The Stardust Paradox

by Sandra Rothfork

© copyright by Sandra Rothfork, Feb. 2003

cover art by Eliza Black

ISBN 1-58608-352-x

Gemstar 1-58608-243-4

New Concepts Publishing

www.newconceptspublishing.com

Chapter One

Jesse stared down at the drawings Scot was scrawling across the front of his exam and she shuddered. Watching him cover the first page of his final with witty doodles like ‘physics sucks’, cartoons of himself blowing his brains out with a gun, and knives dripping with blood, she wondered when? When would she ever get over it? It happened thirteen years ago! I’m an adult now. I’m all grown up. Why can’t I let go of it? Why? Irrationally, she wondered if Scot had somehow seen inside her and plucked those images straight out of the deepest most hidden recesses of her heart. Angrily she wondered if he was aware of her standing directly behind him.

And she wondered what he was doing there at Tech. He simply did not have the discipline and drive needed to succeed at NMT. The attrition rate for the freshman class each year was more than fifty per cent. Along with fully half of the other freshmen, Scot Swineburn, would not make it to his sophomore year. But that was one good thing about teaching at a university. It was sink or swim for the students. She didn’t have to hold their hands.

“Time’s up,” she announced and her anger soared when Scot, not startled, turned and handed her his exam. He knew all along she was standing behind him!

“Didn’t do so well,” he admitted, “I wasn’t ready for the final . . .”

One of his friends coming out of the next classroom caught up with him and the two students followed her down the hall.

“You had the same opportunity to prepare as everyone else.” Jesse hiked up her stack of finals and waved them at her friend, just entering the building.

Still in her jogging suit, Valdez was in a state of shock and disbelief over New Mexico’s weather, “Jesse, you would not believe what a gorgeous day this is. It’s sixty degrees out there in the middle of December and it’s snowing to beat hell back in Illinois . . . whoops, excuse me,” Valdez collided with Scot and his friend as they all three tried to follow Jesse into her office.

With matching grins, Valdez and the other student backed out of the doorway. They leaned against the wall outside Jesse’s office and listened to the exchange between Jesse and Scot.

He was begging now. “Please, Dr. Wren, couldn’t you forget this final and let me take another at a later date? Couldn’t you give me an incomplete for now?”

Jesse stared coldly at him. What did he think? Just because his father was a senior U.S. Senator, somehow he could weasel out of the F he so richly deserved? “How fair would that be to the students who did the work on time and did well on the tests?”

“I had a passing grade before the final.”

“Two F’s and four D’s. Not good enough, Scot.”

“You don’t know what happened . . .”

She didn’t let him finish. “No, I don’t know and I don’t care. You know the proper procedures if you’re having trouble and they don’t include never coming to class, never turning in homework and failing grades on both major exams. You could have dropped this class any time before November 3rd. If you get an F on this test you can repeat the course. That’s your option if you ever plan to graduate.”

Scot stormed out and Valdez poked her head in. Silently laughing at a situation they had both faced many times, they were about to speak when Scot’s loud parting jab interrupted them.

“Fucking whore. Bitch. She’s such a dog she couldn’t get picked up at the Cap on a Saturday night.” The boys’ spiteful laughter reached them from all the way outside the building.

Blushing faintly, Jesse gathered up a pile of finals to take home for grading.

Valdez joked, “You’re as cold as those stars you love so much, Jesse.”

Half angry at Scot’s remark, half amused at herself for being angry, Jesse shot back, “The surface temperature on an average star like the sun is over 5000° K. Not to mention a core temperature of fifteen million degrees. How cold is that?”

They strolled across campus, the young men they passed openly noticing Valdez and Valdez openly noticing the young men.

Jesse scolded, “Valdez! What are you doing? You’re engaged now!”

“Exactly! In six months I’ll be married and I don’t dare do this at SIU. Here I could be just another student. No sense letting all these beautiful men pass by without a few appreciative looks. Socorro is absolutely gorgeous, Jesse.” Valdez encompassed their surroundings with a wave of her hand.

They were crossing the eastern edge of the golf course, the green rolling hills nestled like an emerald beneath a seven thousand foot mountain rising directly west of it.

“Why didn’t you tell me how fabulous New Mexico is? The sunlight. The mountains. The weather. Look at that sky! How perfect, how blue, how clean it is. How bright the light is, how sharp the edges are. And the men! Unbelievable. Jesse, this place is paradise.”

At Jesse’s blank look, Valdez sighed and laughed. “You’re hopeless, Jesse, you know that?” Jesse didn’t mention how beautiful her surroundings were because Jesse hadn’t noticed.

Inside the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the processing center for the information gathered from the sky by the Very Large Array Radio Telescope, things were always happening. Running twenty four hours a day, the giant computers processed the data, creating, cleaning and refining computer generated visual images of radio stars and galaxies. And all day long inside the NRAO, astronomers from all over the world studied, interpreted, shared and wrote about the data and information they received via the VLA, information about physical events taking place millions of light years from Earth.

As usual when she entered the building Valdez was struck by the energy of the place. It seemed to her that the NRAO simply hummed with power, intelligence and purpose. That day was no exception. She stared open mouthed as she and Jesse passed by Dr. Eric Johannson, director of the NRAO and the world’s pre-eminent radio physicist. Dr. Johannson, visiting physicist, Stephen Hawking and science journalist, David Suzuki were standing and sitting in the open foyer at the entrance of the building. The three men were arguing about the existence or nonexistence of the newly discovered magnetars and the equally newly discovered bubbles of hot gas being belched out by radio galaxies.

Jesse passed by the three men without so much as a glance in their direction, as though it was an every day event to walk past Eric Johannson, Stephen Hawking, and David Suzuki. Valdez, on the other hand, had to tear herself away from eavesdropping on their conversation to run down the hall after Jesse.

In her office Jesse’s two graduate assistants sat slaving away, Dan at his own desk, finishing up a few last minute details before going home for Christmas and Max, at Jesse’s desk, downloading a program for her as she had asked.

On her arrival Max glanced up from her computer, smiled a goofy smile and jumped right in thinking he might as well get it over with. “Uh . . . Doc, we have a problem. I’ve downloaded the software but I can’t get the damn thing to work now.”

She frowned. Her office computer had been working perfectly only yesterday. “What about the rest of it? Does that still work?”

“No, not exactly . . . at this point I can’t get any of it . . .”

“Well, you keep working at it until you do fix it! I don’t care how long it takes you. That’s what we pay you for. If it takes you until New Years Day, you keep working at it. I have to have that computer up and working and I’ve got to have that program too. I can’t do my research without it and you know it.”

The two young men blushed uncomfortably.

Jesse whipped out of her office and Valdez followed. “Jesse,” Valdez remonstrated softly, “that’s no way to treat your assistant . . .”

“I don’t care. Max is always doing things like that. He may be the brightest graduate student here, but every time he works on my computer, he messes something up so I have to wait while he fixes it . . .”

“So you have to wait. Big deal. You have other computers! You act like there’s no tomorrow . . .” they walked back down the hall.

From inside the office Dan angrily mocked Jesse, “There she goes, Dr. Wren, the great radio physicist, the master geek who can’t do math . . .”

“Here we have the great radio physicist’s violin stand, music and violin case. We’ve seen that before. Here we have her new laptop and her new Gateway and LaserJet printer and here is her fax. Here is the great radio physicist’s new twelve-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and Dobsonian mounting. Here’s Jesse’s CD player and speakers and what did I say yesterday? Her four thousand dollars worth of CDs? Not one stick of furniture of her own and no new clothes. Just the essentials. Now we know where all your money’s going, Jesse.” Valdez panned her minicam around Jesse’s place, a tiny book and paper cluttered mother-in-law apartment behind the house on Lopezville Road directly across the street from the NRAO.

Then she focused in on Jesse standing behind the kitchen counter.

Jesse looked up from spreading peanut butter on toast to smile and wave at the camera. Valdez and her parents were the closest thing to a family Jesse had had after her father’s death. She spoke to Valdez’s parents and fiancé through the eye of the minicam. “Hi, Jane. Hi, Thomas. Jerry, I want you to know that your lovely wife to be has been flirting with every man she lays eyes on here in Socorro.”

Valdez laughed. “He told me to get it all out of my system. Besides, he knows I’m a flirt. According to him that’s one of the things he loves about me. I’m doing what you told me, Jerry. And here. Here we have the great radio physicist, the master geek who can’t do math, preparing lunch for us. And what the hell did he mean by that? If my memory serves me right you were the one everyone, including me, went to for help with their math. How the hell did you get your doctorate in astrophysics from Berkeley if you can’t do math?”

Jesse laughed. “He means I’m not a genius. I can do it. But not like Max. He’s a world class mathematician. That’s why I work with him. His facility makes up for my mediocrity. A lot of times all I have to do is show him what I’m working on and he can do in minutes what could take me months to figure out. If ever.”

She pursed her lips and shoved Valdez’s sandwich and glass of milk across the counter toward her. “You’re right, Valdez, I shouldn’t have blown up at Max like that. He’s always going the extra mile for me.” She picked up her phone.

“Uh oh. I detect a softening here,” Valdez moved in on a close up of Jesse’s face. Jesse giggled and stuck her tongue out at the minicam while Valdez clowned, “I better pursue this rare weakening, this humanization of the great physicist. Whaddya say, Jesse? Let’s take the back road out to Ladron. You can finish correcting finals tomorrow after I’m gone . . .” She paused while Jesse apologized to Max, then continued mercilessly. “Come on, Jesse, I want to see some of the wilderness around here . . .”

Jesse waited for the old tan and white Jeep station wagon to pass by before turning to follow the Jeep north on Camino Real.

“No, Valdez. You’ll have to tell your folks I’m sorry but I can’t manage it. I can’t afford to run out to California for Christmas and then turn right around and go back out there again in May for your wedding. Make up your mind what you want. Are you sure the guy said at the end of Camino Real? I don’t remember any back roads at the end of this street.”

“He said Camino Real. And I bet you’ve never been out to the end of this street. You probably never get further away from your precious NRAO than Furrs. I bet you’ve never even been out of town. You never do anything but work, isn’t that right? And don’t give me that, you can’t afford it. You don’t want to come out to Berkeley because you’re excited about getting started on your research.”

Ahead of them, the Jeep turned into the parking lot at Saracino Middle School. The faded sticker on the Jeep’s back Bumper read, I © To Party At The Cap.

Valdez turned and caught the guilty expression on Jesse’s face, “Aw, that’s Ok, Jess, I understand. An NSF grant and a semester and summer off just to do research are nothing to sniff at. I don’t blame you. I’d be champing at the bit too. And Mom and Dad, they’ll understand too . . . but we’re going to miss you . . . and wish you were there.”

Jesse burst out laughing. “Come on, give it up, Valdez.”

Valdez laughed too. “What’s the Cap, Jesse?”

“Oh no you don’t!”

“Oh yes I do! What is it, Jesse? Is it a bar? It’s the last day of finals before Christmas break.”

Making the transition from blacktop to gravel, Jesse’s little black Taurus lurched and rattled before heading off into the high desert wilderness. “It’s the Capitol Bar and we are not going there.”

“Why not?”

“Why do you want to go to a bar? You’re engaged . . .”

“So, is my life over? Come on, Jesse, it’s almost my last night here. We’ll have fun. It’ll be my bachelorette party. You and me at the Cap. Let’s HOWL tonight!”

“You don’t understand. This is . . .” Jesse shook her head, “a wild place. It used to be the Mining School. The students and the townies can be a rough bunch. The Capitol is . . . there are fights. People get beat up, stabbed, ears get bitten off . . .” Jesse stopped her litany of reasons. She knew from the expression on Valdez’s face that this was an argument she had already lost.

Chapter Two

Sam slouched down in the chair and lifted his feet. He crossed his ankles, rested his heels on the papers at the edge of the Principal’s desk and smiled at the man sitting on the other side.

The Principal stared at the soles of Sam’s shoes. “Get your feet off my desk, Sam,” he ordered. Ever so slowly and with infinite reluctance Sam removed his feet from the desk, incidentally dragging the papers off as well. They fluttered to the floor. Sam stood and crossed to the bookshelf.

Mr. Montgomery barked, “Sit down, Sam!”

Casually Sam pulled a book from the shelf and pretended to leaf through it.

Mr. Montgomery growled, “Put that book down, Sam, and sit back down!”

Sam dropped the book to the floor and returned to the desk. He plucked the glass paperweight from the desk and tossed it up in the air. With each toss the paperweight flew ever higher, ever closer to the ceiling.

Mr. Montgomery yelled, “PUT THAT THING DOWN!”

Gabe turned into the parking lot at Saracino Middle School and parked the Jeep. School was out. Buses were pulling out of the parking lot and all up and down the street, children in small groups walked home.

Ignoring the secretaries’ fascinated stares, Gabe strode into the principal’s office like so many times before. Instantly Sam placed the paperweight back down on the desk and sat down, slumping in the chair under his father’s glare. Gabe stood in the center of the office letting the silence grow. “Well?” he demanded finally.

“I was just showing them . . .” Sam tried to explain only to be interrupted by Mr. Montgomery.

“This is the third time this week your son has broken the rules, Mr. Hunter. He was told less than two days ago not to bring his baseball cards to school, an infraction of the rules clearly stated in the student handbook. Yet he was caught again today at noon showing and selling the cards on the playground . . .”

Gabe paced, his stare raking over both Sam and the Principal. How many more times could he endure this endless harangue of complaints and recital of infractions before exploding? The pettiness, the stupidity of it all were simply staggering.

More than a little threatened by Gabe, the Principal remained seated behind his desk. Yet, Mr. Montgomery persisted. Truth be known, Mr. Montgomery was not above enjoying having Gabe on the receiving end of this harangue. With barely concealed relish he continued, “We are out of patience with your son, Mr. Hunter. Sam cuts class. He is disruptive. He gets into fights. He refuses to do his schoolwork. I have spoken with your son’s caseworker. If you cannot control your boy, if you cannot see that he attends school and obeys the rules, we are now considering declaring you an unfit parent and placing Sam in a foster home. Do you understand, Mr. Hunter?”

Outside in the parking lot Gabe started up the Jeep and verbally lit into Sam. “What the hell is the matter with you? They’re going to take you away from me! Is that what you want? Do you want to go live with strangers . . .” Sam hunched in sullen silence while his father raged.

A few blocks south of the school Gabe pulled into the parking area at the west end of Sedillo Park next to the Municipal Swimming Pool. It was late December. Except for a white Mustang parked there, the park was deserted.

Gabe got out of the Jeep and Sam slipped down in the seat to watch the driver of the Mustang get out of his car. His gaze barely clearing the dash, Sam’s eyes followed the two men as they walked along the edge of the park. Their hands met. Cash was exchanged for a small brown paper bag. Sam knew the routine. Angrily the boy swallowed against the knot of razors stuck in his throat.

That evening, long after dinner, the light from Gabe’s living room fell in a yellow rectangle across the dusty yard. A few yards from the open door Gabe tossed his cue case through the window of the Jeep into the front seat.

He knelt in the darkness beside the Jeep making chirping sounds with his lips. Instantly he was attacked by five squirming puppies. Scooping up the eight-week-old Rottweilers, two in one arm, three in another, he carried them over to their pen on the northwest side of the house. Gently he dropped the puppies into the pen and turned on the light that heated their little house.

Ozone, the puppies’ dam, trotted after him to the low steps that led up to the open door. Together the man and dog sat on the top step. She leaned against him. He threw his arm around her and rubbed her far ear. She groaned ecstatically. “You gonna be a good girl while I’m gone?” he asked. “You gonna guard the house and take care of Sam and Ramona? Uh oh, there’s Ramona. Gotta go, Ozone.”

Gabe stood to let his neighbor pass by him into his house.

Inside the Cap, it was hot, dark, packed and noisy. There was barely room to squeeze between students and townies to get to the bar or from one room to the next. Voices were loud and the music was louder as the students unwound in that smoky old bar, celebrating the end of a long hard semester. A full thirty days of vacation lay ahead of them.

They were surrounded, hemmed in by smiling faces, lively bodies, the sounds of talking, laughter, music and dancing. Still nursing her first beer, Jesse ducked the students who one by one squeezed in next to her at the bar, using the ruse of buying their drinks there to make a pass at Valdez. Those who weren’t openly making passes at Valdez gathered in a group behind Jesse speculating on who Valdez was and why she was with Dr. Wren. Three of the students argued subtly about whether or not Dr. Wren was a fourth or fifth magnitude geek and whether geekitude was an inherent or an acquired characteristic.

Jesse finished up her beer and turned to face them. “Hey guys, anybody got an extra pen?” she pointed to the empty pocket in her jacket. “A geek can’t be without a pocket full of pens. You never know when you’re going to get a 5th magnitude idea.”

The boys fell all over themselves to stuff a pen or pencil in Jesse’s jacket pocket.

Jesse smiled at Valdez’s expression and advised, “Don’t take their remarks seriously, Valdez. Tech is full of geeks. Kids who never fit in. Kids who studied hard in high school, who never wanted to do anything but math and science. Last Halloween all most of them did was throw on a pair of black plastic horn-rimmed glasses, stuff more pens in their pockets, hang three or four calculators and a slide rule or two on their belts and come disguised as themselves. Super geeks.”

Valdez laughed. Suddenly though her eyes grew enormous, her mouth wide. She leaned close to Jesse and grabbed her arm, squeaking, “Omigod! Who is that? Look! Look! Look at that guy! Who is he? Do you know him?”

Jesse followed the direction of Valdez’s openmouthed stare. Carrying his own cue case, the man had just entered the bar and the crowd actually parted for him. Not all that tall, maybe a little over six foot one or so, it wasn’t his height that was impressive. It was the sheer steel hard muscular massiveness of him that impressed.

He was big like an oak tree, like a bull elk, fierce like a giant grizzly. He was graceful. He moved like water, like a great gray wolf, like a golden-maned lion. He prowled, he stalked, he strode. His fierce brown eyes were electric, radioactive. He was magnificent. As he passed Jesse his eyes locked with hers. His stare reached down inside Jesse all the way to her soul. For one eternal moment he transfixed her with that ferocious gaze. Jesse shivered and dropped her eyes. She turned to look at Valdez whose wide-eyed stare followed the man all the way back to the pool tables.

“Close your mouth, Valdez, you’re drooling all over my arm.”

Struck speechless by the man’s sheer animal beauty, Valdez grabbed Jesse’s arm again. “That’s the most gorgeous thing . . . if I weren’t . . . Who is he? Do you know him?”

Jesse suppressed a sneer. This was too easy to pass up. “His name’s Gabriel Hunter and he’s a genius.”

If Valdez’s eyes widened any more they would fall out of her head. “You’re kidding! He looks like that and he’s a genius? You’re lying. You’re joking, aren’t you?”

“No,” Jesse answered truthfully. “I’m not kidding. The man is a genius. I’ve talked to many professors on campus who’ve said he was the most brilliant mathematician the school ever had as a student. Or ever will have.”

Valdez rested her chin on her hand and stared at Gabe like a silly lovesick adolescent. “Oh my,” she whispered. “Oh my . . . if Jerry weren’t waiting for me in California . . . is it too late to break off my engagement?”

Jesse scolded, “Valdez! Get real. You and Jerry are made for each other. How can you possibly go on like this about a perfect stranger . . .”

“Jesse! How can I not? Take a look. What are you? Blind? He’s a genius. He looks like that. You said it. He’s perfect all right. I may be engaged, but you’re not. I saw the way he looked at you. If I were you, I’d . . .”

Jesse gave up the game in disgust. “Can it, Valdez. In the first place I’m not looking for a man. In the second place, if you’ll care to notice, he looks at everyone like that. And in the third place I wouldn’t have him if he were the last man on earth. He may be a mathematical genius, but being smart with numbers is not the same as being smart in life. He’s also one of the town’s dope growers.”

Valdez moaned, “You’re kidding. Oh noooo. Oh Jesus.” Her voice dripped with disappointment. She watched Gabe move gracefully around the pool table. With the end of his cue high in the air Gabe leaned over the table and effortlessly dropped two balls with one perfect double bank shot. Valdez moaned again.

Jesse tried again. “What? You would take on a mess like that if you were free? Don’t give me that. He’s an ex-con. He’s a bum. He’s the next thing up from a street person. He lived in his car for months. He’s nuts.”

Valdez stared at Gabe and moaned again.

Like Valdez there were many in the bar who were aware of Gabe. In the entrance to the dance hall near the pool table where Gabe set up his game, students gathered and talked with each other, surreptitiously watching Gabe, all of them as fascinated with him as Valdez. One young woman standing next to the pool table was particularly loud. She shouted above the music and voices, she shrieked and howled pretending to converse with the four young men standing near her. But all the while her eyes were on Gabe.

A student squeezing and bumping by the loud one’s group caused a mug of beer to spill down the front of her T-shirt. Laughing and squealing at the top of her lungs she looked down at her wet T-shirt in mock horror. One large jiggling breast was revealed through the beer soaked material. Relentlessly she kept up the noise, squealing and howling. She was making so much noise people became uncomfortable, embarrassed for her. Drunken young men reeled by and laughed at her. Valdez and Jesse and everyone else laughed, rolled their eyes and gaped at her. Gabe paced around the table, played his game and scowled. Still she kept up that incredible din. She just went on and on and on in a ceaseless demonic caterwauling yowl.

Jesse and Valdez looked at each other in disbelief. Jesse leaned over to shout in Valdez’s ear, “If someone doesn’t shut that woman up . . .”

