# 1

> I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave 
us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of 
mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering those 
nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
>
> --President Ronald Reagan, 1983

> Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever 
made.
>
> --Immanuel Kant

 Quine approached the Lab on a road that led nowhere else. The 
morning light was thick, almost a substance. Past the razorwire of 
the perimeter fence, cranes and water towers and incinerator stacks 
rose above the fortress city's sprawl of buildings. Construction 
vehicles moved on its roads. Beyond, grassland stretched to hillsides 
sallow from drought and spotted with dark stands of live oak.

Soon he saw the protesters blocking the gate. Cars in both lanes had 
stopped. The blue lights and red lights of patrol cars flickered on 
the road's shoulders. Blackclad police formed a line between the 
protesters and the gate. Over chanting, rhythmic but unintelligible, 
rang a bullhorn's clipped commands, and the protesters moved off the 
roadway, the rhythm of their chant stumbling. A few remained kneeling 
in the road before the gate. Three police holstered their batons and 
moved respectfully among the kneeling protesters, like acolytes among 
devouts, helping them one by one to their feet and leading them 
within the gates to a waiting bus. The sequence of blockade, arrest, 
and release was by now ritual. The arrested chatted with their 
captors.

As the cars edged forward, Quine saw once again the darkhaired young 
woman in the crowd and once again felt the hollowing of his heart. 
Her resemblance to Kate, any reminder of Kate, still lanced him.

Two cars ahead, Leo Highet's red convertible sounded its horn as 
Highet leaned out to heckle, --Get a life! The woman flinched and 
Quine's eyes locked on Highet's head, the bald spot, the wedge of 
features visible in the rearview mirror, the broad nose and dark 
glasses. Once through the gate Highet's car sped into a right turn to 
the administration building while Quine drove on to the second 
checkpoint, then through a desert of broken rock, buried mines, and 
motion sensors erect on metal stalks like unliving plants. Past this 
dry moat he stopped at a third checkpoint, then parked in the shade 
of a concrete building with blank walls and embrasured windows, and 
nervously thumbed the car radio, --affic and weather togeth, while he 
watched two younger scientists cross the lot and enter the building. 
Then he stilled the car and went in.

In his office, one horizontal window too high to reach framed an 
oblong of sky. On the walls, abandoned by the prior occupant and by 
Quine untouched, hung graphs and pictures, seismographs of bomb 
tests, the branched coils of particle decay, a geological map, 
electron micrographs of molecular etchings, a fractal mountainscape, 
all overlaid by memos, monthly construction maps, field test 
schedules, Everyone Needs To Know About Classification, cartoons, 
Curiosity Is Not A Need To Know, whiteboard thick with equations in 
four colors so long unwiped that Quine's one pass with a wet rag had 
left the symbols down one edge ghosted but not erased, and a second 
desk, loose papers cascaded across its surface, the computer monitor 
topped by a seamsplit cardboard carton BERINGER GREY RIESLING and 
buttressed by books manuals folders xeroxes Autoregressive Modeling, 
Rings Fields and Groups, Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks, Numerical 
Solution of Differential Equations, Selling Yourself and Your Ideas! 
and under the desk banker's boxes DESTROY AFTER, and D NULL in black 
marker. Devon Null, the prior occupant, was "on indefinite leave". 
But when Quine had moved in, Highet had insisted that he leave Null's 
half of the office untouched, either against Null's return or, as 
Quine was coming to believe, as a monument to disappearance.

Quine checked his computer mail. Most of the messages were notices, 
chaffing, power plays, trivia.

> A memorial service will be held Nov. 1 for Al Hazen who died Oct. 
27 following a length illness. He was 51. Hazen worked with the 
Weapons Test Group at Aguas Secas. Donations in his memory may be 
made to the American Cancer Society.

One message could not be ignored:

> `From:` Leo Highet <sforza@milano.banl.gov> \
> `Date:` Thu, 31 Oct 1991 17:58:36 (-0800) \
> `To:` Philip Quine <quine@styx.banl.gov> \
> `Subject:` Radiance \
> `Cc:` dietz@styx.banl.gov, szabo@styx.banl.gov, 
kihara@dis.banl.gov, huygens@aries.banl.gov, lb@dioce.banl.gov
>
> Gentlemen:
>
> As you know, the Beltway boys are coming and it is CRUCIAL that 
they go home awed. I want confidence, energy and style. There are 
unanswered questions and we will take hits on those. Meeting at noon 
today to brainstorm our approach, bldg 101, rm E-501.
>
> Highet
>
> ---- "To apply and direct this vast new potential of destructive 
energy excited the inventive genius of Leonardo as had few other 
enterprises." ----

More galling than the message was Highet's new computer login 
_sforza_ and his signature quote. The inspirational conceit, that 
they were all Renaissance maestri under the gentle patronage of 
Prince Leo the High, had come ironically from Quine, who was reading 
about da Vinci's eighteen years as military engineer under Ludovico 
Sforza, Duke of Milan. Leonardo had written, "I hate war, as all 
rational men hate it, but there seems no escape from its bestial 
madness." Not while men of genius bend their talents to it, Quine had 
added. Here was Highet's comeback.

Highet. What a piece of work. Builder and destroyer of his own 
legend. A fecund theorist but a distracted experimenter, an 
indifferent administrator but a champion politician. From the start 
of his career he had traveled to the capital, made himself known to 
congressmen and their staffs. In reward for such attentions he was at 
a young age appointed technical representative to a disarmament 
conference. His conduct was impeccable until one afternoon, goaded by 
the other side's mendacious presentation and by his own ungovernable 
need to command the center of every situation, he let slip classified 
data.

Highet made allies sooner than friends, and enemies sooner than 
either. After this gaffe his allies were silent while his enemies 
pounced. But Highet made the first of the hairsbreadth escapes on 
which his legend was built. A paper published a year before, cosigned 
by the President's science advisor, had exposed the same secret. The 
hearings were dropped and Highet was exiled to an underfunded 
oubliette of the Lab housed in temporary trailers: J Section.

Anyone else would have languished there. But Highet built by inches a 
power base, using his charisma to attract the brightest, most driven 
graduate students he could find, forming in the meantime new 
political alliances. When Congress at last funded Radiance, all the 
necessary talent was in J Section, and fiercely loyal to Highet. Soon 
he was associate director. Two years later, the director retired and 
Highet filled his place.

J Section. Research And Development In Advanced Nuclear Concepts. 
Concepts as in weapons. Advanced as in not working yet. Radiance's 
charter was to develop energy weapons of all types, but Highet's hope 
and pet was the Superbright: an orbiting battle station of hairthin 
rods webbed around a nuclear bomb. The bomb's ignition would charge 
the rods with energy, focused into beams that would flash out to 
strike down enemy missiles, all in the microsecond before the station 
consumed itself in nuclear fire.

So far the beams flashed out only in theory. The theory, originated 
by Null, seemed to Quine sound, but the more he studied his computer 
model, the less he understood why any of Null's tests had ever 
produced the ghost of a beam. Yet the farther tests fell behind 
expectations, the more strident became Highet's public claims. Warren 
Slater, in charge of testing, had resigned in protest. His letter of 
resignation was classified and squelched. Bernd Dietz was given 
interim charge of testing, and to Quine fell the task of finding in 
disappointing test data any optimism about the promised results.

Meanwhile Highet had grown ever more reckless. He began showing up at 
high profile conferences and seminars in subjects outside his field: 
on neural nets, genetic programming, nanotechnology, virtual reality, 
cold fusion, artificial life, making no discriminations between the 
cutting edge, the speculative, and the snake oil, as if the force of 
his character could remake physical law, or at least the local 
version of it. He spoke in banquet halls at Red Lion Inns, he passed 
out abstracts, offprints, videotapes, he painted futures brighter and 
more definite than the present, with himself and his visions at the 
center of them, inviting the wise and the bold to sit with him in the 
prosperity and rectitude of that inner circle, outside which was 
darkness, barbarism, and chaos.

*And many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles, 
deceiving the stupid multitude.* Again the voice. In the mind's 
shadows were countless voices, dead, living, unborn, lost. Since 
working on Radiance Quine had dreamed them. Now they came into his 
waking life. This voice he recognized from Leonardo's notebooks.

On his second computer, secure in steel shielding, waited Quine's 
simulation of the rods. This frail superstructure of hope was raised 
on a sprawling foundation of faith. Hundreds of man-years of Lab 
effort and ingenuity had gone into the underlying physics codes 
programs, magnetic fields, burn products, photon scattering, thermal 
conduction, ion viscosity, bremsstrahlung, all these imponderables 
had to be calculated and updated, interacting in every kernel of 
space, at every nanosecond. If Quine had once puzzled for years over 
the paradox of a single photon, the complexities here were literally 
unthinkable. The reward of deep understanding was not part of the 
package.

None of this cauldron of approximation, this vast rationalization, 
this ingenuous mimickry, was Quine's responsibility. To him it was a 
black box. His laser simulation ran on top of it all, passing it 
data, receiving its judgments. Again he ignited his bomb and waited 
for the nuclear pinball of particles and energies to reach his rods. 
Color bars and line graphs crept across the screen, the visible 
satisfactions of programming. The solipsistic machine worlds. It was 
near to pornography, without nuance. Any halfbright notion could be 
simulated, the simulation tweaked to an approximation of success, and 
the success conjured as proof for more funding. Tweak and squeak, as 
Highet put it. Realization was a "materials" problem. Bend your 
backs, men, to prove this golden turd of an idea.

