Catherine just can't explain it. She has no idea why she felt so compelled to keep on. driving that night after leaving the Boston night-club where she worked as a receptionist. It was after midnight and she had driven past Somerville, where she lives. Nor does she know why she got off the highway about 10 miles to the north, or why she drove around Saugus and momentarily got lost in a wooded area. But after finding her way out, she noted that it was 2:45 in the. morning - at least 45 minutes later than it should have been.

Feeling anxious, she raced back home. The next day, on local news, she learned that dozens of people throughout. the Northeast had reported a UFO, including a policeman and his wife who had seen an object stop overhead and shine a light on them. Astronomers said the object was a shooting star.

A few weeks later, Catherine decided to contact Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, author of the 1977 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of T. E. Lawrence and known most recently for his outspoken interest in the UFO abduction phenomenon. In a series of hypnotic regression sessions, Mack helped Catherine unlock a lifetime of apparent abduction memories, beginning at the age of three and culminating in that murky night just weeks before at the age of 22.

Catherine did not enjoy finding out what had happened to her in the woods on the night of March 6, 1991. "I don't want to be there," a very frightened Catherine told Mack while under hypnosis. "I want to drive out."

But she could not. Her car had apparently come to a stop and her body had gone numb. Then suddenly her door had opened. "There is a hand reaching out to get me," Catherine recalled. "It's long and thin and it's only got three fingers." A being With huge, black, almond-shaped eyes then took her from the car, and the two of them were swept up in a beam toward a huge metallic ship.

The alien abductor, the story goes, then took Catherine inside, into a hallway, where four other beings were waiting. When they began pulling at her clothes, she got annoyed. "Stop it," she recalled thinking. "I'm perfectly capable of doing this myself, thank you." Once naked, Catherine was led into an enormous room "the size of an airplane hangar."

She saw rows and rows of tables everywhere. "There are hundreds of humans in. here," she told Mack under hypnosis. "And they're all having things done to them." The rows were about five feet apart, she noted, and anywhere from a third to half the tables had humans on them. She estimates there were between 100 and 200 people in that room. But in the mass of bodies and blank faces she remembers one of them specifically - the one on the table to her left. He was a black man with a beard.

Catherine was forced to sit up on her table and the beings then began running their fingers down her spine. The terrifying examination had begun.

The, rest of Catherine's traumatic UFO experience appears in John Mack's controversial book, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, and is rather typical of such stories. But one detail in her story stands out like a Gulliver in Lilliput - that bit about the hundreds of other humans she saw aboard the alien craft that night. And Catherine is by no means alone among alleged abductees in reporting the presence of large numbers of humans aboard the alien crafts.

What accounts like these suggest is that the phenomenon actually involves mass abductions. It appears, as in Catherine's tale, that large numbers of people are being taken, one by one, to central locations that serve as holding facilities for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of others during the same period of time. If the other abductees' stories are true, moreover, sometimes entire groups of people are taken all at once.

Reports of this phenomenon, in fact, confirm some people's worst fears about the alien endeavor. Could we all be pawns in some weird extraterrestrial breeding scheme to repopulate a dying alien world? Or is the entire human race being unwillingly drafted into some hideous alien genetic experiment to produce alien human hybrias? Whatever the case, one thing seems clear: Quite a large number of us are potential targets.

"The phenomenon is not, as the general public tends to believe, an occasional `there's one, let's get him' sort of thing on the part of the aliens," explains David Jacobs, a Temple University historian specializing in twentieth-century U.S. history and the author of the book, Secret Life. Instead, he asserts, we have a mass abduction program taking place covertly. The notion of a secret invasion inevitably springs to mind.

"What we have here," says Jacobs, "is a continual abduction scenario. It's very much like an assembly line. The aliens get them in. They go into a waiting area where they see other people sitting around. They get shown to a table. There are all sorts of people lying on the tables as various stages of different procedures are being run on them. Then they get them up, get them out, and new people arrive. It's a revolving door."

The extraordinary number of people supposedly going through that revolving door should, it seems, help cement the case for the reality of the phenomenon. If multiple participants are involved in an abduction, the logic goes, then the experience cannot be the product of one individual's fantasy or hallucination In fact, the mass abduction cases seem to offer believers a golden opportunity to cross-check the details of the abduction experience from independent perspectives and develop the proof the critics have always demanded.

These mass abductions certainly appear to take place often enough. Jacobs estimates that abductees see other humans aboard the craft in half, if not most, of the cases. And one out of every four alleged abduction episodes involves multiple participants, according to Thomas Bullard, a folklorist whose 1987 University of Indiana doctoral dissertation exhaustively analyzed about 300 published abduction accounts.

Bullard found that while approximately half of these multiple-participant abduction cases involved just two people - usually family members or friends - the other half involved either three, four, or more people who claimed to have been taken at once. There are even cases in which seven or more people have reportedly been abducted in a single episode. The situation led Bullard to lament wryly that, apparently, "there's just no safety in numbers."

One of the earliest mass abduction cases on record actually involved nine people and took place one summer some 40 years ago near Crater Lake, Oregon; it was not, however, reported to a UFO organization until 1982. The participants were a 32-year-old woman known only as Mrs. R., her 15-year-old brother, 10-year-old sister, two daughters and a stepdaughter aged 10 to 13, two younger nephews, and Mrs. R.'s 53-year-old mother.

The witnesses remembered that while looking for a gas station they had come upon what appeared to be a restaurant. Their car engine sputtered and coasted into a parking area where three or four other cars were parked. The "building" was round and lighted and the interior was circular. Mrs. R. remembered commenting to her mother that the place was "really unbelievable." The family then sat down at one of the tables and apparently ordered a meal from short, slender people with blond hair who all looked alike and wore identical silver uniforms and boots that sported the same emblem. "When I think about it now," said Mrs. R.'s mother almost two decades later, "I have a funny feeling like maybe we were a surprise to them."

Mrs. R. thinks they ate and paid their bill before leaving. Though the car would not start immediately, it sort of "coasted" onto the highway first and only then got underway. When the family reached the next town, Mrs. R. discovered that they had not spent any money and that no one in town had ever heard of such a restaurant. Though the family returned tb search for it, they never found it.

"I know I was in a UFO," said Mrs. R. almost three decades after the experience, though that realization did not begin to register with her until about 1969, when she started recalling the incident and discussing it with her family.

Perhaps the best documented of all mass abduction cases involves four young men who were canoeing along the Allagash Waterway in the wilderness of northern Maine on August 26, 1976. Under hypnosis, all four experienced missing time and relived a detailed and amazingly similar UFO abduction episode. This case, which was thoroughly investigated by Raymond Fowler, is unique in the annals of UFO research in that it provides four separate, mutually collaborating accounts of the same event.

It went something like this: On the fifth day of their canoe trip, Jim and Jack Weiner, Charlie Foltz, and Chuck Rak decided to replenish their now-scarce food supply by doing a little night fishing. Before sliding their canoe into the water, they prepared a large bonfire in order to find their way back to camp in the pitch dark wilderness.

They were halfway across a cove when they saw a silent, large, bright sphere of colored light at treetop level about 200 yards away. When Charlie began flashing his flashlight at it, the object began moving toward them. Then, as the sphere - now only about 50 feet above the Water - approached, the canoeists decided to head for solid ground and began paddling quickly toward shore. Their paddling became increasingly frantic when the object emitted a beam of light that advanced on their canoe.

The next thing Charlie Foltz and Jim Weiner remembered was standing at the campsite watching the object move away. Chuck Rak remembers staying in the canoe and watching it disappear. Jack Weiner remembers first madly trying to outrun the beam of light, then calmly getting out of the canoe.

He finds it odd that they would be in such a hurry one moment and so calm the next. After the object disappeared the four walked up the beach to find that the huge bonfire they had left just 15 or so minutes before was now all coals. Jim thought the large logs they had set on the fire should have burned for two to three hours.

The four men had no memory of what happened during the time it took the bonfire to burn down. And several years would pass before Jim and Jack began to experience a series of strange dreams of alien abductors that would eventually lead them to seek help from UFO investigator Raymond Fowler in May 1988. Over the next two years Fowler hypnotized each of the four men independently and elicited a strangely congruent testimony about being plucked from the water by a beam of light, taken aboard the craft, and forced to undergo medical examinations by aliens.

Each of the four men recalled seeing the other three on board the alien craft. "They were all made to sit on a bench in the nude," says Fowler, "and they watched one after the other being taken off the bench. Some of the examination was done within eyesight of the others and some of it was done after they were taken around the corner from the bench. But when you put it all together like a picture puzzle, you find that everybody is describing the same event from different standpoints."

Fowler went on to produce a 10-volume, 702-page study of this case and subsequently published a book, The Allagash Abductions, as well. All of the Allagash witnesses are of sound mind and reputation," concludes Fowler. "They not only tell essentially the same story, but under hypnosis they relive it with all the trauma and emotions that would be expected of a real physical event. I think the evidence here is undeniable and would stand up in court if we were only dealing with an automobile accident or something like that. But when you are talking about something as bizarre as UFO abductions, people find that very, very hard to believe."

Even harder to believe is a case that appears to involve a mass, abduction of hundreds of people in New York City late in the summer or early fall of 1992. The case is currently being investigated by Budd Hopkins, who is probably better known as a UFO researcher than as a modern artist these days.

The story first emerged during one of Hopkins' support group meetings for abductees. One person, Mary, was telling the group about a very vivid dream she had had, though she wasn't sure it was a dream. She recalled being in some sort of huge space filled with what appeared to be "people-movers" and many, many humans, all completely naked. The scene somewhat resembled the physical at a selective service exam. And there was a kind of escalator, taking people up to another floor.

At that point, two other abductees in the group, Bill and Joan, became extremely agitated and said, "Oh gee, I've had a dream just like that."

Hopkins immediately cut off the conversation so that he could explore their experiences individually Later, when Hopkins probed into Joan's dream under hypnosis, she recalled the same large space, a strange chart on the wall, and, most incredibly, seeing both Mary and Bill there as well, totally naked. Typically, both looked "out of it" to her.

"Carl Sagan always has the idea that you are going to dash around and steal an alien cocktail napkin or something for evidence as you dash out of the place," notes Hopkins, "as if abductees had all their senses intact. But in this, as in other situations, the abductees were in an altered state."

Joan remembers having a perfunctory conversation with Mary in which they expressed surprise at seeing each other there. Hopkins then asked Joan what Mary looked like naked. Joan said that Mary was very round-shouldered and that she had a big long scar at the bikini line.

Mary, as it happens, is extremely found-shouldered and always wears shoulder pads. And she does have a big long scar; it comes from a bladder operation she had as a child. Joan did not see Bill closely, but Hopkins asked her if he had much chest hair Joan said no, and, in fact, he doesn't.

Bill's description of the experience under hypnosis was much the same as Joan's. He also saw a chart on the wall, and though his recollection of it is somewhat different, Hopkins is convinced they are describing the same object. Under hypnosis, Mary was less clear about the episode than the other two, but, as Hopkins points out, she generally doesn't have the recall that other people tend to have.

Hopkins has not explored how the three were "abducted" or how they were returned, and he will not describe the strange chart seen by Bill and Joan, nor the "space" the event itself took place in; he prefers to keep such details to himself as a check on the authenticity of future cases.

"It's a very good case," explains Hopkins, "because there is literally no way that they knew about this stuff. None of the three is a friend of the other two in any intimate way. They only know of each other from the support group. So here we are again stuck with one of two possibilities. Either they have cooked this up as a hoax, in which case you have three virtual sociopaths because there is nothing in it for them. Or it happened;"

While it's certainly difficult to believe that vast numbers of humans are being abducted in this way on a regular basis, there is, surprisingly enough, some data to corroborate these harrowing anecdotal reports. Several surveys conducted over the past decade indicate that millions of Americans have experienced something that UFO researchers think suggests the possibility of abduction by alien beings.

In a 1991 Roper survey, the most impressive of the polls, 119 people of the almost 6,000 questioned revealed they had experienced what UFO investigators call an alien abduction. If the numbers are extrapolated to the entire population of the United States, this translates to a staggering five million abductees.

The Roper poll, of course, is problematic. It has been severely criticized on the grounds that the five so-called key indicators of an abduction experience - reporting unusual lights in a room, missing. time, flying through the air without knowing why, paralysis in the presence of strange bedroom figures, or puzzling scars on the body - may not in fact mean that an abduction has occurred. Psychologists point out that most of these experiences can also be caused by the little-known but quite common phenomenon of sleep paralysis and the various kinds of hallucinations that accompany it.

But David Jacobs, one of the authors of the poll, begs to differ with his critics. He and Hopkins, Jacobs explains, had thoroughly pre-tested nine of the eleven abduction-related questions on that poll. And those nine were questions most frequently answered positively by abductees, not nonabductees. (The other two questions tested the reliability of the poll. One of them, for instance, was a fake question, which gave the pollsters an idea of how many people had the impulse to answer positively no matter what was asked. The responses from the 1 percent who responded positively to this question were not included in the final results.)