They looked back just in time to see Gabe reach out and grab the wet jiggling breast as he walked by.

A student yelled, “That’s my wife!” and tackled Gabe from behind.

With shockingly swift and economical violence, Gabe reacted, silent and so quick and smooth it could hardly be seen. In less than a second the young man was face down on the barroom floor with Gabe’s knee crushing his spine and both his arms twisted behind his back, pinned like an insect in Gabe’s easy grip. Three more students jumped on top of Gabe and struggled with him in a vain attempt to release their friend.

They were no more than ants on a boulder. Though the loud one was temporarily shocked into silence, the bar was now on the edge of pandemonium as dozens of laughing shouting people rushed to watch the fight. The bartender close to that end of the bar leapt over the bar with a shotgun in his hand. Gabe jumped up from the floor brushing off the young men on his back like fleas and everyone backed away from him. With his hands up in the air Gabe gathered up his cue and case and left the bar. A police car siren yipped outside the bar.

Jesse and Valdez looked at each other in astonishment. “See, what did I tell you?” Jesse pronounced primly.

Valdez’s grin widened. She was less convinced than ever. “He’s fabulous!” she sighed half serious, half teasing Jesse.

“He’s scum,” Jesse declared even more coldly.

Valdez laughed.

The bar was closing. Outside the Capitol, the loud one hopped insanely around the police officers, shouting hysterically at the top of her lungs again, “I’ve been assaulted! He grabbed me . . .”

Jesse and Valdez walked by small groups of people standing around watching Gabe argue with officers and witnesses. As they passed, Gabe stared directly at Jesse for the second time that night. It seemed to Jesse then that his stare shot through her to the soles of her feet this time. Once again she looked away from that ferocious stare.

They drove down the dimly lit streets, Valdez’s thoughts back at the bar with that strange man. “I wonder why he is the way he is?” she mused, not really expecting an answer.

Jesse was appalled at Valdez’s interest in someone other than her fiancé. As for Gabe and his problems, she was scornful and without sympathy. Harshly, self righteously, she pronounced judgment. “He’s a grown man, Valdez, and a very intelligent one at that. He has exactly what he wants. He’s worked hard at it. Failure.”

Suddenly it seemed to Valdez, that though Jesse might be right about Gabe, it was Jesse’s life that was impoverished. For eleven years now she had been waiting for Jesse to get over her parents’ deaths. Other people got over these things. But for Jesse it never seemed to happen. Valdez stared across through the darkness at her childhood companion. “Jesse, Jesse, Jesse. Where is the beautiful girl I used to know? Where is my laughing friend? Where are the love and joy in your life? You are such a little thing, Jesse. But you’re so heavy. Life is such a burden to you.”

Shocked at this assessment, Jesse tried to deny it. “How can you say that? I love what I’m doing. There’s no one in the world who loves the stars and physics and cosmology like I do. I’ve studied them all my life. I have a Ph.D. in astrophysics for Chrissake. I’ve been here at Tech for only a year and a half and already I have a grant from the NSF and a semester’s leave to do my research. I’m a success. I’ve worked very hard to get where I am. I’m not a failure. I’m a success!”

“Are you happy?” Valdez asked quietly.

“Right! And how many happy people do you know?” Jesse snapped.

Valdez slumped inwardly and gave up. “All right. Let’s forget about it. I had a ball tonight, an absolute ball. Thanks. You were right, Jesse. This is a wild and woolly place. The wild, wild West. I think you must be living in one of the most beautiful little spots in the entire United States. I mean it is sooo beautiful. The desert. The sky. The mountains. Think of Berkeley where we grew up. The ocean and the fog. The tall trees. The cool shade. How soft and sweet and gentle it all is. All the women in their long flowing skirts. Soft beautiful women everywhere. This place is so clean and hard, the air so crisp and bright. If Berkeley is the quintessential feminine place, Socorro is the quintessential masculine place. All these fabulous men. This is the most masculine place I have ever seen. We don’t even have to count that guy back there in the bar. You got all these handsome black-eyed Hispanics. You got real Navajos. You got real cowboys. You got the VLA and the NRAO. You got the CETR, the Center for Explosive Technology Research, the ultimate boy-man fantasy occupation. Yeah, blow it all up! You’ve got the National Anti-Terrorism School, another male fantasy-job. You got gorgeous students, professors, scientists running around everywhere . . .”

Jesse responded with another scornful snort. “Valdez, you and I are on different wavelengths. Except for the NRAO, I don’t even see this stuff you’re talking about.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Jesse. This whole place is making love to you and you don’t even know it. You are just . . . so . . . heavy, Jesse. If only you could lighten up,” Valdez whispered, never guessing, never knowing that even as she spoke, Jesse’s beloved stars were reaching out to touch Jesse and afterwards she would be both infinitesimally heavier and infinitely lighter than anyone could ever imagine.

Chapter Three

Number 11 Relay Station was small, about the size of a football stadium. No more than a spec of dust, a tiny microscopic artifact in the vastness of space, it hurtled through wide black vacuums, through clouds of interstellar gas, its speed and trajectory synchronized with the slow circling dance of the Galaxy. It moved in concert with the stars that formed an arm of the spiral thirty thousand light-years from the Galactic Nucleus. It sped silently, devouring space at 150 miles per second. Like the stars around it, Number 11 Relay Station would complete an orbit of the Milky Way once every 250 million years. But the bets were on throughout the Eridanian Empire that in less than two hundred Earth years it would no longer be profitable to maintain the station in that particular corner of the Galaxy.

Captain J’nor was bored. Miserable. Deeply unhappy. In fact Captain J’nor had been deeply unhappy for more than seventy years. More than seventy long Earth years had passed since the accidental bonding. Since the Assignment Earth. That huge forced compromise between the Imperial family and the Eridanian ruling party.

For the first forty years, dozens of Llyssans were posted on the station, most of them as teachers and companions for the Captain. The Captain was well educated. Back home on Llyssa, the fourth planet out from the star Epsilon Eridani, Captain J’nor could have successfully pursued a career in medicine, art, literature, politics, philosophy, mathematics. The list was endless and throughout the entire Empire, Captain J’nor was the most respected scholar of Earth history, languages and cultures.

But J’nor was Captain in name only, the title merely honorary, in deference to both J’nor’s ancestry and long years of service on the ship. The truth was Captain J’nor would for many, perhaps hundreds of years to come, remain a prisoner of the Empire, held captive on one or another of its relay stations. Gradually over the years J’nor grew weary of the Empire’s hired companions. At J’nor’s request the Empire sent no more teachers, no more companions. The crew was pared down to the bare minimum, an Engineer, a Medical Officer and a Chief Petty Officer and it was obvious to all on board that their primary purpose on the ship was to serve as jailers to the Captain.

“Uhhnnn!” J’nor turned and smashed with a grunt back first into the padded wall of the nil gravity room, then pushed off, twisting, rocketing, tumbling toward the far wall. This time the Captain struck the wall feet first and on impact collapsed gracefully to a crouch, only to explode away again in another twisting tumbling curve to the adjacent wall. The Captain spent many long hours of every waking period in hard physical activity. For years now the challenge of relentless physical training and exercise were one of the Captain’s only defenses against despair. Exhausted at last, the Captain pushed off lightly toward the door.

J’nor didn’t bother to shower or change clothes. Wiping away sweat with a towel the Captain headed for the ship’s monitor room. J’nor wanted something to look at, something to listen to, something to distract from a deep loneliness and desolation of the soul. Down the long grimy corridor as far as a half a block away the Captain could hear the music and voices, the chatter and noise from the monitor room. Turning the corner J’nor faced the blast of flashing light and continuous low murmur of the hundreds of television monitors and radios that lined the walls of the room and the rest of the equipment that along with housing and supporting the Captain were the heart and soul, the raison d’être for the entire station.

All three of the crew were there. They spent the long idle hours of their days as jailers, watching the monitors. They cut the loneliness and boredom of their brief tenure on the ship being entertained by the radio and television waves that the Captain/QoG both received and transmitted, booting the signal directly – instantly throughout the entire Galaxy.

Each had their private station in the monitor room where with headphones and television they could escape the confining isolation of the ship and for a few hours enter the world of a living planet. As usual the Medical Officer sat talking quietly at his monitor, arguing with the audience on Oprah. The Engineer, watching reruns of Star Trek II, also mumbled and laughed at his monitor, forever contemptuous of Earth’s romantic notions of life on a ship. The Chief Petty Officer listened silently and morosely to CNN.

“J’nor.” The Medical Officer and Engineer greeted the Captain, both always quietly insisting on a semblance of civility and manners. They were very well paid to be polite and civil.

The Chief Petty Officer ignored the Captain, their hatred for each other constantly simmering below the surface of their mutual silence.

Ignoring all three of them, J’nor crossed immediately to the monitor that was exclusively the Captain’s. Connected to the finest space telescope in the entire Galaxy, the Captain’s monitor was the only instrument on the ship capable of optically viewing the world beyond the ship. It was the Captain’s private toy, the Captain’s window on the world. That monitor was the Captain’s connection to life.

Checking the ship’s atomic clocks, J’nor sat down at the station. With fingers dancing over the keyboard, J’nor canceled the holding pattern on the monitor to bring up an image of the Large Magellanic Cloud. It was time for a star to die. J’nor focused the instrument on a single star, a red supergiant, an object the size of Earth’s solar system. For more than a half an hour, silently, patiently, dispassionately, J’nor watched the magnificent glowing star.

Then . . . in less than a second the star disintegrated and collapsed to become a neutron star less than 20 kilometers in diameter with a density of one million billion grams per cubic centimeter. With no means of support, the outer regions of the star followed the collapsing core. Matter crashed down onto the rigid surface of the neutron star only to instantly become very hot. Expanding violently in an outward moving shock wave that drove all before it, the matter literally bounced off the core and in the next second at one billion degrees, oxygen near the surface of the star ignited in a colossal explosion that for the next few weeks would flash forth in the dark night of space with the brightness of one hundred billion suns. The explosion first illuminated then swallowed the Eridanian ships hovering (relatively) near in hopes of capturing another QoG. But the odds were against them. J’nor sighed hopelessly. Even if the Eridanians succeeded in capturing another QoG, that would not mean freedom for the Captain.

J’nor sighed heavily again, then glanced around the room at the others. No one was paying attention. J’nor’s monitor view turned now to the nearest star. In a matter of seconds the view slid past Saturn, Mars, the Sun. The image slipped past the Moon to finally focus on planet Earth. Quickly the monitor closed in on North America.

J’nor wanted an intimate view. Closer. The Rocky Mountains filled up the monitor. Closer. The Plains of St. Augustin and the Very Large Array Radio Telescope, the VLA, Earth’s primitive technological analogue to the J’nor/QoG, came into view. The view slid east past Magdalena, down into the Rio Grande Valley, focusing finally on the tiny city of Socorro, New Mexico, right where J’nor wanted to be.

There was movement everywhere. Cars and trucks traveled the streets. People walked the sidewalks, moved in and out of buildings, stores and schools. J’nor wanted more. Closer. A jogger ran north along the ditch bank past Lopezville Road. J’nor could see the dark auburn of her hair, the blue of her sweat suit. A red truck was coming her way, a plume of dust blowing eastward marked its progress. More. J’nor wanted more. J’nor wanted to see ordinary people living normal lives. Just living. The view slipped east one block to the playground at the Saracino Middle School.

As J’nor observed the children’s silent play, an unbearable sense of loneliness and frustration welled up inside. It had been more than seventy years since J’nor set foot on the surface of a living planet. Hopelessly J’nor watched the children run and play, moving freely on the surface of their planet without giving a thought to their privilege.

At the western edge of the playground a boy took off his coat and laid it on the ground. More boys gathered around. The blond one spread his baseball cards over the coat. The boys knelt around the coat, the blond one wheeling and dealing, the cards passing inspection and disappearing into pockets, rumpled bills and grubby coins passing through small brown hands. Arm in arm, groups of girls strolled by giggling and gossiping and searing hatred for the QoG boiled up inside the Captain. At that moment J’nor hated the QoG with an explosive ferocity that was volcanic in its intensity, every atom, every cell in the Captain’s body burning white hot with loathing for the QoG. And the usual happened.

The QoG partially separated and semi-coalesced outside the body of its host. Small, no bigger than a hen’s egg, what could be seen of the QoG was transparent, almost invisible except for an occasional reflection of its surroundings on its surface. Infinitely malleable and elastic it rolled around on the console like a large vague drop of water imitating its surroundings. One moment it resembled a pen, the next a piece of paper, the next a transparent moving replica of J’nor’s hand. Angrily, foolishly J’nor ignored it.

Within less than a second though, the reception and transference of radio and television signals ceased. The images and sounds from Earth on all of the monitors but J’nor’s instantly blipped to a meaningless snowy hiss. Now J’nor had everyone’s attention. For each second that the signals from Earth were interrupted, the Empire lost the equivalent of the GPP of an entire planet, and for every second that the signals were interrupted each member of the crew lost a large portion of the fortunes they were amassing through their lonely duty on that ship so far from home. For these reasons it was strictly forbidden for J’nor to use the telescope to observe Earth.

“Turn that telescope off!” The Medical Officer and the Engineer both spoke at once.

“If you don’t turn that thing off I’m going to see to it that the ECC removes it,” the Chief Petty Officer barked.

Ignoring their threats and demands, J’nor continued to stare hungrily at the screen.

The Chief Petty Officer rose from his station and crossed to J’nor’s, two small books in his hand. He tossed the books on the workstation next to J’nor’s monitor. J’nor’s eyes widened, then narrowed. The books were J’nor’s, taken by the Chief Petty Officer from J’nor’s room. They were used paperbacks from Earth, copies of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The worn and tattered books would have been worth millions anywhere in the Empire. Anywhere in the Empire they would have sold on the black market for three or four times what the three jailers on the ship were being paid for their lonely months of duty so many light years from home.

But possession of artifacts from Earth was an offense that was punishable by death except on the Captain’s ship. In fact J’nor was the only person in the entire Empire who was allowed to possess artifacts from Earth because the simple truth was the Empire could do nothing about the fact that the objects insisted on appearing in the ship. As far as anyone knew there were only two ways the artifacts could come to be on the ship. Either through the efforts of one of the two missing QoG bondees or through J’nor finally achieving full union with the QoG. The Empire could do nothing about the activities of the missing bondees. However the Empire and its lackeys on the ship did anticipate the day when J’nor gained full union with the QoG.

The Chief Petty Officer seethed with envy toward J’nor for being a bondee and for so easily and indifferently possessing objects from Earth. “Learning to do a little traveling with the QoG are we?” he inquired, his voice simmering with hate, “because if you are, I can tell you, the Empire has plans for you. You may think you’re safe because you’re part of the Imperial family but you’re not. What difference does it make to the Empire if you’re suddenly brain dead? Your body and the QoG will continue to transmit for centuries.” He smiled slyly at J’nor.

J’nor watched the Chief Petty Officer stare at the books and the QoG rolling around on the console. J’nor knew what the Chief Petty Officer thought he wanted and if it were possible J’nor would gladly have given the QoG to him or to anyone else who thought they wanted it. J’nor smiled sourly and leaned back in the chair. “Go ahead,” J’nor prompted, “Have the books and the QoG too. Take it. Pick it up. You can have it. I don’t want it.”

The Chief Petty Officer’s face shimmered greedily. He reached toward the QoG, his trembling hand slowly closing around it. He held his breath and lifted his hand. As though his hand hadn’t touched it, the QoG remained undisturbed on the console.

Cheerlessly J’nor reached for the QoG, picking it up effortlessly. J’nor tossed the QoG playfully, slipping it between skillful fingers like a magic coin.

Though his stare was openly murderous the Chief Petty Officer controlled himself. One didn’t threaten one of the eleven most valuable things in the known universe. But jab he could. “I made some bids of my own yesterday,” he sneered.

J’nor’s hand became still, the QoG suspended above it like a pretty jewel.

“I put in the top bids so far on Velasquez’s Las Meninas, the Shiva Nataraj in New Delhi, and De Kooning’s Excavation and . . . the city of Venice,” he drawled, casually listing four of J’nor’s favorite human artifacts, noting with satisfaction the expression on J’nor’s face. The Chief Petty Officer was spying on J’nor’s finances! “And the Engineer here has put in the top bid on Mount Rushmore. He’s already got a place for it.”

J’nor shot up and whipped around to face the Engineer.

“You . . . you didn’t bid on it,” the Engineer stammered guiltily. “I like it. I’d like my family to have it when the humans are . . . done with it.”

J’nor almost staggered under feelings of rage and frustration. The Galaxy was picking the bones of the Earth before it was dead and J’nor could do nothing about it. In fact J’nor was an inseparable organic part of the situation. If J’nor hadn’t been part of the Imperial family, invited to witness that bonding so many years ago, none of this would be happening. J’nor wouldn’t have been a prisoner held in stasis, hovering above that beautiful little planet for so many years. Forced to learn of human history, forced to love and hate them, forced to care about their fate. But never allowed to participate in their lives. Everyone else in the Galaxy was merely entertained by the drama on Earth. Everyone else was content to make their millions, to place their bets on global warming, the population explosion, nuclear annihilation, pollution, the climate, the Middle East, Africa, Afghanistan, terrorism. Everyone else was content to bid on their favorite artifacts. But J’nor cared. Deeply. Passionately.

Screaming in white hot rage, “I hate this thing!” with one powerful arc of the arm J’nor hurled the QoG at the telescope monitor. It splashed against the screen and disappeared. Instantly the screen went blank.

For a moment the relay station was utterly silent. Then the Chief Petty Officer’s scream echoed down the long empty corridors. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”

Chapter Four

Monday morning at eight Jesse turned in her grades to Brown Hall, her semester and summer of research now officially begun. By two that afternoon she and Max working together finally succeeded in de-glitching her computer in her office at the NRAO. Already she sat at her terminal using the program to construct models of the galactic radio jet she was studying. “Max, this is fabulous. It’s great. It’s exactly what I needed. Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She couldn’t say enough about the new program.

Grinning at her praise and enthusiasm, Max glanced up from his terminal. “I can help you install it in your computers at home if you want,” he offered.

“Could you? I mean, would you? I would be forever grateful,” she beamed at him.

“Do you want me to do it before I leave for Christmas vacation?”

“That would be great.”

“How about tomorrow then?”

“Wonderful. But . . . would you mind working alone?” she asked, unwilling to give up even one day of her research to oversee Max’s work on her computers at home.”

He grinned. “Nah, that’s Ok, I don’t mind,” he nodded. But her eyes had already dropped back down to her terminal and he could see she was instantly lost in the problem she was working on. Max shook his head in mystification at her. There was a lot more to life than stars and numbers. At least to Max there was.

“Fine,” she mumbled, barely aware of him now, her concentration focused on her work. She was back in that place where nothing mattered but her stars. Today was her day. For a full six hours the VLA would track Cygnus A moving across the sky with the turning of the Earth on its axis. Add those six hours of observation to the previous hours of tracking last summer and last fall and she would have fourteen full hours of information to analyze. Though she had been through this before and though the tracking and information gathering was actually taking place up on the Plains of St. Augustin at the VLA, she was excited. She had to be there in her office. It made no sense, she knew that. The tracking and recording of information were automatic, taken care of by the engineers and technicians who ran the giant radio telescope. Still she had to be there. It was the fulfillment of her every wish.

“Max.”

At the sound she looked up from her work.

“You ready to go?” Luke and Brandon, two of Max’s friends, were outside in the hall. Behind them, Scot Swineburn stood, a pair of climbing shoes draped over his shoulder. Scot had been waiting all semester to go bouldering with these guys.

Out in the hall, Max talked with his friends. “Come on, Max,” they urged quietly, “this might be the last good day before it starts to snow.”

Utterly disinterested in rock climbing and impending winter storms, Jesse looked back down at her work. Then . . . for a few seconds her fingers became still. For a moment her eyes stared unseeing at her monitor. She felt strange . . . hot and sweaty, nauseated, dizzy . . . ill.

The feeling passed and her fingers resumed their rapid almost silent tapping. Then Jesse’s fingers stilled over the keys again. Overwhelmed by the sudden sensation that she was falling faster than light toward herself from somewhere far out in the black vacuum of space above the Earth, Jesse stiffened in her chair.

The young men quit talking. Silence descended on them and over the entire building. Luke was the first to notice her. “Jesus, Dr. Wren!” he cried, when like she’d been hit by a giant fist, Jesse crashed to the floor, trembling spasmodically, her eyes and mouth open in a silent scream.

Luke and Brandon leapt into the office both of them yelling at once, “Call 911!” Max jumped toward his desk and grabbed the phone. Out in the hall Scot Swineburn stood stunned, immobilized.

Caught in the throes of violent spasms, terrible things were happening to Jesse’s body. Then . . . her eyes closed, her body stopped shaking and Luke was beside her, his hand on her wrist, her neck, her breast. She was no longer breathing. Her heart no longer beat.

Screaming at the phone, Max continued to punch 911. Luke cleared Jesse’s mouth, put his lips to hers and began breathing for her. Brandon knelt on the other side of her, placed his hands in the center of her chest and began pressing hard, once every second, while all around them a strange pressure built, becoming a faint barely audible hum that smashed down from the sky toward them. The lights in the building and the consoles flickered then suddenly went out and a tiny shock wave passed through the city of Socorro, the heart of it centering on the NRAO Building, knocking out even the auxiliary power for the huge computers in the center of the building, just as one last violent shudder gripped Jesse. The lights flickered again and came back on.

“Damn,” Max cried, “the phone is out!”

