hsen. "It is some small group of special people. Some elite organization, some hidden force that works through the Third World nations and organizations such as your International Investment Agency. We can see them at work in Brazil, and India, and elsewhere. These so-called 'Great Souls' are nothing more than the front men for the real organization working against us."

"Aren't you confusing a few random events with some international scheme?" Jo countered. "There's no movement to create a world government. That's pure paranoia."

"There is such a scheme afoot!" Kruppmann slammed a heavy fist on the padded armrest. "And it is extremely dangerous for us."

"It must be stopped."

As calmly as she could, Jo answered, "But our companies are still profitable. None of this has harmed us very much."

"We have lost billions!" Kruppmann snapped.

"And made billions elsewhere," Jo pointed out.

"Pah! You'll think it's a necklace when they come to slip the noose around your throat."

"Perhaps you don't understand the long-range implications," Hsen protested. "A world government would be dominated by the overpopulated nations of the southern hemisphere-including, I must add, several Asian nations above the equator, such as India and the Philippines."

"And China," Jo snapped.

"Their first order of business will be to squeeze taxes out of us until we go bankrupt," Kruppmann grumbled. "And then they will take over all our factories and other facilities. They want to control everything, the entire world! They are dangerous!"

"And your IIA is helping them," insisted Hsen. "Perhaps you do not realize it, but the International Investment Agency is part of our problem. You have supported the IIA blindly, and this must stop."

Jo fought to keep her face from showing her thoughts. You little yellow bastard, you don't like what the IIA is doing, so you're threatening to push me out of Vanguard if I don't play the game your way. She knew that Hsen had his own little clique on her board of directors, including Kruppmann. If I don't do what they want, he's going to try to muscle me out. Very neat.

Almost, she relaxed. Handling her board of directors was not frightening to her. They had even elected her chairman, unanimously, two years earlier.

"Still," she said softly, "I think the IIA has been a net gain for us. We're in no real trouble."

"We will be if this keeps on!" Kruppmann grumbled.

"Then what do you propose to do about it?"

Hsen now leaned forward too. "First, we must find out who our enemies are and how they are organized."

Jo nodded.

"Then we must eliminate them," said Kruppmann, with implacable finality.

Making her lips smile in the shadows, Jo asked, "Have you taken any steps along those lines?"

"Yes, we have. We want you to help us, though. We need the support that Vanguard Industries can give us."

Hsen added, "And we need you to work for us at the IIA instead of against us."

"I won't do a thing unless you bring me proof that this-this cabal actually exists."

"The proof we will bring you."

"We must work together on this," Hsen insisted. "You are either with us or against us."

Very carefully, Jo said, "I don't want a world bureaucracy taxing us to death any more than you do."

As she listened to their plans, Jo knew that these men meant to seek out her husband and kill him. They think they can control me by threatening to take over Vanguard and throwing me out. But they mean to kill Keith, once they find out who he is and what he's been doing.

And when they find out that I've been helping him, they'll want to kill me too.

CHAPTER 5

IT was lunchtime in Sydney. Cliff Baker sat half sprawled in the imitation wicker chair at a corner table in his favorite restaurant, the oh-so-posh and totally phony Bombay Room atop the tallest skyscraper in Australia. Fake Hindus with bogus turbans waited on the tables with feigned humility and fraudulent politeness. Wog-waiters, Baker called them: phony as a virgin in a cathouse. Bowing and scraping and speaking in whispers. Not a robot in sight. But you paid for all the servility; the prices were even higher than the room's altitude.

From his corner table Baker could see the magnificent harbor with its graceful old bridge and the breathtaking opera house. But his attention was riveted, instead, on his luncheon companion.

She was a Magyar beauty, with honey-colored hair, high cheekbones, a heart-shaped face with slightly asian eyes the color of a lioness's. Flawless skin. Delightful bosom straining the buttons of her mannishly tailored blouse.

Baker was halfway drunk, not an unusual condition for him in the early afternoon. He had started their luncheon with three whiskeys, then consumed most of the wine that the servile, bowing wog-waiters had poured for them. Now the restaurant was nearly empty and the turbaned crew stood clustered near the kitchen door, whispering among themselves as they waited for the last luncheon customers to leave. The dishes had been cleared from their table by still other dark-skinned fakes in turbans, but Baker had called for a bottle of cognac and two snifters. His glass was now empty. Temporarily.

He had been a ruggedly handsome man fifteen years ago, with golden blond hair and a lean muscular body. Now his face sagged and there were pouches beneath his blue eyes. He was going to bloat, and even his hair looked a thinning, unhealthy graying blond.

"So you want to know about Stoner, do you. That's what this is all about?"

The woman nodded, holding her snifter in both hands, where it caught a glint of afternoon sunlight.

"Dr. Ilona Lucacs," muttered Baker. "Doctor of what?"

"Neurophysiology," she said, in a voice that was almost sultry. "At the University of Budapest."

"And what's your interest in Stoner?"

Dr. Lucacs was clearly uncomfortable, but she forced a smile. Luscious lips, thought Baker.

"My interest is purely scientific," she said, with the trace of an exotic accent. "My research is in the area of cryonics, freezing people at the point of death so that they can be revived later, when medical science has learned how to cure the ailment that is killing them."

"Ahhh," said Baker, reaching for the cognac bottle. "So Stoner's still the only one to make it out of the deep freeze, eh?"

"So far as I have been able to determine, no other human being has ever been revived successfully from cryonic suspension."

Baker splashed five centimeters of golden brown liquid into his snifter and downed half of it in one gulp. "Then An Linh's mother is still on ice," he muttered.

"I beg your pardon?" Dr. Lucacs leaned forward slightly, a motion that roused Baker's heart rate.

