Special Feature: FIREBIRD, by Tony Rothman [Part 1 of 3]

ALSO BY TONY ROTHMAN

Fiction

The Course of Fortune

Censored Tales

The World is Round

Nonfiction

Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry (with Fukagawa Hidetoshi)

Everything’s Relative and Other Fables from Science and Technology

Doubt and Certainty (with George Sudarshan)

Instant Physics

A Physicist on Madison Avenue

Science à la Mode

Frontiers of Modern Physics

DEDICATION

To the memory of my father, Milton Rothman,

with gratitude for the scientific life.

ZERO

“You know this is mad.” That’s how it began. That is how Nathaniel Machuzak remembered it began. With the wind blowing into the Texas hill country and the convoy snaking after it toward folly. With his half-incredulous, half-angry challenge to the bearded Russian sitting beside him in the jeep.

“Yes, it’s mad.” The parched gulches the procession crossed each moment were hardly drier than the Russian’s reply; his distant gaze, trained on a Brahman steer munching grass behind a barbed-wire fence, shrouded his desiccated response with fatality.

“Borisovich, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of it working. And if something fucks up…Jesus…”

“Machine is conditioned. Should be okay.”

Nathaniel scowled ferociously at Yaroslav Borisovich Archangelsky, but that one only continued to stare out the window, bearded chin resting on knuckles. Worthy of Rasputin, the great beard provided its pint-sized wearer with effective camouflage and his bedraggled hair lent Archangelsky more than a passing resemblance to the crazy monk, but Machuzak had known this Russian too long to be fooled. Slava was crazy, foxlike, and the barely perceptible purse of his lips assured Machuzak that he was far from blind.

“Y–you’ve misunderstood something, Slava,” Nathaniel persisted to the march-past of scrub and rock. “This was supposed to be the dedication. The plan was to give them the c–cook’s tour, show them a routine pulse. That’s all.”

“Plans change, moi drug.”

“I—wasn’t told.”

For an instant the conversation lapsed; then Archangelsky chuckled with an unearthly rumble an octave lower than could possibly emerge from such a shrimp. “Nat Edward’ich, you think we’ve been killing ourselves day and night for cook’s tour? Who was Cook anyway?”

Managing a faint smile at the Archangelsky-ism, Machuzak did not at once reply. He recognized that he was slow in speech, to the point of hesitation, and he flattered himself that this was because he thought before he opened his mouth. But at this moment the welling anger soon overcame hesitation. “What the hell does Rasmussen think he’s doing?” he hit the steering wheel with the flat of his hand, even as he knew exactly what Slava would say:

“Giving fire to the world.”

* * * *

Machuzak’s jeep insisted on its own judgment. The video was off, permanently, but no one could mistake the voice: Leonard Rasmussen himself, CFRC’s director, online from the lab. Urgency shaded the famously boisterous tenor, one that had of late grown gravelly, but even in poor health Rasmussen did all to sound confident, sanguine. “Mac,” he said, “I smell trouble brewing at the gate. Be prepared, like a good scout. What’s your ETA?”

“N–no problem, Len. Give us twenty minutes.”

“Thumbs up,” Rasmussen said, and signed off.

A long sigh escaped Machuzak’s lips. His slowness, he conceded, was not limited to speech alone.

“Be glad we don’t have implants,” Slava remarked.

Machuzak nodded grimly. With forty the next milestone, both men were too old to want to have anything to do with the Apple Brainwave, which wired you to the Internet once and for all. Auto fatalities for 24/7 chatterers already exceeded deaths by GPS distraction. Smart cars could take over the thinking, but drive-thru Texans hadn’t exactly gone into paroxysms of ecstasy at the thought of handing over the sacred wheel to a superior intellect.

The world had changed, Machuzak shook his head with the now-permanent wonder, the geography no less. As the procession trailed the buzzards west and south out of Austin, Machuzak numbered the ranches covered with solar panels, some the older silicon and copper, more with photovoltaic nanopaint. He convinced himself that the lazy whoosh of blades turning in the wind made itself heard above the road noise.

Some things are frozen in time. A beet-red farmer perched atop his tractor stared down Machuzak and Archangelsky as the motorcade passed, leveled at them imaginary shotgun sights. The locals blamed the lab for the worsening of the water, for the annual freak snowstorms and any time their TV signal got lost. St. Cecilia and her talk-show cronies insisted that CFRC scientists were space aliens.

“We’re all aliens in this place,” Slava spat out the window.

It was true. They all spoke with accents, hardly any of them Texas twangs.

The caravan snaked up and down more kilometers, past oak trees dripping with moss, clumps of prickly pears, more ranches, down, up and—suddenly it lay before them. Machuzak pulled off the road to give the dignitaries an opportunity to gaze upon it for the first time. But whether you came over this rise once in a lifetime or every morning for a decade, you remained unprepared. There below, sprawled over three or four square kilometers, the great complex—the water towers, cooling towers, the giant structures you’d mistake for aircraft hangars, the satellite dishes, the swans gliding over the artificial lake—each time it seemed less planned than dropped. From an alien planet.

The congress members and tycoons shielding their eyes in the Texas light made astonished noises. Aye they should, Machuzak nodded. The vista confronting you from this rise is so unexpected, so irreconcilable with the eyescape, that you cannot but be drawn toward it, downward, into the valley. And they descended.

* * * *

The scene at the gate was worse than Rasmussen had foreseen. “What the—?” Machuzak exclaimed, seeing the way blocked by a mass of cameramen and bots pointing headsets in every direction and, worst of all—“Slava,” he said, as he jammed on the brakes and the motorcade ground to a halt, “who the hell’s been talking to the press?”

Archangelsky didn’t need to say, “I told you so” as the journalists stampeded toward them.

Nathaniel’s perplexity was rising by the instant. On a normal day nothing much distinguished CFRC’s main gate from the entrance to the Ruby or L-Bar Ranch, nothing except the nearly invisible eyes that surmounted the modest brick fence and the buffalo roaming in the vast fields beyond. On a normal—Before him, several dozen protestors had braved the afternoon heat to prevent…what? Nathaniel shook his head; there hadn’t been a protest since the lab opened. The college students—well, that anyone could understand… The Buddhists surprised him and the hermits and dropouts of all sorts interspersed among the rest, people who had simply removed themselves from the pace of the current century. More than the numbers it was the agitation, the genuine fear written on their faces, that seized Nathaniel’s attention. As he stepped out of the jeep they pushed toward him angrily waving their placards. “No radiation!”

“No bombs!” a bearded twenty-year-old shouted silently in his face by flashing his phone screen at Machuzak. “This place is hit and we all go up!”

“Whoa,” said Machuzak, raising his hands. “No one’s building bombs here.”

“What about the tritium?” the kid insisted belligerently, punching his keys.

“I’ve got to shoot you,” Machuzak answered with a smile, which to the surprise of both of them disarmed his opponent.

At that moment, a portly businessman on the far side of fifty, shaded by a full-sized Stetson, stepped out of his long-horn-graced limo and waded into the fray. Nathaniel knew him by sight, of course, but their handshake at Bergstrom airport had been his first and only introduction to Richard Garrett, the billionaire chair of CFRC’s board of governors.

“Excuse me, sir, just what is going on here?”

Despite the confrontation unfolding about them, and that he towered over Garrett by a head, Machuzak deferred to the tone of voice of a man who not only expected to be, but was, listened to. “M–Mr. Garrett, I suspect you know better than I. Rumor has it—” he glanced at Archangelsky in the jeep—“that Leonard has decided to use Prometheus to fire up the lab’s power grid.”

“First I’ve heard about it, er…Dr.—”

“—Machuzak, Nathaniel Machuzak.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing…everything.”

Garrett looked up quizzically at the lanky, perturbed, perplexed scientist. “These people seem to think it’s dangerous. Is it?”

Nathaniel hesitated, glanced at the fevered crowd surrounding this surreal exchange. “Hmm, probably not to us, if that’s what you mean. But Mr. Garrett, believe me, that machine was not ready, is not ready—”

“Ah,” Garrett shrugged jovially, considering. “Dr. Machuzak, where’s your sense of adventure? I say we give it a go. If it fizzles, well…”

In spite of himself Machuzak was fast working up a sweat. They’d always known that the second-worst thing that could happen to the program was a fizzled demonstration and the worst thing was an accident. Today they were risking both. For what? He only dimly perceived the implications. On the verge of losing his temper altogether, Machuzak half spit out, “It’s insane!” but confronted by his own lack of imagination, he swallowed his tongue and faced the crowd. “Why don’t you come watch?” he announced to the protestors, badging open the gate.

For only an instant, shocked silence and baffled glances met the unexpected invitation, then one by one the young people nodded and moved toward the retreating fence.

“Good move,” remarked Garrett.

“Welcome to the Controlled Fusion Research Center,” Machuzak said, and the crowd streamed in.

* * * *

The motley guignol of grizzled recluses munching on home-baked pies, saffron-robed monks banging drums and Energy Star moms pushing their phone-charging strollers quickly engulfed the motorcade, and the limo-bound dignitaries might have walked the final kilometer to the guardhouse. Metalized balloons bobbed above everything.

“That boy at the gate is like my daughter,” observed Slava. “She won’t speak to me except by texting.”

Aye, the world was new. Machuzak vividly recollected that day nearly two decades ago when Americans awoke to pictures of cuddly polar bears drowning in the former Arctic ice cap. By now green had turned black. His “jeep” usually ran on algae, and long ago those fourteen-mpg Urban Assault Vehicles, which Texans believed were guaranteed them by the Second Amendment, had met the same fate as the dinosaurs, except in Crawford.

The one word you never heard amidst solar, wind and bio was fusion. The energy source of stars. If fusioneers, physicists like him and Slava, could do it, they would hand the world a new, virtually limitless supply of energy. The first problem, Machuzak conceded heavily, was that after eighty years of effort, the ultimate goal still lay just beyond their fingertips. The second problem was that to people like the kid at the gate, fusion meant bombs of the worst sort. Then there was the third problem: the future never had much of a constituency.

Leonard Rasmussen, CFRC’s director, was determined that their endeavor should succeed. Ten years after he’d rebuilt the old Austin National Fusion Research Laboratory into the Controlled Fusion Research Center, his troops had yet to produce a self-sustaining reaction, which would alter the history of the world, but if Slava was right, they were going to try today.

* * * *

Machuzak waved the crowd past the perplexed duty guard, who raised the boom in spite of himself, and everyone passed through the crumbling concrete barriers that had been ordained after 9/11. Nathaniel figured the odds of a terrorist attack on CFRC were about the same as a hit against the nearest Taco Bell, but when even university students thought they were building bombs…

The crowd passed along the wide arc of the lake until at last everyone stood before the main building, gawking, giggling at the majestic fountain that rose from the water and enveloped them all in a fine spray. Their childlike wonder prompted Machuzak to see the sculpture for the first time in years. Once, those irregular, artfully corroded bronze sheets soaring heavenward through rainbow mists had reminded him of angel wings, and now he remembered that. Afresh he contemplated the small sphere surmounting the whole, bronze, brass, intricately carved away such that inner labyrinths were suggested.

“What do you suppose that sphere means?” a guest asked.

“The sun,” Nathaniel answered and ducked inside, the crowd after him.

Each and every person was instantly transported outside again by the lobby, which had been designed with light. Once more transfixed, hermits and dignitaries stood together, smiling at the vaulting arches that touched skylights open to the heavens. For a second moment, the throng’s admiration of a visionary creation briefly rekindled in Nathaniel a cinder of boyhood wonder. In those two moments, he discovered again what his profession was about, what it should be about, and resolved to act.

Setting off, he ignored the exhibits and memorabilia and mountains of food, determined to confront Rasmussen. The director was nowhere to be found, but his eyes lit on Leonard’s wife, Theresa, surrounded by admirers. Machuzak took two steps toward that charmed circle and suddenly halted, lassoed by his damned indecision, and he foolishly stood frozen in the middle of the great lobby as Slava looked on with amusement.

Luckily, Theresa herself caught sight of him and motioned him over. “What’s wrong, Mac?” she said. “You look troubled.”

He’d bypass the obligatory pleasantries: “Theresa, is Len up to anything?”

“Shh,” she smiled. “It’s supposed to be a secret.”

Christ, Slava was exactly right. For a moment Nathaniel stared blankly at Theresa. They’d known each other a decade, since he’d first set foot in this miraculous space. A handsome woman, a strong one, Theresa sometimes remarked that she read history to “be reminded of the beauty of ephemeral things,” and with her husband’s health in decline, she had well crossed the threshold where life’s transitoriness ceases to be a surprise. “Believe me, Mac,” she said, casting on Nathaniel the indulgent gaze a mother reserves for the runt of the litter, “everything will be fine. Leonard knows what he’s doing.”

Nathaniel scowled. As splendid as Theresa was, she wasn’t a scientist.

“Theresa, this isn’t the sort of thing you try in public. It’s arrogant—” He suddenly halted, seeing. “This has something to do with ITER, doesn’t it?”

Theresa’s silence instantly told Nathaniel he’d hit the mark. ITER, the colossal twenty-billion-euro device that the EU and a half dozen other countries had built in southern France, had finally completed its shakedown last week.

Leonard would never allow the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor to beat CFRC in the race for fusion. When ITER’s construction was announced, years before climate change went mainstream, the United States’ first move was to pull out of the endeavor. In, out… America’s endless vacillations handed Leonard Rasmussen his opening. With legendary charm, boundless vigor, infinite patience, he sweet-talked and cajoled. “I want ten billion dollars and fifteen years,” he leveled his gaze on high-tech magnates and secretaries of energy. Eventually he got what he wanted, the Manhattan Project for energy.

From the ashes of the decaying Austin lab rose a glittering new entity, the Controlled Fusion Research Center. Construction began immediately on the consortium’s centerpiece, christened ASSET for Advanced Steady State Experimental Tokamak. Few words, Machuzak knew, could be more meaningless to outsiders. To insiders, it meant one thing: the future, and lab hands soon christened the device Prometheus, bringer of fire. Not fully ITER’s size, ASSET’s design was—they hoped—smarter, and with luck it would trump its rival. Today the competition had stepped out of the shadows.

Nathaniel walked away from Theresa and found Archangelsky hovering over the hors d’oeuvres. “A tsar’s table,” Slava mused, only obliquely glancing at Machuzak. Then he raised his beard, grinning. “You look tortured, my friend,” he said, thrusting a sparkling glass into the other’s hand.

“You were right, friend,” Machuzak answered, glancing at the improbable, expectant crowd now milling everywhere about them. “They’re going to turn on the lights today—they’re going to try.”

“Of course I was right. I said it before. You think we’ve been busting our balls for a month now on cook’s tour?”

Nathaniel nodded, belatedly as usual, he thought. When fully operational ASSET was meant to supply electricity for the entire laboratory. When. If. It had never been connected to the turbine. They’d been slowly putting the machine through its paces when suddenly the board decreed a commissioning, apparently more, and they threw Prometheus together with sealing wax and string. Oh, it was sputtering along all right—not with a torch but a match—and they’d have to dismantle the beast and spend weeks righting what they’d made wrong. Even with ITER suddenly breathing down their necks, something here did not add up. The idiots couldn’t believe that they’d turn on the lights in front of an audience.

“Let them make fools of us all. Game isn’t worth candle. The higher-ups will get blame.”

“We all will. Tell me, Slava, weren’t scientists at one time supposed to be honest, dedicated to the truth? Wasn’t that the oath we took when we became physicists?”

Archangelsky threw a bewildered expression at Machuzak. “Nat Edward’ich, tell me on what strange and wonderful planet you grew up.”

* * * *

With a resignation to futility, Nathaniel Machuzak again resolved to stop this lunacy. He took a step toward the lobby’s center and the lab’s deputy director, Cyrus Krieg-Zuber. “Into whose hard hat were the alleged feces defecated?” Zuber snarled as if offended by his phone itself. “Yes, we shall investigate at once.”

“Cy, what are you on about?” Machuzak said the moment Krieg-Zuber had signed off. “I saw it myself this morning in the rf heating area. A tech was so stressed that he took a crap into his hard hat, that’s all. You would too if you had any idea of what was going on around here. Put an end to it.”

The blond Krieg-Zuber, accent purposely falling on the final syllable, trained his laser stare momentarily on Nathaniel, stroked his chin. Then he turned without a word, straightened the trimmed lapels of his jacket and edged toward the cameras. For a moment Machuzak stared after him, openmouthed.

Nathaniel ducked into the men’s room only to be brought up short by Leonard Rasmussen turning toward him. The director hadn’t been much visible around the lab for a year, not since the day when that terrible thing happened. Until that day, he’d been a compact, vigorous fifty-five, with silvering hair, ruddy skin and a sly grin, and then he stumbled. Machuzak hadn’t set eyes on him at all for three months and the change was almost too much to endure. Leonard Rasmussen in a wheelchair.

The moment Rasmussen caught sight of him, he struggled to his feet.

“L–Leonard,” Nathaniel stuttered simultaneously, moving to help.

Rasmussen waved him off. “It’s fine,” he said with the effort of one whose muscles refuse to obey. “I can make it. We have a demo to perform, don’t we, Mac?”

“Len,” Nathaniel pressed, “you can’t do this. How far is ITER from ignition? They can’t be close—”

“One day ahead is too close, Mac.”

“To hell with them. You know as well as I do what you’re risking. Overloads, disruptions, equipment damage—”

“ASSET was behaving during the pre-ops—”

“—reputation. What you’re planning isn’t a pre-op. Don’t do it.”

For an instant Rasmussen glanced at Nathaniel with pleading eyes and steadied himself. In that space the last piece of the day’s puzzle fell into place. ITER may be breathing down our necks, but Leonard Rasmussen is determined to see Prometheus’torch set ablaze before he dies.

Machuzak fell silent and helped Leonard into the lobby.

* * * *

Cyrus Krieg-Zuber had reappeared and already begun herding the crowd across the three hundred meters of asphalt and grass that separated the main building from the great tokamak complex at CFRC. Cyrus the Great, striving with his corporate physique for every air of an acting director, if not presidential candidate, had invited the entire planet to watch. What a spectacle it would be, he assured the press, his sartorial splendor no less than his unplaceable accent convincing them that history itself was today in the making. For an instant Machuzak caught his eye, but the adder’s glare Zuber shot at him before he turned again to the cameras said one thing: don’t.

There was nothing for it. He passed Leonard on to Theresa and filed out with Slava and a hundred others toward what they called the pentagon. Not quite “twice five miles of fertile ground,” but six stories high, the immense complex consisted of five connected subunits arrayed around a central hub. Within that hub sat Prometheus. All told, the pentagon covered the area of two or three football fields. The size of the place alone filled visitors with a certain awe, and as they approached, Nathaniel could not doubt it, each one of them was wondering what on Earth could be inside.

What is inside is not quite on Earth.

Krieg-Zuber had stationed a few smiling bots at the nearest entrance to distribute hard hats, say, “Have a wonderful day” and break-dance. Flashing his badge and teeth to the crowd, he waved it over the electronic lock, a gesture that told everyone they were about to enter forbidden domains. With nearly comical bows, he ushered in the dignitaries, then the rest, and when Machuzak and Archangelsky passed him, his expression soured.

Inside, Nathaniel and Slava found themselves shoved up against Garrett again. Soon Machuzak became conscious of a hush descending on the crowd, the same hush that descended every time visitors entered the motor-generator room and understood they are dwarfed.

“Size does matter,” Archangelsky remarked.

Garrett looked askance at the Russian, not knowing what to make of him, but Slava was right. Above the persistent whir of the flywheels, Nathaniel explained that beneath their feet spun the four huge motor-generators that power CFRC’s experiments. Without them, every time they started up Prometheus they’d be in danger of draining greater Austin of electricity. He led Garrett to a chain surrounding one of the wells and the chairman caught his breath when he gazed onto the 700-ton giant resting in a pit the size of a small house. Two generators remained idle—spares—but for short periods the primaries alone could supply 700 megawatts of power: seven million lightbulbs, 700,000 microwave ovens, enough electricity for a small city. On the other hand, the purpose of these beasts was merely to put a match to Prometheus.

“That’s hard to believe,” remarked Garrett.

Machuzak lowered his gaze at the chairman and recounted how during their installation, a great crane was lowering one of the flywheels’ outer casing into the pit. Suddenly cables began straining, snapping. Within seconds the entire crane collapsed and the stator fell into place. Four hundred tons of steel crashed down around the workmen standing atop the flywheel. A cable whipped up, smashed through the crane-cabin window and broke the operator’s arm. Seismometers in Dallas and Houston registered the tremor, but no one died of a heart attack. One of the workmen did take the week off.

“Dr. Machuzak!” exclaimed Garrett, now in outright disbelief, “surely you are making this all up.”

“In the realm of the gods, Mr. Garrett,” Machuzak replied pointedly, “even the extraordinary is ordinary.” Nathaniel regretted the words even as they escaped his lips. He was attempting to make a perhaps-too-subtle hint and was certain that Garrett would hold the remark against him as a sign of the arrogance of physicists, but the businessman appeared oblivious, shrouded by the sense of personal insignificance the motor-generators produce.

Hurrying on, Zuber led the crowd directly to the tokamak test cell. He received voice and visual authorization from the guard to enter and ordered the massive door open. Soon the onlookers were rimming the central bay, streaming videos to friends worldwide. A hush fell, more palpable than the one that had come before.

Prometheus was the ultimate plumber’s nightmare and no matter how often Machuzak tried to describe it, he failed. His failure was not a matter of words, he reassured himself; the eye is simply incapable of taking in everything that confronts it. The device, all fifty thousand tons, stands nearly four stories high, but is buried by the hundreds of cables and microwave guides feeding it from all directions, by the diagnostic equipment that sprout from every crevice, by the massive particle accelerators that heat the fuel. You glimpse a ladder here, a girder there, two flags flying from the impossibly massive crane above, but Prometheus is too complex to allow you to make it into a sensible whole.

Peel away the cables and plumbing and girders and you discover a great cylindrical vessel, the full height of the machine, which contains a vacuum nearly as perfect as you’d find in deep space. Dismantle this cryostat and you reveal sixteen superconducting magnet coils cooled to 268 degrees below zero by the liquid helium flowing through their veins. Each coil reminds you of a pearish D, except this D is eight or nine meters tall, and all sixteen are arrayed around in the form of a giant doughnut. When pulsed, the magnets attempt to lurch toward each other with a force, well, several hundred thousand times what a hefty horseshoe magnet produces—but they don’t lurch; their superalloy casings and the machine’s massive titanium superstructure hold them fast. Finally, strip away the magnets and you peer into the heart of the tokamak itself: a D-shaped superalloy chamber, three times the height of a person, wrapped around in the shape of a doughnut.

Tokamak, Slava once explained, is a Russian acronym meaning “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils.” That says pretty much what a tokamak is: a giant doughnut wrapped with magnetic coils. What it doesn’t say is that inside this doughnut, fusioneers intended to create the center of the sun.

The naked eye is incapable of assembling Prometheus into a sensible whole because Prometheus was, barring perhaps ITER, the most complex device ever constructed. The product of fifteen thousand man-years of work, it was altogether too complicated. And now, Machuzak thought, as much as I am protesting, we are going to turn it on.

* * * *

By the time Krieg-Zuber steered everyone to the control room, located in a kind of underground bunker attached to the main building, 4:00 p.m. had come and gone. He directed the overflow crowd to spread out around the glass-walled visitors’ gallery while inviting a select few to take their places on the “captain’s deck” overlooking the command center floor.

Leonard merely waved to everyone and Zuber made his announcement. “Mesdames et messieurs,” he said with his most sparkling affectation while running his finger along the scar of unknown provenance he wore with pride on his right cheek, “Prometheus is the prototype of machines that will someday provide humankind with clean and virtually inexhaustible energy from ordinary water. This no person can doubt. The more modest goal of Prometheus itself is to bring fusion power to our lab. Although over the past months we have been testing the machine, we have yet to connect it CFRC’s grid. On the occasion of Prometheus’ commissioning, it seems fitting to make the experiment.”

Machuzak fumed. The great goal of ignition—a self-sustaining reaction—yes, that was the dream, but no one knew whether ASSET—or ITER—would ever achieve it. One thing was certain: with the machine in its thrown-together condition they weren’t going to get it today.

“Let us now dim the lights and wait for Prometheus to turn them back on.” The room went dark, leaving the onlookers bathed only in the star-glow of panel lights and monitors. With a nod Krieg-Zuber signals the COE to commence. Chief Operating Engineer Larissa Davidson sits before the controls; she has trained two years for this moment. All safety interlocks are engaged; around the room the scientists take their stations at a few of the hundreds of terminals, one poised to measure temperature, another pressure…x-rays, optical radiation…dirt.

“Two minutes, forty seconds,” announces the electronic voice and the countdown has begun. Instinctively, everyone turns toward the steady tick of the clock, but then they catch sight of the flashing digits on the big screen. The collective breathing slows.

“Magnet temperature, four-point-two degrees absolute,” Larissa says over the intercom. “Poloidal field magnetization commencing.”

Even at that point the whine is audible, not the protest of the flywheels spinning down as the tokamak saps their energy, but a screeching from the machine itself caused by rapidly changing magnetic fields.

“Ninety seconds…eighty-nine…eighty-eight…”

Today, Cyrus announces, they are counting down toward full power; launch will be at t-minus-sixty. It makes sense. No roar of engines will greet them, no majestic liftoff of a giant spacecraft. Only a blaze of light, a miniature sun created in their midst, then…

“Prepare for DT injection and current ramp-up.”

“Sixty-three…sixty-two…sixty-one…”

Liftoff. A crack resounds throughout the room as the screen monitoring the interior of the tokamak flashes red. The guests are transfixed by that flickering, incandescent glow, displayed for all in the gallery to see. At the same time the loudspeakers pipe in a great metallic wrenching as Prometheus groans under the immense magnetic forces attempting to tear it apart. From the audience there is oohing and aahing, but the scientists remain silent. Liftoff is not what counts in this game. How hot. How long. How much power…

“Beginning current ramp-up.”

Nothing has fucked up. Ten seconds into the pulse and they’re still sailing. Slava turns to Nathaniel with astonishment written across his face. “Bozhe moi,” he crosses himself, “the thing may work.”

My God, Nathaniel thinks, he may be right. As images fly to the corners of the world, he finds caution slipping away.

“Tap thirteen. One hundred fifty thousand volts. Rf heating, lower-hybrid drives engaged.” Larissa has begun walking the taps of the high-voltage transformers, engaging some of the auxiliary heating systems. “Thirty seconds to full-power injection.”

“Tap fourteen. Three hundred thousand volts.”

“Twenty-five seconds…twenty-four…”

Machuzak and Archangelsky both glance over to the display wall. Five million amps of electric current are circulating in that doughnut, some fusion reactions have begun. The main beams are on the ready, prepared to bring the process to fruition. God, let us not disrupt. The two men find themselves clenching their fists and urging Prometheus on. Theresa on the captain’s deck holds her hands to her face as she watches the digits mutate. “Preparing for full-power injection at tap fifteen.”

“Ten, nine, eight…”

“Go! Go!” Krieg-Zuber shouts while Leonard beams.

The audience is counting: “Six, five, four…”

“Go!” Nathaniel and Slava shout with the others. “Go!” the cry fills the air.

“…zero.”

Zuber jumps and punches the air in triumph. “Yes!” he cries, slapping Leonard on the back. The room explodes in wild, hysterical applause. But what’s this? Ten, twenty seconds go by and Nathaniel sees no lights, fails to hear the speakers broadcasting the roar of the turbine. From the corner of his eye he glances at the display wall and sees zero helium pressure in the heat exchanger. An operator’s finger points at a terminal and a flashing red bar. Indeed, anticipation has overtaken reality and everyone is cheering the emperor’s new clothes. Nathaniel and Slava finally nod to each other; something has indeed fucked up. As a minute passes without a spark or flicker, the applause turns to tweeting and the world is alerted that all is not right.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Cy at last announces, “there appears to be a difficulty. We will track it down presently.” He turns and snarls something to Andy Lipman, one of the technicians, who runs out of the room. Machuzak sighs.

* * * *

Despite Leonard’s halting attempts to distract the crowd by explaining tokamak operations, before long everyone was back to video games. A half hour crept by. Finally Lipman reappeared and whispered something to the deputy director. As Rasmussen made another apology for the delay, assuring everyone “the problem will be solved within minutes,” Krieg-Zuber angrily stormed out of the room.

“They forget first pancake is always flat,” quipped Slava. “Now Cy will prove he can do more than talk on phone.” Nathaniel nodded. Cyrus the Great intended to show everyone that he could fix tokamaks.

“What do you think’s wrong, Mac?” asked Theresa, stepping down from the captain’s deck. “You must be gloating, ‘I told you so.’”

Hardly. “Theresa, probably close to a million things needed to go right for this to work. I’m sorry, it must be embarrassing for you.”

She shook her head and touched Nathaniel’s arm. “We’ll survive.”

Lipman seemed to be hesitating and Machuzak managed to catch him before he left the control room. “What’s up, Lip?”

The tech answered with a shrug of resignation. “Dunno, Mac. Got a level-three fault in the neutral-beam system. Something down in the surge rooms. Maybe an old switch… You know how it is.” With another shrug he ran out after Krieg-Zuber.

“I wish we had a computer from 2020, even,” one of the diagnostic team was growling as he pounded on a terminal.

Another fifteen minutes crawled by as the caterers began distributing refreshments and the visitors complained that ASSET operations lacked a music track. Suddenly an agitated Lipman reappeared and whispered to Leonard, who went wide-eyed and attempted to rise, only to collapse back onto his chair. Only after a few minutes did he manage to grope for the microphone, drop it, then, when his wife handed it to him, find enough composure to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said slowly, “there a…appears to have been—” he stopped—“an accident. The…ceremony is canceled.”

As everyone rushed to the captain’s deck, Lipman waved Slava and Machuzak after him. Followed by others, they sprinted three hundred meters through the big tunnel to the neutral-beam power system. The safety door to one of the surge rooms was open. There on the floor amidst the maze of electrical equipment lay Cyrus Krieg-Zuber. Nathaniel guessed that he had accidentally hit one of the capacitor terminals, which sent his heart into fibrillation.

A technician straddled Zuber and was pumping his chest while another administered mouth-to-mouth through a pocket mask. Machuzak snapped on a mask as he and Slava relieved the other pair. The belated wail of the lab emergency medical team siren grew higher, louder.

“I’ve never seen The Terminator so angry,” Lipman was saying. “When he opened the door the safety interlock should’ve discharged the capacitors. He must have slipped or something. Jesus…”

“Do you mean this stuff is still hot?” Machuzak asked in disbelief, rows of high-voltage capacitor terminals not a foot from his head. “What the hell!”

“Interlock failed?” asked Slava, staring at Nathaniel for a moment before resuming mouth-to-mouth.

“Screaming like a madman but he didn’t jump it,” answered one of the techs. “We even racked out the breakers.”

“You did?” This was impossible.

In that breath the EMT arrived and took over with its defibrillator. Nathaniel got up, feeling dizzy and nauseated, and stumbled out of the surge room. To the incessant ring of phones, he made his way to his office and fell back into his chair. Mail was coming through.

CHAPTER ONE

Forty-five minutes after they’d left an inert deputy director in the surge room, Slava Archangelsky, hair bedraggled, eyes bloodshot, staggered through the labyrinthine corridors of CFRC toward Nathaniel’s office to see that half the lab’s thousand employees had beaten him there. No thought confusing his mind, he shoved his way to the door to find his colleague inside under journalistic siege.

“Do you know what happened, Dr. Machuzak?”

“N…no I don’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“Cyrus Krieg-Zuber seems to have been electrocuted in an accident.”

“Do you know what caused it?”

“Current.”

“Would you care to—”

“—speculate? No!”

Resembling the mad Rasputin more than ever, Archangelsky grabbed the nearest reporter by the shoulders and herded him toward the door, just as that one huffed, “Jesus, what a fool.”

“Go to hell,” Slava said and booted him out. God, he needed a cigarette. What kind of country is this where it’s illegal to kill yourself? Riffling his pockets, he shoved a tattered stick into his mouth, took it out when he saw Machuzak painfully staring into the reporter’s wake. Slava cast at him a sympathetic glance. Like most Americans, Nat lacked a ready wit, but no scientist deserves to be called a fool because he says he doesn’t know. “I don’t know” is honest, more honorable by far than saying you know when you don’t. In an instantaneous world, Nat’s problem was that he was an old-fashioned romantic. He remembered that PhD meant doctor of philosophy. “Forget it,” Slava tried to beat it into his brain often enough. “We are not natural philosophers pondering workings of the universe. We are here to build the tokamak. Save world from itself.”

Now, having been sucked dry by parasites, Mac to most, Nat to Archangelsky, sat before the Russian with hazel eyes staring blankly ahead. “You look like hell,” Archangelsky offered, puffing on the unlit cigarette. Machuzak usually came across as young for his years. Wrinkles hadn’t intruded much yet, but tonight his face was all creases. “You need a drink?”

“How could this have happened?” was the physicist’s only reply.

“Stupidity. Idiot plays with high-voltage system he doesn’t know shit about. What do you expect? He saves Enterprise? Look, you predicted it yourself. Nobody listened.”

“Did the local emergency people show up?” Nathaniel asked dumbly, still frozen.

“Da, everybody. The devil would break a leg over there.”

Finally Nat exhaled and he scratched his gray-streaked temples as he did when stumped. “So, friend, we’ve just had the most public accident in fusion history. Christ, half the world was watching. It’s already all over…everything.” With one motion he brushed aside a mop of his lazy brown hair and waved across the images leaping from the monitor. “Protestors, board members, reporters… We couldn’t have set it up better if we tried.”

Seated on the edge of the desk, Archangelsky nodded heavily and they fell silent. He liked Nat because, unlike most CFRC grunts, he thought beyond physics. He didn’t need to say that today’s events had put the entire program in jeopardy; that was written all over his face. Pravda, Nat was a little slow. Slava briefly recollected their first meeting, six years ago when he’d come to CFRC after a previous existence at Dubna and the Kurchatov Institute. Maybe he was testing his new colleague—after all, the tokamak was invented by Andrei Sakharov himself. These Americans? Within a minute, the two had gotten into a heated argument, which required some calculations. Machuzak’s math was clumsy—he’d obviously never been through enough Olympiads—and after an hour Archangelsky spat, “You can teach me nothing.”

The American went white like a ghost and walked slowly away. A week later, though, Nathaniel caught him in a stupid mistake and Archangelsky laughed, “So you can teach me something after all.” They hooked their arms and drank to brotherhood with a bottle of French cognac Slava had stuffed into his pocket and they’d been putting up with each other ever since. No, Nat wasn’t much of a mathematician, but he had an experimental nose like a razor. Somehow his career had been derailed. He’d gotten his PhD at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, once America’s leading fusion research center, now little more than some half-empty buildings standing in a New Jersey meadow. Leonard recruited him just as he transformed the Austin National Fusion Research Laboratory into CFRC. Recently he’d been made a division head, but everyone knew the reason for that.

The momentary silence was cut short by Andy Lipman, who appeared at the door with three emergency people. “Uh, Mac,” the tech said, “they wanted to ask you a couple questions for their report.” Slava got to his feet and ushered them in with a silent frown. The last thing either physicist was interested in was answering more of the same.