Down the halls people came out of their offices and Scot ran toward the main door of the building to see about calling for an ambulance for Jesse.

The next morning, up in Albuquerque, Raymond Burke, Regional Director for the FBI, hung up his phone with a barely suppressed look of astonishment on his crumpled pockmarked face and announced, “That was the boss.”

On the other side of Burke’s desk, Special Agent McArthur Turney asked, “The boss?” In an institution like the FBI there were many bosses.

“Carl Green. Your boss and mine. He just got off the phone with Senator Swineburn. You know, head of The Senate Committee on National Security. The Senator’s son is a student at Tech. Apparently something unusual happened at the NRAO yesterday afternoon. At least the Senator says something happened. He insists in fact that something strange happened. His son was there during the incident. The boy witnessed the whole thing. He called his father with a story about a radio physicist down there who collapsed at her desk around two yesterday afternoon. They’ve got her in intensive care up here at University Hospital right now. According to the boy something came down out of the sky and the woman collapsed at her desk.”

Agent Turney asked, “What do we hear from the people at the NRAO?”

“Nothing. Not a word. According to the kid they all dismissed it as an earthquake. Small earthquakes happen all the time around here. But the kid says it wasn’t an earthquake. He says that what happened to the woman happened because of something that came out of the sky.”

Agent Turney’s small colorless eyes blinked impatiently, his heavy jaw shoved forward making his shaved pointed head look even more like a missile. “Thing? What kind of a thing? Did he see this thing that came out of the sky? How does he know the two events were related? Maybe she did collapse. Maybe there was a small earthquake.”

Raymond Burke ordered. “Listen, you’re going to go down there and you’re going to ask some questions. Got it? Finish what you’re working on. Then go. Shouldn’t take you more than a day to ask a few questions, enough to satisfy the Senator. And take Foster with you. He’s been waiting all his life for something like this.”

A few blocks away, deep inside the bowels of UNMH, the machine monitoring Jesse’s heartbeat beeped quietly. Small and silent and still, Jesse lay paralyzed. With multiple IV’s trailing from her arms and catheters and tubes invading various orifices, she looked more like a plumbing or an engineering project than a human being. As far as the doctors and the hospital staff were concerned, the difference between Jesse and a dead body was only a matter of degree. A small technicality. The two hundredths of a degree in her favor? Her heart now beat on its own. She breathed on her own.

Silhouetted against a glowing light wall, four neurologists conferred, studying her x-rays, Catscans and MRI’s. According to the images they were looking at now, her brain – now strangely opaque to their machines and their attempts to discover what was wrong with her – had the apparent coherence and consistency of instant oatmeal. The results of her EEG were spread on the counter below the glowing wall. They looked again at the straight flat line.

“ . . . definitely brain dead. She will never regain consciousness.”

“Too bad. I understand she was brilliant, a promising physicist.”

“Even if by some miracle she should partially recover from this, look at how far down her spine this goes. She will be totally paralyzed. She could live for forty, even sixty more years unable to so much as bat an eyelid.”

But despite the doctors’ vast knowledge, despite their expertise, despite the perfection of their machines and their tests, the doctors were wrong about Jesse in a very major way. Yes, she was paralyzed, unable to flutter so much as an eyelash. But she was far from unconscious. Trapped inside her still shell of a body Jesse was very conscious. In fact during the entire ordeal Jesse was never unconscious, not even for a second. She was fully conscious from the moment she fell from her chair.

Now alert and wide awake she heard the doctors’ every word. Not only did she hear them, she understood them. They were like her. They wanted to know. Jesse knew them so well she heard their unspoken thoughts. Each one of them was silently considering – if they could just get at her brain, maybe a little surgery, a discreet probe or two, a couple of biopsies. What difference does it make? She’s dead anyway. A little probing while the cells are still alive will reveal more than when the biological processes have ceased.

“Does she have any relatives?”

“No.”

“Has a guardian over the body been assigned?”

“The school where she works has signed over guardianship to the hospital. They don’t want their insurance premiums going up again because of a brain dead vegetable.”

She listened to the smooth dry sound of two hands being rubbed together.

“Let’s do it then.”

“Crack’er open.”

In less than five minutes they wheeled her, IV’s, tubes and all, down the hall to surgery. In less than twenty minutes they cut and shaved away a small patch of her hair and splashed her scalp with a swab of cold evil smelling disinfectant.

She endured the seering bite of the scalpel slicing her flesh to the bone. Then the agony of her flesh being peeled away from her bone. The drill screamed in her ears grinding through her skull. She smelled her own blood, the smoke of her scorching bone. For a moment the operating room was silent.

“Will you look at that?”

“I’ll be damned.”

“It looks perfectly normal.”

“Go ahead. Cut it. Let’s have a look.”

They sliced away a thin flat sliver of Jesse’s brain and removed it from her skull. All while she was fully conscious. Inside the prison of her paralyzed body she suffered waves of terror and rage. Inside she screamed, “No, no, no, no . . .”

Then . . . “I don’t believe it!”

“How can this be?”

“It is perfectly normal brain tissue.”

“Incredible. I say we lift off the top of the skull and do some deep tissue samples as well. With the kind of damage we’re seeing in her pictures, my guess is we hit on the only normal spot left in the brain.”

“Go for it.”

“Where are those papers we have to sign? Does anybody have a pen?”

“Nurse, tape up that hole and shave the patient’s head.”

She heard the sharp snick of tearing tape and felt a quick hard pressure. Then cold rubbery fingers grasped her firmly by the temples. The electric shaver whined in her ears. Her eyes snapped open. “No!” she screamed. “Stop! You can’t do this!”

Less than twenty-four hours later, standing in front of the floor to ceiling windows, Jesse watched the snow fall. Outside the day was white and gray, the snow coming down hard and fast in big heavy wet flakes. Beyond the hospital parking lot, traffic was nonexistent on the usually busy street.

One doctor spoke for all of them. “You realize, Dr. Wren, nothing has changed. The tests that you allowed us to take after you recovered your speech and movement show us that whatever was wrong with you is still wrong with you. Nothing has changed. It could be a massive brain tumor. It could be something else. We simply do not know. It is also our opinion that your . . . unaccountable recovery . . . is temporary and that you will without question suffer a relapse. When we cannot say. It could be within the next few seconds, it could be hours, it could be days. But a relapse will occur. Soon. We are allowing you to leave the hospital only at your insistence. Because when the next collapse happens and you are not within the reach of a facility such as ours, within minutes you will either be dead or permanently paralyzed.”

She turned from the window to regard each of them, her rage undiluted, undisguised. “I don’t hear you saying there is anything you can do to stop the paralysis or death, but I should stay and be your guinea pig, is that it? Your laboratory rat? You’re letting me go because my insurance has been canceled and for no other reason. And I’d be better off dead than a vegetable,” she stated coldly.

Jesse stepped up to the desk so aggressively that all four doctors flinched. She scooped up the enormous yellow envelope containing the results of her tests. “Did you make copies of these?” she mocked, sweeping out of the office.

Down in Socorro, Dr. Zimmer, the president of New Mexico Tech, tried to explain to Jesse how she had been dropped by the university’s insurance company and was now being billed for her treatment at two different hospitals and her transportation to both hospitals, “The business office knows more about this than I do. You would be much better off to talk with them about it. But I understand it has something to do with your collapse and the manner in which your mother died. Apparently you concealed that from the insurance company. Also the fact that you left the hospital against the recommendation of all four --.”

Jesse interrupted hotly. “Dr. Zimmer, I was fully conscious in the room with those doctors when I heard them say that less than twenty four hours from the moment of my collapse you signed over my guardianship to the hospital in order to confuse the issue and protect the school and the insurance company from responsibility. What does my mother’s death have to do with that? Or when I leave the hospital? I pay for that insurance. Every two weeks those payments are taken out of my paycheck. What’s going on here? I work for you people. You’re supposed to represent and protect me!”

She sighed unhappily, trying to get control of her emotions. Because of the snowstorm she turned down her lawyer’s offer to accompany her down to Socorro to be with her at this meeting with Dr. Zimmer, a move she now deeply regretted. She looked away from Dr. Zimmer’s bland smug face and stared out his office window. As it was, she caught the very last shuttle before service to Socorro was canceled. Even now the snow was still falling so heavily that the view beyond Dr. Zimmer’s window appeared to be all white light.

How could she have been so foolish? So stupid and arrogant, asking for a leave of absence before she had tenure? She could have taught and done her research at the same time. Now her contract for next fall was uncertain. According to Dr. Zimmer she might be offered a new contract, “Pending a clean bill of health next spring.” And because of her collapse, her NSF grant was suspended, the funds to be paid, again, “Pending a clean bill of health.”

Her well-planned life was in ruins and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it and there was no one besides her attorney she could turn to for help. Why did she spend her money paying off debts, buying a car, a telescope and all that music? Why didn’t she save her money? She had planned so carefully. She had felt so secure. How could she be working so successfully for these people one minute and be their adversary the next?

Like the true bureaucrat he was Dr. Zimmer was not above lying to escape unpleasant situations or responsibilities. “You must be mistaken, Jesse. That’s not how it happened. Perhaps you dreamt or hallucinated . . .”

“It’s Dr. Wren to you, Dr. Zimmer,” she snapped. “What about my office in Wier? I understood that I would still have use of that office during my leave. What about my office at the NRAO?”

He cleared his throat, resentful at being put in such an embarrassing position. After all, four of medicine’s finest had declared Dr. Wren clinically dead. What the hell was she doing back here so soon after she was dead? “Uuhh . . . I’m afraid your office in Weir has already been occupied by Dr. Crannick. As for the NRAO, I couldn’t say. That’s a federal facility, separate from . . .” She stood up and his voice trailed off into silence. Despite her diminutive stature Jesse could be very intimidating.

“The next time we meet, Dr. Zimmer, it’ll be in court,” she promised.

Her books, papers and things stood in boxes and piles outside the door of her office in Weir. Her key no longer worked. She spent the next half hour trudging through the snow between Weir and the parking lot, carting her possessions out to her car. Except for Jesse’s lonely little figure, the snow covered campus was deserted.

Her office space at the NRAO was still hers. A single bright note in an otherwise dark and somber score.

“Jesse, we’re delighted to see you back and working,” there were tears in Dr. Eric Johannson’s eyes as he took her hands in his. “Dear, dear girl, you gave us such a scare. It’s wonderful to see you sitting here at your desk. And don’t worry about your grant. I’m certain the hold up on the funds is only temporary. And here’re copies of those discs of mine for your project.” He laid the discs on Jesse’s desk.

One by one technicians, staff, students and scientists working at the NRAO that day, came by to say how happy they were to see her back at work and looking so well. And so many of her colleagues, temporarily shocked out of their usual fierce rivalries, dropped off copies of research and information, that at one point Jesse remarked dryly to herself, “I guess that’s one way to get cooperation. Pass out and almost die. By golly then people know you’re alive, don’t they?” But her tone was humorless and her expression lifeless.

Her computer hummed softly as the six hours of information gathered from the sky on the day of her collapse were transferred from tapes running on the big main computers to discs that she could use in her personal computers. Her printer clicked and whirred, turning out page after page of hard copy, paper versions of the same information.

Barely aware of those stopping by to wish her well, Jesse didn’t see the information as it flashed by on her screen. Any moment, any second it could happen. You could be a vegetable for up to forty, maybe sixty years . . . Like they’d been etched there by acid, the doctor’s words were burned into Jesse’s memory and it was the word paralysis . . . paralysis . . . paralysis that played endlessly over and over in her mind. With each mental repetition Jesse grew colder, more hopeless, more dead inside.

Chapter Five

Truly enormous for a mere artifact, The Ship, easily the size of the Earth’s moon, hurtled through space less than a light year from J’nor’s little # 11 Relay Station. From inside J’nor’s station signals from Earth were once again being booted to the heart of the Galaxy. The transmissions from Earth were simply too profitable for the Empire. Earth was at a crucial moment in its history. Human survival was at a turning point. The wagering on the fate of the humans and the bidding on human artifacts and Earth’s plants and animals represented wealth the Empire could not afford to lose. The 13th QoG bondee had been removed from his assignment near a planet that no longer transmitted radio waves. Now the 13th bondee would live/transmit from J’nor’s station. The 13th bondee would live wherever the Empire placed him. Without question, without objection.

Three millennium ago the Llyssans sent a ship into space in a desperate attempt to locate another habitable planet. The effort bankrupted the planet and the Llyssan civilization collapsed under the burden of their exploding population and the thousand years of war, disease and famine that followed that explosion. But the ship that the Llyssans launched floated on. Thirty years after the launching a small miscalculation sent the Llyssan ship too close to a star about to go nova. The impact of the explosion killed all but one of the astronauts and destroyed the ship’s navigation and communication systems.

The captain of the ship, S’Phan, awakened to find everyone dead and the QoG on board. Captain S’Phan jettisoned the QoG many times in those first few hours, only to suffer its instant reappearance at his side. After that he ignored the strange little object. Later he talked to it. Hours later he awoke to find it was no longer on board. Months passed before S’Phan discovered what happened to the QoG. Years passed before he discovered what he and the QoG together could do. Five hundred years passed before he returned to Llyssa bringing technology back to a smaller more mature population. There, on his home planet of Llyssa, Captain S’Phan founded a dynasty and an empire. J’nor was S’Phan’s direct descendant.

In the two and a half thousand years following Captain S’Phan’s return, the Llyssans succeeded exactly fourteen times in acquiring more QoGs. They lost the second QoG. When they tried to study it, they discovered that if it was interfered with, if it was not allowed to bond shortly after captivity, it dissipated. When the third QoG bondee died under their instruments, they discovered that once bonded, the QoG could not be studied. No matter. They had a use for it. There were fortunes to be made in broadcasting and transportation.

When the fourth bondee disappeared within months of bonding, it was decided thereafter that only idiot savants would serve as future bondees. And on the capture of the fifth QoG, the Emperor, Captain S’Phan disappeared from the Llyssan world.

Now the search for the 15th QoG would begin.

Deep inside The Ship several thousand representatives from many different planets sat in formal public witness to the pronouncement of their judgment. Though the deliberations and debate had been long and arduous, the sentence they were about to witness was so certain that throughout the Galaxy there were zero wagers placed on the event. They were the Eridanian Network, co-owners of the Captain-QoG and all of the other ten QoG-bondees. They were co-owners of all of the transmitting and transporting stations, owners of all of the Planetary Auction Houses and owners of Galaxy Lotto, the planetary gambling consortium. They represented the wealthiest most powerful groups in the galaxy.

Captain J’nor’s father had been dead for many years. J’nor’s mother, now ancient and frail, sat with the rest of the Imperial family directly behind J’nor. J’nor sat in the docket awaiting judgment. J’nor’s own cousin would read the judgment and sentence, the will of the Eridanian Network. Two years younger than J’nor and now in the late prime of his life, J’nor’s cousin was the Chairman of the Eridanian Network, Emperor of the Galaxy.

Dread wound like a serpent through J’nor. J’nor knew Galaxy law and knew that the laws were about to be broken that these infinitely wealthy powerful people might recover one of the most valuable objects in the known universe. The 15th QoG. There was only one person capable of accomplishing that feat. To send any one else was futile. But to send anyone at all to Earth was tantamount to a death sentence. Earth was a wild violent place. Survival on Earth was a difficult and chancy thing even for Earth’s rightful inhabitants. More than anyone else there, J’nor was aware of all of that. Terror at the words about to be spoken churned inside J’nor.

And hope. Between the terror and dread, hope fluttered like a moth in J’nor’s breast. Freedom, even if only for a few moments, flickered, a tiny flame of hope on J’nor’s horizon. A little blue planet danced before J’nor’s eyes, beckoning like a treasure island. A planet, solid ground beneath J’nor’s feet. People, animals, plants, mountains, rivers, oceans and deserts. People! And freedom! Glorious terrifying visions shimmered before J’nor’s eyes like a mirage of an oasis shimmering before the eyes of a desert traveler dying of thirst. J’nor’s cousin cleared his throat and the Audience Hall became silent. J’nor stood to receive sentencing.

J’nor’s cousin spoke, his deep voice booming through the Audience Hall. “After long and arduous deliberation and debate it has been decided by this Tribunal that Captain J’nor, the bondee of the 15th QoG, shall be transported to the surface of the planet Earth where all of our sensing devices indicate the 15th QoG still exists. The QoG’s bonds to the Captain remain strong and it is entirely feasible for Captain J’nor to recover the QoG. Therefore Captain J’nor, while on the surface of the planet Earth, shall conduct a search for the 15th QoG. On recovery of the QoG the Captain/QoG shall return to duties in Earth Relay Station #11 or another relay station to be designated by the Eridanian Network. In order to insure that Captain’s search for the 15th QoG is pursued diligently and with all due alacrity, Captain J’nor will be fitted with a capsule.”

J’nor stood tall, grim and dignified.

J’nor’s mother bowed her head in grief. This should never have happened to J’nor. Were it not for the accidental bonding with the QoG seventy years ago, it would be J’nor up there in the Chairman’s seat, not J’nor’s cousin. Now J’nor was being sent to the surface of a strange planet to recover the QoG. The capsule was a deadline. J’nor must find the QoG or die. That is, if Earth didn’t kill J’nor first.

Three million miles away, far, far down on planet Earth, with Sam on the bus and well on his way to school, Gabriel Hunter was out on an early morning run. Plowing through virgin drifts on the east side of the river, he followed the road up and down, around and over the hills above the Rio Grande. Midway between Socorro and San Antonio, Gabe stopped and parked on a hilltop overlooking the forest that stretched for miles along the river. He got out of the Jeep and stood knee deep in the snow, looking, listening. Except for the occasional call of a raven and the soft brrr of nearby cranes and geese, the forest below was deeply and profoundly silent.

Then the hum of an approaching vehicle reached him.

Seconds later a small black car rounded a distant bend below him and inched laboriously along the road hugging the trees. What on earth are they doing down there in the snow in that ridiculous car? It can’t be anybody, Gabe told himself when right under his disbelieving eyes the car pulled off the road and parked in the trees in exactly the spot where he usually parked.

He ripped a small pair of binoculars from his coat pocket and whipped them up to his eyes. Holding his breath he watched through the branches of the trees as the door opened and someone stood up out of the car. Just what I thought, a woman . . . following her with the binoculars Gabe watched her walk back into the trees several hundred feet from the car. She’s not wearing a uniform. But . . . she looks like she’s looking for something.

He watched the woman arrange a blanket on the snow and when she finally sat down on the blanket, only then did his heartbeat return to normal. Fascinated, still concerned, he mumbled to himself, “Ok lady, what now? The blanket is all neat and tidy. We’re all comfy. Is that a beer? By golly it’s a beer. A Dos Equis if I know my beer. And on a cold snowy day like this. Well, she certainly likes her beer. Uh oh, now we’re . . . eating something . . . what? Is it . . . pills? Now we’re drinking the beer. We shudder. Maybe we don’t like the beer. Now we’re . . . taking off our coat . . . our sweater . . . our hat . . . we’re laying down . . .”

At last Gabe realized what the woman was doing. “Jesus Christ, lady, don’t do that! Goddamn! Sonovabitch!”

What started out as a suspicious event and appeared to grow into a harmless and amusing curiosity had suddenly become a very serious matter. What could he do? If she died down there it would not be good! He knew there were times when, despite all his caution, he had been observed coming or going from the area. The place would be thoroughly searched. His footprints, his tire tracks were everywhere down there under the snow, probably very well preserved in the now frozen ground. He would be investigated. At the very least he would lose all of last summer’s work. Swearing like a madman, he leapt into the Jeep. Nobody was going to commit suicide down there if Gabe had anything to say about it!

Jesse had a strange sense of herself as she lay with her shoulder, hip and thigh resting on the cold beneath the blanket, her hands and cheek pressed into the woolly fabric, the trees around her rising up sideways out of the earth in front of her eyes.

Her eyelids drifted down and as in an out of body experience, she saw herself, an incredibly small dollop of life, no more than a drop of sentient water and a few minerals puddled there, still alive, still shimmering briefly on her tiny wrinkled postage stamp of a blanket, stuck at the bottom of a sea of air, hidden among trees and plants, all of it amounting to little more than a thin membrane of life spread over the surface of the Earth. She saw the forest around her, then the river, the desert and mountains, the oceans, then the blue and white curve of the Earth turning before the seething roiling surface of the sun. So hot. When she should be cold . . .

Jesse pried open heavy eyelids. The snow covered earth spread out away from her. Black tree trunks and scraggly winter bushes rose up out of the ground. She tried to focus her eyes. It seemed to her that there was a man suddenly standing in the snow directly in front of her, where less than a second ago there had been only the trees. Had she actually seen him materialize out of nothing? She knew her mind was playing tricks on her. Against her will, her eyelids drifted closed again and she slipped down into the warm dark . . .

Why was she still so warm? The effort it took to open her eyes was superhuman this time. It seemed to take centuries. At last snow bright daylight blasted through tiny cracks. She squinted. The tops of the man’s boots and his blue Jean clad legs now standing next to her, were all she could see. Slowly she rolled her head back to look up at him. He was very tall and very slender. He had strange colored eyes and the whitest hair Jesse had ever seen. He bent close. The sky was blinding white all around him. His hand reached out to touch her. Jesse screamed in terror or thought she screamed just before the black void of a drug induced sleep swallowed her up . . .