"An old friend of mine," explained Baker. "Her mother was dying of cancer so she had the old lady frozen-god, must be twenty-five years or more."

"Would this be Ms. An Linh Laguerre?"

"You've met her?"

"I interviewed her a few weeks ago, in Paris."

"How is she?"

"Very successful. She is a vice president of Global Communications."

"So I heard. Haven't seen her in more than ten years. She was a close friend of mine, back then. A very close friend."

Dr. Lucacs caught his meaning. "She is married now, and has two children. She appears to be quite happy with her life."

Baker grunted. "Global's a subsidiary of Vanguard Industries, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't know."

"It is. She's working for Vanguard, same as me."

"You did know Dr. Stoner fifteen years ago …"

But Baker was muttering, "We all work for Vanguard, dearie. You, me, An Linh, everybody. They own us all."

Ignoring his implications, Dr. Lucacs tried to get the conversation back on subject. "How well did you know Dr. Stoner?"

"Not well. But too well, if you get my meaning."

"I'm sorry?" She shook her head.

Baker gulped the rest of the cognac in his glass, then leaned his head back as if inspecting the high ceiling with its slowly-turning fans.

"I knew him well enough to damned near get killed," he said, bitter anger in his voice. "I knew him well enough to get kidnapped and tortured. Too damned well."

She said nothing, but glanced at the purse in her lap where a miniaturized tape recorder was hidden.

"You don't know about Stoner, not really." Baker hunched forward in his chair, leaning both arms heavily on the table and bringing his face close enough to hers so that she could smell the liquor on his breath.

"He's not human. He can see right through you and make you do things you don't want to do. I saw him make a bloke go blind, just while we were sitting at the dinner table. Made his eyes bleed, for chrissakes! Drove him dotty." His words were blurring together now, coming out in a half-drunken rush, frenzied, urgent. "He turned the owner of Vanguard Industries into a basket case just by saying a few words to him. He never sleeps! He spent months with An Linh in Africa and never touched her-for sex, I mean. I think he can walk through walls if he wants to. He's not human, not human at all!"

Dr. Lucacs's tawny eyes were glittering. "He spent several years aboard the alien spacecraft," she whispered, almost to herself.

"That's right. He was frozen up there in space, and when they brought him back to Earth it was another ten years or more before they figured out how to thaw him and bring him back to life."

"And no other human being has ever been thawed successfully and revived."

"Because he ain't human," Baker insisted. "While he was in that alien spaceship, I think they grew a clone of him or something. He's just not human. A human being can't do the things he can do!"

"He won't let me examine him," Dr. Lucacs said.

"'Course not. Then you'd find out what he really is."

"But I have all his medical records from the Vanguard Research Labs, where he was revived, fifteen years ago. They are the records of a normal human being."

"Faked."

"They match his earlier records, from the years before he went into space."

"Faked, I tell you."

She looked doubtful. "Why would … "

"Don't be a naive fool!" Baker snapped. "He's the property of Vanguard Industries, the most powerful corporation on this planet, for god's sake! He married the corporation president …"

"Ms. Camerata? I didn't know that."

"Don't you see? He's secretly controlling the biggest corporation on Earth. Through her. He killed off her first husband and set himself up in his place. He paid off An Linh with Global Communications and stuck me with this bloody IIA."

She looked surprised. "But I thought that you were the chairman of International Investment Agency."

"Sure I am!" Baker made a sound halfway between a laugh and a snort. "It's like being the mascot of a rugby team. You get treated well and everybody admires you. But they don't take you very seriously, do they?"

Dr. Lucacs looked uncomfortable.

His voice rising as he reached for the cognac bottle again, Baker went on, "Sure, they made me chairman of their bloody IIA. And all the big multinational corporations send their flunkies to sit 'round our table. But who runs the IIA? Actually runs it? Jo Camerata, that's who! Vanguard Industries, that's who! And who runs Vanguard? Stoner, the bloody alien freak. Her husband."

The scientist leaned back in her chair and tried to sort out all this new information.

"You'll never get to Stoner," Baker predicted. "He's better protected than the bloody Pope."

"I've interviewed almost everyone who knew him when he was first revived," she mused, as if reviewing the options left for her next move. "Most of the medical team has died over the past fifteen years."

"You bet they have!"

Dr. Lucacs raised her brows. Baker smiled a crooked, knowing smile and poured more cognac for himself.

"Ms. Camerata won't see me," she said.

"'Course not."

"There is only one other person that I know of. A Professor Markov, of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. And he's very elderly."

"Better get to him right away, then," said Baker. "Before Stoner finds out you're after him."

Her beautiful eyes widened. "You don't think … ?"

Baker's smile turned cruel. "All those medical blokes kicked off, didn't they? You don't think those were all natural deaths, do you?"

Yendelela Obiri staggered to a halt along the forest trail and doubled over from the nausea. She was close to complete exhaustion, her khaki slacks and shirt soaked with sweat, her head swimming with the strange double vision of the biochips.

Gasping in the thin mountain air, she almost sank to her knees. Almost. But when she closed her eyes she saw what Koku saw, heard and smelled and felt what the young gorilla was experiencing.

Koku was being chased. Hunters were pursuing him. And the young male was too inexperienced, too tame, to realize what danger he was in.

"You are not alone," Yendelela muttered, knowing that Koku could hear her through the biochips implanted in their brains. "Lela is near, Koku. Lela is coming."

Fighting down the bile burning in her throat, she adjusted the straps of her heavy backpack and staggered up the steep wooded slope, pushing through brush and nettles that flailed at her from both sides of the narrow mountain trail. The sun was warm, but the cool mountain breeze chilled the perspiration that beaded on her dark, intent face.