"When we first got the numbers, the raw statistics," tics," says Jacobs, "the numbers were ridiculously high - 7 percent, 8 percent. It was politically unacceptable. So we decided to look only at the answers to the best five questions - those we considered to be the highest indicators for an abduction - and didn't consider people potential abductees unless they answered four or all five of those questions positively. By doing that, we got the numbers down to a politically acceptable 2 percent. The best we can say is that about one out of every 50 Americans has had experiences consistent with what abductees have had. That indicates that an awful lot of people out there have had abduction experiences. And this of course is consistent with what the abductees themselves tell us. They come into a room and they see 50, 75, or 100 other people lying on tables, and they report a constant stream of people. And we figure it's twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week."

But to critics, millions of abduction reports actually prove the opposite - that there are just too many of them for the phenomenon to be real. That's what Robert Durant, a commercial pilot with a long interest in UFOs, thought at first. But when he decided to put his doubts to the test by figuring out how large a work force the aliens would need to carry out the millions of abductions the Roper survey suggested were taking place, he began to think the mass abduction scenario was at least plausible.

"I began very skeptically," notes Durant, I thought no way could these numbers be correct. But I decided to work through the math to see what I would come up with. I began by assuming that abductions are real physical events carried out systematically by a large work force. If this is the case, then the shop-floor parameters relevant to a shoe factory or medical facility ought to apply equally well to the case of an alien abduction program carried out on a host planet."

To avoid comparisons with other fanciful exercises, like counting the number of dancing angels on the head of a pin, Durant searched the literature for actual data points to plug into his equation. How often does the typical abductee claim to be abducted? Though this varies widely, he found that 10 times was not an unreasonable number. At what age do abductions begin and cease? Typically, they begin around age 5 and end by age 55, he discovered. How long did abductions take to accomplish? The periods of missing time reported by abductees range from minutes to days, but most are on the order of two hours. How many aliens does it take to perform an abduction? It's rare, he learned, for more than six aliens to be involved in any one abduction event.

Based on that data, Durant came up with some hair-raising numbers about the required "alien work force." If five million abductees have experienced 10 abductions over the last 50 years, then an astonishing one million abductions take place per year, or 2,740 per day in the United States alone. If a team of six aliens is required to perform each two-hour abduction, Durant figured that each team could then perform 12 abductions a day. So to perform 2,740 abductions a day, he calculated that the aliens would need 288 teams, or a total of 1,370 aliens.

Even if you double these figures to account for the fact that most abductions take place at night rather than 24 hours a day, the bottom line, Durant discovered, was that "about 500 crews, totaling about 3,000 aliens could do the job." While these figures may appear large, if you compare them with the numbers needed to man naval vessels, says Durant - 5,500 for an aircraft carrier and about 350 for a destroyer - the whole thing begins to look, well, plausible. "The Way the math worked out kind of knocked me back a bit," he admits. "This is extremely troubling to me because while I'm a total believer in UFOs, I don't buy the physical abduction scenario. And there's no way I'm saying my analysis proves abductions are real, because after all these years, we still don't have a shred of tangible proof."

But Durant's number-crunching exercise was just the beginning. Before long, Dennis Stacy, editor of a monthly UFO publication, The MUFON Journal, had picked up the ball. Doing some math. of his own, he came to conclude the numbers didn't work. By his reckoning, in fact, the alien work force required was way beyond the limits of possibility.

"If the phenomenon is global in nature, as it appears to be," says Stacy, "then the 1 million abductions a year in the United States grows to 22 million abductions worldwide. You would then need at least 11,000 alien crews, for a total of 66,000 aliens, to carry out the task, and of course, 11,000 UFOs overhead at any given hour." And if you take into account the need for support crews, reasonable shifts, and such, notes Stacy the numbers, like the Eveready Rabbit, "keep on growing and growing and growing."

For Stacy, the ridiculously large numbers point to an obvious conclusion. "There must be a terrestrial, that is, psychological in nature, rather than extraterrestrial origin to the abduction experience," he says. "The argument that some 200 million people have been abducted aboard physical flying craft in, say, the last decade or so, is simply unsupportable in terms of common sense and logic. What imaginable need of non-terrestrial science would this serve? And think of the logistics such a fantastic undertaking would involve. UFOs would be stacked up over the world's major metropolitan areas, awaiting landing and abduction rights, like so many 747s. The scale of such an invasion would be impossible for any government to plausibly ignore or cover up."

If the numbers don't make sense, then how do we explain the mass abduction memories of people like Mary, Bill, Joan, Jack, Jim, Chuck, and Charlie? William Cone, a clinical psychologist with a private practice in Newport Beach, California, has done a lot of research on abductees and thinks that while some cases of mass abduction are quite impressive, many can be explained as "contamination."

Look for instance, he says, at the Allagash case - the one involving the four men in the canoe. "It's interesting that all of these guys were heavily interested in UFOs and abductions before ever going to see Fowler. They all knew about abductions, and they walked in to Fowler, who they knew had written other books on the subject. They walked in with a pre-set mind of We saw something, we have missing time, so we must have been abducted. And this happens again and again. I find it interesting that 12 years went by when they didn't worry about it, until they read some UFO books.

"The other thing I find incredible," Cone continues, "is that these four guys who have been buddies for all these years go through abduction regression therapy, get all these memories, and manage not to talk about it to their buddies for a year, until they've all been hypnotized. If you were my buddy and that had happened to me, I think I'd tell you. So when they say we didn't talk to each other, I don't buy that. But I think they really did see something. They really did have an experience. But whether it's an abduction experience, I don't know."

Cone ventures a similar explanation for the mass abduction case of 1992 in New York City, which first appeared in a support group meeting of abductees at Budd Hopkins' home. "There is a great deal of contamination in this field," notes Cone, "especially in support groups. We've known since the days of the nineteenth-century French physician Jean Martin Charcot that support groups contaminate memory. It's no secret, but somehow UFO researchers, not being mental health professionals, have never bothered to look at this. They think these people are getting support, but what they are doing is reaffirming their own fantasies. I hear this all the time in hospitals I work at. You put somebody in the support group, and the next day they have their neighbor's story. I think a lot of that is going on."

In fact, an examination of the literature reveals that those reporting shared abduction experiences virtually always know one another beforehand, or contact one another before giving their stories to independent investigators. Because of this, researchers can never really prove there had been no collaboration, either consciously or unconsciously, between the alleged abductees. The ideal case would involve two or more people who did not know each other but who gave collaborating details of the same abduction incident to independent investigators. There is no such case. Of course, if the reports of mass abductions were literally true, there should, infact, be dozens, hundreds, even thousands of such cases in the files of UFO investigators.

David Jacobs tries to explain why there are none. "The secret aspect of the phenomenon," he says, "is remarkably efficient and extraordinarily effective. The way in which the alien program is instituted militates against having a lot of cases from the same day. And so does the way in which we find out about cases. Most people who have had abduction experiences don't really know what has happened to them. They might know that an odd thing has happened here or there, but linking it to a UFO abduction is not something most of them would probably do. So of all the abductees out there we only hear from about .001 percent of them. But every once in a while we'll have a case where somebody who is an abductee will come up to another person and say, `I know you. I've seen you before. And they will trace it back to an abduction event they have shared."

Jacobs does not look to such experiences for verification of the existence of the abduction phenomenon, however, having long ago moved beyond verification in search of answers to such questions as, Who are they?, Where do they come from?, and What do they want with us? "Yes, some people still want to be persuaded," admits Jacobs. "But it's not something that I spend a lot of time on, because for me that's a little bit of wheel spinning. I realize that for others this is extremely important, but I can't be too much bothered with that because it takes a lot of time and effort and it keeps me away from researching what I think are more important ,aspects of the phenomenon."

For Jacobs, it's the little details in the abduction stories - the kind that have no reason for being there unless they really happened - that tell him this is real. "Just last night," he says, citing one example, "I did a session with a guy who saw maybe 15 other people aboard. He was abducted with his wife and two kids. He remembers being in line with a group of people, and once they went into the waiting area, they took their clothes off. He noted in front of him an older guy, heavy set, and bald with just a fringe of hair on his head. He told me in passing that there was a mole on his left shoulder."

A mole on his left shoulder. To Jacobs, that kind of detail just smacks of a real, rather than an imagined event, But such details will never be enough to convince the rest of the world that Catherine, Jack, Jim, Chuck, Mary, Bill, Joan, and millions of other humans have been abducted by aliens. Something more is needed, something more than what any abduction case, or mass abduction case, for that matter, has yet been able to provide: a shred of physical evidence. If there have been millions of abductions, it seems as if by now, we'd have come up with something certifiably alien - a lab tool, a tunic, a skin sample, a heretofore unknown universal law, or yes, even a measly cocktail napkin.

Meet one Katharina Wilson, an attractive, intelligent, apparently well-adjusted, 34-year-old woman. Born in a small college town in the Deep South, Wilson now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her second husband, Erik. She sees herself as "an average American woman," a fitting self-description marred by just one fact: She also claims to be a UFO abductee.

At first glance, Wilson's story sounds rather typical of other abduction lore. She claims to have been abducted and reproductively traumatized since the age of six by small alien creatures with large black eyes. Then, in her late twenties, she decided to come out of the UFO closet and tell all.

What's different about Wilson's account, however, is in the way it comes to us - straight up. She has told her story - all of it, every dirty detail - on her own. It does not come to us secondhand, through a Budd Hopkins or a David Jacobs, to name just two of the most prominent UFO abduction researchers in this country. Instead, the story comes to us pure and wholly unfiltered in a book Wilson has written and published herself.

Why is this so important? Because hearing about alien abductions directly from experiencers reveals aspects of the phenomenon long ignored - or perhaps just swept under the carpet - by most researchers. And in the end, these regularly hidden details may be vital in determining the cause of the UFO abduction phenomenon.

Indeed, as a journalist who's investigated more than my fair share of UFO abductions, I've learned that many aspects of the so-called abduction phenomenon just don't make it into print. instead, most investigators inevitably process the stories, molding the accounts to fit the theories they favor or the patterns they expect to find. Things that don't fit their preconceived notion of what's really happening "out there" are often deliberately left out of subsequent retellings of the tale.

In the standard abduction scenario, a person may or may not have seen a UFO but is somehow whisked away from his or her home or car by small gray creatures and forced to undergo some sort of medical examination aboard a spaceship. The incident usually turns out to be one of many in the person's past involving it variety of reproductive assaults - semen sampling, artificial insemination, and fetus removal - resulting in the production of human/ alien starbabies that the ETs keep.

Generally lacking in the standard scenario, however, is the wide variety of other phenomena that the person often claims to have experienced as well - the psychic perceptions, the premonitions, the bedroom encounters with dead relatives, the ghosts, the time travel, and more. Despite what is often a nearly mindnumbing display of high strangeness, you would be hard pressed to find such descriptions in the published accounts.

In the standard abduction scenario, as brought to us by the experts," these messy details are summarily expunged. What we are left with is a cleaned-up story, a tale that stays unerringly "on mark," thus fitting the desired "alien" mold.

Of course, to some extent information selection happens, often unconsciously in every field of human inquiry. But in a protodiscipline like UFOlogy where the basic data is itself a subject of contention, this sort of filtering is particularly damaging.

Now all this has changed, thanks to The Alien Jigsaw, Katharina Wilson's courageous effort to buck the wave of censorship and tell all. In this brutally honest, firsthand account, Wilson describes a harrowing lifetime of encounters with what she sincerely believes are aliens. She holds nothing back, and provides numerous surprises along the way. To begin with she tells us of not one, or two, or a dozen abduction episodes, but an astounding 119 of them, occurring in a span of just 26 years. And her experiences involve not just your typical aliens, but also encounters with the dead, time-travel episodes, psychic experiences, and even a vision of an eight-foot-tall floating penguin - everything you can imagine and a whole lot more.

In the middle of one abduction episode, for example, Wilson somehow encounters her present husband as a young man, years before she met him. Later in the episode she is terrified when told by the aliens that it is 1957 - three years before she was born. Wilson also credits the aliens with saving her life; she twice had alien premonitions of nearly being killed by lightning, and on August 7, 1989 Wilson put on a pair of rubber-soled shoes just moments before lightning shattered the courtyard wall and nearly killed her.

I don't think Wilson is perpetrating a hoax. If she were, she certainly would have left out the journal entry dated August 4, 1992. "I'm with Senator Gore," Wilson wrote, "and we are in a large room with many people. He is organizing something. Governor Clinton must be here, too - now I'm looking directly at President Bush. He really looks tired - beaten." When Wilson tells Gore that she has never voted Republican, Bush looks at her "with a look of disgust on his face." Later, she realizes that Gore and Clinton are preparing a feast, and she watches as it grows larger and larger.

Following this journal entry, Wilson writes: "Although I did not remember seeing any alien beings associated with this encounter, it felt the same way all of my other visitations felt. It was extremely vivid." I asked Wilson if she had actually seen Bush, Gore, and Clinton.

"I hope not," she replied with just a touch of humor.

But that's a contradiction, I pointed out. You say your alien encounters are real and that this encounter with political figures was just as real as those you have with the aliens.

"Did I say that.?" she said. "Well, I don't think it was Gore because he was very short. I thought that was some form of camouflage." Wilson regards this episode as an alien-inspired vision of the Clinton and Gore win in November 1992.

Wilson also believes one of the beings actually helped her with the book, pointing out before the book went to press that she had transcribed five journal dates incorrectly.