Gabe’s heart almost leapt out of his chest when he saw the footprints in the snow leading from a stand of salt cedar directly to where the woman lay on her blanket. But there was no one there and there were no tracks leading away and he had no time for mysteries just then. By the time he cut through the snow to her side, the woman, or girl maybe, he couldn’t really tell, was sound asleep. He knelt on the blanket beside her, slapping her cheeks and rubbing her hands and arms. But there would be no waking Jesse that day.

Clumsily he fished through her coat pockets for the plastic container of pills. Filled out less than an hour ago, it was a prescription for twenty, five milligram valiums. He poured the remaining pills into his hand and counted them. She had taken exactly four. Not nearly enough to kill her. She was counting on the cold to do that.

Without wasting a second he rolled the woman up in the blanket and lifting her from the ground, ran with her to her car. Damn! Her passenger seat was piled high with stuff. He had to lay her back down in the snow, open the door and shove her things one by one into little spaces that were left open in the back seat. Then he stuffed her into the passenger’s seat, slammed the door and ran around to the driver’s side. Ah, good girl. She left her keys in the ignition. He started up her car, backed out of the hiding place among the trees and headed down the gravel road.

He parked her car on the north side of his house where it would be hard for anyone, even his neighbors to see and carried her up the stairs into his house where he dumped her unceremoniously onto one of two mattresses on the floor of the single bedroom.

He knelt beside her and felt her neck for a pulse. There it was, a warm steady beat. Gabe heaved a great sigh of relief. Her hands were cold so he covered her with his sleeping bag. That’ll roast her. He sighed again. Man! That was close. It could have been a disaster.

He noticed the small orange colored bald patch on the top of her head. The skin there was stitched in a perfect little circle. Curiously he touched her cheek. It was warm and smooth. She had the palest skin he had ever seen. It was so white and smooth it was transparent almost, white and glowing like moonlight. She lay with her face away from him and her straight blue-black shoulder length hair spilled out behind her in a dark triangle on his pillow like a glorious shining black wing. He bent close to examine the color and saw in each hair sparkling prisms, shimmering rainbows of color and light. He touched her hair scooping it up and it slipped through his fingers like black liquid silk.

He snorted in disgust at himself. He was only half done with this mess and here he was staring like a fool at the hair of an unconscious suicidal stranger. He had a five mile hike through the snow ahead of him.

A full two hours passed before he returned with the Jeep. After a quick peek at the woman to make certain she was still alive, he went back outside to her car. Looking through the things he had earlier shoved into the back seat to make room for her, he discovered to his surprise a new Compaq laptop computer, a Sony Minicam, a violin case, and a stack of books and papers on nothing less than that most lofty and esoteric of subjects, radio astronomy. Astonished, he opened the large yellow envelope that had been on top of the pile of papers. The woman’s name was Jesse Wren. Dr. Jesse Wren. He scowled and stared in disbelief at a federal document from the National Science Foundation granting Dr. Jesse Wren funds for her research on the radio galaxy jet in Cygnus A. Beneath the grant was a copy of Jesse’s proposal and beneath that was her leave of absence agreement with Tech.

Anger swelled in Gabe’s breast. Hot unforgiving anger seethed in him at the woman lying asleep on his bed in his house. He actually growled in his anger. What he wouldn’t give to be this woman, to have her problems whatever they were. He stuffed the papers back into the envelope.

In the back on top of boxes and more books was another much larger yellow envelope. Opening it, he pulled out Jesse’s x-rays, Catscans and MRIs. He held an x-ray up to one of the windows then shoved it flat against the front windshield trying to see the image there. It was obviously an x-ray of her head and brain but even he could see that the image was opaque, lacking in information. All of the images were of her skull and all of them were strangely blank.

But Gabe did not know enough about how the images should have looked to know how astonishing their appearance actually was. He only knew that apparently there was something wrong with the woman. And it didn’t change a thing. He would have given just about anything to be in her shoes instead of his. Thoroughly disgusted he shoved the plates back into their envelope and tossed them into the back seat.

Later that afternoon when Sam, Ozone and the puppies burst through the door trailing mud and snow everywhere, Ozone and the puppies headed straight for the bedroom and Sam followed. Sam stood in the arch between their living and sleeping areas, his mouth hanging open in surprise while Ozone snuffled and licked the face of a woman lying sound asleep on his father’s mattress and the puppies tumbled and played right over the top of her without disturbing her in the least. “There’s a girl asleep on your bed, Dad,” he informed his father.

“I know that!” Gabe snapped. He rushed into the room. “Here now. Stop that! Get out.” He grabbed up a couple of puppies. “Help me, Sam.”

Together they cleared the room of dogs, placing cardboard boxes in the doorway to keep them out and Gabe returned to the kitchen to continue his preparations of the evening meal.

Sam stared at the woman for a moment longer. Gabe was not a conventional man and Sam’s life with him was unpredictable. If his father was not concerned about the woman asleep on his mattress, why should he be? After another moment of thoughtful staring and a dismissing shrug he went outside to play in the snow with his friends.

When he came in from playing he stood in the arch and stared at the woman again. The puppies had pushed aside one of the boxes to gain entrance to the room and now all five of them lay sleeping, snuggled close around the woman.

At the dinner table he asked, “Who is she? Why is she still asleep?”

“She’s an old friend. She’s been traveling on the road for three days now and she’s very tired.”

Sam was beginning to be suspicious, but he said nothing more.

At the sink washing dishes, Gabe listened. Things were very quiet out in the other rooms. No sounds of laughter and puppies playing. From the arch Gabe watched Sam pry Jesse’s eyes open and experimentally touch the bald spot on the top of her head. “You wouldn’t want somebody to do that to you while you were asleep would you?” he asked.

Startled but not particularly guilty Sam looked up at his father. “She’s got silver colored eyes with black rings around the silver part,” Sam told him. “What happened to her head?”

“I don’t know. Leave her alone,” Gabe ordered.

Together they sat on the floor in the next room watching TV. Later they put the puppies to bed in their pen outside. Later still they both lay down to sleep, Sam on his small mattress and Gabe on his, next to Jesse. They lay in the darkness for a moment, then Sam broke the silence with his question, “Is she really all right?”

“Yes, she’s fine. Go to sleep.”

Ozone slept where she usually slept, with Gabe and Jesse on the foot of Gabe’s mattress.

The next morning as the puppies raced and thumped and growled and played noisily on the wooden floor and Gabe and Sam sat at the table eating breakfast, Sam spoke his mind. “Who is she? I bet you don’t even know her. Why is she still asleep? Maybe she’s sick. Maybe we should take her to the hospital.”

“Her name is Jesse. She’s all right. She’ll probably be back on the road and on her way by the time you get home from school this afternoon.”

Even as Sam sat staring disconsolately out the school bus window at the snowy landscape passing by, Max was thrumming his fingers, sliding them over the keys of Jesse’s computer at the NRAO . . . waiting. On the other side of Jesse’s desk, Luke, Brandon and Scot sat . . . waiting.

Agents Turney and Foster leaned over Max’s shoulder to peer at the material on the screen. “Can you bring up the information that corresponds to the exact moment when she collapsed? You know, when the earthquake hit at 14:03:44 and 14:03:45? ” Turney asked.

“Sure.” Max’s fingers flew over the keys and the information flashed onto the screen. “There it is,” he announced, infinitely glad that the agents standing behind him could not see the expression on his face.

Both men leaned closer to the screen. Even the agents who had no idea what they were looking at, could not miss the extraordinary jump in the incoming radiation during the two seconds of Jesse’s collapse.

“Look there, what does that mean?” Turney pointed to the radical increase in the electromagnetic wave amplitude exactly one second before and then during the quake itself.

But Max had already recovered from the shock. “I have no idea what it means.” The incredibly aberrant information he was looking at certainly didn’t have any thing to do with an earthquake. He guessed at the possible causes for the two second jump in intensity. “It’s probably part of what Dr. Wren was looking for. Possibly a burst of radio and other radiation from the region of space around the galactic jet she was observing. But it could also be electromagnetic interference from a source on earth. Happens all the time. Or it could be a computer error. This stuff is only half cleaned up and certainly not ready for final analysis. It might not mean anything.”

Behind Max, Turney and Foster exchanged glances. “We want copies of that material. Start the process now.”

Again the agents missed the surprise and this time outrage that registered briefly in Max’s eyes. Aside from research ideas, there is nothing secret about what goes on at the NRAO. As scientists they share information freely. But if the feds hadn’t been there investigating, other than being concerned about Dr. Wren’s welfare, no one at the NRAO would have been alarmed by or interested in this event, other than as another source of information for their research. But federal agents asking for Dr. Wren’s material? That was different. To Max’s way of seeing, the agents had no reason, they had no warrants, they had no rights to Doc’s information.

He nodded and complied, his fingers tapping out the instructions for the copying process. The printer turned on, warmed up and clicked and whirred and the paper slid softly, piling up a second hard copy of Jesse’s material.

The agents walked around the desk and sat on the edge facing the other three students. “Scot, tell us what happened when Dr. Wren collapsed. Leave nothing out, not the smallest detail.”

“Well, Brandon and Luke and Max and I were all standing outside in the hall . . . and something . . . some kind of pressure or energy or something was coming down at us from . . .” people walked by and peered into the open door of Jesse’s office, their expressions serious. Agent Foster stood up and closed the door. “ . . . and then I ran down the hall to see if the phones at the front of the building were working.”

The agents turned to Luke and Brandon. “Tell us, Luke, what you think happened when Dr. Wren collapsed.

Luke sat up straight, cleared his throat and described what he could remember about Jesse’s collapse, including the fact that he thought that the near death of Dr. Jesse Wren was the only unusual event that afternoon.

“. . . and you don’t remember experiencing any pressure, any unusual sensations like Scot here?” Agent Foster asked.

“No sir, I do not.”

Brandon and Max, followed suit with their versions of the events, both of them denying experiencing anything unusual other than Jesse’s collapse.

Agents Turney and Foster swapped glances again. They turned to Luke and Brandon again. “We understand you’re both graduate students in biology and chemistry? Going on to medical school. Is that correct?”

“If we get accepted.”

“You must have formed some opinion of what happened to Dr. Wren.”

“We discussed it, yes,” Luke admitted cautiously.

“And?”

Luke cleared his throat again, “It seemed to me that when Dr. Wren collapsed she was experiencing a complex partial idiopathic seizure as she was clearly unable to respond to exogenous stimuli. I observed an alternating contraction and relaxation of her muscles due possibly to an excess discharge of diethylmonohoganide in the large cortical area in the precentral gyrus.” He turned expressionlessly to Brandon for a corroboration of his diagnosis.

“Exactly! A seizure.” Brandon responded to Luke’s challenge. “But I disagree, Luke. In my opinion, Dr. Wren experienced a generalized, certainly as you said idiopathic seizure, caused by either a metabolic disturbance or an organic lesion. I favor the idea of a metabolic disturbance, an ionic imbalance in the neurotransmitter, trigammadimethylhitridixalot, resulting in the massive sustained, tetanic, bilateral muscular contractions and flexion that caused Dr. Wren to fall from her chair.”

Luke and Brandon delivered their opinions so seriously and so respectfully that there was no way the agents could respond other than to glare at the smiling young men. This whole thing was a colossal waste of their time. So far, aside from this little joke, all of the people involved appeared to be cooperating. Everyone in the building thought it merely an odd coincidence that a small earthquake shook the building at the same time that Dr. Wren collapsed. No one but the Senator’s son thought anything extraordinary happened. The agents stood. There was not much more they could do at the moment except to interview Dr. Wren and she was not at the NRAO, nor at school, nor at home.

Agent Foster picked up the partially completed copy of Jesse’s material from her printer. He leafed through it looking for the crucial two seconds of time.

“What the hell happened here?” he demanded, his fierce little slit eyes glinting furiously. He flipped through the pages looking again for the jump in amplitudes.

They were gone. They were absolutely no longer there. He waved the papers under Max’s nose, “What happened to those two seconds of information? When we looked at it on the screen here, they were radically different from what came before and after them. On this paper here they look like all the rest. What did you do?”

Max lifted his hands from the keyboard, “I copied Dr. Wren’s material for you like you asked. Let me see.”

Foster slammed the papers down on the desk in front of Max and jabbed a stubby finger at the now very ordinary two seconds of time. Max studied the figures for a moment, then looked up with a puzzled expression and a shake of his head. “It must have been some kind of computer error, that’s all I can tell you.”

“Bring it back up!” Foster pointed at the screen.

At the touch of Max’s fingers on the mouse the information Foster wanted to see flashed on the screen. Turney and Foster leaned over Max. The two seconds were still there, but the information that went with them was no longer anything out of the ordinary.

Max remarked mildly. “See? It’s not there any more. Must have been a computer error like I told you. If you worked with these things as much as I do you’d know how common that is. Didn’t you ever get a computerized bill that wasn’t right?”

“Where does this information come from?” Foster demanded.

“You’re looking at the original right here. It’s being fed to this machine by the main computers in the building.”

The Feds fumed. The information was obviously gone from the original. Max stood up followed by Luke and Brandon. “Are we free to leave?” they asked.

“Yes!” Agent Foster barked. “But . . .”

“We know. Don’t leave the country,” Luke muttered on the way out the door.

Scot remained seated. No one seemed to be taking his version of what happened to Dr. Wren seriously. “I know what I saw, what I felt. I know something happened,” he insisted.

Foster dismissed him, “You can go now, Scot.”

Down the hall, Max, Luke and Brandon were headed toward the Student Room, “Could you believe those guys . . .”

“I know. How’d you like to have those two investigating you? Was that really the only copy of that stuff?”

“Doc picked up her copies yesterday. And there’s another copy up at the VLA. But I wasn’t about to tell them that . . .”

When Scot caught up with them, they turned in unison, Max speaking for all three, “What do you mean going on with that crap about something coming down out of the sky? Doc has enough problems without those two hounding her. This is a scientific institution, not a palm reading parlor. We talk about what’s empirically observable and measurable and we don’t call in the FBI to investigate astronomical phenomena for us!”

Scot backed away from their contempt. “But what about what I felt? What about those two seconds? You were there. You saw it.”

“We saw that Dr. Wren almost died. That’s what we saw. You want to believe anything else that’s your business. But don’t come trailing around us pretending you’re a scientist!” They turned their backs and walked away from him.

The two agents discovered Jesse’s landlords busy cleaning and painting her apartment, getting it ready for new occupancy. Jesse had given up her apartment early yesterday morning. Her landlords didn’t know where she was and she had not said where she was going. They knew about her illness and suggested that perhaps she had returned to Albuquerque to the hospital.

From the icy driveway Turney and Foster looked back across the street at the NRAO. If those two seconds had not disappeared like that and if they had been able to meet with Dr. Wren, they would be done with this investigation.

“I say we wind this whole thing up,” Turney suggested. “Not one scientist over there thought there was anything to this. That harebrained kid, Swineburn, is the only one who thinks anything weird happened.”

“And I say we interview Dr. Wren at least once,” Foster insisted.

Chapter Six

Jesse looked up into the most beautiful brown eyes she had ever seen. A deep reddish golden brown, those eyes scowled down at her. A man sat on the edge of the mattress she was laying on, staring down at her. He was a big brawny golden brown man with tanned ruddy cheeks. He fairly bristled with vigor, health and strength and that fiery brown stare was fierce enough to burn a hole right through her. It was the man from the bar!

Gabe scowled down at Jesse, deeply relieved to see her awake and conscious at last. She had silvery eyes like Sam said. They were beautiful eyes. The sparkling silver color of the irises was dramatically emphasized by a black edge, a dark outline that gave her eyes incredible depth and power. Her lashes were thick and black like her hair. Her eyebrows were straight dark slashes above those beautiful eyes. Her sharply delicate face was unusual and dramatic, and to Gabe, very appealing, which only made his scowl deeper. His scowl deepened yet again when the moment of recognition came. Without a word he rose from the bed and went into the kitchen. An error on his part, considering Jesse’s state of mind at the moment.

Stunned to find herself very much alive and in unfamiliar surroundings, Jesse lay very still for a moment looking around. A radio or TV played softly in the next room.

He stood at the kitchen counter fixing her something to eat when she hurled the entire weight of her tiny body at him. With fists and elbows flying, knees and feet kicking, she attacked him from behind, crying, “You ruined it! You had no right! Nobody asked you!” Jesse’s error.

Gabe reacted automatically. He had merely to turn fast and hard in her direction and she flew across the kitchen banging into the wall with enough force to knock her breath out. With his eyes shooting fire at her he snarled, “Listen lady, I won’t take that from anyone. Not a woman, not anybody. I lived with violent people for most of my life and when . . . it was over I swore I’d never tolerate that from anyone again and I won’t. I don’t care what your problems are. Don’t attack me again.”

Jesse leaned limply against the wall in the kitchen trying to breath. Though she had yet to cry over any of this, her tears were close to the surface. “You had no right,” she managed to choke out. “Do you think you’re the big hero? Did you think I would thank you? I’m dying, don’t you get it? I have a brain tumor. I want to die.”

He held up his big hands in a gesture of infinite indifference. “We’re all dying, lady. There isn’t a one of us gonna get out of here alive. And you can die any old time you like. I could care less. Just don’t do it on my property.”

“Your property? That was BLM land. I looked it up on the map. I made certain.”

“BLM land, yes . . . but it wouldn’t look too good for an ex-con to have a dead woman turn up right on top of his stash now would it? Mighty suspicious, wouldn’t you say?”

“Your stash?”

“My crop. I spent all summer growing it. It represents my income, get it? Some of us don’t have big shot professorships up at the college. Some of us don’t have big NSF grants to do research on important things like radio waves shooting off of black holes.” He was getting wound up now, far less indifferent to her predicament than she could ever guess. Angrily he waved his arms in the air. “Jesus Christ, lady! With all the empty land around here, you have to do this on my doorstep? Why didn’t you go on up to the mountains to do it where it’s really cold? You would have been dead in less than an hour up in Water Canyon. Why do I have to get stuck with every crazy person that comes along?”

“Highway 60 was closed or I would have. And I’m crazy? Look at you. The big genius. He’s so smart he lives in a place like this and grows dope for a living.”

“What’s wrong with this place?”

“Are you kidding? Look at it. No furniture. Look at all the trash. It’s a dump, a dirty trashy little dump like where all the trashy little dope dealers live on Real Cops. How is it a big genius like you can’t think of anything better to do than grow dope for a living?”

Now Gabe was shouting. “Who’s going to hire an ex-con? Tell me that, lady. Where’re all the jobs for me and all the guys from the pen? Who’s going to hire a mathematician from the pen?”

Jesse fought right back. “Well, you weren’t always an ex-con. What did you do? Get caught growing it? Some genius. And here you are growing and selling it again. Begging to go back to prison. And who’s talking about a job as a mathematician? Did you ever consider that the first time you sold the stuff you were forfeiting your right to your choice of jobs?”

“I tell you what, lady. At least I’m not checking out, taking the coward’s way.” Bitterly Gabe cut at her with his lie. Many times he considered suicide when despair and loneliness and his sense of failure overwhelmed him. His only reason for being alive? Sam.

Jesse knew he was lying. There was no mistaking the profound sorrow and regret in the man’s face. Her words had indeed hit their mark. Jesse didn’t want to argue with this man. She didn’t want to hurt him. She looked away from that ferocious stare, sick to death of the futility of it all. Once again she had to face the fear of paralysis and helplessness. She had to work up the courage to die all over again. She covered her face with her hands and sank to the floor, crouching against the wall in silence.

Gabe saw instantly when the fight evaporated from her and he was even more distressed with her deep unhappiness than he was with her scorn and anger.

The front door opened and Sam, Ozone and the puppies raced into the house. Sam skidded to a halt in the kitchen doorway and stood looking at Gabe and Jesse. The postures, the expressions, the tension and unhappiness there in the kitchen were all too apparent and familiar to the boy. A heavy sick feeling welled up in him.

Jesse looked up at Sam, deeply shocked. A boy! A beautiful boy with hair exactly the golden brown color of September wheat, golden gray eyes and glowing ruddy cheeks. He looked like an angel to Jesse, an apparition, so great was his shining beauty.

Gabe scowled, crossed his arms over his chest, shifted his weight to one side and introduced them. “Jesse, this is my son, Sam. Sam, this is Jesse Wren.”

She was further shocked. She had difficulty imagining this man with a family. In her shock she was even more rude. “Your son? I didn’t know you had a child. Where is his mother?”

Gabe’s answer fell into the room like a boulder. “She died in a car accident.”

Ozone and her puppies thumped around on the floor playing, fighting and growling. Jesse crouched close to the floor made a perfect target for their antics. They crowded around her, Ozone licking her face, the puppies jumping on her, chewing on her clothes and hands. She pushed them away and slowly stood up. The tension in the little house grew heavier and thicker with every soft tick of the clock on the kitchen wall.

The phone on the kitchen wall rang. Jesse flinched and Sam jumped to answer it, but Gabe beat him to it. Gabe talked only a moment his eyes never leaving his son’s face. Sam turned guiltily away from his father’s hard stare. Gabe hung up the phone and sighed unhappily. He would have to deal with Sam later.

He looked at Jesse huddled against his kitchen wall. Clearly, she was in no condition to make any decisions. He pointed to a little room off the back of the kitchen. “The shower’s in there. You’re welcome to it, Jesse. You must feel like cleaning up after traveling so long and such a long sleep. Come on, I’ll get you a clean towel. Stew’s been cooking all afternoon. Why don’t you stay for dinner before you take off?”

Wordlessly she followed him to the shower.