Her teachers, back at the university, had been doubtful about allowing Lela to do a field mission with a male gorilla. Even Professor Yeboa, who had been her advisor, her sponsor, her secret love, had expressed doubts.

"The hills can be dangerous for a city girl," Yeboa had said. He had smiled, as he always did when he reminded Lela of her urban upbringing.

"City streets can be dangerous, too," she had retorted, also smiling. "I am not afraid."

The aim of the project was to repopulate the area that had been set aside as a safe reserve for the mountain gorilla. Over the past half century the gorillas had been driven nearly to extinction, but now at last an ecologically viable tract of uplands had been set aside for them, thanks to Nkona. Three female gorillas had already been placed in the reserve by other students and rangers, waiting for a male to complete a viable group. Lela's task was to guide Koku to the females, using the biochips to help control the young male.

Lela had even met the Great Soul of Africa, Dhouni Nkona himself. He had come to the university to see personally how they were rearing the infant gorillas from the zoo population and teaching them to survive in the wild.

As a graduate student, Lela had been concentrating on theoretical studies of ecological change and environmental protection. But once she looked into those fathomless eyes of Nkona she was swept up in an irresistible frenzy of dedication.

"The work you do here is the best that human souls can achieve," Nkona had told the eager students. He smiled at them, a sparkling bright smile in his deeply black African face. "You know that we must learn to control our behavior, to think before we act, to accept responsibility for the consequences of our actions. We cannot live by exterminating others, that much you have learned in your studies, I know. By saving the gorillas, you help humankind to save itself."

"Many oppose what we do," said one of the students.

Nkona closed his eyes briefly. Then, "All life is linked together, from the humblest forms to the most grandiose. Thirty-three years ago the human race made its first contact with an alien intelligence, a race from another world, another star. I say to you that our contacts with the life of this world are just as important-no, more important-than our link to other races in space."

He turned a full circle to sear each of the students crowded around him with his compelling gaze. "We are all links of the same chain, the chain of life, which extends out to the stars and the farthest reaches of creation. Your struggle to save the gorilla is the struggle to preserve that chain, to keep faith with all the forms of life that share this universe."

Theory could never be enough for Lela after that. Aflame with Nkona's passion, she volunteered eagerly for the biochip operation that would allow her to maintain sensory contact with a selected gorilla. She battled the entire faculty and field staff for the right to work with one of the animals through its difficult transition from the human environment of its childhood to the wild mountain forests where it would live as an adult.

For nearly two years Lela had trained hard, both physically and mentally. Out of a soft, self-indulgent adolescent cocoon there emerged a leggy, lean-muscled young woman with lustrous brown eyes and a smile that dazzled.

She was not smiling now. Out here in the thick brush of the forest, with the early morning sunlight just beginning to filter down through the trees, with the sweat of near-exhaustion chilling her, Lela knew that Koku was in danger.

She should have been the only human being within a hundred square kilometers of the young male gorilla. But she was not. Through Koku's eyes she saw a band of hunters thrashing through the brush. White men and black, carrying rifles.

"Run Koku!" she directed. "Run!"

Startled by her abrupt warning, the big gorilla crashed off through the brush. Lela felt his sudden fear as her own. Looking back through the gorilla's eyes, she saw the hunters dwindling in the distance until they disappeared altogether in heavy green foliage.

Lela sighed out a breath of relief. Koku could easily outdistance them in the thick brush. But within minutes he would feel safe and slow down or stop altogether. Lela knew she had to reach Koku before the hunters did.

CHAPTER 6

JO dropped the two men off at their hotels, then instructed her chauffeur to drive to Washington National Airport. A Vanguard Industries executive jet was waiting for her there, and shortly after midnight she leaned back in an utterly comfortable leather lounge chair and watched the stately monuments of Washington glide past her window as the plane climbed to its cruising altitude. Once above the normal traffic patterns of commercial airliners, the plane's wings slid back for supersonic flight and the cabin lights dimmed for sleeping.

But Jo had no intention of sleeping. Not yet. Hsen and Kruppmann were threatening her. Now she knew why the board of directors had suddenly insisted on a special meeting to review Vanguard's participation in the IIA. Hsen was making a power play. The sneaky little bastard must have nearly half the board in his pocket already, in addition to Kruppmann, Jo said to herself. While I've been helping Keith he's been maneuvering to acquire leverage on my board.

She dictated a memo to the computer outlet built into her seat's armrest: "Check all board members and executive staff to see which of them also sit on the board of Pacific Commerce." Then she added, "Also, I want a complete list of all Vanguard executives above the level of divisional vice president who have been involved in any transactions whatever with Pacific Commerce."

What about Kruppmann? Jo decided that the Swiss banker was more bluster than anything else. He never made waves at board meetings. He would loan money to Vanguard no matter who ran the corporation, as long as Vanguard showed profits. Hsen was the dangerous one. Kruppmann made most of the noise, but Hsen was the kind who knifed you in the dark.

She nodded to herself. First rule of business: find out who your enemies are, and then keep them as close as possible-until you're ready to chop their heads off.

Leaning back in the deep luxurious chair, Jo felt satisfied that she had done all she could do for the moment. She allowed herself to relax and fall asleep.

Her dreams were troubled. She was in the lobby of an exclusive hotel, carrying heavy suitcases in either hand and trying to get into an elevator. But she could not get the suitcases through the elevator doors before they slid shut and left her behind. No one in the hotel lobby offered to help her. She was frantic, because Keith was somewhere on one of those upper floors and she had to find him before he went away and left her all alone.

She awoke to a pert young stewardess smiling over her. "We land in half an hour," she said.