Neither did the emergency people appear in a hurry to ask. “Can we get this over with?” Archangelsky said, but something about Machuzak’s office amused them; they clucked in mock admiration at the shelves of texts, the stacks of printouts heaped up everywhere, the blackboard, the wall charts. All the while a fire-truck beacon flashed through the window, painting everyone with pallid Christmas colors as the low rumble of the engine sent concussions through the air. In that weird twilight zone Archangelsky fidgeted with his cigarette, waiting. The fireman made a bad joke about smoking regulations, to which Slava replied with a ferocious stare. The intruder swallowed; they got down to it.

Machuzak repeated what he’d said to the reporters: At the surge room, they found Krieg-Zuber receiving CPR on the floor. He’d evidently backed into a charged capacitor and, as they’d learned, a couple hundred milliamps is just right for the heart of an acting director.

The paramedic checked his notes. “Isn’t there supposed to be a safety interlock or something that discharges those capacitators when you open the door?”

Machuzak nodded wearily, glancing at Slava.

“But it failed?”

“Yes,” Machuzak said, “it failed. We don’t know why. There’s a lot of old equipment down there. We use parts from previous machines.”

“Got it. Anything else you can add, Dr. Machuzak?”

“No,” he sighed again, “I really can’t.”

“I can,” interrupted Slava, throwing down his cigarette. “Terminator shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The man didn’t know what he was doing. That’s all there is to it.”

“Slava, take it easy,” Machuzak interrupted.

Archangelsky immediately caught himself, gazed forlornly at the cigarette on the floor, raised his hand in a peace salute. His nerves were more on edge than he’d realized. “Sorry.”

The apology didn’t seem to appease the police sergeant, who was showing more interest in the “Miss Fusion” calendar pinned above Nat’s desk than in an EMT report. She turned to the Russian and said, “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Yaroslav Archangelsky,” Slava replied without expression.

“Yaaroslaave Archangelsky?” she repeated with a serious Texas twang, obliterating his name.

“Yahroslav Arkhahngelsky,” Slava said as if correcting a schoolchild.

The fair-haired policewoman didn’t perceive the menace in Slava’s voice. “You descend from high places,” she said cheerfully enough, intending to alter the mood or at least show that she understood his name even if she couldn’t pronounce it.

Now Archangelsky answered at absolute zero. “Just old name from old country. You need history lesson?”

“Sorry,” she said, seeing that things were going from bad to worse, “just curious. You know, it’s quite a place y’all have. I’ve always wanted to visit. Never been too clear about what you do here—”

“Build bombs,” cracked the fireman, having remained in a private bubble throughout.

Archangelsky wouldn’t let the remark pass. “Energy,” he said severely, punching out the words. “No bombs, no secrets. We want to give the world energy. Understand?”

“Oil’s pricey for sure, but we got plenty o’ sun and wind in Texas. Don’t need no radiation.”

“Why you ignorant sonofabitch!” Slava leapt toward the fireman.

“Slava!” Machuzak shouted, at once on his feet, fully interposing himself between the two men.

“Sorry,” the policewoman said in the same instant, pinning the fireman to the wall with an evil eye. “Sorry,” she repeated. “You know how gung-ho we Texans can be. Anyway, I hope you can give me the cook’s tour once this is sorted out. What d’ya do now?”

Machuzak accepted the peace offering and eased Slava into his chair. “Serious accidents almost never happen, but there’ll be an internal investigation.”

Despite the last minute’s drama, the cop continued to prowl around the room in a slightly distracted manner, as if the business at hand only half captured her attention. “Seems straightforward,” she said after a pause so long that both Archangelsky and Machuzak were caught off guard. “Who’ll be in charge for the interim?”

The two physicists exchanged glances. “I…it’s difficult to say. Our director Leonard Rasmussen is seriously ill—”

“Well, maybe this Krieg-Zoober will pull through.”

“Huh?” Both Nathaniel and the Russian started. “Zuber isn’t dead?”

The officer shrugged. “He was, but the EMT crew finally jump-started his ticker. They said he’s pretty fried inside and it’ll be touch ’n’ go for a day or two. Anyway, we’d best be on our way. Sorry about what happened.” The sergeant ushered the others out and had half disappeared herself when she took a step closer to the large wall chart outlining the principles of fusion. “Plasma physics… Yeah, people use that word a lot when they talk about this lab. Everybody who doesn’t think you’re building bombs thinks y’all are doing blood research and—that ain’t what’s goin on here.”

“No…” Machuzak smiled faintly, “… it ain’t.”

The young woman continued to ponder the chart, eerily discolored by the flashing fire-truck beacon, and scratched her head. “This really isn’t too clear. D’ya think you could tell me what a plasma is?” At a glance at the scientists’ ashen faces, she retreated. “Well, maybe another time.” Again she prepared to depart but instead moved closer to a cluster of photographs on the wall. “Hmm, Durham Cathedral,” she said, peering closely at the first. Then she touched two fingers to her forehead in a salute, said, “Good evening, sirs,” and vanished.

* * * *

Slava lifted his phone to make a call only to find that not only could he not get a signal, but his address book had been erased. Machuzak tried an outside landline but it was dead. “Eb tvoiu mat’,” Slava muttered. Leaving Nat with a perplexed look on his face, he stepped into the corridor and ran downstairs to the lobby. John Henderson, CFRC’s security chief, motioned for him to wait as he frantically tried to deal with the internal calls lighting up his board.

“What the hell’s going on, John?” Slava finally interrupted.

Henderson looked up at Slava in a desperate bafflement. “W…wireless is jammed and outgoing Internet seems to have been cut.”

“How?” asked Archangelsky.

Removing his cap Henderson scratched his head. “Cyrus installed some equipment in the back room last year. H…he didn’t tell me what it does.”

“This isn’t goddamned NSA!” cursed Archangelsky. Maybe it was. This is exactly how things were going at CFRC. Four years ago Krieg-Zuber had silently put in place a routing system: all scientific papers bound for publication were siphoned to his office and secretly vetted. Nat Edward’ich himself uncovered the scheme and protested to Leonard until it was shut down.

“Why cut signals now?” Slava continued. “World knew what happened hours ago. Fucking amateurs…”

“Must be automatic. Don’t ask me how.”

“That miserable sack of shit… He got this from his CIA trainers at Cryotech…” Waving his arm in disgust, Archangelsky returned to Machuzak’s office to explain what had happened. He switched on the light and found Nat looking more exhausted than he’d left him, brooding over the unfiltered incoming broadcasts.

“It’s worse than we imagined,” Machuzak said before Slava could open his mouth. Every news organization in the state was broadcasting from the environs of CFRC, and blogs—divided equally among those claiming Krieg-Zuber was alive and those claiming he was toast—already saturated the Web. Cut to Washington. Whatever coffee-infused staffers journalists can uncover at this ungodly hour are eager to assure viewers that an investigation is called for.

“Government no longer funds science,” Slava talked back to the screen. “Those off-course whores can’t call for anything.”

“They can and they will,” Nathaniel corrected him wearily. “We still get enough federal bucks that Congress can sink this ship.” One or two maybe.

Slava snorted as he squashed a big roach with his foot. “The bastard isn’t even dead yet.”

“The bastard isn’t the point, Slava; the accident is. Mark my words: the politicians will be on us within a week.”

“Another prediction, Cassandra? Look at them,” Archangelsky pointed to a smirking senatorial aide. “It’s as if they were waiting for this to happen, ignorant sons of bitches.”

“Slava,” Machuzak said, suddenly turning, “what got into you before, calling that fireman an ignorant son of a bitch? Were you out of your mind? Why do you think ignorant sons of bitches want to shut us down?” Aye, you didn’t need to be a Cassandra to see that in more ways than today fusioneers had themselves to blame for what was taking place before their eyes. For too many decades the bigwigs had insisted that a commercial reactor was “just over the next machine,” a claim that would ring ever more hollow as Nature slowly revealed the awesome difficulty of the endeavor. Tonight that arrogance was coming to roost.

“Sorry,” answered Slava with as much contrition as he was capable of. “Nerves… Anyway, public will get investigation. Too bad they won’t investigate the way that svoloch’ has been running lab.” He went on to explain what had just taken place.

“Well, at least we can forget about The Terminator for a while.”

“Not before the crayfish whistles on the hill.”

Nathaniel chuckled morosely, swiveling away to answer incoming mail.

“Don’t.” Slava stayed his hand.

For a moment Machuzak stared blankly at the Russian until Slava launched a new window and pointed to the message that for years had appeared on their screens:… Individuals using this system expressly consent to having all their activities monitored and recorded by system personnel…

Why the implications of the advisory had never sunk in before this moment entirely eluded Machuzak and he mumbled only, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Then he remembered Krieg-Zuber’s paper-vetting scheme.

There was nothing for it. Nathaniel silently got to his feet and switched off the lights. Outside, the parking lot was deserted; phones functioned but memories were gone. The two men breathed heavily. At this hour here was only one thing to do—head to town and the Yellow Rose, where Slava would bargain with the dancers for their G-strings, and hope that tomorrow would not prove worse.

CHAPTER TWO

Early next morning Nathaniel Machuzak, looking no better than the fits and starts of sleep he’d had, abandoned attempts to dream and headed south. The radio did nothing to untie the knot that twisted his stomach. Over night, every media host had flocked unswervingly to the call for an investigation. The single thought running through his mind was a mordant “What next?” Dread quickly crystallized when a sunrise eco-pundit warned that CFRC’s tritium supply was a sure target for terrorists. The words hit Machuzak with such force that he nearly swerved into a ditch. At once yesterday’s student came back to him and he vowed that someday he’d collar the kid and explain tritium. Machuzak switched stations: yet another suicide bomber had attacked Verizon in a last-ditch effort to communicate with a human being. He flipped to the surviving Austin classical music station. Tchaikovsky, as usual.

The sight of media vans lying in wait beyond the guard booth triggered evasive action. Veering off the main drive, Machuzak skirted the pentagon and drove directly to Site Alpha on the lab’s periphery. To the aging structures of Alpha Site, the original complex of the Austin National Fusion Research Laboratory, were relegated some of CFRC’s secondary experiments, including the Materials Test Facility, of which he, Nathaniel Machuzak, was head.

At the parking lot Nathaniel granted himself a breath in the deep morning shadows to gaze eastward. The thought was unavoidable: No wonder the public finds us so inscrutable. What could one make of this Lego-set city? Apart from the showcase main building, the rest of the sprawl was entirely utilitarian, great shells meant only to keep the rain off the tumult below. Strangers invariably found the lab ugly and unnavigable. Machuzak had always found a certain beauty in the haphazardness of CFRC. The unrestrained growth of offices, machine shops, temporary structures that took root to become labyrinths of the mindscape. The high-tension towers, hum of the transformers, silicon panels tracking the sun, satellite dishes linking them to supercomputers worldwide. CFRC was an improvisation, an improvisation crackling with energy.

Not, he understood, today. Machuzak badged himself into the water-stained test facility and threw the light switch. The archaeological fluorescents that functioned sputtered on and produced an irritating sixty-cycle hum. He’d call maintenance, but they’d probably RIFfed the electrician.

His laboratory greeted him and for the first time in twenty-four hours he felt a space of peace. People like him could hardly escape it, really. They were born tinkerers. Nothing gave them so much pleasure as making something work, unless it was the pleasure of making something work that nobody thought possible. When he described his workplace, Slava chided him for sounding like the futurists of old, with their songs of electricity and locomotion. No, it is not progress, it is sensation. I relish the cement floors, smooth with age, the smell of oils, ozone when the capacitors spark, the glint of steel and brass atop the workbenches. The polished vacuum chambers, the test cells sprouting wires and hoses. The clacking of the forepumps, the microwave plumbing running from floor to ceiling. This is my world. Here I am in charge.

Dream on. Though he hadn’t set foot here in nearly a month, to work proved impossible and he managed only to fidget and wander aimlessly through the rooms. He paused briefly at his desk and lifted his cold-fusion apparatus. The great cold-fusion scare of 1989 and the extraordinary hoopla surrounding it was beyond his memory, but he later tested the claims himself. There was nothing to the apparatus: a beaker of heavy water and two electrodes. It was madness to think that such a thing could work, but it was understandable madness. Inexhaustible energy on a benchtop. No great tokamaks, no billions of dollars, no decades lost, no high voltage, no…accidents. The Fountain of Youth. Understandable, misguided madness.

Unable to concentrate, Machuzak was about to head over to his office in the main building when the lab phone rang. Andy Lipman. Machuzak didn’t like the sound of the tech’s voice and Lipman wouldn’t talk online. Nathaniel told him to meet at his office in ten minutes.

Archangelsky was waiting. “Have you heard about the tritium?” Nathaniel asked before Slava could speak.

“Ahh, tritium…” the Russian scoffed. “It is as harmless as radioactive materials come. They should be more concerned with radium in coal smoke.”

“Tell that to CNN—”

Lipman appeared then with an uncertain rap on the doorframe and glanced uneasily at Archangelsky.

“It’s all right,” Machuzak assured him. “No secrets among friends.”

The tech hesitated, waved the pair after him down the back stairwell, past junked computers, improbable numbers of crickets and the stagnant smell of concrete; they left the main building and made their way across to the pentagon. Years ago, in homage to Peter Max, someone ordered the pentagon units painted tan, yellow and blue. The result was considerably less than psychedelic. During the walk, a grackle cawed from Toshi Matsushima’s geometry tree, where ceremonial plaques rattled like bamboo chimes, but Lipman said not a word. By the time the tech badged them in, they’d already guessed their destination: the surge room where Krieg-Zuber had glimpsed immortality.

The accident site was as they’d left it the previous day, except for the yellow DANGER DO NOT ENTER tape the police, probably, had put around the area. The truth is always too late.

“So what is it, Lip?” Machuzak said at last.

The tech yet hesitated. “Well, I figured I’d be appointed to the investigation, so I thought I’d get a head start.” Motioning the physicists forward, Lipman ducked under the tape and stopped at the door to the surge room. “Look here.”

Nathaniel followed Lipman’s finger to the interlock at the top of the orange door. It was a simple magnetic switch like the ones you find on alarmed doors. Open the door, a relay trips, alarm sounds. Here, open the door, a relay trips the capacitors are mechanically grounded, discharging them. To Machuzak it seemed okay.

“Yep, Cy didn’t touch it and I don’t believe anybody else did either.”

But if the interlock was intact—how? And the safety was just the first line of defense. After the fault light, the techs had also racked out the breakers—literally rolled out the circuit breakers from their cradles, disconnecting them from the circuit. There the monsters sat. In the open. What could have failed?

Now Lipman opened the door to the brightly colored room. The great power supplies at CFRC were divided into dozens of these smaller units to isolate the subsystems and make it more difficult to electrocute yourself everywhere at once. Machuzak listened for the discharging mechanism to connect. It did.

“Come on…nothin’s charged now. I checked.” Lipman pointed to the lightning rod in the corner—the time-honored, mandatory way of grounding a capacitor. That rule Zuber had evidently ignored.

Machuzak cast his eye over the tower of metal rings looming above them. Straight out of Frankenstein, these unearthly “ignitrons,” two or three times as tall as he was, protected equipment down the line. A fault is detected, the ignitrons fire, the circuit is “crowbarred.” A dead short in two microseconds. Toss a crowbar across the terminals of the nearest high-tension tower and watch.

Near one end of the alcove, amidst all the plumbing, Lipman pointed to a short section of busbar. “I noticed this when I came in,” he said, indicating the heavy piece of copper used to conduct large currents.

“What’s wrong?” Nathaniel asked, unable to see clearly in his own shadow.

Lipman waved them closer and Nathaniel saw immediately what he was getting at. The busbar, perhaps once thirty centimeters long, was now two. It seemed to have melted in the middle, leaving a gap of a few centimeters. A gap.

“This takes out the circuit protection,” Nathaniel guessed, “and the capacitor discharge switch?”

Lipman nodded.

Slava also instantly understood. “Open circuit—capacitors didn’t discharge when they should have.”

It was not too difficult to infer what had taken place: Circuit protection goes, some component in machine fries, fault light appears in control room, Krieg-Zuber fries.

The three stood for a moment in silence. “When was the last inspection?”

“Five days ago,” Lip answered. “I walked through myself. Here.” He handed Machuzak a touch pad. “I suppose I could’ve missed something.”

Nathaniel stared at the screen. The implications of Lipman’s words weren’t hard to divine, but his every instinct resisted them. Finally, he forced himself to look at the tech. “Are you saying,” he asked, holding his breath, “that someone deliberately cut the busbar?”

“Ain’t hard. Two minutes with a hacksaw—done. On the other hand, this looks it was cut by a torch. Maybe it melted under the load. I dunno. We were pressing the machine pretty hard. Some of this stuff’s museum quality and I’ve known one or two of these to go in my time. You guys got the PhDs. Tell me.”

Nathaniel paused long, glanced at Yaroslav Borisovich, stared at the electrical equipment surrounding them, listened to the distant hum of a generator. At last, exhausting every possible diversion, he whispered the word in the world he wanted least to hear: “Sabotage?”

Lipman only shrugged again. “You guys got the PhDs.”

“Hmm.” Nathaniel stood there, head completely empty. “Who would sabotage the machine?”

The tech didn’t reply, realizing that the physicist was merely drafting thoughts, but Slava whistled softly as if to say, “How many possibilities would you like?” Then he too fell silent.

“Lip,” Nathaniel asked, staring at Slava, “why did you come to me about this?”

The tech shrugged with a glance of Archangelsky. “Gotta go to somebody. Who’s in charge of this place anyway?”

“Well, maybe The Terminator when he’s recovered.”

“That’s the point, Mac,” Lipman said with another glance at Slava. “Last year we found a penny in a motor-generator and Zuber’s roaring sabotage. Cooling pumps break down—sabotage. Yesterday it’s shit in hard hats—all my addresses have been wiped. That guy thinks he’s J. Edgar but his screws are a little loose, you know. Time’s ripe.”

Before Machuzak could respond, Archangelsky cut in. “If the press has gone loco with the accident, can you imagine what they will do with sabotage? They’ll go ballistic. Orbital.”

No denying it.

“Not to mention lab itself,” Slava added, almost as an afterthought. “We should keep this quiet.”

“Are you loco?” Machuzak exclaimed in amazement. “How are we going to keep this quiet?”

“We merely don’t tell anyone. Nat Edward’ich, I am of course not suggesting we ignore what has happened: we must in fact quickly determine what is down here.”

“Up,” Nathaniel muttered. Machuzak felt his hesitation surging forth. Again. God, where are my principles? The sound of passing footsteps argued for a quick decision. “How many people knew about this?” Machuzak asked Lipman.

He had yet to tell anyone.

“Don’t.”

“The bar?” pressed Slava.

Machuzak felt himself shaking internally. “No,” he put his foot down, “we can’t do it.” Machuzak left the surge room and the other two staring at each other. After a moment, Slava ran out after him, and the two walked back to the office together. The open space between the giant forms of the pentagon and the administration building seemed larger than ever and every two paces, or three, Nathaniel found himself glancing over his shoulder. Archangelsky was fuming.

“Brat, are you a holy fool or just plain idiot? They’ll discover that bar within hours. The instant they do…” Slava muttered something in Russian that Machuzak couldn’t understand.

“Maybe we’re making too much of this,” Machuzak responded, more to himself than to Archangelsky. “If you were going to sabotage the machine, why not blow it up and be done with it?”

Slava did not calm down for some time. When he did, he turned to Machuzak and said, “My naive friend, remember Andreyev’s play, The Black Maskers.” The Archangelsky-ism, referring with familiarity to a play no one had ever heard of before, might under other circumstance have been amusing, but Slava’s voice was fully laced with warning. “A rich duke, Lorenzo, holds ball. More and more guests arrive, wearing fantastic, grotesque masks. He asks each, ‘Who are you?’ but his question goes unanswered. Finally, they set fire to palace and Lorenzo goes up in smoke.”

Although with the rest of humanity Machuzak hadn’t read it, he vividly recollected the music Roger Sessions had written for the play. Disturbing, to say the least.

“Remember Lorenzo’s question, my friend.”

Archangelsky’s words chilled Machuzak to the bone. “Slava, enough,” he finally said, paranoia quickly rising. They entered the back courtyard of the main building and once more passed the geometry tree. At sunup and sundown when the temperature shifted and the wind picked up, the grackles there lost their minds, as if the end of the world was upon them. Now it was silent but for an occasional caw and the rattle of the plaques.

“What will you do now?” Archangelsky asked.

“We’re going to have to call the police.”

“What will you tell them?”

“I have no idea.”

Slava walked off shaking his head and Machuzak barricaded himself in his office. It was just eight in the morning.

CHAPTER THREE

Not sixty seconds later, while Machuzak dredged his memory for the name of the police officer from last night, the phone rang. Nathaniel stared long without moving. When he at last answered, the voice on the other end didn’t wait for a greeting.

“Hello, Machuzak?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“Not Jesse James. Richard Garrett here.”

“Mr. Garrett, w…why—?”

“I’ll tell you why. With Leonard and Krieg-Zuber in the state they’re in, I’m gonna have to get more involved with the day-to-day here, and I’m callin the division heads for a meeting.”

“W…what’s happened?” What else could have happened?

“Well, Mac—or should I call you Cassandra—?” The nickname was going to stick, Nathaniel realized as the knot in his stomach twisted again. “You weren’t spittin in the wind yesterday. That accident’s got a lot of people spooked, real spooked. The board’s gone loco overnight—Hold on a second… Mac, can you get up here? On the double.”

After staring at the dead phone in his hand for one second, Nathaniel bounded up to the third floor where he collided with Garrett as he waddled into the conference room. “Moravec, the thief who runs GlobeTex, wants an explanation—now. He’s threatening to pull out.”

Texas Global, one of the world’s largest renewable energy concerns and CFRC’s largest investor. Machuzak suddenly felt hit from every side. This was no coincidence. Sabotage the program, pull out. Eliminate the competition. What should he tell Garrett? “They’re not spooked. They’re trying to shut us down.” He stopped there.

“What’s the point, Mac?” the chairman rejoined. “Why join the consortium to begin with?”

It had been a question since the day Rasmussen and Garrett, this plump maverick who’d made billions in oil and poured millions back into pet energy projects, had founded CFRC. GlobeTex was a leader in wind, solar, bio. Fusion made sense for them at the same level solar had once made sense for BP. Evidently not. Stop, Zuber talks like this. About to blurt out to Garrett the discovery of the busbar, Slava’s warning came to him: “Who are you?”

“This way’s a more permanent death,” Nathaniel said to the chairman. “The people who hold the purse strings are waiting for the right moment to kill off the competition.” The moment could always be engineered.

Garrett didn’t answer, only switched on the big screen. A second later a tall, suited, androgynous figure jumped out at them in poor 3-D.

“Who is this person?” asked Moravec, who appeared more female than male, with so little intonation that he, she or it might have been an advanced bot.

“This is Dr. Machuzak, one of our physicists. I was on the phone with him when you called. He can explain what happened better than I.”

“Explain?” Machuzak erupted, suddenly crossing into overload. “Damn it, Richard, who can explain any of this? Prometheus’ predecessor worked. Prometheus itself was behaving okay during the pre-ops.” He ran his hand through his hair, taken aback at his own outburst but unable to control it. “Christ, I told you it was fucking nuts to connect it to the grid. That’s five years away—if we can get the damned thing to ignite.”

The faintest glimmer of a smile spread across the remote Moravec’s lips. “I’ll give you six months.”

“Huh?” Machuzak swiveled. What could he possibly—

“Our contract is up in six months, from today, as it happens. In six months we pull out—unless you ignite your machine.”

Machuzak found himself staring openmouthed at the screen. Ignition. A self-sustaining fusion reaction. The stuff that powers stars.

“It…it can’t be done,” he managed to stammer.

“I’m sorry, the matter is out of my hands.”

“It’s…it’s impossible, I tell you.”

“In that case, good-bye.”

The image vanished but Machuzak continued to stare. “It’s impossible,” he stammered again. Even as he uttered his disbelief, he saw that more than the fate of a single lab was at stake. In its gargantuan magnificence, Prometheus was the last vestige of the American fusion program. If the lab went, ITER remained. Alone.

Suddenly, Nathaniel felt himself peering downward into a vast abyss. From a great distance, Garrett’s voice penetrated. “We’d better call a general meeting, Mac.”

* * * *

Rumors had gone viral by 9:00 a.m., and the weary lab personnel gathering in the main auditorium sensed that something unprecedented was about to take place. That much is true, Machuzak thought. In the crush he found himself seated next to Toshifume Matsushima, the lab’s great thinker, who remarked in that Eastern way of his, “The accident has spurred the regime to new heights of watchfulness and vigor.” Watchfulness and vigor, Nathaniel agreed, skeptical that the “accident” designation would survive ’til the end of the day. At the same moment, a pair of workmen slid closed the big doors at the back of the stage, doors that were normally open to reveal the friendly hills beyond. Soon the room overflowed with five hundred shell-shocked people bracing themselves for the worst. In the commotion Leonard Rasmussen hobbled down to the stage on crutches and seated himself with Richard Garrett.

When the ringtones finally died away and the pall settled, Leonard took the microphone. No, he does not look well, worse than yesterday. Nathaniel felt a great pity for the director. “Friends,” Rasmussen said, voice unusually hoarse, “all of you know that for ten years I have pushed this laboratory toward the goal of infinite energy. Hotter, denser, longer, I always said…” A few in the audience chuckled nervously as Leonard coughed. “We have survived indifferent and hostile governments, economic crises; we have surmounted every obstacle thrown in our path except Nature’s own. Today we have suddenly been called to face our greatest challenge. We will rise to the occasion, but I shall let Richard Garrett, chairman of our board, explain what has taken place.”

Garrett, all two hundred thirty pounds now on display, took the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the restless sea, “we indeed face a crisis. You folks know I’ve supported this lab’s work since Leonard and I set up the consortium. And I mean through hell and high water. A lot a people think fusion is a pie-in-the-sky pipedream. If any of you still have doubts, take a look at this mornin’s sites. You gotta understand that yesterday’s accident…” Virtually without prologue he then dropped the last hour’s bombshell: GlobeTex, CFRC’s principal investor, would pull out unless within six months from today the lab achieved, “as you folks call it, ignition.”

Machuzak was certain a riot would break out. Shouts of “Impossible!” rose from all sides, echoing his own first outburst. What Moravec was demanding was that they achieve the most difficult technological feat ever attempted by the human race, a task so intractable that it had eluded fusioneers worldwide for eighty years—and that they do it in six months with a machine that might not be capable of it. With a loose saboteur thrown in for good measure.

The shouts abated, only to be replaced by angry accusations that Moravec had planned this from the moment he, she or it joined the consortium. “We’ve been set up!” one voice cried louder than the rest. Truer than you imagine, Machuzak nodded, truer than you imagine. Toshi glanced at his neighbor in a forlorn way. “It is truly impossible, Nathaniel,” his expression said before he cast his gaze to the floor.

Garrett remained on stage as Leonard struggled to his feet. “Friends,” he said with difficulty, above the noise. “We have no choice. Can we do it?”

“No!” was the unanimous reply.

“Can we do it?”

Leonard’s valiant exhortations were drowned out and a general strike appeared to be in the making as the sick director looked on despairingly. To Nathaniel’s amazement, Krieg-Zuber himself suddenly appeared on the big screen, larger than life. Nat’s first thought was that he’d been resurrected; only belatedly did he realize that Cyrus the Great must have taped the bit twenty-four hours ago at the ceremony. “Monsieurs et mesdames,” Zuber was saying with his practiced smile to a circle of journalists. “Our success will be a significant moment in the history of mankind. Failure is not an option.”

The ploy backfired, and as Garrett announced a meeting of the division heads for 11:00 a.m. at the ASSET conference room, the rumble of disbelief welled up again and the crowd stormed out without waiting. In the lobby Toshi turned again to Nathaniel. You always listened when Toshi spoke, but this time he said something other than what Machuzak had read in his face. “So, Nathaniel, it seems that our kairos is suddenly at hand, the moment of grace and opportunity. May we use it well.”

“Kairos—we should all remember that,” an administrator said, exiting the auditorium.

More like a perfect storm, Machuzak was thinking as Slava passed by. “Maybe we should all take our heads out of our asses,” the Russian quipped loudly enough for everyone to hear and continued on his way. Machuzak slowly made his way upstairs to the ASSET conference room.

CHAPTER FOUR

Machuzak stood in the doorway of the ASSET conference room, the same space where less than three hours ago he and Garrett had received Moravec’s ultimatum. Now, thoughts a-tumult, barely cognizant of his surroundings, he is grasping at solutions, resisting the most likely, rejecting them all as unsatisfactory or unpalatable. Nothing made sense. Nathaniel lifted his eyes, they fell on the clock and remained riveted. A morning so quickly lost toward ignition. A morning stolen? Stop. He sat down, staring blankly while the others drifted in. At the stroke of eleven, Leonard and Garrett appeared and for an instant Machuzak again considered revealing Lipman’s discovery, but as his gaze swept the room Lorenzo’s infernal question, “Who are you?” once more muted him.

The dozen division heads took their places around the big table, surrounded by smartboards, blackboards, antique bulletin boards posted with data, ancient overhead projectors. In this room all eyes were invariably drawn first and last to the huge chrome letters ASSET, which protruded cyberlike from the front wall, reminding each and every onlooker of the corporate dollars mingling with scientific blood. But now, this moment, no one could avoid the startling image of Cyrus Krieg-Zuber, who unlike an hour ago now appeared live, swathed, wired and beeping as he hovered weirdly above the proceedings from his hospital bed and surreptitiously broadcast himself to the undoubted ignorance of his nurses.

Nathaniel abruptly realized he was becoming hyperaware of everything around him. One rubbing his nose, another puckering his lips, a third fingering her hair, each wearing a downcast expression. Garrett has taken up his position at the table’s head, beatified by the gleaming ASSET letters, which form a sort of halo behind him. Leonard sits to his left in the wheelchair… Who are these people?

At that moment Rasmussen opened his mouth, preparing to speak, but to his own surprise Machuzak interrupted. “Leonard, I want to know what that electronic craziness was about last night. Whoever heard of such a thing at a scientific laboratory?”

A murmur of approval at Nathaniel’s words circled the table at which Fred Abbuhl, ASSET’s chief engineer, added in his lazy Georgian drawl, “Yeah, Len, what was that about?”

The question caught Rasmussen off guard but the general reaction required a response. “Uh, after numerous bomb threats and worse, Cyrus authorized the plan last year,” he said with a glance toward Krieg-Zuber.

The patient nodded decisively, if wearily, as his monitors bleeped. Cyrus the Great’s heart was stronger than he’d supposed, Machuzak sighed as everyone glanced toward the safety posters: SAFETY HAS NO QUITTING TIME. “Yes,” Zuber said with surprising force, “unsubstantiated rumors can never be allowed to damage the Mission. Wiping phones is standard procedure. In anticipation of an emergency, yesterday the system was set to trigger automatically if I did not check in. Henceforth, proceed with the utmost caution in dealing with outsiders…”

Machuzak seethed as others texted. Yes, we’ve had bomb threats, several a year. Why today such measures? Machuzak perceived the flaccid grumble of impotence about him now.

“In this regard,” Zuber unexpectedly went on, “in order to repair the public damage, we must urgently convene an investigation of yesterday’s accident—if accident it was.”

The last words elicited a sharp glance from Garrett, while Machuzak ceased breathing, waited.

“We shall spare no effort in this matter,” Cyrus continued. “However, in light of today’s dramatic turn of events, my attention shall be occupied with overseeing the ignition campaign—”

At that Garrett interrupted, perturbation overcoming civility to the wounded. “Excuse me, Dr. Krieg-Zuber,” he said, managing to correctly put the accent on the last syllable, “you’re in no shape to oversee anything. Take a rest and enjoy it. We’ll have to appoint an interim director today, right, Len?”

Although Leonard appeared distracted, elsewhere, he nodded with a sudden, incomprehensible irritability. “That’s correct—we’ll have to make a decision.”

Krieg-Zuber fell silent, only the hospital noises and his heavy breathing constituting a reply, but after a prolonged and awkward suspension of all debate, just at the moment Garrett was moving to switch off the broadcast, he surprised Machuzak again by attempting a comeback. “Leonard, we cannot let the great challenge handed us go unanswered.”

“You’ve got to do it, Len,” Tom Kettering called out. “If anyone can…”

Nathaniel glanced over at Tom, who sat as usual with cowboy boots propped up on the table. Is Kettering supporting this madness or Krieg-Zuber or…? Kettering, the beefy head of the tritium division, is just an ex-marine who once worked at the government’s Savannah River tritium extraction site and acts as if he were a member of the SWAT team there. Can do, shoot the fuckers. His truck sports a rifle rack and he once detailed for all within earshot how a terrorist would go about stealing CFRC’s tritium supply. This is a typical Kettering pose.

Is it?

Machuzak snapped-to to see Leonard cast a pained and painful look around the table. Finally, “Thank you. I d–don’t know…”

It was the first time Nathaniel had heard Leonard Rasmussen express doubt about anything, but with Kettering’s interjection the course of the meeting began to veer toward the main business, the greater trial.

Fred Abbuhl leaned over to Garrett with a theatrical, conspiratorial wink intended to lighten the atmosphere and said, “Why don’t you tell them the truth, Mr. Garrett? You’re just continuing Len’s April Fool’s tradition, a few months late.”

Garrett chuckled, forced himself to. “I wish that were the case, Mr.—”

“Abbuhl—”

“Yes, were that the case, but Moravec is dead serious. Dr. Machuzak heard him. Six months. From today.” Garrett struck the table with his knuckle and this time all eyes turned to the clock.

“My, my,” replied Fred, shaking his head in less-than-mock disbelief as he leaned back. “Mr. Garrett, sir, let me tell you, before that ill-considered demo we were getting pretty good temperatures and confinement times. A plasma is the world’s most ornery beast, but I’d say in six months we might be able to show them a four-minute pulse at low power—”

We might, Nathaniel nodded. If we can show them anything at all.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Abbuhl,” Garrett interrupted, “I don’t understand all this tech-speak. I’m a simple man…”

The chief engineer smiled, shaking his head softly. “Sir, the bottom line is that this picayune request of Moravec’s is, well, to find the right word, I don’t know, I think you may have heard it downstairs… How’s impossible sound?”

At this moment more than ever Machuzak yearned to rev Fred up—his speech, his innate tempo—but even news of sabotage would have failed to do it. The blond Abbuhl, graying as retirement loomed, was, thank God, the archetypal Southern gentleman, incapable of yielding to pressure or deadlines. All of which is required if you are going to head ASSET operations. With its hundreds of subsystems, each composed of ten thousand parts, each prone to failure, if you tend to hysteria don’t apply.

And yet, what do I truly know of this man? Nathaniel felt his guts twist again.

“Mesdames et messieurs,” Krieg-Zuber interjected with unexpected persistence, raising his hand slowly from his bed, “what Moravec is demanding is only what we should have done long ago. Nothing will capture the imagination of the world like ignition, the creation of a star on Earth, which will lead to an inexhaustible supply of energy for mankind. We can do this. We must do this. Our day of judgment is at hand. Our kairos, as I believe our Toshi Matsushima put it just an hour ago.”

Despite Krieg-Zuber’s condition, Machuzak shook his head sourly.