The display glitched and broke into the debugger. Lines of code 
filled the screen, `void qelem`, `malloc(xarray)`, `atof(nptr)`. He 
ceased to see words or even letters, his eyes grasping instead at the 
pixels, the shards of light within the characters. That radiance 
within the meanest mote of being.

What is light? Surfaces boil with quantum fire. How comes this dumb 
swarming to write beauty, alarm, or desolation upon the soul? Eyes 
are the questing front of the brain, the channel to the heart. The 
eye may not, as Archytas thought, emit illuminating rays, but our 
knowledge of its working is no surer than his.

Mind's eye and heart's channel presented him now Kate's russet hair, 
her full mouth and cheeks, her dimpled chin, her dark eyes framed by 
wire glasses. Like a key those features fit his heart. They appeared 
before him like a truth of nature. Mostly he lived in the mundane, 
scarcely noting what or whom he passed, but at rare moments the world 
came forward in all its vividness, stunning his heart. Every time he 
saw Kate, there was that shock of presence.

She was 23, he 37. They'd met in a yoga class. He hadn't pursued at 
first. He was coupled with Nan, a quiet woman his own age who worked 
at the Lab. They lived apart but spent half their spare time 
together. He was content and not content with what they had. But he 
and Kate talked, and they went out a few times. She seemed interested 
in him. Her eyes met something in his. Some hope had stirred in him, 
some need for joy so long put by he'd ceased to miss it. Thus fed his 
need grew, covert but unchecked. The years separating him from Kate, 
years he'd squandered in ever more esoteric projects at the Lab, 
seemed his to reclaim at will. Kate's attention fed in him some myth 
of starting over. He grew testy with Nan and impatient with himself, 
seeking not a break between them but between themselves and what he 
now acutely felt them becoming, burdens and reproofs to each other. 
Nan waited him out. Her deepening disappoint in him was unspoken but 
heavy. His desperation grew until he could contain it no longer and 
he lay it before Kate, blurted it out, a bitter plea. Save me. Who 
wouldn't flee from that? She regarded him kindly. Oh Philip, the 
moment's passed. It just didn't happen for us. There's someone else. 
That the moment could pass. That he had let it. Had not seen it 
passing. Such a small thing, that attention, that renewed hope, 
briefly given and withdrawn, gone now.

The morning too was gone to no end. Every failure now he referred 
back to that moment, and he saw in his life only patterns of failure 
and emptiness.

---

Quine avoided that part of the building where Highet's young 
theorists worked, X Section, or, as the older men called it, the 
Playpen. But today his customary exit was blocked by a tour group of 
weary adults and bored children in facepaint, their guide saying, 
--tiny robots that actually repair human cells, as he swerved past a 
sign WARNING TOUR IN PROGRESS NON-CLASSIFIED CONVERSATION ONLY to the 
swell of the Brahms Requiem in full clash with The Butthole Surfers 
and a rapid din of simulated combat followed by the admiring 
exclamation, --Studly! Big win! and laughter fading as he passed an 
open room in which three refrigerators stood flanked floor to ceiling 
by case upon case of soda, and veered into a stairwell clattering 
down metal steps to a metal door held open by a wastebasket and 
silent despite EMERGENCY EXIT ALARM WILL SOUND and emerged onto a 
loading dock between brown dumpsters NOT FOR DISPOSAL OF HAZARDOUS 
WASTE stepping down onto a paved path then jumping back to doge a 
white electric cart DAIHATSU jouncing onto a debris of torn asphalt 
and treadmarked dirt past chainlink CREDNE CONSTRUCTION and three 
blue PORT-O-LET stalls to vanish behind three glossy cylindrical 
tanks COMPOSIT PLASTEEL CONTAINMENT DO NOT INSTALL WITHOUT READING 
PLASTEEL KIT B INSTRUCTIONS, on past temporary trailers holding his 
mouth and nose against the metallic stench of bright green flux 
oozing from an open pipe into gray earth, until he regained the main 
road and passed the checkpoint, showing his badge, to enter Building 
101, passing through the lobby where visitors and employees were 
edified by models of bombs, lasers, satellites, boosters, and photos 
of the celebrated Nobelists who'd devised them, and on to the 
conference room where all but Highet had already arrived.

--He was one of these, shall I say, Marxist radical types. His mother 
cut him out of the family money. Hello, Philip. We're waiting for Leo 
as usual. So he's in Prague now selling laptops to the Czechs. Ah, 
the man himself.

--Who's this you're talking about, sounds like he's figured out that 
free markets are diplomacy by other means. Everyone, this is Jef 
Thorpe, postdoc from the University of Utah, he's here to look us 
over. Jef worked with Fish and Himmelhoch on cold fusion, and I just 
want to say don't believe the conventional wisdom, something is 
happening there. Jef, this is Dennis Kihara, our new press officer, 
he takes the heat for my excesses. Bernd Dietz, materials and 
research. Frank Szabo, systems integration. Phil Quine, our x-ray 
focusing guru, Philip, Jef's done interesting work in your area, you 
should sit down with him. Okay, all present? Let's do it.

Highet seated the young man opposite Quine. Jeans, jacket over 
t-shirt, short black hair, high color, a small gold stud through his 
left nostril, his presence a breach of protocol and probably 
security, though the others knew better than to say so.

--You all see the news last night? About the protest? The good news 
is we won. First they showed the protesters, out on the street, wind 
noise, bad lighting, and then our rebuttal from our respectable 
office. We won because we got to go last, and they put us last 
because we provided closure. That's the model for our presentation: 
beginning, middle, end. We'll begin by showing footage of successful 
tests. The middle will be video simulations of the system, where 
we'll highlight potential problems. By defining the problems we 
control the questions. And we'll end by addressing the problems and 
introducing entirely new approaches and spin-off programs. Dennis is 
running things, but I may break in at any point.

--Leo, can we skip the last part, the science fiction?

--No, Bernd. Past, present, future. Closure. Without this you leave 
people ready to ask questions.

--We're avoiding questions?

--Not if they're intelligent and informed but we have a few critics 
and wise guys on this panel and I'd like to keep it simple.

--Leo, I have more respect than you for the intelligence of senators. 
Congressmen are not always so bright but

--Bernd, it's simple courtesy. We inform them at a level that's 
neither condescending nor technical, we tell them their money is 
being well spent, show them how, say thanks so much.

--Salesmanship.

--Grow up, Bernd, a couple times a year I ask you to do this. Is the 
money well spent? Yes or no.

--Yes, yes.

--I'd ah, feel better if we could discuss the middle part in ah 
detail, there are just some questions that I'm not comfortable to 
address without ah, just a little more input. For example the 
focusing data...

--Dennis, only Slater has questioned that data, and he's gone. 
Discredited. Focus is now Philip's baby.

--So, ah, focus is our main problem?

--Yes, it's one, said Quine. --Focus, brightness...

--But we're within an order of magnitude?

--I don't see any quantitative agreement with theory, said Quine. 
--The tests have shown a few bright spots. That's all I'm willing to 
commit to.

--That's all you've committed to for what is it ten months now Philip?

--I don't see any fundamentals. I'm beginning to wonder.

--Are you pulling a Slater on me, Philip? Because I want to tell you 
something, all of you. Some people in the lower echelons are making 
Slater out to be some kind of hero. To m this man was a menace to 
every one of us because he didn't care about winning. He didn't know 
what he wanted out of life and wouldn't have been able to get it if 
he had known. I have no respect for parasites like that.

--Leo, Null had a brilliant notion and we should pursue it, but 
that's all it is so far, a notion. We

--No one's questioned Null's theory, no one, not even critics.

--Sure but it's a long way from there to even a prototype

--We have supporting test data

--which may or may not mean qualitative agreement may or may not, but 
never quantitative, we have no understan

--well you're the one with the models Philip lo these many

--and you're the one who said this was a long term project, your 
words, long term, and now suddenly

--oh sure, and if we all had seven lives

--now that there's a little pressure it's

--what I'm hearing

--it's suddenly urgent

--what I'm hearing from you Philip is that we need more shots. Convey 
that necessity to our guests when they're here, think you can do 
that? And put a little urgency into it?

--I won't pretend we have focus when

--You're not going to give me an inch are you?

--Not on the basis of spotty data I can't interpret.

--I tell you what. There's an eighty kiloton shot  coming up next 
Saturday, right, Bernd? Piggyback it, Philip. Get yourself some 
better data.

--In what, a week? Design and fabricate apparatus in a week?

--Nine days. Jef can help you if he sticks around.

--Now hold on...

--Get off the pot. Let's move to Frank's contribution. You've all 
read it?

--Leo...

--We're moving on.

There was a brief silence in which papers rustled.

--Nothing new here, said Dietz.

--That's its strength. We've taken heat on preproduction 
technologies. This is a simple, viable off-the-shelf option. It's an 
easy sell. Contractors are lining up.

--It's good show-and-tell, said Szabo. --We can point to a card cage, 
this is the guidance system a year ago, then hold up a wafer, here it 
is today. Tangible progress.

Dietz continued to study the paper. --These are Baldur anti-satellite 
missiles in a smaller package.

--That's right.

--These were shelved over ten years ago as an ABM treaty violation.

--That toilet paper? Let that worry us we might as well give up.