Jo saw that the sky was aflame with the rising sun. Then, brows knitted, she realized that she had to be looking toward the west. The sun was setting, not rising. Lifting her wrist close to her lips she said softly, "Hawaii." The watch's digits quickly shifted from 0328 to 1928. Almost 7:30 p.m., Jo realized.

The drive from Hilo Airport to her sprawling home in the hills above the city was swift. Keith Stoner was at the front door to greet her, tall and safe and smiling warmly. She had loved him since those ancient days when she had been a student and he a former astronaut. They had worked together on the project to make contact with the alien starship that had appeared near the planet Jupiter. When Stoner had flown out to the starship and remained in it, frozen in the cryogenic cold of deep space, Jo had clawed her way to the top of Vanguard Industries to gain the power to reach the distant spacecraft and return the man she loved to Earth and to life.

But he was not the same man that she had known eighteen years earlier. Frozen in the cryogenic cold of space aboard the alien starship, he had somehow been changed. It was strange. Keith seemed more human than he had been earlier, more attuned to life than the self-contained, solitary scientist she had once known. He could open his emotions to her and love her as he had never been able to do before. Yet he was somehow beyond human, endowed with abilities that no human being had ever known, burning with the urgency of a demon-driven fanatic-or a saint.

But he loved her. Loved her as she loved him. For Jo, nothing else mattered.

Now she felt his strong arms around her and relaxed for the first time since she had left their home, four days earlier.

"I thought you'd stay the night in Washington," he said, smiling down at her.

Jo said, "The party was pretty much of a bore. I decided I'd be much happier at home."

"I'm much happier, too."

They walked arm in arm into the house while the chauffeur handed Jo's overnight bag and briefcase to one of the squat, many-armed household robots.

Stoner stopped at the foot of the stairs that led up to the master bedroom suite. On their right was the spacious living room; straight ahead along the corridor was the kitchen.

"You must be still on Eastern time," he said. "Do you want some dinner or some breakfast?"

"I'm not hungry at all," Jo replied.

He pursed his lips slightly. "You know, the best way to adapt to a change in time zones is to go to bed and sleep until you've caught up with the local time."

She grinned up at him. "Sleep?"

"There's iced champagne waiting in the bedroom." He grinned back at her.

"How about a nice long shower first?" she suggested as they started up the steps.

"Sounds good to me."

Hours later Stoner lay on his back gazing up at the stars. Jo was curled next to him on the waterbed, warm and breathing in the slow regular rhythm of sleep. All of Stoner's childhood friends were in their places in the night sky: Orion and the Twins, the Bull, the glittering cluster of the Pleiades. A slim crescent Moon hung in the darkness like a scimitar, with the red jewel of Mars nearby.

There was no ceiling to their bedroom, only a bubble of energy that kept out the weather and served as a soundproof barrier. Yet it was completely transparent; like having the bedroom outdoors. Flowered hangings both inside and outside the room filled the dark night air with the fragrance of orange blossoms and magnolias, completing the illusion of being out in a sighing, whispering garden.

The energy screens that had ended humankind's nightmare fear of nuclear holocaust could also serve more romantic purposes, Stoner mused. A gift from the stars. From my star brother.

He felt no need of sleep. Instead, as he watched the stately motion of the stars arcing across the dark sky he murmured the command that turned on the record player, keeping it so low that only he could hear it. The muted, moody opening of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras No. 8 filled the room faintly, violins and cellos dark and sensuous.

The best invention the human race has ever made, Stoner thought. The symphony orchestra. And so typically human: a hundred virtuosos voluntarily submerging their individuality to produce something that no one of them could produce alone.

A meteor flashed across the night sky, silent and bright for the span of an eyeblink. Stoner sank back on his pillows and clasped his hands behind his head, content to lie beside his sleeping wife and wait for the dawn while the orchestra played for him.

Jo murmured drowsily, "Go to sleep."

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I didn't think it was loud enough to bother you."

"Big day tomorrow."

"I know. My surprise party."

She bolted up to a sitting position, suddenly wide awake. "Who told you?"

"You did." He laughed softly. In the shadowy darkness, Jo's naked body was washed by the pale moonlight, her skin glowing warm. He could not see the expression on her face, so he reached up and pushed back her shining dark hair.

"The household staff has been fussing and making phone calls for a month or more. You cut short your stay in Washington to come home in time for tomorrow. And you just told me tomorrow's going to be a big day."

Jo leaned over him. "You're the only one in this house who knows how to keep a secret."

"I have no secrets from you, Jo. You know that, don't you?"

Nodding, she began to tell him of her conversation in the limousine with Hsen and Kruppmann. Stoner listened patiently, quietly until she finished.

"About what I expected," he said at last. "They're not interested in the global picture. They only see their own needs."

"Their own selfish interests."

"They just don't understand what's going on. Maybe they don't want to understand. They want the power to control events, to keep themselves at the top of the heap. They don't understand that it's not a zero-sum game anymore. The world's economy is completely interlinked; it's not even just a global economy, not if you consider the Moon and the asteroids and the factories in Earth orbit. If the Third World gets richer, we all get richer. That's what they don't see."

"They're willing to commit murder," Jo said.

Stoner gave a bitter little laugh. "If they're willing to bankroll wars and insurrections, what's the murder of one man to them?"

"But it's you they want to kill!"

"They don't know who I am," Stoner said, "and it won't he easy for them to find out. Especially when I have such an excellent Mata Hari in their camp."

"I can't protect you forever, Keith. There's no such thing as absolute security."

"I'm more concerned about you," he said. "How serious is their move to take over Vanguard?"

She shrugged her naked shoulders. "I don't know yet. But they'll get their guts ripped out if they try to take over my corporation."