“What is it, Dr. Machuzak?” Garrett asked, seeing his expression.

Aye, what? How could he allow an ignition campaign to proceed…? Nathaniel chose his words carefully. “I… If I recall the remark Dr. Matsushima made after the general meeting,” he said, throwing a disgusted look at Zuber, “kairos is not only the moment of opportunity but the moment of grace… Mr. Garrett, I’ve told you that that demonstration was not merely premature but…insane. The machine was not ready, is not ready. Before we even begin an ignition campaign, we’ll have to dismantle it to recheck everything. That alone will take weeks.”

“Mac is correct, Mr. Chairman,” Thaddeus Hasschler put in from the far end of the table. “Our tokamak is a machine, much like the engine of a car, except with perhaps one thousand times as many parts. And we are conceivably subjecting it to the most extreme environment in the solar system outside the sun’s core. First we must create a vacuum such as the one in deep space in order to get rid of everything that might interfere with the reactions.”

Nathaniel watched Hasschler speak and caught himself: Thad, Tadeusz, and I are not close friends. Head of Prometheus’experimental group, his love is the machine. He occasionally attempts to be pleasant, but can’t help exuding a certain European aristocracy, an effect amplified by his thoroughly bald head. Thad is a tough commander. I sometimes get mail from him sent at 3:00 a.m. Had he lived in the eighteenth century, Thaddeus could only have been a Prussian drill master with a sabre scar slicing his cheek, a distinction Krieg-Zuber somehow wears in real life. No, inconceivable…

“And once we create that vacuum,” added Fred, “we gotta be sure it stays that way. Just leak checking is no job for amateurs. Mr. Chairman, sir, all that equipment to heat the fuel, those massive generators—”

“Hell,” Diana Cochran, head of the cryoplant division, interrupted, joining in for the first time, “it’ll take a couple weeks just to get down to operating temperatures,” 4.2 degrees above absolute zero, helium’s boiling point.

And now Nathaniel squinted at her. What did he know of Diana other than she was his own age, blond hair streaked with the first strands of middle years, an engineer with kids who’d somehow gotten into refrigerators? Nothing…

“Mr. Garrett,” Machuzak raised his head, resolving to put an end to this folly here and now. “To create fusion you first have to heat the hydrogen fuel—this plasma—to twenty times the temperature of the center of the sun, high enough so that nuclear reactions begin—”

“This is the easy part,” put in Hasschler.

“True,” Nathaniel nodded in Thad’s direction. “The hard part is holding it long enough to get a decent amount of energy out of it. That’s the purpose of those enormous magnets. In principle they can do it, but I tell you, trapping a plasma in a magnetic cage long enough to produce a sustained reaction is probably the hardest thing ever tried. Period. No qualifiers. You think building an atomic bomb was difficult? A hydrogen bomb? If controlled fusion were that easy, it would have been done a lifetime ago.”

At hearing those words Garrett’s face darkened, and Nathaniel at last felt some satisfaction for producing an effect. The difficulty in confining the plasma was the main reason fusioneers had failed to build a working reactor despite the better part of a century of trying.

“So what are you saying, Machuzak?”

What he was saying is that we could heat the damn fuel to 400 million degrees. Before that fatal ceremony, Prometheus was even holding it for a few minutes before it crapped out. Old AUSTOR, Prometheus’ predecessor, could produce twice as much energy as they used to heat it—two times “breakeven.” Forty years ago skeptics said breakeven was impossible.

Yet.

For all that, the reaction was not self-sustaining. Prometheus was still a fireplace full of damp logs; turn off all the external heating sources and the reaction stops. That’s why yesterday was such a fraud. “But,” he continued to Garrett, “even if the fire catches, it could flame out in two seconds, which won’t do anybody a helluva lot of good. For commercial power you need both ignition and a reaction that goes on for hours—days. Mr. Garrett, ASSET’s initials stand for Advanced Steady State Experimental Tokamak. It was designed primarily to see if we can hold a plasma for days. We’re not even sure it will reach ignition…”

The chairman puckered his lips, as if about to whistle, and ran a finger around the rim of his famous Stetson. For a moment it seemed as if the mists had finally dispersed and he perceived with clarity the unscalable cliff towering above them. “Leonard, ASSET is your baby. Is what Dr. Machuzak says true?”

“Richard,” said Leonard with his earlier sharpness, his head now twisted into a strange position, “what Mac says is true, but I have devoted my entire life to making it untrue. I designed ASSET to achieve ignition. It can be done. It will be done. No one will ask the victor what is true.”

“Ignition is within the design parameters,” Hasschler affirmed. “After all, we have incorporated a simple heat exchanger and turbine—”

“Right,” put in Kettering.

“—although we may have been infected by optimism.”

“Dr. Machuzak’s conservatism in these matters is well known,” Krieg-Zuber suddenly interrupted from his bed, gathering all his strength. “That is why he is not a regular member of the ASSET team and confines himself to less significant research.”

A guillotine of silence fell. For a moment Nathaniel chewed his lip. In that unaided space he felt more alone than he had in his entire life. He passed his eyes slowly over his colleagues, imagining them guests at a doomed ball, all wearing fabulous, grotesque masks. For an instant the image became so vivid that he thought he must be hallucinating. With a few breaths he forced it to pass and gained control over himself. What Krieg-Zuber had said was painfully true: until his conscription for the ceremony’s preparation, he’d been living in exile as division head at the neglected Materials Test Facility. The only recourse is to quit; Machuzak pushed his chair back to arm’s length, staring at the floor.

At that moment one of the group who had been elsewhere surfing looked up and said, “ITER’s director just announced that they will push forward their experimental timetable.”

Krieg-Zuber raised his arm heavily. “Initiate triple shifts,” he breathed the command. “Immediately.” The inevitable round-the-clock operations. “Monsieur Abbuhl, begin organizing the shifts at once. This is destiny, kairos.”

“Triple shifts?” returned Fred with as much umbrage as he was capable of, making a last stand, “after the run-up to that ceremony? The guys’ll mutiny… And you know what? It won’t make any difference. We can’t do it.”

Forgotten, Nathaniel stood on the verge of walking out but he could not abandon the old engineer. “Fred’s right, Mr. Garrett,” he said, putting Krieg-Zuber aside. “We’ve been pulling triple shifts for over a month. Everyone’s exhausted. An ignition push would be worse, a dozen times worse.”

“You know, I kinda like this kairos concept,” Kettering jumped in again, scratching his chin. “Maybe if we’d gotten a swift kick in the ass years ago we’d have the problem licked.”

“Precisely!” wheezed Krieg-Zuber in his sepulchral baritone.

Machuzak shook his head, sighing in disbelief, and moved toward the door. No surprise that Tom embraced the ass-kicking solution. Only surprise is that he hasn’t suggested bringing in the military.

“I don’t know that the helium factory can keep up,” Diana was mumbling to no one in particular.

“Thaddeus,” Leonard told the ASSET head wearily, “assemble your team immediately and start planning ignition experiments. Not a minute to lose, remember?”

At that Machuzak closed his eyes. Yeah, blow up the machine and be done with it. The next time he blinked, the meeting had adjourned. Once more he surveyed the room. The boards, the photos of the Austin tokamaks. We had pride in them once. Chen, the large armadillo mascot standing in the corner, CFRC emblazoned on the saddle thrown over his armored back. There was something welcome in Chen’s deflationary humor and even at this moment the sight of him elicited a faint chuckle from Machuzak.

Fred was standing at his side. “You all right, Mac?”

“I suppose,” he lied. Yet how could he abandon his companions at their kairos? He would not. “Well, let’s make the best of this. No more slacker days.”

Outside, the two stood on the balcony above the building’s great central atrium, filled with its palms and banana trees below and the tentlike glass ceiling above, which might have come from the hand of Le Corbusier. As majestic as it was, the lab’s scale was dwarfed by the magnitude of the endeavor they were suddenly, unexpectedly preparing to undertake. Nathaniel perceived only a castle going up in flames. Garrett sidled up to them then, breaking the silent commiseration, and remarked that he didn’t have the impression their task was impossible, just “difficult.”

“Let’s put it this way, Richard,” Machuzak answered pointedly. “The EU, Japan, China, India…have poured twenty billion euros into ITER, which is designed to reach ignition. Would you bet on it, Fred?”

The senior engineer shook his head.

“The thing is, Richard, the world has seen a few tokamaks. A few have worked better than they were designed, most have worked worse; none—ever—has worked the way it was supposed to. We can kill ourselves day and night, we can be ingenious and even brilliant, but as that deadline nears, what’s going to be most important is sheer, dumb luck. If you were asking me to bet, I’d bet that Moravec has signed our death warrant.”

Garrett frowned and nodded silently. Then he said, “Hmm,” and ambled off.

“Well, Herr Doktor Professor,” said Fred, watching Garrett, now truly The Chairman, depart, “I don’t know who or what’s behind this, and God knows we can’t beat the deadline, but at least now we have a chance to beat ITER.”

Machuzak perceived that what he took for “this” was not what Fred meant by “this,” but he only looked at Abbuhl and said, “Do we deserve to?”

CHAPTER FIVE

Before an hour ticked by, every phone on Nathaniel or within his reach went off simultaneously and Lise, Leonard’s secretary, asked him to come up to the octagon immediately. She wouldn’t say more. He took the stairs, flinched so visibly as he passed Diana Cochran that she recoiled with a snarl, and arrived moments later. The meeting’s tension remained fully with him, so too the knowledge that in a few hours, an accident would become sabotage. Without delay Lise ushered him into the famous, erudite space that had once been so familiar.

Sunlight streaming through two sides of the octagon immediately drew his eyes to the luxurious semicircular desk occupying the room’s center and illuminated the wrinkles on Leonard Rasmussen’s face as he peered up from behind a 360-degree monitor. The same light fell onto the thousand books and Oriental art that covered another three walls; a single ray brightened a Japanese Daruma doll, which blessed the lab with good fortune and whose second eye would be painted in when the great task was accomplished. The big blue bottle atop the water cooler standing at the entrance to the private bath sparkled as always.

Even after ten years Nathaniel felt a certain reverence when stepping into this office, and as he had since he’d set eyes on Leonard yesterday, he fought back tears, but before he could wallow in the lost past, Richard Garrett’s voice interrupted.

“Machuzak,” Garrett said, rising from the conference table off to the side, “we’ve got some good news for you.”

Nathaniel had hardly noticed him sitting at the table, drumming his fingers impatiently. At the big man’s words, Nathaniel caught his breath. Good news no longer existed, by definition.

“The board of governors,” Garrett put his arms around his shoulder, “of which I am chair, has authorized the executive committee to appoint you acting director.”

For a moment Nathaniel blinked at the chairman, then nearly spit up his lunch as he attempted to prevent himself from bursting out in caustic laughter. He glanced distractedly at the medals and citations decorating the octagon’s remaining walls, the photographs of Leonard with presidents of the United States, the leaders of the European Union, Korea. None of those luminaries offered advice.

“What’s the matter, son, cat got your tongue?”

Nathaniel now merely stared at the chairman in full disbelief. “I…I don’t understand,” he said at last, just to make certain he’d heard correctly.

“Mac,” Garrett replied after recovering from a sharp cough, “at the meeting you weren’t exactly grinnin like a skunk eatin cabbage at midnight. Admit it, you wouldn’t prefer the alternatives.”

Machuzak left it to The Chairman to read his expression.

Seeing the resistance that faced him, Garrett pressed forward in a more conciliatory tone, attempting to win the reluctant physicist over to his preposterous plan. Cassandra, he rolled out the epithet again, Machuzak was the only one who showed good sense about the demonstration; everybody else was wrong. “What can I say?” the Texan concluded. “We’re gonna need a level head around here in the comin months.”

Nathaniel couldn’t discern exactly what had been taking place behind the scenes, but his reaction was simple and firm: “I decline.”

“Come on, Mac, duty calls.”

“You’re asking me to oversee the ignition campaign, aren’t you?”

Cocking his head The Chairman said, “I’d say that about sums it up.”

“Why don’t you offer me the Astor suite on the Titanic? Look, the whole thing is crazy.” Crazier, much, than Garrett knew. “You heard me before. It can’t be done.”

“It’s gotta be done. We gotta try.”

Machuzak suddenly felt trapped, set up, and every instinct told him to escape. “What about Krieg-Zuber? He won’t take this lying down.”

“He will, exactly, lyin down. Doctors say there’s been internal injuries. Two months, at least.”

Funny, Cyrus the Great didn’t seem to know that.

“With respect,” Nathaniel said with an increasing desperation, “I’m a scientist, not an administrator. I don’t have the interest, I don’t have the force of personality. Anyone at the lab can tell you that.”

“You don’t see yourself, son.”

“Really it’s absurd,” Machuzak answered, voice acidic, diplomacy ended. At that, he and Garrett simultaneously turned toward Rasmussen, who had remained silent. “Leonard,” said Nathaniel, knowing his words were self-serving, but betraying none of the uncertainty he felt, “you can do this. You above anyone.”

With a visible reluctance, the director shook his head. “I’ll stand behind you, Nathaniel, but the time…” He didn’t finish his sentence. “You must take this on. I ask you.”

Not that. Nathaniel could refuse anything but that. “How long? Six months, no—”

“Two months, max,” said Garrett, “or until Krieg-Zuber’s recovered. I give you my word.”

With a sigh of resignation, of the damned, Nathaniel agreed to think it over.

“I’ll expect a positive reply tomorrow,” The Chairman answered. “It’s time to cowboy up. Realm of the gods, remember?”

Too well. “Would you mind if I spoke to Leonard alone?” Nathaniel asked.

The rich Texan nodded, picked up his hat from the table and with a marked, bowlegged lope waddled out of the office.

* * * *

Machuzak remained standing, looking at Rasmussen in his wheelchair, deciding whether to reveal the sabotage, but it was Leonard who spoke. “I’m sorry to put this on you, Mac,” he said, expression noticeably contorted, “but we have so little choice. We cannot afford to fail in our great endeavor. I have devoted my life to this project…”

“Yes, you have,” Nathaniel replied with difficulty. How far this shrunken man from the dazzling father who, legend told, went to bed at midnight and awoke for calisthenics at 5:00 a.m. Yet, half immobilized as he was, Leonard insisted on wearing a jacket, today with open collar. There’d always been that slight formality, a precision in his entire manner that put one on one’s mettle and was all the more unsettling because he was unfailingly polite.

As he was at this moment. “You’ll have to come by for dinner with Theresa and me,” he said. “You’ll need real fuel during the coming trial, not bachelor noodles.”

“I’m honored.” That was genuine. The Rasmussens regularly invited lab hands to their spectacular home for afternoon cookouts; to be invited for dinner…

“Don’t be honored. Be prepared to eat—and to think.”

“Is that your idea of a bribe?” Nathaniel smiled, shaking his head.

“Of course it’s a bribe. The definition of a scientist is an unscrupulous opportunist, you know that. If the Indian ambassador is in town, I’ll ask you to wear a tie.”

This time Nathaniel laughed. How as a freshly minted PhD he’d longed for one of those coveted invitations! How Leonard’s dazzling aura of elegance and achievement had put him at a far distance. He might have been Christ on the Mount. Several years passed before Leonard became more human than god, and then Nathaniel began to see his formality as an accoutrement of office. Leonard spent his days on the phone with congressmen or at august gatherings where the planet’s future was decided. He was quoted and therefore needed to be precise; he was photographed and therefore needed to appear precise.

“Tell me your plans for ignition,” Rasmussen said.

Nathaniel shook himself into the present. “L–Leonard, you’ve asked me this minute to take charge of an impossible project that I’m not usually attached to—”

“Do not use the word impossible in my presence! Nathaniel, I think a walk would do you good. What do you say?”

That was more like the Rasmussen of old, Machuzak smiled. “Are you sure…?” he asked.

“Of course! Get those crutches!”

As Nathaniel grabbed the crutches propped up against the wall, Leonard struggled to his feet, helping himself to a drink from the cooler. They slowly made their way out of the building to the lake, where Leonard sat down again.

“Now,” he said as the fountain spray refreshed them, “give me your ideas.”

My idea is the single idea I have had for five hours—someone has sabotaged the machine. Someone may do it again.

“Mac, attention! This is the most important task the world has seen!”

Nathaniel chuckled ruefully and recollected those weekends when the formal director would appear at the lab in shirtsleeves and a straw hat, clutching a can of beer. He’d prowl far and wide, corner you at your bench and grill you. If you reported an insight, he’d punch the air with his fist and make you feel like the most important person in the world. Today he may have meant it. Needing to talk over an idea, he’d say, “Let’s go for a walk” and off you went. Leonard was not exceptionally tall, but every stride was taken with purpose and you’d soon find yourself breathing hard beside him.

This afternoon, Machuzak was hardly breathing at all. “I think,” he said, “we must heed the old Roman motto, festina lente—”

“—make haste slowly—”

“—or we risk making a terrible situation worse. If I take this on, I’ll ask Abbuhl to dismantle the machine as far as possible.”

“Is that necessary?”

Yes, Leonard, it is necessary. “I need to think about the triple shifts.”

“Don’t think. Do it,” said Leonard. Rasmussen, as far as anyone could tell, had never wasted a moment of his life.

“Len,” Nathaniel answered, glancing at the sun-sphere surmounting the fountain, “the important thing is to convince the gang that we are not acting desperately and that this task is achievable, even when both aren’t true. I don’t know how to do that.”

“If ITER can do it, we can do it.”

“Leonard, forget ITER. They cannot be close.”

“ITER will not forget us, Nathaniel. You heard the announcement; they’re already redoubling their efforts. I know those people well. I trained half of them. Maybe we need a slogan. ‘Prometheus—Lighting the Way…’”

Machuzak couldn’t help but sigh. “Leonard, somehow we’ve already gotten ourselves into a race with ITER, but we can’t win. Of that I am certain.”

“Why are you certain, Mac?”

“Because Prometheus has been sabotaged.”

Both men stopped short. Finally Rasmussen stuttered, “W–what do you mean?”

Nathaniel told him everything. When he finished, he thought he had killed Rasmussen and was waiting for the older man to die. After a long silence, Leonard spoke again, “This can’t be.”

“I am afraid it is. How serious it is, I don’t yet know. Maybe it was a prank.”

“You mustn’t say a word. Morale would be crushed.”

“It would. How can we go forward?”

“We…you will find the saboteur. Yes, it is probably no more than a bad joke or a grudge. Mac, we are on the cusp of history. This is the moment at which we steer mankind away from three hundred years of folly. You would not let that moment slip through our grasp, would you?”

Kairos again? Machuzak saw in Leonard’s remark the dying of dreams.

After another silence Leonard gazed up at Nathaniel with the same plea in his eye that he had cast at him in his office. “ASSET is my epitaph, Nathaniel, remember that.”

Nathaniel helped Leonard Rasmussen to his feet and they walked back to the main building. He sprinted over to the pentagon, found Lipman and asked if it was too late. When the tech shook his head, he ordered him to replace the busbar at once.

* * * *

When Nathaniel found Slava in his office and told him that the chiefs wanted to appoint him acting director, but that he hadn’t yet agreed, Archangelsky’s reaction was swift and merciless: “Has a fly bit your balls? This is best thing that could have happened. Now we can control the situation.”

Machuzak didn’t reply directly, but thinking the news would pacify Archangelsky, he added that Rasmussen knew about the sabotage and authorized him to replace the busbar. To the contrary, the Russian’s eyes grew wide, he grabbed Machuzak by the arm and marched him outside to the lake again.

“W–why are we here?” was Machuzak’s confused reaction.

“Put on your brain, Edward’ich! Who knows who’s listening? This is the opt-out century, remember.”

Machuzak didn’t get it; The Terminator was out of commission. But yes, here was the boy who had spent his childhood in Russia, Machuzak realized. Archangelsky, though, seeing his friend staring at him in horror, with equal exasperation threw up his hands. “Akh, spilling beans to Leonard may have been right thing or worst mistake of your life, but I tell you reason for this. After Time of Troubles in Russia, this stretch in seventeenth century when country was in chaos, one tsar after other until pfft!—nobody. Finally nobles get together and who do they crown? Little Mikhail Romanov, a teenager, a total wimp.” Slava cast about for a cigarette, found one, and thrust it into his mouth. “That’s why Rasmussen chose you.”

“Don’t you dare call me a wimp,” Machuzak said angrily, turning back to the main building. With a glance at the real sun in the sky and at his watch he growled, “Excuse me, it’s time to call the police.”

CHAPTER SIX

When late in the day T. J. D’Abro at the Austin Sheriff’s Department got a call from one of the physicists she’d met at CFRC not twenty-four hours earlier, she was already half out the door—for good. In her half-belligerent mood she verged on telling the guy to fuck off. Nah, she’d put him on hold. You know, why not celebrate? She puckered her lips and told him to meet her at Scholz’s Beer Garten.

She would have missed him stumbling in if she hadn’t glanced up from one of the picnic tables out back at the exact moment, scowling at the “game over” that blinked obnoxiously from her wrist. From a distance, he seemed tense, fatigued, distracted—she couldn’t tell what—surely no more festive than the voice over the phone. She could tell he didn’t come here often. That was dead obvious from the way he scrutinized the banners strung up all around proclaiming “Hook ’Em Horns” and Coors. Maybe he was worried about droppings from the trees. But hell, that was Scholz’s trademark—bird shit in the beer. “Dr. Machuzak!” she called out and waved. He turned. Yup, as far as he was concerned she might have been Sally Skull or Calamity Jane walkin the streets of the Old West.

It was something like that, Machuzak conceded. The chaos of the day was tumbling through his head and before him stood cowgirl crystallized—half a cowgirl. As she unplugged an ear bud and they shook hands, she reacted with a faint, ironic smile, as if she got the joke. With what attention he could muster, he stood openmouthed in shock and admiration, victim to that streak of self-parody among Texans that makes it difficult to tell whether they are serious and dangerous to guess. D’Abro’s designer jeans were smartly tucked into boots that were embroidered more tastefully than most in these parts, with scarlet stitching. He would have found her black hat—one of those flat, Mexican-style hats rimmed by silver bangles—attractive if he could have struck sabotage from his mind and if it hadn’t been for the green-blond ponytail peeking out the back, but the white silk shirt and brown bandana matched it well anyway. Her earpiece, stylishly disguised as a silver-and-lapis earring, provided a nice touch. What penetrated most through the haze, though, was her distant, ironic smile, entirely uncharacteristic of the locals, which set a course for places unknown.

“Sir, you sure look like you could use a drink,” she said as they sat down, amused more than she expected by the scientist’s disorientation. She laid her hat on the table and poured him a beer, peering at his drawn face, observing him wince at all the “likes,” “I means,” “you knows,” and “absolutelys” assaulting his ears. “Hey, it’s not as bad as it used to be.”

True enough, Machuzak concurred absently. The noise level in the Old World had significantly receded as virtual life’s population swelled, in particular around the waistline. “I’m sorry, Officer D’Abro, I didn’t recognize you without your uniform. It’s been a…”

“… tough day?”

The physicist replied with a morbid chuckle, raised his glass as if were made of lead, and drank. Despite her Gallic-flavored surname, over the rim of his glass D’Abro appeared to be of German descent, unusual these days as Mexico reconquered the Southwest: tall enough to be within striking distance, about eight years more idealistic than he, fair, blond when not green, features soft. If it hadn’t been for the smile and the hair, he might have labeled her wholesome. Back East she would have turned heads, but this was Texas.

“Remember what all those Miss Americas from Denton used to say,” she pronounced as if reading his mind. “The only thing worse than being ugly in Denton is being dead.”

“Are you sure that wasn’t vice versa?” Machuzak managed with effort.

D’Abro granted a smile to the fellow’s faltering attempts to enter the here and now and then asked with abrupt seriousness, “Anyway, Doc, your call sounded urgent. What is it?” Before he could reply, she interrupted herself with a glance at her wrist and turned away. “I…I probably can’t help,” she apologized.

“Why’s that?” Machuzak asked.

“I’ve been promoted to detective today.”

“Congratulations,” Nathaniel answered, thinking to clink her glass, which stood ignored on the table. “That could be useful.”

But D’Abro barely responded. “I resigned. Well, I took a leave,” she eventually replied.

Nathaniel glanced toward the German-style bar inside, where more laws—no doubt—had been enacted than any place outside the Capitol, then peered at D’Abro again with a perplexed shake of his head.

“Don’t ask. I don’t know why. I’m just not good at stickin around too long. You know that.”

Did he? By now entirely bewildered, Machuzak straightened. “Sorry, are you on the phone?” This time she didn’t respond at all. “Look, I’ll find someone else,” he said and got to his feet.

At that D’Abro swiveled back and waved him down. “My fault, Doc, sorry. Why don’t you tell me what’s up.”

“What’s the point?” Machuzak said, exhausted of more than energy. “You’ve resigned…taken leave?”

“Yeah, I do have trouble stickin around. Attention deficit disorder or somethin.” She regarded the weary physicist with some sympathy, if not understanding. “Look, tell me what’s up, Doc, and I’ll refer you. The news says your director friend will probably survive his heart attack.”

“The question is whether the lab’s heart will survive his recovery,” he said humorlessly. “And don’t call me Doc, please.”

“Will do.” D’Abro turned to salting her beer, murmuring that she liked to watch the bubbles.

Machuzak exhaled deeply, already convinced that to reveal anything to this strange woman was an exercise in futility. “I didn’t call about Krieg-Zuber,” he offered finally, reluctantly. “This morning one of the techs found something. I think…” She prodded him with a glance, he considered and went on. “… I think the machine’s been sabotaged.”

D’Abro didn’t react at once. Nathaniel was certain another call had come through until she said with a wrinkled nose and intensity, “So, the professor getting zapped wasn’t an accident?”

Who this T. J. D’Abro was, Machuzak hadn’t decided, but he had decided that to talk was more important than to sleep. “Depends on what you mean by accident,” he said, seeing himself in the surge room not twelve hours ago. “No one could’ve known that The Terminator would run into the power area like a madman. I doubt he’d been down there in years. When he’s not bugging phones he’s on a plane. Zuber was an accident, but that the demo failed wasn’t—not in the way it failed.” Having begun, it was easier to continue and Nathaniel went on to describe everything: the safety systems, the inspections, the surge rooms, Lipman’s morning discovery. “It looks…it looks like someone cut the damned busbar in half.”

When he’d finished, D’Abro only wrinkled her nose again. “Wouldn’t a brick of C-4 do a better job?”

Exactly. “If you want to destroy the machine, not if you want to destroy the program. A pebble is all you need. A pebble may be what we have.”

“Doc—uh, sorry—” She suddenly halted, blushing, just as she jerked upright and put a finger to her earpiece. “Nobody calls you that?”

Machuzak comprehended then that he was as far from T. J. D’Abro’s world as she was from his. Two space aliens meeting in no-man’s land. “That’s movie talk,” he replied, dismissively or wearily she couldn’t say. “If you’re a physicist you have a PhD, period. It’s just a hunting license. The only thing that counts in our game is brains. Anyway, we’re all on a first-name basis at the lab. Call me Nat or Mac, as you prefer.”

“Will do.” D’Abro glanced again at her screen. He’d witnessed the same continuous distraction yesterday in his office, but a minute part of her brain, evidently, was engaged. “So, Doc,” she looked up abruptly, “you don’t sound one hundred percent convinced this is sabotage.”

“Don’t call me Doc. No, I’m not, one hundred percent. Machine parts often fail in strange ways.”

“Then to state the obvious,” D’Abro said, cocking her head with an eyebrow raised, “you’re not one hundred percent sure a crime has been committed.”

Machuzak couldn’t read her expression, which sat somewhere to the left of scorn but to the right of neutrality. “The only thing I’m certain of,” he said, “is that we’ve suddenly gotten ourselves in a race with ITER to achieve ignition, a race we can’t win in six months, and that a saboteur may be determined to stop us.”

D’Abro’s sharp shake of her head revealed complete bafflement. “What’s ITER?” she asked and the question caught Nathaniel off guard. ITER was front-page news all over Europe, evidently not in Texas. Still, he would have taken the detective’s tone as one of genuine curiosity if in the next instant she hadn’t jumped again. “Sorry, Doc, d’ya think you could genetically engineer a spam filter…?”

He doubted it. “ITER,” he explained, calling for a real beer from a waitress passing by the cheerful alpine scene painted on a small stage, “is the huge reactor several dozen countries have built in southern France. The initials originally stood for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, but the greens didn’t go for the ‘nuclear’ part—.” D’Abro craned her neck in mock surprise, even as she fact-checked Nathaniel’s assertion. “There were a lot of protests from Greenpeace and so on. Then some alert scholar informed the administrators that ITER is also Latin for ‘the way,’ and they greened the name without even changing the acronym. There are still protests. ITER was originally budgeted at about five billion euros, now it’s twenty and years behind schedule. It’s the largest technological project ever attempted and its director, Jules César Balard, is not about to let CFRC win a race for fusion.”

“Or the reverse.”

“Or the reverse.” Machuzak suddenly realized that Leonard’s slogan of the afternoon, “Prometheus—Lighting the Way,” might be misconstrued.

“And ignition, what’s that?”

Again Machuzak was surprised, as much by the abrupt sincerity in the woman’s voice as by the question itself. “Ignition is the dream of all fusioneers. Our bid to save civilization. Ignition is a self-sustaining fusion reaction, a fire that catches and gives you a lot more energy out than you put in to get it started. Until now no reactor has achieved ignition, but if you can’t do it, commercial power is just…” He trailed off, shaking his head.

Examining the scientist’s weary face over her own glass, D’Abro began to sense a man who believed in what he did, or at least tried. “You know, Doc, there’s lots here I don’t understand. All the people we talked to last night were grumbling that the demo was way premature, but nobody had the guts to say so except you. Why the hell would a lab full of pure geniuses try such a thing?”

Machuzak chuckled, weakly. “Officer—Detective?—in the 1970s, Princeton beat out Oak Ridge for a contract worth several hundred million dollars. Oak Ridge had proposed a giant ignition machine, almost as big as Prometheus—fifty years ahead of its time. There’s no chance, none, it ever could have worked. Ignition.” Now he managed an outright laugh. “You find a premature demo surprising? I don’t.”

“The Oak Ridge tomahawk was a fraud?” D’Abro exclaimed with astonishment but was answered only by the face of the sphinx. “You know, I was actually researching this ignition on the drive over. Six hundred videos today say you guys are swindlers and what you just told me proves it.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Her voice shifted instantly from antagonism to wonder. “But can you really do this—provide Earth with a star?”

For an instant the physicist hesitated and D’Abro was poised to pounce again, but then he said simply, “We know we can do it someday, not in six months. Minus a day.” Absently he traced a large 1 on the table amid the bird droppings.

“That’s the second time you said six months. Why?”

“Because this morning Moravec called.” Before she could ask, he filled her in on the consortium, the morning’s unexpected call from GlobeTex’s strange CEO, the ultimatum. “Six months. From today.”

D’Abro listened with widening mouth. “And Moravec made this ultimatum before sunrise after the accident!” she exclaimed when Nathaniel was finished, loudly enough for the people at the next table to turn.

He nodded.

“And it didn’t occur to you that the two are connected?”

“Don’t tell me you’re a conspiracy theorist,” Machuzak said with a gaze no less severe than hers was incredulous, but she didn’t react. “What’s the point of sabotaging the machine if you can pull out the moment your contract’s expired?”

“Certain amount of logic in that,” D’Abro conceded unhappily.

“Look, the accident’s scared everybody. GlobeTex may be simply spooked, as The Chairman says, but I had the strangest feeling that Moravec was being forced to do it… I can’t explain why. And don’t ask.” Actually, he couldn’t blame D’Abro for weaving conspiracies; against his instincts he’d been weaving all day.

D’Abro didn’t ask. She took a gulp and then said as if the last exchange hadn’t occurred, “I don’t understand what GlobeTex’s doing in your consortium to begin with. Aren’t they into wind, solar, biofuels?”

“They are an energy company,” Machuzak replied, accepting a Brau-Weisse from the waitress.

“I really don’t get it,” D’Abro objected. “I mean, the point. Wind and solar are here. I don’t know anything about nukular fusion, but if you can’t even make it work, how’s it going to compete?”

As the faint smell of urine wafted over him from the toilets, or the Capitol, Machuzak conceded she had a point. The case for fusion was hardly straightforward. “Maybe you’ve noticed that CO2 hasn’t always decreased in the past twenty years. Solar’s not cheap, we’re using as much fossil fuel as ever, legislation goes nowhere in Congress, Texas ignores every regulation and every time someone grows a biofuel in one place, the price of food goes up somewhere else. Not every country is bathed in sunlight, the wind doesn’t blow all the time. An intelligent grid design helps but you still need a backbone power supply. It takes energy to charge plug-ins. Where does that come from? Where do the emissions go? You think the price of beef and silicon chips is an accident? We’ve got to start using less energy.”

Suddenly the physicist was more animated than he’d been since he arrived, gesticulating like an Italian. D’Abro couldn’t stop herself from bursting out in laughter. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “You came in here like a cat walkin in mud, and suddenly you seem alive. It’s kinda cute, actually.”

Machuzak laughed—at both of them. He was finding it difficult to understand this woman. Discounting earpiece and thought processes—hell, she remained perpetually mobile. She’d lean forward on her elbow, fiddling with her bracelet or wrist screen, then suddenly sit knee up along the bench, long, manicured fingers wrapped around her chin. Whether it was swagger or sass, God knows he couldn’t say.

“I’m flattered,” he eventually replied, “but I often think the greatest evil in the world is the idea that you can get something for nothing. You gotta refine silicon and copper for solar collectors, making fertilizer takes energy—lots. There’s no free lunch.”

“Yes,” she said with the rising Texas diphthong that makes it sound like yee-ass, “seems I heard that once upon a time. Conservation of energy you physicists call it, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Good girl,” said Machuzak.

She let the borderline condescension pass. Maybe this physicist was a bit crabby after his strange, trying day, but he did seem sort of human, as if he’d always been wrestling with…questions. He looked to be finding his way, groping. “All I can say is that you folks sure don’t have a lot of friends. Energy companies don’t like you, greens don’t like you and you don’t like each other. The question is, who hates you enough to sabotage your program?”

Machuzak could manage only a perplexed shake of the head and the two at last fell silent. Finally, after a pause long enough to give birth to a militiaman, he said, “So where does that leave us, with you having resigned?”

“Let’s say I’ve taken indefinite leave. Look, the feds won’t be interested in this—no sex, no money, no drugs, no publicity. Even the sheriff’s department won’t give a dang unless you convince them a crime has been committed. So…why don’t we go have a look at the scene of the incident and see if there’s anything you missed.”

“Now?”

“The sooner the better. Then you can use your rocket-scientist’s imagination and figure out why somebody would spike your machine.”

“I am not a rocket scientist,” Nathaniel mouthed silently as a fistfight broke out behind them. They walked into the bar, where a cantankerous health inspector was threatening to shut the place down, settled up and for the second time this day Machuzak headed south.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Seeing the physicist’s exhaustion, D’Abro offered to take the wheel of his jeep and met no resistance. She grabbed an aluminum box from the trunk of her own car nearby, but now, sitting before the unfamiliar controls, she asked what sort of jeep this was. “It runs on algae,” Machuzak told her.

“Where do you tank up on that?”