--These are not by any stretch of the imagination directed energy 
weapons. You want to put, what does it say, five thousand of these in 
orbit...

--We're pursuing many options, Bernd. These would be one layer of a 
shield. Look, it's a long way to deployment. Oh and we get something 
else totally for free with Frank's idea. Always think dual use. Put a 
warhead on these guys they're earth penetrators, aim them downward 
get a thousand g impact, three k p s terminal velocity, earth-coupled 
shock waves to destroy hardened shelters. We have a friend in the 
Pentagon who's hard for that and the Beltway boys know it.

--Wait just wait you mean, this, these ah interceptors are for the 
presentation? But it's, we need to address the existing problems, 
that's what they're coming for, we can't feed them something totally 
new! And with this Slater thing

--Dennis, trust me, it's the best possible thing to do. As far as 
Slater goes, he's history, a blip, not even an incident. This visit 
was scheduled long before his snit. Sure we'll get closer scrutiny 
than we would in the average dog-and-pony but it's an opportunity. 
Remember NORAD's famous false alarms and screwups? They got a 
billion-dollar facelift out of those incidents. You up to speed now?

--Well yes, I mean no, not on the interceptors but...

--Put Frank's paper in the kit, I'll step in during the presentation. 
Oh, and make sure everyone gets a souvenir.

--A, I'm sorry?

--A souvenir. What are you giving the kids for family day today?

--Ah, some laser-etched aluminum disks...

--Good. Run off half a dozen make it a dozen more etched with the 
Radiance logo, can you do that? And glossies of the new artist's 
renderings.

Highet was out the door before anyone else had left their seat. 
Thorpe, abandoned, stood but did not move quickly enough to follow 
the older man out. As the seated men studied him incuriously he 
blushed and exited.

The others then rose. Szabo went out singing under his breath, --It's 
a long way, to deployment, it's a long way, I know. In the meantime, 
we have employment, it's the stick that makes us go...

At the doorway Dietz said to Quine, --It is outrageous that he should 
bring a boy into that meeting and criticize you this way. Easy for 
him to make promises, but when the promises are not so easy to 
deliver we suffer for them.

--I don't think the boy knew what he was getting into.

--Tell me what you want added to this test as soon as possible. He 
has put our asses on the line, both of us.

--I'll send you e-mail.

--Souvenirs! He gives senators souvenirs.

---

Quine had come to the Lab at Réti's invitation, Réti the legend, 
intimate of Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, founder of the Lab. 
Impossible to refuse. Réti had for one semester graced Quine's 
university with his presence, where he'd sat on Quine's doctoral 
committee. Quine must have made an impression, for two years later 
Réti called him. I hear you are working hard on some good ideas. How 
would you like unlimited resources for this work? Come for the 
summer, work on what you will.

Quine and Sorokin, a fellow postdoc, had isolated the emission of a 
single photon from a calcium source in order to determine whether a 
lone quantum displayed wave-particle complementarity. For two long 
years they had refined their approach, paring it to essentials, 
designing an experiment they might hope to realize with the school's 
meager resources. Elegance born of need. A slow and painful progress. 
At the Lab, in one month Quine was able to design and build a 
detector acute enough, and the experiment came off on the first try. 
Both tunneling and anticoincidence were evident. They had touched the 
central mystery. Even a single photon is both particle and wave.

Quine stayed. After that it was never a question. Not till much later 
did he guess that he'd been played. That Réti had his reason for 
waiting two years before approaching him. That by then his work was 
ripe for plucking, and the Lab's resources had little to do with its 
fruition apart from giving them the juice of it.

At the Lab his paper brought him a celebrity near to grace. Unlimited 
time to think. No assigned duties. And the mysteries ceased to open 
to him. Idle, he took up one of Highet's endless suggestions, the 
optics of x-ray mirrors. He welcomed the work, as though it paid some 
tithe of the mind to the practical. And it was a challenge, but 
finally it was, as the pioneers had with exact irony called their 
first bomb, a "gadget". Any solution, even if it laid bare 
principles, was beside the point if it couldn't kill missiles. So his 
mirrors never passed a design review. He wrote some computer codes 
for modeling the mirrors, and those turned out to have some 
peripheral application in inertial confinement fusion. The weapons 
work which he knew to be central to the Lab still seemed distant from 
him. Then Radiance geared up, and his modeling software proved 
flexible enough to accommodate the next idea: the bombpumped 
Superbright. Opportunistic as a virus, the Lab took it up. Now he was 
pressured. Now he was in a competitive atmosphere where the 
possibility of failure, of weakness, of doubt, could not be voiced 
even to oneself lest it undermine the resolve needed to get through 
each day. All the projects here were difficult, at the edge of the 
possible, and all the scientists worked at their limits and at the 
limits of their science. You could work on a problem for months only 
to have your work demolished in minutes in a review by your peers, 
your competitors, your colleagues. That was what reviews were for: to 
show up fatal flaws before they became expensively entrenched in a 
design. So ideas were hammered without mercy. It was and it wasn't 
personal. If the idea was good, it was yours but somehow beyond you, 
and if it was bad the attack was on it, not on you. Quine saw men in 
tears even as they went on arguing and, after it was over, thank 
their assailants.

Throughout this he kept silent faith with the mysteries. He would 
return to them when the pressures of the moment were past. 
Programming took only the surface of his mind; its essence he held in 
reserve, or so he thought. Quine came at last to understand that he 
did well at his assigned tasks precisely because he brought them his 
all. Nothing was left over.

---

When he left the building the sun was low. The air was thick with 
heat, and as he started the car the radio blurted --record temp, 
before he silenced it.

Through the gate traffic slowed. Demonstrators in costume paraded in 
the road. Quine edged forward through skeletons and spooks with signs 
and props, TECHNOLOGIES OF DEATH, a longrobed mantisheaded figure 
towering on stilts above the crowd, tambourines jangling, EL DÍA DE 
LOS MUERTOS, and lab security herding the crowd off the road. As he 
cleared the crowd a klaxon blared. The mantis swayed, tugging at 
robes snagged on the perimeter razorwire as the entrance gates slid 
shut, alarm lights strobing. On the inner perimeter road security 
vehicles appeared, racing toward the entry kiosk. Then he saw 
standing by his passenger window the woman who resembled Kate. She 
wore black spandex bicycle pants and a blue chambray shirt. She was 
staring at the gate. Quine hesitated, then rolled down the window.

--You want a ride out of here? They're going to start arresting 
people.

She looked at him, then back at the gate. On the main road Quine saw 
a flurry of approaching lights. City police.

--I can't wait.

Whoops blasts squeals cut the crowd noise. She saw the vehicles 
approaching and with something like annoyance got into Quine's car. 
Quine sped away shutting his window against the shriek of the passing 
vehicles.

--I'm Philip Quine.

--Lynn Hamlin. Did you see what happened?

When he looked at her all resemblance fell away. Same body type, same 
round features, but hair almost black with a russet tinge, cropped 
close to the neck. No glasses. Dark penetrating eyes. Tanned calves 
faintly downed, lithe as a huntress's. No key turned in his heart, 
just an echo of loss.

--The one on stilts, his costume caught on the fence. It must have 
set off the alarm.

--Were you there for the demo?

--No. I work there.

His ID was still clipped to his jacket. She'd been looking at it, and 
now she smiled, as if to confide her little subterfuge.

--What do you work on?

He turned onto a road parallel to the freeway, where earthmovers were 
parked in torn up lots behind emporia of sporting goods, fast food, 
auto parts, videotapes, computers, discount carpets. Sun flashed 
through the struts of a half finished retaining wall.

--Defense weapons.

--You mean Radiance. Do you believe in it?

*And those in the anterooms of Hell demur, saying, I do not approve 
what goes on inside.*

--It's what I do.

--Do you know what Einstein said? That you can't simultaneously 
prepare for war and prevent it?

--Where can I drop you?

--Corner of Mariposa.

As they passed over the freeway, the sun struck their shadow out 
toward the golden eastern hills. He sensed her still looking at him, 
then she faced ahead.

--I like this time of day, she said. --The light.

--I don't, said Quine. --It makes me think of endings.

She said nothing to that. As the car descended into the shadow of the 
overpass Quine said, --We didn't hear about the protest. The 
organizers usually let us know.

--Maybe they're tired of playing your game.

--It's not my game. A green sign with white letters Mariposa hung 
over the intersection. Quine pulled to the curb by a bus stop bench 
placarded FAST DIVORCE BANKRUPTCY. She turned to him with sudden 
vehemence.

--These demonstrations won't stop, you know. You don't know how angry 
people are... Her voice held some doubt, whether for the anger or his 
belief in it, he couldn't tell.

--Then I'll probably see you again out there, he said.

--Tell me, what's the point, I mean, isn't it obviously a waste now 
that the cold war

--Look, and hearing the annoyance in his voice he stanched it, --I 
don't make policy...

--Well, that's part of the problem, isn't it. People not taking 
responsibility for what they do.

Pricked, he turned to her just as a bus pulled to the curb, the 
squeal of its brakes preempting whatever he might have meant to say. 
Some hurt might have remained in his eyes. She seemed abashed and 
held his gaze for a moment longer before reaching to unbuckle her 
seatbelt.

--Listen... would you have lunch with me sometime?

She looked at him in surprise. --Lunch? Why?

--I'd just like to talk more.

--Do we have anything to say to each other?

--We could find out. His pulse thickened in his throat.