Stoner chuckled in the darkness. "That's my woman! What'd Business World call you: 'The tigress of the corporate jungle.'"

She laughed too, but there was anxiety behind it. "Keith, I can handle the corporate battles. And I can balance Baker and his Third World friends against the corporate interests on the IIA. It's you I'm frightened about."

"I'll be all right."

In the darkness her voice took on a sharper, harder note.

"Don't you understand? Hsen's out to kill you! I'm going to strike first, before he gets the chance …"

"And be just like him? What good would that do?"

"It'll keep you alive, Keith!"

He shook his head. "Hsen is not the enemy. He's just acting out of fear."

"Dammit, Keith! Sometimes you carry this sainthood crap too far!"

Startled, "Sainthood?"

Jo was immediately sorry. More softly she said, "Okay, so I'm a tigress. I know you're not a tiger, Keith. Not a street fighter. But you've got to protect yourself, got to let me protect you."

Stoner countered, "Look. Even if you could kill Hsen someone else would take his place. So there'd be another assassin coming after me, with the added excuse of avenging Hsen's murder."

Jo said nothing, but he could feel her body tensing, like a true jungle cat just before it springs.

"Deliberately killing a human being is the worst thing you can do, Jo. Not because there's a rule against it written in some book, but because it always leads to more killing. Because the human race hasn't quite learned yet how to deal with its animal instincts. We're supposed to be working on the side of life, not death. Life is precious. Human life is the most precious of all."

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Keith, if there's one thing we've got too much of on this planet, it's human beings. And most of them aren't worth the effort it would take to blow them to hell."

In a near-whisper Stoner replied, "If you only knew how rare life is, truly rare among all those stars."

But Jo refused to be drawn in that direction. "What happens if Hsen kills you? What do you expect me to do?"

"Jo, we're in a race against time. You knew that when we started down this road, fifteen years ago."

"But the closer we get to the end the more dangerous it becomes."

He nodded abstractedly, as if his mind were really elsewhere. "The biochips are the next step. If the human race can absorb that technology, then we're almost finished."

"I've got our lab people working as hard as they can go," Jo said. "Biochips will be an important product for Vanguard."

"It's more than that, Jo. Much more," Stoner said. "Biochips can help us get around the limits on brain size set by the female's birth channel, the first chance to expand the capacity of the human brain in hundreds of thousands of years, Jo!"

"You're blaming women for the limits on brain size?"

He laughed. "All the great religions of the world blame women for humankind's troubles. Didn't you know that?"

"All the great religions of the world are schemes by men to keep women down!"

"But they're right, in a way."

"Really?" Jo's voice dripped acid.

"Goes back millions of years," Stoner said lightly. "Most ape females are in estrus only a couple of days a month. Our ancestors' females were sexually receptive all the time. That's how we outpopulated the other apes. It led to our dominance of the planet. But now it's a problem."

"Well, I know how to solve that problem." Jo pushed away from him slightly.

Stoner reached toward her and she let him put his arms around her easily enough.

"Some solutions are worse than the problems," he said softly.

"That's better," she murmured.

"But the biochips are important, Jo. Implanting protein chips in people's brains will allow them to link themselves directly with any library, any data bank on the planet. And they'll be able to communicate with each other directly, like …"

Jo interrupted, "I don't care about that! You're the only one I'm worried about."

"And the rest of the human race?"

"Let them all go to hell, what do I care? As long as you and the children are safe."

Very softly, Stoner said, "None of us will be safe, Jo, unless all of us are."

"You keep saying that. Is it really true?"

He closed his eyes and saw a different world, a planet that circled a bloated red star that hung in the sky like a huge menacing omen of doom. A world that teemed with delicate birdlike people, human in form except for feathery crests that ran along the tops of their otherwise bald skulls. A world that was dying beneath the weight of its own numbers.

Cities covered almost the entire face of the planet, their soaring towers crammed with people. Harbors were black with boats and rafts where people lived packed literally shoulder to shoulder. What little countryside remained was bare, denuded, while immense factories struggled to produce enough artificial food to feed the ever-growing masses of people. Murder and madness were as commonplace as breathing, and the only parts of the planet that were not covered with people were the waterless deserts that were slowly, inexorably growing larger, and the oceans that were all too quickly becoming polluted.

Despite famine and war and agonizing plagues the highest ethic of this race was the sanctity of life. There was no allowable way for the species to deliberately control its numbers, and as its technology and medical skills grew, billions of babies were born each year to parents who procreated in the blind faith that procreation was the ultimate goal of life.

The planet-girdling society became schizophrenic, rewarding fruitful parents with honors and blessings on the one hand, while tacitly condoning genocidal wars and mass murders on the other. Laws prohibited birth control while exacting the death penalty for minor theft. Scientists produced medical miracles for prolonging life and nerve poisons that could wipe out a city overnight.

The entire species was insane. Yet it continued to grow, continued to enlarge its numbers, spread across the surface of its world like a crawling, writhing cancer until it covered even the barren wastelands with cities bursting with overcrowded buildings where murder was as commonplace as birth.

And then the planet itself exacted its revenge. The air became poisonous, the oceans too fouled to support life. Glaciers crept down from the mountains to cover the land in glittering sterile ice. Life ended. The planet waited for eons before the first faint stirrings of protoplasm could begin again in a sea that had at last cleansed itself of the last traces of those who had come before.

Stoner shuddered in the darkness. He knew that the world he had just seen was real; it existed somewhere out among the starry deeps. His star brother had been there.

"Jo, we're in a race against time. We've got to learn how to control our population growth. Sooner or later somebody's going to stumble onto the technology that the starship carried, discover it independently. The biochips are only the first step in that direction. Somebody's going to move on into nanotechnology, you know they will. If we haven't curbed our population growth by then …"

Jo leaned back on the pillows without replying.