“One of our guys built a pond at the lab. Algae produces biofuels ten, a hundred times more efficiently than grasses, so we’re trying to grow it in the car’s tank itself—but yeah, still no pump at the local station. Infrastructure takes time. No instant fixes.”

“No Mr. Fusion?” D’Abro smirked as she decoded the dashboard and they took off.

Machuzak was not only exhausted but famished. South of town, on the infinite field of fast-food and biodiesel signs that rise pikelike high above the plain to impale civilization, D’Abro stopped long enough for him to grab a burger from the car window. Before he finished a bite she was fiddling impatiently with the radio and caught a talk-show pundit in midflight:

“—After all, the laboratory’s tritium supply makes it too likely a target for terrorists.”

Machuzak nearly choked on his fries, but D’Abro merely snatched a sip from his soda, put her foot to the accelerator and pressed him. “What about that tritium, Doc? Everyone’s talkin about it.”

“Talkin,” Nathaniel nodded, “not understandin.” Usually he told people tokamak fuel is hydrogen, which was true, but it isn’t ordinary hydrogen. “We use two isotopes: deuterium—heavy hydrogen—and tritium, extra-heavy hydrogen. Tritium is mildly radioactive.”

“Why would terrorists want it?” D’Abro asked with sudden interest.

The scientist, feeling but partly revived as the caffeine began its work, sighed heavily. “The military uses it in hydrogen bombs. If a terrorist got enough, he could add it to a fission bomb as a sort of booster, making a crude hydrogen bomb.” That’s why the tritium safeguards at CFRC border on the supernatural. That’s why at Savannah River, SWAT teams guard the country’s tritium stockpile.

“How much you need?” D’Abro pressed as they turned off Route 290.

“You get shot if you ask,” Machuzak replied. “It’s not a lot—grams—but we don’t have a lot at CFRC. You’d have to steal virtually the entire supply.”

“This must be connected—”

“No.” He put his foot down. “Ockham’s Razor, detective, prime directive in science: find the simplest solution. Terrorists… Sheesh…”

“You shave with Ockham’s Razor every day, Doc?” D’Abro retorted and, not waiting for his response, pushed another preset.

Machuzak nodded after one second, two. “Tchaikovsky. Third Orchestral Suite, fourth movement, sixth variation.”

“Wow,” said D’Abro, “you oughtta be on a quiz show. Is your memory that good for everything?”

“Not quite,” he equivocated, biting into his sandwich, “but musically I’ve always been able to identify nearly anything. The world’s most useless talent.”

“Glad to hear you don’t spend all your time thinkin about tomahawks.” She helped herself to his remaining fries.

Machuzak didn’t react and they continued southward. Twilight was descending. As they crested the final rise and the lab came into view below, D’Abro said, “There’s a whole lot here I still don’t understand. Like where that Miss Fusion calendar in your office came from. Seems about as likely as an armadillo with brains.”

“No more unlikely than anything else connected with fusion,” Nathaniel chuckled. “Christ, the whole US program started because the New York Times screamed that Argentina had fusion in 1950. Ever heard of Bob Guccione?”

“Penthouse? He was before my time. Playboy asked me to pose for them once. ‘Girls of South by Southwest’ or somethin. Mighta been a hoot. I was a wild undergrad-thang then, but I said nope. I did dance at Sugar’s once or twice to pay the rent.”

D’Abro spoke offhandedly, but having put up with her now for two hours, Nathaniel was somehow already certain that Sugar’s would have been merely another of life’s distractions for the strange woman. Why not? This is the Republic of Texas, where bumper stickers proclaiming Secede mean it. “Guccione thought fusion would save the world. He poured sixteen million out of his own pocket to build an economical miniature tokamak—”

“Sixteen million?” D’Abro whistled. “No shit?”

“No shit. He even created a subsidiary of the magazine to oversee the project: Penthouse Energy and Technology Systems.” Nathaniel paused, sure D’Abro would get the joke, but her face remained a perfect blank. “PETS.”

Now she smiles. “T, A and fusion—now there’s an angle I hadn’t considered. My, my, the world is full of interesting connections.”

They soon reached the main gate and Machuzak passed the detective his badge for scanning. As the fence swung open, she quipped, “You short on biometrics around here?”

“You’ve been watching too many movies,” he said, before admitting to D’Abro that Guccione had lost every cent. Down the drive the guard booth was already empty for the night. After D’Abro grudgingly accepted Machuzak’s badge again and the gate lifted, they drove on to the main building. She grabbed her box and they walked inside.

* * * *

At once T. J. D’Abro’s expression changed as she was transfixed by the expansiveness of the lobby and she began prowling about. Moments hadn’t gone by before she homed in on a glass case that housed a bird, as large as a peacock and certainly no less colorful, but one wholly unnatural. Whatever mad artisan created it had fashioned the eyes from emeralds, or what might pass for them, the beak from gold. Rising above the head, a crest of diamonds and sapphires. A train of ruby and gold feathers trails away to curl around the bird’s silver feet. The wings, spread above the head like a ballerina, have been fashioned from the same fabric of ruby and gold. This crystalline bird, glittering, dazzling, would be more at home in a museum than a laboratory. At the same time, its very luminescence, as overdone as the Dallas skyline, telegraphed its kinship to a rhinestone cowboy.

“Why, that’s as pretty a sight as I’ve ever seen,” D’Abro exclaimed of the gaudy creature, shooting a video. “What could it be?”

“The firebird,” Nathaniel replied. “Do you know the ballet?”

D’Abro had never heard of it.

The jeweled bird had been presented to the laboratory by a Russian visitor long ago, he told her. The firebird is a symbol of dreams and hope; according to legend, anyone who catches one of its feathers is assured of realizing his heart’s desire.

“Whoever gave you this gift was an optimist,” said a voice from behind them. “If you read the original fairy tales, she is not so nice.”

For an instant, Machuzak caught his breath, until he recognized the accent as Archangelsky’s. “Working late?” he asked, and as Slava sullenly turned up his lips, said, “I believe you two have met. Dr. Yahroslav Arkhahngelsky, T. J. D’Abro, occasional detective.” Puzzled, Slava gingerly took her hand and D’Abro forewent the pronunciation of his name. “Slava is, uh…informed. You might as well come with us, Slava. Do you think the nb supply area is clear?”

“Should be okay. No acting director has authorized triple shifts.” He stared at Machuzak significantly. “Tired bots have gone home.” Seeing that D’Abro’s attention was still fixed on the bird, Archangelsky shook his great beard like an ancient bard. “This firebird causes a lot of trouble,” he sighed mournfully, “a lot of trouble.”

The three of them cut through the atrium to the back door and walked out toward the pentagon.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A few minutes later Machuzak badged them into the central hub. No one was in evidence at this hour. Nathaniel removed a safety key from the interlock, pocketed it, and at the push of a button the heavy door to the tokamak bay swung open.

From their brief acquaintanceship, Nathaniel would have guessed that nothing could silence T. J. D’Abro. But standing on the test-cell floor, gazing up at the colossus covered with its cables and plumbing, at the monstrous crane hanging above it, all on a scale more appropriate to Vulcan’s forge than to a human workshop, she frames no questions, no witty remarks escape her lips. For himself there is: six months, saboteur.

After a few moments of stillness, the young woman shook her head and gulped. “Why don’t we have a look at that whatever-you-called-it—surge room—and see what we got?”

They descended to the bowels of the power-supply area, completely deserted but for the overpowering gloom of a medieval dungeon, ducked under the DO NOT ENTER tape and opened the door to the surge room, which appeared undisturbed.

“I’m gonna check for latents, fibers, you know…” D’Abro said, craning her neck at the science-fiction setting around her. “Normally the crime-scene techies would take care of it, but since this is an unofficial visit…”

This time Archangelsky could not restrain his own bafflement at the woman. “What do you mean, ‘unofficial’? You are detective or aren’t you?”

Reluctantly, D’Abro fessed up to Slava that on this day of her promotion she’d taken indefinite leave. The Russian rolled his eyes in Machuzak’s direction and the latter answered with already proficient exasperation. D’Abro snapped. “You docs think you’re bein saddled with a greenhorn amateur who doesn’t know shit about tomahawks, don’t you?”

“Look, Bedbug,” Machuzak replied, by now more than fed up with the woman’s continued judgments and imputations. “Every scientist I know is a professional amateur. We’re amateurs because everything we try, we’re trying for the first time. We’re professionals because we have the sense to know that whatever it is, we’re going to have a helluva time with it. Every one of us is a greenhorn.” Now more than ever. “Got it?”

“Got it,” D’Abro swallowed, red faced.

As she opened her aluminum case, Slava flipped on the light and pointed out the fateful busbar, half hidden in the maze of electrical plumbing. D’Abro took one look before she snapped a picture: “I thought there was a gap.” No embarrassment in her voice now.

Slava and Nathaniel glanced at each other. “There was,” Nathaniel said. “I told you, didn’t I? Our director is worried about panic—he authorized me to have it replaced.”

As she slipped on a pair of gloves, D’Abro shook her head with an expression no less sour than Slava’s had been. “Cover-up’s worse than the crime, boys.”

Machuzak understood that no good deed goes unpunished, but his irritation only mounted. “Bedbug, if you think the last thirty hours around here have been normal…! I’ve told you everything I know, damnit, and remember, we can’t absolutely rule out that the thing just melted.”

D’Abro scowled but wasn’t as concerned as her reproach had made her sound. “Calm down, Doc. I know you’ve had a rough day.” Her physicist was holding up better than most people she met on duty, actually. She flipped off the light, playing over the equipment with her own special light source, dusted.

“You’ll probably find our prints all over here,” Slava said.

“I expect to,” she replied dryly. At that D’Abro noticed something, crawled past the ignitrons and capacitors toward a far corner. The other two saw only the camera flash before she backed out of the maze again and stood up with palm held open. “What d’ y’all make of this?”

“May I?” Machuzak asked with his eyes, and D’Abro handed him a pair of gloves. She’d found two thin pieces of copper—what was left of them. Each piece was five or six centimeters long and largely melted, but Nathaniel imagined that they had originally formed two halves of a rectangular sleeve, which might have easily slid over a busbar. He and Slava exchanged glances and Machuzak told him to see if he could find the original busbar.

D’Abro’s fiery gaze was now unambiguous. “You mean you may have thrown it away?”

“No. It’s on my desk in the main building.” Slava was gone.

Machuzak and D’Abro stood facing each other. He understood in that moment that D’Abro must be asking, “Who is this reticent fellow who sought out the law but has not exactly acted this day with the strength of a comic-book hero?”

The detective didn’t put to him Lorenzo’s question. She took a hand vac, ducked down behind a capacitor bank and just before she turned it on said, “Now, as I understand it, that there plasma is some sort of hot gas.”

Nathaniel perceived no escape. “A plasma is nothing mysterious,” he answered reluctantly. Most of the visible universe is plasma: stars, the northern lights…the neon signs that trim Austin skyscrapers. “It’s just a gas that’s been heated to at least about ten thousand degrees, enough so that the electrons have boiled off from the nuclei. We say you’ve ionized it. Plasma is a synonym for ionized gas. That’s all.”

“Why do you need to heat it?” She switched off the vac just long enough to pose her question.

Machuzak’s fatigue was fast returning, but the surreal quality of this conversation with a lithe woman, who in the semidarkness resembled nothing more or less than a Halloween cat, inexplicably increased his willingness to go along. “You get energy when you slam those deuterium and tritium nuclei together so that they fuse, but since they’re both positively charged, you’ve got to get them moving fast enough to overcome their electrical repulsion—that requires heating them to, oh, four hundred million degrees.”

D’Abro nodded but was missing something. “What are the magnets for?”

“Nature is generous. The secret of the tokamak is that magnetic fields deflect charged particles. You’ve heard of the Van Allen belts?” D’Abro played her light up and down over Nathaniel’s face. “Cosmic rays fly in from deep space and end up spiraling around the Earth’s magnetic field. The Earth wears a magnetic shield. The thing is, you can’t confine a plasma by any material. It’s so hot that enough of it would vaporize the tokamak. As it stands, inside Prometheus there is so little—it’s almost a deep-space vacuum—that the walls act like a freezer and cool the plasma way below the temperature needed for nuclear reactions.”

D’Abro had been on the verge of accusing the physicist of being in love with facts, but she began to perceive that he wasn’t in love with facts; he was in love with facts in motion, facts that led somewhere. “Seems simple enough,” she said anyway, feeling contrarian. “Hardly string theory.”

“The devil’s in the details,” Machuzak scoffed. “The other important thing about plasmas is that they conduct electricity, like wire. Probably in grade school you connected a battery to a wire and watched it deflect a compass needle.” D’Abro nodded her light again. “The current’s generating its own magnetic field. Sakharov’s idea for the tokamak was that you zap a few million amps of current through the plasma and it generates a magnetic field; the field squeezes the plasma and heats it. Squeeze hard enough and fusion begins.”

“So what’s the problem?” she wants to know.

“Squeeze a water balloon in one place—”

“—it goes gaflooey somewhere else.”

“Precisely. Now try holding a beer with a glass made of rubber bands.”

“Come on, Doc, it’s impossible.”

“Yup, that’s about how hard it is to cage a plasma. At least it’s the hardest technological feat ever tried, period.”

D’Abro extinguished her light source and for a moment became silent. Suddenly her disembodied voice rose archly, “Tell me, Doc, are y’all doin this because it’s worth it or because it’s hard?”

Machuzak wished he were less weary and could anger, but he conceded that her implied accusation was not completely off target. The challenge was part of fusion’s allure, the temptation of the “technically sweet.” Glory would shower a few, but he had nothing to be ashamed of. “Bedbug, most people don’t think it’s worth it. Technically, it boils down to one thing: fusion is about a million times more efficient than burning fossil fuels. There’s more energy in the top two inches of Lake Erie than in all the world’s known oil reserves.”

“Really?” Even the distraction of silencing her phone could not mask D’Abro’s surprise. “Y’all just slurp up that water in Lake Erie and burn it?”

“Nature may be generous but she’s not straightforward. We need deuterium, which we get from heavy water, D2O. Ordinary hydrogen, from H2O, doesn’t react well enough. Only about one out of every five thousand water molecules is heavy, but even that tiny fraction in the top two inches of Lake Erie would be enough. For millions of years.”

At that D’Abro finally got to her feet with her tapes and bags of dust. “Now, Mac, let’s whoa a bit. Where’s the catch?”

The main one was that they hadn’t achieved a sustained fusion reaction, let alone a commercially viable reactor.

D’Abro’s stance, arms akimbo, showed she wasn’t buying. “Now wait a minute. What about the tritium? You said it’s radioactive. Aren’t you risking another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island?”

The inevitable had arrived. Like everyone, D’Abro was confusing fusion with fission, when about the only thing they had in common was “nuclear.” “Look, Bedbug,” Machuzak replied after a sigh, “I’ll say it again—there are no free lunches. We would have done better if we’d just explained fusion’s problems to the public. A deuterium-tritium reaction produces four times more energy than a deuterium-deuterium reaction and is much easier to get going. That’s why weaponeers use tritium in hydrogen bombs, and that’s why fusioneers use it in tokamaks. Yes, tritium is mildly radioactive.”

“Ah,” said D’Abro, firing a finger pistol at his eyes.

“But its half-life is only twelve years, as opposed to twenty-five thousand for plutonium, and a meltdown is physically impossible in a tokamak.”

“Why is that?” D’Abro asked, now fully facing him again.

Luckily, at that moment Archangelsky returned and Machuzak was able to say, “Bedbug, if we’re still speaking to each other in forty-eight hours and you haven’t figured it out, ask again.” His voice had almost left him.

“Have you found anything?” Slava asked as he handed over a plastic bag containing the remains of the original busbar.

“I’m actually surprised how clean the place is,” D’Abro said. The physicists weren’t; you didn’t want junk floating around a surge room. “No one’s been whacking off here, for sure. Nothin obvious except some grease and prints.” While D’Abro opened the bag, the two men pressed nearer. She held up the two halves of the original busbar and Nathaniel tried to slide the pieces she’d found over the melted end. Yes, they appeared to fit. Little imagination was necessary to see that the two new pieces formed a sleeve that bridged the gap cut in the busbar, except that the thin sleeve had melted—more likely exploded—under the high currents. The sleeve’s only purpose could have been to camouflage the gap. At that moment any uncertainty that they’d been dealing with sabotage evaporated without trace.

“My money’s down that someone is determined that your tomahawk won’t ignite—ever.” D’Abro’s tone was flat as she reached into her pocket and offered Machuzak a hundred.

Only the night sounds of a giant laboratory broke the silence as the full implications set in. Finally Machuzak said, ignoring the bill, “Will you turn over what you’ve found to the Sheriff’s Department?”

“I suppose I could,” D’Abro nodded, “but I’m not sure there’s anything on the DNA side, and even if I got usable prints, I somehow doubt they’d show up in the FBI database.”

“They might show up in ours.” D’Abro flicked on her light again and trained it directly into Slava’s eyes. “The Terminator recently installed fingerprint identification system. Will go online soon.”

“So you do have biometrics,” D’Abro interjected with the same dryness as before.

Machuzak wasn’t amused. “Bedbug, if you still haven’t gotten it, this is a civilian lab, not Los Alamos. Security has never been a priority.”

“I’ve noticed.” This time her voice was fully desiccated. “Well, boys, let’s have a look at your fingerprint database.”

“I’m not authorized.”

“You could be,” interjected Slava. At D’Abro’s raised eyebrow he explained: “This afternoon powers-that-be requested Nat to become acting director.”

D’Abro squinted at Machuzak. “You didn’t tell me, Doc.”

“I haven’t decided.”

The detective looked to the floor, sighed, then shook her head decisively. “I think you have. Bein that I find myself on leave, Doc, you’re going to take the job, hire me as a security guard and”—she flicked Nathaniel’s badge slung on a lanyard around his neck—“we’re gonna have a look at everyone who’s been in this surge room recently. Damn, and I was looking forward to a little quiet meditation.”

They ascended to the tokamak bay in silence and out to the parking lot. Past midnight, stars were bright. Regarding the physicist’s upward gaze, D’Abro said, “You know, Doc, I’ll bet when you were a boy scientist blowin up rockets, you never thought you’d end up here.”

“That is for sure, Bedbug. That is for sure.” This was indeed not the future that a youngster thirty years past had beheld in the wintry stars.

“And tomorrow when you become director and have to decide between going for ignition and riskin your machine, whatta y’all do?”

Machuzak continued to stare heavenward. “‘For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go… ’”

“Huh?” D’Abro wrinkled her nose.

“‘And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. O daring joy but safe! are they not all the seas of God?’”

“You’ll go for it then?”

The physicist brought his gaze down to her eyes, sucked in his breath and exhaled long. “Let’s say I’ll pray that we find the saboteur before he gets nervous.”

CHAPTER NINE

The next morning Nathaniel Machuzak, expunging the weariness from his bones, awoke before dawn, swilled a standing cup of coffee, and drove south. The temperature swings, severe this time of year in the semi-desert, sent him shuddering in the jeep, whose top he’d left open. By the time he reached the outer gate, the landscape had turned purple and he began to shake off the cold. The chill mounted.

Down the road he badged himself in at the guard booth and noticed the sign hung to the left of the boom:

Remember:

Turn in Your Radiation Badges Today

Only the tritium handlers and the techs who spent their days on the machine would remember. For everybody else, radiation doses were no greater than the Austin background and they would do only one thing with the monthly reminder: ignore it.

The guard was the tall, angular and silent one. As he asked himself who the fellow staring across the space was, Machuzak thought he sensed a fugitive veil of compassion soften the hard features. About to drive off, he noticed for the first time in years the sign on the booth listing the materials forbidden to bring on-site: explosives, benzene, hydrofluoric acid, radioactive substances… “Do you check every vehicle daily for those materials?” he asked. The granite face scowled and asked whether he was carrying any firearms. “Would you expect anyone to say ‘yes’ to that question?” Nathaniel retorted. Realizing that empathy had been imagined, he flashed his badge across the reader and the gate opened.

At the main building Nathaniel yanked open the lobby doors to see that someone had posted a big Hollywood calendar on one of the columns, the kind whose leaves fall off one by one to ever-so-gracefully mark the passage of time. It showed the number of days to ignition, six months’ worth. A photo of Bill Balustradi’s bearded, smiling face was taped up beneath it, but no smile crossed Machuzak’s lips as he tore off the day they had left behind.

He took two steps at a time up to the third floor to find he’d beaten both director and secretary. For a few minutes he paced, the elevator doors opened and Lise stepped into the foyer, irradiating the space. Lise might have been one of the German beer maids painted on the walls at Scholz’s: tall, buxom, boisterous and fabulously blond. Her Teutonic efficiency was no less authentic and before she sat down the coffee was brewing. “They’re expecting you, Mac,” she said with her radiantly lipsticked smile. “Leonard and Mr. Garrett will any moment be here.”

They showed half an hour later. When The Chairman stepped out of the elevator and saw Nathaniel pacing before him, he beamed like he’d eaten the canary, but when he perceived the physicist’s expression, something closer to fright seized him. “This way, Mac,” he said, ushering him after Leonard into the octagon. For an instant Nathaniel felt in free fall as he gazed through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall overlooking the atrium. Garrett closed the blinds and sat down at the conference table. “What’ll it be, Mac?” he said gravely.

“I’ll do it—,” said Nathaniel.

Garrett slapped his hand on the table. “I knew we could count on you.”

“I have conditions.”

“Name them,” said Leonard from his wheelchair as Garrett sobered again.

Nathaniel turned first to The Chairman. “Two months, as promised.”

Garrett crossed himself.

“Cell-phone wiping and email blocking shall cease.”

“I didn’t authorize that,” Garrett and Rasmussen responded simultaneously.

Now Machuzak faced Leonard and leveled his gaze to the great man’s eyes. “That I don’t answer to you, Leonard, to Richard or to Krieg-Zuber. That I’m director and you are not my shadow.”

The older man nodded softly, with difficulty. “As you wish, Nathaniel. I trust you will not be above taking advice.”

“A wise man once told me that an adult is someone willing to take advice—even when it’s the right thing to do.”

Both Leonard and The Chairman smiled. “Your first directive, sir?”

“My first question: Have you spoken to Moravec since yesterday?”

The Chairman nodded, shook his head. “I didn’t see any slippage. Whatever he is gives me icicles. That guy could eat the devil with his horns on.”

“Then let’s get the division heads together, right away. And get me an appointment with Moravec, now.”

* * * *

The meeting began well. With Leonard and The Chairman flanking him, Machuzak stood at the head of the table before the ASSET letters and told the dozen people gathered there that an hour ago he’d taken the job of acting director. To his surprise, applause greeted him all around. For an instant he stared blankly as the words “You people don’t know it, but the machine’s been sabotaged” verged on escaping his lips. He blinked and said, “Thank you. Now let’s get to work.”

He announced triple shifts, seven days a week with overtime. “Fred, organize them today, and take the beast apart.”

“Will do, sir,” Fred saluted.

The division heads took the announcement of twenty-four/seven operations without grumbling more than a roomful of freshmen. When Machuzak declared that they’d meet daily at 8:00 a.m., beginning tomorrow, they grumbled more. Abbuhl mentioned that rain had leaked into pentagon unit 4, shorting out some components. At that, Tom Kettering, boots propped up, put in that even with the recycling plant going full blast, an ignition campaign meant they’d have to import extra tritium from Savannah River. “Do it now,” Machuzak replied and caught Kettering off guard. Diana Cochran reported that a nitrogen shipment scheduled for the morning would be delayed because the tractor-trailer had jackknifed on the way to CFRC. Her factual remark sent Thaddeus Hasschler into orbit, roaring that he couldn’t work surrounded by such incompetents and that they might as well give up now.

A shouting match erupted before his eyes and Nathaniel remembered the Austin lab’s push to build ASSET’s predecessor, AUSTOR. After a cutthroat competition, ANFRL had killed General Atomics and Oak Ridge for a $700 million government contract on the basis of a deadline. The staff worked like madmen to beat it. More dead than alive they got their “first plasma” at one minute to. “Pink glow,” it’s sometimes called—the tokamak lights up like a neon sign. For $700 million they’d built a fucking neon sign. Then they stripped it down and started over.

Now we will do it again, for ten billion dollars.

As Hasschler and Cochran railed at each other, the sensation that had gripped him since yesterday tightened: These people are shards of personality, I know nothing of them—nothing. Jesus, stop. Looking up from his wrist he raised his hand and read aloud the morning release from ITER: director Pierre Jules César Balard had ordered a review of their DD timetable. ITER had planned to use the low-yield deuterium-deuterium reaction for several years before switching to the high-octane deuterium-tritium mix. The news release could mean only: That was going to change.

As the room fell silent, Machuzak walked over to Hasschler, put his arm around his shoulder and asked if since yesterday he’d gotten a team together to begin planning the experiments. Glancing at the list Hasschler handed him, Nathaniel told him to add Toshi Matsushima and Slava Archangelsky. Thad balked; neither would agree. Machuzak met his sullen stare and assured him they would.

He adjourned the meeting then, asking Fred Abbuhl to stay behind. When the two of them were finally alone he whispered, “Check everything, Fred, and I mean everything in the biblical sense.”

“Sir,” Abbuhl saluted.

“And Fred, how is the mood today?”

“Everyone’s still in shock, of course. It’s only been twenty-four hours since Moravec’s ultimatum. We’ll live without The Terminator at the helm, if that’s what you mean.”

“I suppose we will.”

Fred said he’d get the machine up to atmosphere at once and disappeared. As Machuzak opened the door, Theresa Rasmussen, walking from her husband’s office, caught sight of him and stepped into the conference room. “The whole thing is terrible, isn’t it, Mac?” she offered, touching his arm. “This ignition deadline. It seems so impossible… And Cyrus…” She lapsed into a momentary silence, then said as if somewhere else, “Il n’y a pas de morts. That was Maeterlinck, wasn’t it.” And that was Theresa’s signature habit. She’d sometimes leave off a conversation but continue the dialogue internally with herself. When she surfaced, leagues away, those stranded ashore were more than a little bewildered about how she’d gotten there. “Leonard says he invited you to dinner, Director sir. Why not tomorrow, if you can spare a few hours?”

How infinitely far tomorrow seemed from the now. “That would be nice. I’ll do my best.”

Theresa squeezed his hand and continued on her way.

Once again Nathaniel made ready to depart, but just then the big screen blinked on. He half expected to see Moravec, laughing, but no, it was the white-swathed Cyrus Krieg-Zuber, broadcasting again from his hospital bed. Machuzak involuntarily stiffened.

“So, Mac, old boy,” the sick man said, “you have your revenge. Very clever becoming director, as temporary as that will prove to be.”

“You were listening?”

Krieg-Zuber didn’t reply.

“Big Brother had nothing on the average twenty-first-century consumer. What do you want?”

“Merely to advise you, I intend to step in when the doctors permit and you’d be wise not to attempt anything I would not authorize.”

“What would that be? More jamming? More firings because someone has sent mail you disapprove of? More exiles to remove people whose ideas you’ve filched?”

Krieg-Zuber smiled wearily and benevolently. “Put aside ancient quarrels, Mac, old boy. The fate of the Mission is at stake. We require iron discipline from the troops. Have a punch clock installed—”

Machuzak cut him off. “Shut up, Cy. I’m not listening. The stress on the crew during the insanity that got us into this fix was unbelievable and is going to get worse. Morale is what needs to be in fighting form. As of today your measures are going to cease. Why do you want a punch clock anyway? You already monitor entrances and exits to time lunch breaks. Why all that skullduggery the other night surprised me, I don’t know. Maybe you think everyone around here is so desperate to hang on to their jobs that they’ll put up with anything, or that they’ve forgotten ol’ Ben—those who give up essential liberty for security deserve neither liberty nor security. I haven’t forgotten, Cyrus.”

“This is your problem, Machuzak,” Krieg-Zuber answered, weakly raising a finger. “We are engaged in a great struggle for survival, the Manhattan Project for energy, and you think we are at a decadent university. The Manhattan Project—the most successful scientific endeavor in history. Secret, secure and aimed at one goal alone. No loafers permitted, old boy, no hobbyists.”

Machuzak pondered the slightly older man hovering larger than life above him. One of them was fighting the wrong war, in the wrong century. “The odds are that in six months this lab will cease to exist,” he eventually said, “but we’ll go down as a scientific laboratory, that I swear on my grave—and yours.”

“You have never understood what we are about, old boy. Admit it, you are a second-rate hack who confines himself to problems of no significance.”

“True, I have never understood what your lab was about,” Nathaniel returned, suddenly losing his anger, “but if you, Cy, ever knew what science is about, you forgot long ago. And take it from me, being second-rate is a notch above being third-rate. There’s only one thing I want to know from you: did you feel dizzy in the surge room?”

Caught off guard, Krieg-Zuber merely replied, “Uh, yes. How did you know?”

“I didn’t. Now, either recognize the fact that I’m in charge or die. I don’t care which. Good-bye.”

Once more about to leave, Machuzak turned when he heard a lone pair of hands applauding behind him. Slava, having snuck in, sat in the corner. “‘I perceive you now, beginning of high and turbulent days.’ It’s about time you put that motherfucker in his place.”

“What are you doing here?”

Slava put his finger to his lips, motioned Mac into the corridor. “Heard you accepted inevitable. Instructions, Boss?”

“Get on Hasschler’s team and start planning experiments.”

“That’s not what I meant. I felt dizzy in surge room too. What were you talking about?”

“Meet me at my lab, late.”

He left Slava standing in the corridor alone and stopped in Lise’s office, two steps away. Moravec in Copenhagen was, but agreed to meet him in three days. Set it up. He declined her offer of a spare office up here, near Leonard’s, and disappeared down the stairwell. At the security office he informed Henderson that they were moving to triple shifts and needed to bring on a new security guard. The chief readily agreed. Machuzak said he had a qualified candidate in mind and he’d send her around ASAP.

Another thing: Did Henderson know where The Terminator had installed the phone jammer? John took him into a back room and pointed to the equipment. Machuzak yanked the plug. What about wiping software and email blocking? Henderson shrugged. Well, we’ll know if it doesn’t stay turned off. At that moment Machuzak noticed in the corner a fiber-optics junction box that serviced the lab. Somebody had installed a simple splitter on the cable, a splitter that bled off every byte of Internet traffic into or out of CFRC.

“Where does this go?” Machuzak asked severely, vividly seeing the advisory on his computer screen.

“To my computer.” Henderson shrugged. “Don’t know where else.”

Machuzak knelt to disconnect the splitter, halted and stood up. “Let’s leave it.”

One more thing. He was assigning Lipman and a few others to write up the accident report. They’d need the access records for the past days. Without further prompting, Henderson sat himself at a terminal and brought up the week’s records.

Nathaniel nodded. He’d foreseen the dozens if not hundreds of entrances to the nb supply area. Lipman, Faberman…half the technicians at the lab. Himself. What’s more, the system was an electronic sieve. If anyone tailgates, like Slava and D’Abro last night, that one is invisible. When Nathaniel arrived ten years ago, Henderson himself asked what areas he needed access to and programmed him in then and there.

Ten minutes after Henderson handed him hard copies, Nathaniel authorized Lipman to enlist two others to write the report and ten minutes after that he was on the phone with D’Abro, telling her to get her ass down to CFRC.

CHAPTER TEN

T. J. D’Abro arrived two hours later and smiled slyly at Machuzak’s unintentional snap of his head. Jettisoned were yesterday’s stylish accoutrements and beauty-queen persona. Overnight she’d transformed herself into an Austin slacker, an authentic biker chick arrayed from top to bottom in leather and studs. Only the swath of green hair identified her as the same woman he’d met at Scholz’s. No, after barely taking his extended hand, distraction seized her and she swooped in on the infernal bird, then followed her curious nose toward the other lobby exhibits.

Machuzak watched, wishing to touch her naïveté. Nevermore. She lacks his sense of premature obsolescence. She does not know that what the exhibitors have forgotten to reveal is that many of the projects on display were long ago canceled, never built or never will be. With the rise and fall of our endeavor, the vagaries of our fortunes, the precariousness of our survival, no one thinks to remove what has been lost, to erase the future, which is already past.

“Director, sir,” she said, saluting, “T. J. D’Abro reporting for duty.”

With a glance at two nearby technicians shouldering an electrical ladder and cable, Nathaniel said, “Come,” and introduced her to Henderson, who welcomed her aboard. “At the lab, security means equipment more than intruders,” he informed her. “You’ll be checkin that the cooling systems are on. Has water flooded a laboratory? That sort of thing.” Right, D’Abro glanced at Machuzak. “You’ll need to take a basic safety test to get badged, and a short radiation course to be cleared for the machine area.”

“Will do,” D’Abro said and Machuzak left her to her studies, reminding her that the word when fighting a fire is PASS: Pull the plug, Aim the nozzle, Squeeze the trigger, Swing the extinguisher.

“Wouldn’t PISS be more like it?” she replied and he told her to come to his lab when the day was done.

* * * *

After twilight, D’Abro appeared at the Materials Test Facility in Alpha Site, bitching that one required GPS to navigate CFRC.

“A test,” Machuzak replied dryly, looking up from his desk, which sat to one side of a cluttered laboratory dominated by a big metal cylinder two meters long. D’Abro wrinkled her nose at an oily smell permeating the space and cocked her head at a persistent clacking that reminded her of an antique gasoline lawn mower. The physicist paid no attention any of it and instead asked, “How did yours go—the tests, I mean?”

“PASSed with flying colors,” she smiled. “I memorized the emergency phone numbers, so I aced the safety test, and the radiation course is all ALARA—As Low As Reasonably Attainable—or is that Achievable? Damn, what were those phone numbers?” She lifted a copy of the Bhagavad Gita amidst the piles of technical papers on the scientist’s desk, put it down. “Where are we, Doc?”

Nathaniel got to his feet, peered into the corridor and locked the door. “I don’t know,” he said. “We do know ITER will be pulling something soon… I’ve ordered triple shifts…” He shook his head to himself, baffled, disgusted and walked over to a workbench where he’d spread out some hard copies. “I also got the access records, everyone who was down in the nb supply area for the past two weeks. I don’t see anything funny. Every name’s authorized, no one vanished into thin air.”

“I meant, where are we—this place?” D’Abro said, craning her head as she joined him at the bench.

“The covert op was your idea, Bedbug,” he said, for the first time noting her blue CFRC uniform. “This is the Materials Test Facility. There’s no traffic here except for my two colleagues who like half the lab have disappeared since the accident.”

Standing beside him, D’Abro ran her finger down the records. “Slava and I tailgated on your badge last night, didn’t we?” she remarked. “I know, this ain’t Los Alamos.” She pointed out Machuzak and Slava’s names several times, most recently three days ago. “We were down there a lot second shift, checking out equipment. Deadlines, you know… Everyone on this list had good reasons to be in the dungeons.”

“Doc, just because the badges were there doesn’t mean the names attached to the badges were there. Tell your techs to interview these people for the accident report and find out what bodies were there.” There’d be nearly a hundred, Nathaniel thought. The detective sighed. “Okay, let’s check the surveillance videos. Where are the cameras positioned?”

With a puzzlement that lay between real and feigned, Machuzak glanced around the space. “You see any? There are a couple in the main lobby, a few at the pentagon entrances and every centimeter in the tritium vault. I doubt there are any at all in the power areas. Who’d walk off with an ignitron?”