A surreal, almost unbearably heavy silence hung over the three of them as they sat around the kitchen table. Sam stared openly at Jesse throughout the entire meal. Gabe stared too, though less openly, while Jesse gazed down at her bowl, not looking up until the other two were long finished with their food.

Then like a person slowly coming to consciousness she began to take a vague interest in her surroundings. She picked at her food and watched Gabe clear the dishes from the table. She studied his broad back as he stood at the sink. She studied his downcast eyes, his big arms and hands as he leaned over the table, dishcloth and pan in hand, helping Sam with his homework, answering his questions or looking at a problem.

She looked down at her bowl. It was empty. How long had she been sitting there? She could have been there one hour or twenty-four, she had no idea, her sense of time was so skewed. What on earth was she doing there sitting at that table in that strange house staring at that strange man and his child like some kind of a fool?

With a supreme effort she lifted her hands, placed them on the table beside her plate and stood up.

Gabe and Sam looked up at her, but neither spoke.

Slowly, hesitantly, she stepped away from the table and into the next room. Her hat, coat, sweater and gloves lay across the top of the single rickety armchair and a small television sat on a kitchen chair, the only two pieces of furniture in the room. A kerosene stove off to one side of the room heated the house. Jesse’s eyes widened. Her new Compaq laptop computer lay on the floor propped against the wall next to the door.

She whirled back to face Gabe accusingly. “Did you touch that? Turn it on?” she demanded, pointing angrily at the computer.

“Yes,” he answered mildly, “I was curious about it. I did turn it on, but . . .”

“You might have messed it all up, deleted something important,” she snapped.

The familiar dark scowl returned full force “What do you care?” he growled.

She snatched up the laptop and hurried into the bedroom. Besides the two mattresses on the floor, a four foot dresser was the only other furniture in the room. She shoved aside several books and tablets and set the computer on top of the dresser. She opened the laptop and stared at it . . . He’s right. What do I care? What difference does it make?

The phone rang again. Gabe answered it. She listened to him agree to meet someone in town later that evening. Then he was calling, asking someone named Ramona to come over and stay at the house while he was gone. Then he was talking quietly to Sam again.

Instead of turning on the computer she pulled the tablets closer to examine them. There was writing on every page. They were Gabe’s notes, problems he was working on. She looked at the titles of the paperbacks next to the tablets. The book on top was Prigogine’s Order Out of Chaos. Under that were McFadden’s Quantum Evolution and Hoffman’s The Same and Not The Same. Under those two was Hewitt and Stromberg’s Real and Abstract Analysis. And finally, on the bottom was Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind.

Gabe’s voice though still quiet carried a new edge and intensity. Sam’s voice became even softer. Jesse listened. The earlier call had been from Sam’s school. Sam had cut class that afternoon.

She lifted the edges of the books and the pages fluttered down. He’d read them all. The folded corners, the underlinings and marginal notes testified to that. She looked more carefully at the tablets. Jesse’s jaw fell slack at what she saw. He was working on dynamic systems. The notes that she was looking at that moment were an attempt to apply the current understanding of quantum mechanics to biological systems. He was playing with the notion of constructing an open downward acting Hamiltonian that would describe and account for the ever increasing complexity in evolutionary biological systems! Jesse stared at his work in complete astonishment. She could hardly believe her eyes.

The conversation in the kitchen was deteriorating into an ugly confrontation. “You will go to school and you will attend class!” Gabe at last ordered loudly.

Sam screamed back at his father, “I don’t have to go to school. What good did it do you? I hate this place. I hate you. Look at the way we live. I don’t have a mother. I don’t have anything. Foster homes were good enough for me while you were in prison. What about that? Who cared if I hated those places then? Nobody! I want to go to a foster home. I want to!”

Jesse winced at the crack of a hand connecting with a face.

Sam ran into the bedroom and threw himself on his mattress, facing the wall with his back to her and the rest of the room. For a moment Gabe stood in the doorway looking at Sam, then he turned and sat down in defeat in the armchair in the next room.

She closed the tablet she’d been looking at and thought. What did she care? She had nothing to lose or gain from these people. She sneered quietly at Sam, “Boy, you really are a spoiled snot.”

Still facing the wall Sam asked in a muffled voice, “What do you know about it?”

“I know what I see,” she told him.

“What do you see?”

“So this place isn’t a mansion. Big deal. What do I see that belongs to your dad? One bicycle and some books. But I see your things everywhere. Three bicycles, a skateboard, rollerblades. Superheroes, GI Joe and X-Men. I see games and books and toys everywhere.”

She pulled open the dresser drawers to reveal a child’s clean clothes neatly folded in each drawer. “I see clean clothes here. Lots of them. There was a good hot meal on the table tonight and someone willing to take the time to help you with your homework. I see a dog and five puppies. I heard your friends outside. There’re lots of children in this world who would give anything to have what you have. You have food. You’re warm. You’re clean. You have toys and books and pets and friends and a parent who loves you and takes good care of you. So what do you want?”

“Oh yeah?” Sam wailed still facing the wall. “You don’t know anything about my life. I don’t want it! Any of it! I wish I was dead!”

Despite the irony of the situation, rage boiled up in her at the boy’s excessive self-pity. She had heard that last statement about one hundred thousand times too often in her life. And her plans had not intentionally involved others. A fine self-righteous rage seethed in her at the boy’s selfishness. “Why you rotten little blackmailer. Everything has to be the way you want it, is that it? Everything has to be easy and instant. If you don’t get your way you’re going to die, is that it? You’re going to blackmail people into making things be the way you want them to be. Well, that’s not the way life is. And you’re wrong about me. I know exactly how tough life can be.”

At last he whirled around to face her from his bed. “You don’t know jack about my life, so why don’t you shut up and get out of here?”

“Right! With your attitude you’re not even worth talking to anyway, so I’m on my way.” She turned back to her laptop, mumbling, “I just want to check this stuff first . . .” and touched the computer. It beeped and whirred quietly.

“What about . . . what about . . . what my dad does . . . you know . . .” he asked, his voice full of despair.

“No, I don’t know,” she denied stubbornly. “I’m talking about things that you control. Your attitude. What you do with your life. Not his.”

He turned angrily away from her again.

She left the room in search of her coat and hat and gloves. She jerked the garments from behind Gabe and hissed at him, “You make yourself powerless with him by the way you make your living!” His eyes lit up with the fire of fight but she whisked past him back into the bedroom.

Standing in front of her computer she accessed her files. They were all there. Nothing appeared to be lost.

Sam turned again to watch her curiously. He asked, “What are you doing?”

“Checking to see that all my material is all here. That your dad didn’t accidentally delete any of it.” The model she was currently working on flashed on the screen. She paused to stare at it sadly.

He asked, “What’s that picture you’re looking at?”

“It’s a model of a jet I’m working on.”

“It doesn’t look like an airplane.”

“It’s an astrophysical jet, a galactic jet.”

“What’s that?”

“Part of a galaxy like the Milky Way, a family of about 200 billion stars. Jets are one of the things I’m interested in. Here’s the galaxy, this little dot here and the jets are these big clouds of matter on either side of the galaxy.”

He sat up and asked, “You study the stars? Why do you study stars?”

“Because they interest me.”

“But why?” It seemed to Sam that studying the stars made about as much practical sense as his father’s interest in numbers. Where was the money in that?

“They just do. I find everything about them fascinating.” She looked at him fiercely. “I want to know about them.”

He clung to the notion that studying the stars was as unpromising a career as mathematics. “But why? Why would anybody want to do that?”

“You mean what got me started? Books. Arthur C. Clark. 2001. Childhood’s End. I was looking for space people. I wanted to design Ring World. I wanted to fly with Captain Kirk. I wanted to be Spock.”

At last he saw the practical side. “You’re a Trekky! You want to be on TV.” Aching for a fight he got up and stood beside her.

“No, I want to study the stars. Those stories are Ok, Sam, but they don’t compare to the story the stars are telling us. Here’s the way I look at it. We have sixty, maybe seventy years to live . . . most of us. And . . . I wanted . . . want to know things.” Fixing him with a stare as ferocious as his father’s, she sat down on the floor with her computer. Her fingers flew across the keys and suddenly on her screen came image after image of exquisitely beautiful celestial objects. “Look, Sam. Look at how beautiful they are.”

Kneeling beside her, he stared at the shining images of stars and galaxies. He might be willing to concede their beauty but he still had questions. “But what do the stars have to do with anything? Why would anybody pay you to do that?”

“They pay me to teach physics and I get to study the stars. And you’re wrong, stars have to do with everything. We come from the stars.”

“We do not! We’re from here on Earth. I was born here and so were you.”

“Yeah, we’re from here, but here came from the stars. We are the star people. We are stardust.”

“No way!”

“Ok, have it your way.” She reached to turn off the computer.

He was interested in spite of himself. “How can we be stardust?”

“Simple . . . well, not so simple, but here it is. About thirteen billion years ago, before 10-43 seconds after the Big Bang, all of the stuff in the universe, all of the matter and energy that forms the galaxies, the stars, the planets and you and me was compressed into an object that was 10-33 cm in diameter, or 10 million billion billion times smaller than a hydrogen atom. I know, Sam, I know! It simply staggers the imagination. Then. In a huge expansion, the rest of the moment we call the Big Bang, space and time and matter and energy were born, including all the elementary particles that make up the atoms in your body. But you are not just elementary particles. Where did the complex molecules that form you and that form life come from? All of the higher elements and many of the molecules, organic chains of thirteen or more atoms long that are the building blocks of life were made inside stars that formed when the universe was very young. Stars that formed out of the expanding, cooling matter created in the Big Bang. In fact ours is a second or third generation star. Our sun, the planets and even we are made of atoms and molecules formed in the engines of earlier stars. So you are eleven earth years old and you are also a thirteen billion year old creature made out of stardust.”

He fixed her with a disbelieving contemptuous look. “You know all this from studying the stars? How? How do the stars tell us all this?”

She returned an equally contemptuous look. “It would take me five or six years to explain to you how we know all of this to you, not to mention the 10,000 years it has taken us to accumulate this knowledge, or the years of dedicated study it would take you to understand it. Ask something specific. Maybe I can answer and maybe you will understand a little of the answer.”

“What’s that jet you’re studying?”

“It’s a stream of gas coming out of the center of a galaxy.” She split the screen on her computer bringing up another image along side the radio image of the galaxy she was studying. “Here’s an optical image of Cygnus A, what you would see if you looked at it through a very powerful telescope. And here next to it, what we were looking at in the first place is a radio image, a computer synthesized image of the same galaxy in radio frequencies.”

She touched the mouse pad and the division of her screen dissolved, the two separate images flowing together to show the radio lobes jetting out from the galactic core along the galaxy’s axis of rotation. She explained, “Here is what Cygnus A would look like if we could see both the optical and the radio contours. I study the processes that result in these huge lobes of matter spurting out into space from the center of this galaxy.”

“What? What causes them?”

“We think a black hole, a region in space where there is so much mass in a relatively very small area and therefore so much gravity that even light can’t escape. In fact there is so much gravity that nearby stars are pulled down into the black hole and ripped apart, some of their matter spraying out of the galaxy in a gigantic event that emits radio waves.”

She moved to turn off her computer and he stopped her again. “But what causes a black hole?”

“The death of a giant star, one that is eight times more massive than our sun. A star is a spinning ball of gas, Sam, mostly hydrogen that is collapsing inward due to the gravitational attraction of its mass. The closer together all the gas particles get the more active they become and the hotter they get until the particles get hot enough to start a process called fusion where elementary particles join together to form new more complex particles. This burning, this fusion creates enough energy, enough outward pressure to prevent the collapse of the star. The star spends most of its life, billions of years burning. Fusing hydrogen into helium, then helium into carbon, then the carbon fuses into iron, then the iron fuses into cobalt, then the cobalt into nickel. At this point the star is no longer able to burn, fusion is no longer possible and there is no longer any process to resist the gravity of so much matter. Some smaller stars simply contract, cool off and become brown dwarfs. Rocks out in space. Some collapse inward and then explode outward again in super novas. But when the biggest stars collapse inward nothing can escape including light.”

“How can this be?” At this point Sam scowled looking very much like his father. “I don’t understand how it can be that light can’t escape.”

“Everything I’ve been telling you, Sam, is determined by laws that nature follows. Laws that describe relationships between things, how they hold together or fly apart, how hot or cold they are and on and on. And every one of these relationships can be precisely described by numbers. Mathematics. Imagine all the matter in the sun being compressed into a smaller and smaller volume. An object on its surface would move closer to its center. Newton’s law of gravitation says the nearer to the center, the bigger the gravitational pull. If the sun were reduced one hundred thousand fold to the size of a neutron star its surface gravity would increase ten billion times. A hundred and fifty pound person would now weigh fifty trillion pounds. To leave the sun this person would need an escape velocity of about 125,000 miles per second, about six per cent the speed of light. Now if a neutron star were to collapse to a diameter of three miles, which is what happens when a giant star dies, escape velocity, the speed a body would need to leave the surface, would reach the speed of light. Et Voila! You have a black hole, not even light can escape this object.”

Still the notion of light being unable to escape made no sense to Sam. “If nothing can escape, not even light, how do we know a black hole is there? If there is no light, we can’t see it.”

Jesse smiled for the first time that night. “Very good, Sam. We know it’s there by its affects. When we find a star that appears to be orbiting an object but there is nothing there. It must be orbiting a black hole. And the radio jets I’m studying are evidence of a black hole.”

But even after this, Sam was perplexed and angry. “You say all this stuff and I still don’t see how we know it!”

“I wasn’t telling you how we know it. It takes years of study to know how we know it. It’s not simple stuff. It’s complex. It’s mathematical. Just about everything you’d want to know about the stars aside from appreciating their beauty is mathematical.” She started to leave again.

He growled, “Everything you say just makes more questions!”

“Exactly! You see? Oh Sam, life would be so boring if it were simple. If we knew everything there was to know it would be boring, boring, boring. Instead it’s a wonderful complex unending mystery, a grand great party of investigating, discovering and learning. And we’re invited! We’re the guests of honor, Sam! At a banquet of knowing, a feast of understanding. Einstein said, the only thing incomprehensible about this world is the fact that it is comprehensible. And we’re the ones who get to comprehend! It is such a joy to know, to understand, Sam, to be part of discovering something.”

Her fingers flew over the keys and images of the great galaxies came up on her computer screen one dissolving into the other before Sam’s dazzled eyes. “Look, Sam. See how utterly and completely beautiful and awesome they are. They gave birth to us. Can you believe it? Don’t be sad. Don’t let your heart be filled with grief and anger. Life is so short. And the stars are calling to us. They say, look! See. Understand. Life is too short for anything but learning, Sam. You know what my dad always used to say to me when I was feeling sorry for myself? He’d ask me, are you going to remember this a hundred years from now? And I would insist, yes! until one day, I got it. Don’t waste your time being sad. Learn. Learn for the joy of it.”

For the first time that night Sam smiled looking suddenly shy and a little embarrassed. He was more than a little moved by Jesse’s passion and more than anything else he didn’t want her to leave. He pointed to her computer. “That thing is really neat. You use it a lot in your work I bet.”

“We wouldn’t know half of what we know without computers, Sam, they have expanded our world in so many ways. It’s like, I don’t know how to put it any other way, when you use a computer your brain is suddenly bigger, faster, stronger, smarter. They are wonderful things!”

In the next room, Gabe sat. Eavesdropping. Angry and astonished. After all he and Jesse said to each other earlier he was astonished to hear Jesse defend him. And he was deeply moved by her words. Even more than Sam he was moved by the things she said. Because of what he knew about her. How could this passionate intelligent woman want to die? Once again Gabe was very angry at Jesse. He rose and from the arch stared at the two of them sitting on the floor, their heads bent together like two lifelong friends.

Smiling down into the light shed by the computer Sam asked, “How does this thing work?”

She explained, “Computers are devices for translating one set of information into another.” At the boy’s blank look she explained further, “Computers are symbol manipulators, Sam. They can imitate any process that can be described accurately. A symbol is merely an abstraction, something that represents an elementary fact about the world. Like a word.”

“A word?”

“Yes, words are abstractions, representations. They aren’t the thing are they? If I say the word moon or you see the word moon written somewhere, the word moon is not the same as the object the moon, is it? The same goes for numbers. Numbers are abstractions. What does three mean all by itself? Three what? So you have symbols that represent facts about the world. Then you have specific rules to represent relationships between the facts. Computers follow the rules to figure out how facts affect each other and what happens when facts change.”

“But I still don’t understand how it works,” he complained.

“Oh you mean what’s actually happening in the machine. A computer is merely a bunch of electronic switches in a row or series of rows that are either on or off. There is either a pulse of electricity down a wire or there is not. The whole process is similar to the way your brain works. The presence or absence of a pulse is like a signal to either go on to the next step or do not go on to the next step. Here, let’s you and I design a small computer. Get me that pencil, Sam.” Jesse reached for one the many pieces of paper that lay scattered on the floor and Sam retrieved the pencil from beside his mattress.

“All computers operate the same way, Sam, switches on or switches off, no matter how hard the problem or task. We’ll design a series of switches that do something you know how to do, but that isn’t necessarily simple. You know how to divide one number into another. How would it look for a computer? What are we doing when we divide the number 25 by the number three?”

“Subtraction. Division is subtraction, lots of subtractions.”

“So we’ll start out with the two numbers, which could be any two numbers really, and ask a series of questions and each step in the process will represent an electrical switch that either goes on to another step, or repeats a step, or stops the process with an answer.” They leaned over the paper as she drew a flow chart demonstrating the arrangement of switches for any simple division problem.

Gabe listened and watched, anger, astonishment and resentment all vying for ascendancy in him. Jesse was teaching Sam physics! And math. And computer science. He stepped into the room and stretched out on the floor beside them.

When she finished the flow chart Sam asked, “That’s how our brains work?”

She nodded. “Nerves and messages together are essentially electro-chemical switches that are either on or off.”

He asked, “Then do you think there will ever be machines that can think like us, like 3 Sepio and R2 D2?”

She answered, “Sure, someday.”

Gabe could not let her get away with that one. “Is that so? And when will that be, Ms. Minsky, or is it Seymour Papert we’re talking to? Or maybe it’s one of the Churchlands.”

Jesse looked up surprised by Gabe’s attack. And for a moment then it seemed to her as she looked at Gabe stretched out on the floor next to them, his elbow crooked and his head resting on his hand, that he glowed, that he actually gave off a light around him. She resisted the urge to shudder and slowly closed her mouth.

He continued the offensive. “So you think the human mind is nothing more than a machine for translating one set of images and symbols into another? You think that mental activity is simply the carrying out of some well defined sequence of operations like an algorithm? You AI people are so arrogant your arrogance makes you stupid.”

“I’m arrogant? I’m stupid?” she choked, nearly speechless with indignation.

“Yes, arrogant. You fool around with fancy electronic calculators for forty years and think that’s equivalent to thirteen billion years of evolution.”

That sounded like familiar territory. Sam had to ask. “Thirteen billion years?”

“Yeah, Sam, thirteen billion years. You heard the lady. She already told you. That’s how long it’s taken our universe to come up with thinking, conscious, deliberately reflective organisms. Human beings. At least here on Earth. The processes that comprise your life and your consciousness are a result of thirteen billion years of evolution and miss radio physicist here thinks we can accomplish the same in forty years with some on off switches. She thinks the human brain is merely a machine for translating one set of symbols into another by following a sequence of steps or rules and nothing more.”

“A biological machine, yes!”

“The terms are contradictory.”

“No, they aren’t. The brain is an organ for receiving and interpreting signals from our environment and for carrying out actions or thought. Nerve signals are electro-chemical and entirely an all or nothing phenomena. The strength of the signal does not vary. It is either on or off exactly like a logic gate in a computer. So in my humble opinion and in the opinions of many of those who design computers if you had a complete enough description of the ways in which neurons either send a signal or do not send a signal you could replicate that operation with a computer. And I think we will someday have a complete description of the ways in which the neurons in our brains fire.”

He snorted derisively. “That’s not the only way our minds operate. People don’t stop to break down what they’re going to do into rules or steps to follow before they act. Understanding is knowing how to find your way in the world, not knowing facts and the rules for relating them. Perception and understanding are not based on our ability to pick up rules, but on flexible styles of behavior. We know what a pencil or a dog is because they fit into a whole set of experiences we grow up with. Computers have no bodies, no childhood, no cultural practices. They are disembodied, fully formed, nonsocial, purely analytic machines. They can never do anything more than they are programmed to do. They cannot learn from experience. They cannot acquire anything as apparently simple as common sense or a natural language. They can’t make value judgments based on experience. They have no intuition or insight. Even the most rigidly logical process known to man, mathematics, relies on intuition and insight for big breakthroughs, for the big jumps in understanding. Computers can never operate on the level of a human expert instantly and effortlessly relying on an accumulation of thousands of experiences as a guide. Tell me, Sam, each time you ride your bike, do you break it down into steps you have to follow to do it right?”

“No way.”

“Well, that’s what a computer would have to do every time it rode a bike, or drove a car, or walked down a road. Nothing computers do is contextual. Everything humans do is contextual. In fact when you do that, ride your bike, recognize human faces or voices or even when it is deciding what to do on the basis of past experience, your brain is acting much more like a hologram matching patterns than it is acting like a logic machine, a computer.”

Jesse sneered, “Big deal, you read Hofstader too. Distributed associative memory systems with the required holistic properties can be built using amplifiers or resistors or they can be simulated on digital computers.”