"If we fail, the human race dies. Not tomorrow. Not even in the next decade or two. But we'll kill ourselves off eventually and that will be the end of humanity."

Jo said to herself, Maybe we'd be better off dead. Most of the human race is despicable scum. What difference does it make if we survive or disappear?

But she did not voice the thought.

Turning on his side to face her, Stoner urged, "We're close, Jo. Very close. It's all coming to a climax. The biochips are the big test. If we can absorb that technology, use it to help the human race instead of harm it, then we'll be ready for the final step."

Even though his face was shadowed in darkness, Jo could feel the intensity of purpose blazing in him. She wondered if the we he spoke of referred to her, or to the others.

She tried to see his eyes in the moonlit shadows, tried to peer into his soul. Keith had worked so hard since being revived, since coming back to life after being on the alien star ship. Like a man possessed, like a saint or a holy man who saw a vision beyond what ordinary human eyes could see.

"It's almost finished," he repeated, in a whisper that held regret as well as anticipation. "All the threads are coming together, the task is almost complete."

"Almost," Jo echoed.

BANGKOK

SHE was in such excruciating pain. It was necessary to sedate her so heavily that her labor stopped altogether. The delivery team performed a caesarian section, something they had done countless times before. But once they had exposed the baby the surgical nurse gagged and slumped to the floor. The two assistants stared as if unable to turn away.

The baby was already dead, and the mother died minutes later.

Now Dr. Sarit Damrong paced nervously along the roof of the hospital, the cigarette in his shaking fingers making a small coal-red glow in the predawn darkness.

The baby had been a bloody, pulpy mess, already half eaten from within. The mother also; her abdominal cavity was an oozing hollow of half-digested organs. It was the agony of having her innards eaten alive that had racked the poor woman, not the pain of labor.

The woman had been one of the millions of lower class workers who lived on barges in the khlongs, the canals that crisscrossed Bangkok. Dr. Damrong had immediately performed an autopsy, right there in the delivery room, and sent scraps of tissue samples to the university laboratory for analysis.

Now he stood at the parapet at the roof's edge, leaning heavily on his thin arms and staring out at the tower of the Temple of the Dawn, across the river, as it caught the first rays of the golden sunlight.

The first time he had seen a patient with her innards eaten away, a month earlier, he had been curious. It reminded him of something from one of his biology classes, years ago, about a certain species of spider that laid its eggs inside the paralyzed body of a living wasp. When the eggs hatched, the baby spiders ate their way through their host to enter the world.

How grisly, he had thought as a student. Now he had seen three such cases. And these were human beings, mothers dying in the attempt to give birth, destroyed from within.

Dr. Damrong watched the sunlight slowly extend across the teeming city. Cooking fires rose from the canals and the crowded houses and apartment blocks. He could hardly see the curving river, there were so many barges clustered on it. Another day was starting. The darkness of the night had been dispersed.

But still his hands trembled. Three women eaten away from within their own wombs. As if the fetuses within them had turned to murderous acid.

For the first time since he had been a child, Dr. Damrong felt afraid.

CHAPTER 7

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY!"

Stoner tried his best to look surprised, but everyone knew he wasn't, and he knew that they knew.

But it did not matter.

That morning Jo had begged him to stay up in his office, on the top floor of the spacious stucco house, as far away from the pool and patio as could be. Stoner spent the hours there speaking with people in Brazil and India and Thailand on the videophone. He read a few reports and tried to ignore the cars and limos that pulled up to the front door and discharged men, women, and children laden with brightly-wrapped packages.

Household robots buzzed and bumped up and down the front steps repeatedly, discreetly scanning each new arrival for weapons as they accepted suitcases and garment bags.

No matter how hard Stoner tried to concentrate on his reading, a part of his mind reached out inquisitively to sense the people arriving. That's my son Douglas, he said to his star brother, with his wife and children. And later, Claude Appert, flown all the way from Paris. Then he recognized his daughter Eleanor and her new husband, whom he had not yet met. His grandchildren were teenagers now, and trying their best to be quiet and secretive. Stoner smiled to himself and went back to his reading.

The world's fundamental problem was the result of cultural lag. Stoner had decided that fifteen years earlier, but here in his hands was a detailed academic study by a team of researchers from half a dozen universities that came to the same inescapable conclusion-in ten thousand turgid words and computer-generated graphs.

In a world where modern medicine had reduced the age-old agony of infant mortality to negligible proportions, many cultures still drove their people to have large families. The poorer the people, the more children they begat. The higher a nation's birthrate, the poorer the nation became. There were almost ten billion people living on Earth. Too many of them were hungry, diseased, and ignorant. And with the ability to select the sex of their babies, too many lagging cultures produced an overabundance of males, far too many for the available jobs in their economies. It had been this overabundance of young men, boiling with testosterone, that had led to wars and terrorism in the past several decades.

Most of the world's experts knew the answer to this problem: Lower your birthrate, they said to the poor, and you will become richer. Balance your male/female ratio. For nearly a century this gospel had been preached to the poor. To little avail. More babies and still more babies-half a million each day-threatened to drown the world in a pool of starving humanity.

Even with the best of intentions, good-hearted but shortsighted people made the problem worse. Feed the starving poor. Give money to help the famine-stricken people of the Third World. The people of the rich industrialized nations opened their hearts and their pocketbooks, and the starving poor survived long enough to produce a new generation of starving poor, even larger than the last. The cycle seemed endless. Yet what could an honest person do when others were dying for lack of food?