--But you're the enemy, she said.

--Me...? He caught, under her serious dark brow, a glimpse of 
mischief, though she didn't smile.

--Thanks for the ride.

She was out the door before he felt the protest of his heart. So even 
now he had not relinquished hope.

---

When he got home Nan's car was in his parking space. Most Tuesday 
nights she spent with Quine. He went to her place Friday nights and 
some weekends. But he'd worked late Tuesday, so they'd shifted it to 
tonight. He'd forgotten.

--Lo, she called, --In the kitchen. I picked up some tortellini at Il 
Fornaio and a salad, is that okay?

--Fine. As he entered she turned with a wary smile. The sight of her 
brought him a roil of giddiness, of memory, of guilt, of sadness. Her 
features were sharp and fine, her skin pale, her straight auburn hair 
just starting to show gray, her slight body always dressed with a 
style that in its impeccability read as a brave front.

--Bread's in the oven, can you get that?

He looked for an oven mitt while she talked about her day, some 
seniority conflict in the personnel department. Quine's patience 
wore. When, setting the plates down, she bent to kiss his neck, he 
flinched.

--What's wrong?

--Nothing. It's just Highet's going mad again. A Congressional 
visit's coming up, it should be routine, but he acts like the whole 
program's at stake.

--Is it?

--First he drops Null's work in my lap, then today he starts pimping 
some lunatic idea of Szabo's, and he assigns me a postdoc like, like 
a chaperone... and the protesters.

--What about them?

--They're getting on my nerves.

They ate in silence for a few minutes. At last he said, --What would 
you think if I quit?

--Quit? Your job?

--Yes.

--But Philip, what would you do?

--Well, I don't know. I could take some time off to think about it.

--Time off? I thought that we were trying to save money...

--Save...?

--Philip, I'm not trying to pressure you, but I thought we agreed 
that it makes sense to look for a place together...

--I told you, Nan, I can't think about that while this project is on, 
I can't make big plans like that until this whole thing is, is 
settled.

--Well, couldn't we start looking just to see what's available, just 
go to a few open houses...?

--If you want. But I don't see the point if we can't afford it yet.

--The point is to plan for a future, Philip. Haven't you made any 
progress?

--Progress, I feel like I'm chasing my tail, there's no progress to 
be made!

--Please don't snap at me.

--I, I can't even discuss it with you, you don't have the clearance.

She stood and carried dishes into the kitchen. He got up to follow.

--Nan... He came up behind her and embraced her. Her hands rested on 
his forearms.

--What about Sunday?

--Sunday?

--We're seeing Ginny and Bill, remember? If you came early we could

--Sunday. Look, I have a deadline. I can't. I'm sorry but I just 
can't.

--You're working? But if you're not getting anywhere...

--Well but that's the whole problem isn't it! Meantime there are 
still short-term goals and meetings.

She sighed and left the kitchen. In the living room the television 
came on. When after a moment he entered the room he heard her in the 
bedroom speaking on the telephone. Remote control in hand he viewed a 
cool panoptic tumble of war famine catastrophe enormity larded with a 
fantastic plenty of goods caressed by smiling tanned models, to pause 
on the logotype of Martin Marietta, --a proud supporter for 
twenty-five years of science programming on public television, his 
impulse to switch again frozen by the worn, imposing face of Aron 
Réti, saying thickly, --In science there is a cult of the beautiful 
theory. But how beautiful is reality? These beautiful theories, these 
elegant mathematics are not verified by experiment. Experiment shows 
us a mess of a universe with over a hundred basic particles and three 
irreconcilable forces. We would like to unify them all, just as we 
would like to smooth over all the political differences in the world. 
But experience shows, in physics and in politics, that this is not 
always possible.

Abruptly the screen glared with the involute radiance of the bomb. 
Sun's heart. Cosmic ground. Siva and Devi coupling. A thin roar 
issued from the set and the thick voice rode over it, --The duty of 
science is to pursue knowledge even if it leads to the unbeautiful. 
Or to evil. How else learn about evil?

Nan returned to sit beside him. --Isn't that Réti?

The camera returned to the physicist. Emeritus director, Réti was 
rarely at the Lab; the office he kept there served him solely as a 
clubroom or a backdrop. Six months ago a film crew had come to the 
Lab. Quine had heard Réti shouting at them behind the closed door.

--Watch, this is what Highet calls the liberal bias of the media, 
said Quine as the camera went to the interviewer.

--After the war, many of your colleagues turned away from weapons. 
Some of them have won Nobel Prizes. Do you feel that your work with 
weapons has cost you credibility or respect within the scientific 
community? Has it compromised you as a scientist?

--Never. In fact it has challenged and improved me as a scientist.

--You're closely connected to Radiance. What about recent charges 
that test results have been faked?

--This is a lie! First, I am not closely connected...

--But you've lobbied extensively for Radiance in Wash

--I am no lobbyist! I am a private citizen with some scientific 
expertise, and when I am asked to testify about technical matters I 
do so...

--But for over forty years you've been an advocate of nuclear 
weapons. Your authority and influence are well known.

--Now you listen to me. It is an imperfect world, a dangerous world. 
There is evil in the world. How do you meet it? All ends, even the 
best, are reached by impure means. Reason is supposed to be the 
hallmark of science, but I tell you that no one is swayed by reason. 
A theory, an idea, does not make its own way. It was Einstein who 
said merit alone is very little good; it must be backed by tact and 
knowledge of the world. I know of many cases where maybe the data 
does not quite agree with your theory, no, you think, the carpers 
will question, your case is far clearer if you discard this set of 
data, if you report only these results. And who are these frauds? 
Ptolemy. Galileo. Newton. Bernoulli. Mendel. Millikan. What matters 
in the long run is not some wishful dream of scruples, but whether 
you have driven your knowledge home!

Behind the fury in Réti's eyes Quine saw a bright and open wound: 
more illustrious for his influence than his work, he had failed at 
everything but success. And Quine's own life, he suddenly saw, was 
bent around Réti's influence. A man has no wealth nor power but his 
knowledge, Réti had once said to Quine. But now he said that if 
power did not lead, knowledge could not follow. Quine stood, ignoring 
--Philip? what is it? and went to the bathroom. He held the sides of 
the sink, heart racing. In the cabinet he found the pill bottle.

*The spirit is radiant, yet there are two principles of radiance: 
that of light, and that of fire. Fire comes to the use of those who 
go not the way of light. And the difference is, that fire must 
consume its object.*

Quine returned to Réti's angry voice, --So I have no Nobel Prize, 
that accolade of the pure. But Alfred Nobel would understand me well. 
And history will be my judge, not you.

--What is it, Philip? What's the matter?

Quine turned to Nan, her face in the phosphor light bleak as a rock 
outcrop. He reached to touch her neck. Unsmiling she leaned her head 
against his hand. His fingers cupped her nape and he drew her mouth 
to his.

In the bedroom they undressed on opposite sides of the bed. The 
television droned on. Between her legs he felt the string of a 
tampon, and as he touched it she bent double and enclosed him in her 
mouth. Above the activity of their bodies his spirit hovered sadly 
regarding the terrain of his life. Lightly his hands cradled her 
head. He began to pump semen. Deep inside him a talon drove home and 
brought forth, impaled, his soul, writhing. A minute later he was 
awash in sleep. Waiting at a counter to pick up xeroxes. Quick tap at 
his shoulder. Kate. She smiled, her eyes upon him, and he knew it was 
a dream, and he was happy, and he slept.

# 2

The morning sky, pallid with haze, conveyed yet enough sun to cast 
through the high embrasure of his office window a faint rhombus which 
crept toward the doorway relentless as a horologue. From his desk 
Quine gazed at it half hearing the radio, --ildfires in three 
counties, when his phone rang.

--Quine.

--Is this Philip?

--Yes, who's this.

--Lynn. From the demo yesterday?

--Oh. Oh yes. How did you... He stood and paced with the phone. --How 
did you get my number?

--I called the switchboard. I want to apologize. I behaved badly. Are 
you free for coffee?

--Well I... not this morning.

--Later this afternoon?

--Well I...

--Don't let me pressure you.

--No I, I want to. It's just a surprise.

--I get off work at four. Do you know the Café Desaparecidos the 
missing,

--I get off work at four. Do you know the Café Desaparecidos [the 
missing]? In the central mall. I work near there.

--Sure I, okay, I'll see you there about four.

As he hung up Jef Thorpe knocked on his open door. Black jacket, blue 
shirt, jeans. A faint pock where yesterday the nose stud had been.

--Come in. [pg24]

--I guess we'll be working together.

--Oh, you're staying.

--If you'll have me. Listen, that meeting yesterday, I didn't belong 
there, I'm sorry if...

--Not your fault. Doctor Highet has his way of doing things.

--Yeah, I see that. Listen, before we started I want to tell you, the 
single-photon experiment you did with Sorokin was really elegant. I 
was, you know, sort of surprised to find you here, I thought you'd be 
somewhere more theoretical.

--I thought everyone had forgotten that experiment by now.

--Oh no. It was very sweet work.

--The detector was critical. We worked on it for two years. We got it 
only after I came here.

--You didn't follow it up.

--Sorokin thought I was wrong to come here. He said it would be a 
black hole. He may have been right. Of course things look different 
from inside.

--Black hole, yeah, I've thought of that. But you know where I come 
from. That limits my options in the straight academic world.