Though some may think Wilson's account ridiculous, it is, in fact, typical of the sort of outre material that abductees consider part and parcel of their alien experiences. It's no wonder that investigators intent on proving the alien root of UFO abductions often leave such material out of their published stories. It clearly weakens their case.

What does Wilson think about her verboten account, so potentially damaging to the alien hypothesis and contrary to UFOlogy's unwritten code?

"Some people suggested that I cut out some of this material," she told me, "but I thought there is a lot more going on, and even though we don't understand it, it doesn't mean that it shouldn't be reported. As far as I know, this has not been done before. The book was really put out there for other experiencers, because I know they are experiencing things that they cannot account for by reading Budd Hopkins' Intruders and David Jacobs' Secret Life.

Despite her candid attitude, Wilson's ultimate conclusion echoes that of the abduction gurus: "The aliens are probably collecting ova," she opines, landing strictly within the standard-issue abduction scenario and sounding a lot like Budd Hopkins, who was the first to investigate her case back in 1988.

In fact, like Hopkins, who has penned the introduction for The Alien Jigsaw, Wilson tends to blame aliens for just about all the weirdness. "I know that penguins aren't eight feet tall, and they don't float in, midair," she explains. "That was an instance of camouflage and screen memory. And I don't really think dead people are visiting me. I think that's a form of alien manipulation. I do believe that the time travel is real, but I think there have been a few occasions where they manipulated, md into thinking that happened."

If you think about it, of course, the surrealistic scenes described by Wilson have the fantastical feel of dreams. Is she, in fact, recalling nocturnal images from the land of dreamy dreams - concocted by a trick of consciousness, cooked in the fires of REM, and transformed in the morning to a cocktail dish of aliens, starbabies, and UFOs? When I ask Wilson for the temporal context of her encounters, her response is typically straight-forward - and telling. "I would have to say, that the last thing I remember prior to most of these experiences," she said, "is going to bed."

Isn't that sequence - going to bed, falling asleep, getting abducted," and waking up - suggestive of the nightly journey we all take to the imagistic outback of the dream?

"That's a fair question," she replies. "But I happen to have dreams all the time and, even if I don't leave my bed, abductions and dreams just do not feel the same."

Whether Wilson is reporting from the land of Nod, the domain of aliens, or some other realm yet unknown, we may never know. But whatever the truth of the matter, it's time to applaud her tell-all book and attitude. Her story is, in fact, far more typical of abduction cases than we have been led to believe. And the only way to learn the truth behind the UFO abduction phenomenon is to let it all hang out.

Wilson's candid tale may have already opened the floodgates. Some researchers new to the field have begun to balk at the pre-packaged version of the abduction phenomenon we have been spoon-fed by the experts, and other abductees are beginning to step forward with stories of their own. A 24-year-old businessman from Harrison County, West Virginia, for example, has come forth claiming that he has been abducted by aliens at least 1,500 times.

Hard plas-soled boots pounded and echoed off the narrow street driving casual loungers and pedestrians into the nearest cover. Doorways, back alleys, any space away from that sound became suddenly crowded with terrified, scattering people.

The leader signaled and the pounding became a whisper of carefully placed feet in a softer, still determined pace.

The Sanitation Squad halted abruptly on the leader's hand signal. Frank Slater leaned against the black wall, his ISO suit scraping away rebel graffiti. Idiots, he thought; they know it comes off easily but they persist in painting and spraying their seditious nonsense.

He peered around the wall, cursing the ISO suit for jutting out before he could see. If the pissy little informant was right, there should be two men under that halo. On a foggy damp night like this the street light was aptly named, its cold bluish light surrounded by a misty saint's corona. And there he was. Brad Johnson's baby brother. Johnson himself would be on the scene in minutes, there having been a general police call.

There were actually four of them, but all the better. Rebels were rebels and he and his unit were empowered to eradicate where deemed necessary. Slater smiled. It usually was necessary.

Even at this distance, he could see the red eyes of the carrier. His brow furrowed. How could the scum rebels stand close to a man so clearly infected with CHROMO? No matter. It was time to get to work. The carrier must be the first target. There must be no chance of his getting away. Slater let his weapon hang from its sling and made a pattern of signals that his men, through long hours of training, understood immediately. The man in the long gray topcoat was his, Slater's.

A patrol's nearing wail was the signal for Slater to spring into action. That vehicle could only be Brad Johnson responding. Slater jumped out, his weapon already fixed on Terry Johnson. The group of four, alerted by the siren, were crouching, ready to bolt. Two of them did and were cut down by Slater's men. One of them was the carrier. Their bodies, already lifeless when they smashed into and slid along the street, smoked with the crackling energy of the Sanitation Squad's weapons. Terry Johnson and the remaining rebel put their hands up. Slater laughed out loud, the metallic sound eerie in counterpoint to the nearing siren. He smoked the quaking rebel next to the Johnson brat. The body jumped and slid near the other two. Apart from briefly closing his eyes and compressing his lips, Terry Johnson said nothing and revealed nothing of his feelings or reaction. Slater smiled approvingly. The boy had balls, no question. He was a traitor and a fool, from a family of fools, but he had balls.

Slater walked closer as the siren behind him stopped, the patrol car's wheels sliding on the wet ground. Doors were opening. Voices raised. Brad Johnson's booming above the others. "Wait, Slater - don't fire!" he pleaded. Now, thought Slater. Now. The boy blinked once, then attempted what Slater thought might be a sneer.

The charge blew away Terry Johnson's head, disintegrating each fragment with a lingering succession of crackling puffs of blue lights. They died away in tiny sparks bouncing along the street. Brad Johnson's initial bellow of fear and rage echoed once along the now quiet street. A smiling Slater turned to face him.

It was a recurring nightmare.

Brad Johnson's dream world has become a monochrome, monotone hell. In that inferno, a twelve-year-old boy, trapped in an ISO protective suit far too large for him, screamed soundlessly, his breath misting the faceplate. As Brad clawed at the suiting's controls, trying to open it to help the boy, a green mist began to rise in the suit like stagnant water, slowly gathering around the boy's chin, then lips, then ...

Every time he awoke from the dream, Brad's hands were still clawing, hooked like talons, still trying to open the damned suit. He knew that boy. His face, so clear in the dream, blurred into something like a police fugitive sketch on waking, its features not really those of anyone. But he knew that boy.

Another drink, he was certain, would not help him at all to figure out exactly what it was he was up against. But it would ease things a bit. Make him feel he was up to it.

To what?

To going up against Dr. Maelstrom. There. That wasn't so hard, was it? No, that special blended liquor didn't solve anything, but it sure made you breathe deeply. (He eschewed the opti-cube. As it was, he'd been using it more than he thought safe. Psychosis was a real danger with the little old cube.) He checked the time. A few minutes yet before he had to leave for the shareholders' meeting. Brad poured himself three more fingers in a wide glass.

After all, Richard Maelstrom had to piss like anybody else, didn't he? In fact, Brad remembered a time when he and the all-powerful head of Genetix were side by side at the company urinals. The Captain of all Captains of industry had cupped his penis so that it would be safe from Brad's possible gaze.

He took another sip of the amber bliss. Oh yes. Much better.

Brad concentrated on Raymond Masters, Dr. Maelstrom's dogsbody, for all his brilliance. Then, of course, there was Masters' wife, Sonia. What should he make of her?

Brad stepped over the ISO window and stared out at the city he'd once loved. He looked past his reflection; an athlete going to seed. His hair, though still full, was lank and lifeless. His slacks, not quite freshly pressed. The once-trim waistline protruded above the loosened belt.

The city's pinpoint windows winked like stars on the impossibly high edifices. How he had once loved that city. He tried to remember how he'd felt, that very long time ago. It was no use. Too much had happened since. Too many killings in the name of protection. Protection from CHROMO: the disease that has inspired abject, deathly fear in all of us for how long now?

And to Brad and his men had fallen the awful task of protecting the general populace. Protecting their lives, that is, by taking the lives of others. Of the afflicted.

Sonia Masters had sworn to him that she was close, very close, to finding the key. Not according to her husband, the celebrated discoverer of the lock to that key, the CHROMO molecular chain. Masters' brilliant research had culminated in the exposure of the elegant pattern now so familiar through constant vidnews bulletins. Culminated.

And then stopped.

Somehow, Raymond Masters, superscientist, winner of every truly prestigious international prize, holder of some of the most complex and envied genetic patents, had come up against a solid wall. CHROMO yielded its outline, its mathematically elegant patterns, like a posturing flirt, then halted all further advances. Stopped at the moment of intimacy, the moment of revelation. The moment of pleasure.

How then could Sonia Masters say she was fashioning the key? Was she deluded? She would not lie to Brad. Not now. But if neither lie nor delusion - what? Not a real cure, surely.

Across the city he once loved, lay the Sprawl. In its labyrinthine alleys and hovels, the broken streets and filthy poverty, rebels without hope plotted. He pitied them. The military man in him hated them for their ineptitude, their lack of discipline, of power.

He checked the time again. Now he was sure of what he would say at the meeting when called. It would be short and sweet and they wouldn't like it one bit. Brad Johnson rubbed at the stubble on his chin and decided that, if two drinks were this beneficial, why then, two more . . .

Dr. Richard Maelstrom's passion was chess. Computers having long since become grandmaster players, Maelstrom tired easily of draw play, however elegant the moves. Three-dimensional chess was his game. He loved sucking in the computer programs, making seemingly random and illogical moves and then listening to the low whir as the idiot machine tried desperately to log in the strategy for future use. That machine reminded him of Masters. He chuckled as he thought of Raymond.

Masters had balked at first. Oh, he ranted a bit about his principles, his ethics, the morality of it all - God help us! In the end it all came down to the matter. The matter. The stuff that cannot be held in the hand, or smelled, or felt. But for Richard Maelstrom it was as palpable as air and just as important: it was power.

Project Habitat.

Maelstrom's computer reminded him of the time in soft, mellifluous tones. When Maelstrom grunted, the machine, mistaking it for absentmindedness, said, "The shareholders' meeting, sir." Maelstrom waved at it impatiently, "Yes, yes, I know. Bishop captures pawn. Queen check."

He smiled as the machine whirred, trying to make sense of the move, It was simple, really. Take the pawn. The machine - for so Maelstrom thought of it, never giving it a name - would be forced to take the bishop with its king, thereby losing its castling privilege. It was a fair trade, Maelstrom felt.

He had explained the project to Masters in words of many syllables, that being Masters' mode of understanding and expression. Maelstrom could almost hear the whirring in the man's brain as he tried to log in the sense and store the strategy for future use.

Genetix, the entity Maelstrom had fashioned as surely as it were clay in his hands, was embarking on the greatest, the most expansive industrial enterprise in the history of the planet. Nothing less. Its scope was no longer a measurable form. It was beyond wealth, beyond power. It was ultimate.

And Raymond Masters would be responsible.

Of course, Masters didn't know that. It was his speech at the shareholders' conference that would trigger the explosion. It would mushroom immediately and become The Project. And the Japanese, those double-dealing, genetically self-centered, would-be world leaders, would atone. Maelstrom liked that.

They would atone.

To have to explain it to Masters at any length was a measure of the man's essential smallness. But he was reachable. The carrot, looming impossibly large before his astonished eyes, shielded him from the stick behind. He would, did, submit. Con Amore.

His wife Sonia was another matter.

Masters, Maelstrom mused, seemed to have only a tenuous control over her. Her constant probing into what she called the key to CHROMO's lock was - unsettling. She was not approachable through the same avenues of conviction as her husband. Nor was the used-up hulk of an ex-commander, Brad Johnson. He was no longer a factor, excepting insofar as he could still be used, public hero that he still was. And Maelstrom knew just how to use him.

That was part of his genius.

"Shareholders' meeting in 22 minutes, 17 seconds," the computer reminded him. It would not do so again, having been programmed against what his owner would consider nagging. Maelstrom called for the door and it whispered open. He turned and conceded the game.

The machine, insofar as any machine could be, was puzzled. "You ... concede, sir?" It whirred, then clicked, then accepted. As a smiling Maelstrom left to go to the Genetix shareholders' meeting, the singular turning point of his remarkable life, he chuckled at the machine's inherent stupidity, and its surprising malleability.

Spiral remembered his sixth birthday quite clearly. His father overheard him blurting out as fast as his baby syntax would allow, the square root of a seven-figure number to his astonished uncle. He beat the boy until restrained by a horrified family.

Father and son thereafter regarded each other only peripherally, suspiciously, and as seldom as possible. After CHROMO felled most of his family, Spiral made his plans to leave. Only his mother kept him from fleeing their now uncrowded home. When the Squads killed her like an animal, her eyes blazing red with the disease, Spiral left. He felt a horrible guilt that her death was his freedom. But it was worth a lot to look over his shoulder on leaving and see his father staring after him, stunned and alone.

He made his way easily into the first ranks of the rebel cadres. They were cells, really. Five men to a cell. If captured, they could not tell what they did not know, however ingenious the persuasion. Their connections were cellular; easily and often changed, impossible to trace.

His ability to snake his way through cyberspace was invaluable. Any degree of classified information was open to him. He checked the day's haul. A pass to a conference on holo-solids and their artificial gestation - whatever that was about. Must be good for something. Some profit for him or the cause. He would bring it to Mr. Lightstone as he did with almost everything he brought back from the 'space.