Hard-headed analysts pointed out that giving food to the starving without forcing them to control their birthrate was only making the problem worse, accelerating the cycle of poverty and starvation that was threatening to drown the world. Force birth control on them, said these experts. Make the poor control themselves. That led to cries of genocide and the angry blind flailings of terrorism, the one weapon that the poor could use against the rich to satisfy their furious seething hatreds, their sense of injustice, the frustrations that made them feel powerless.

Stoner's approach was the opposite. Instead of preaching to the poor he worked to make them richer. Instead of demanding that they lower their birthrate, he worked-through Jo, through Vanguard Industries, through the International Investment Agency, Cliff Baker, Nkona, Varahamihara, de Sagres, anyone else he could find-to increase the wealth of the world's poorest. Raise their standards of living and they will lower their birthrates: that was his gospel.

And it was working. Slowly, at first, but more and more clearly Stoner saw that it could work, it would work. If he were not stopped first. If he did not run out of time.

His greatest fear was that some bright young researcher would hit upon the central idea that would extend human lifetimes indefinitely. The technology that the starship had carried could allow humans to live for centuries, perhaps much longer. If that technology were turned loose in the world before people learned how to control their numbers, human population would start soaring out of control. Strangely, perversely, Keith Stoner-a man of science all his life-dreaded the thought that science would discover the real secret of the starship, the hidden knowledge of his star brother.

At last Jo appeared at his doorway, looking fresh and bright in a sleeveless miniskirted sheath of Mediterranean tangerine. Their fourteen-year-old daughter Cathy stood beside her, a flowered Hawaiian shirt several sizes too big for her slim frame thrown over her bathing suit. She was trying to appear cool and nonchalant, but Stoner could see the excitement bubbling in her.

"Are you in the mood for some lunch?" Jo asked casually.

He looked up from the report he had been reading. "Lunch? I'm not really hungry yet."

"Come on, Daddy!" Cathy yelped. "Have lunch with us!"

"Now?" he asked, grinning.

"Now," both women said in unison.

Stoner closed the report and laid it on his desk top, then went with them down the stairs and out to the patio by the swimming pool. Several large round tables had been set out beneath the gently rustling palm trees. He could see no one, but sensed the crowd huddling in the dining room, behind the drapes that were never drawn at this time of the early afternoon.

"Are we eating out here?" he asked.

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" roared out two dozen voices as the glass lanai doors of the dining room slid open.

They poured out and surrounded Stoner, shook his hand and pounded his back. Stoner laughed and greeted each one of the guests while his ten-year-old son, Richard, took up the official chore of accepting the gifts they had brought and stacking them up neatly on the long table beneath the big azalea bush in the corner of the patio.

The guests were mainly family, Stoner's son and daughter from his earlier life, Jo's only brother and three sisters, and their various children. A few trusted members of Vanguard Industries' headquarters staff, from the nearby city of Hilo.

Stoner was happy to see the offspring of his first marriage. Deep within him he wanted the opportunity to try to settle their relationships, square their accounts. Almost as if he were afraid he would never see them again.

He felt a puzzled tendril of thought tickling at the back of his mind. Why should I be afraid? he wondered. His star brother wondered, too.

His son Douglas came up to shake his hand, warily, almost like a stranger. Doug was well into his forties now, but the wound that had opened between them when Stoner had left his first wife, a lifetime ago, had never completely healed.

"I'm glad you could make it, Doug," he said to his son.

"I wouldn't have missed it for anything," said Douglas. "A free vacation in Hawaii for me and my whole family? Who could turn that down?"

Douglas had grown to middle age. His blond hair was thinning, his eyes had lost much of their youthful fire. He had two sons of his own nearing twenty, but the bitterness was still there. Stoner saw it in his eyes, heard it in the tone of his voice. Douglas no longer fought with his father, no longer refused to see him. But the anger seethed just below the surface. And Douglas pointedly avoided Stoner's younger children, the offspring of his marriage to Jo.

Eleanor was friendlier, more relaxed. She had remarried a genetic surgeon in Christchurch after the death of her first husband, but they had divorced after two years. Now, a dozen years later she had a new husband and seemed at peace with the world. And with her father. Stoner felt immensely grateful for that.

Stoner embraced Elly and her teenaged daughter, shook hands with her son and her new husband, a cargo specialist for Pacific Commerce's space transport division. He was startled to sense that Elly's daughter was pregnant. I'll be a great-grandfather in seven or eight months, he told himself. It seemed strange; he did not feel old enough to be a great-grandfather. I wonder if Elly knows? I'll have to talk with the girl later on.

Aside from Elly and Doug, the only one among the guests milling around the swimming pool whom Keith had known back in his earlier life, before he had spent eighteen years in frozen suspension, was Claude Appert.

The Frenchman was as dapper as ever despite his seventy-two years. Pure white hair and trim little mustache, jaunty double-breasted blazer of navy blue, pearl gray slacks, Appert was the very picture of the perfectly-dressed Parisian.

"Claude, you're looking very well."

"Not so well as you, mon ami. You seem ageless."

"I'm a year younger than you."

Appert laughed. "But you cheated! You spent eighteen years sleeping and not aging one minute!"

Stoner shrugged like a Parisian.

"Still," Appert said, looking closely at Stoner's face, "you do not seem any older than you did when you first recovered from the freezing. Shave off that black beard of yours and you would look no more than thirty-five or forty."

"How are you getting along?" Stoner changed the subject.

"The same as always. It is lonely without Nicole, but there are any number of handsome widows who invite me to dinner."

"Paris is still Paris, then."

"Ah yes. The one thing that remains constant in this world of change."

"Things are changing rapidly, aren't they, Claude? And for the better, I think."