“Yes, but in the simplest test, recognizing a human face, the so-called holistic computer succeeded in recognizing a face only if the face was the same size and in the same orientation to vertical as the reference faces. But a human baby only a few months old can recognize familiar faces at any size, any distance, upside down, sideways, any old way. The human brain, mind, whatever is more than switches that are either on or off, it is more than patterns matching up.”

“What kind of more are you talking about?” she demanded. “You sound like Penrose! Wade through The Emperor’s New Mind and what do you come to? Consciousness is associated with necessary truths. Penrose even admits it. Consciousness represents contact between the external world (by that I suppose he means our world) and something timeless. Oooweeooo. It’s out there somewhere, I just know it is. What is this timeless thing? It’s Penrose’s Correct Quantum Gravity. Now this CQG is going to explain the Weyl Curvature Hypothesis constraining it so that Weyl = 0, so that, ta da! particles can emerge from singularities. CQG is going to explain how an elementary particle, an object that does not possess a complete set of physical attributes, sometimes it’s a wave, sometimes it’s a particle, it’s going to explain how this nebulous object, an object so ephemeral we can’t even look at it without changing it, is matter. What everything is made of! And! It’s going to explain the holistic nature of consciousness. And! It’s going to explain the non-locality of quantum mechanics and thus the entire universe. A clean sweep!”

Gabe stared intently at her. “Jesse, you just explained abstraction to Sam. Not taking the word for the thing. But you’re guilty of the same error. Only you’re elevating not just single words but whole theories to the level of fundamental reality. What’s so difficult about a quantum object being both a wave and a particle? Wave-like and particle-like aspects are never displayed in a contradictory way in the same experiment. Besides both wave and particle aspects are merely descriptions of what we know about a system or an object, which may be, despite our great pride in our accomplishments, very little. A theory is not the object or process itself. It is something we have created as a way to talk about it. So what’s the matter, Jesse? A little uncertainty terrifies you? Electrons and photons have to be objectively real? If you can’t predict what’s going to happen down to the last . . .”

Her eyes flashed. “I’m taking theories for reality! I am! You’re the mathematician! Now you sound like Prigogine where irreversible phenomena are primary and reversible processes are secondary. According to you, elementary particles are not elementary at all. They’re abstract constructions based on irreversible observations or measurements. You believe in downward causation!”

He smiled. “I don’t believe in anything. I find things . . . existence interesting. That’s my primary attitude, my primary motivation in life. A little while ago when you were talking to Sam I would have sworn it was yours too. And for me quantum mechanics is important precisely because it introduces probability and uncertainty into microphysics so that our understanding of the world moves away from deterministic reversible processes to stochastic irreversible processes. Quantum mechanics is in the middle where probability appears but not irreversibility. So yes, I do agree with Penrose. Eventually we will discover a fundamental irreversibility on the quantum level . . .”

“Oh!” She was utterly indignant. “And is this fundamental irreversibility going to explain the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen experiment too? Is it going to explain Alan Aspect’s experiments where effects seem to be instantaneous, faster than light?”

“It might. I don’t have a problem with any of this. I see no conflict with reality when two particles though apparently separated by space remain part of a unitary quantum system. It seems paradoxical, but I just love a good paradox, don’t you? And yes I am deeply interested in Prigogine’s work. In how order in the universe emerges from nonequilibrium, from random chaotic states and irreversible fluctuations in those states. Time equals information. That seems to me to be what’s happening. That there is something we have yet to quantify that makes the universe a single entity that is . . . in conversation with itself. Gravity pulls things together but the universe does not collapse. Thermodynamics spreads things apart but galaxies and stars continue to form and evolve along with life here on earth. Something as small as a flap of a butterfly’s wings can determine global outcomes. Randomness, like tossing a coin, is essential on all levels and this random evolution of change through time is expressed almost always in our world as a higher degree of complexity, not a lower degree as the second law of thermodynamics would predict. This may be the biggest paradox of all, that nonequilibrium is a source of order. At equilibrium molecules behave as independent entities. They ignore one another. Nonequilibrium wakes them up and introduces a coherence quite foreign to equilibrium. Maybe Bohm is right when he talks about an implied order ‘folded up’ in nature gradually unfolding as the universe evolves, enabling organization, again I am most comfortable with my own analogy, information, to emerge. But whatever it is, it is nonlocal. What happens at a point in space depends intimately on the wider environment and in principal on the universe as a whole.”

Jesse seethed. “So which of us is holding abstraction up as ultimately real? You or me? An implied order? Folded up in nature? A conversation? I’m surprised you’re not blathering on about yin and yang or the Tao of physics! I was right! No matter what you call it, a conversation, whatever, it comes back to the same thing. You mathematicians are all alike. You couldn’t get any more teleological. One more degree in that direction and you’ll have us all being nothing more than ideas in the mind of God.”

Gabe remained calm. “Or vice versa. Or . . . paradoxically . . . both. You physicists are all alike. You have to have an objective definitive answer for everything. Here’s my real theory. No matter how many answers we find including the possible discovery of Correct Quantum Gravity each new answer is only going to open onto another mystery. We’re never going to know it all and that’s fine with me. I like the search. When you were talking to Sam I would have sworn you felt the same way. The search is the point of life. Which puts consciousness dead center. Like you said, we’re the guest of honor. And that takes us right back to quantum mechanics where consciousness is inseparable from what we know about elementary objects. Quantum mechanics is a subjective science and that’s not the contradiction you scientists think it is, nor is it a personal insult to you, Jesse. The ambiguity of it all terrifies you, doesn’t it? You prefer Newton’s determinism to Heisenberg’s uncertainty. You’re only three centuries behind the time. You’re a materialist, Jesse, a mechanist and a determinist. No wonder you’re so full of despair. It’s a cowardly position that denies the existence of free will and time and the importance of the individual in shaping the world and their own destiny. You’re scared to death of the flow of life, of the mystery of reality, so scared of the unknown that you have to take matters into your own hands. You have to be in control, you have to have all the definitive final answers when the only definitive final answer we’re ever going to get is the same one we’ve been getting for millennium. Is that why you’re so determined to end it all? You’re a total repudiation of the mystery and wonder of life.”

“A determinist!” she shook with the rage he inspired in her. “You’re a fine one to talk. Mr. Chaos! What is this, the sixties? Far fucking out, man. The mysterious flow of life has brought you to such a good place. And who’s cowardly? Who’s the determinist? I had a good job. I never accepted it when people told me I couldn’t be a radio astronomer because I’m a woman. I went out and did it. Who has accepted everyone else’s definition of him as a criminal and a failure? Who has accepted defeat and given up on legal employment because he can’t have exactly the job that he thinks suits his great genius?”

His scowl returned full force. He sat up. “So who asked you? What the hell do you mean coming in here setting up this computer? Did anybody ask you to do that? Do you think that’s good for Sam when there is no way I can afford to do it for him?”

“You brought the computer in here. I didn’t,” she stammered. “I . . . I was trying to answer . . . I thought . . .”

“No, you didn’t think!”

It was at that point in their argument that Jesse’s rage expanded to just about the known boundaries of the entire universe. Suddenly she was simply enraged. Enraged at still being alive. Enraged at Gabe for snatching her from the jaws of death. Enraged at this man and this child for making her forget for a moment the fate that waited for her. Enraged at Sam for enticing her into teaching him. Enraged at Gabe for drawing her into this . . . this ridiculous conversation. Enraged that she felt so alive . . . when . . . when all she wanted to do was . . . die. She punched the computer off and snapped it shut. She stood up, grabbed up her coat and hat from the floor and picked up her computer. “Where am I?” At his blank look she exploded, “Where is this place? Where is Socorro?”

“You’re on the road past San Antonio about two miles toward the Bosque. Take a left at the corner less than a block from here, the road to Socorro is a quarter of a mile away. Turn left again.”

“Don’t bother to get up and see me out. I don’t think I could take anything so unpredictable!” She slammed the door as she left.

Gabe and Sam looked at each other. Sam had never witnessed anything like this before. The fights between his mother and father invariably involved his mother’s drinking. They were ugly, sometimes violent and always irrational events. Sam wanted to know, “What was that?”

Gabe stared thoughtfully at his son. “That was an argument.”

“What’s a determinist?”

“A person who thinks that the laws of mechanics that Newton discovered three hundred years ago are still the way we should look at the world today. They are laws about the behavior of matter and energy that say that if you can describe the initial conditions of a situation, how a system starts out, then you can describe everything that will ever again happen in that system. So if there was a God who created the world using those laws, then the initial conditions for everything were set down according to those laws at the time of creation. Therefore everything that has happened since then and ever will happen was predetermined, decided in advance, including you and me and everything we do.”

“So? You don’t even believe in God. Those are just words. A lot of big words. They don’t mean anything. Why did she leave? Nobody was throwing anything. Nobody was hardly even yelling. Why was she so mad?”

“I don’t not believe in God either. And words are important, Sam. Words are ideas. Ideas are part of what make you who you are. Tell me this, who decides what you do?”

“I do. Well, you do some of time. But I do some of the time too.”

“Ok. I want you to tell me why you really cut school. I want an honest answer, so if it involves me, that’s Ok, but I want you to really think. When you come up with the answer maybe we’ll know for certain if you decided and are responsible for that decision, or if it was somehow decided ahead of time even before you were born, like at the beginning of time, that you should do it.”

“That is so stupid and bogus . . .”

“No, don’t say that. This is important. Think about it . . .”

He stopped speaking to listen to the faint sound of music coming from outside the house. Dumbfounded the boy and man looked at each other. They rose from the floor and opened the front door to let in the cold still air and the sweet sound of Jesse’s violin. From the top step they peered through the darkness.

She had walked through the snow out among the greasewood away from the house so that she stood under the pale light of the stars. They could barely see her small figure out there in the blackness, the wind blowing the edges of her coat, a tiny light glinting off her moving violin, her white hands and faintly glimmering hair.

The sensuous sinewy sounds of Steve Roach’s Grotto of Time Lost floated like smoke from the slow slide of Jesse’s bow across the strings. The music twisted and curled up into the darkness away from her, expressing all the longing and pain she could not speak. The violin was Jesse’s voice and the words it sang were infinitely sad and lonely. All around the small rural neighborhood porch lights came on, people opened their doors and stepped outside in the cold to listen to that incredibly beautiful sound.

Gabe and Sam were mesmerized, transfixed, pierced by the sounds. Far too soon it ended and they heard only the wind in the trees and her footsteps in the snow approaching them. She emerged from the darkness, placed her violin back in its case, then stepped around the car to stand below them.

She looked up at them. “Thanks for the stew, Gabe, it was . . . tasty.” She held out her hand to Sam who stepped down to take it. His hand was warm, hers cold. “Bye, Sam. Take care.”

Her car pulled out onto the gravel road and they watched her headlights disappear down the road toward Socorro. They turned to go back into the house and Gabe noticed the laptop sitting on its end, propped against the stairs in the shadow. He left the computer where it was in the snow.

He sat in the kitchen brooding while Sam prepared for bed. He could not believe what he was thinking of doing. Wasn’t one crazy maniacal woman enough for one lifetime? Guilt, shame and failure burned inside him, leaving him feeling old and hollow. Forget her! There is nothing I can do for her. Ramona will be here any minute. I’m going into town. I’m going to meet my buyer, make some money, play a game of pool and have a beer. This whole thing calls for a beer. Maybe a six-pack.

Chapter Seven

Two mornings ago the road to Magdalena was closed. Now it was dark. Jesse was afraid to die in the wilderness in the dark. She knew it was foolish being afraid of the dark when she was about to die. What difference did it make, after she was dead, if badgers or foxes ate her eyes out, or coyotes ate her hands and feet, or mountain lions ripped her open to get at her heart and liver? None. But there it was. She was afraid.

The city of Socorro was aglow. Holiday lights sparkled and flashed in front yards, on porches and across rooftops. Luminarias lined miles of snowy sidewalks and driveways. But Jesse was blind to the beauty around her.

Grim determination and monomaniacal pursuit of goals were Jesse’s forte. She was good at them. Desperately, with every bit of strength left in her, she focused on getting herself through this thing one more time. She drove around Socorro making up her mind to do it, deciding where to do it. She stopped at Furrs and picked up another beer, then she drove three blocks to the east end of Sedillo Park and parked. It was late. The town was shut up, closed down, the streets were empty. Everyone was asleep. The night was clear and very cold. It wouldn’t take long for her to die. No one would pay attention to her car parked there at the edge of the park. She might not be discovered for more than a day, certainly not until daylight tomorrow, long after she was dead.

She turned off the engine and rolled down both windows in the front seat letting in the freezing air. She twisted the cap off the beer and took a long swig, shivering and grimacing as it went down. In a sudden panic she searched her coat pocket for the pills.

Oh thank goodness! They were still there. What if Gabriel Hunter had taken them? What if he had thrown them away? For an instant the fact that he didn’t take the pills filled her with the only moment of self pity she’d felt in all of this.

Then with a shake of her head she collected herself, breathed deeply and let the moment slide by. She would not fail again. She would not let her thoughts be diluted by distractions. Everything was secondary to her one desire, her one purpose.

She popped open the pills, spilled four into her palm and dropped them far back into her throat swallowing them with another swig of beer. She tapped more pills into her palm and lifted them to her lips.

A hand reached into the car and grabbed her wrist knocking the pills into her lap and onto the car seat. “Don’t do it, Jesse.” She looked up to see Gabe standing beside her car.

She wrenched her arm from his grasp. “So who asked you?” she demanded, staring up at him, her expression as ferocious and determined as his. With infinite calm then, she picked up the pills and placed them back in their container. She replaced the cap on the beer, set it on the floor and reached for the ignition.

Before her fingers could connect with her keys, her car door swung open and he was in the car beside her, propelling her across the seat as though she were weightless. He rolled up the window on the driver’s side, then reached across her, the clean warm scent of him filling her nostrils, the heat of his body enveloping her as he rolled up the other window. He started up the engine and turned on the heat. In a moment it was warm inside the car. He turned off the engine, sat back in the seat and stared at her, his scowl momentarily absent.

Jesse spoke first. “If you’re done with the heroics now, will you kindly get out of my car and leave me in peace? I did not intend to involve you in this and I hereby absolve you of any and all responsibility. Now will you get the hell out of my car?”

Still he stared at her and it took every ounce of strength and will she possessed to return his stare.

At last he spoke. “Don’t do it, Jesse. Right now, right this minute you’re healthy and cognizant. Ending your life before it is naturally over is wrong and you damn well know it. You left out the best part when you were talking to Sam. We don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know. No matter what you think you know about what’s going to happen, the truth is you really know nothing. That’s the wonder of life. Every second with systems pushed far out of equilibrium, and that means all biological systems including you, the unexpected, the unpredictable is around the bend. In the next second the surprising, the new, the unknown is about to unfold. What about your work? Isn’t every minute you spend doing your work precious to you? What if in whatever time you have left you should figure out even one little detail of the big picture. What if in your fourteen hours of information from the VLA there is an event described that contains a clue or two to some of the mysteries you have been studying all of your life? It could be so, Jesse, you don’t know. Then there is all that other information you have. The research your colleagues gave you to correlate into the picture. What if there is something wonderful there? Some little pieces of the puzzle waiting for you, something important and significant scattered among the bits of information, just waiting for everything you know to put them together and make sense out of them?”

She stared at him, dumbfounded by his words. How could he do that? See inside her and seduce her with her own desires like that? “Look who’s talking about wrong and right,” she jeered, trying to insult him out of her car.

But all Gabe saw and heard were the moment of hesitation, the wavering of resolution. Relentlessly he continued his offensive. “Why don’t I drive you home? I’ll call a friend for you, someone to come and stay with you tonight and tomorrow or the next day you’ll feel better about this. You’ll feel differently and you can get on with your life.”

Her eyes grew more enormous with every word he spoke. His arguments had her teetering on the edge of hysteria. In mustering the strength to oppose him she dropped over into the abyss. At last there were tears in her eyes when she spoke, admitting at least part of her predicament to Gabe. “I gave up my apartment. I’m on leave without pay until fall semester to do my research. Because of what happened, my collapse, the school is fighting offering me another contract and the NSF has suspended my grant money pending an investigation of my health. As things now stand I can’t even make my car payments, let alone buy food, pay rent and pay off my college debts! Never mind the hospital bills!”

“I’ll drive you to a friend’s house.”

“You don’t understand. I want to die. I don’t want to involve anyone else. I want to die!”

“I’ll drive you to a motel and check you in and tomorrow I’ll come help you locate another apartment. I’ll move you in.”

“No. Leave me alone. Please, please leave me alone. None of this is any of your business.”

“Ok. How about you check into the hospital? I’m sure they’ll take you in your depressed condition. They know about your tumor and all that down here, don’t they?”

“What? A little therapy and hand holding and everything will be all fixed, is that what you think?” Now she was angry. With herself. If she hadn’t taken those pills she would be able to think of a lie. Something. Anything to get rid of him.

And angry with Gabe. This was plain and simple none of his damn business. She exploded. “Get out! Get the hell out of my car and leave me alone. I didn’t want or invite your interference. I’m going to do it and there is nothing you or anybody else can do about it. I didn’t ask anybody to help me with this. I can and will take care of it myself. Look! I lied to you about what is wrong with me.” She reached behind her for the envelope containing her medical records. She pulled out her x-rays and MRI’s and shoved them one by one up against the windshield. “Look! Look! I’m not dying. I wish I were. I’m going to live. The tumor or whatever, actually they don’t know what it is, isn’t going to kill me, it’s going to completely and permanently disable me. Paralysis. Get it? Look!”

Through the dim light of a distant streetlight, once again Gabe observed the strange images of Jesse’s brain.

“I won’t be able to move, not even an eyelid. I will have no control over my bladder or my bowels. I will lay paralyzed on a bed fully conscious, though the doctors consistently and insistently denied that I was conscious. They told me I imagined it. They said that if their machines said I was unconscious, then I was unconscious no matter what I think. I will be fed by machines, cleaned by strangers’ hands, unable to move or communicate for, according to the doctors, oh forty to sixty years, give or take a decade. I have a tumor or something, they’re not even sure what. Probably it’s benign. Get that? It’s benign. It only covers all of my brain and some of my spinal cord. But! I’m still alive and there was no sign of cancer in the tissue samples they cut from my brain. So it has to be benign. See? See?”

Sobbing, she slapped her hand angrily at the images of her brain plastered up against the windshield. “So here I am conscious and moving around and able to make a choice. According to the doctors a relapse is immanent. All four of them said that I will without fail return to a state of paralysis within days or hours from now, if not seconds. Tell me,” she demanded, “Which would you choose?”

She shoved the plates back into their envelope and tossed the envelope behind her talking all the while. “I lost control of my body right there on the floor of my office in the NRAO. I fell out of my chair in spasms that had me shaking all over the floor with my eyes bugging out of my head, my mouth wide open, spit, drool and vomit flying everywhere. I lost control of my bladder and my bowels right there on the office floor while two young men worked over me trying to save my life, breathing for me, making my heart beat for me. My blouse was ripped open. I received electric shocks, not once but three times while my peers looked on from the hall. And I’m telling you I was fully conscious the whole time. I was hauled out of the NRAO on a gurney and taken to Socorro General. IV’s were put in my arms, tubes were stuck down my nose and throat. I had to be cleaned up from my own waste. A catheter was inserted up my urethra and a diaper was put on me. I was x-rayed and examined. I listened to jokes about onions and tomatoes while they handled me like a piece of meat. I was moved up to UNM for further probings and tests where I was wheeled into surgery, no questions asked, because they assumed there was no one inside here to ask. They shaved away my hair, they drilled a hole in my skull and they cut away a piece of my brain. Without anesthetic, because they assumed there was no one inside here to be hurt. And I was fully conscious for the entire procedure. You should have heard how surprised they were when the tissue they took from my brain turned out to be normal. It was such a surprise they couldn’t wait to lift off the top of my skull to see how the rest of my brain looked. They ordered the nurses to shave my head so they could find out what is really wrong with me. They would have too if I hadn’t regained my speech and movement. They had the papers right there in surgery with them. They were signing them when I recovered. If there hadn’t been nurses there who had nothing to gain by my surgery they probably would have continued. Despite the fact that they universally agreed that whatever is wrong with me, short of removing my brain and part of my spinal cord, there is nothing any of them can do to help me. Now I’ve made up my mind. I take responsibility for my life and my death. I asked neither you nor anyone else to help me with this. I ask nothing of you. You are a stranger to me. Why do you press me on this and make me question a decision you obviously have the sense to agree with? I’m asking you one more time, Gabe, please get out of my car and leave me in peace.” Finished at last and certain he could no longer argue with the logic or the rightness of her decision she stared at him, her eyes begging him to leave her.

Despite her increasing emotional fervor and incidental sleepiness Jesse was to Gabe utterly magnificent, utterly rational and utterly different from Annie. For a moment he even agreed with her decision. Given her circumstances, faced with a fate as certain as she seemed to face he might . . . no he wouldn’t. It made no sense to Gabe that she would willingly give up even one second that could be spent on her work. Why was she so quick to relinquish the chance to live healthily until the disaster of her illness really did disable her? The irony of it was that if it weren’t for Sam, Gabe would gladly trade places with Jesse just to have the opportunity to be a mathematician for real again, if only for a few hours or a few days.

“One thing you said about all this bothers me, Jesse. The doctors told you that you were unconscious when you were conscious. They were wrong about that. Maybe they’re wrong about you becoming ill again. What if they are? What if there isn’t anything wrong with you at all? What if you’re not going to collapse again? What if you’re not going to become paralyzed?”