Lightstone was the man. He made it all happen. Without him there was no rebel cause; he was it. A first-class VIP pass for the Genetix shareholders' meeting tonight. With it, anyone would gain instant entry. Unchallenged. That looked real good. Mr. Lightstone would know what to do with that. He was the man who was going to make things right. Though, in some vague way, Spiral did not want things to be made right. He liked things the way they were; with infiltrators, spies, good guys, bad guys. The Sprawl and the City, the black wall to be broached with contraband, guards to be bribed, and above all what he alone could supply: info.

As he made his circuitous way back to Lightstone-or where Lightstone might be-he glanced at a terminal way station with the usual longing. It was one of the new models, one he hadn't tried to tap into yet. No. Enough for the day. He sorted through the rest of the take and put it neatly into the little boxes. That was how he thought of the processes of his brain: little boxes, like egg crates, all stuffed with info, and all instantly accessible.

Spiral knew he was important to the cause. Lightstone himself, his arm around Spiral's shoulder, would praise him to the others, Spiral regarded Mr. Lightstone with great love and something close to pity. For all his years, his courage and generalship, Mr. Lightstone was somewhat naive. He seemed to be sure of the cause winning, an end to the fighting. There was no end to the cause, the fight. Any more than there was an end to CHROMO. It was the disease that kept the struggle going, Spiral knew. While there was CHROMO, there would be the fight, the cause, the good guys and the bad guys.

Spiral was proud to be known by name to every Squad in and out of the Sprawl. His capture or death, he knew, would have meant instant recognition, promotion for every man on the team that brought him down.

He was twelve years old.

Maelstrom considered the enigmatic Lightstone, leader of the rebel resistance. His legend had grown beyond reasonable belief. His narrow escapes, retold and told again throughout the Sprawl and into the city, gave credence to the biggest part of his mythos: that Lightstone was part holo, part machine, wholly untouchable. There would be time enough to deal with him and the rebels. They served a purpose, after all. Were it in Maelstrom's power to magically vaporize them all instantly, he would not.

Maelstrom watched the glittering lights of the city blurring past the limo window. The chauffeur occasionally glanced at the traff-ease screen as it computed the time it would take to reach the Genetix auditorium. Cruising the VIP lane made the trip easier, though there was some traffic this evening.

Still, Lightstone was a bit beyond control. Too many recent casualties among the Sanitation Squads. Morale was slipping. As good as Frank Slater was, he was not the leader Brad Johnson used to be. 'Used to be' being the operative term. Yet Slater had what Maelstrom most needed: an amoral ferocity that could be turned, like a white-hot torch, against whatever target it was directed. Slater seemed to hate everything outside of himself with a paranoid simplicity. The man was invaluable. A great tool. Like all tools, useful. Until the day they were no longer useful. Then ...

Lightstone stared at the pass with disbelief.

The boy, Spiral, had outdone himself. Lightstone doubted the cause could continue in its present escalation of harrying the Maelstrom structure without the gifted boy. The Genetix shareholders' meeting tonight was no mere bean counting profit-and-loss affair. Though some members might have expected it to be just a self-congratulatory gathering, the atmosphere, the feel of the thing, told him otherwise. Something was up. Something big. Everyone who was anyone would be there tonight. Including, Lightstone mused, some previously uninvited guests, courtesy of our gifted young Spiral.

Frank Slater's dream would come true.

Brad Johnson would fall into his hands, along with the Masters bitch. There is injustice after all, Slater chuckled, winking at one of his men. The man nodded uneasily. The others did their best to ignore the weird, metallic chuckles emanating from Frank Slater's ISO suit.

Brad Johnson's brother, sent out to kill Lightstone - a prime assignment given to baby brother and better handled by himself - had been turned instead into a traitor by that freakish entity. What infernal incantations the evil Lightstone had breathed into that little man's ear no one could tell, and Slater could not guess at. What a pleasure - what a delight - it had been to waste the little bastard. Then to see big brother boo-hooing over the corpse - ah, that had been even better. It had taken three men to hold the raging Brad back from Slater. Or at least, thought Slater, that was how it appeared. Had their positions been reversed, Slater knew it would take more than three men to stop him from whatever damage he wished to inflict. When Johnson had calmed down sufficiently and the men had released him, staying close by at the ready, Johnson had threatened legal action. Slater almost spit into his faceplate in utter disgust.

The whole damned family was like to like; self-righteous poseurs. Ineffectual as eunuchs. Johnson's appointment, for example, to the theater of war where he had distinguished' himself was what actors called actor-proof. it had been like shooting fish in a barrel. Hardly any resistance. They could have sent Bo-Bo the chimp and he would have garnered every ribbon and medal given to Johnson. That hogwash about rescuing his men from an encirclement. A leader took care of his men, that was that. That appointment should have been mine, Slater often whispered through gritted teeth.

For Frank Slater, the killing had become pleasurable early on. Dumb shit Brad Johnson with his professional scruples. He'd have let that diseased kid get away that day. Ten-year-old kid, his eyes already a deep red with CHROMO, his movements erratic. The little twerp would've infected half the damned Sprawl. One shot brought him down. Little guy. He remembered Johnson's look. Made Slater happy for a week.

Taking Brad Johnson's place would be only logical. Should have come sooner, but . . . what the hell. Commanding the Squads was what Slater was born for. And hey - it was for the public weal, wasn't it? He was the bulwark between CHROMO and the gutless populace hiding up in the great citadel, in their mile-high condos, away from the Sprawl. Away from the poverty, the stink, the CHROMO - the action.

He was a hunter by disposition, by nature. Though hunting CHROMO vectors was not entirely satisfying; they had no means with which to fight back, not much defense. Oh, occasionally an armed ragtag inflicted a casualty or two among his men, or the rare armed rebel appearing out of nowhere, wild-eyed, making a suicide attack.

These skirmishes kept the politicos generous and on their toes. Funding was never a worry; the fat asses gave him more than he asked. Invitations to their fancy homes, too. The menfolk uneasy with him, the women fascinated. He found the women disgustingly easy and eventually of no interest to him at all.

Slater looked forward to no more than the hunt, may it last forever. That, and the final showdown with Brad Johnson. Big fucking hero Johnson, has-been drunk, his eyeballs rolling with opticube use. Christ, how he hated that son of a bitch! Killing his brother had been most satisfying. Now Frank Slater looked forward to killing Brad Johnson.

Slowly would be good.

Killing Lightstone - the Lightstone - would then be the capstone of his career. He was bound to be persona most grata and - in the highest circles. Maelstrom himself - der alte-el supremo - would place the circle of blue ribbon around his neck. On national vid. The nation's highest award. Nothing closed to him, nothing held back. Oh, the swells would still regard him with what they thought was condescension. But it was weak, like the light wave from an exhausted weapon, its power source used up. It was he, Slater, who held the high ground, from which he regarded them all. Only Maelstrom loomed above, and that aerie Slater granted to him readily, gladly.

Maelstrom after all, was Maelstrom.

Sonia Masters leaned closer to one of the screens. Her lithe body twisted slightly as she strove to force a result with body English. Raymond Masters watched her while he pretended to read his news printout of the day. He needn't bother to pretend, he knew. She was so absorbed she would not have noticed him dancing a hornpipe.

It would be impossible, he knew, to make her understand the project. She only saw her own efforts at finding the key. Her world was in that multiscreen workstation, staring at the damned CHROMO configuration. He watched her edge the substructure closer to the CHROMO grape cluster. CHROMO shied away, as it always did; coy, quivering with seeming vulnerability. Raymond's lips formed a sneer CHROMO was about as vulnerable as laminated rocket skin. His sneer turned into a genuine smile as he saw CHROMO gather itself, certain now of its foe's essential weakness. It straightened. The quivering stopped. Like a faking fighter; it came off the ropes, suddenly not tired or weak. Adapted. Quickly, easily.

Sonia shook her head, her lustrous hair spilling about her shoulders, then bent to the task again. Masters checked the time. Soon he would be speaking at the shareholders' meeting. Maelstrom had insisted that he, Masters, speak first. The first words on the road to Project Habitat. Raymond felt the beads of sweat on his upper lip. He patted it gently with a fresh, stiff linen handkerchief.

It would be a dead end, this substructure. Promising, then nothing. CHROMO was too good. Too adaptive. He remembered reading about the old ebola strain, late twentieth century. The victims took it to the grave. Outbreaks were sporadic and limited. CHROMO, on the other hand, weakened and maddened its victims, but they survived far longer. The vector, an incubator of swarming, multiplying billions of bacteria, staggered on to infect others. CHROMO was smart.

Sonia leaned closer again, to the screens. Her concentration, Raymond marveled, was total. It really was time they were going.

The greater scheme, the enormous enterprise, would be beyond her. The project did not lend itself to easy description, and besides, she would never understand or condone Raymond's sacrifices in the cause of the greatest industrial ... It was no use, he though, looking at his wife's intent face. He would never tell her either, of the sacrifices he had made in the name of the enterprise, would go on making as it matured into reality. What was it Jeremy Bentham said - "greatest good for the greatest number?" Bentham would have understood. Sonia never would.

And CHROMO was the key. Sonia searched for the key to CHROMO, not knowing the disease was itself the main element in the great enterprise. Without it, there was no enterprise, no Maelstrom, in fact. The entire structure would collapse without its basic underpinning. That was the great secret.

Masters marveled at the paradox: CHROMO needed us and, in its struggle for primacy, killed us. And we, for our own purposes, needed the deadliest plague we had ever known. CHROMO.DQ

Warning: Enter CHROMO At Your Own Risk

Welcome tot he world of CHROMO - if welcome is the right word.

CHROMO - a world of tradegy and triumph, hope and hopelessness, heroes and villains, a deadly disease and the desperate search for a cure.

CHROMO - something new in the world of science fiction, a bold new approach to storytelling.

Over the months and years ahead, CHROMO will take shape in many media ... novels and stories, graphic stories, interactive CD-ROMS, motion pictures, the Internet, media not yet invented. CHROMO will spread across them all ... taking you along.

For now, enjoy this preview of the world of CHROMO ... if you're brave enough.

The top brass at Ford had good reason to preen during the public dedication of the company's new Scientific Research Laboratory, held in Dearborn, Michigan, at the end of 1994. The expanded lab culminates a $1.2 billion investment in R&D facilities that began more than five years ago.

John McTague, Ford's vice president of technical affairs, put the expenditure in a business perspective. "The rapid development and application of advanced technologies are fast becoming one of the key competitive advantages a company can have," he said, spinning off that old adage, "You have to spend money to make money."

But the payoff from this brand of research comes far down the road, only after a particular product or process is perfected to the point that dozens or even hundreds of thousands of them can be knocked off flawlessly and inexpensively and millions of car owners will find the ideas useful enough to purchase.

Carl Johnson doesn't think car plants will employ the liquid competitive molding technique for plastic body parts much before the next century. Still, he directs its research with urgent determination to contribute to a motor-scene anxious for light, fuel-thrifty cars.

His task is to discover fast, low-cost ways to mold plastic around pre-shaped mats of glass or carbon reinforcement that make the finished pieces at least as strong as steel, but up to 60 percent lighter. Johnson oversees four technicians in a material-science lab as large as a tennis court, stretching upward nearly three stories, where it's capped by a tangle of catwalk, gantry crane, and ductwork large enough to make a good venue for a chase scene in a James Bond flick. The lab is packed with refrigerator-size industrial computers, toolchests, wires, hoses, conduits, cables, and three big molding machines. The largest one, big enough to fill a suburban garage, presses out liquid composite molded fenders in trial runs, letting out a persistent hiss and whir that's punctuated by the occasional pneumatic-robotic whoosh of serious machinery.

Across the building, in the chemical engineering department, the labs are smaller, but the discovery continues with the same earnest anticipation. In the atmospheric chemistry lab, Tim Wallington has built a 140-liter smog chamber to test the environmental impact of new fuels. Looking like a seven-foot-long glass thermos bottle, the chamber takes ultrapurified air and then mixes in nitrogen monoxide, an engine by-product. A cylindrical band of UV lights wrapping the thermos bottle mimics the sun, turning the mixture to nitrogen dioxide - smog. Wallington then runs the brew through an infrared spectrometer, revealing its precise chemical nature.

A few doors down, simulators in the catalyst research lab pipe gases through reactive compounds to find the formulas that scrub the air cleanest. Four orange-red, tabletop infernos burn' in minifurnaces encased in glass and fed by a tangle of cables, tubes, and cords.

Of course, Ford isn't alone in this type of work. Across town, General Motors operates its own future-focused R&D lab within the GM technical center which is housed in a square-mile campus configured by the visionary architect Eero Saarinen. Honda conducts R&D in Torrance, California, Marysville, Ohio, and at its home bases in Wako and Tochigi, Japan. Virtually every automaker pours millions - sometimes billions - of dollars into scientific inquiry. Separately, their efforts push and pull the companies into greater or lesser positions within the ever-changing competitive hierarchy. But collectively, the research advances the state of automobility everywhere.

Accordingly, in Ford's catalyst research lab, Dr. Haren Gandhi swirled 10.5 grams of black liquid in a beaker to represent the pollutants emitted each mile from the average automobile of the 1960s. His pride apparent, Dr. Gandhi next held up a small cylinder with just a splash of black in the bottom. That, he said, is the output from a contemporary car. To illustrate the eventual output from an ultra-low-emission vehicle, he let a tiny drop fall from a glass pipette.