"But yes! Even the government of France has agreed to stop exporting armaments. And there was hardly a peep of protest from the industrialists. That is how good the economy is, these days."

Surveying the assembled guests, Stoner realized that one man was missing: Kirill Markov. He hasn't been in good health, Stoner knew, but Kir would have come no matter what. Unless something really has hit him. Better ask Jo about him.

He went through the motions of the party, and soon found that he was actually enjoying himself. There were tensions, of course, especially with Doug and Elly's daughter Susan. But it was good to see his two families in the same place, good to see an old and dear friend like Claude, even if Nicole had died. Life goes on, he told his star brother. Life belongs to the living, his star brother replied.

The presence in his mind seemed to enjoy the party, as well. The rituals of the birthday cake were especially fascinating. As he bent to blow out the candles, for a flash of an instant Stoner's inner vision saw a parallel ritual on the world of his star brother's birth, where all fifty members of his creche celebrated the day of their awakening every ten years, coming together to unite physically no matter where their individual lives had taken them.

But the vision passed in the flicker of an eye and he was back on the patio by the swimming pool, beneath gently swaying palm trees under a blue Hawaiian sky, surrounded by friends and colleagues and-Stoner looked up sharply from the smoke of the blown-out candles. There was an enemy here. A traitor. A spy.

All his senses tingled with alarm.

Certainly not Doug, no matter how deeply his bitterness ran. No one in the family. Elly's new husband? Stoner looked at the man with fresh interest, but he turned away immediately to speak to one of the other guests.

One of Jo's people? That would be more logical. And much more dangerous. Perhaps it was corporate secrets he was after. It was definitely a man, that much Stoner sensed. But which man?

The sense of danger slowly faded. Although Stoner stayed taut-nerved and wary for the rest of the party, he could learn no more. Maybe I'm getting paranoid in my old age, he thought. How much could a corporate spy find out at a birthday party? But that's not the real problem, he knew. There's a spy in Jo's inner staff. I'll have to warn her about it.

He pulled his granddaughter Susan to one corner of the patio and, still keeping an eye on the crowd of guests eating birthday cake and drinking champagne, he let her tell him about her boyfriend and how much in love they were and how afraid she was to tell her mother.

"He's Japanese," Susan confessed, struggling to hold back tears. "He wants to marry me and take me to Osaka, where he lives." Susan looked very much like her mother: chestnut hair, round face so young, so vulnerable. With a pang, Stoner recalled that he had never spent a day with his own daughter when she had been a troubled teenager.

"How did you meet him?" Stoner asked.

"At the university in Sydney."

"He's a freshman too?"

"Yes."

"And do you expect your parents to keep on supporting you once you've married him?"

With a shake of her head, "We'll take turns working. One of us will work for a year while the other goes to classed. It'll take longer for us to get our degrees that way, but we'll manage."

"And the baby?"

The tears threatened to overflow. But Susan kept her voice level as she answered, "We've talked about it and we've decided to abort it. Neither one of us is ready for parenthood yet."

Stoner felt a sigh go through him. Deep inside his mind the alien presence there felt an immeasurable sadness at the thought of deliberately ending a life. Life is so rare, so precious! But Stoner replied silently, Not on this planet. Despite our best teachings, human life is still held cheap. Jo was right: it's the most abundant thing we have.

Yet all he said to his granddaughter was, "Why did you allow yourself to get pregnant, in the first place?"

"We didn't plan to! It just happened. You were young once, weren't you?"

Despite himself, he laughed. "A thousand years ago, it seems."

Still wary of the danger that he had sensed, Stoner went with Susan and pulled her mother away from the crowd. With him standing between the two women, Susan told her mother about the man she wanted to marry.

"Live in Japan!" was Eleanor's first shocked reaction.

Stoner soothed, "Half an hour away, Elly. Osaka is only half an hour from Christchurch." With a grin he bantered, "And your new husband can probably get free seats for you on Pacific Commerce spaceplanes."

Elly was totally surprised and deeply hurt. Stoner felt the anguish that raced through her and reached out to his daughter to soothe her, ease her pain, help her to assess the situation calmly. Humans react with their glands first, he knew. Only afterwards do they examine the problem rationally. It was a survival trait back when we were half-brained apes hunted by leopards. Now it's a detriment. He felt his star brother's almost amused agreement.

Once he saw that both women had gotten past the point of hormone-drenched emotion, Stoner left mother and daughter deeply engaged in talk and rejoined the other guests. Jo was off in the dining room, he saw through the open lanai doors, equally deep in earnest conversation with several of her Vanguard executives. There's no such thing as a social occasion for her, he knew.

The sense of danger tingled along his nerves again, but so faintly that he could do no more than wonder if it was real or imaginary.

Both of Doug's boys were splashing down the length of the pool, with ten-year-old Rickie matching them stroke for stroke. Stoner smiled. Born and raised on Hawaii, young Richard could swim like a dolphin. At least the youngsters are getting along all right. Swinging his gaze around the patio, he saw Doug sitting at one of the tables the servants had set up, a full champagne bottle in front of him, his wife beside him looking unhappy.

I could change Doug, Stoner told himself. I could open my mind to him and let him see all the pain and sorrow and guilt that I feel. He wouldn't be able to hate me after that.

But his star brother asked, And what would your son have left in his life, after you do that? He does not hate you, but his anger toward you is the main emotional prop of his existence. Take that away and he might collapse altogether.

For the first time in years Stoner wondered if the alien inside him was truly his brother, or was he being controlled, manipulated by forces he could not understand? He felt a shudder of astonishment within himself. After all these years, still some doubts, some ancient fears?

Stoner nodded grimly to himself. You see how difficult it's going to be to reveal the truth to the rest of the human race.

His star brother fell silent.