She slumped hopelessly against the car door and shook her head, turning it slowly on the cold glass window. She was caught now in the throes of a weak weepy hysteria. Damn him! Why won’t he give up? He wasn’t there. It wasn’t him. He didn’t go through it. He has no idea.

“I won’t do it!” she sobbed. “I won’t go through this again. They don’t understand. You don’t understand. I don’t trust them. I told them I was conscious the whole time. But they wouldn’t believe me. They said my EEG showed I was in a coma, but I wasn’t! I was awake. I was aware. I heard everything they said. I felt everything they did. It takes two to three weeks to die of starvation. Five days to die from dehydration. I would be awake. I would feel everything. I won’t suffer like that. I won’t do it! I won’t go to a hospital to die. I won’t. I hate hospitals. I have every right to die the way I choose. You can’t stop me.” She huddled in the corner of the car crying her heart out for the first time since her mother’s death.

Man, you should have stayed out of this. You should have let her do it. Didn’t you learn anything from that mess you were in before? Even as he wrestled with these thoughts, even as his failure to cope with Annie ate at him like acid, Gabe moved across the seat closer to Jesse. Gently his hand closed around her arm.

“No! Don’t do that. Don’t touch me!” she swatted at his hand and struggled in his grasp. Sobbing hysterically she beat at him. “Why don’t you leave me alone? Why don’t you let me die? This is none of your business. I want to die.”

Ignoring her fists, he pulled her into his arms holding her, comforting her, one big hand slowly and delicately caressing her hair. “What about a relative, a friend? Somebody to help you when the time comes?”

“Noooo,” she moaned, “I wouldn’t ask anybody to bear a burden like this. Please, Gabe, it’s sweet of you to be concerned, but please, I’m begging you. Let it go, get out of my car and walk away. This isn’t your problem. You’ve got plenty of your own to take care of. Please.”

“I’ll do it,” he offered, knowing what an insane thing he was doing. He told himself it would only be for a day or two and anyway he was never one to take the well-traveled path in life. He’d made up his mind.

“What?” She was almost shocked out of her tears and into a state of alertness.

He whispered into her hair, “Live, Jesse. Live until the last moment that you can. Don’t let fear rob you of your life. Besides it could be years, not moments that you’re giving up. You don’t know. And neither do the doctors. Live, Jesse. Do your research. The VLA has done its work, now you do yours. All you need is a roof over your head with an outlet for your computer, isn’t that right? I’m offering it to you for however long you have left. Study your jets and your black holes, do your work and when you fall ill again I’ll be there for you.”

She pulled away from the warmth of him enough to look up into his eyes. “Are you offering to be my Dr. Kevorkian?”

“Not at all. I may be weird, but playing God is not one of my things. I’m offering to be by your side when and if you collapse. If you don’t want, I won’t take you to a hospital. But I will be there. I will know that you are conscious. I will take care of you. I will keep you clean and comfortable. I will talk to you, read to you, hold your hand, whatever. I will be there with you until the last moment of your life. I will sit with you until you are dead. Live, Jesse, live and do your work. You talk of suffering, but you and I both know that suffering is a natural and common part of life. Don’t give up precious moments of your life because you are afraid of a few short days of suffering. Live, Jesse, and when the time comes I’ll be there for you.”

“But I told you I don’t have any money, I can’t even make my car payments.”

“I have money.”

“Dope money,” she told him contemptuously.

“What difference does it make if all you have is seconds, minutes, hours, days?”

She stared up at him. His golden brown eyes gazed down at her. He was the perfect Mephistopheles to her desperate Faust. “It makes a difference,” she protested. In her sleepy teary state with his arms comforting and warm around her Jesse was so tempted. But only for a second. Because when she thought of this beautiful vital man seeing her as she was on the floor of her office she shriveled up inside. “No!” She struggled in his arms but he held her tight.

“Why not?” he whispered into her hair.

She hung her head and admitted so softly that he had to strain to hear her. “When it happens . . . you’ll see me like I was . . . falling on the floor . . .”

He shrugged, “It’s all right for you to see me at the nadir of my life but not for me to see you so low?”

Again she pulled back so she could see him. “What the hell kind of logic is that? Some kind of insane mathematical equation?”

“We are outside the rational and normal here or are you going to deny that?” He could hardly keep from laughing. “Jesse, I spent almost two years in the federal pen and there isn’t one horrible disgusting thing on the face of this earth that you could think of that I haven’t seen. I have lived on the streets. I’ve lain on the street in a drunken stupor in a 113° heat unable to move and watched the guy laying next to me let go of everything just like happened to you. With as many drugs and as much alcohol as I’ve consumed it’s entirely possible that it’s happened to me and I don’t remember it.”

Jesse was horrified. “No!” Then, she exploded, “Great, the insane leading the dead! After what you’ve said I should trust you? What if I fall into a fit while you’re in a drunken stupor? While they cart me away to vivisection and years of torture in a hospital, what will you do? Piss yourself?”

At this he did laugh. “I’m offering you more time. Do you hear anyone else making such an offer? Besides since I’ve been out I haven’t touched the stuff because of Sam.”

“But you sell it! What if you get caught and thrown in jail again when I need you?”

“I’m offering time, Jesse, not guarantees of perfection. You’ll have to take a chance on this one. Throw your dice instead of dropping out of the game. Step out of the light into the darkness like the rest of us. Have a little faith in the world even though you have limited control.”

“No, I couldn’t do this to Sam. It wouldn’t be fair to him to involve him in all this.”

“Why not? Isn’t death the fate of each and every one of us? Why does everybody make such a fuss? We are all going to die. Do you think he doesn’t know this? Besides, if you agree to this, I see no reason to tell Sam everything. This is strictly a seat of your pants situation, a play it by ear piece. Sam doesn’t have to know every last little detail of what might or might not happen. We’ll tell him you need a place to stay and work for a while. He’ll understand. We’ll take it one day, one minute at a time.”

“What if I don’t . . . fall ill right away? What if I’m healthy a lot longer than the doctors said I’ll be?”

“Are we talking hours, days or weeks here? I don’t know about anything more than a few weeks,” he teased, knowing she wouldn’t stay with him more than a few days at the most and fervently hoping she lived long enough to have to make that decision. “You know, I’ll bet you read the end of a book first before you read anything else.”

“None of this is funny. How can you joke?” She rubbed her face sleepily and unselfconsciously into the warm flesh of his neck. She heaved a long shaky sigh breathing him in.

He grinned. “How can I not joke?”

She was getting sleepier and sleepier. “I don’t believe this,” she mumbled into his neck. “You, the master of self destruction. You’ve spent your entire life working yourself down to zero, choosing drugs and alcohol over life. Nothing but slow suicide. You are begging me to live and work. What’s in it for you?”

He told her again, “Live, Jesse. Live every minute that you can.”

All Jesse perceived were the impossibilities, the insurmountable difficulties for Gabe and Sam. “No,” she told him quietly. “No,” she said again and then she fell asleep against his shoulder.

He held his lips against her forehead and with his fingers softly touched her hair, her cheek, her lips. “Unbelievable,” he whispered.

Chapter Eight

Jesse turned her head to look up at the stamped tin ceiling and the bare light bulb hanging from a wire there. The white light of a snowy afternoon poured through the window into the room. Gabe’s sleeping bag was heaped on the mattress next to her and though she lay under her own bedding with her own pillow squashed against her belly, her arms were draped around his pillow and only moments ago her face had been buried there, the scent of him surrounding her. She tried to move only to discover that she was pinned to the mattress by four sleeping puppies pressed close around her. Muffled sounds of laughter, squeals, shouts, and running feet came from outside the house.

She craned her neck looking around the bedroom. A third mattress leaned against the wall and her clothes were neatly piled on top of a second dresser that wasn’t there before.

Slowly Jesse sat up. Pushing her hair away from her face, she gazed around in astonishment at the changes in Gabe’s house. The place was now immaculately clean. All the trash was gone. The floors were swept and mopped. The laundry was picked up and the clean clothes were put away. Sam’s toys and things which had comprised most of the disorder in the place were now lined up on brick and board shelves along one wall of the room. The sleeping bag and pillow on Sam’s mattress were carefully arranged.

In the next room there were more changes. The small television still sat on the broken kitchen chair. But along the western wall under the window there was now a small worn couch. In the corner next to the couch there was a used, not a fancy, but a very real computer center with her Gateway 2000, her printer, her fax and all her papers and discs in place. A wheeled office chair was pushed neatly in place against the desk and her laptop lay on the top shelf. Along the entire northern wall was another brick and board bookshelf with all her books and possessions from her car lined up next to Gabe’s and Sam’s books and a few more of Sam’s toys as well.

A pot of red chili and pork simmered on the stove in the kitchen filling the house with a mouth watering smell. There were even some yellow chrysanthemums blooming in a small pot on the kitchen table. In the bathroom her shampoo and hair rinse were in place in the shower. Her toothbrush stood in a glass and a clean folded towel lay waiting for her on the edge of the sink.

When she returned to the bedroom the puppies were stretching and yawning on the bed, their small pink tongues curling, licking the air. They thumped down from the mattress and sniffed around on the floor. One squatted to pee and Jesse rushed to pick up two of them. She carried and herded them out of the house.

With her hand shielding her eyes she stood in the open doorway squinting at the brilliance bouncing off the snow. Gabe and Sam and at least a dozen more people, both children and adults were outside playing, building snowmen and forts and fighting snow battles. A snowball exploded against her breast. She frowned and brushed off the snow.

Sam yelled, “Jesse, come play!”

Laughing at the game, Gabe looked a giant with his legs spread wide in the snow, snow caught in his hair, eyebrows and eyelashes, coating his shoulders and arms and matted into ice on his legs and boots. He stared at her heedless of the snowballs that pelted him, his golden brown eyes shining at her. He brushed himself off and stepped up into the house. Jesse followed him.

He sat down on the couch. “You made it another eighteen hours,” he told her.

Silent and ambivalent, she sat down in the chair at the desk. How could she even be considering this? This strange man made her feel so . . .

He reached behind her and switched on her computer, his expression serious. “You don’t know,” he said. “It could be days, weeks, months. Years.”

“I don’t even have the money to make my car payments. I . . .”

“I have money,” he said with a dismissing wave of his hand. “As for your car, take it back to the dealer and leave it on the parking lot. I’ve done it myself. It won’t even hurt your credit,” he joked darkly.

“But what about when I . . . die? People will be suspicious. They might accuse you of something. You don’t want that kind of trouble.”

“You can write a note explaining everything.” He gestured at Valdez’s minicam sitting on the bookshelf next to Jesse’s laptop, “We’ll make a video.”

“The camera isn’t mine. It’s Valdez’s. She left it in my car when I took her to the airport and I have to send it back to her,” she explained irrationally.

“Does that prevent us from using it?” he asked rationally.

She stared at him for a long silent moment. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

“Why not?” he shrugged. Then he frowned. “This is a temporary thing, Jesse. Something that will last only as long as you want it to. Until you get back on your feet . . . or until . . . you collapse again. And . . . no matter what you are obviously free to leave whenever you choose. You are under no obligation to me. Look at it this way. Maybe this is a small opportunity for me to do something positive. Maybe I need to do this.”

Still she hesitated. There was something she had to get straight. She looked through the door of the single bedroom, knowing that for the last two nights she lay next to Gabe. “This doesn’t mean that we . . . I’m not going to . . . we’re not going to . . .”

He smiled one of his rare smiles. “The big bad man is going to get you, hmmm, Jesse?” he asked softly. He leaned back, stretched out his legs, crossed his ankles, lifted his huge arms, linked his hands behind his neck and rested his head on the wall behind him. His eyes were warm and sparkling. The moment stretched out filling up the room just like his legs. At last, none too gently he let her off the hook. “In your dreams, Jesse,” he told her, figuring his scorn was a perfectly adequate barrier for them both to hide behind for the next day or so.

She dropped her eyes to study her hands resting in her lap, her pale cheeks pinkened just a little.

He broke the silence with a question. “Are you hungry? Would you like me to fix you something to eat?”

She shook her head, “I can get myself something to eat. You don’t have to do it.” She looked up, both despair over her situation and disbelief at what she about to do written all over her face. He was still smiling at her. “What day is it?” she asked.

“It’s Christmas day, Jesse,” he told her. “Merry Christmas.”

The next morning in the Student Room at the NRAO, Max was surprised to open up his E-mail and find Jesse waiting for him there. He had left several messages for her without receiving any response, so he had pretty much given up on hearing from her until the semester break was over. In answer to her question, he typed, “It’s Ok, Doc. I want to keep working with you. I have my assistantship for next semester so I’m not hurting for bucks. I’ll keep track of my hours and you can pay me when your grant comes through.”

Sitting in front of her computer in Gabe’s house, Jesse chewed on a fingernail and stared at Max’s message. She was not nearly as certain about accepting Max’s time without being assured a way to pay him as he was about offering it. She typed, “What if the NSF decides to rescind my grant?” It crossed her mind to type, “What if I die?” but she didn’t.

Max typed, “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter. I want to work with you. For now let’s assume that’s not going to happen.” He was more interested in finding out if Agents Turney and Foster had caught up with her than he was in any money. His earlier messages were about them looking for her. He typed, “Did those two FBI guys I told you about ever get a hold of you?”

“No.”

“They want to talk with you. They came down here and asked all kinds of questions. They went back up to Albuquerque and talked with the doctors, the whole bit, came back down here and asked more questions. That other kid that was there, the Senator’s son, Scot whats’is name? He said something about you that got them all interested. And then I guess the doctors said some weird things about you. The FBI really wants to talk with you.”

She frowned at the message, then typed, “I flunked Scot. That was probably reason enough for the Senator to sick the FBI on me. I haven’t paid my hospital bills and furthermore I left the doctors with the impression I may not be paying them anytime soon. Even more reason to call out the FBI, don’t you think? If they come back, tell them to contact my lawyer, Sharon Carnes in Albuquerque.”

Convinced the agents were merely doing dirty work for the NSF Jesse really did not want to talk with them. She didn’t have time for nitpicking bureaucrats and their damn questions about her health. “To hell with them!” she typed. “As long as I’m alive the NSF owes me my goddamn grant and if they want to fight about it, they can fight with my lawyer!”

Max read Jesse’s message with a combination of interest and bemusement. She still didn’t understand who these people were who were looking for her or what they wanted from her.

“Where are you?” he typed.

Even that harmless little question somehow terrified Jesse. She ignored the question, signing off instead. “Thanks Max, for sticking by me. I’ll contact you as soon as I’ve read through my stuff more thoroughly. Not tomorrow. But soon.”

But as far as Jesse was concerned she had no tomorrows. Experience had demonstrated and medicine’s finest had declared that she had no future and in the hours and days that followed that was how she worked, like there was no tomorrow. Every daylight hour and long into the night she poured over the hard copy of her information from the VLA and when she wasn’t doing that she sat in front of one or the other of her computers tapping away, gleaning numbers, arranging them, applying formulas, asking questions of the radio waves from Cygnus A. It was only work that kept Jesse’s terror at bay.

Work and Gabe. Gabe couldn’t keep her safe from sickness and death, she knew that. Yet she felt safe in his presence. She knew it was irrational to the point of thinking she was loosing her sanity but Jesse didn’t have time to care about whether she was sane or not. It was an unimportant detail in the now vastly shrunken timeline of her life.

Jesse was in hiding. The simple truth was she was terrified now of just about everyone but Gabe and Sam. Only in Gabe’s house did she feel safe. Not from the immanent and certain collapse that threatened her second by second. But safe from hospitalization, safe from long term imprisonment in a body that no longer responded to her will, safe from being kept alive like a plant, alive and cognizant but unable to move, safe from weeks if not a lifetime of paralysis allowed by physicians who would be driven by the very same thing that drove her. Curiosity. Jesse felt safe in Gabe’s house. Safe from doctors and hospitals. Ironically, safe from meddlesome well wishers and lifesavers.

But admit it or not Jesse was most afraid of her own thoughts. She worked and worked and worked because only work kept her safe from her own thoughts. Only when she was working did she achieve that blessed forgetfulness, that sweet ignorance of sickness and death that the young and healthy take for granted. She honed in on Gabe’s words, “Do your work, Jesse,” and clung to them like a lifeline. In work she was safe from her own thoughts. Safe from dread. Safe from the paralyzing fear of paralysis and death. Safe. Safe from death. Safe from life.

Those first days together seemed somehow outside of time to Jesse and Gabe. In the days that followed Christmas they occupied an odd empty intimate place of no gravity, no time, no contact, no connection, a space where they twisted and spun slowly, floating near each other somewhere, but definitely in a nowhere somewhere between life and death. A place where their thoughts, their emotions and judgments, even their momentary responses to one another were held in suspension and abeyance. Sometimes even their breaths were held it seemed as they waited for what Jesse was certain was going to happen.

As though it had been previously agreed upon they assumed a cautious wary silence with each other that was rarely broken. They spoke when practical circumstances required. The rest of the time they communicated through Sam, saving all their warmth and naturalness for him.

Gabe and Jesse might as well have been invisible to each other their eyes and bodies slid past one another so easily, so effectively. It was only for a few days they told themselves whenever they thought about their circumstances. Whatever the outcome it was only for a few days. On the rare occasion in those first days when Jesse would look up to find Gabe studying her intently, instantly her eyes would drop and only the faintest of blushes would betray the chaotic surge in her heartbeat when their eyes met. Even that she hid quite well. Even from herself.

Next to her computer center, a long narrow utility table appeared spread with her papers, books, some of Gabe’s notes and even some of Sam’s home work. The television was moved into the kitchen because the tiny living room was now so full of furniture, mostly her work space, that there was only room for people to thread their way through narrow passages to the other rooms.

Jesse read and worked. Gabe read and worked. The phone rang. People drove from all around to look at the puppies and by the end of the first day only one remained. Gabe drove into town and returned with money and groceries. Sam played outside with his friends. But Jesse never left the house. Sometimes she helped a little with the housework and meal preparation. Mostly though she worked, never looking up from her research or her computer for literally hours on end. Some evenings Sam and Gabe sat on the mattresses playing Street Fighter on Jesse’s laptop. Each night, though, Jesse continued to work even until long after Gabe retired.

Then at last exhausted, she changed into her T-shirt in the bathroom and tiptoed in her stockinged feet around Sam and Gabe’s sleeping forms to her mattress on the floor to lie down to sleep with strangers. She lay there listening to them breath, thinking, for the few moments before she fell asleep, about the man who, every day it seemed to her, gave her another day to work. Each night for a brief moment she thought about the oddness of her situation, the events that had brought her to Gabe’s house. Then she would think about leaving, she would even begin to begin making plans to leave, but at that point sleep would overcome her. The next morning she would get up to work, telling herself she didn’t have time to make plans, she didn’t have time to leave. The truth was, though she never would have admitted it, Jesse didn’t want to leave. Her fear made her want to stay, made her need to stay, or so she told herself.

At the sound of a vehicle pulling into Gabe’s drive, she looked up from her computer. From where she sat she could see out the window behind the couch. Maybe it was a buyer for the last puppy. To her surprise she saw that it was Arthur Ross, the man who owned the computer company in Socorro, the one with all the government contracts. Was he after a puppy . . . or . . . terror bordering on panic slithered through her. She shrank back into the shadows, grateful for the darkness inside the old adobe.

The snow had melted and the brilliant New Mexico sun was warm despite the cold winter air. Gabe and Arthur talked together like old friends. She could hear their voices softly mumbling, hear the metal body of the car ping as it cooled, she could see the heat waves radiating off the hood of the car. The two men talked without a glance or gesture toward the house.

With a sigh of relief she returned to her work. What the hell did Arthur Ross care about where she was? What did anybody care for that matter? She lifted her head and turned to look again at the sound of a car door opening. Gabe stood in front of Arthur’s car, his arms crossed over his chest. There was Arthur again beside Gabe, only now he held a printout in his hands. Arthur spread the printout on the hood of his car and he and Gabe studied the paper, discussing it intently.

She looked back down at her work again. She didn’t look up when the car door shut nor when the vehicle pulled out of the drive. She did look up curiously though when Gabe returned to the house with the printout he and Arthur had been discussing. He carried the printout into the kitchen and sat down at the table with it. How odd.

The next day another vehicle, a new pickup this time, pulled into Gabe’s drive. She looked up from her work to see him talking this time with Lester Fink of all people, a physicist at the White Sands Missile Range. Gabe and Lester played the same scene as yesterday. The two men talked for a moment. A printout was fetched from the front seat, laid out on the hood of the pickup and studied and discussed. Lester Fink departed in his truck and Gabe returned to the house, went into the kitchen and sat with the printout spread out on the table in front of him.

Jesse was intrigued. Yesterday afternoon, more times than she could count, curiosity made her lift her head to stare at Gabe. Gabe, unaware of the interest he had aroused in her, sat at the kitchen table with his back to her, one moment filling his tablet with notes and the next sitting utterly still, gazing out the kitchen window for what seemed to Jesse like hours only to return to scribbling in his notebook. He stopped his scribbling long enough to prepare the evening meal and the moment Sam was in bed and asleep he spread the printouts on the kitchen table and again sat down.

She could no longer contain her curiosity. With thirst and a glass of water for camouflage she passed by him twice, both times peering over his shoulder. In fact on the second pass she paused and stood behind him openly examining what he was doing. When it finally sank in, she could not believe her eyes nor contain her shock. He was solving problems for those men!

She whipped around to face him on the other side of the table. Placing her hands flat on the tabletop she leaned toward him. Speaking in a low whisper because of Sam, she demanded, “Do they pay you for your time?” Her eyes flashed angrily.