"Being part of that improvement," said Dr. Gandhi, who joined Ford research in 1967 and who now manages the chemical engineering labs, "even in a small way - you can't help but feel good about your work and how it helps society."

"Behold! Human beings living in an underground den ... Like ourselves, they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite walls of the cave." - Plato, The Republic

I rose from the bed, leaving Diane sprawled across the rumpled sheets, smiling, lipstick smeared and large belly sweaty. She said, "Wow."

"Wow, yourself," I said and turned to the mirror. Behind me, the other woman rose ghostly from the bed and crossed, smiling, to the window.

Diane, said, "Come back to bed, Jack."

"Can't. I have to go. Student appointment."

"so what's new?"

In the mirror I saw her eyes narrow, her mouth tighten. The other woman turned from the window, laughing, one slim graceful arm pushing back a tendril of chestnut hair.

Diane skinned her brown hair back from her face. "Is it too much to ask, Jack, honey, that just once after we make love you don't go rushing off like there's a three-alarm fire? Just once?"

I didn't answer.

"I mean, how do you think that makes me feel? Slam-bam-thank-you, ma'am. We have an actual relationship here, we've been going out for three months, it doesn't seem a lot to ask that after we make love you don't just -"

I didn't interrupt. I couldn't. The dizziness was strong this time; soon the nausea would follow. Sex did that. The intensity. Diane ranted, jerking herself to a kneeling position on the bed, framed by lumpy maroon window curtains opened a crack to a neighbor's peeling frame house and weedy garden. Across the room the other Diane stood framed by crimson silk draperies opened a crack to a mellowed-wood cottage riotous with climbing roses. She blew me a lighthearted kiss. Her eyes glowed with understanding.

The nausea came.

"- can't seem to understand how it makes me feel to be treated like -"

I clutched the edge of the dresser, which was both a scratched pressed-board "production" and a polished cherrywood lowboy. Two perfume bottles floated in front of me: yellow plastic spraybottle and clean-lined blown glass. I squeezed my eyes shut. The ghostly Diane disappeared in the act of sauntering, slim and assured, toward the bathroom.

"- don't even really look at me, not when we make love or -"

Eyes shut, I groped for the bedroom door.

"Jack!"

I slammed the doors, both of them, and left the apartment before Diane could follow. With her sloppy anger, her overweight nakedness, her completely justified weeping.

Outside was better. I drove my Escort to campus. The other car, the perfectly engineered driving machine with the sleek and balanced lines, shimmered in and out around me, but the vertigo didn't return. I'd never gotten very intense about cars, and over the years I'd learned to handle the double state of anything that wasn't too intense. The rest I avoided. Mostly.

The Aaron Fielding Faculty Office Building jutted boxlike three stories from the asphalt parking lot, and it blended its three floors harmoniously with a low hillside whose wooded lines were repeated in horizontal stretches of brick and wood. The poster-cluttered lobby was full of hurried students trying to see harried advisers, and it was a marble atrium where scholars talked eagerly about the mind of man. I walked down the corridor toward my cubicle, one of a row allotted to teaching assistants and post-docs.

But Dr. Frances Schraeder's door was open, and I couldn't resist.

She sat at her terminal, working, and when I knocked on the doorjamb (scarred metal, ghostly graceful molding), she looked up and smiled. "Jack! Come look at this!"

I came in, with so much relief my eyes prickled. The material Fran's long, agespotted fingers were held poised over her keyboard, and the ideal Fran's long, age-spotted fingers echoed them. The ideal Fran's white hair was fuller, but no whiter, and both were cut in simple short caps. The material Fran wore glasses, but both Frans' bright blue eyes, a little sunken, shone with the same alert tranquility.

She was the only person I'd ever seen who came close to matching what she should have been.

"This is the latest batch of phase space diagrams," Fran said. "The computer just finished them - I haven't even printed them yet."

I crouched beside her to peer at the terminal.

"Don't look any more disorganized to me than the last bunch."

"Nor to me, either, unfortunately. Same old, same old." She laughed: in chaos theory, there is no same old, same old. The phase space diagrams were infinitely complex, never repeating, without control.

But not completely. The control was there, not readily visible, a key we just didn't recognize with the mathematics we had. Yet.

An ideal no one had seen.

"I keep thinking that your young mind will pick up something I've missed," Fran said. "I'll make you a copy of these. Plus, Pyotr Solenski has published some new work in Berlin that I think you should take a look at. I downloaded it from the net and e-mailed you."

I nodded, but didn't answer. For the first time today, calm flowed through me, soothing me.

Calm.

Rightness.

Numbers.

Fran had done good, if undistinguished, work in pure mathematics all her life. For the last few years she - and I, as her graduate student - had worked in the precise and austere world of iterated function theory, where the result of a given equation is recycled as the starting value of the next repetition of the same equation. If you do that, the results are predictable: the sequences will converge on a given set of numbers. No matter what initial value you plug into the equation, with enough iterations you end up at the same figures, called attractors. Every equation can generate a set of attractors, which iterations converge on like homing pigeons flying back to their nests.

Until you raise the value plugged into the equation past a point called the Feigenbaum number. Then the sequences produced lose all regularity. You can no longer find any pattern. Attractors disappear. The behavior of even fairly simple equations becomes chaotic. The pigeons fly randomly, blind and lost.

Or do they?

Fran - like dozens of other pure mathematicians around the world - looked at all that chaos, and sorted through it, and thought she glimpsed an order to the pigeons' flight. A chaotic order, a controlled randomness. We'd been looking at nonlinear differential equations, and at their attractors, which cause iterated values not to converge but to diverge. States which start out only infinitesimally separated go on to diverge more and more and more . . . and more, moving toward some hidden values called, aptly enough, strange attractors. Pigeons from the same nest are drawn, through seeming chaos, to points we can identify but not prove the existence of.

Fran and I had a tentative set of equations for those idealized points.

Only tentative. Something wasn't right. We'd overlooked something, something neither of us could see. It was there - I knew it - but we couldn't see it. When we did, we'd have proof that any physical system showing an ultradependence on initial conditions must have a strange attractor buried somewhere in its structure. The implications would be profound - for chaos mathematics, for fluid mechanics, for weather control.

For me.

I loved looking for that equation. Sometimes I thought I could glimpse it, behind the work we were doing, almost visible to me. But not often. And the truth I hadn't told Fran, couldn't tell her, was that I didn't need to find it, not in the way she did. She was driven by the finest kind of intellectual hunger, a true scientist.

I just wanted the peace and calm of looking. The same calm I'd found over the years in simple addition, in algebra, in calculus, in Boolean logic. In numbers, which were not double state but just themselves, no other set of integers or constants or fractals lying behind these ones, better and fuller and more fulfilled. Mathematics had its own arbitrary assumptions - but no shadows on the cave wall.

So I spent as long with Fran in front of the terminal as I could, and printed out the last batch of phase space diagrams and spent time with those, and went over our work yet again, and read Pyotr Solenski's work, and then I could no longer put off returning to the material world.

As soon as I walked into Introduction to Set Theory, my nausea returned.

Mid October. Two more months of teaching this class, twice a week, 90 minutes a session, to keep my fellowship. I didn't know if I could do it. But without the fellowship, I couldn't work with Fran.

Thirty-two faces bobbed in front of me, with 32 shimmering ghostly behind them. Different. So different. Jim Mulcahy: a sullen slouching 18-year-old with acned face and resentful eyes, flunking out - and behind him, the quiet assured Jim, unhamstrung by whatever had caused that terrible resentfulness, whatever kept him from listening to me or studying the text. Jessica Harris: straight A's, thin face pinched by anxiety, thrown into panic whenever she didn't instantly comprehend some point - and behind her, the confident Jessica who could wait a minute, study the logic, take pleasure in her eventual mastery of it. Sixty-four faces, and 64 pieces of furniture in two rooms, and sometimes when I turned away to the two blackboards (my writing firm on the pristine surface, and quavery over dust-filled scratches), even turning away wasn't enough to clear my head.

"The students complain you don't look at them when you talk," my department chair had said. "And you don't make yourself available after class to deal with their problems."

He'd shimmered behind himself, a wise leader and an overworked bureaucrat.

Nobody had any questions. Nobody stayed after class. Nobody in the first 32 students had any comments on infinite sets, and the second 32 I couldn't hear, couldn't reach.

I left the classroom with a raging headache, and almost tripped over a student in the hall.

Chairs lined the corridor walls (water-stained plaster; lively-textured stucco) for students to wait for faculty, or each other, or enlightenment. One chair blocked fully a third of my doorway, apparently shifted there by the girl who sat, head down, drawing in a notebook. My headache was the awful kind that clouds vision. I banged my knee into a corner of the chair (graffiti on varnish on cheap pine; clean hand-stained hardwood). My vision cleared but my knee throbbed painfully.

"Do you mind not blocking the doorway, Miss?"

"Sorry." She didn't look up, or stop drawing.

"Please move the damned chair."

She hitched it sideways, never raising her eyes from the paper. The chair banged along the hall floor, clanging onto my throbbing brain. Beside her, the other girl shrugged humorously, in charming self-deprecation.

I forced myself. "Are you waiting for me? To see about the class?"

"No." Still she didn't look up, rude even for a student. I pushed past her, and my eyes fell on her drawing paper.

It was full of numbers: a table for binomial distribution of coin-tossing probabilities, with x as the probability of throwing n heads, divided by the probability of throwing an equal number of heads and tails. The columns were neatly labeled. She was filling in the numbers as rapidly as her pen could write, to seven decimal places. From memory, or mental calculation?

I blurted, "Most people don't do that."

"Is that an observation, an insult, or a compliment?"

All I could see of both girls were the bent tops of their heads: lank dirty blonde, feathery golden waves.

She said, "Because if it's an observation, then consider that I said, i already know that."'

The vertigo started to take me.

"If it's an insult, then I said, I'm not most people."'

I put out one hand to steady myself against the wall.

"And if it's a compliment, I said, `Thanks.' I guess."

The hallway pulsed. Students surged toward me, 64 of them, except that I was only supposed to teach 32 and they weren't the ones who really wanted to learn, they were warped and deformed versions of what they should have been and I couldn't teach them because I hated them too much. For not being what they could have been. For throwing off my inner balance, the delicate metaphysical ear that coordinates reality with ideal with acceptance. For careening past the Feigenbaum number, into versions of themselves where attraction was replaced by turbulent chaos. . . . I fell heavily against the wall, gulping air.

"Hey!" The girl looked up. She had a scrawny, bony face with a too-wide mouth, and a delicate, fine-boned face with rosy generous lips. But mostly I saw her eyes. They looked at me with conventional concern, and then at the wall behind me, and then back at me, and shock ran over me like gasoline fire. The girl reached out an arm to steady me, but her gaze had already gone again past me, as mine did everywhere but in the mirror, inexorably drawn to what I had never seen: the other Jack shimmering behind me, the ideal self I was not.

"It affects you differently than me," Mia said over coffee in the student cafeteria. I'd agreed to go there only because it was nearly empty. "I don't get nauseated or light-headed. I just get mad. It's such a fucking waste."

She sat across from me, and the other Mia sat behind her, green eyes hopeful in her lovely face. Hopeful that we could share this, that she was no longer alone, that I might be able to end her loneliness. The physical Mia didn't look hopeful. She looked just as furious as she said she was.

"Nine times out of ten, Jack, people could become their ideal selves, or at least a whole lot fucking closer, if they just tried. They're just too lazy or screwed up to put some backbone into it."

I looked away from her. "For me," I said hesitantly, "I guess it's mostly the unfairness of it that's such a burden. Seeing the ideal has interfered with every single thing I've ever wanted to do with my life." Except mathematics.

She squinted at me, "Unfairness? So what? Just don't give in to it."

"I think it's a little more complicated than -"

"It's not. In fact, it's real simple. Just do what you want, anyway. And don't whine."

I'm not -"

"You are. Just don't let the double vision stop you from trying anything you want to. I don't." She glared belligerently. Behind her, the other Mia radiated determination tempered by acceptance.

"Mia, I do try to do the things I want. Math. My dissertation. Teaching." Not that I wanted to be doing that.

"Good," she snapped, and looked over my shoulder. "Double vision doesn't have to defeat us if we don't let it."

I said, "Have you ever found any others like us?" What did my ideal self look like? What strengths could she see on his face?

"No, you're the only one. I thought I was alone."

"Me, too. But if there's two of us, there could be more. Maybe we should -"

"Damn it, Jack, at least look at me when you're talking to me!"

Slowly my gaze moved back to her face. Her physical face. Her mouth gaped in anger; her eyes had narrowed to ugly slits. My gaze moved back.

"Stop it, you asshole! Stop it!"

"Don't call me names, Mia."

"Don't tell me what to do! You have no right to tell me what to do! You're no different from -"

I said, "Why would I look at you if I could look at her?"

She stood up so abruptly that her chair fell over. Then she was gone.

I put my hands over my eyes, blotting out all sight. Of everything.

"What was this system before it started to diverge?" Fran said.

She held in her hands a phase space diagram I hadn't seen before. Her eyes sparkled. Even so, there was something heavy around her mouth, something that wasn't in the Fran behind her, and for a minute I was so startled I couldn't concentrate on the printouts. The ideal Fran, too, looked different from the day before. Her skin glowed from within, almost too strongly, as if a flashlight burned behind its pale fine-grained surface.