“Somebody sabotaged Prometheus, Doc. All right, Henderson’ll show me. Motion detectors?”

Now Machuzak choked. “You really are kidding. The only thing that’s ever been stolen from this lab were some radiation badges by a group of Korean tourists who wanted souvenirs.”

“Okay,” D’Abro sighed in an exasperation that equaled Machuzak’s own. “That leaves the fingerprints.” Henderson had already walked her through the new system and all she needed was time alone. “I’ll wait on the DNA. Bein that I’m no longer official, it may take some strings… The problem is, Doc, your system is so leaky, there’s hardly any evidence to believe that anyone was down there.”

Even as Machuzak wondered whether he’d torpedoed this investigation from the start by recruiting a neophyte detective on indefinite sabbatical, D’Abro got to her feet and began to wander around the lab, peering at the tarnished gas cylinders shoved to the room’s perimeter, turning from one thing to another with abrupt, sharp movements. She reminded Nathaniel of a bird, perhaps the firebird herself.

D’Abro stopped before a map taped to one of the gray storage cabinets. It appeared to be the United States—sort of. The coasts had federated with Canada, the Southwest had allied with Mexico, the Midwest was a religious autocracy, Texas a born-again republic. The legend read, “Post-Civil War 2.0.” D’Abro about laughed, but the laugh stuck in her throat. Texas had been negotiating with the feds for autonomy.

“One reason Rasmussen created the consortium here,” Machuzak said, this time as if reading her mind, “is that it’s the most powerful state. Fusion won’t stop the country from splitting up, but with the climate changing, people worldwide are migrating, fighting over resources. If they were more equitably distributed, conflict would go way down.”

“Hmm,” was D’Abro’s only reply, then she swiveled around to the big test chamber in the room’s center, which stood on a stainless-steel stand reaching to her shoulders.

Nathaniel didn’t wait. “Basically, all this stuff is to test materials under bombardment of a plasma,” he said, running his hand over the two-meter-long cylinder. “In a tokamak you’ve got particles at four hundred million degrees slamming into the walls. In a commercial reactor the plasma is producing so much heat that it’s approaching the power radiated by every square meter of the sun. That’s the environment we’re creating. You better damn well know how the walls react, what materials can survive and how to cool them. Believe it or not, the problem has been constantly avoided and remains unsolved. No one is sure how long ITER—or ASSET—will last under real conditions. What we do here is important.”

D’Abro nodded pensively, thinking that her physicist was trying hard to convince himself. “Wouldn’t you have more fun goin to a football game?” she asked, maybe half joking. D’Abro didn’t wait for a reply, glanced at her wrist screen and said, “What this?” pointing to a little hooded flame that had been rigged up on the side of the big cylinder.

“That?” he snorted. “That, Bedbug, is my concession to the environmentalists. My still. People are afraid of what goes on here”—D’Abro flinched uncomfortably at the gaze he leveled at her—“so instead of venting all the deuterium gas after I run it through the chamber, I burn it in this here distillation tube like the flames you see at oil refineries. It makes heavy water. Sometimes we give batches to local labs. Some oddballs still use it for cold fusion experiments. Mostly,” he said, pointing to the tube running through a little hole he’d made in the wall, “I just let it drain outside.”

D’Abro opened the small spigot and gave it a taste. “A little flat,” she said, flashing her smile. A pause and then, “You know, you’re a strange fellow.”

“How so?” replied Machuzak, puzzled. She was staring at him almost angrily now, and he hadn’t the faintest idea why.

“I just can’t figure you out,” she said with visible, audible frustration. “You dress casual, on the surface no one would call you pretentious. But there’s somethin real internal about you—”

“I suppose so,” Nathaniel conceded. “The life of the mind is internal.”

“You got the Bhagavad Gita on your desk like some damned philosopher,” she went on heedless, voice sharply rising, “and when you start explainin this stuff you can’t help soundin superior, like your shit’s a different color up—”

D’Abro’s sudden hostility left Machuzak stunned, but today, this moment, he felt no urge to respond in kind. “Bedbug, I’m not going to defend myself to you. God knows we’re not track stars around here and we’re sure not as glamorous as movie stars, but damnit, we are scientists. We’re athletes of the mind. What we’re good at, on a fair day, is thinking. If you ask me a scientific question, you’re going to get the best answer this scientist can give you. I don’t know who you think builds tokamaks or solar cells, but it sure as hell ain’t Madame Sosostris down at the local tarot parlor.”

“Sorry,” D’Abro apologized suddenly and looked away, bit her nail.

“Remember,” said Machuzak, cocking his head, “we’re all greenhorns here.”

A brief silence ensued, but D’Abro’s flash of bitterness had spent itself as quickly as it had flared. “Sorry,” she repeated, lowering her head contritely, “I guess I’ve always been pissed off that I never became a scientist—or anything else. I can’t do math and I can’t stick.”

“You aren’t alone,” Machuzak answered sympathetically. The disease was endemic by now. Online life had decimated concentration to the extent that almost no one had the skills to do research.

“As it stands,” D’Abro went on with the barest hint of a smile, “I’m sort of a physics groupie.”

At that Nathaniel stared with openmouthed disbelief. Movie stars had groupies, rock stars… Physicists? Dream on.

“It’s true,” she said, now visibly blushing. T. J. D’Abro then revealed herself to be a born-and-bred Austinite, daddy a bona fide oilman. She’d naturally gone to UT, The University, which Nathaniel had guessed at Scholz’s from the ring girdling her finger. “I tried reading a few books about string theory and a couple about physics and synchronicity, but never got too clear on the connection, ya know. I just didn’t know what I was good for. Detective work sort of interested me for a while. It’s not too different from science, don’t you think? We’re both trying to find the answer.”

“Yes,” reflected Machuzak, “but in science you aren’t always presented with the question.” By now he was truly convinced of a broad provincialism blanketing D’Abro’s entire outlook. “Tell me, Bedbug,” he asked her, “have you ever left the republic?” Many Texans hadn’t.

She nodded shyly. “I spent a year in England.”

“Ah,” said Nathaniel. “Durham Cathedral. Why England? Seems unlikely for a gal like you.”

“Unlikely for sure, but the Rhodes people thought to give me a scholarship, so I went to Oxford… I know what you’re thinking.”

“No, you don’t,” he said even as he shut his gaping mouth. “And I’ve already gotten tired of your mind-reading.”

“Sorry, it’s a bad habit… Hell, I wasn’t even sure where Oxford was. I applied for that Rhodes on a lark and was damn sure there’d been a big mix-up when I got it. But, Doc, I never really got into the dang City of Spires. Swilled beer on Tuesdays at the King’s Arms, didn’t do much else, never finished my scholarship, came back to Austin after a year. England’s sort of a luke country, ya know, luke weather, luke food, luke people…”

As far as Machuzak could make out from her circumspect, even embarrassed account, D’Abro knocked about for several years, sneezing in an archaeological lab or living high on Daddy’s credit card, then somewhere in her jumbled odyssey she met a UT professor who taught forensic anthropology and ended up auditing the course. That’s when she decided to try detective work. “But I still don’t know what I’m good for.”

“Is that why you quit yesterday?”

She nodded, almost sheepishly. “It’s more than that, Doc. I look around this lab—it’s so…unreal. I mean, it’s not on a screen, ya know? You guys actually build things, tighten bolts. How does having five thousand friends help you learn to do that?”

“It doesn’t,” Machuzak replied honestly. “It doesn’t.” The young woman seemed genuinely afraid, afraid of the world she was living in, afraid of the world she’d today entered. For a moment he almost felt sorry for her.

“Well,” she said, checking her networking site, “it’s already late. I’d like to see the tomahawk area again. Maybe we can figure out how someone can get down there undetected, if that’s what happened.”

Machuzak nodded. Fred Abbuhl was still organizing the triple shifts and the machine area should be clear. They set off. As they walked across the fields toward the pentagon, D’Abro unexpectedly asked, “What’s between you and Krieg-Zuber?”

“What do you mean?”

“To be honest, Doc, you and Slava don’t exactly show a lot of commiseration when his name comes up. ‘Cyrus the Great.’ ‘Terminator.’ What happened?”

“Let’s just say I came to this lab to do science.”

They gained the pentagon and he was about to badge them in when D’Abro stayed his hand and flashed her own badge across the reader. Entering, she said, “You’ll tell me some other time.”

“Yeah.” At the door to the tokamak bay, Machuzak took out the safety key from the interlock, as he had last night, and pocketed it.

This time D’Abro asked.

“Another puzzle. To gain entry to the test cell you need to remove one of these keys from the interlock. It’s not that they allow you in. Once you remove the key, the machine can’t operate. Not to mention all the backup switches that shut down Prometheus should a door so much as jiggle. ASSET couldn’t have even begun to function if anyone was in the vicinity at the time.”

“Hate to tell you, Doc, but nothin we know at the moment, which ain’t much, indicates that anyone was down there.”

The heavy door swung open and once more they faced Prometheus. Already Abbuhl has begun the disassembly and a few giant parts lie scattered around the floor. Once more the sight of the colossus silences D’Abro, but Nathaniel knows what the place will look like in the coming weeks and he turns to the stairwell leading down to the neutral beam power area.

Halfway to the underbelly he realized she was not with him. “D’Abro!” he called. No answer. He climbed up the stairs but didn’t see her. “D’Abro!” he called again.

He walked toward the tokamak, noticing now that one of the access ports had been opened during the day. Then he jogged, fearing the worst. He ducked through the port, making his way through the great cryostat toward the torus itself. Between two giant magnet coils a pair of legs stretched out toward him. “D’Abro!” His cry echoed in the tank, but—no answer. Moving forward he saw that the detective’s head lay at an inner port and that she was unconscious.

“T. J!” he shouted, nearly passing out himself. He fell against the cryostat floor, shook his head, forcing himself not to breathe. With a desperate pull, he got her loose and dragged her out to the main floor. After a few slaps on her back, she sputtered to life.

“Whew,” she said. “What hit me?”

“Are you out of your fucking mind!” Machuzak shouted, glancing at a poster, A BEATING HEART IS A SAFE HEART. “This is no goddamned amusement park! That machine was filled with nitrogen gas. Jesus, you’re lucky to be alive.”

“Nitrogen?” was all she said. “Why?”

“Why?” Machuzak could hardly believe it and pointed to a “Confined Space” warning. “To kill idiots like you… To keep the machine clean, for Chrissake… They’ve opened it up today…”

A few minutes passed before they recovered legs and sanity. Brushing herself off, D’Abro said meekly, “I’m sorry, sir; it won’t happen again.”

“If it does, you’ll be dead.”

D’Abro’s expression showed that she wanted to make amends, but Machuzak’s cold fury left her at a loss. Finally she said softly, “Thanks, Mac. You saved my life.”

“You’re welcome, T. J.,” he replied, nothing else coming to mind.

They walked back toward the Materials Test Facility in silence. “You know, it’s the first time you’ve called me T. J.,” she said.

“No, I called you T. J. when you were knocked out in the machine, but probably you didn’t hear me.”

“I guess I didn’t.” She smiled and held out her hand.

Before he could take it, Slava emerged from the MTF, wanting to know where they’d been. Machuzak didn’t reply, waved the two toward the building, but Slava shook his head and suggested they meet on Sixth Street instead. Agreed. As Machuzak drove into town, he remained unsettled by D’Abro’s harebrained misadventure, but it might have proved useful. They still had no better idea of who had spiked the machine or why, but at the end of this day, again fighting off the urge to sleep, he become convinced he knew why Krieg-Zuber had nearly met his maker.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

By the time they converged on Sixth Street, it was well into the a.m. The music, focused by hard walls and deep enclosures, shot laserlike onto the streets. When they opened the door to Maggie Mae’s and dissolved in sound, they searched farther for a safe haven. The trio walked a block or two past the massage parlors, bearded cowboys, studs and leather, tongue rattles and nose rings. “If it protrudes, I’ll pierce it,” the sign flashed. T. J., again in her biker duds, urged Slava to yield to an earring; he declined, pushing on through the throngs of fourth-generation hippies and automutilators. He stumbled against the eight-hundred-pound gorilla, accoutered in red hat and tie, looked up to see the birdman proffering his echnicolor assortment of parrots, macaws and cockatoos. Behind him the dwarfish paraplegic draped in a KKK shroud sat high in her hydraulic wheelchair, embroidering.

Austin’s archaeology normally cheered him, but Nathaniel frowned when a Bible thumper, dressed nattily in a gray suit and tie, thrust a tract into his hand. “As it is written, there is none righteous, no, not one.” The three pushed on harder but could not avoid the reconquistas, demanding the formal receding of the Southwest to Mexico. Nor could they shun the hordes of the destitute lining up outside the Medecins sans Frontiers emergency clinic or the echo of a well-known dance club, where young customers sat in silent rows, plugged in and staring blankly. At last they holed up at the Driskill, the once grand, then dilapidated, then re-grand hotel marking the end of the amusement district.

Nathaniel began without prologue under the stare of a giant steer head above the fireplace. “Slava, when we went down to find Zuber, did you notice anything unusual?”

“You’re talking about dizziness, not Terminator lying unconscious on the floor? Yes, I said so this afternoon. I thought it was nausea.”

“So did I. But I had the same sensation an hour ago when I went into the tokamak after D’Abro.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t nausea again?” T. J. asked, smiling faintly. Even on Sixth Street, she’d been unusually reticent, chastened.

Chastened or not, it was exactly the wrong thing to say. “If that had been a pure nitrogen atmosphere, you would have been dead within one breath.” The physicist snapped his fingers. “One. You were lucky it was just residual gas that hadn’t been purged. A visiting Japanese scientist pulled the same stunt once and bought it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said with the same reserve, “I’ve already apologized.”

Machuzak sighed. “No, I’m sorry. One shouldn’t tally these things. One should just do what is right and forget the rest…” The two glanced at each other with determined smiles and he turned again to Slava. “Is it possible that the surge room was filled with gas? For all his excitement, the bastard doesn’t seem to have tried anything. Suppose there was nitrogen down there, he got dizzy, backed into a capacitor.”

“It’s conceivable,” Archangelsky agreed. After deuterium, nitrogen was probably the most common substance at the lab. They used it everywhere: liquid nitrogen surrounded liquid helium coolant as an insulator. If the machine went down for maintenance, they usually filled it with nitrogen until technicians or ex-detectives needed to enter. “Perhaps sulfur hexafluoride,” Slava speculated. SF6, an inert insulating gas, prevented electrical arcing between high-voltage components. The ancient switches in the surge rooms were filled with it. SF6, six times heavier than air, would have sunk to the floor where they were administering CPR, but neither of them recollected sounding like Darth Vader.

A glass of cognac, two of wine arrived. T. J. lifted hers and said quietly, “Seems to me y’all tryin to make this more complicated. Ya know, cops have an expression: ‘If it looks like a horse and has hooves like a horse, then it’s probably not a zebra.’ Police version of Ockham’s razor.”

“Bedbug, who sees vast conspiracies everywhere, talks about complications,” Machuzak said. “I did not imagine my dizziness, neither did Slava… You know, Bedbug, in science you may proceed by logic but you begin with a hunch. The access sheets don’t seem promising. Is there any way we could detect nitrogen or SF6 in the surge room?”

“Two, three days after the event?” Slava wrinkled his nose, downing his cognac. “This is unlikely.”

In an enclosed area it might be barely possible, Nathaniel suggested. If not, could there be any reaction between nitrogen or SF6 and the components down there that might have left a trace?

Archangelsky shook his head and ordered another cognac. Nitrogen was not highly reactive; SF6 not at all.

“Too bad Cy didn’t die—then we could exhume the body.”

In spite of herself, T. J. spit out her wine and put a hand to her mouth while the guests at the next sofa threw a merry glance their way. At that moment Nathaniel was acutely aware of her physical presence, her sparkling eyes, which might have been filled with stage glitter. She looked at him over her hand, lowered it the slightest amount and bit the knuckle of her forefinger.

Changing course, Nathaniel recounted his conversation with Krieg-Zuber that afternoon. “I don’t know how long he’s going to be out of commission, but…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “You don’t need to be Cassandra to see that when he gets back on his feet…”

“I thought you didn’t want to be director,” responded T. J.

“Only a madman would, but Krieg-Zuber has always run the lab day to day, more so since Rasmussen fell ill. He led the push to cancel everything but ASSET. You’d think a lab was a place for investigation, but no. ‘Our Mission, old boy, is to drop ten bombs into the same hole, as the general said.’”

“This is true,” added Slava, downing a second glass as the waitress handed it to him. He was beginning to show effects. “Pompous ass has done everything to change lab from scientific organization to military-industrial complex. Remember day when he puffs up chest and announces that everything but Prometheus is canceled? I tell him: this is science, you do not explore alternatives? Someday your tokamak will look like elephant. Other machines will prove better. Other countries will build them. Worst thing you can do is lock yourself into this design, I told him. That is risk we are prepared to take, it is best bet. Fuck you, I said.”

“My, my,” T. J. smiled wanly, “have I fallen into a scientific laboratory or a pit of vipers?”

“You see, T. J.,” said Nathaniel, “movie stars may fight over publicity; we fight over immortality. Slava is right, Zuber’s gotten rid of everybody who’s ever had an idea he couldn’t steal—”

“Four years ago he started going pazzo,” Archangelsky interrupted, drilling a finger into his temple. ‘Into whose hard hat were the alleged feces defecated?’ There is no way we could let him be director again. Time was perfect—”

“So that’s it!” exclaimed Machuzak, rising fully to his feet. Suddenly he understood the chain of events. “Y–you had me appointed.”

Slava lifted his hands in feigned surprise. “Brother, I am not so powerful to do anything.”

Amazement at how fast Archangelsky acted is one hundred percent. “You must have talked to Garrett within hours after we discovered the busbar.”

Slava raised his glass in a salute, which only prompted Machuzak to raise his fist to strike him. T. J. looked on in genuine alarm until Machuzak sighed and lowered his hand, chuckling. “Well, somebody needed to take this on.”

“Thank you,” was all that Slava said and Nathaniel sat.

D’Abro puckered her lips, considering all she’d heard. Her discomfort, which Machuzak had taken for penitence, had become more evident with each word of the conversation. “I need to ask…” she said, deciding. “What were you two doing down in the power supplies? You guys are PhDs and all, but surge rooms are engineers’ territory.”

After a glance between them, Slava talked. “You think you are at a fabulous installation, rich and gleaming, but after we became ‘dedicated lab’ everyone became multifunctional. Last days were nuts getting ready for so-called commissioning. And physicists do talk to engineers, you know. It is good to know experiments can run.”

D’Abro cast an unsatisfied look at Machuzak, but when he frowned, her expression immediately dissolved into one more contrite. She did not comprehend much about this strange place and its inhabitants, but the man sitting opposite her had this morning, largely at her behest, taken on an impossible task. And two hours ago he’d risked his life to save hers. “Where do we go from here?” she said.

Machuzak’s wrist prodded him. “Huh? The Real World is calling.”

D’Abro sat upright, puzzled. “You guys have avatars?”

“We sometimes hold meetings there.” Machuzak told Slava to log on.

A moment later the pair was standing on the rim of an erupting volcano facing a genuine fire-breathing dragon, complete with scaly wings and flaring nostrils. When the monster spied the two avatars facing him, he took flight and headed out over an expansive sea, whose surface shifted from a dark opalescence riven with flashing tongues of red, to a gleaming diamond lattice, to a golden fretwork studded with varicolored gems. Machuzak and Archangelsky were after him. It was a strange duo, a winged horse and a furry black hat with chicken legs and beady eyes.

Nathaniel and Slava followed the dragon until it suddenly dove toward an island and alighted on the plaza of a grand conference center; then before the physicists’ eyes it morphed into a huge armadillo, which scurried under the eaves of the wood and stone complex built in Japanese-Karelian style. Machuzak and Archangelsky likewise set down and rushed into the center. The avatars glanced at each other even as their owners did in the Driskill lounge; both had been to ITER’s Real World conference center before.

At a meeting under way, colleagues, mostly in human form with nametags, milled about the lobby. The sudden appearance of Machuzak’s horse and Archangelsky’s hat, racing through the hall, interrogating everyone with whom they collided about whether they’d just seen a dragon or a giant armadillo, drew raised eyebrows but no answers. The two sped through lecture halls, lounges, bars purveying virtual alcohol; their quarry eluded them.

At last one of Slava’s Russian colleagues said that he’d seen an armadillo scamper into the video parlor. The winged horse and chicken-footed hat ran in to see find a number of avatars heatedly arguing—what to do about CFRC?—but no armadillo was in sight. As Pegasus and Hat nervously circled the room, their alter egos at the Driskill carefully recited aloud the names of everyone present. D’Abro had thought to log on to ITER’s website and was simultaneously checking the online personnel list; all were genuine ITER physicists.

The pair searched further. A minute later, on a broad terrace overlooking the sea, they glimpsed the armadillo rounding a corner. Machuzak went directly after it, while Archangelsky cut through the nearest room and emerged on the other side. They’d trapped the beast. Pegasus and Hat pounced on the animal, which stood as tall as they did, but it promptly blinked out of existence. The avatars got to their feet, puzzled. On the ground lay a large chess piece. Hat picked it up: a queen with a shot glass for a crown.

“What’s that?” asked Nathaniel.

“A trophy from a visit I made to ITER,” said Slava. “We had little chess tournament—you take the shot of vodka before each move. I won.” D’Abro wrinkled her nose at the strange form of Russian roulette while Slava paused, continued. “Not many people were there. Armadillo was.”

“Sure sounds like an invitation to me,” T. J. whistled and peered closely at Machuzak. “You don’t think ITER’s in on your problem?”

Nathaniel ran his tongue over his lips. “I think you two deserve a vacation in Provence. Be on a plane in the morning—if you can, tonight.”

“Not bad idea,” said Slava, considering.

“I’ve never been there,” said T. J., getting up. “I’ll need to check whether my passport’s expired…”

Machuzak shook his head sadly. “A person should always carry two things in this world: a valid passport and a sweater.”

“You’re not comin, Doc?” she blushed.

Again he shook his head. “I need to sit down with Moravec.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

By eight the next morning, Slava and T. J. were at Bergstrom scrambling for a flight to Houston, and an hour later they were searching at Houston for a flight toward Marseilles. Archangelsky’s skeletal plan was no more than to surprise the dragon and learn the meaning of its prophecy.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to be a wild-armadillo chase,” remarked D’Abro, who sometime after having stowed her sweater and jacket, accepted a beer from the flight attendant. Slava only tugged at his beard, bought a new supply of cognac and the two settled back for the long leg to Europe.

“I don’t think I’ve ever known a Russian, Dr. Archangelsky,” T. J. offered, mutilating his name as always. “I’ll get that right sooner or later. What part are you from?”

“Why don’t you just call me Slava; it’s easier. I grew up in Moscow, the Big Onion, but that was a long time ago.”

“You wouldn’t go back?” she asked, sensing a certain sadness in his reply.

Yaroslav Borisovich Archangelsky shook his disheveled head. “There is nothing to go back to. For the decade after the Soviet Union collapsed, there was spasm of democracy, but the place has reverted to time-honored Russia. It is country that can’t shake off its past. But this is like all countries. In America you are so bloody individualistic, you can’t take one step in any direction—to sign climate-change treaty, initiate carbon tax. You have a right to live as you please and destroy everything else. Second Amendment.”

D’Abro let that go. Slava didn’t wear a ring but she asked anyway whether he was married or had children.

“Sometimes married,” he said after a pause, rubbing the crease on his finger. “Dostoevsky, you know, did not write out of vacuum. In Russia everything is drama. Everything. My daughter is American—well, virtual. Can’t talk face-to-face, has five billion friends she’s never met.”

Slava downed what was left of the too-small bottle, and as the United States fell away, D’Abro could see that he was staring across vast seas and into times long gone by. “You know,” he said at last without prompting, “they built tokamak at my institute, the Kurchatov, one of world’s first superconducting machines. It was before my time. They ran it precisely once.” He held up a solitary finger to D’Abro’s skeptical eyes. “Oh, tokamak worked okay, but at that moment Soviet Union slipped out of existence and liquid helium supply went with it. They sold machine to Chinese for one ruble. What was that worth then? A penny? A hundredth of cent? The Chinese ran it for long time. If Prometheus fails and ITER, they will do it. Chinese have two billion people thirsting for energy. I doubt it will be with tokamak, though.”

T. J. didn’t follow his meaning. The Russian opened another bottle.

“Tokamaks are big, complicated, expensive, prone to failure and inherently not meant for steady-state operation. You need all kinds of fixes to make them run long enough for fusion. It is inconceivable that anyone would want to use a tokamak for commercial reactor. Its cousins, stellarators, mirror machines will prove better, but at CFRC we are glued to doughnuts. This is what happens when wagon bands get rolling. Like I said to Krieg-Zuber, worst thing to do is lock yourself into one design. But whole world put twenty billions of eggs into ITER. Texas put ten billions into ASSET. Science can always progress if you have infinite amounts of money. If you don’t, you become like hammer hitting one nail.”

At this moment T. J. felt like Slava’s daughter, suppressing an urge to text the man beside her. “I didn’t really get what you were saying about Krieg-Zuber last night, that he’s been in charge. Doesn’t Rasmussen approve everything?”

Slava snorted and took another drink. “Being director of big lab does not mean you are in charge. You know Golden Rule: ‘He who has gold makes rules.’ Until he got sick, Leonard was always running around, begging for gold. When he wasn’t begging he was on plane to Korea, Japan, China. Asians treat him like master, god even. He will be remembered as father of fusion. Day to day Terminator ran lab. But he likes power more than science. A few people who love science, Nat, me, fought back.”

“Hmm,” D’Abro said, lapsing into silence again. After some time she went on. “By the way, Slava, Nat said you couldn’t have a meltdown in a tomahawk and that if I couldn’t figure out why, I should ask.” Her time limit hadn’t expired but her patience had.

“He is correct,” replied Slava, chuckling. “In fission reactor, cooling system fails, uranium becomes so hot that it destroys reactor. Meltdown. In the tokamak we need big magnetic fields to keep reaction running. Magnets fail or machine ruptures, plasma escapes, gas cools down in blink of an eye and reactions stop. Pffft. That’s all.”

“You leak out tritium into the atmosphere, though, right?”

“Nu da, but a tiny amount of tritium is no big deal. And it ain’t meltdown… You know, there is something I miss about Russia.”

“What’s that?”

“The word for clever is not an insult. I wish public would once in a while credit scientists for having some idea of what they are doing… How are you finding your first case, or whatever you call this?”

T. J. shook her head in a baffled way. She already doubted her days tracking down stolen credit cards were going to help with five million amps, tritium and tokamak sabotage. “If I ever write up a report when this is over,” T. J. said, gazing into her beer, “I can’t imagine what it will be.”

“Do what scientists do when they write budget proposals,” Slava shrugged. “Invent.”

* * * *

At Marseilles the next morning, Slava refused to wait “three hours for a bus into the mountains”; they rented a car and followed the GPS toward Cadarache, sixty kilometers northeast, home of the French Atomic Energy Commission.

“You think we’re just going to walk into a nukular establishment?”

“That is exactly what we are going to do. Surprise is best weapon.” He pronounced the last with gravity and handed her a forged ITER badge.

“Where did you get these?” she started, but Slava merely frowned.

Well before the gate, T. J. perceived that the Cadarache facility matched or exceeded CFRC in size, housing not only ITER in a huge tomblike complex, gypsum white, but an older tokamak in a smaller building, as well as a dozen fission research reactors. The facility lacked the artistic merits of CFRC’s showcase main building, but she grudgingly conceded that the Provençal hills, nearby castle and river held advantages over the scrubland of southwest Austin.

The ITER complex sat outside the security fence and D’Abro abruptly understood why Slava foresaw no serious difficulty getting past the elderly guard who turned away from a soccer match, pulled a cigarette from his lips and asked with no apparent interest the reason for their visit. They were here for the tour, Slava said, and were told where to park. At the lot, Slava handed T. J. her badge and headed toward the front entrance of the low-lying administration building. The mistral was blowing and T. J. slipped on her jacket.

The whole place had the feel and smell of a giant construction site, which was the truth of the matter, for ITER had been completed only a year or two earlier, and loose gravel still got underfoot. But granting no time for T. J. to gawk at the monumental and characterless shed that faced them, Slava headed straight for the front door and sought out Dima Sazhin.

Sazhin started at the unexpected rap on his spartan office’s door, and at catching sight of Slava, he leapt to his feet and embraced his old friend, kissing him soundly on the lips. At once the blond Dima began gesturing wildly and the two launched into an animated conversation. Sazhin appeared to be a few years younger than Slava and, disconcertedly, wearing a thick walrus moustache he reminded T. J. of Captain Kangaroo. She couldn’t follow a thing, except “Slava!” “Hell!” “business” and “vodka,” the last just as Sazhin slid open his desk drawer and poured three glasses. Without a blink Slava downed the shot; T. J. tried, failed. Then, in English: “It’s urgent.” Dima’s round face dropped into a puzzled frown.

“We’ve got trouble at CFRC,” said Slava, glancing about the office, shutting the door behind him.

“We know,” deadpanned Sazhin. “Too bad about Krieg-Zuber. What a crazy accident.”

“Dima,” Slava said, taking his arm, “it wasn’t an accident.”

Sazhin didn’t catch Slava’s meaning and continued waving. “Well, it was damned stupid going straight for ignition on opening day—but we know how these things snowball. Ceremonies, deadlines, money, deadlines, pride, deadlines…” He paused long enough to smile toothily at the beautiful stranger in his presence. “You think you have bureaucracy over there… Now we’ll pull the same stunt here just because you guys tried it—and we’ll have our own accidents.”

“Dima,” Archangelsky finally cut him off. “That’s not what I mean. I mean it wasn’t an accident.”

Sazhin peered at his compatriot, twirling his moustache. “What was it then?”

“I can’t tell, Dima, and if you breathe word to anyone, I swear to Almighty God that I’ll string you up by your eggs on Nikolsky Gate.” Dima crossed himself in the Orthodox manner. “Do you remember that little chess tournament we had when I visited about five years ago?”

Sazhin wrinkled his nose. “You flew across Atlantic to ask me about a vodka-laced chess tournament?”

“Dima, who was there? There weren’t many—five…ten…?”

“Hmm, so small event, such a long time ago. You, me, Misha Klebanov, Alessandro Marietti… Will Marlow… I can’t remember.”

“Dima, remember! Somebody who was at tournament contacted us—probably warning us not to go for ignition.”

Slava’s chum jerked his head up and smiled crookedly. “I am to be surprised at this? Half of ITER staff is ready to blow you to hell. Who do you robbers think you are, trying to steal ignition from us?”

“This is science,” Archangelsky shrugged “Open thievery. What do you expect?”

“Expect?” Dima stared with wide, then narrow eyes. “Do you have any idea of what your foolish prank has started? We were planning to spend years on low-power experiments before going for real burn, but since Monday, everyone here is determined to squash you. You don’t believe me when I tell you ITERniks must now try the same stunt. You think EU has sunk twenty billions of euros into The Way to let a bunch of cowboys show us The Way Out? You can’t understand how dangerous this situation has become.”

Dima’s anger-laden outburst forced Slava to understand that CFRC truly had a race on its hands, a race with the most formidable opponent conceivable, the most formidable even had the playing field been level. “Dima, are you trying to stop us?”

“Me?” He put his arm around his friend’s shoulder. “I want CFRC and you to survive so that when ITER fails, I have waiting job.”

“Dr. Sazhin,” T. J. interrupted firmly, “were you in the Real World two days ago?”

After a startled pause, Dima made a motion of his head to Slava in the direction of the woman. “Go ahead,” Slava said.

“Yes, I was at the ITER conference center early. I told Slava’s hat I saw armadillo.”

T. J. glanced at the list she’d made in the Driskill lounge, though she couldn’t imagine anyone inventing such a story. “Yeah, Dima Sazhin, that’s you all right. The others aren’t on the list.” She faced Sazhin. “Sir, can we talk to Marietti, Klebanov and Marlow?”

“Well, they still work here,” the baffled Dima shrugged.

“Let’s find them,” said Slava.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

They hadn’t gone five steps down the corridor when the last person in the world Slava wanted to see saw them: Pierre Jules César Balard, the director general of ITER himself. Slava turned away too late.

“Dr. Archangelsky,” the nearly two-meter-tall Balard greeted him with a heavy French accent. “No one told me you were visiting.”

Slava accepted the extended hand, which fully engulfed his own. “Was in area. Just thought I’d drop in to see Dima.”

The bald Balard’s reputation was of a brusque, intransigent tyrant who’d been inspired by his own name. It might be necessary if you are coordinating a project involving thirty countries, Slava conceded. Inevitably, Balard brought up events at CFRC.

“Give my best to Krieg-Zuber.” From the way Balard frowned and rebuttoned his jacket, Slava could see the director was about to say more. He did. “Zis was, of course, not unexpected when you attempt something so foolish. What did Leonard think he was doing, Dr. Archangelsky? Trying to beat us? By what moral authority does Leonard think he has ze right to attain fusion, to challenge moi—moi?” He thumped his vast chest. “The civilized world has invested in ITER—in CFRC? Pfff. Listen carefully, Dr. Archangelsky. I will never—never—allow zat son of a bitch Rasmussen to win zis race against me. I will show you what we can do here and by the time I am finished, there will be nothing left of him but a pip, a laughingstock on every continent. No, that is too good. He will be forgotten, completely forgotten. That is what ze bastard deserves…”

Dima took Slava’s arm, intending to spirit him out of harm’s way, but Archangelsky shook himself loose. There he stood, in an unbuttoned sports jacket, resembling today if not exactly Rasputin then a rock musician, drawing himself up to his full height, which put the top of his head somewhere short of Balard’s shoulders. He raised his chin to the starched figure towering over him and pointed his finger straight at the director’s nose. “You, sir, think you have moral authority to achieve fusion. You with your lowballing of costs and billions of euros of overruns, not to mention years lost with magnet problems and overstuffed claims for baby ITER. You know as well as I do the thing will never do what you advertise. You call this moral authority? Maybe others can make it happen quicker, cheaper. Maybe we Texans will do it. You stand here telling me you will crush us and call yourself moral authority. Hah. I spit on it.” Slava paused, almost surprised at himself, and literally spat at Balard’s feet. But he wasn’t quite done. “Tell me when in science does anyone have moral right to breakthrough? In some long-lost fairyland, gentlemen scientists grant moral authority to rivals, but you are neither moral nor have authority anywhere but in ITER-land. Come on, pussyfoot”—Slava suddenly put up his fists, began to dance like a boxer—“show us what you’ve got. We’re ready for anything.”

Fully enraged, Balard raised two clenched hands over his head, as if about to squash the pint-sized Russian with a sledgehammer, but Dima again grabbed Slava and this time dragged him away. Balard screamed after them, “I will crush you like insect! You have no chance, none!”

“Bring it on!” Slava shouted back with raised fists as Sazhin hustled him into the nearest elevator. The doors closed.

T. J. let out a long whistle. “Whoa.”

“Eb tvoiu mat’,” both Dima and Slava breathed simultaneously, undoubtedly for different reasons.

“You weren’t kidding,” T. J. said after she’d finally caught her breath. “He really hates Rasmussen.” Dima nodded. “And Slava, what a performance.” She held him by the shoulders at arm’s length, then kissed him smack on the lips.