--You don't have qualms about defense work?

--It's not what I'm here for.

--It's just, you might want to consider your position. I came in 
neutral about defense work, but before long I was in the thick of it. 
It's easy to slip into.

--I'm sort of apolitical.

--Well, if that's what you want, turning to the computer which glowed 
with:

> `Date:` Fri 1 Nov 09:05 \
> `From:` Leo Highet <sforza@milano.banl.gov> \
> `To:` Philip Quine <quine@styx.banl.gov> \
> `Subject:` Upcoming J Section Tests
>
> 11/4 23:00 PDT, Building 328, Codename "Stelarc", ground-based 
laser guide star, R. Grosseteste, sup.
R. Grosseteste, sup.
>
> 11/9 18:00 PDT, Site 600, Codename "Taliesin", 80 kiloton, B. Dietz 
& P. Quine, sup.
>
> "Mechanics are the Paradise of mathematical science, because here 
we come to the fruits of mathematics." LdV

--Looks like we're real, said Thorpe.

--You're lucky. It was years before I was associated with a shot.

--Is that luck?

--It's a bit of a prestige. A merit badge

Quine cleared the screen and brought up the Superbright test data.

--You see. Intense brightness here, and here. Very erratic pattern.

--This data is picked up how?

--When the bomb ignites, radiation from the rods bounces off some 
reflectors to

--X-ray mirrors?

--Yes, something like that. They're beryllium. The data agrees with 
theory to a point, but when we increase power, we don't get an 
increase in beam, in fact we get less. We've talked about trying 
different metals in the rods, we've used gold till now, but mercury...

--Yeah, elements seventy-two through ninety-five would be good to try 
but with the, you know, time constraints, I checked and Fabrication 
has gold rods ready to go, so maybe those are a good choice and you 
can, or I mean we can sort of concentrate on sensor configuration...

--Sounds reasonable.

Thorpe continued to stare at the screen. --Could this be an annular? 
This pattern I mean, could those reflectors be picking up a sort of 
imperfect focus, you know, the edge of a ring? If we move them in...

--I've tried, no luck.

--Can I look at your focusing code?

--Yes, sure, all the files are in this directory.

--That's great. Mind if I work here? pointing to Null's desk.

--Ah, sure. Sure, go ahead. I'm going for lunch and maybe a swim. 
I'll see you later.

*We read of the beaver that when it is pursued, knowing that it is 
for the medicinal virtue of its testicles and not being able to 
escape, it stops; and it bites off its testicles with its sharp teeth 
and leaves them to its enemies.*
---

Gaunt, saturnine, Bran Nolan in a corner of the cafeteria looked up 
unsmiling from scattered papers to raise a hand in greeting.

--How's our new boyo Kihara?

--Weren't you in line for that position?

--It's my Tourette's syndrome. Terrible liability in a press officer, 
never know what he might blurt out in public.

--You should have been asked.

--Do you know, I'm happier, if that's the word I want, where I am. 
Kihara is a little lamb. The last man, Vessell, didn't outlast 
Slater. And we're not done with all that, no indeed.

--Getting some work done? Quine indicated the papers.

--"The Lab has a longstanding commitment to developing new methods 
and technologies to protect the environment", the most effective of 
which to date has been the press release. Do you know we have a 
toxics mitigation program now? Seems there's a toxic plume seeping 
into the groundwater under a vineyard off the north boundary. Vines 
died, soil went gray, the whole field stinks like sepsis. I'm writing 
an upbeat report about it. And yourself? How's the death ray coming?

--We can maim small insects at a meter. The new concept is 
interceptors. Small flying rocks.

--Do you know, da Vinci invented shrapnel. He'd have been right at 
home here with all these advanced minds.

--Yes, that's Highet's conceit.

--Throwing rocks at things. We should be proud, thinking about these 
old impulses in such an advanced way.

A plump figure cam forward shaking a sheaf of papers, from which 
Nolan recoiled. --Bran, Bran, Bran. What must I do to get you to use 
a font other than Courier?

--Hello Bob, how's the gout? I don't like this business of tarting up 
manuscripts. You get enchanted by the beauty of it all. You start to 
think you're writing the Book of Kells.

--A few attractive fonts, tastefully applied, can spice up a 
presentation. A little humanitas, you know. Why else, Bran, did we 
get you that powerful and costly workstation?

--I don't know, Bob, why did you? I was still figuring out the type 
balls on my Selectric.

The sheaf of papers fell fanning from their clip onto the table.

Shaking his head and chuckling grimly, Bob passed on to another table.

--Humanitas, yes, that's what we need here, isn't it, Highet with his 
Renaissance, and Aldus Manutius there, need a few more particle men 
who've read the Tao Te Ching, couple more managers who've studied Sun 
Tzu, lend these binary views a little tone, dress up the winners and 
losers, the Elect and the Preterite, the screwers and the screwed. 
Each man in his station, and keep your distance from the low life, 
can't have just anyone winning, because if you ever let the rabble 
ahead, if they can rise, you can surely fall.

Nolan folded back pages, --listen to this bit, "the support of this 
tight-knit community", support is it now? I'd have said the goading, 
the ambition, the Schadenfreude, that's what gets the work done. The 
wife walked out six months ago with the kid, you're eating Campbell's 
soup cold out of the can, you haven't got a clean shirt, but after a 
few months of eighteen hour days you've got *data* that everyone 
wants to see. You *win big*.

--Bran, you work here, too.

--What should I do then, write novels? Or maybe journalism, that's 
it, *investigative* journalism. Have you met the journalist from 
Cambridge? Right over there with his tape recorder, name's Armand 
Steradian. He's researching the belief systems of those who work on 
weapons of mass destruction, I think that was his phrase. Quite the 
charmer. He's published one book on scientific fraud, and a paper 
highly critical of what he calls the defense establishment. You 
probably don't watch TV but there was a program on PBS last night, 
Steradian was in it abusing Réti.

--Does Highet know he's here?

--Highet invited him.

Quine headed for the door, passing as he did Armand Steradian, who 
held a small microphone before a J Section technician, --you're so 
goldang busy every day you just put off thinking about it, though in 
Quine's view pressure was a tool well used to put off thinking.

---

Black cottonwoods around the pool throve despite the drought. Their 
catkins littered the water. A jet moved on the sky, stitching a 
contrail across a lace of cloud where a white sun struggled. Quine 
sat on a towel on the grassy verge and watched a portly swimsuited 
man enter through the gate, barrel chest glossed with hair, and 
behind him a woman in a white halter top and shorts, the heads of 
three men turning to follow. The pool was crowded this Friday 
afternoon; it was warm, it was the end of the workweek, it was family 
day; unlike Quine, most worked a five day week, most would depart 
hence into a forgetfulness. In the shallows of the pool two young 
girls splashed. One opened her mouth to show her companion a bright 
penny on her outstretched tongue. A young mother in a black maillot 
gripped a ladder to raise herself half from the pool and wave at her 
infant in a nearby stroller, glisten and shadow in the cords of her 
back, and Quine suffered a pang for a life now beyond his knowing: to 
be wed, with child, so young. On thermals a black and white winged 
vulture, _Cathartes aura_, rocked and banked. From the jet thunder 
fell like muffled blows. The warmth and the sound of water churned by 
swimmers and the spray tossed up by their passing lulled Quine into a 
lethargy from which he woke with a start to consult his watch. On the 
pool's floor danced cusps of light.

---

The café's walls rose past exposed beams and ducts to the nacre of 
frosted skylights. Lynn sat in a wirebacked chair at a glass table, 
face downcast at papers before her. In the moment before she looked 
up, Kate's face glowed before him. What do you do, Philip?

--Hoy es el día de los muertos, Lynn said in greeting, banishing 
Kate's image. Angularities all her own moved in her flesh; a small 
gap showed between her teeth as she smiled.

Quine seated himself and said gravely, --I should tell you I'm 
involved with someone.

--Gee, I said I wanted to apologize, not start an affair.

--I, sorry I...

--And maybe pick your brain about Radiance.

--I'm sorry, I, what did you say before? El día...

--Today is the Day of the Dead. All Saint's Day. All of California 
used to be Mexico, you know, they called it Aztlan. Once my group 
shuts the Lab down, we're going to reclaim Aztlan for the native 
peoples. Oh, don't look that way, I'm joking, that's the kind of 
thing the far right says about us.

--Your group?

--Citizens Against Nuclear Technology. I'm a paralegal with them.

--What's that you're reading?

--Your press releases. She held a sheaf set in unadorned Courier 
font. --You people have fingers in a lot of pies. When I started my 
concern was the bombs, but that's just the tip of the iceberg, isn't 
it. There's also the supercomputers, the lasers, the genetics, the 
chemicals...

--You probably know more about it than I do.

--Your cover stories are so creative. Every one of. Oh, go ahead, 
order, she's waiting.

--Cappuccino. What do you mean, cover stories?

--Quisiera un espresso por favor. Every one of these quote benign 
technologies has a pretty easy to imagine military use. Laser x-ray 
lithography for etching microchips, uh huh, right, and here's one 
about kinder gentler CBW, "less virulent" tear gas for "crowd 
control", heavier specific gravity for controlled delivery, if this 
is the stuff you're public about I can only imagine the rest.