"That was rhetorical, Jack. I know what the system was before it diverged - the equations are there on the desk. But this one looks different. See . . . here . .

She pointed and explained. Nonlinear systems with points that start out very close together tend to diverge from each other, into chaos. But there was something odd about these particular diagrams: they were chaotic, as always around a strange attractor, but in nonpatterns I hadn't seen before. I couldn't quite grasp the difference. Almost, but not quite.

I said, "Where are those original equations?"

"There. On that paper - no, that one."

"You're using Arnfelser's Constant? Why?"

"Look at the equations again."

I did, and this time I recognized them, even though subatomic particle physics is not my field. James Arnfelser had won the Nobel two years ago for his work on the behavior of electron/positron pairs during the first 30 seconds of the universe's life. Fran was mucking around with the chaos of creation.

I looked at the phase space diagrams again.

She said, "You can almost see it, can't you? Almost . . . see .

"Fran!"

She had her hand to her midriff. "It's nothing, Jack. Just indigestion on top of muscle tension on top of sleeplessness. I was up all night on those equations."

"Sit down."

"No, I'm fine. Really I am." She smiled at me, and the skin around her eyes, a mass of fine wrinkles, stretched tauter. And behind her, the other Fran didn't smile. At all. She looked at me, and I had the insane idea that somehow, for the first time, she saw me.

It was the first time I'd ever seen them diverge.

"Fran, I want you to see a doctor."

"You're good to be so concerned. But I'm fine. Look, Jack, here on the diagram . . ."

Both Frans lit up with the precise pleasure of numbers. And I - out of cowardice, out of relief - let them.

"... can't understand a thing in this' fucking course."

The voice was low, male, the words distinct but the speaker not identifiable. I turned from writing equations on the board. Thirty-two/sixty-four faces swam in front of me. Did one of you say something?"

Silence. A few girls looked down at their notebooks. The rest of the students stared back at me, stony. I turned back to the board and wrote another half equation.

". . . fucking moron who couldn't teach a dog to piss." A different voice.

My hand, holding the chalk, shook. I went on writing.

". . . shouldn't be allowed in front of a classroom." This time, a girl.

I turned around again. My stomach churned. The students stared back at me. They were all in on this, or at least tacitly complicit.

I heard my voice shake. "If you have any complaints about how this course is being taught, you are advised to take them up with the department chair, or to express them on the course evaluation form distributed at the end of the semester. Meanwhile, we have additional work to cover." I turned back to the board.

". . . fucking prick who can't make anything clear."

My chalk stopped, in the middle of writing an integer. I couldn't make it move again. No matter how hard I concentrated, the chalk wouldn't complete the number.

". . . trying to make us flunk so he looks bigger."

Slowly I turned to face the class.

They sat in front of me, slumping or smirking or grinning inanely. Empty faces. Stupid faces. A few embarrassed faces. Fourth-rate minds, interested only in getting by, ugly gaping maws into which we were supposed to stuff the brilliance of Maxwell and Boltzmann and von Neumann and Russell and Arnfelser. So they could masticate it and spit it on the floor.

And behind them . . . behind them . . .

"Get out," I said.

One hundred twenty-eight eyes opened wide.

"You heard me!" I heard myself screaming. "Get out of my classroom! Get out of this university! You don't belong here, it's criminal that you're here, none of you are worth the flame to set you on fire! Get out! You've diverged too far from what you . . . what you ..."

A few boys in the front row sauntered out. A girl in the back started to cry. Then some of them were yelling at me, shrieking, only the shrieking wasn't in my classroom, it was in the hall, down the hall, it was sirens and bells and outside the window, an emergency medical van, and they were carrying Fran out on a stretcher, her long-fingered hand dangling limply over the side, and nobody would listen to me explain that the terrible thing was not that she wasn't moving but that lying on the stretcher so quietly were not two Frans, as there should have been, but only one. Only one.

I didn't go to the funeral.

I took Fran's last set of diagrams, and copied her files off her hard drive, and packed a bag. Before I checked into the Morningside Motel on Route 64, I left messages on Diane's answering machine, and the department chair's, and my landlady's.

" - don't want to see you again. It's not your fault, but I mean it. I'm sorry."

I "resign my teaching fellowship, and my status as a post-doc at this university."

"My rent is paid through the end of the month. I will not be returning. Please pack my things and send them to my sister, COD, at this address. Thank you, "

I bolted the motel door, unwrapped two bottles of Jack Daniels, and raised my glass to the mirror.

But no toast came. To him? Who would not have been doing this stupid melodramatic thing? Who would have seen Fran's death as the random event it was, and grieved it with courage and grace? Who would have figured out the best way to cope with his problems from a healthy sense of balance undestroyed by knowing exactly what he could never, ever, ever measure up to? I'd be damned if I'd drink to him.

"To Fran," I said, and downed it straight, and went on downing it straight until I couldn't see the other, better room lurking behind this one.

Even drunk, you dream.

I didn't know that. I'd expected the hangovers, and the throwing up, and the terrible, blessed blackouts. I'd expected the crying jag. And the emotional pain, like a dull drill. But I'd never been drunk for four days before. I'd thought that when I slept the pain would go away, into oblivion. I didn't know I'd dream.

I dreamed about numbers.

They swam in front of me, pounded the inside of my eyelids, chased me through dark and indistinct landscapes. They hunted me with knives and guns and fire. They hurt. I didn't wake screaming, or disoriented, but I did wake sweating, and in the middle of the night I hung over the toilet, puking, while numbers swam around me on the wavering, double floor. The numbers wouldn't go away. And neither would the thing I was trying to drink myself out of. No matter how drunk I got, the double vision stayed. Except for the equations, and they hurt just as much as the polished floor I couldn't touch, the cool sheets I couldn't feel, the competent Jack I couldn't be. Maybe the equations hurt more. They were Fran's.

Take Arnfelser's Constant. Plug it into a set of equations describing a nonlinear system ...

Phase space diagrams. Diverging, diverging, gone. A small difference in initial states and you get widely differing states, you get chaos ...

Take Arnfelser's Constant Use it as r. Let x equal . . .

A small difference in initial states. A Fran who diverged only a small amount, a Jack who ...

Take Arnfelser's equation ...

I almost saw it. But not quite.

I wasn't good enough to see it. Only he was.

I poured another whiskey. The knock on the door woke me. It sounded like a battering ram.

"Get out. I paid at the desk this morning. I don't want maid service!"

The shouting transferred the battering ram to my head, but the knocking ceased.

Someone started picking the lock.

I lay on the bed and watched, my anger mounting. The chain was on the door. But when the lock was picked the door opened the length of the chain, and a hand inserted a pair of wirecutters. Two pairs of wirecutters, physical and ideal. Four hands. I didn't even move. If the motel owner wanted me, he could have me. Or the cops. I had reached some sort of final decimal place - I simply didn't care.

The chain, cheap lightweight links, gave way, and the door opened. Mia walked in.

"Christ, Jack. Look at you."

I lay sprawled across the bed, and both Mias wrinkled their noses at the smell.

I said, even though it wasn't what 1 meant, "How the fuck did you get in here?"

"Well, didn't you see how I got in here? Weren't you even conscious?" She walked closer and went on staring at me, in soiled underwear, the empty bottle on the floor. Something moved behind their eyes.

"How did you find me?" it hurt to speak.

"Hacked your Visa account. You put this dump on it."

"Go away, Mia."

"When I'm good and ready. Jesus, look at you."

"So don't."

I tried to roll over, but couldn't, so I closed my eyes.

Mia said, "I didn't think you had it in you. No, I really didn't." Her tone was so stupid - such a mix of ignorance and some sort of stupid feminine idealization of macho asshole behavior - that I opened my eyes again. She was smiling.

"Get. Out. Now."

"Not till you tell me what this is all about. Is it Dr. Schraeder? They told me you two were pals."

Fran. The pain started again. And the numbers.

"That's it, isn't it, Jack? She was your friend, not just your adviser. I'm sorry."

I said, "She was the only person I ever met who was what she was supposed to be."

"Yeah? Well, then, I'm really sorry. I'm not what I'm supposed to be, I know. And you sure the hell aren't. Although, you know ... you look closer to him this morning than you ever did on campus. More ... real." I couldn't shove her out the door, and I couldn't stop her talking, and I couldn't roll over without vomiting. So I brought my arm up and placed it across my eyes.

"Don't cry, Jack. Please don't cry."

"I'm not -"

"On second thought, do cry. Why the fuck not? Your friend is dead. Go ahead and cry, if you want to!" And she knelt beside me, despite what I must smell like and look like, and put her arms around me while, hating every second of it, I cried.

When I was done, I pushed her away. Drawing every fiber of my body into it, I hauled myself off the bed and toward the bathroom. My stomach churned and the rooms wavered. It took two hands to grope along the wall to the shower.

The water hit me, hard and cold and stinging. I stood under it until I was shivering, and it took that long to realize I still had my briefs on. Bending over to strip them off was torture. My toothbrush scraped raw the inside of my mouth, and the nerves in my brain. I didn't even care that when I staggered naked into the bedroom, Mia was still there.

She said, "Your body is closer to his than your face."

"Get out, Mia."

"I told you, when I'm ready. Jack, there aren't any more of us. At least not that I know of. Or that you do. We can't fight like this."

I groped in my overnight bag, untouched for four days, for fresh underwear. Mia seemed different than she had in the cafeteria: gentler, less abrasive, although she looked the same. I didn't care which - or who - she was.

"We need each other," Mia said, and now there was a touch of desperation in her voice. I didn't turn around.

"Jack - listen to me, at least. See me! "

"I see you," I said. "And I don't want to. Not you, not anybody. Get out, Mia.

"No."

"Have it your way."

I pulled on my clothes, gritted my teeth to get on my shoes, left them untied. I braced myself to push past her.

She stood in the exact center of the room, her hands dangling helplessly at her sides. Behind her the other Mia stood gracefully, her drooping body full of sorrow. But the physical Mia, face twisted in an ugly grimace, was the only one looking at me.

I stopped dead.

They always both looked at me. At the same time. Everybody's both: Mia, Diane, Fran, the department chair, my students. Where one looked, the other looked. Always.

Mia said, more subdued than I had ever heard her. "Please don't leave me alone with this Jack. I . . . need you."

The other Mia looked across the room, not over my shoulder. Not at him. At . . . what?

From a small difference in initial states you get widely differing states with repeated iterations. Diverging, diverging, chaos . . . and somewhere, in there, the strange attractor. The means to make sense of it.

And just like that, I saw the pattern in the phase space diagrams. I saw the equations.

"Jack? Jack!"

"Just let me . . . write them down . . ."

But there wasn't any chance I'd forget them. They were there, so clear and obvious and perfect, exactly what Fran and I had been searching for.

Mia cried, "You can't just leave! We're the only two people like this!"

I finished scribbling the equations and straightened. My head ached, my stomach wanted to puke, my intestines prickled and squirmed. My eyes were so puffy I could barely see out of them. But I saw her, looking at me with her scared bravado, and I saw the other one, not looking at me at all. Diverging. She was right - we were the only two people like this, linked in our own chaotic system. And the states I could see were diverging.

"No," I got out, just before I had to go back into the bathroom. "There aren't two. Soon ... only one of you."

She stared at me like I was crazy, all the time I was puking. And the other Jack was doing God knows what.

I didn't really care.

I haven't published the equations yet.

I will, of course. They're too important not to publish: proof that any physical system showing an ultradependence on initial conditions must have a strange attractor buried somewhere in its structure. The implications for understanding chaos are profound. But it's not easy to publish this kind of innovation when you no longer have even a post-doc position at a decent university. Even though Fran's name will go first on the article.

I may just put it out on the Internet. Without prior peer review, without copyright protection, without comment. Out onto the unstructured, shifting realities of the net. After all, I don't really need formal attention. I don't really want it.

I have what I wanted: relief. The other faces-other rooms, other buildings, other gardens-are receding from me now. I catch only glimpses of them out of the corner of my eye, diminished in size by the distance between us, and getting smaller all the time. Diverging toward their own strange attractors.

It's not the same for Mia. When she said at the Morningside Motel that I looked more like the ideal Jack than ever before, it wasn't a compliment to my unshaven frowziness. For her, the phase space diagrams are converging. She can barely discern the ideal separate from the physical now; the states are that close.

She smiles at everyone. People are drawn to her as to a magnet; she treats them as if their real selves are their ideal ones.

For now.

The crucial characteristic about chaotic systems is that they change unpredictably. Not as unpredictably as before the Schraeder Equations, but still unpredictably. Once you fall into the area past the Feigenbaum number, states converge or diverge chaotically. Tomorrow Mia could see something else. Or I could.

I have no idea what the ideal Mia was looking at when she gazed across the motel room, away from both me and him. When you are not the shadow on the cave wall but the genuine ideal, what is the next state?

I don't want to know. But it doesn't matter whether or not I want it. If that state of life comes into being, then it does, and all we can do is chase it through the chaos of dens and labyrinths and underground caves, trying to pin it momentarily with numbers, as our states diverge from what we know toward something I cannot even imagine, and don't want to.

Although, of course, that too may change.