“You may regret that,” Slava said.

On the third floor the doors opened and T. J. asked, “Does he hate Rasmussen enough to do anything?”

Dima shrugged as they exited. “Two months from now I show you the scars on my back from director’s cracking whip. That much he will do. The rest?” He shrugged again. “I told you, half of ITER staff is ready to blow you to hell. After what just happened, Balard would light match.”

* * * *

T. J. was soon convinced he was right. “You remember Slava Archangelsky?” Dima said to Alessandro Marietti as they cornered him in his office.

“Of course,” the Italian replied, shaking hands. “The best drunken chess player on two continents.”

“This is why we need to talk, Alessandro,” Slava said to the handsome young Latin, whose black hair and chiseled face could have belonged to a movie star who’d intentionally forgotten to shave that day. “Do you remember who was at that chess match?”

Marietti produced the names Dima had, plus Sabine Warzel, a German. He thought there were some others, but it had been four years ago, maybe five. Slava pressed him to ignite his memory.

“Sir,” T. J. interrupted, glancing at the picture of stray cats on the Campo dei Fiori that Marietti had taped above his desk. “Were you in the Real World this Saturday?”

“No,” Marietti replied, suspicions rising. “What is this about?”

“A matter of urgency,” Slava said.

Before Marietti could respond, T. J. asked if he had a Real World account. The young man nodded and reluctantly logged on, offering his account information and IP address only because he knew Slava. T. J. hadn’t learned much from her computer security courses, but enough to know that an IP address meant little.

“Eh, what is this about, really?” Marietti said finally, getting to his feet. “This has something to do with that happened at CFRC? You know what we think about that, don’t you, Slava? You deserved it—”

“Some of us think so too—”

“You are like a putanna who gives the clap to the whole village, no? You endanger everybody—”

“I’ve already told him,” put in Dima.

“In three days the whole world program has gone pazzo. Everybody is infected. You should read Machiavelli, why do states go to war with each other when they don’t want to—”

By now Marietta was making wild gesticulations and Dima was already on his phone to Marlow. “He’s in the test cell,” he said to Slava and T. J. “Come.”

* * * *

A few minutes later they reached the tokamak bay. The machine was down for maintenance. Dima got authorization to enter and the door opened.

“Behold,” said the Russian.

Suddenly, without warning, ITER stood before them. T. J. gulped as her hand went to her neck and her knees nearly gave out. The device confronting them was unlike anything she’d ever seen. Half again as large as Prometheus, the machine stood, she guessed, fifteen times as tall as she did. The tokamak bay was far cleaner than at CFRC, all the scientists wearing ties tucked into their shirts. The innards of the machine were entirely obscured by the great cylindrical cryostat that housed it, of the same sort that surrounded Prometheus, whose purpose was to provide a vacuum barrier between the superconducting magnets and room temperature. Immense blocklike devices protruding from the cryostat were covered with heavy cables that ran on metal trays through the walls and out of the test cell altogether. Slava was commenting to Dima on neutral beams, a term T. J. had already heard several times without comprehension at CFRC.

The feeling of insignificance she’d experienced while standing before Prometheus was magnified here over and again. Mere humans no longer had any say in the course of events, and their fate was in the hands of giant, alien devices with a life of their own—impersonal, inscrutable, implacable.

“This is the machine that the civilized world is counting on to prove that limitless energy is possible,” said Dima.

“Some of the civilized world,” Slava corrected.

Will Marlow was a big American who spoke with a flat Californian accent. Like Marietti, he volunteered his Real World account and avatar. Nothing. “Who was at that chess match?” Slava put to him the question.

Marlow scratched his head, racking his memory. “You, me, Alessandro, Misha, Sabine, some post-docs and grad students, I think…”

“Pravil’no,” recollected Slava through half a decade and vodka, “there were some younglings. Who? You’ve got to remember.”

“Oh, those transients never stick around for long—you know that, Slava. Jesus, they’re anonymous.”

“There must be records,” T. J. interrupted with annoyance. “If they were students, somebody knew they were here—like their professors, maybe.”

They made for the exit and agreed to split up, Slava and T. J. going after Sabine Warzel and Misha Klebanov, Dima saying that he’d try to find some records, but it was like searching for bank account numbers without knowing the customers. T. J. asked Marlow why he was here instead of in Texas.

“Originally it was because I like Europe and thought the job would be more stable. But with the economy for the past decades… ITER was a giant gamble from the beginning and almost never got finished. Now that stunt you idiots pulled has put the entire world program in jeopardy. The race is on. We’ll rush years ahead, do something stupid and ITER will fail. Governments won’t forgive us and that will be the end of fusion for the next century, mark my words. Damn you all.” Marlow walked away.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Dima said and was off.

* * * *

Misha Klebanov was abroad for a week. Sabine Warzel, a dark-haired, pretty German from Munich, had been at the Real World conference and was on T. J.’s list. Her avatar matched the one they’d seen. Sabine also dimly remembered some post-docs and grad students hanging around the chess tournament, but couldn’t produce names. “I believe there were a couple French, a Spaniard, a Japanese or a Korean, I’m not sure…maybe a Chinese or two.”

“Japanese or Koreans would’ve been shooting videos,” T. J. said. “And posting them.”

“Good point,” agreed Slava and Sabine simultaneously and they logged on. Sabine’s office was hardly distinguishable from the others—computer, a white board, papers. T. J. began to think that though she’d fallen in with the most international bunch of characters imaginable, the laws of nature required all physicists to be identical, regardless of sex. “Bosons,” quipped Slava to her mystification. Sabine remembered that one of the Chinese was a woman. There never were many in physics, she smiled.

“For sure,” D’Abro said, thinking she’d seen two female physicists at CFRC. “You don’t get lonely?”

“That would depend on what you’re hunting for,” Sabine smiled again.

Soon, their search coughed up a short video of a pink-eyed, red-nosed Archangelsky, surrounded by, indeed, some Europeans and Asians, one a woman, but neither he nor Sabine could identify anybody in the picture. “Do you have facial recognition software?” T. J. asked.

“Bedbug, as you said, somebody around here should have records,” answered Slava, wrinkling his nose. “Why don’t we check personnel office first.” As T. J. protested that online would probably be faster, they forwarded the video to Dima. Thanking Warzel, and hoping to evade a diatribe about CFRC, they were half out the door when T. J. thought to ask whether she’d ever been in at CFRC.

“Sure. Several times.”

“Do a lot of ITER physicists spend time in the States?” T. J. continued, curiosity aroused. Ah, something distinguished Sabine’s office after all: a large beer stein standing on the windowsill, open, with a plastic flower stuck in it.

“Nowadays, it’s mostly the reverse,” the German laughed broadly. “The American labs are almost nothing now, and ITER is such a gigantic project. You know, contracts are spread over sixty countries. They tested magnets in Japan, Germany, Korea, Switzerland… Chinese peasants wound coils for a dollar a day. We ended up with more administrators than physicists. This is modern science.”

“Thank you, that’s very interesting.” T. J. remarked and she and Slava were into the corridor.

“By the way,” Sabine called out, “may a tornado wipe CFRC off the face of the Earth.”

* * * *

T. J. and Slava were momentarily alone. It was late in the day, nearing five o’clock, and although Klebanov was missing, T. J. didn’t feel the trip had been wasted. They had a better idea of who had been at the chess tournament, and she was now absolutely convinced that the ITER folks had it in for CFRC.

“Find Dima and hunt down those records,” she ordered. “In the meantime, I’m gonna visit with M. Pierre Jules César Balard.”

She mangled his name almost as badly as she did “Archangelsky,” but Slava started anyway. “You think he will speak to you now? And why would you possibly want to talk to that svoloch’?”

“I don’t know exactly what you just said, Slava, but leave it to me. One thing, though—stay out of sight.” She smiled radiantly.

He led her to the director’s office; she smoothed out her hair in the big window’s reflection, brushed off her suede jacket and abandoned the Russian. Shrugging, Slava tracked down Dima, who’d been trying to explain to the staff who they were looking for. The video on Dima’s handset helped them identify three of the Europeans, while several others remained anonymous. But now the day had trickled away and everyone abruptly vanished. It would have to wait until tomorrow. Slava made his friend swear that he’d continue working on it.

Archangelsky paced for an hour when T. J. phoned and they met out front. “We need to find a place to stay for the night,” he said, glancing at the sun, which nearly touched the hills. The only facilities in the immediate area were a gas station. “I doubt we will be welcome in dormitory.”

“Don’t worry about it,” T. J. replied. “We’re staying in the castle, courtesy of the director.” Archangelsky shook his head with disbelief, but she shook her head right back. “You’ve been married too long, Slava. As someone once said: boobs, Doc, boobs.”

“But did you get anything out of him?” Archangelsky answered, once he’d recovered.

“Yeah. I’ll tell you after I’ve gotten back from dinner.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

At eight o’clock the morning after Sixth Street, while Slava and T. J. made their way to Europe, Nathaniel entered the lobby of the main building and tore off the top page of the deadline calendar. He crumpled up the paper and tossed it into the nearest basket, watching another day slip uselessly from their grasp.

Ripping off the sheet had not been his first act this day. Two hours earlier, he’d badged himself into the test cell, where one of those stand-up balloons of Edvard Munch’s Scream with Bill Balustradi’s face pasted over it now guarded the entrance. Although it was hardly dawn, skies yet gray, the lab was alive. An undermanned first shift had just gotten under way, and clean-suited technicians were disappearing into the tokamak to begin the task of washing the inside of Prometheus’great toroid by hand. Under Abbuhl’s eye, techs were all over the area, checking everything…but what needed to be checked for. One of their first tasks would be to make certain all safety interlock systems functioned properly, short-circuiting the possibility that Lipman’s accident investigation would uncover anything.

The chief engineer walked up to him and tossed Machuzak a bolt the size of a rolling pin. “We’ve been finding some of these, Director, sir,” he said. “Counterfeit bolts.”

“Counterfeit?” Machuzak sucked in his breath, catching the monstrous object. His was thinking: explosive.

“I mean substandard. Chinese. We should be able to identify them.”

“Neutron spectroscopy?”

“Labels.”

“Do it.” With a small relief, Mac slapped Fred on the back; the engineer was gone.

* * * *

Machuzak had not come to the test cell to watch. The suspicion that The Terminator had succumbed to gas would not free him, and he desperately needed to disprove it. If his hunch was right, it might snag this saboteur before a second strike, but Nathaniel couldn’t deny that what captured his imagination was the intrigue of an idea. D’Abro had missed the mark when she suggested that detectives and scientists were twins. Detectives are paid to find; scientists are paid to seek. There is no other profession paid to be confused. It is a great privilege—had been.

Machuzak knew his plan was harebrained, but he clambered down to the neutral-beam supply area and, waiting until the coast was clear, sucked a sample of surge-room air into a little evacuated cylinder. Thieflike, he stole back to the Material Test Facility where he kept an old quadrupole mass spectrometer, not much different he supposed from the ones they were always mentioning on crime shows that identify the atomic constituents of samples of unknown substances. His obsolete machine was capable only of detecting parts per million, which would more than do.

Nathaniel cranked up the voltage and ran tests on the surge-room air and controls from lab corridors. When he finished, the cracking charts lay before him on the bench. There the telltale spikes at mass number 14 for nitrogen, but on both test sample and corridor control—the same height. There oxygen 16, argon, neon, carbon dioxide… He could see no significant difference between them. No, here: The surge-room air shows minute traces of SF6, which slowly leaks out of the high-voltage switches and must be periodically replenished. Seek and ye shall seek.

Nathaniel felt certain he was blind. The idea must be true. I felt the gas, damnit. Nevertheless, Machuzak was now forced to concede that the idea was no more than one of those clever conjectures relinquished by their creators only under extreme duress, and ultimately lead nowhere.

He was about to depart for the main building when his assistant, Jerry Wilson, unexpectedly appeared, glancing shyly about the clutter, and asked if they might speak. Nathaniel hadn’t set eyes on him since the accident; only a short message had informed him that Jerry was taking a few days off.

Wilson was endearingly bashful, rarely able to bear the weight of another’s gaze. “Umm,” he said, looking toward the floor, “last time I talked to Cy, he was threatening to shut down the MTF and scrub Toshi’s experiment. I was kinda wondering…”

Machuzak puckered his lips, nodded. Krieg-Zuber had only weeks ago threatened to close down the MTF, and Wilson’s concern for self-preservation was understandable. Formerly, Jerry had been a diagnostician who measured the properties of a tokamak plasma. For a few years, he’d worked happily on ASSET’s predecessor, AUSTOR, even before Nathaniel had joined the lab, then he tired of midnight shifts and requested something less demanding. The pickings were slim, but Jerry wasn’t ambitious, entertaining no thoughts of a PhD. He floated around a long time, ended up overseeing one of Toshi’s ideas and assisting Nathaniel part time. Machuzak had first found it strange that Wilson was older than he, but they both got over it. One thing was certain: if the MTF went, Jerry went with it.

“The MTF is safe for the moment,” Nathaniel assured him. “You have my word, but I’ll talk to Toshi.”

Wilson thanked him and disappeared into the next room. Today’s ignition meeting was due to begin in ten minutes. Nathaniel would collar Toshi there. He drove to the main building, tore off the top sheet of the deadline calendar and took two steps at a time up to the ASSET conference room.

* * * *

Toshi was not present. The others were, though it made no difference. Four days had passed since Moravec’s ultimatum, but no one could see how to ignite Prometheus short of putting a torch to it. Everyone had the same thought: to hell with long pulses, just get the power up, way up, if only for seconds. Push the magnets to the limits. Ignite, disrupt, claim victory. Seeing the state of affairs, Nathaniel asked if anyone knew what had happened to Matsushima, and he was unable to ascertain from Thaddeus Hasschler whether Toshi had even been informed.

“He’s too busy levitating,” cracked Kettering, pressing his palms together and making a mock bow in all directions. “What’s he doing at CRFC anyway?”

Nathaniel was not amused. “Tom,” he said, “let me put it hypothetically. If I had an ignition deadline to beat and you asked me to put my money on the entire lab or Toshi by himself, I wouldn’t hesitate…”

Thad instantly rose. “I find that insulting, Nat. I demand an apology.” Had Hasschler been wearing a glove, he would have hurled it to the ground. Aye, Hasschler’s difficult temper was already leaking out at the knowledge that his would be the responsibility for coaxing the impossible fire out of that great, sullen machine. Who is this man? The question came unbidden, but Nathaniel asked evenly whether he had any ideas. Caught empty-handed, Thad sat down again and said gruffly, “In any case, there is nothing to be done until Prometheus is ready.” He shot a smoldering glance toward Abbuhl.

“My apologies, Thad,” Fred replied with his signature calm, “I only got three shifts on the boards a couple hours ago”—he glanced at his watch—“and we won’t be up to strength ’til tomorrow. You’re going to have to give us a few weeks, maybe a month.”

“Then let’s cancel these damned meetings until then!” Hasschler erupted.

Diana Cochran quipped that one of the concrete platforms supporting the helium factory had cracked and needed repair. Nathaniel leveled his gaze at Diana. They’d always irritated each other. As their eyes met, the same spike of suspicion caught in his throat. No, here is nothing more than the usual conflict of personalities. I regard her as knee-jerk gung-ho and she finds my skepticism of the Mission treacherous.

At that moment Hasschler swiveled to Machuzak with a pointed finger. “It is your responsibility to get Moravec to relent. This is our only hope.”

“Take him to a surge room and electrocute him,” Kettering cut in.

“Moravec’s in Copenhagen,” Nathaniel replied, peering at the tritium head with incredulity. “I’m meeting him in Dallas day after tomorrow.” That silenced the insurgents, but as they adjourned Machuzak took Tom aside, about to interrogate him on the remark. Catching himself, he cursed audibly and backed off.

“What’s your problem, Machuzak?” the ex-marine asked sternly.

“Sorry, nothing,” Nathaniel answered, turning away awkwardly, putting a vague mental question mark by Kettering’s name and certain only that it was essential to enlist Matsushima at once.

* * * *

Toshi Matsushima had also been exiled to Alpha Site by Krieg-Zuber and Nathaniel was forced to drive over again. To his surprise, he found the Japanese physicist in place, trim and agile at fifty, sitting on a tatami mat drinking tea.

“Why weren’t you at the meeting?” he demanded.

“I wasn’t informed,” replied Toshi without apparent interest. As Nathaniel had suspected. “In any case, why should I join such a group of bots?”

“If you don’t,” said Machuzak, “we are certain to fail.”

“What is that to me?”

“‘You have the right to your labor, not to the fruits of your labor.’”

The exhortation obliged Toshi to smile. “Hoisted on my own petard,” he said, knowing he had recommended the Bhagavad Gita with its famous advice to Nathaniel. “So how are you holding up, Prince Arjuna, on the eve of battle?”

Nathaniel chuckled morosely. “I am just trying to do my duty, dharma, isn’t it?”

“Correct,” Toshi responded, offering Nathaniel some tea. “But remember, the message of the Gita is that one does his duty whether one likes it or not. And now you will tell me that this applies to the both of us.”

“Yes.” Nathaniel declined the tea but sat down without invitation and bored unrelentingly into Matsushima.

Toshi understood. “The others are of course paralyzed, without ideas. You expect me to work the required miracles to spare the impossible Mission immolation. Will I be canonized, Nathaniel?”

“‘You have the right to your labor, not to the fruits of your labor.’”

Toshi agreed only to consider it. Nathaniel well knew that Matsushima’s exile to Site Alpha was spiritual as well as physical, that he would resist impressment; he tactically changed course to Jerry Wilson’s request: What had Krieg-Zuber been up to?

“It is very much like the situation when one company buys another with its own money, isn’t it?” Machuzak didn’t quite follow. “You well know that the funds for my experiment come directly from the pocket of our exalted benefactor Richard Garrett. So if Krieg-Zuber was planning to scrub it, he would be canceling an experiment he did not fund. This is typical of The Terminator’s ego.”

When Matsushima spoke of “his” experiment, he meant one of his ideas, which others like Wilson were carrying out. Toshi could probably tie his own shoelaces, but tightening a bolt would have been beyond his range. That Garrett had been personally financing Toshi’s experiment was public knowledge; it was too far out for anyone else to take seriously. “So, if I continue to pay Jerry at the MTF, you can ante up your half?”

Toshi smiled like the Buddha. “Is Krieg-Zuber able to hear our laughter?”

Despite his surname, Toshifumi Matsushima was half Korean and much of what he said had the flavor of a Zen koan, something that demanded completion yet could not be completed. This was typical of Matsushima, if anything could be called typical. An encounter with him left you inspired or perplexed, sometimes annoyed, rarely unaltered.

Toshifume Matsushima was in every respect the most singular character Nathaniel had known. He came from the six hundred thousand or so Zainichi families, ethnic Koreans, remaining in Japan, and Nathaniel often wondered whether his internal exile had shaped his destiny. He thinks qualitatively differently than you or I. “It is like a goat going up a hill and coming down a camel,” he will describe a nuclear transmutation. Toshi’s quicksilver mind allowed him the luxury to work on what amused him and he’d made contributions to several branches of physics. His great speed was equally his downfall. Toshi bores easily and has never carried through anything to the bitter end. He once confessed he could win his freedom only by receiving the Nobel Prize. Nathaniel laughed, reminding him that no one gets Nobel Prizes for plasma physics, and pitied him.

As Nathaniel glanced at his watch, the older man said, “Don’t forget your deep-breathing exercises, Arjuna. Breath is the first thing that goes.” Nathaniel nodded good-bye as Matsushima offered to show him his latest geometry problem, which he felt worthy to hang on the tree, but Machuzak had already disappeared, wondering, as always, who Toshi was.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Leaving Slava behind, T. J. had walked forthrightly into Balard’s outer office to see the ITER director giving instructions to his secretary. She extended her hand and said, “Professor Balard, I’m T. J. D’Abro with CFRC, and I want to apologize for Dr. Archangelsky’s behavior earlier. You can imagine things are a little tense over there.” A true Frenchman, Balard counted it a good day when an attractive woman glanced at him, and to resist the enigmatic smile being cast in his direction was altogether beyond his capabilities. Allowing him no chance to recover, T. J. asked whether they might speak and he unhesitatingly offered a gracious bow, ushering her into his inner sanctum.

With a glance at the classical artifacts adorning the office, T. J. continued to improvise. “Hopefully things at CFRC will calm down once we determine the cause of the accident,” she said, taking the seat offered, “and then you’ll see that this is all a gentleman’s misunderstanding. As a matter of fact—”

By this time Balard was smiling. “Gentleman’s misunderstanding?” he interrupted with his heavy accent. “Mademoiselle, permit me, ITER is one of ze largest scientific projects ever undertaken, and doubtlessly ze most important for ze future of mankind. You see—” he gestured to a wall chart behind him that showed the dozens of countries and agencies involved. “What you cannot detect from zis chart is how small a role the United States is playing, approaching zero. Your country could have been the leader, but no, thirty years ago America turned its back on ze future. Your fundamentalist politicians, who live in a medieval world, have much on their shoulders, rejecting science for superstition, habitually pulling out of signed international protocols. What’s more, when Rasmussen had the chance to correct these mistakes, what does he do? He swindles billionaires to invest in his ridiculous consortium, for no other reason than to serve his own vanity, which I assure you is unsurpassed. From ze beginning he has attempted to sabotage ITER. He steals from me scientists, engineers, he has diverted dollars to CFRC that were rightfully ours… If you think I will allow t…that voleur to beat ITER to ignition by one second—No. I will stop him, so help me God…”

As the director clenched his fist, T. J. saw that she was witnessing an outburst that verged on approaching the earlier one in the corridor. Balard simply could not disguise his hatred of Rasmussen. “How will y’all stop him, sir?” D’Abro asked simply, silencing her phone.

“W…what, what do you mean?” Balard abruptly halted. “I will stop him with every means. I will play his game. I will entice his best scientists with higher salaries, better cuisine, lovelier scenery. I will be sure that every cent of American fusion dollars comes to ITER instead of CFRC. I will push my people to the limits of their endurance and we will show Rasmussen what it means to challenge Pierre Jules César Balard.” As before, the immense man thumped his chest angrily. “Leonard has asked for a race and now he has one. Give him regards from his former student, mademoiselle.”

“Y–you were his student?” T. J. stammered in full amazement.

“His first doctoral student, oui, half a lifetime ago.”

Boy, was this personal, T. J. began to suspect. “I’ll be sure to tell him,” she swallowed. “I’m curious, Dr. Balard, a lot of people here seem to have connections to the States.”

“Of course, physicists are some of the world’s best jet-setters, unfortunately not always of their own choosing. When funding for one lab is cut, the lab farms out its physicists to another site, sometimes for three, five years. Lives are changed, disrupted, divorces… Often one’s home lab becomes a mere pied-à-terre… For many years the brain drain has been running in reverse, since so little goes on in America… But of course you know all this…”

“Of course. Do you still keep in touch with anyone there?” T. J. asked as nonchalantly as she might, peering at one of the Roman vases that adorned the desk.

Balard leveled his big shining head at her. “Why do you ask?” he said, less with suspicion than with perplexity.

“You said you were Leonard’s student, that’s all. Are any of your own students in Austin?”

“Perhaps, but for the past years I have had virtually no contact with anyone at CFRC, except for those who want to come here… Why have you come here, mademoiselle?”

She’d feared the question. “Just vacation, sir.” T. J. told him, winging it. “I’ve been pretty stressed out recently. I’d never been to Provence and Dr. Archangelsky thought I might like to visit ITER.”

“Better, mademoiselle, I should show you Avignon,” Balard said. “Tomorrow, if my schedule permits.”

“That might be very pleasant,” answered T. J., if we haven’t been deported.

“In any case, why don’t you be my guest for dinner zis evening, Mademoiselle… D’Abro, is it? and we can have a more leisurely conversation—”

At that moment Balard’s phone rang and he excused himself to the next room, saying the call would take a few minutes.

T. J. didn’t know what she was looking for, but she lost no time, walking around his uncluttered desk. A blotter occupied the desk’s center. She pushed aside a few papers. The blotter was a mess of notes, doodles, memos. It took a few seconds for the tangle to resolve. Emerging from the rest, the words Rasmussen Rasmussen Rasmussen Rasmussen, penned no fewer than four times. A cartoonish portrait next to the names with a sword stuck through its head. “I would slice him without a knife, good.” That was all.

T. J. started when she heard Balard sign off in the next room and quickly returned to the chair. The director general entered. “Please excuse the interruption,” he said. “That was ze Chinese director. India and China joined the program very late and have been a constant headache with their demands. Where were we? Dinner? Shall we say in two hours? My secretary will arrange rooms for you and Dr. Archangelsky at ze castle tonight.”

* * * *

After dinner, T. J. said to Slava, “There ain’t room in Fusion Town for Rasmussen and Balard both. Julius Cesar is gunnin for him, no question. Apart from detailing the ways he’d destroy Rasmussen, you know what he said over dinner?”

Of course Slava had no idea; he’d spent the past hours on the castle tower attempting to contact the people in the video they’d identified so far.

The Frenchman had leaned over to T. J. with wineglass in hand and tightened his lips. “Mademoiselle, you will forgive if my remarks earlier seemed, umm…heavy-handed. I am of course upset by zis week’s events. Were I to do in Rasmussen, the method I would choose would be much simpler, requiring neither money nor theft. I require merely ideas.”

“What do you mean?” T. J. asked, wrinkling her nose, checking for text messages.

“Mademoiselle, everyone hates Rasmussen. All that is required to make certain ASSET fails completely is for one of his team to feed him an idea.” Balard examined his wineglass. “It should be a bad idea, but one that appears…good. There are many of those in science, you know. In fusion, a cleverly bad idea, disguised as a good one, would be enough to detour your program for years—forever.”

When Slava heard this, it chilled him to the core. The scientific mills grind finely but ever so slowly. Balard was correct: in present circumstances little would be required to turn the impossible task before them into a catastrophe.

Archangelsky got to his feet atop the castle and stared at the light-flecked river below. T. J. was saying, “Slava, you gotta believe Balard’s planted a mole among you folks. I don’t know who, but Monsieur Director General sure wasn’t leveling with me about not havin contacts at CFRC.”

Slava suddenly wanted very much to get back to Texas.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Early Friday morning, en route to the lab, Nathaniel received a message from T. J. with a smiley; they’d reached their destination. Glad for that, he tore off the top sheet of the calendar as he arrived for the daily ignition meeting. Matsushima failed to appear and the meeting went precisely as far as yesterday’s. As the division heads logged off their Facebook pages, he announced he was shutting down access to social networking sites. He knew he’d just deprived them of mother’s milk.

The sensation that remained as they adjourned was one of futility absolute. While they stood paralyzed, the deadline had notched forward twenty-four hours. The single bright spot was that Abbuhl believed his team had identified all the Chinese bolts and that they could be removed. Kettering would contact Savannah River within the hour to make arrangements for new tritium shipments.

At Site Alpha, Nathaniel searched for Toshi, futilely. He returned to the MTF next door, thinking to send him a note, saw the on-screen warning again, halted. Instead, he tried to learn something about Moravec, whom he’d meet tomorrow. Machuzak uncovered much about GlobeTex, but its CEO left few electronic footprints, an extraordinary feat in the post-Google world. With little to show for his efforts, Machuzak found himself staring into the empty beaker of his cold-fusion apparatus, wishing, as always, that the thing would work.

* * * *

It was only at seven that evening, a day postponed, that Nathaniel turned onto Red Bud Trail in West Lake Hills, where natural twilight alone shrouded the streets. Probably another power outage. Electricity had been vanishing at state borders from the nascent smart grid, but in fact he’d probably never discover what exactly had happened. Since the local papers had folded, no one really knew what went on in this town… Ah, by the time Machuzak pulled into the Rasmussens’ driveway, the lights were back.

Theresa Rasmussen welcomed him at the door with a wineglass in her hand. Entering, Nathaniel kissed her on the cheek and complimented her on the elegant evening dress, which fairly slinked around her tall, almost bony figure. Theresa would have sooner fled town than be caught in a pair of blue jeans, Austin’s official uniform. Like Leonard she couldn’t escape an air of formality, breeding, Nathaniel had to call it, but she never allowed the likes of mongrel CFRC scientists to feel uncomfortable in her presence.

“What is it, Mac?” Theresa asked. “You look troubled.”

Machuzak chuckled grimly, accepted the proffered wine with gratitude and saluted Leonard, who already sat at the dinner table. Leonard slowly raised a hand in return. “I think I’ve faced more trouble in the past week than in the rest of my life all together.” After this day and its manifold problems he felt yet unfocused.

“Well, relax for a few minutes.”

Together they strolled through the house. Here a Japanese wall unit full of mementoes: honorary degrees from a dozen universities in the United States, Japan, China, Korea, France; a citation from the president of Korea, a bullwhip from graduating students, government medals. Here the rare books: French novels, Enlightenment philosophy, a first edition of the Arabian Nights with illustrations by Dulac. Leonard’s presence overwhelmed and, as at his office four long days ago, Nathaniel felt he was treading on hallowed ground.

“I’m surprised Leonard collects fairy tales,” he said, leafing through the Arabian Nights, but the illustrations, soft and suffused with kindness, failed to stir him. “He always assured me that reality is far more interesting than any literature.”

“That’s why he’s a scientist. Those are mine,” Theresa replied, though her answer hardly surprised him any less and he asked what she found in them. “Truth,” she said. “It’s not just in tokamaks, you know.”

They walked into the rec room. There, one of those walking machines for the hyper-energetic, complete with drink holders, fiber-optic connection. Behind it an African mask, bold, modern in its lines, frightening. Opposite, a clay sculpture, a nude, half finished. “Is that yours?” Nathaniel asked with curiosity.

She nodded. Nathaniel hadn’t known Theresa was a sculptress, but she protested that she wasn’t very good. He said she was wrong. “With Leonard’s health I… I haven’t been able to work much recently. Sometimes I get upset and smash everything, Just…” With that she bit her lip and turned away. Slashes disfigured the piece’s legs, arms.

Nathaniel found no reply. Leonard was dying; that was the long and short of it. For the first time Nathaniel noticed gray on Theresa’s ordinarily brown hair, and it seemed to him that she’d cut it short, the thing women do in a crisis.

She led him by the arm back into the living room. The wooden beams arching across the space, separating skylights, gave the fabulous house a rustic and Oriental feel. They stopped before the big windows overlooking Austin. Behind the house, the setting sun threw a soft purple veil over the city. Downtown, the mirrored buildings cast back the light, although little trim was left on after dark these days; farther north the university’s tower glowed a faint orange.

“Did UT win a game today?” Theresa asked with the tone of someone who has been sidelined from world events.

Nathaniel shrugged no less than she. The window glass, separating them from the town, represented exactly how he felt. Austin, The University, belonged to another planet.

“Well,” said Theresa with sudden cheer, “you’ve had three minutes. What is it?”

Nathaniel focused on the music that had been playing all the while. “Dies Irae from Zelenka’s D minor requiem, I believe.”

Theresa smiled. “You’re very hard to fool.” She dropped into silence for a moment, then, “Do you think you can do it, Mac?”

“No. It’s impossible,” he answered flatly, “but we’ll go down trying.”

“Don’t say that to Leonard.” She led him toward the dining room. “And Leonard’s told me what happened,” she said, disappearing into the kitchen.

* * * *

Machuzak sat down across from Leonard, confused. “You’ve told her about the sabotage?” he whispered.

Leonard nodded with difficulty. “She is my wife, you know.”

Nathaniel found himself concerned and relieved. Too many people were learning about the true state of affairs, but he was thankful that he wouldn’t have to lie to Theresa.

When she reappeared with salads for the two of them and soup for Leonard, Theresa paused to light candles and asked how Nathaniel was holding up. “The worst thing is that since this thing happened, I have to force myself to look people in the eye. I walk down hallways, crossing them off some mental checklist of personalities, motives, opportunities, catching words in my throat, glancing over my shoulder, wondering if in the next hour, minute, the machine is going to be hit again—or blown to bits. It’s the strangest sensation I’ve ever known—distrusting one’s friends. I… I know so little about them. I guess I’ll have to live with it.” Throughout Theresa and Leonard remained silent, expressions downcast. “Otherwise, I’ve enlisted a, umm, private detective and we’ve started an investigation. We have almost no clues, but she and Slava got to ITER today.”

Leonard started, such as he was able. “ITER, why?” he said slowly.

Nathaniel disclosed that they’d received communications from somebody there who apparently knows something. “That’s all I can tell you.” He omitted the information that the someone was a virtual dragon who’d morphed into an armadillo.

“Jules Balard will do everything to prevent us from attaining ignition,” Leonard continued with genuine alarm. “I’ve known him thirty years. He’s the worst son of a bitch on the face of the planet.”

“I can’t believe he would go so far as to sabotage Prometheus!” Nathaniel exclaimed. “That’s preposterous!”

With difficulty Leonard wiped away a line of soup dribbling down his chin. He reminded Nathaniel that Prometheus had been sabotaged once. The only question was, Who would do it twice? “I wouldn’t put it past him,” he spat. “The man steals everything he can get his hands on. He has stolen so many ideas of mine that he blocked me from winning the Nobel Prize.”

The candlelight could not disguise the anger contorting Rasmussen’s face. Nathaniel had never seen the older man display such vehemence. “Tell me,” he changed the subject but put it directly, “did you authorize Krieg-Zuber to install a cell-phone wiping and jamming system? To block, monitor Internet traffic?”

Leonard’s expression now dissolved into one of pain. “Cy felt the lab was being run too loosely, that the Mission was being compromised. Four years ago he decided that something needed to be done. I had other responsibilities and did not pay much attention, Mac. You understand, don’t you…?”

“Len,” Nathaniel replied, staring at him in disbelief, “while you weren’t paying attention, The Terminator transformed the lab from a scientific establishment into a—You know why I am at Alpha Site—” Without thinking he slammed his fist on the table, nearly overturning his glass. “He’s already threatened to take over again as soon as he’s able…”

Nathaniel recounted their conversation from two days ago, but Rasmussen simple refused to believe it. “You must be exaggerating,” he said.

“Mark my words.”

“Maybe you could appoint him your deputy,” Theresa suggested.

Nathaniel merely stared, as if she’d made a bad joke. Leonard thought the doctors had sidelined Krieg-Zuber for several months, but agreed to speak to him. Then as Theresa served salmon, he pressed Nathaniel for his ignition strategy. Nathaniel described the fruitless meetings, his determination to include Matsushima, the opposition to that on all sides, including Matsushima’s. “The worst thing is the lack of ideas.”

To Nathaniel’s disappointment, Leonard offered no proposals that he hadn’t already heard, adding only, “It might help to pray.” At his own remark, a dark twinkle appeared in Rasmussen’s eyes and he said, “Austin is the buckle of the Bible Belt more than ever before. We’ll hire an televangelist to uncover biblical passages prophesying fusion and set up an eight-hundred number to raise funds.” It was a relief to see the unexpected flash of good humor, despite…and Nathaniel smiled for the first time this evening.

“Could we start a Mideast war to drive up oil prices?” Machuzak asked, not entirely facetiously.

“I tried it once,” Leonard answered with perfect gravity. “Unfortunately, there is always a war in the Mideast. I also promised the Saudis for a sum not to develop fusion—naturally I intended to funnel the money into ASSET—but they refused the bribe. Neither has Congress accepted my repeated observation that we could develop fusion for what they spend each month defending oil fields.”