--You're wrong, there's a genuine effort to convert to peacef

--Dual use, I know. Genuine effort to blur the line is what it is, 
and it goes far beyond the Lab, people in physics and comp sci 
departments across the country are lining up at the same trough, the 
grants are there and if they don't take the money someone else will. 
That's the reasoning. What a waste of talent and resources.

--It's more complicated than that. The people I work with, they're 
not cynical.

--Yes, I know how people get caught up in their work. I have a friend 
there, not in Radiance, in another section. He's a Quaker, he calls 
it "being in the world". At least he's thought about it. How did you 
get into it?

--Me? I'm, well, a lapsed theorist. But I'm not typical... Was he 
not? Réti, Highet, Dietz, Thorpe, all had failed in some subtle way 
that in such a place could be denied. But where was there not failure 
and denial?

--Do your people pay any attention at all to our demonstrations?

--In J Section? Not much.

--We seem to bug your boss, at least.

--Highet?

--In his little red sports car. What about you? What did you think 
about the big one yesterday?

--It seemed, I don't know, festive, almost a costume party, I didn't 
realize at first it was Halloween...

--But no, that wasn't it. It was a ceremony. An exorcism.

--Oh come on, what, you mean we're possessed...

--By arrogance, if nothing else.

--That's absurd, you can't convince anyone with some absurd ritual...

--It's no different from your rituals, your bomb tests, just as 
absurd, but really dangerous!

--They're not my tests... and he remembered *B. Dietz & P. Quine, 
sup.* --I'm sorry. I'm no good at talking about this.

The set of her features, so poised and eager, softened then and her 
voice lowered. --I don't mean to attack you. I'm sure you think about 
it.

--Yes but, but I'm not sure! What to do, I mean. What if it is a 
waste, what if, if all the money and the decades, all the lives and 
talent... then it's more than just me, it's not just my mistake, but 
something wrong at the root of it, and what, what can I do about that?

--If it is a mistake, you can face it. You could stop.

--But that wouldn't stop anything. It's almost as if these things we 
work on... they use us to get born. Could use anyone.

--It must be very hard for you. Their eyes met, and the troubled 
sympathy in hers wrung him. Her face was so concerned for him that he 
almost cried out with selfpity.

--It's not your fault. I, I need to get back now.

--I really am sorry, can we... can we forget about all this and just 
start over?

--Start over...?

Abruptly he rose and walked away stolid with loathing of his own 
erratic heart, and of her for stirring it.

---

 In the night he woke sweating with a pulse of ninety, reached for 
the pillbottle next to the small box DREAMLIGHT Unlock Your Inner 
Potential and its plastic headset. The pills opened a plain of 
timelessness in which it seemed a lost part of himself dwelled. as he 
lay in their haze, his fluency returned. Wonderful problems enticed 
and yielded to his insight, wisdom depended from the sky like fruit. 
He kept a notebook in case any insight survived his waking. None did.

He attached the headset like a blindfold. At the onset of dreaming a 
strobe would flicker there and rouse him enough to observe and direct 
his dream but not to wake. He settled and conjured an image: the 
battle station shining in the void of space. Slender arms and rods 
pivoting. The missile rise in swarms, bright points on the black 
hollow of a crescent Earth. They blur in a silver mist of chaff. 
Above the crescent distant battle stations ignite in globes of light, 
their beams lance out, but swarm follows swarm up from the Earth, far 
too many to destroy. He pulled off the headset.

The world has changed, the old enemy has collapsed into ruined 
republics. Yet despite this consummation of all the Lab has strived 
for, the work goes on, the mood is spiritless, the shots in the 
desert continue like some ritual of penance, some black and endless 
propitiation of forces that in losing their fixed abode have grown 
closer and more menacing.

Stillness. Faint whistle of tinnitus, first sounds of birdcall. Wan 
dawn light. The enemy is gone. But the work goes on and on.

# 3

 For a while Lynn was not among the protesters. Their numbers had 
diminished to a small contingent by the main gate, holding a drooping 
sheet painted DIABOLIS EX MACHINA. Quine slowed through the gate and 
stopped, valves in the engine ticking, for a backhoe lurching across 
the main road, and closed his window against the dust billowing 
toward him as he went on past an air hammer breaking a sidewalk to 
rubble, overtones of its chatter following him across the rock moat 
and into the building where, too late to retreat, he saw Thorpe 
seated at Null's computer tapping without letup at Quine's entrance.

--Morning, said Quine.

--Is it? I've been here all night. Something there for you to read.

On top of Quine's stack of journals, a year's unread accumulation, 
colored slips in their pages flagging articles that at an earlier 
time would not have waited a day, was a xerox topped with a yellow 
sticker SEEN THIS? _Physical Review Letters 1954_. A dig at his age?

--I know it's old, said Thorpe. --But I think it applies. See, I 
started with an EE from a hick school, taught myself quantum 
mechanics by reading Dirac, so my perspective is sort of, things 
don't change that much. Lots of good ideas have been left hanging. 
That's how I found your paper... I mean... stumbling at having 
touched as he thought Quine's sensitive point, --not to say, it's 
just, you know, if you're a student like me, not well connected, not 
seeing all the latest preprints and hearing all the gossip, you need 
another way up. So this is my way, sort of looking for old forgotten 
stuff to build on.

--So tell me about this.

--I came across it working for Fish and Himmelhoch, looking for a 
sort of nuclear model to explain the cold fusion reaction? Okay I 
know, the current wisdom is, there's no reaction, it's bogus, or if 
anything is happening it's electrochemical, okay, fine. But you know, 
if you model the process in a nuclear way, it looks like a phenomenon 
called super-radiance. The equations are similar. Highet saw the 
connection.

--To this? Highet told you about Superbright?

--Very sharp guy.

--That's quite a breach of classification.

--He sort of hinted around it, citing the open literature. Anyway 
it's moot, I'm cleared now. What do you think?

--I'll read it when I get a chance, dropping it back on to the stack 
of journals.

--But, I mean, we don't have much time. Should I pursue it?

--What have you been doing?

--Well, here, let me show you, I started sort of modifying your code 
but I had a couple of quest

--You changed my files?

--No no I made copies, changes only on my copies and I

--Okay, but look, just be sure you log all your changes into the CASE 
system, okay? You know how that works?

--Yes, sure but I wondered about a few things like where you've got 
this array of reals here, what's that?

--That's the rod array, angles lengths diameters densities

--Okay I thought so, because see I was thinking if you make that 
something like ten to the minus ten here

--That's the thickness, we can't make rods that thin it's imposs

--But what if we play what-if with these numbers...

--Wait what are you do

--then the beam, oops that's a little extreme but you see what I

--But there's no, I mean sure, you can make the model do anything, 
but it has to correspond to reality!

--Sure, I'm just getting, you know, the feel of the system. But, oh 
here I wanted to know what this function does, this hyperbol

--Yes that's the response curve of the reflec, look, can this wait? 
and without pausing Quine was out of the office as from speakers 
overhead a pleasant female voice advised, --Attention all personnel. 
Starting at midnight tiger teams will conduct exercises in this area 
using blank ammunition... and he turned into the restroom where at 
the end, past a row of sinks and urinals opposite metal stalls, a gym 
bag hung on a hook and steam billowed as Quine, elbows braced on a 
basin, looked up from the laving of his hands at a bass voice echoing 
around the hard tile, --bist du ein Tor und rein, to see in the 
mirror not his own eternally surprised features but fogged void, and 
turned from the hiss of his faucet to glimpse through the mist a hard 
white nude male body emerging to towel itself, still singing, --welch 
Wissen dir auch mag beschieden sein.

---

In the cavernous building where Dietz supervised, Quine watched long 
metal tubes welded one by one to the great monstrance in which the 
bomb would rest a quarter mile underground. From instruments at the 
ends of each tube hundreds of cables would run to the surface. Dietz 
displayed a blueprint of the cylinder.

--We are already welding. I cannot wait to know.

--Can you hold off a day or two? If I had any idea where to put the 
damn things I'd tell you if I had any idea even how to find what I'm 
looking for...

--We can go ahead with other things for just a little while. For a 
day. Now the rod configuration...

--Unchanged. I'm not touching that.

--Make sure, please, that Highet knows all this. Sometimes he wanders 
through here and if things are not what he expects he is most 
unpleasant.

Outside Highet's office Quine, arm raised to knock, from within heard 
Highet's insistent rasp, --like Kammerer, you know, it's not who 
makes the mistake it's who takes the blame, and at Thorpe's voice 
barely audible, --sorry for the poor son of a bitch stuck in his 
position at his age, barely shows his face, and Highet, --never 
passed a design review, Quine's ears flared with heat, the door 
before him turning flat and insubstantial as he lowered his hand and 
proceeded down the hall unseeing, guided by a familiarity more the 
prisoner's than the adept's around a corner to a water fountain, 
stopped before a bulletin board and its overlapping notices O 
Section, programmer needed to model underground plumes K Section, 
LASS expert needed Z Section, multimedia guru sought B Section, 
materials engineer, while two young men passed, one saying, --I have 
no special loyalty to OOP, and on to a further junction where a 
convex mirror above him presented an anamorphic view around the 
corner. There Nan emerged from a cross corridor with a wiry man, 
white teeth in a tanned face, blackhaired forearms folded. The two 
spoke briefly. The man put a hand on Nan's neck and bent forward to 
kiss her mouth. Quine turned back the way he had come, slowing only 
when he found he had nearly circled the building. He backtracked to 
Highet's door and entered without knocking.