First-person science-fiction action games are bad for your health. They keep you up all night in front of the computer or TV, run up your phone bill when you make the leap to multiplayer mode, and crank up your virtual violence level to that of a digital Ted Bundy. But hey, they're fun, right?

Doom, which started the whole mess, begat a legion of in-your-face games. Not surprising, for they're as visceral as gaming gets, in or out of the house. With claustrophobic sets, threatening situations and enemies, limited resources, and above all, a view that puts you in the shooter's seat, Doom and its ilk break sweat faster than any other kind of game.

Doom and the next-of-kin Doom //:Hell on Earth (id Software/GT Interactive) are the best places to start. You're a space marine wandering through a Mars moon station (Doom) or a cavernous Earth-based locale (Doom II), armed to the teeth and lookin' for trouble. A cast of bad things fills your sights, from zombielike humans mans to grotesque demons, but a few rounds from a shotgun or plasma rifle and they're toast. The plot is simple: Survive long enough to get to the next level. Play on a network or across phone lines via modem, and these games feel like you're a character in Aliens. If you have a Sega 32X system, you can also play Sega's version of Doom in front of the TV.

Compared to Doom, Interplay's Descent drops you into freefall. That's because you've got a full range of motion both horizontally and vertically, without any gravity constraints. If you get nauseous on the ferris wheel, stay away from Descent. You're driving a robotic spaceship through corridors, blowing away enemy ships, and trying to get to the next of 30 levels. The perspective's slick and the freedom of movement extraordinary. Still, since the threats are machinery, not embodied evil, it's tougher to get scared by this one.

Adding the ability to look up and down and jump to the first-person viewpoint, Dark Forces manages to evoke the world of LucasArts while slathering on the firepower. The corridor mazes are complex, the sound effects almost overwhelming (this is on CD, so audio is excellent), and though it's only single-player, the heart-pounding meter is near the red zone.

Mars Needs Women (and Kids). Going to Mars would be a frighteningly difficult job, but learning about the Red Planet is a lot less scary, especially with the Next Step: Mars? CD-ROM from IVI Publishing. Perfect for kids (but filled with enough info to keep most adults interested), Next Step: Mars? is a gentle, but thorough, Martian exploratorium. The premise is goofy - you're enlisted by an intergalactic Council to research Earth and its plans to head to- Mars, then report back with your findings - but the interface is slick. There's the 3-D Village of Knowledge, where rooms are filled with objects and data. Narrated reports, video, text, still images, and away-from-the-computer activities take you from the history of our thoughts on Mars to future possibilities of travel.

On the Internet. If the only thing about Star Trek: Voyager that's scarier than Kate Mulgrew's steel wool-edged voice is the possibility of missing an episode, you need to hit the Web page at http.//voyager.paramount.com. Using an interface, you can pull up brief summaries of already-aired episodes, read short bios of the crew (and longer bios of the actors), and download audio and video clips from the series. It's mostly fluff, but it's worth adding to your Netscape or Mosaic hotlist when you forget to punch Record on your VCR.

Depressed for weeks, worried his career was going nowhere, he mulled over a set of apparently unsolvable problems. Otherwise unemployed, Whitfield Diffie was a househusband about to cook dinner for his wife, when he sat down in the living room of their borrowed quarters to ponder once more the ideas that had plagued him for a decade. Diffie cared about hidden writing - codes, ciphers, cryptograms - because he had a passionate interest in keeping people's private lives private. A Sixties radical with blond hair flowing down his back, he saw cryptography was the only way for citizens to protect themselves from government snooping. He also knew, even in the early Seventies, that cryptography was vital to home shopping, digital money, automated offices, and other business-related activity planned for the information highway. Society could never stop doing business face to face and move into computerized negotiations without the invention of digital signatures-electronic "handwriting" as unique as that produced by pen and ink. And on that spring day in 1975, Diffie suddenly saw how to do it. The solution flitted across his mind, left momentarily, then came back in "a real adrenaline rush of excitement." In a brilliant stroke he solved two of the biggest problems in modern cryptography, and, as a bonus, realized for the first time they were related.

In classical cryptography, one secret key is used both to encrypt and decrypt messages. Diffie saw that this key could be split: Half would be public knowledge; half would be kept secret. This idea of separate but mathematically related keys allowed "two magical things" to happen. People can send you messages, encrypted with your public key that can be read only with your private key. Or conversely, you can send out cryptograms that can be read by anybody, but recognizable as only coming from you. The first realization solves the problem of making cryptography available to everyone. The second allows for digital signatures. Split-key or public key cryptography has been adopted by companies ranging from AT&T to Apple, and Diffie's cryptographic protocols underlie the security measures incorporated into all modern computer networks.

Diffie met his wife at the door that evening with a sober look on his face. "I've just discovered a very important idea," he said. "I don't think our lives will ever be the same again."

Diffie, who describes his life as "a model of how not to get things done at the right time," was born to Campbellite Southern Baptist parents in 1944. But he grew up in a mainly Jewish section of Queens, New York, where his father taught Spanish and Latin American history at City College and his mother worked as an independent scholar on the French woman of letters Madame de Sevigne. Largely self-taught in mathematics and always a poor student, Diffie graduated from MIT with a math degree in 1965. To avoid the Vietnam War, he took draft-deferred jobs as a computer programmer at MIT and then Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Diffie's early interest in cryptography was rekindled when his boss, Al pioneer John McCarthy, was asked in 1972 to look into security on the ARPAnet, the military communications network that later grew into the Internet.

Diffie eventually quit his job to become the world's first public cryptographer. This began with car trips back and forth across the continent, with stops to buttonhole any scientist willing to talk about cryptography. One conversation led back to Stanford and Martin Hellman, a young professor of electrical engineering. From 1975 to 1978, Diffie and Hellman co-authored a series of now-classic papers on public key cryptography. In 1992, the Swiss Federal institute of Technology awarded Diffie an honorary doctorate in recognition of his creation: public key cryptography.

Secret writing dates back to Egyptian hieroglyphics. Codes and ciphers have always been jealously guarded secrets of state until Diffie and fellow cryptocommandos, who call themselves cypherpunks, began developing expertise on their own. A field traditionally reserved for spies, soldiers, and diplomats is now a hot topic on the internet, with public access to cryptography being the latest battle cry in the information revolution. "For the past few years I've made my living out of politics," says Diffie, who writes position papers and testifies before congressional committees. His latest cause is the Clipper chip, an attempt by the U.S. government to embed cryptographic hardware into the nation's telecommunications channels. These chips will contain back doors allowing the government to eavesdrop on telephone calls and computer messages. Diffie argues that Americans must oppose this effort to put the cryptographic genie back in the bottle.

Our talks began in Diffie's office at Sun Microsystems's campus in San Mateo and ended at his second office in downtown Palo Alto. At dinner Diffie's wife, Egyptologist Mary Fischer, recounted with tears in her eyes the scene of coming home to hear of her husband's great discovery: "He was right. Our lives were not the same after that."

Omni: How do you secure all the phones in North America? Diffie: I'd mulled this problem over in my mind for five years, and when I got to Stanford in 1969, I began thinking about a seemingly unrelated problem: How do you conduct business using home computer terminals? I didn't see how to create a paperless office without having what we now call "digital signatures" on your electronic documents. Omni: How did you solve the problem of digital signatures? Diffie: I was aware of two sorts of authentication mechanisms. The first, now used to protect the password table in the UNIX time-sharing system, employs "one-way functions." These are easy to compute in one direction, but hard in the other. The second is called challenge and response. Military fire-control radars send out a randomly selected challenge and only friendly aircraft know how to encrypt the challenge correctly and return it to the radar for verification.

One of these protects you against somebody studying the lock and figuring out how to make a key; the other against eavesdroppers on the channel watching the process and knowing how to repeat it. I was trying to combine both systems in one package when I saw that it was possible to design a mechanism that could verify a response to a challenge, even though it could not have figured out the response. This is what we now call a digital signature. I wrote the idea down in my journal and forgot about it. It got added to a list called "Problems for an Ambitious Theory of Cryptography."

About two weeks later I had another breakthrough. In between cleaning and cooking, I suddenly realized the problem could be turned around to solve the question bothering me since 1965: How do you initiate secure communication with somebody you've never met? I'd already seen that by means of an asymmetric pair of transformations that are the inverses of each other, a crypto system could either sign or verify a signature. Then I realized if I did the verification (the nonsecret part) first, I could encrypt messages by means of oneway functions - in such a way that only one person could get them back. Omni: Did you shout, Eureka! Diffie: I walked downstairs to get a Coke, and almost forgot about the idea. I remembered I'd been thinking about something interesting, but couldn't quite recall what it was. Then it came back, and I was acutely aware, for the first time in my work on cryptography, that I'd discovered something really valuable. After dinner I walked down to Marty Hellman's house. We'd yet to develop the term "digital signature," so we talked instead about things like "one-way authentication." It took me an hour but finally Marty understood and got as excited as I was. Omni: How does public key cryptography work? Diffie: In classical cryptography, the cryptographic variable or key controls how plaintext is transformed into ciphertext. Every key does it differently. The critical thing in classical systems is their symmetry. Knowing how to encrypt messages tells you how to decrypt them. My big realization was understanding how to build a cryptographic system in which each communication was controlled by not one, but two keys. The two keys are related, so anything you encrypted with one can be decrypted with the other. But they also have the property that if you're told only one key, you can't figure the other one out. We subsequently called these the public key and the private key. Omni: What do you gain by splitting the two keys? Diffie: Imagine you want to send me a secure message. You look up my public key in your phone book, plug it into your machine, and encrypt a message for me in such a way that it can be read only with my private key. I generate the key pair and disseminate my public key as widely as possible, but keep the private key to myself. Whenever a message encrypted with my public key comes in, I can read it. Since my private key is required to read it, nobody else can. This was the invention's first, more mysterious application. It got us over the fundamental problem in all previous systems - the only way for you and me to talk cryptographically is if we first have an "out of band communication," as they say in the jargon, in which we exchange keys.

Key distribution is a major part of classical cryptography. In the U.S. government, it's handled by the COMSEC, or materials control system which, along with communications intelligence, is one of two major functions of the National Security Agency. COMSEC moves tons of keys around the world every day to cryptographic devices, mostly military, using a range of systems: key lists, paper tape, cards, disks.... When a ship comes into port, the cryptocustodians go ashore with their locked briefcases and pick up tens of pounds of material for keying their machines. Prior to Aldrich Ames, the two most famous spy scandals in a generation involved the sale of cryptographic keys to the Russians - who read our traffic.

With conventional symmetric cryptography, you can talk securely only to people to whom keys have been distributed. This just won't do for securing a telephone system. There's no physical way tb do it. Distributing cryptographic keys to the entire population would be the equivalent of sending everyone a registered letter when you installed your phone, just in case you ever wanted to talk to them. The best you can do is have key distribution centers" that share keys among subscribers and make introductions. Omni: What's wrong with that? Diffie: The key distribution center must set up every call, and worse, it can read all the traffic. But public key cryptography reduces key storage requirements to the point where there is only one secret for every person in the network, and that secret never has to move. The key gets manufactured in your own cryptographic device, and stays there. The public key is the movable part. In practice, I get my name and public key signed by a sort of notary public, so you can recognize it as belonging to me. Then my secure phone calls yours and hands you my credentials. "Whitfield Diffie is calling and his public key is such and such." Some central authority is still involved in introducing us, but it can no longer read the traffic. Omni: How did you design keys that are both public and private? Diffie: It's not obvious to you because it isn't obvious. It wasn't obvious to me, and I did not discover a solution to the problem as I originally posed it. Marty Hellman and I discovered another approach - Diffie-Hellman - that solves many problems better. But three mathematicians at MIT, Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman [RSA], actually solved the original problem. Omni: How does this approach, the RSA system, work? Diffie: Start with the notion of a one-way function. If you took algebra in high school, you probably remember how much easier it is to raise numbers to powers than it is to take roots. If I ask you for the fifth power of the number 2, it takes a few seconds of multiplying to discover that 2^5 = 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 32. But if I ask you what's the fifth root of 32, it takes longer to figure out. If I give you a number as big as ten billion, it'd take you a very long time to calculate its fifth root. So raising numbers to powers is a one-way function with respect to the inverse operation of extracting roots.

Another example is multiplying versus factoring. If I give you two numbers - 31 97, which are both prime - you can easily multiply them: 3007. But if I give you the product, 3007, then finding out that 31 and 97 are its factors is much harder. The fact that multiplying prime numbers is easier than factoring them has been a fundamental problem in mathematics since the Greeks.

RSA, which to date is the most successful public key cryptographic system, combines these two phenomena. Raising numbers to powers is a one-way function in relation to extracting roots. Multiplying prime numbers is a one-way function relative to factoring. If the product is big enough, and you alone know its factors, this constitutes a trapdoor that lets you and only you decrypt messages. Omni: How does it work? Diffie: Your cryptographic equipment manufactures two large primes, each of which is 300 digits long, and multiplies them together to get a product 600 digits long. These numbers are big: they utterly dwarf any that describe phenomena in the physical world. The number of particles in the universe, for example, is estimated to be less than 100 dig its long.