Leonard’s voice bore no trace of its famous April Fool’s Day impishness and it gave Nathaniel pause; he seemed to be telling the truth. Failing as always to imagine the exalted circles the director traveled in, Nathaniel changed the subject to Moravec. Here too Leonard was of little help. As it turned out, they’d met only virtually. “There is something strange about him,” Leonard conceded, but added that GlobeTex’s chief was no fool and a hero to environmentalists. Before Nathaniel could press him for weaknesses, Leonard asked to be excused. Theresa helped him to the bedroom and returned shortly, suggesting that she and Nathaniel adjourn to the living room.

* * * *

They stood again by the front windows with Austin in the distance. Nathaniel said he was sorry, Leonard’s illness must be very difficult for her.

Theresa nodded, took a drink. “It’s given me time to prepare. ‘You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.’ That was Augustine, wasn’t it?”

She’d done it. Theresa’s internal dialogue had taken her across continents and momentarily short-circuited Machuzak’s ability to follow.

“Oh, I was just thinking of the tower,” she said, sitting, “that’s all.”

Nathaniel frowned, at himself. He perceived that at this moment Theresa Rasmussen herself was not excepted from his past days’ revolving unease that he was surrounded by strangers. For all their years of acquaintanceship what did he know of Theresa? At a party, here, when Krieg-Zuber was pontificating that Einstein was the most important person of the last century, she casually asked him, What about the researchers who had vanquished tuberculosis? The inventors of birth control? Stalin? And what after all was one century? The Byzantine Empire had lasted fourteen. The Terminator was soon noticed to be missing from the party.

Theresa was no professional historian. Coming from a well-to-do family, Nathaniel doubted she was a professional anything. She’d been groomed to be the gracious wife of an important man, but ornamentation didn’t suit her. Sprung from college, she hoisted a pack onto her shoulder and set off. Europe, Africa, Asia; Machuzak wasn’t sure why or where. To touch Earth. Her wanderjahr lasted until the years left her rootless, and she returned. Once married, she headed committees and arts organizations. No less than Leonard, Theresa disdained idleness, and when she was not leading worthy charges, she delved into all sorts of strange byways. Her tastes ran in every respect to the obscure. She rejected the Great Men theory of history and was convinced that most of what is important in the world has gone unrecognized and unrecorded.

Nathaniel knew that much. He once asked why her aversion to jeans and she replied, “It smacks of indiscipline.” In an age when 120 characters counted as epic, he’d rarely seen her without a book, often printed.

Theresa patted the spot on the couch by her side. “Sit,” she said.

He obeyed. “I think I must disappoint Leonard,” he said.

“Why no,” her eyebrows lifted. “He’s always said you had some of the best physical intuition of anyone he’d ever met. You just saw how an experiment would turn out. That’s why he made you a division head. I’m sorry you haven’t gotten farther at the lab. I think it’s because you’re too honest. You’re the most honest person I know, Mac. It’s a bit quaint in this age, wouldn’t you agree?”

Machuzak stood again. “I’d rather be quaint and forgotten than take after some others and be shrouded in glory. Theresa, you can be sure that during this past week I’ve found it difficult to be as honest as I’d like. Slava’s right. Google changed the definition of honesty. It’s optional now. In science too. These days, I don’t always remember why I got into this business, but you can be sure that by the time all this is over, I will have found out.”

“Bravo, Nathaniel, bravo!” Theresa exclaimed, clapping, but Machuzak felt embarrassed, as if he had revealed too much.

“Maybe it’s time for me to leave,” he said.

She stood, took his arms, searched his eyes. He and Theresa were both in that plateau of years where it is impossible to guess another person’s age, and he had always assumed, merely, that she was slightly older than he. Theresa ran her hands down his arms and lay her head against his chest, crying softly. Flustered, he allowed her to remain for several moments with his arms around her, then gently released himself. She kissed him lightly on the lips, lingered a beat too long, and he disappeared into the night.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Well before dawn on Saturday, a ringing next to his ears shattered Machuzak’s dreams. Bedbug. “Doc, we’re going to be a little late. I’ll call ya later,” she said and abruptly hung up. He’d intended to rendezvous with T. J. and Slava on his return from Dallas, where he was to meet Moravec. Puzzled, unable to return to sleep, he roused himself, headed to the lab, watched Hasschler and Kettering nearly come to blows at the ignition meeting, cursed, received the first resignations on his desk, cursed again and departed for the airport.

Garrett had put his private jet at his disposal and two hours after he’d left CFRC, Nathaniel entered the domain of Moravec, GlobeTex’s CEO. After the call five days ago he did not know what to expect—male, female or otherwise. Stepping into the huge corner office Machuzak was equally unable to decide whether it had been modeled after a Hollywood set or vice versa. The plush carpet, the heavy purplish drapes. The rosewood conference table. The 3-D displays, remote conferencing studio, scale models of solar plants, a wallful of awards and citations from environmental organizations.

The opening pleasantries. A tall suited figure, in no way resembling the one he’d seen once before, stepped out from behind the desk and extended her hand; today Machuzak was willing to guess at the gender, but he remained unsure whether facing him was a living human being or a bot. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said in a voice no more devoid of intonation than a Californian’s. “Who am I? It’s difficult to keep a low profile in this day and age, so I hide in broad daylight. I rarely make public appearances, employ doubles—no two of whom look alike—project various virtual images to confuse the enemy, if you will. Call it electronic chaff. I find it keeps the intruders at bay, not knowing exactly who they’re dealing with.”

Multiple personas, Machuzak thought, not unlike any Web citizen. Perhaps Moravec has forgotten who she is. “I should think it would spur curiosity, not decrease it,” he said.

Moravec smiled faintly but didn’t answer. “I know you are here to talk about the ignition deadline. Let’s get down to it, shall we? Scotch?”

Nathaniel thanked his host for meeting him, and on a Saturday, accepted the proffered chair but declined the scotch. Moravec sat down stiffly opposite him, across a small lounge table. The being facing Nathaniel was taller than he, elegantly if sexlessly dressed, with silvering hair and a pale complexion that spoke of rare hours beneath the sun. He couldn’t read her expression, which seemed of one accustomed to intimidate crossed with a discomfort at live conversation. It was not altogether unkind, but Machuzak chose his words carefully nevertheless.

“Many people at the lab have long felt that your membership in our consortium was a ploy, that GlobeTex intended to shut us down at the right moment. That does appear to be what you are doing—”

“—to eliminate the competition from fusion, just as GM destroyed public transportation, the Lear engine and early electric cars. Yes, I’ve heard that theory myself.” To Nathaniel’s surprise, Moravec revealed a slight bemusement. “In fact, apparently I staged last week’s accident to give GlobeTex an excuse to pull out.”

You took the words out of my mouth.

“Mac, you’ll agree—I understand everyone calls you Mac; is that okay?” she said that with a typical female intonation, confusing Nathaniel further. “You’ll agree that there would be little point in such a move given that our contract expires in six months…minus a few days.”

Again anticipated. Machuzak leveled his gaze. “You know that deadline can’t be met.”

Moravec reacted only by standing and turning away. “I’m sorry. There’s no choice in the matter. We’ve been putting far more money into your lab than the Republic or federal government. For a time Leonard Rasmussen convinced me that success was inevitable. He was, it appears, exaggerating. You may have heard that a controlling interest in our company has been bought by the Germans, who are much more enthusiastic about solar than fusion, especially with ITER causing so much controversy. GlobeTex’s current plans are to establish the world’s largest wind farm and solar facility in the panhandle, and push harder on cellulosic ethanol along the Brazilian model. I’m sure you’ll agree that America’s detour to corn-based ethanol was a total failure.”

A diversionary tactic, Machuzak thought, but he did agree. Ethanol was, in a word, stupid. It wasn’t energy efficient and its development only caused people to starve elsewhere. “I didn’t come to talk about ethanol,” he said. “I came to ask you for more time.”

“How much?”

“A commercial fusion plant is still decades away. To demonstrate feasibility, ignition, a few years…four, five…”

Moravec chuckled while pausing before the award wall. “Mac, you’re talking like your predecessors have for seventy years. We took a big risk investing in CFRC. People who support me are opposed to fusion—these days they’re leaning toward ordinary fission now that Japan is forgotten—and GlobeTex is not prepared to wait any longer.”

“Two years—give us two years.” Nathaniel suddenly felt as if he were bargaining with the devil in a three-button jacket.

The CEO turned from the wall, raised her glass toward the physicist. “Tell me, Mac, what are the odds of success in two years?”

“Ten percent,” Nathaniel replied, flinching internally, as he well knew the meaninglessness of placing odds on a single event.

“Not a risk any businessman would accept. Leonard would have answered one hundred percent.”

“He would have lied. I am not Leonard.”

“To your disadvantage, Mac.”

That cut. Machuzak knew that he had no experience in these matters and must be coming across as a neophyte. “A year,” he said.

Moravec laughed, this time Nathaniel might have said sardonically, and absently spun the blades of a miniature wind turbine standing on the desk. “If the odds are ten percent in two years, surely they are less in one.”

“Tell me,” said Nathaniel, now rising, “imagine we do the impossible and achieve ignition in six months.” He stepped toward the reclusive CEO. “Then…?”

For the first time since the audience began, Moravec paused. “A fair question. We are obliged to extend your contract, I suppose.”

“You suppose. For how long?”

At this, the executive’s silence was slightly, perceptibly longer. Machuzak realized that she, it, hadn’t considered the contingency.

“That would depend.”

“On…?”

“On how promising the results look, I imagine.” Moravec glanced away, the discomfort Nathaniel had noticed upon entering flashing briefly.

“You wouldn’t accept ignition as promising?”

“I didn’t say that. But as I understand it, the definition of ignition is not so clear-cut. Is ignition for one second ignition?”

One second is an eternity in physics. “You’re shifting the goalposts.”

Moravec set down her glass, no smile now. “Mac, do not class me with those reactionary politicians who have ruined Texas by fighting restrictions on carbon, fuel standards or research into alternate energy.” For an instant the CEO’s voice was infused with a sad anger. “I too am of the future. But I no longer see fusion as part of that future.”

She said the last in an earnest, nearly importunate tone. Nathaniel nevertheless perceived that Moravec’s answer was a shameless evasion. She, it, had no intention of rescinding the deadline. “You’ve never visited the lab, have you?”

“Only by remote.”

At that instant, her cell phone rang. The ringtone was a jaunty one, unusual, and a few seconds passed before Nathaniel placed it as an electronic version of the Nisi Dominus from Monteverdi’s Vespers. Moravec cut her caller short, saying she was occupied, and returned to her guest.

“Why don’t you visit, see what you are destroying?” Nathaniel said before Moravec could resume speaking.

“I don’t relish the thought of being blown to bits,” she replied.

Nathaniel tilted his head. “What makes you think that would happen?” he asked curiously.

“No reason,” Moravec shrugged, “undue suspicion. I suppose I owe you that much, but I’ll be traveling for the next six weeks. Make an appointment with my secretary.”

They stood. As Nathaniel prepared to leave, he noticed on Moravec’s shelf Sun Tzu’s Art of War, beloved of movie executives. “Doesn’t Sun Tzu write that it is better to take a state intact than ruin it?” remarked the scientist.

“If possible,” reacted Moravec with surprise.

“He also writes that moral superiority is the first weapon in waging war.” Nathaniel shook Moravec’s hand and said he’d make the appointment.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Early Saturday morning, as they left Cadarache Castle, Slava had found a message waiting in the foyer. He opened the envelope and handed its contents to T. J., who read, “Your presence in Cadarache is not required.” Lost in thought, Archangelsky lagged behind while she walked in the brisk air down the steps through the garden and toward the parking area. Suddenly, she froze, and in that instant the two were buffeted by a deafening roar as their car went up in flames. Even now her instincts told her to take cover; she pulled the physicist after her three steps and together they dove behind a five-hundred-year-old stone wall. When their ears had stopped ringing, the two got to their feet, dusted themselves off. T. J. pulled a leaf from Archangelsky’s beard but did not pause to ask for an explanation. As the castle staff came running, she gripped him by the arm, marched him to the other end of the lot and shoved him into an idle taxi.

* * * *

Only late that evening did Machuzak link up with Slava and T. J. at the Salt Lick in Driftwood. Even as Nathaniel entered the rough-hewn lodge, choking on the smoke that poured from the barbeque pit, D’Abro and Archangelsky signaled him from a bench in a far corner. Despite the dimness of the place, he perceived that the expressions worn by the pair went beyond jet lag.

They ordered brisket and ribs, which arrived on paper plates, beer in cups. Only a couple of Republic of Texas Defense Force militiamen immersed in computer games a few tables away and emitting alien shrieks disturbed the unusual quiet.

With an expression that appeared no less grim to Slava and T. J. than theirs to him, Nathaniel shook his head, ran his fingers over the wooden table scarred with knife wounds and began. “Nobody has any ideas. Toshi has vanished. People have begun to quit.” This morning: one tech, two engineers, a physicist. He reported his negative results detecting nitrogen and SF6 in the surge room, to which T. J. smiled faintly, and he then relayed his meeting with Moravec. “He, she is a new species, homo virtualis. I’m not even sure I met the Moravec, but I’m convinced whoever or whatever I met can’t rescind the deadline even if she, it wants to. Someone is forcing her to do this. I invited her to the lab, but…”

The deadline remained, immovable. The wheels of their great task were slowly beginning to turn. At this very moment, cooling-water checks, leak checks of the neutral beams would be proceeding. In the next day or two, techs would seal up the torus, further leak checks… The bakeout could take weeks. The cooldown would overlap but a month might yet pass before the desperate games could begin. Even Moravec could not fast-forward Nature. “Did you find the dragon?” Nathaniel asked, suddenly impatient.

Archangelsky and T. J. glanced at each other. “We got video of some people at chess tournament and have identified them,” replied Slava somberly. Dima, true to his word, had found the names in the administrative offices and Slava received them over the Atlantic. “This is not main thing—”

“Did you find—”

“Doc,” said T. J., “those ITER people don’t like us.” To Nathaniel’s cocked head, Slava reluctantly described the corridor scene between him and Balard. When he finished, D’Abro added, “What you called a race with ITER before is gonna look like a pissant go-kart in a bowl of Cheerios compared to what’s shapin up now. Believe me.”

Machuzak glared ferociously at the Russian. “Yaroslav Borisovich, I send you to ITER on a reconnaissance mission and you start a war! I can’t believe…!”

“Sorry,” said Slava.

“Are you sure Balard would…?” Machuzak managed once he’d calmed.

T. J. described her encounter with the director, the note on his desk, the dinner conversation. “Doc, my theory is he’s planted a mole here at CFRC who’s determined that ASSET will fail—permanently.”

Nathaniel disdained nonscientists’ use of the word theory for any idle proposition. Archangelsky scorned it no less but said, “She’s right, boss.”

To prove her case, D’Abro shoved a phone toward Machuzak. “The whole conversation is there, and the voice stress analysis. Wanna hear it?”

Nathaniel was still absorbing the fact of the phone lying before him when Slava revealed what had happened that morning at Cadarache Castle. As the Russian finished, Nathaniel stared at him as if nothing had penetrated. Nothing had, so impossible was it to believe what he’d just heard. “You with us, brat?” said Slava, waving his hand before the other’s eyes.

After an infinite space, Machuzak blinked. “I’m glad you are, brat… Who knew you were there?”

“By this morning? Every plasma physicist in the world, probably.”

“Balard sure wouldn’t have forgotten,” put in T. J. “It was just a warning. We weren’t anywhere near the car and if they’d intended to kill us, they would have.”

It seemed preordained when at that moment Nathaniel’s phone signaled. Holding his breath, he logged on to the Real World and, sure enough, found the dragon perched on a crag above the same volcano. “There will be another,” the dragon roared with flared nostrils, and took wing.

Its wake left the three of them staring. After eons T. J. breathed. “Believe me now, Doc? We’ve got to locate those folks in the video.

“I’m working on it,” Slava said.

Even as they were en route to Europe, T. J. had contacted the Real World administrators to get the dragon’s user information, but they naturally demanded a warrant. “That’ll be tricky with me on leave. The other choice is to hack in.” She abruptly lit up. “Can you boy scientists do it?”

Machuzak glanced at T. J., to the phone on the table, back to her. At length he said, “Maybe with enough—. I don’t like the idea—”

“When it’s this urgent—?” T. J. was staring at him with the ravenous eyes of a teenage download pirate.

“Damnit, Bedbug, it’s illegal!” Nathaniel shouted loudly enough so that the militiamen glanced up from their computer games. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.” All of them stared at the Real World volcano bubbling on the screen, as if to decide who was going to capitulate first. “No,” Machuzak finally shook his head, “I’ve had it up to here with people telling me to do the wrong thing all week. What’s happened to this world?”

“To freedom of information,” Slava raised his glass.

“Look,” Nathaniel went on, “if we hack into the Real World we’ll only end up with a whole daisy chain of proxy server addresses that’ll lead nowhere. What we need is the Real World’s cooperation to snag Mr. Dragon next time he logs on. If we can trace him in real time, we might at least get a geographical fix.”

“We should have thought of this before flying to Europe,” muttered Archangelsky.

“We’ve got to smoke out the mole,” T. J. insisted. “I tell you, when Balard told me he had no contacts here anymore, I believed him about as much as I’d believe that Pam Anderson’s tits were real.”

“Because of a cheap piece of software?” Nathaniel mumbled to himself, pushing her phone away in disgust. It did remind him, though… “Krieg-Zuber has evidently been monitoring email traffic for some time.” He told them about the back-room splitter. “You might check if there’s been any communication with Balard.”

Now T. J. cocked her head. “Much obliged, Doc. Are you sure it’s legal?”

“I’m not, The Terminator apparently was.” An awkward silence descended but then Nathaniel’s eyes suddenly twinkled. “You know, why wait for the dragon’s next appearance? Why not lure him online?”

“How?” T. J. asked, puzzled.

He wasn’t sure. “Announce a meeting: ‘radical ideas for ignition.’ God knows we need some. Maybe he’ll show up, in one avatar or another. If we’re lucky, the Real World can trace him while we’re on.”

“This is not-bad idea,” said Slava, “disinformation.”

T. J. agreed. “Good to know you’re thinkin, Doc; it’s worth a try.”

Nathaniel nodded and fell to contemplation. Slava called a halt then, saying he needed some sleep. The lines on his face were evident and D’Abro wasn’t looking any better. With a wave Archangelsky abandoned the other two in the parking lot, and since T. J. had left her car at home, Nathaniel offered her a lift.

* * * *

She lived in Hyde Park north of the university, which after all these years retained its reputation as a hippie enclave. Machuzak pulled into the gravel driveway in need of weeding and suggested that she also hit the sack. T. J. nodded wearily, getting out of the car, but after a few steps halted and with a backward glance asked if he wanted to come in for a drink. He agreed. She unlocked the door to the smallish house, frowzy and single storied, switched on a light and apologized for the disarray. Ironing board in the dining room, clothes scattered hither and yon, books piled studentlike in corners, on unvarnished pinewood shelves. T. J. dropped her sweater onto the sofa and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Nathaniel to glance over her collection. The young woman had not lied about being a physics groupie. Prominent in the stacks, Entropy: The Key to America’s Decline; Cash In on Climate Change; 1001 Theories of Everything; Reenchanting Everyday Life Through Quantum Mechanics. He smiled, pondering the chasm between such treatises and the nitty-gritty of science, noticed the genuine biology, physics and chemistry texts interspersed among them.

T. J. returned then, holding out a glass of bourbon, saying she was too keyed up now to sleep.

“I can imagine,” Nathaniel answered, as she cleared a place on the sofa for them to sit. “First week on the job, you pass a radiation course, almost kill yourself in a tokamak, nearly become a murder victim… Not bad.”

“Yeah,” she smiled faintly. “You know, Doc, when I resigned I was feelin real burnt out, too much from all sides—work, cyberspace, chores… I’d been thinkin of spending some time in one of those Buddhist retreats up in the hills. The online ones didn’t help. My plan doesn’t seem to be workin out, does it?” She smiled dimly again. “And we still don’t have any idea of what’s goin on.”

“It’s been less than a week, T. J. Scientific problems often take years…”

“Investigations go cold in a day.” She plunked down on the sofa and motioned for him to sit. “You know what was goin through my mind at ITER, Doc?” she said, facing him unabashedly. Nathaniel shook his head. “That I missed you.”

Reddening, Machuzak swallowed and managed to say, “I missed you too.” He realized he meant it.

“What do you want to do?”

Nathaniel was taken aback, here, not earlier than midnight, watching D’Abro lean closer with her elbow resting on the back of the couch. Her hair flopped over her face, almost into her glass; she flicked it back, chuckling in a way that was as embarrassed as he felt. “What do I want to do?” he said. “We have a job, T. J.”

“Upstanding Nathaniel doesn’t believe in mixing business with pleasure?”

Machuzak answered that intense situations bring every kind of…emotion…illusion. “We’re very different, you and me.”

“About as different as they come.” She made a nod that might have been taken for pensive and silenced her earpiece. “Opposites attract but don’t stick, huh?”

“Do they? Anyway, it’s dangerous, getting involved with coworkers, in science especially. Look at a woman the wrong way and—there’s hell to pay.”

Again D’Abro chuckled, rolled back against the sofa with her eyes toward the ceiling. “Doc, I’m not a scientist, in case you’re still confused on that point. I know. No office romances, too unpleasant when they go sour. No next-door neighbors, same reason. Forget subordinates, superiors, students, you name it. In fact, the only place when romance is legal is when it’s…virtual.” T. J. sat up, clasping her glass with two hands and took a drink. “You know,” she said abruptly, “according to your radiation manual, the greatest health risk to a male is staying single. Ten years off your life.”

“Are you suggesting I take up smoking?” Nathaniel asked dryly.

“You’d gain seven years.”

Nathaniel couldn’t help but laugh, not perceiving where these two people were heading. Neither were the sculpted curves of T. J.’s figure lost on him as she lay against the couch with her eyes half closed and her blouse loosely buttoned. He was tempted to reach out his hand, and she might have welcomed it, but he hesitated. “Surely,” he said, finally, “someone as attractive as you must have…commitments.”

He sees that T. J. finds the words funny. “Umm, occasional commitments,” she replies. “You already know I have trouble stickin around.”

“Then why, I mean why me?”

“I told you I’m a physics groupie.”

“Anyone at the lab can explain what a plasma is.”

Again she rolls her head toward him. “Maybe, but not everyone has the Bhagavad Gita lyin on his desk.”

Without thinking, Machuzak stretches his hand across the small space and runs his finger down her cheek. She does not oppose him, indeed attempts to nuzzle his hand. “The Gita won’t help with tokamaks, but I keep hoping it will help with life. It reminds me to do my duty, that’s all.” Somehow he has not expressed himself well, he feels, an especially common state with women. “T. J.,” he says, reluctantly withdrawing his hand against all desire, “we have a long row to hoe and… I’m not sure you entirely trust me.”

She looks up at him in her fatigue. The moment may be slipping. “You keep a lot to yourself, Doc, you really do. Or else you’re so damn naïve that you have nothing whatever to hide. I’m not sure which is scarier. It’s the wrong century for someone like that.” Her blue eyes are locked on to his, as wide as he’d seen them, limpid and imploring. “What haven’t you told me?”

He shakes his head, puzzled.

“I hope you’re right, partner.”

She loops her arms around his neck and nestles her head against his shoulder. A moment later she is asleep. Machuzak sits there until late becomes early, gently disentangles himself and goes home.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Machuzak again arrived early at the MTF, a foam mattress and sleeping bag in tow. After yesterday’s warning from the dragon he found himself edgy, convinced against his better judgment that another attack on Prometheus was inevitable, imminent. The insane events at Cadarache left no doubt of the prognosis and what he’d feared most was taking place: he could not empty his mind of suspicion.

A mole? Who could Balard have turned? Who at CFRF reviled the program so fiercely to throw the race to ITER? Machuzak began scanning a mental list of CFRC scientists who’d worked on ITER or visited Cadarache itself. He lost count. Hasschler, Krieg-Zuber, Slava… No, not even Archangelsky was jaundiced, crafty enough. Nathaniel clasped his head between his hands.

The hiss of a valve caused him to jerk upright. He breathed, thought to check ITER’s daily report and instantly regretted it: Balard had moments ago announced that he would bypass deuterium-deuterium experiments altogether and go straight to the high-powered deuterium-tritium mix within a week. Machuzak struck the desk hard with his fist. “Damn you, Archangelsky!” he shouted. The empty lab echoed with his vain curse but as T. J. had predicted, the race between ITER and ASSET was no longer one between pissant go-karts in a bowl of Cheerios.

He cast about for a way to turn the situation to their advantage and ordered the nearest webcam on. Moments later he’d recorded an announcement that CFRC scientists, under the leadership of Toshifume Matsushima, had conceived a radical new magnetic field configuration that would allow ASSET to achieve ignition in record time. Experiments would begin within weeks. It was a complete lie, but Machuzak added an upbeat soundtrack and after sucking in his breath readied his finger to release it to the world.

Was he out of his fucking mind? They yet had no warrant to tap the Real World. What if the ruse succeeded and the dragon logged on today? They’d have gained nothing, absolutely nothing. Nathaniel lowered his finger.

* * * *

As he sat in the gloom-shrouded lab, chin resting on knuckles, the MTF’s third worker walked in. Nathaniel looked up, smiled faintly at Mercedes Ramirez. He hadn’t seen her in a full week. Seven days past the event, she appeared in a state of shock, eyes large, red, a sleepwalker’s. Perhaps it was the hour. Perhaps it was her.

“Hello, Mercedes,” he said.

She didn’t reply, exactly, instead pulled off her earbuds and shook out her hair, staring at him for a moment with a pinched, sullen expression. Without a word she walked into her lab, which adjoined his own. He followed and asked how she was doing.

“The whole thing freaked me out,” Mercedes at last answered. She stood facing him in a brown vest and set her portfolio on the bench. The space wasn’t much different from Machuzak’s own next door. “I’m sorry, I just didn’t want to come in.”

A few years younger than Nathaniel, Mercedes was more of their generation. Permanently plugged in and insensible to her surroundings, she could give T. J. a run for her money as poster child for the smartphone stare, the gaze into cyberspace that was the indelible brand of the age. Nathaniel often wondered why Mercedes had become a physicist. Like many of their contemporaries, she wielded video-game reflexes but was less than adroit with true experiments, having been schooled since birth to view a nuts-and-bolts laboratory as an artificial thing. A refusal to confront a world in which systems fucked up and could not be reset at the blink of an eye had become the most intractable dilemma facing modern science. For all his mathematical shortcomings, Machuzak at least respected the mathematical process. Mercedes regarded calculus, even algebra, as software. Like most CFRC hands, when presented with the simplest problem her first move was invariably to the computer. It never entered her mind that a mathematical problem might have an exact solution and that humans were capable of finding it, occasionally. The very concept of an exact answer had disappeared from the face of the Earth, as extinct as the dodo and the polar bear.

They’d briefly danced around an affair and Nathaniel couldn’t deny that she was an attractive woman. But despite her Latin name, Nathaniel found Mercedes to be brittle, uptight, taken to offense and imagined slights. She also suffered from that androgynous, sexless quality that seemed to be the hallmark of the few women who entered physics to this day. Machuzak readily conceded that she may well have felt the same about the men, but as he regarded her, he wished D’Abro were standing before him.

Had Mercedes taken up with Krieg-Zuber last year? Those were the whispers, but if anything was going on, they’d kept it under the radar and Nathaniel didn’t consider it his business. Had she’d ever worked at ITER? Yes—he scanned her face her uncomfortably—he thought she had. “I’ve invited Moravec to visit next month,” he said. “We’ll show her—”

“—Her?”

“Them, maybe. We’ll show her the MTF, the accelerator. It may be our last chance to convince her to rescind this hopeless deadline. Will you do the honors?”

At that moment a tool clattered loudly to the floor in the next room. “What was that!?” Mercedes Ramirez exclaimed, going stiff from head to toe.

Machuzak also flinched, against his will. “Something fell, that’s all… Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said, sniffling.

“Good, I’ll talk to you later. I’m late for today’s meeting.”

Nathaniel made a quick exit, leaving Ramirez standing sullenly in the MTF, wondering very much who she was.

* * * *

As the meeting, the paralysis he’d described to T. J. and Slava last night continued. The realization that one false step could send them down a blind, fatal alley had completely incapacitated the division heads. Hasschler was arguing that they couldn’t dare anything exotic. But if they refused to essay the radical, they’d fail. And Toshi? After leaving Mercedes Ramirez, Nathaniel scoured the MTF for him in vain. Archangelsky hadn’t showed either, and with jet lag from Europe he shouldn’t be sleeping late.

“Pierre Balard announced today that ITER will go to DT within the week,” Machuzak told them in the midst of it.

Instantly, the division heads sucked in their collective breaths as if they’d been punched in the stomach. They stared, but no brilliant suggestions came to their lips. In the vacuum, Fred Abbuhl distributed a list of immediate repairs: turbine on cryoplant pump #4 ; five high-voltage capacitors for pulse-cleaning; two klystrons for rf heating… Nothing major. Nor the stuff with which to serenade your true love. When all was said and done, Nathaniel understood, that was our problem—lack of romance. We are too much engineers.

* * * *

As he left the conference room a call came through. Krieg-Zuber, now at home from the hospital, on the line. “Fuck DD, old boy,” he commanded. “Go straight to DT.” Machuzak clicked off and blocked the number.

In the next moment he collided with D’Abro, who’d been looking for him. “Doc,” she said, with no trace of awkwardness from the previous night, indeed with some unspoken, melancholy intimacy, “I’ve been thinkin, maybe you do need someone on active duty. This is getting beyond my pay—”

Without a word, Machuzak silenced her, grabbed her arm and rounded up Slava. Outside in the fountain’s spray, T. J. revealed herself to be as on edge as Nathaniel himself. “Doc, another attack is a sure thing and I’m not in the position… Geez, I’m already calling in a couple favors to get a Real World subpoena and DNA tests.” She shook her head at a loss, then stared at Machuzak sadly. “Look, why don’t you put me on the accident investigation, if it’s not too late.”

“It’s not too late,” Machuzak said sympathetically, laying his hand on her shoulder.

She smiled faintly. “Then I can at least interview everyone who was in the power area. But I won’t even be able to take DNA elimination samples unless we break cover.”

“She’s right, boss,” Slava interrupted. “This covert ops business has strung us by the ham. Maybe best to get unstrung.”

Machuzak was surprised to hear this from Archangelsky the subversive, but evidently they’d all been thinking the same thing.

“Until we’re not,” D’Abro sighed before he could answer, “I’m gonna raid all those emails your former superiors have hoarded and flag Cadarache traffic. I’m also gonna bury myself in your personnel files and do a lotta cross-checking with what passes for your surveillance records. Believe me, I won’t surface before sundown, CSI reruns notwithstanding.”

They had no better plan. Slava remarked that he’d contacted most of the Europeans in the photo, and that they all seemed to be in the clear. “No reply yet from Asians and I doubt asking whether they are posing as dragon in Real World will help. Best bet is to snag Dragonmaster next time he logs on. We need their help, with or without warrant.”

Nathaniel then revealed the video he’d made and come to within seconds of launching two hours ago. “I almost torpedoed the show.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Doc, you’ll be a rock star soon enough. The minute we get the Real World’s cooperation, you’re online.”

“A microsecond after I’m online, everyone at CFRC will know I’m lying and about ten milliseconds after that so will ITER. We have no ideas, none, to achieve ignition in record time.”

Archangelsky stroked his beard, shrugged. “We merely adjust truth to lie. Governments do this all the time.”

“True,” nodded Machuzak with something that might pass for a smile. “Standard operating procedure.” He then got up and walked back toward the main building, preparing to wait, for exactly what he didn’t know.

CHAPTER TWENTY

T. J. was pissed off and scared. Pissed off because she was painfully aware that her training, life, had not prepared her for what she’d stumbled into. Why’d she let Mac talk her into such a mess? What was this “we’re all amateurs” bullshit? Pissed off enough, for sure, to request the sheriff’s department’s cooperation in an official-like investigation, reminding them that CFRC was fronting the bill. Outsourcing sounded good to Austin; with the sheriff’s permission she filed for the Real World subpoena herself, fast-tracking it online. And now she fidgeted, waited. Damn, she had so looked forward to that Buddhist retreat.

Scared because she couldn’t comprehend her surroundings. For several days she’d been poring over surveillance files. Mac’d been right. There was no coverage, none, in the bowels of Prometheus. Whatever world this laboratory belonged to, she’d never seen its like at IMAX. Nor could she understand a tenth of the jargon she found in Krieg-Zuber’s email cache. Stubbornly she persisted, staring at her monitor until bleary eyed, cross-checking against personnel files images of anyone the cameras had caught at the pentagon entrances within twenty-four hours of the event, cross-checking her fingerprint matches against the same, checking all personnel files for scientists who’d worked at Cadarache, which were many. None had an obvious connection to Balard.

Damnit. T. J. abruptly got to her feet, walked out of the security office into the darkened lobby. Not a word she’d read during the past hour had penetrated. She walked over to the opalescent firebird, whose wings glistened even at midnight, and pressed her forehead to the display glass. For a moment she wondered again at the mad artisan who had spent months fashioning the thing. No multitasker.

Thoughts obstinately refusing to organize themselves, she checked her messages. Nothing new in the past ten seconds. T. J. glanced at the shadowy exhibits surrounding her and glumly conceded that, maybe, truly, she wasn’t cut out for science, at least at a place where the experiments took not seconds, not years, but lifetimes.

She returned to the office and, with a bad taste in her mouth but a curiosity she couldn’t deny, went through Mac’s file. He hadn’t spent time in Cadarache, but Slava had and neither much liked Krieg-Zuber. They’d already admitted bein in the power area before the accident. Krieg-Zuber’s database coughed up a dozen pairs of prints that matched those she’d found in the surge room; a few were too smeared to identify. How old they were she couldn’t know, but every name attached to the matches appeared on the access records. The only prints on the damned busbar were Mac’s, Slava’s and Lipman’s. Professional amateurs, sheesh. Oh, that strange reticence of his… She’d rarely ever met anyone so diffidently smart; she’d even asked him about it. “The Greeks tell us true valor has no need to call attention to itself,” he’d replied, smiling. She couldn’t understand. Not to advertise was practically un-American.

To hell with this. Now an official member of Lipman’s accident investigation, she sent the tech a list of people she wanted to interview tomorrow, but not until she spoke to Krieg-Zuber. She turned off the lights and slept on the floor.

* * * *

Only after Krieg-Zuber confirmed with Henderson that D’Abro was a new hire at CFRC did he agree to take her call. She spoke to him from the big field, amid the buffalos, figuring that put her out of range of cupped ears.

“How are you feeling, sir?” she asked the clean-shaven, imposing blond man of about Mac’s age who stared at her from a living room chair.

“Not badly, mademoiselle, thank you. The burns are healing, my left arm is still partially paralyzed and may take some months to return to normal, but have no fear, I intent to resume the directorship as soon as possible. Only the plebian doctors have prevented me from returning already.”

“As you know, we’re conducting an accident investigation,” T. J. said, observing even over the phone that the deputy director rarely blinked. “I need to know why you ran into the surge room against all safety regulations.”