--Get Thorpe out of my office.

Highet looked up in surprise. --What did he do to you, Philip? You 
look ready to spit.

--If he's so important give him his own space, I don't want him 
hanging around me.

--Thought you'd appreciate the company, thought he might be useful to 
you.

--What's that supposed to mean?

--Thorpe handles himself well, you could learn from him. Show some 
team spirit. Poor boy's feeling abandoned by you.

--I'll work with him, but I don't have to like him or share office 
space with him. It's bad enough Null's stuff is still there.

--Thorpe has his own space. You want him out, you can tell him so. By 
the way, Réti's here for a visit, you might want to pay your 
respects. Instead of running around down in Fabrication with Dietz.

--Someone has to tend to those details.

--Let me tell you something, Philip, I'm a smart guy but to be 
brutally honest I'm a second rate physicist. I have the ideas but not 
the persistence, I've known that about myself for twenty years. But 
I've learned to position myself and to use other people to get what I 
want. Win win, you know, we help each other look good. You take my 
point?

Voices approach in the corridor as Highet went on in a lower tone, 
--One path in the world is up. There's also a path down. What there 
isn't is standing still. Now you, friend, have been standing still 
for quite a little while. I'd say you need to make some career 
decisions soon, before they're made for you.

Flanked by two Lab factotums, Aron Réti came slowly, stamping his 
cane, into Highet's office. His eyes, azure behind thick lenses, 
peered without recognition as Quine greeted him. --Ah, my young 
friend, how are you?

--You remember Philip Quine, Aron. That beautifully sweet photon 
detector he built for us.

--Of course, of course.

--So here we are, three generations of first rate physics talent.

--Yes yes, the torch is passed.

--I really must be

--No, stay. Aron, Philip's going to get us the data we need to 
silence the critics.

--The critics, there is no need to mind them.

--From your eminence perhaps not, but I have to deal with these fools 
and dupes almost daily. Do you know what a senator, a United States 
senator, said to me the other day? He called this place a scientific 
brothel.

--I know the man you mean. Brothels I am sure he knows well, but of 
science he is ignorant.

--Well unfortunately this ignoramus chairs a committee that oversees 
our funding, so I have to deal with him.

--Speaking of influence, this left wing journalist, I see him here 
again, why do you let him in? Six months ago he abused my trust with 
gutter tactics of the worst sort.

--You mean Steradian? He's a useful idiot. He's so cocksure I let him 
hear things I want to see in print, look here... Highet lifted from 
the desktop a folded newspaper, --"Radiance Research Forges Ahead", 
see, this is solid gold. He's so excited when he hears something that 
may be classified, his critical sense shuts off. You can see him 
quiver like a puppy dog.

--Keep him away from me, I want nothing to do with him. What is our 
testing status?

--We need more. As always. Classifying them has helped deflect 
criticism but we're still being nickel and dimed.

--What do you need?

--An additional three hundred million over the next year.

--I will talk to the president. This is for Superbright?

--Yes. We can definitely show quantitative agreement with theory. 
It's only a matter of time and money. Philip will tell you how close 
we are. He and his new assistant have made tremendous headway, just 
tremendous.

--So? Tell me about this, my young friend.

--Well, I think it's premature to say so. There's a shot next 
Saturday. We'll know better than.

--Philip's too modest, that's always been his problem.

--No I just think we need a lot more

--More funding. Basically it's a matter of funding. In the long run 
we see coherent beams striking out a thousand miles and diverging no 
more than a meter. We see a single battle station downing every 
missile any enemy can launch. And Aron, we're also going ahead with 
your interceptors. As part of the overall system.

--Baldur?

--Smaller, faster, smarter, cheaper. Less than thirty billion to 
deploy.

--Even twenty years ago I thought that this idea only needed the 
technology to catch up. It is good we have a history, a tradition, a 
culture here.

--Like Ulysses, we're never at a loss.

--Really? Never at a

--Philip...

--Unless we're trying to produce a thousand mile beam where no test 
has ever shown

--Philip!

--Well how long do you think we can keep it up! this this

--As long as it takes.

--and you, Doctor Réti?

--My young friend, I am an optimist.

--Philip I want a word with you. Excuse us Aron. One arm clutched 
Quine in tight embrace and steered them into the hallway, Highet 
saying in low controlled tones, --One day soon, very soon, I'll stop 
giving you second chances. Come up empty this time and you're 
through. Clear?

--Meaning what? You'll what?

--I don't know. I don't know but it will be terrible and final and I 
promise you'll never forget it. Highet raised his voice to hearty 
amiability, --Good man! You let me know, and went back into his 
office.

---

As night came on the life of the building went to X Section, the 
Playpen, where the younger men worked on schemes even more 
speculative than Superbright, and Quine returned for the thousandth 
time to his simulation with the sinking heart of a man returning to a 
loveless home. Entrapment. As if fine wire had threaded his drugged 
veins, and now, as feeling returned, any movement might tear him 
open. He fidgeted the radio on to, --fades to a reddish color as it 
enters Earth's shad, and off as he saw again the tilt of Nan's head, 
the fine whorls of her ear, the man's dark hand cupping her neck. The 
ridge of her collarbone, the warm pulse of the vein across it.

On Null's whiteboard deltas sigmas omegas integrals infinities in 
variegated ink still wove like fundamental forces their elegant 
pattern around a void. From the clutter on the desk he lifted CENTURY 
21 LAB QUARTERLY. Changing world betokens larger role for science. 
Acceptable levels of social risk. Public does not fully understand. 
World free of threats too much to ask. Revolutionary new technique. 
Major improvement. Important to a variety of national goals. Unique 
multi-disciplinary expertise. Two young men, one poised to hurl a 
balloon, caromed past his doorway. He shut the door on guffaws and 
--teach you some hydrodynamics!

He picked up Black 1954. He looked at the citations, then read from 
the start. He stopped often to reread, with a doggedness that made 
shift for his halt sense, once so fine, of the rhythms of scientific 
thought, the probe and test and parry and clinch that now required 
his slow and remedial attention to be grasped. As he read, his 
respect for Thorpe grew even as an emptiness opened with him. When he 
was finished he started into space before reaching across the desk to 
snap off the lights.

The phone chattered. On the second ring he lifted it, holding silence 
to ear for a moment before speaking. In the darkness the computer 
screen, phosphors charged by the room's vanished light, was a dim 
fading square.

--Quine.

--Hi, it's Lynn, I'm glad I caught you. I'm hiking up Mount Ohlone 
with some friends tonight, you want to come?

--Well...

--I know it's short notice.

--I should be working.

--Good heavens, all night? We're not starting till nine.

--No but... He scrutinized the whiteboard as if this quandary might 
be expressed there in double integrals. --I mean... sure, why not.

--Good! Meet us at the park gate. It's ten miles north on Crow Canyon 
Road.

In the hallway a length of surgical tubing, knotted at both ends, lay 
ruptured and limp in a film of water. As he left the building 
sprinklers came on in a silver mist and rainbows shimmered in the 
floodlit air. He drove out past parked vehicles and armed men in 
fatigues.

He arrived early. The sky was starry, the moon full. Some planet was 
setting in the west, probably Saturn by its color. The V of Taurus 
pointed back the way he'd come. A car approached, lights snagging in 
the trees, then came around the last bend lightless and rolled to a 
stop.

--Mark, Julie, this is Philip.

--Why're we whispering?

--Park's closed. Not supposed to be here.

They went around the closed gate and past a building set back among 
trees. In a second story window a dim line flickered, a fluorescent 
tube not on nor off, stuttering between states. Fifty yards further 
they left the road for a broad path that rose winding under black 
oak, then bay. An owl called, leaving the harbor of a eucalyptus.

Quine and Lynn walked in silence. Ahead Julie laughed and touched 
Mark's arm, not a lover's touch, but a gesture of intimacy with the 
world, the same hand caressing air and underbrush. They talked about 
people they knew, hes and shes darting in and out of audibility like 
moths in the dark. Soon they entered a darkness of trees where 
nothing was visible but shards of the moon fallen like leaves around 
them. He went more slowly and stumbled. Lynn paused and he heard a 
rustling. Leaves popped free of a branch and came crushed under 
Quine's nose, carrying to him a strong waft of mint and resin.

--Sweet bay, she said, --is sacred to Apollo, but this is not 
European bay, _Laurens_, it's California bay, _Umbellularia_. Her 
tongue lingered on the liquids.

They kept climbing until they broke from the woods into an open 
slope. Moonlight rinsed palely the open range land below them.

--_Artemisia tridentata_, Lynn said, inhaling as she broke from a 
sagebrush a twig of gray leaves.

It was pungent in her cupped palm. The warmth of her came with it.

--Named for the goddess Artemis. Who loves it. And this is willow. 
_Salix_. _Los alamos_. Which is the meaning of Orpheus's name. Who 
opened doors he couldn't reenter.

--How do you know all this?

--This is where I grew up. This is the smell of my home. This is how 
I know I belong.

They came up to Mark and Julie at the edge of the grove. The moon 
hung above them, swollen, no goddess remontant but an airless world 
already mapped, trodden, and projected for division into satrapies of 
mining, manufacturing, and defense, occupancy deferred only until 
these scenarios could enrich their planners at a margin of return 
greater and more reliable than what current technology assured.

--Let's sit here.