The 600-digit number, the product, is made public. It's immeasurably difficult for anybody but you to factor this number. The largest number of this type that's been factored - last year - is "RSA Challenge Number 129." A 129-digit number is a long way from a 600-digit number. First proposed in the Seventies, the Challenge was only solved by hundreds of computers working together for years. Omni: What did you do as a kid? Diffie: The same thing I do as an adult. I mostly remember staring off into space. From time to time I did well in mathematics. I read [Robert] Heinlein's The Rolling Stones, about a family who fixes up an old spaceship and travels from the moon to the other planets. The family believes mathematics is the key to understanding the world. One summer, I went off to Europe carrying the Chemical Rubber Company Handbook of Mathematical Tables. It had no text, just tables of formulas and integrals. The next summer I studied G. H. Hardy's Course of Pure Mathematics. This was a better choice, but probably not as good as taking Courant's calculus. Still, by the time I entered MIT, I probably knew half as much mathematics as I know now.

As a kid I was passionately interested in military things, but being an intellectual snob, I thought cryptography was vulgar. Everybody liked spying and cryptography, but few people were interested in camouflage, chemical warfare, or the influence of the Crusades on military architecture in thirteenth century Europe. in junior high I lived the "hit parade" life, going to dance parties where I acted like a cross between Elvis and Archie. But I changed completely in high school, and the discussion groups of the Ethical Culture Society became the social and intellectual foundation of my life. I became a peacenik, marched for nuclear disarmament, sang folk songs in Washington Square Park. Wild parties became places where you sat around discussing the meaning of life. At MIT I regarded myself as a pure mathematician, particularly interested in analysis. Curiously, the things I did best are not particularly useful in cryptography. Omni: Were you into sex, drugs, and rock and roll? Diffie: I would not wish to speak ill of any of those things. Omni: I presume you partook of the Sixties revolution. Diffie: Oh yeah, I'm a Sixties man all the way down. Omni: What did you do after college? Diffie: To dodge the draft in 1965, I took a job at the Mitre Corporation, which worked on command and control systems for the military. I worked as a computer programmer on Mathlab, an interactive tool for symbolic mathematics that eventually became the Macsyma system. Software is the greatest development in manufacturing technology in our lifetime, maybe in the millennium. I became seriously interested in proving software correctness. Omni: When does cryptography come back into the picture? Diffie: Security was a large part of the Multics time-sharing computer system going on at MIT, and I began thinking more and more about personal privacy. Multics had elaborate file protection systems, but all required trusting the programmers. Whatever password I had on them, system programmers could always get at my files, and somebody could always get at the system programmers, who wouldn't be interested in going to jail to protect my files. We're verging from a free society into tyranny when the government can go behind my back and subpoena files from system programmers, which is what they do now in bank investigations. I saw that the only way to control my files would be to encrypt them. Omni: Did you go to Stanford to study cryptography? Diffie: No, I went to work with John, Mc-Carthy at the Al lab on the proof of correctness of programs. He was the only other person I knew at the time who understood how important the problem was. Proof of correctness aspires to mathematically prove that the programs you write will always do what you want them to do. Many programs work on an effectively infinite number of inputs, so there are too many possibilities for test.

But in 1972 I got sidetracked when Larry Roberts, head of information processing at ARPA - the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon - approached the NSA for help with ARPAnet's security. But as the boss of a mere $100-million-a-year military research project, poor Larry wasn't entitled to NSA's help. They told him to go stuff it. So Roberts asked McCarthy to think about network security. McCarthy did cook up a cryptographic program. All time-sharing systems since the Sixties had commands that said "encrypt file," but nobody used them because they were so cumbersome and slow. I thought a serious cryptographic program should be able to encrypt a file as fast as you could copy it, and McCarthy's program came nowhere close to that. Omni: So really, the NSA got you working on cryptography? Diffie: Yes, I was officially working for ARPA, but only because they were using NSA's money and doing them a favor. Proof of correctness of programs has since grown into a big security-related industry. By spring 1973, I was working on nothing else but cryptography. This did not please McCarthy, who wanted me back on proof of correctness. But I was old enough then not to worry about the draft so I took an indefinite leave of absence.

On one of many cross-country trips, I stopped at the IBM lab in Yorktown Heights [New York] to visit Alan Tritter, one of the first generation of telephone hackers. Tritter called himself "the biggest man in computer science" - he weighed 400 pounds. He introduced me to Alan Konheim, who directed IBM's cryptographic research group - probably the only significant American research group then in cryptography outside the NSA. Konheim was very secretive. He only told me one thing, and probably wishes he'd never said that. "When you get back to Stanford, look up my friend Marty Hellman," he said.

When I returned to California in 1974, I called Hellman. We immediately found each other the best-informed people we'd ever encountered. Marty and I worked together for four years and became a great pain in Konheim's tush. Our first political fight started in 1975, when the government adopted as the data encryption standard [DES] a system developed by IBM. We thought its key was too small. I made my living for several years arguing against DES, and now I'm making a living arguing against a new government standard, the Escrowed Encryption Standard.

The government is trying to push on everybody a new cryptographic. standard. It's secret and will be available only in tamper-resistant hardware - the Clipper chip. The government will control the products you buy. Worse yet, these products will contain a trapdoor allowing the government to read the traffic when it feels it needs to. Omni: Why is the Clipper chip so devoutly to be opposed? Diffie: If the only telecommunications products available allow the government to spy on your conversations, then there'll be no privacy left for anybody except fat cats who can fly around to visit one another in person. This tremendous centralization of the government's power will create a basic vulnerability in American communications. Power so centralized in an entity can be captured, whether by foreign invader or coup d'etat. By creating a system that can be turned against the American people, we are making the country vulnerable in a way that could become very important in the future. Omni: Why's the government pushing it? Diffie: I imagine there's a hidden intelligence agenda here. The government is obviously terrified about the proliferation of products over which it has no control. Widespread deployment of cryptographic systems too difficult for NSA to routinely break might degrade their performance and result in their budget being cut. Omni: Didn't Vice President Gore announce that the government was backing down on the Clipper chip? It will go into our telephones, but not into our computers. Diffie: I don't think he backed down on anything. His statement was merely misleading. The Clipper chip has always been intended for telephones, and we have no idea what he's cooking up for computers. He merely reiterated the demand for a key escrow system. This is a mechanism built into cryptographic systems allowing the government to read the traffic. The keys for bypassing the encryption will be held in escrow at a pair of government agencies. Omni: How will the fight end? Diffie: It's hard to believe the government will get what it wants, but that doesn't mean freedom won't suffer in the process. They are swimming upstream against the flow of technology. People dedicated to protecting their communications will get better systems as time goes on, but that doesn't mean honest citizens will have that freedom. The administration has insisted it will not make private use of cryptographic systems illegal, but FBI director Louis Freeh recently admitted at a meeting in Washington that if unescrowed encryption got in the way of wiretaps, he'd push for a law against it. Freeh keeps telling Congress electronic surveillance is necessary for law enforcement, even though there were fewer than 1,000 court-ordered wiretaps last year, out of nearly 250,000 federal cases. NSA's former chief lawyer likes to cite the case of a pedophile in Sacramento who encrypted his computer files. I think the pedophile has already been convicted, but they want to get hold of his files and put him away for another ten years. The notion of pedophiles "seducing" people over the Internet hardly seems a major threat to society.

Banning cryptography is not like gun control. We don't have drive-by shootings on the Internet. This approach to crime control is a lot of nonsense. They say they want to prevent a security-minded criminal from going down to Radio Shack and buying off-the-shelf communications equipment that will defeat law enforcement. This means government-approved equipment has to be the only product available. Omni: Will I be able to go to Radio Shack and buy a crypto machine nobody can crack? Diffie: I'm inclined to think so. in the 1790s, when the Bill of Rights was ratified, any two people could have a private conversation - with a certainty no one in the world enjoys today - by walking a few meters down the road and looking to see no one was hiding in the bushes. There were no recording devices, parabolic microphones, or laser interferometers bouncing off their eyeglasses. You will note civilization survived. Many of us regard that period as a golden age in American political culture. Omni: How secure is the government's proposed escrow system? Diffie: Building trapdoors into security equipment inherently reduces its security. For intelligence reasons, the government is demanding the system only use 80-bit keys. This tells you the upper bound on the amount of work needed to cryptanalyze messages: 2A80 objects. This is a million million million million computations. It would have to be an incredibly interesting phone call for anybody to do 2^80 computations to read it. On the other hand, given the way the system is organized, it takes only a few times that much work to read all the traffic ever passed through an individual telephone. In 2005 or 2010, when there's much more computing power or new cryptanalytic techniques, somebody who's been recording this traffic might read it with relative ease. And make no mistake about it, people are recording lots of traffic right now. Omni: Now that I can get cryptographic programs on the Internet, hasn't the public outsmarted the spies? Diffie: in no way has the battle for the availability of cryptography been won. Since the end of World War 11, people have been saying the end of the spymasters was nigh. But if you drive through Cheltenham or Fort Meade, you notice a lot of money being spent on fancy new buildings. Communications intelligence is still eating high on the hog, because the rate traffic migrates into potentially vulnerable telecommunication channels exceeds the rate traffic can be protected. The Internet itself doubles in size every 14 months.

Will more of this traffic be encrypted in the future? Undoubtedly. Will cryptosystems become and stay popular for years, even though they have flaws or trapdoors somebody knows how to exploit? Very possibly. Omni: So, then, the only way to break secret codes is for a lot of people to attack them? Diffie: Not necessarily a lot of people, just the right people. Omni: This seems to argue for making cryptographic algorithms public. Diffie: It certainly does. if you publish your algorithm you're more likely to hear if somebody breaks it. Thinking you can keep cryptographic algorithms secret from your major opponents is folly. It takes strong opponents to break a good algorithm, but the strongest - best funded - also have the capacity to acquire the algorithm against any reasonable commercial attempt to keep it secret. The reason to keep crypto systems secret is most people working in this business are spies. The NSA is the supplier of algorithms for the U.S. communications security but something between three-quarters and 90% of their budget goes to spying, so they have a vested interest in keeping cryptographic equipment out of their opponents' hands. Omni: Are you a spy? Diffie: I don't work for anybody but Sun Microsystems, and I don't snoop for anyone but myself. Omni: Do you get offers? Diffie: Only from NSA, if that counts, and never good enough. Omni: The field of cryptography historically has lent itself to amateurs. Diffie: We amateurs like to think so. Thomas Jefferson invented a cryptographic system rediscovered among his papers in 1922 and was later adopted by the Navy. If he'd used his own system when he was Secretary of State instead of one infinitely easier to solve, U.S. traffic might have been secure into the twentieth century. Instead, it was porous well into the Forties. Omni: In 1980 you predicted all computers and telephones would be encrypted by now. Diffie: I was vastly wrong about the degree to which people would be concerned with the problem. But the vast majority of the world's communications is still uncrypted. Interception costs are dropping, meaning the need to protect telecommunication channels is rising, and at some point this situation will spark a vast range of products. But so far people still don't see the damage being done to them by insecure communications, so they keep postponing the decision to do something about it. Omni: How can you tell when eavesdropping is happening? Diffie: It's hard for anyone other than an intelligence organization to know it's being spied on. You may see "manifestations." Five times in one year you lose contracts by narrow margins to the same competitor who seems to know in advance what your bids are going to be. But it's expensive and difficult to figure out if this is due to a communications security failure. During the Cold War, spies changed sides relatively infrequently, but in industry, people change sides every day. Many people in Silicon Valley constantly move. So security problems in industry may be more difficult than in the military. The military knows people are spending lots of money attacking its communications, whereas industry is usually in the dark about it. Omni: What types of problems are you working on now? Diffie: Certification of cryptographic systems is the core problem. The difficulty of finding hidden functions in computer programs is unboundedly high. How can you certify there aren't trapdoors in systems, particularly if manufacturers are working with trade-secret designs? I don't know how ordinary people can be supplied with something they trust, because the reward for undermining widely-used systems is very high.

Intelligence agencies are not in business to play fair. They don't want to break traffic that they can arrange to get some easier way. So they're building visible trapdoors into things through the key escrow program. There's no reason to believe they aren't also building trapdoors into things that are hidden. For instance, I've been told the diagnostic computers in cars now record information about your driving style that potentially affects your warranty. If your mechanic can determine the highest speed you achieved in the last several thousand miles, then your car is spying on you. Omni: Sun Microsystems's largest customer is the U.S. government. Has anyone in the company suggested you tone down your criticism? Diffie: I see no sign the government regards my activities as objectionable or that my activities hinder it in any way. Having people testify before Congress and carry on public debate creates the illusion of democracy. Why should they object to that? I give apparent legitimacy to these behind-the-scenes processes. I don't seem to have any real effect on what happens. Omni: In his story "The Gold Bug," Edgar Allan Poe says there is no such thing as a cipher that can't be broken. Do you agree? Diffie: That's a tricky question. Newcomers to the problem are inclined to say it's easy to make an unbreakable system. if you start designing a secure communications product today, by the time it goes into service in 2000, your system is good for 20 or 30 years. But on the last day it's in use, somebody encrypts a sensitive message so important it's still interesting to an opponent 50 years later. This means you're designing today against an opponent who sits down to attack you a century from now. He holds in his pocket calculator more computing power than we now have in the entire world, and he knows a bunch of mathematics as yet undreamed of. Do you see why it's a hard problem?