“Mademoiselle,” Krieg-Zuber replied with visible, unblinking annoyance, “that has already been explained to Lipman. In my younger years I fixed tokamaks every day. By the time I arrived on the scene, technicians had already racked out the circuit breakers and the system should have been entirely discharged. Obviously it wasn’t. I may be a foolish statistic now, but this far from the first electrical accident at a laboratory. You shall determine the cause.”

“This is our intent, sir,” T. J. answered with complete honesty as a buffalo nuzzled her. “Apparently you told Dr. Machuzak that you felt dizzy in the surge room?”

At that Krieg-Zuber cast at her a wide-eyed startled glance. “I don’t remember much if anything about what happened, but yes, I told him that. Why did he ask?”

“Just a theory. He thought you might have fainted in the excitement.”

The convalescent snorted disdainfully. “Hardly likely, and irrelevant. Young lady, people like Machuzak have deluded themselves into thinking that their minuscule problems, observing the dent an ion makes in a piece of titanium, grants them mastery of the universe. These humdrum physicists, engineers—they are interchangeable, their ideas, their personalities. They can be bought and sold in bulk for discount rates. You certainly don’t realize it, but this war with ITER is the best thing that could have happened. Machuzak has no vision. A strange quirk of fate has catapulted him to the directorship, but be assured, he will not maintain that high position long.”

“May I ask, sir, what is your vision for the laboratory, the ignition campaign?”

“ITER is a historic boondoggle. It was never subjected to true scientific scrutiny; it was an entirely political decision and is billions of euros over budget. No one believes that it can achieve ignition—”

“Then why, sir,” interrupted T. J., petting the buffalo, “are you in a race?”

“We did not ask for this, but now we must win.” Krieg-Zuber clenched his fist. “The world must know that fusion can be a reality and for a smaller cost than ITER—”

“ASSET is a ten-billion-dollar machine, sir, and it’s a tokamak.”

“Not all tokamaks are identical, mademoiselle, and as CFRC is overwhelmingly privately funded, no one can accuse it of siphoning money from other research.”

“Could you tell me, sir,” it suddenly occurred to T. J. to ask, “what ideas you have contributed to ASSET to make it different from ITER?”

“Ideas? Miss D’Abro, that has been explained to you one minute ago,” he said with his unnerving stare. “Ideas in science are a dime a dozen. If one person doesn’t have an idea, another will. No one cares who has the ideas. The man who understands people, mademoiselle, he is the man who changes history. I have led this project. There can be no greater contribution.”

Krieg-Zuber’s scoff or sneer or condescension would have been impossible to surpass. “I see…” said T. J. pensively. “May I ask one other question? Have you worked at Cadarache?”

“I visited for a few months four or five years ago. What, young lady, can that possibly have to do with the accident?”

“Nothin really, but y’all seem like a big, incestuous family, you physicists. You’re friends with your rivals and rivals with your friends and have no allegiances except to the place you’ve parked your overnight bag. Well, thank you, Dr. Krieg-Zoober. I’ll send you a copy of the report.”

T. J. signed off, uncertain of Krieg-Zuber’s vision for Prometheus, certain that every one of these high-minded folks wanted fusion on their own terms and no one was about to retreat. She walked back across the field toward the pentagon. It was time to interview the techs.

* * * *

They all had plausible stories. Red Ehlers had been down there just twenty-four hours before the dedication, doing some last minute high-potting. What that meant, T. J. hadn’t the faintest, but in the gloomy dungeon he demonstrated, as did the other techs. She began to understand why judges hated expert witnesses.

Their resentment at recent events leaked through everything they said. “The Terminator saw two guys having a mock knife-fight with screwdrivers”—Frosty Patton spat on the floor—“and fired them on the spot. If they were still around, they’d have thrown the big ass into the surge room themselves.”

By evening, T. J. had a numbing headache and no more reason to believe one tech wanted to sabotage the machine more than the next—or had refrained. It seemed unlikely to her that the techs were involved. How would a tech have known she and Slava were in Cadarache? Well, Slava had said it: by the second day probably every plasma physicist in the world knew their location with GPS precision. That wasn’t the point. How many knew why they were there? A tech? No way. Had Balard guessed?

T. J. returned to the security office and stayed late again. The DNA tests came in that evening. Progress. There’d been a few samples on the busbar. She’d retrieved one of Slava’s hairs from her sweater after the Cadarache incident and one of Mac’s from her couch. With a knot in her stomach, she’d sent both in for testing. The results left no room for interpretation.

She’d also found a few hairs in the surge-room vicinity and those tests had come back too, but unless she broke cover she couldn’t get elimination samples. Fuck… She wandered again out into the lobby and peered into the firebird’s display case. “Why don’t you help, bird?” The unblinking jeweled eyes merely stared at her.

Abruptly T. J. glanced over her shoulder, but the only other occupants of the lobby were shadows and her own echo. She felt very stuck and she needed a drink. T. J. closed the security office door and this time went home.

* * * *

By morning the Real World under subpoena had turned over their logged IP addresses for Dragonmaster. Meeting Nathaniel and Slava early in the MTF, T. J. gave them the bad news. The addresses led to a server near Cadarache. The two physicists glanced at each other. “You were right, Mac,” she bowed. “It’s a proxy that disguises the original address.”

“I’d have been surprised had it been otherwise,” remarked Slava.

Machuzak pondered their situation. “I suppose that means we need another subpoena,” he eventually replied.

“Doc, you don’t get it. I can’t subpoena a French service provider. I’d need cooperation from the French law enforcement agencies, and to get that…”

She stared at him significantly, but Nathaniel had no intention of resurrecting his adolescent hacking skills; the idea daunted and disgusted him equally.

Archangelsky felt the same. “Looks like it’s time to launch your infomercial, Boss,” he said.

They huddled around the computer and Nathaniel posted his video, with enhanced graphics, on CFRC’s website and then on the big video sites. Forty-eight seconds later the first burst of rage and disbelief came back from ITER. Machuzak nodded. Good. By the time this morning’s ignition meeting was over, the announcement should have gone viral.

* * * *

The division heads were watching the video as Nathaniel entered the conference room and met him with fierce outcries from all sides. “What the hell have you done, Machuzak?” Diana Cochran shouted. “It’s a bald-faced lie.”

Absolutely. He feigned a smile and lied again: “It’s only to keep ITER off balance.”

At which Thad Hasschler exploded. “Off balance! You have made what was impossible inconceivable! Not only Balard, but the whole world will be breathing down our necks and know us for frauds!”

“If you don’t want the world to know us for frauds,” Nathaniel now answered icily, “I suggest you come up with some ideas. You’re way behind schedule.” With that he canceled further ignition meetings and left.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

An hour later, blogs being posted on the four corners of the Earth but no sign of Dragonmaster, Machuzak headed to the pentagon, hoping that if the damned physicists couldn’t keep a level head, his chief engineer could.

Nathaniel found Abbuhl in the test cell, where now two balloons of Edvard Munch’s Scream face guarded the entrance. Technicians had sealed up the torus a few days ago and had been pumping hard on it since. Leak checks were proceeding. Machuzak stood at Fred’s side watching the techs climb in and out of the cryostat as they sprayed helium gas over every surface of the inner vessel. Meters below, diagnosticians checked whether the helium showed up in the vacuum-pump exhaust.

“Looks good,” Andy Lipman reported. “Seals are tight.”

Machuzak audibly expelled a quantum of tension. They’d run into no major catastrophes, like the plastic pails or latex gloves that techs had sometimes inadvertently left in machines after the hand washing, household items which easily contained enough gas to destroy the vacuum they were attempting to achieve. More than once the discovery of such objects had cost them months while the tokamak was brought up to room pressure and reopened. The thought sobered: a rubber glove in the wrong place today would be the perfect sabotage. Our nemesis should have thought of it. But he hadn’t: after days of pumping the gauges would have already hit a latex iceberg.

“When can you begin the bake?” Machuzak asked.

“Mac,” said Abbuhl, “you know as well as I do that it takes a week to get down to operating pressure.” Meaning no pressure at all, one hundred billionth of an atmosphere.

Once there, Abbuhl would begin the vessel bake, heating the torus to nearly 400 degrees Celsius to drive out recalcitrant impurities and water. That would take…

“Mac, sir, even Balard can’t rush this. The bakeout before the dedication took two weeks.”

“Push it,” said Machuzak and winced even as he uttered the words.

Abbuhl glanced sideward at him. “Herr Doktor Professor, let ITER fuck itself.”

Nathaniel barely heard him; he was already considering helium. While the torus baked, the big cryostat surrounding it would be pumped out too. After ITER’s, it was the world’s largest vacuum vessel. More leak checks. The magnets themselves would then be flooded with liquid helium, slowly bringing them down to operating temperatures, 4.2 degrees absolute. Should they get there, the hottest place in the solar system would reside next to one of the coldest, only a vacuum jacket separating them. Machuzak was grateful that vacuums are the best insulator.

Three weeks for the cooldown. At the same time Abbuhl’s team would be checking out the heating systems. “How long to condition the neutral beams and the rf drives?” Nathaniel asked.

“Mac, it takes a month—you know that as well as I do.”

“Push it,” said Machuzak and left the test cell without waiting for the chief’s protest.

* * * *

He found Diana Cochran conferring with two of her engineers in the cryoplant, which occupied pentagon No. 3. The trio stood below the nitrogen factory with its boxlike plant towering above and its maze of multicolored pipe-works and holding tanks that resembled supersized hot dogs. To the best of Machuzak’s knowledge, it was the second-largest liquid nitrogen factory in the world and the helium factory near it was larger. They both churned 24/7, 365 days a year.

Nathaniel approached and perceived that Cochran’s expression was not welcoming. “What’s wrong?” he asked. The others could hardly hear him over the high-pitched whine of the compressors.

First she scowled. “We’ve been getting nonstop response videos about your commercial, Machuzak. You really raised the stakes with that one. We needed this like a hornet up our ass.”

“What else?” Nathaniel said; he always felt itchy around Cochran.

“One of the nitrogen refrigerators failed,” she answered above the noise. “We’re going to have to replace the motor.”

“What about helium? Abbuhl’s ready to start cooling.” That was a stretch.

“The tap is on.”

“Make sure it stays on. I want that machine superconducting in two weeks.” A larger stretch.

Cochran turned away from him and muttered something, which the noise rendered indistinct. He thought he heard, “If I were you, Machuzak, I’d pray.”

It suddenly felt like he’d been doing that his whole life.

* * * *

The afternoon had half run its course when Machuzak’s wrist, handset and office phone went off simultaneously. “This is it,” he whispered to Slava, who’d just stopped by. Too late he realized that it was not the Real World pinging him but an obscure, unfamiliar website. Even as they ran outside to the fountain they got a rough fix on its URL: Cadarache.

Within a moment Machuzak found himself walking along a desolate plain at twilight. To one side, on a beach under a black-red sun, he spied a group of small creatures, which for some reason he took to be the Eloi, huddled around a campfire while they filled the air with a final song. As he traveled along the plain, to either side stood ruins of past civilizations. Here the stark pillars of the Roman forum, there the colossal wreckage of the Bibi-Khanym mosque in Samarkand and the remains of Ulug-beg’s observatory. Farther on, the Parthenon, a pile of rubble that was once the great Buddha at Bamiyan, a half-excavated Pompeii with its ash-encrusted mummies, casts of citizens in the final moments of their lives as they futilely struggled to escape the inescapable. Nearby, the Qin Emperor’s tomb, with its row upon row of terra-cotta warriors, here headless, armless, lifeless.

As he passed the mummies, one rose and approached. “You have ignored my warnings,” it said in a thick Scottish brogue.

Not in the mood for games, Nathaniel grabbed the mummy by the throat. “Are you the saboteur or are you trying to help?” he demanded, his pent-up anger and frustration surging forth.

“If you persist, Prometheus will be destroyed,” the mummy said flatly with blank eyes that revealed nothing.

An instant passed before the words sank in. When they did, Machuzak reeled. Dragonmaster’s two previous messages might have been ambiguous. Not this one. “Who is going to destroy it, damnit?”

“Not to act is to act,” the mummy replied.

“Tell us what you know!” Nathaniel shouted but the avatar had already dissolved in his hands.

Under the fountain Archangelsky sighed. “At least there were no flying samurai.”

For his part, Nathaniel remained silent long. “Looks like Dragonmaster knew we’d staked out the Real World,” he finally said.

Slava glanced around, pausing at a wild turkey that had wandered onto the drive. “Not clear. Maybe he was just smart enough not to show up on same website too many times. He must realize we are after him.”

“Not to act is to act,” Nathaniel muttered, stomach knotted again as in the past days. “I destroy the machine by continuing on course…?”

“You could abandon the effort,” Slava proposed heavily. “We have no chance anyway.”

“Damnit!” Machuzak exploded again. “How can we do that now?”

Slava stared hard at him with a beard glistening from the spray. “Nat Edward’ich, avoid becoming Krieg-Zuber. You give the word, project ends. Lab ends. ITER wins. Machine survives, no one is hurt.”

“I give the word, Krieg-Zuber steps in.”

The two men stood facing each other until the Russian bit his lip. “Well, Dragonmaster has outfoxed us. He won’t appear in Real World again. We need way through that proxy server, or around it.” As Machuzak cursed aloud, Archangelsky offered the latest on the Cadarache video: “I contacted Asians. No surprise Japanese fellow is at what’s left of Naka Fusion Institute, the Korean was at KBSI—” that was the Korean Basic Science Institute, site of Korea’s fusion program. “The Chinese are at Hefei, of course.”

“They all check out?”

Slava nodded. “That leaves only one person unaccounted for.”

“Who’s that?”

“Whoever shot video.”

Nathaniel peered at the Russian. He had half a mind to throw Archangelsky on a plane, but said only, “Find him,” and, “You’re also going to start showing up to ignition meetings.”

“They’ve been canceled,” the Russian replied.

* * * *

The complexes at CFRC were already sparkling with the glow of evening when T. J. appeared at the MTF. She wasn’t happy to learn about the meeting at the End of the World, not one bit. What they needed was help from the FBI Cyber Division, which wasn’t gonna happen. “You say this server was Cadarache again?”

“Doesn’t mean a damn thing,” Machuzak growled, still seething, “and you know it.” He cut off further discussion by showing her some of the messages that had been pouring in throughout the day: nearly two hundred from France alone. She didn’t need to be a physicist to see that the ITER team had gone ballistic over Mac’s infomercial and was already planning tests for later in the week, just to stick it to CFRC. His attempt to bait the Dragonmaster, Nathaniel acknowledged, had unquestionably failed in every purpose except to put them in a more precarious position than they’d already been in. Hasschler was very right about that…

“It was a good idea,” T. J. offered, “even if it hasn’t worked.”

“Slava’s ready to throw in the towel—”

“Don’t.”

The ever-present clacking of the vacuum pumps receded under the plea in her voice, but Machuzak’s only reaction was to strike the desk hard with his fist. At that moment a call from Abbuhl came in. His team had located a cracked flange on one of the neutral-beam boxes. “I’ll be right there.” He took D’Abro by the hand and fifteen silent minutes later they stood in the test cell with Abbuhl. Luckily, it was no emergency. The chief told them that they’d need to replace the flange and pump the box down again, but there was no further damage and the vacuum in the cryostat was holding. Then he vanished to take care of other business.

D’Abro glanced up at the massive steel monoliths covered with cable, and perhaps wanting to change the tone of their previous conversation whispered, “It’s way past time you explained to me what these damned things are. Maybe if I knew, it might help with this here investigation. As far as I’ve made out, neutral beams have something to do with heating that plasma to twenty times the temperature of the sun, but your household Radar Range doesn’t come close, does it?”

“Well,” Machuzak began slowly, if nothing else also wanting to change the previous conversation, “after holding the plasma, heating it is our biggest headache. A tokamak being the world’s largest contraption, we use several methods.” Apart from merely squeezing the plasma with the magnets, which wasn’t popular because of the water balloon problem he’d explained last week, there was the toaster method, there was in fact the Radar Range method and there was the billiard-ball method.

“The toaster method is pretty simple minded. A plasma is like toaster wire; zap it with a few million amps and it heats up. But it’s sort of a reverse toaster wire—the hotter it gets, the less it wants to heat up further, until it stops, period. The toaster method gets you only to twenty or thirty million degrees.”

“Only,” T. J. grunted, wondering what the incomprehensible amount of plumbing above her was for, wondering whether nanobots could change her hair color.

“Yeah. You can do better with the Radar Range method. We call it rf—radio frequency heating.” Machuzak pointed to the racks of microwave guides running into the test cell above their heads and disappearing into Prometheus. “Essentially we nuke the fuel with microwaves and on a good day it heats it up beyond what the toaster method can achieve. But to get the temperature way up we use the neutral beams—”

T. J. stopped crunching the peanuts in her mouth and said, “Go on—the suspense is killing me.”

Machuzak nodded. “These huge boxes are actually particle accelerators, which accelerate deuterium and tritium to high energy and inject them directly into the plasma. The nuclei collide with the particles already inside the torus and—”

“A break shot,” T. J. interrupted, now with him. “Cue ball slows down, other balls speed up. Doesn’t sound so complicated, Doc. You might have told me before.”

Nathaniel laughed soberly. “Bedbug, the devil is much in the details. The electric field in the beam boxes can only accelerate charged particles like deuterium and tritium nuclei. Fine. But the Earth’s magnetic field deflects cosmic rays. How do you get charged nuclei past the tokamak’s own magnetic field into the machine?”

The cocky expression on D’Abro’s face dissolved. “Let’s just say we do a fast two-step—we change the neutral tritium and deuterium atoms into charged ions by adding electrons, accelerate them, then strip away the extra electrons to neutralize them again. Then the deuterium and tritium can pass through the tokamak’s magnetic field and clobber the particles inside. Sort of a bait-and-switch operation. The neutral beams not only supply the fuel, but bring it up to operating regimes, four hundred million degrees.”

“Humph,” T. J. snorted pensively, then abruptly asked whether there was reason to sabotage the neutral beams as opposed to anything else.

Not that Machuzak could think of. “It’s one of the biggest systems and dozens of people work on it. As you see.” Techs were already swarming around the cracked flange.

“Well,” she said, “I think I’m gonna visit with Krieg-Zoober.” Nathaniel cocked his head at her. “He’s back on-site today. By the way, Doc, I’ve been meanin to say, about that night at my place…”

“I know, don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worrying,” she smiled bravely, and they parted company.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Moments later, T. J. rapped on the third-floor door of Cyrus Krieg-Zuber’s office, glancing at the posters of the Arc de Triomphe, Napoleon’s tomb, the pyramids and Westminster Abbey hanging in the interstices of the teak cabinets that lined his spacious office walls. This was the first time she’d actually seen him in the flesh. She’d read his personnel file with the others and knew that Rasmussen had originally recruited Krieg-Zuber about ten years ago from Advanced Cryotech, which had manufactured ASSET’s magnets, and where he’d received some highfalutin CIA security training. He’d spent time at various ITER sites but as deputy director at CFRC had become Rasmussen’s right-hand man and four years ago decided to tighten up security. That’s when things, as Mac told it, began to go seriously amiss.

The man who sat at his monitor today wore a blue silk shirt and necktie and grumbled even as he stood up, his left arm hanging somewhat stiffly at his side. “He has shut out the director, he believes…” he spat, annoyed at having to adjust his tie with a bad hand.

“Dr. Krieg-Zoober,” T. J. said, already unsettled by the man’s wide, unblinking ice-blue eyes, “I’m surprised you’re in. What brings you here?”

“Zubér. Mademoiselle D’Abro, isn’t it? What do idiot doctors know? No one can prevent the director from performing his duties. To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” T. J. was equally unsettled by his demeanor, bow-string taught. Before she could answer, he interrupted himself. “You have obviously seen the video that was launched this morning, if you did not assist in producing it. What could have possessed Machuzak to make such untrue and hazardous statements?” He trained an incendiary stare on her and she involuntarily backed up a step.

“I believe Dr. Machuzak wanted to light a fire under the division heads,” she swallowed, suddenly doubting that this man and the one she’d spoken to by phone were entirely the same. “Get their asses in gear.”

But the two were the same, externally. The deputy director paused, running a finger along the scar on his face. “Mademoiselle, if one wanted to ‘light a fire’ under the division heads—quaintly put—far more effective tactics may be brought to bear. Threaten them with replacement, announce that we have offers of help from the best Japanese, Korean and Chinese teams. Shame is a most compelling weapon against cowards who shirk from laying down their lives for their cause.”

T. J. regarded with curiosity a small sculpture of San Sebastian hung on the wall, complete with dripping wounds and piercing arrows. “Dr. Krieg-Zubér,” she said sweetly, turning her glance slowly from the statue, “why not just line them up against a wall and shoot them?”

A thin smile spread across Zuber’s lips and he blinked once, slowly. “A sufficient threat should suffice…” He walked to his desk, put his nose to a flower, then raised his head so that he appeared be staring up at her almost through his eyelids. “You have come about the accident investigation.”

“Exactly, sir.”

At that Krieg-Zuber gazed at her in amazement for an instant, then nearly spat out a laugh impossible for him to contain. “You cannot expect anyone to take such a charade seriously!” he snarled. “With the ignition campaign under way, crucial evidence has already been erased. You will find nothing—if you ever intended to.”

T. J. now shut the door behind her, leaned against it. “I came to find out what you remember.”

“Mademoiselle,” Krieg-Zuber answered with dripping fatigue, “stop playing games. You have been told what I remember. If you are truly attempting to get to the bottom of this, then you have been examining access records and our pitiful supply of surveillance files. You surely cannot be so naïve to believe this was an accident, can you?”

“What makes you think that?” T. J. said, suddenly feeling more nervous than she hoped she appeared.

“There are no accidents in this world, Miss D’Abro, but there are myriad enemies who would like to see this program end, apart from Moravec. Look at my arm!” he exploded without warning. “What they have done to me!”

“Sir, someone in your condition should take it easy,” T. J. said, nearly jumping backward as Zuber stooped to examine his own desk for bugs. “Can you be more specific?” she ventured, hoping that she continued to prop up her innocence. “I mean, about who would like to see the program end?”

“No,” Krieg-Zuber answered, abruptly breaking off his search and sitting down at his desk, where he began to play absently with the toy trains there. “But there is more here than meets the eye.”

T. J. frowned at the cliché, at the same time dying to know what this man knew. “Well, sir, if there is, I hope to discover it, but the surveillance records haven’t been as helpful as I’d hoped.”

“How surprising.” He no longer attempted to disguise the sneer in his voice. “The people who designed the CFRC security system were amateurs, but there are other records.”

“I am aware that you monitor email, Dr. Krieg-Zuber—”

“Routine!” The wave was angry as he got to his feet again. “CFRC has completely lagged behind the times. You have, young lady, undoubtedly noticed that the damned fingerprint-reader system has not yet even gone online.”

In one sense it had. “I also know that you were monitoring all Internet traffic to this laboratory.” T. J. thought that Krieg-Zuber paused and cocked his head at her, but then decided no. She was finding him difficult to read, since his penetrating stare met her eyes and did not.

“Accepted practice and legal,” he said, with slightly less anger. “Surely you do not need to be reminded that CFRC is a private lab.” T. J. couldn’t argue. The practice was accepted and legal, and it hadn’t disturbed her nearly as much as it had Mac. “Stupidly,” Zuber went on, “Machuzak has pulled the plug; this you obviously know.”

“Are you offering something, sir?” she asked.

For a moment Krieg-Zuber glanced at his arm sorrowfully, whimpered, said, “The director’s archives are yours, mademoiselle.”

At that he fairly bowed toward her, but in a way that his blank eyes made T. J. uncertain that she was present. “Tell me, Dr. Krieg-Zuber,” she said, swallowing, “a random question: have you ever met Pierre Balard?”

Zuber stroked his chin thrice, nodded. “Certainly.”

“Is it true that he was Dr. Rasmussen’s first doctoral student?” T. J.’s question was genuine and Krieg-Zuber’s smile knowing.

“Quite true,” he replied. “Balard despised Rasmussen for stealing his ideas, which were significant. They haven’t spoken to each other for twenty years.”

“As I suspected,” T. J. answered. “I’ll let you know if I require your assistance, Dr. Krieg-Zuber.” With that she opened the door, noticed the damp she left on the knob, and stepped into the hall, feeling no less stuck than she had for the past days, and a notch more ill at ease.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Machuzak, Fred Abbuhl and Diana Cochran stood in the ASSET control room, watching the downward tremble of the temperature gauges. The cryostat had been pumped down to a billionth of an atmosphere, a vacuum that would serve to insulate the magnets, and liquid helium was flowing from the helium factory into Prometheus’great coils. The cooldown had begun. Fred had been right: they could hardly hope for better than a degree an hour and that would mean—weeks. Someone had hung a big deadline calendar under the captain’s deck, with more than two weeks crossed out. They’d heard nothing from Dragonmaster since the encounter in the ruins and Nathaniel could only wonder which of the remaining dates was marked.

“Is extra tritium coming in from Savannah River?” he asked.

“Kettering ordered it over a week ago,” Abbuhl replied. “We should have a shipment in a couple days.”

Cochran was not happy. “There’s another helium shortage in Amarillo,” she told them and Machuzak understood. The Federal Helium Reserve in the panhandle produced a third of the world’s helium supply, but over the past decade industrial demand had risen ten times faster than predicted and they’d intermittently been running dry. The spiking prices meant that helium cost fifty times what it had a few decades back. “If we have to bring Prometheus up again…”

“I know, pray.” Nathaniel bit his lip, trusted that Diana was merely engaged in her habitual grousing. Prometheus and the helium factory form a closed loop and there should be no losses. Under normal circumstances. He took his leave.

* * * *

T. J. intercepted Machuzak at lunchtime on his way to the cafeteria, a pseudo Spanish-style mezzanine of pink marble that opened to the back courtyard. The same constrained agitation gripped him now as the other evening, and unfortunately, she was not about to make his life easier. She pointed her handset at him, he glanced at it, frowned in her direction, walked over to a microphone that stood before a big mural of cowboys riding into the sunset. Bill Balustradi had taped his smiling face over one of the cacti.

“Today ITER has begun DT experiments,” Machuzak announced. Exactly as threatened, Balard had skipped the low-yield DD, going directly to deuterium-tritium. These were just low-power test pulses but it meant that ITER had suddenly jumped ahead of CFRC by a month. At Nathaniel’s words, a veil descended over the cafeteria and silenced it. Good, we deserve this. Together he and T. J. descended with sandwiches from the mezzanine to a picnic table below.

D’Abro gazed across the grassy place, which yielded to asphalt and the pentagon in one direction, to vast fields and Site Alpha in the other, and turned to Nathaniel. She had intended to report her meeting with Krieg-Zuber. Instead, observing his dark expression, she said, “What is it, Doc?” even as she knew the answer. Suddenly she wanted to take his hand.

“Damnit, T. J.,” he erupted, “what good is having a machine when you have no idea of what to do with it?”

Before she could respond, her attention was distracted by a slim figure who entered the courtyard, walked up to the big oak and looped a small wooden tablet over one of the branches, where it began to rattle hollowly in the breeze with all the others. For a brief moment he stood with his head bowed, then walked toward the cafeteria.

“Who’s that?” T. J. asked.

“That”—Nathaniel clenched his teeth as he rose—“is Toshi.” He strode over to the older physicist, grabbed his arm and dragged him back to the table. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded angrily. “I’ve been looking high and low for you—office, home… You dropped off the face of the Earth. Who do you think you are, a killer bee?”

The older physicist only shrugged and sat down cross-legged on the grass before the fishpond, where he opened a container of rice. Finally he said, “I have been doing geometry problems.”

“Geometry problems! Damnit, Matsushima, in case you haven’t heard, I canceled the ignition meetings because no one has come up with a single decent idea—”

“This is not surprising,” Toshi replied, gazing straight ahead. “What do you expect from a group of people who exist only as appendages to computer terminals? They have never learned how to think, only to calculate. They have never learned that where heaven and Earth meet, this is where you have attained proficiency in the art of swordsmanship. This is where knowledge lost is knowledge gained, where to win is no more than to lose.” Briefly he halted. “And why, Nathaniel, do you think these bots will accept my ideas any more than they have in the past?”

Listening, T. J. was instantly captivated by Matsushima, but at last a shadow of perspicacity fell. “Dr. Matsushima, sir, doesn’t this lab mean anything to you?” The question surprised her as much as the others and Matsushima’s silence was uncomfortably, disturbingly long. “Doesn’t the future mean anything to you?” she continued with an even more importunate tone when he didn’t answer.

“There are many futures, Miss D’Abro,” the physicist finally replied, “but the gods have not given us the vision to choose the one we want.”

“If we don’t choose, who then?” she said, verging on despair. “Didn’t all those gurus used to say, ‘Not to decide is to decide’? Haven’t we not decided on this planet too long? Dr. Matsushima, if you people don’t decide, who? I’d really like to know.” She squinted at him fiercely until she embarrassed herself. “Excuse me, Professor. I’m out of line.” She turned away, blushing as the physicist stared with a puzzled expression.

Not to act is to act, Nathaniel couldn’t help thinking, but seeing the state of these two, he attempted to rescue both. “Toshi, I know how you feel about Krieg-Zuber and being out in Alpha Site—”

“Do you, Nathaniel? What do you, a mere foot soldier, know? These rumors that I believe in levitation and ESP? Being reduced to foraging for funds when I should have been creating. Here I am, banished to Alpha, where I am invisible and shorn of respect. I might have changed the entire fusion program had anyone listened to me.”

“I am sorry about what Krieg-Zuber has done to you—”

“Krieg-Zuber!” Toshi snorted.

T. J. was following the exchange with widening discomfort, uneasily deciding to check Matsushima’s file. She saw equally Mac’s displeasure at being stripped of rank and expected him to anger again, but he did not. Instead he answered, “‘They are forever free who renounce all selfish desires and break away from the cage of I, me and mine to be united with the Lord. This is the supreme state.’ Toshi, if you could only listen to yourself.”

The older man stared at Mac momentarily with an annoyed expression, which then saddened. “Do not be clever, Nathaniel.”

“I am not being clever, Toshi,” he said, shaking his head with a sadness that exceeded Matsushima’s own. “I am asking you to put aside your feelings and turn your talents to the task that called us when we were young and idealistic, when we willingly, bravely became scientists to understand the intricacies of Nature and with our understanding turn her to the benefit of the future. Maybe Nature will not bend, outwit us as she always does, but let us make our struggle with her, with our understanding, not with the past or with personalities we dislike. Let us act without regard to rewards or consequences, and we will succeed even in failure.”

“Again you try to outwit me, Nathaniel. When the Master governs, the people barely know he exists. I see you are becoming a master. My compliments.”

“Please, Dr. Matsushima,” T. J. entreated, again surprising herself.

Once more, Toshi agreed only to consider the request, but his reply was amiable enough that T. J. allowed herself to rise. The two physicists watched her walk over to the oak, where Toshi hung worthy geometry problems, and she began turning the tablets over one by one, pressing the flat of her hands against them, even sniffing them, as if by these actions she could absorb the mathematics she so claimed to dread.

“Sacred geometry,” she said almost to herself as she returned to the pair, staring in befuddled wonder at Matsushima.

Toshi overheard. “Ah,” he said, “who knows what is sacred in the world of Samsung and Toyota? But many are the gods to be propitiated and hopefully a few digest mathematics.”

“Professor,” T. J. asked, at this moment with more genuine curiosity than professional acumen, “I’ve heard a lot about you, but I don’t think I know what you do here.”

Matsushima, calmer now, leaned back on the grass and smiled. “Miss D’Abro—that is your name I believe—it is quite clear none of us know what we are doing here. As for me, I am robbing the rich.” T. J. asked for his meaning. “Since my present ideas are considered—how do we say it in polite company?—not to lie along the Eight-Fold Path, I am forced to beg alms on the street.”

Nathaniel put in that Garrett paid Toshi out of his own pocket.

“What sort of ideas are you talking about, professor?” T. J. pressed, her conversation with Balard suddenly loud in her ears.

But Toshi only snorted. “Miss D’Abro, it is not the ideas; it is the implementation of the ideas. Ideas are cheap. Machines are expensive. When the US government trashed all approaches to fusion beyond the tokamak, it was rolling billion-dollar dice, not to mention our future. Of course, partisans claimed the other devices never would have worked, but some of them were simpler than tokamaks, being mere cylinders rather than doughnuts, and with a few modifications they might have outperformed America’s favorite. Geometry, Miss D’Abro, is destiny and it is far easier to remove the waste products of fusion from the ends of a tube than from a doughnut, and to service the machine. You wrinkle your nose. Indeed, these are practical concerns—hardly poetic, but they are important for a real, not imaginary reactor. A tokamak, in my view, is an imaginary reactor.”

“Why is that, Dr. Matsushima?” In Toshi’s remarks, T. J. heard an echo of Archangelsky’s on the airplane. After three weeks at CFRC she had begun to perceive the deeper faults in this hermetic community, and now she wondered whether she had too jokingly called it a pit of vipers.

“Oh, everyone knows how tokamaks are prone to failure. I imagine a field the size of several football stadiums filled with giant tokamaks, such that when one nosedives and requires servicing, another is brought online. Each of these machines should be five times the size of ITER, volumewise—”

“Five times the size of ITER!” T. J. choked. Her first sight of that unbelievable construct, and her reaction to it, returned in full force.

“Oh yes. This is when Nature bestows her favor on tokamaks. But to attempt fusion with something so insignificant as ITER or ASSET is a waste of time. Of course, none of these ideas helps us in our current predicament, but there are more subtle possibilities that might allow us to cheat a deadline. They involve technical matters that I am sure do not interest you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Miss D’Abro. It has been a pleasure.”

* * * *

Toshi got to his feet and moved off, leaving the other two alone. “What a character!” T. J. blurted out, then abruptly, soberly peered at Machuzak and whispered, “Doc, is he angry enough to have done it?”

Nathaniel replied with a strange disgust etched across his face. “I trust him more than anyone, except Slava perhaps. He’s a difficult, vain man who sees everything with crystal clarity—except himself. I suppose in that he is human.” For another moment Machuzak continued to gaze intently at T. J., then he nodded with comprehension and switched off.

D’Abro saw that Machuzak had just become one step more of a stranger. “You really don’t think I trust you, Doc, do you?” she said after one heartbeat, then another. “Even now?” The anguish in her voice was audible.

“It’s your duty not to trust me,” he replied. “I don’t hold it against you.”

The genuine equanimity of his response coerced from her an incredulous shake of the head. “Sometimes you don’t make it easy, partner,” she began, but he’d already changed course.

“Maybe Abbuhl is right—you can’t hurry the process.”

“Huh?” T. J. asked, not following.

“They say it’s important to be stuck,” Machuzak replied, as if somewhere else. “You know, Siddhartha wandered for six years before he sat himself under a fig tree, where for forty-nine days he was assailed by every force and temptation. When he finally arose, he was the Buddha. It is necessary to be stuck.”

“I’ll order a fig tree planted in the courtyard,” T. J. said quietly.

Machuzak’s only response was to stand and clench his fist. “It cannot be as difficult to achieve ignition as enlightenment.”

“I hope you’re right about that, Doc,” she said with continued wonder, “because we are truly, truly stuck.”

That state lasted another minute.