Julie passed around bread, cheese, fruit, a plastic bottle of water. 
On the grass they sat eating. Somewhere crickets chirred on and off, 
their presence like a field of energy shifting.

--It's so warm tonight. Almost like summer.

--You from around here, Philip?

--I went to school in the East. I've been working around here for 
eight years.

--Practically a native. What do you do?

--I write software.

--Friend of mine works for CodeWin, maybe you know him.

--It's a big industry.

--Bigger by the day, said Lynn dryly.

--Where's the Big Dipper? I can't see it, said Julie, standing.

--It's too low to see, said Quine. --That's the handle above the 
ridgeline. There in the west, that's Vega setting. A summer star. 
Winter coming in over there... pointing to that swarm of fireflies 
tangled in a silver braid, --The Pleiades. Also called the Seven 
Sisters. You can count more than seven on a clear night. But not with 
the moon out. And right behind them Orion, you can see him just 
coming over the horizon, those three stars in a line. Chasing them. 
Kind of a bad luck bunch, the Sisters. They were all seduced by one 
god or another, except for Merope, who married Sisyphus.

--Look! Is that a planet?

Finding the pale green disk where Julie pointed, a handsbreath from 
the Sisters, Quine knew it was the beam of a laser ten miles south 
stabbing to the edge of space where sodium atoms glowed in its heat.

--No, not a planet... Suddenly Lynn's hand was in his. She squeezed 
it once, and before he could respond released it to run downhill 
toward a dark grove. He stood for a moment and then he ran too. He 
ran for no reason he could name, wind in his ears, an excitement 
rising almost to fear in his heart, hackles alive. Some presence 
almost, chasing him. Then the darkness of the trees was around him 
and he tripped and went sprawling. The presence was still there. He 
feared it though he knew it was benign. It was not death, but it 
would change his life if he let it.

--Philip? Are you all right?

She stood over him, at the edge of the grove as Mark and Julie 
approached. He lay there in anxiety, anger almost at how she'd 
stirred him, at the beauty of her movement, at the way her features 
held the moonlight.

--Philip...?

--I'm fine. He brushed leaf dirt from his sleeves. The presence was 
gone. They walked in silence until emerging from the grove and 
heading downslope. Overhead the green star had vanished.

--So what are you working on now, Philip?

--Oh... things in the sky, Quine said. --An aerospace partner wants 
us to program low orbit balloons a couple of miles across, the 
apparent size of the moon, sunlit, carrying messages, logos, 
advertising...

--But that's so, Julie began and Mark cut in, --Seems I read about 
this. The Sierra Club's bringing suit, aren't they?

--I don't know about that, we're just the contractors, I just do my 
job... and Julie glancing at Lynn claimed Mark's arm to move them 
away and resume in a low voice their conversation of hes and shes 
while Lynn walked apart, obliging Quine to follow, leaving behind 
--she sees him as a reclamation project... to overtake her on a 
knoll. She waited with crossed arms. Behind her, the valley was 
filled with glittering points. At its far verge was the floodlit 
terrain of the Lab.

--Philip, what are you doing?

--You don't like me as a software mogul?

--Is that your, your cover story? Her face remained still and fixed 
on him, moonshadow in her eyes' hollows.

--That balloon thing really is a Lab project, they started a small 
group on it...

--You don't want to tell them what you really do.

--No, I...

--You think Mark isn't smart enough to see through you? He is. You 
take his good faith for foolishness.

--Look I, I just didn't know what you told them. I didn't want you to 
be embarrassed by me. His face heated as he said it.

--Well, that would be my problem, wouldn't it. Now I have a different 
problem. Because it happens I did tell them. She waited for something 
he wasn't able to give her, then went on. --When you were talking 
about the Pleiades you were so, I don't know, at ease. What happened?

--Look, I'm sorry, I just... Another breath of warm breeze and he 
realized he was sweating.

--What happened?

--That green star we saw. It wasn't a star, it was something from the 
Lab. A laser test.

--A Radiance laser?

--No... something else. Unclassified. A guide star for adaptive 
optics.

She was listening with her arms still crossed. --Why did that change 
your mood?

--It's just, I'd almost forgotten, about everything except, except 
for being here. That thing in the sky reminded me. Then Mark asked 
what I did...

--They really have their hooks in you, don't they.

--I know that.

Face still hollowed in moonshadow she stepped toward him. His need to 
be touched and take comfort welled up, but some structure unknown yet 
dreadful held him still. After a moment's wait she turned to face the 
valley lights. --I'm surprised you haven't quit.

--And do what! Turn from the one place where my, my talents have some 
use?

--What do you want, Philip?

--Want? I don't know. I can't get it. I want eight years back. Before 
this I was a scientist.

--They haven't robbed you of that.

--Yes, that's so, I gave myself over, and now I'm on the line for 
something I don't care about. That's the way, yes, you're going to 
get screwed regardless, so you should make sure it's for something 
that matters to you...

--What would that be?

--I don't know.

Julie and Mark were calling. They went down the slope and rejoined 
them. She was still talking to Mark, --so I'm, wait, stop, this is 
it, these are the boundaries and he's like, what did I do? She turned 
to Lynn with the pack, --take this? and embraced Mark from behind, 
arms around his chest, straps of her shortlegged overalls a dark X on 
her back, bare calves duckwalking the pair down the slope.

In the lot Lynn said to Julie, --Get a ride with you guys?

Quine called out, --Mark, just joking about the balloon.

Mark looked up, fumbling with his keys, smiling. --Oh yeah?

--Thanks, thanks for, for inviting me. He got in the car, opened the 
glovebox, found a tablet, brushed lint from it, swallowed it dry.

---

In his apartment was a smell like stale smoke and old sweat and 
rotting food, edged with something fouler, like the metallic stench 
of the flux from the open pipe. At first he thought it came from 
outside, where earlier they'd been roofing. But on the deck the air 
was fresh. He knelt to the carpet and smelled nothing. In the kitchen 
he bent to the drain and smelled nothing. From a bottle he squeezed a 
pearl of soap onto a sponge, ran hot water in the sink, scrubbed and 
rinsed it. He scrubbed the stove top. The ceiling fan was silted over 
by grease and spiderweb. He fetched a chair and reached to touch it. 
A black gobbet fell from it to the stove top. He fetched pliers and 
freed the nuts holding the shield, banging with the handle to break 
the dried paint around the rim. In both hands he bore the shield like 
a chalice to the sink.

In its concavities had pooled a glossy tar. He scrubbed it for 
minutes, smutch washing into the sink. Then he spooled off yards of 
paper toweling, wet and soaped it, and climbed the chair to wash over 
and again the sleeve of the fan, the blades, the hub. A viscous brown 
residue clung to the towels and his fingers. Further into the recess, 
beyond his reach, was more tar.

Sweat soaked him. He went onto the deck. The moon was dim and 
reddish, as if the sky held smoke. He stared in wonder and fear until 
the knowledge that it was an eclipse broke upon him banishing fear 
and wonder alike.

When he went back in the smell was waiting. He understood that from 
now on everything would smell like this. For a while he sat at the 
table with his eyes shut, then opened the newspaper for the memory of 
CARPETS CLEANED but it parted to 24 HRS OUTCALL DAWNA and LOVE TALK 
$2/MIN and he stared bleakly at the sullen pout, circleted forehead, 
hair as wild as if fresh risen from the sea, linen garb pleated in 
most subtle fashion. His hand found the telephone, and after a 
distant chirrup a small insinuating voice flicked like a tongue in 
his ear, and he stepped back from the uncradled receiver, switched 
off the lights, leaving the voice breathing unheeded into the 
darkness and the moonlight pooled on the floor.

He showered. In the stream lust swelled in him like nausea. Hot spray 
lashed him. Incoherent images flashed upon him. Runnels nudged 
moonwhite globs toward the drain. Depleted he toweled. On the sink 
were Nan's toothpaste, hairbrush, lipstick, mascara. On the toilet 
tank an unzipped travel kit of quilted cotton gaped to show 
diaphragm, jelly, tampons, vitamins, ibuprofen, hairpins, barrette, 
lens wetter, a glass jar of face cream. A towelend snagged in the 
zipper as Quine scrubbed dry his hair, dragging the kit. Items hailed 
on the tile floor. He dropped the towel, then swept his hand across 
the sink top. He grabbed the kit and hurled it. The jar flew out and 
smashed against the wall.

# 4

Dry sycamore leaves scraped over pavement in a hot wind drawn out 
from distant desert by a stalled offshore low. Over the ridge east of 
town dust and the smell of manure from the farmlands and a haze of 
smoke blew fitfully into the valley. as the sun rose through layers 
of haze Quine, driving to the back gate of the Lab so as to avoid the 
protesters, passed the dead vineyard by the north boundary. He pulled 
over, stilling the engine and the radio's --ty thousand acres ablaze.

The gate was closed but unlocked. A bright new sign bore the 
bio-hazard trefoil and DANGER TOXICS MITIGATION PILOT SITE ALPHA KEEP 
OUT. The drone of flies rose and fell like a turbine. Stunted vines 
clung to irrigation uprights. Bark from one sloughed like ash on his 
fingers. From deep in the vineyard a warm moist flatus perfused the 
air. A stink like the chyme of a dying beast. He ran back to the car 
choking and drooling. At an irrigation faucet he rinsed his mouth, 
his face, his hair, his hands, yet the foulness, as of corroded 
metal, lingered. What god loves this?

At Null's desk Thorpe worked.