He looked up surprised at her tone, amazed at her stance. He lifted his big hands in that now familiar gesture and answered softly, “They’re friends. We went to Tech together. I’m doing them a favor. It’s one little problem they were having trouble with.”

“How often do they do this? Once a year?” Her eyes widened when he didn’t answer her. “Twice?” Her mouth fell open. “Six times?” Her frown deepened along with her whisper. “Why don’t they do you a favor and hire you? Why don’t they pay you for your time? Oh I know, you’re an ex-con, not good enough for the likes of them. But you’re good enough to solve their damn problems for them!”

Now he was scowling. “They make weapons for Chrissake! I decided a long time ago I was never going to work for anybody who makes weapons.”

“Great logic, Gabe. This from the guy who worked for the CETR for five full semesters. The guy who went out into the desert with his buddies to blow up freezers, refrigerators, old cars, you name it, with stolen explosives. You’re notorious! They’re still talking about it. So if it’s for fun, it’s no problem. If you don’t get paid when you solve their unsolvable problems for them, then you’re not actually making weapons, is that it? How is it you can have all these high moral values about not making weapons yet you openly sell dope for a living?”

He was completely taken aback by her passion. The fact that these men came to him with their challenging problems was one of the few things left to him that made him feel like a man, a person of some worth. Right then it seemed to Gabe that Jesse would deny him even this small pleasure. Everything she said seemed to him to be a complaint and condemnation of him.

The argument continued in low angry voices and whispers. “What’s the matter, Jesse? Had enough of the poverty around here? Ready to call it quits? Or is it that you no longer have control over every minute, every second of your life? For the first time in your life you find there are things beyond your manipulations, beyond your terrified need to understand and order everything, to subordinate everything to your manic need to work? Well, if it’s all too much for you, go ahead! Leave. Nobody’s holding you here!”

She was shocked at how he interpreted her words. His quick easy offer to end their tenuous agreement terrified and enraged her even further. She could not explain even to herself why she cared about how he made his money. She could be dead tomorrow. What difference did it make? But it did matter to her and she couldn’t take her words back. She could only go forward. “That’s not what I meant! You’re the one who brought up the subject of getting out of our agreement, not I! I can only assume that means you’re the one who’s had enough.”

They were shouting at each other now, but still in whispers and low growls and in the shouting department Jesse was no match for Gabe who literally blasted her with, “Wrong! I can stick it out as long as you can! I agreed to help you with your problem, Jesse. I didn’t agree that you could tell me how to conduct my life! Got that?”

Suddenly she felt sick, actually physically ill. Her brief ruminations about leaving before she fell asleep each night had been nominal, vestigial, merely quick sops for her conscience. For the first time in her life it occurred to Jesse that there was a similarity between herself and her mother, that she was nothing but a problem to Gabe. From the moment he reached past her to turn on her computer on Christmas day she simply accepted his generosity without question. She opened her mouth to speak again but he cut her off by looking down at the mathematics he was working on. Unable to cope with the rage he inspired in her and the self loathing she inspired in herself she whirled out of the kitchen into the next room where she stood for a moment with her arms squeezed hard and tight across her breasts. She grabbed up her coat and violin and stepped out into the cold dark starlight. She stomped through the greasewood to a fair distance from the buildings.

Suddenly the furious sounds of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring ripped through the night air even inside the house. Gabe stood up and went to the door. He and Ozone sat in the open doorway listening. All around him lights blinked on, front doors opened as Gabe and his neighbors listened to that powerful angry music.

Chapter Nine

With her heart exploding like dynamite and adrenaline shooting like fire through her, Jesse’s eyes snapped open. Where am I? The night was still pitch black. She held her breath, listening. The Jeep started up outside. She lifted her head from her pillow, turned over and peered around the room. The light from the Jeep’s headlights floated over the walls and she spied Sam’s mop sprouting from the top of his sleeping bag. But Gabe’s pillow lay crumpled at the head of his mattress. His sleeping bag was shoved carelessly down over the dark hump of a curled up, snoring Ozone. The Jeep drove away.

She fell limply back on her elbows and stared up at the ceiling. Valiantly she fought her tears and the crushing tide of terror and anxiety that threatened to engulf her yet again.

How many days had she been there? She had no idea. Until now it was always Jesse who rose first in the early morning hours before dawn. Gabe had never done this before. Is this something he usually does? Where is he going? Why is he going? Does it have anything to do with last night’s argument? Is he coming back?

At that last frightened and hopelessly absurd thought she collapsed back on her pillow, her eyelids slid shut, hot tears trickled down her temples into her hair. Another wave of self loathing washed over her. What in the hell is the matter with me? What a coward I am! What a creepy wimpy nerdy little coward! I survived Mom’s sickness. Her death. Dad’s death. I made it through college. I made it through graduate school. I got my grant and my leave. I’ve literally made my dreams come true. That’s more than most people get in a lifetime. I’m going to die. Big deal. So is everybody else. Like the man said, nobody gets out of here alive. Why am I so afraid? Why have I turned into such a coward? Other people live through these things . . . with grace and dignity. Where are my grace, my dignity? That’s what Dad would want to know. What on earth am I doing here? Why is it I suddenly need a man around to feel safe? I’ve got to pull myself together and get the hell out of here. I’ve got to decide . . . I can take my credit card, cash it out and live on that until my grant money comes through. I’ll do it, I’ll do it, I’ll do it. I’ll find a place. Today. Tomorrow. Today . . . tomorrow . . .

“Wake up, Jesse. Wake up, Sam. Get up, both of you. Get up. Get up. Get up.”

The light hanging from the bedroom ceiling flashed on and Jesse squeezed her eyes open a crack. It was still dark outside and there was Gabe turning on the light.

“Gabe!” she could no more disguise the relief and happiness that rang out in her voice than she could stop breathing. If she’d been standing next to him she would have thrown her arms around him. As it was she sat up, brushed the black curtain of hair away from her face and smiled a sleepy little smile that came close to knocking Gabe right off his feet.

He stared at her just long enough to let that sweet smile of hers burn through him like a branding iron before going on with his reveille. “Get up, Sam. Get dressed. We have to hurry. Come on, Jesse, you too, let’s go!”

“Ohhhnnn. What’s the matter? Today isn’t a school day. Why are we doing this?” Sam moaned and burrowed into his pillow.

Gabe stepped across the room to Sam’s mattress. He reached down, grabbed the foot of the boy’s sleeping bag and gave it a good strong yank. The bag flew across the room and landed in a heap in the far corner, leaving Sam squirming on the mattress with his arms still wrapped around his pillow. Cold and bereft in his bare feet and pajamas, the boy blinked up at his father.

“Get up, Sam, and I mean it!” he ordered. “Leonard’s coming too, so get up. There isn’t much time.”

Leonard must have been the magic word for this situation. Sam shot up off his mattress, scooped up his clothes and flew out of the room so fast Jesse hardly saw it happen. But she was wide awake now and when Gabe’s eagle eyed gaze turned on her, apparently still lounging around in bed, her smile faded like smoke in a high wind, her mouth snapped shut, her eyes flashed. He wouldn’t dare! She flushed hot under his long hard stare. At his first imperceptible, real or imagined twitch in her direction her fingers clamped down on the bedding, her body tensed.

Gabe’s fine plan that morning was almost his undoing. It took every ounce of strength he possessed to leave her sitting there looking so sweet and funny on her mattress, it took every last bit of resolve he possessed not to pull her up into his arms and kiss that indignant surprised expectant look from her face. As it was only superhuman effort and a hasty exit enabled him to hide the smile, the unexpected, unaccustomed flood of happiness that bubbled up in him at the sight of her sitting there so sweet and warm.

Almost choking on his laughter he ordered, “ Get up, Jesse,” and strode from the room. “You’ve got five minutes to get your butt out to the car. Wear hiking shoes and a warm coat. You’re coming with us. Today’s a holiday. There’s more to life than work,” he announced in a harsh barely controlled voice that he hoped brooked no opposition. He had no idea what her response would be.

She was up and dressed and out of the house in under four and half minutes. It was still dark outside. Gabe leaned over to open the door and the smell of hot bacon, sausage, eggs, fresh bread and coffee greeted her. That was where he had gone in what had seemed like the middle of the night! To pick up breakfast for them! She climbed in and accepted the cup of coffee he handed her with a silent laugh at herself.

He stopped in front of the very next house and before he could even toot the horn, Leonard burst from the door and leapt down the steps to join them. At the end of the gravel road Gabe turned south on the blacktop toward the Bosque del Apache less than a mile away.

They arrived before sunrise. In the gray light of pre-dawn Gabe drove slowly around the gravel loops of the National Bird Refuge. They watched the long shallow stretches of water turn from black to silver in the growing light and listened to the occasional calls of the birds as they awoke.

In the heart of the refuge they waited on the observation deck, warming their hands on steaming cups of coffee and hot chocolate, licking sugar and cinnamon and sticky buns from their fingers. At last the sun peeked over the eastern ridge and the winter weeds and grasses flamed pink and orange and gold. Within seconds of that first kiss from the sun, more than a hundred thousand birds rose up from the water on thundering wings to fly north to the fields to feed. High up on the observation deck the little group of humans were only feet below thousands of birds flying directly overhead, their high morning cries like a symphony stretching from one end of the sky to the other.

The individual calls of the birds close to her reached down inside Jesse all the way to her bones. She trembled at the sound. Like a string on her own violin she vibrated under their calls and the beat of their wings. The great birds flew so close above their heads that she could hear the whoosh, the whispering pulse of their feathers. She could feel the beat of their wings on her face and in her heart. The wind from hundreds of thousands of wings was a breath of life on her face. She was so close to the birds that she could see the black sparkling eyes of Snow and Canada Geese, the ruby red eyes of Sandhill Cranes and the deep orange of bony webbed feet and legs as they flew over, some of them close enough for her to reach up and touch the immaculate white feathers on their breasts. The white and gray feathered bodies glistened and shone in the morning sunlight. Off in the distance thousands of birds danced in that blue, blue sky, swerving and turning in unison over the fields, catching the light and sending it back to her on the observation deck in enormous synchronized flashes and signals, messages from the sky.

On their way out of the Bosque a lone coyote casually hopped up from the ditch bank and trotted across the gravel road in front of the Jeep. Gabe stopped and the coyote stopped. Four windows rolled down simultaneously. Four heads leaned out to watch the creature standing only feet from the Jeep. The coyote stared back at them with golden eyes.

Jesse was astonished. She had no idea a coyote was such a beautiful animal. Its winter coat was long, thick and multicolored, light yellow, almost white on its back and chest. The long fur on its head and neck and tail was a deep reddish gold in color like a lion’s mane, on its legs the fur was short and dark brown. Short pale hairs frosted the edges and tips of its ears and lightened its muzzle. Long winter guard hairs all over its body glistened gold and silver in the morning light. It watched them, as interested in them as they were in it.

Captivated and unable to resist, Jesse spoke softly to it. “Oh you are so beautiful.”

It took a step closer to her and stared at her for another long moment. Then it turned and trotted down the road a few feet before dropping over into the ditch bank on the opposite side.

They followed the Rio Grande north, the cranes and geese flying by the thousands above them. They followed the dirt roads that hugged the river past Socorro to Escondida. From there they turned east driving up through the red canyons and beyond.

The sky was perfectly clear with not a hint of a breeze and despite the low winter angle the sun shone bright and warm. By noon the day was warm enough for the boys to be riding in the back seat with their windows rolled down. They had been driving the gravel roads for hours and had not seen a single other car or truck.

Gabe stopped beside the crumbling ruins of a long abandoned ranch where the roofless red adobe walls of several small buildings were scattered on a hilltop. He carted a cardboard box full of food to the south side of the middle ruin and Sam and Leonard gathered twigs and branches. Within minutes there were hot-dogs and hamburgers sizzling on a portable grill over a fire. The boys ran out across the hills toward a small lone mountaintop in the distance.

Gabe and Jesse inspected the abandoned buildings. The middle building was at one time the house where the people had lived. A few vigas still straggled across one corner and under the protection of the logs small pieces of the newspaper that once served as wallpaper clung to the wall. The scraps of newspaper dated from the summer of 1931. It seemed long ago to those two young people standing there in the old abandoned home. Life was very different now. They thought about the people who with their own hands built this place so far from anywhere, hours from paved roads, stores and post offices. They thought about what their lives must have been without electricity, without hot running water, without refrigeration, without neighbors, without radio or television or computers, doctors or schools, just without . . . year after year after year . . .

“So, Jesse, did your folks want a boy?” Gabe asked crooking his neck trying to read one of the faded bits of newspaper.

“Hm?” Jesse too was trying to read a scrap of one of the papers.

“You know, the name. Jesse.”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact they did.” She sighed. “I don’t know. I think Mom did more than Dad. Dad didn’t care. He was happy with me. After I was born he had a lot more to worry about than whether I was a boy or not. My mother was . . . sick a lot.” She sighed again. “Not that I didn’t give him the usual share of kid grief and disappointment. By the time I was six both he and Mom thought for sure I was going to be a concert violinist. And I thought so too, until I was sixteen, but . . . after . . . it just never happened. It turned out I like the stars better than I do music, that’s all.” She shot him a sideways glance. “You trying to figure me out, Gabe?” she asked.

He scowled, looked down and kicked at one of the red clods of dirt that now formed the floor of the house. “That was your father’s big disappointment in life?” he asked in disbelief. “That you became a radio physicist instead of a concert violinist? I wonder how he would have felt if you became a criminal instead of a physicist? Take my dad for example. He wasn’t disappointed at all when I went to the pen. I did him a big favor. I proved him right,” he joked blackly, remembering his father’s blind drunken rages, heavy fists and ugly words.

Jesse was aghast at the results of her carefully censored remark. “Gabe, I didn’t mean . . . I wasn’t making comparisons . . .”

“Forget it,” he snapped. “I know you didn’t.”

He glared at her, but somehow now, after these days with him, that ferocious stare of his was not nearly as intimidating as it once was.

“Yes, I was trying to figure you out. I’ve spent my entire life on the outside looking in. Always the outsider. Rebuffed. Scorned. Turned away. Left out. You name it. If it describes ostracization, it describes my experience. For the life of me I’ll never know why. And yes, I don’t understand how you could even consider throwing away . . .” he stopped, aware that he had said too much, far more than he intended or wanted to say.

Dumbfounded, she stared at him. Was he putting her on? What he had just said certainly did not describe his relationships with his neighbors. From what she had seen, he was very well accepted by those who lived near him, including Leonard’s parents, Ramona and Eddie Garcia. In fact Ramona and Eddie seemed of all his neighbors to be the closest to Gabe and Sam, despite the fact that Eddie was an officer for the Socorro police force and despite the fact that, much to her surprise, everyone there seemed to be aware of what Gabe did for a living. The truth was, whether he knew it or would admit it or not, Gabe was well liked by his neighbors, even relied upon. Did he really see himself in those terms?

She studied him openly. He stared back at her, intense, angry, waiting for her reaction. Clearly his distress was real. “Who are you talking about? Who scorns you? Who, Gabe? Who leaves you out?”

“Everybody. Anybody. The people at the bar. I go to play a game of pool, have a little fun, talk a little. Every back is turned to me, every conversation is closed to me. I play rugby. It’s the same thing. Backs are turned, conversations are closed. The same thing happened at work . . . when I had a job.”

Jesse was nonplused that such an intelligent man could be so oblivious to other people’s feelings, other people’s motives. “Gabe! They’re protecting themselves! Probably ninety per cent of them smoke dope and can’t afford to look like they know you. And the other ten per cent may not smoke it but they don’t want people to think they do either.”

She actually smiled. It was the first time Gabe saw her smile. She could see him as he was that night, striding into the Capitol, prowling and staring at everyone with a look as fierce and terrifying as a snarling wolf. His actions were so incongruous with his stated desire that she smiled again. “And you come in, hulking about like Big Foot, looking like you’re going to bite their heads off. Everybody’s terrified of you. That’s not the way to get into a friendly conversation.”

“My grandfather always told me look a person right in the eye and you’ll know by the way they look back at you what kind of person they are,” he muttered.

She shook her head. “You’re not assessing anybody when you come into a place like that, all belligerent and scowling, with that kind of facial expression and body language. You’re announcing your arrival. You’re announcing your very formidable and threatening presence. Everything about you is threatening. You might as well throw your head back, roar, beat your chest and drag your knuckles on the floor when you walk in like that.”

He looked down and scuffed at the dirt again. He looked up still scowling. “I know,” he lied. Gabe had never seen his behavior in that light before nor had he heard himself described in such graphic animal terms before. He did go on with a little more of the truth though. “I get so tired of feeling the outsider, the rejected, the crazy, that sometimes I deliberately do crazy things to prove people right, like the incident at the bar that night.”

She laughed. It was the first time she laughed for him and again she couldn’t help it. He looked like such a guilty little boy. “Gabe, you can’t seriously be feeling bad about that. I don’t believe it. There wasn’t a person in there who didn’t want to do exactly what you did. Shut that woman up.”

Still scowling he looked at her as though he didn’t quite believe she was being honest. “It was wrong,” he told her.

Again she laughed, “Maybe. I wished I’d done it myself.”

At last a little smile lightened his expression.

“Which is this, Gabe?” she asked, “Pretending to be crazy or really crazy?”

“Which?” he asked.

“You and I,” she answered.

“We’re starved!”

“Is the food ready?”

In cloud of dust and a spray of gravel, Sam and Leonard arrived back in the ruins at a dead run, dirty and hungry and laughing breathlessly and Gabe was saved from having to answer her question. Without a word he trotted around the crumbling wall to attend to the food sizzling over the fire.

The next morning, before dawn, before breakfast, Sam lay on his bed playing with the last puppy, dangling a sock in front of her nose, snatching it away each time she snapped at it. At last she lunged and caught the prize in her tiny needle teeth. Sam giggled and pulled her across his rumpled bed, stretching and tearing the sock in the process.

“Oh no you don’t,” he laughed. He wrestled the sock away from her, prying open her jaws to free it. He tossed the sock into the basket of laundry in the corner and shoved the puppy off his mattress so he could straighten his bedding. Up she jumped right back into the thick of all the action, now grabbing hold of one end of his sleeping bag. He laughed and pried her loose again with a scolding, “No! Bad girl.” He gave up and fell laughing onto the bed, roughhousing with the her.

Sam was happier with Jesse in their house than he had been since . . . in fact Sam couldn’t remember a time when he felt this happy. The fact that Jesse’s work took up so much room in their tiny living room was nothing compared to the difference she made in their home. It wasn’t anything a boy of eleven could define or articulate. It was a difference in tone, a difference in mood, a difference in Gabe. Things were just better. If anybody had asked him, that’s what he would have said.

And Jesse was cool . . . radical. She thought about weird things, she said weird stuff. Yesterday they returned from their day of hiking and picnicking in the wilderness after dark and instead of immediately sitting down to work at her computers, Jesse set up her telescope, outside, down among the greasewoods and together they all, including Leonard, looked at the planets – Saturn was so cool – the stars and even a few distant galaxies. The galaxies were so far away they mostly looked like little smudges of light or a star, but in one night Sam learned the names and locations of many of the constellations. He learned stories about their names and what old time people thought the stars and planets were and all kinds of stuff about the Big Bang.

And he learned about dark matter. Dark matter! Wow! Ninety nine per cent of the known universe is unknown, stuff we only know about because of the way galaxies move, because of how fast they turn. You can’t see it but it’s there! It’s everywhere. We don’t know what it is but it’s all around us probably even inside me, Jesse said. Imagine that. Around me. Inside me. Inside this puppy. Making the outside edges of galaxies turn faster than the insides. You can see the results but not the thing. It’s a mystery like Jesse said!

For the first time in his life Sam pictured himself growing up to do something. He imagined himself searching for clues to understanding dark matter, he imagined himself discovering what dark matter was. I’m going to do it. I am! He finished straightening up the bedroom and took the puppy outside to her pen. He almost didn’t mind going back to school that morning.

Jesse on the other hand, was that morning experiencing agonies of doubt about what she was doing there in Gabe’s house. She watched the first dusty shaft of winter dawn light peek through the kitchen window on the east. The golden ray slanted across Gabe’s shoulder and back as he sat at the kitchen table. It lit up his hair turning it to brown fire, it shone through his ear, scarlet. He lifted his arm and the sunlight glinted on the hair on his huge forearm and across his hand. His long fingers delicately held a piece of pancake suspended high and Jesse thought the lush blue shadow dancing in the blood red palm of his hand was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. In fact Gabe was the most . . . her heart twisted heavily under the weight of her emotions.

Last night long after everyone else had fallen asleep she lay awake staring at the shadows and faint light, listening to the sounds of two people and one dog sleeping in the same room with her. She lay there listening and thinking about that day. So beautiful. The birds flying overhead at the refuge, the coyote, the drive along the river, the picnic at the ruins, the long wilderness hike, the gorgeous drive home and then setting up her telescope for the first time and sharing the magic of a dark starlit night with Gabe and Sam and Leonard. Not once that day until she lay down in this house with these people to sleep had Jesse thought about dying. And then her only thought had been the glad realization that she had not thought about it. And an overwhelming sense of thankfulness for every second of life she’d had since Gabe prevented her death.

But Jesse was growing more and more uncomfortable with the situation. Clearly until last night she hadn’t thought it out.

“You’re such a good girl, Ozone,” Gabe spoke in a silly sweet voice to the dog sitting hopefully beneath the dangling piece of pancake. “You love your pancakes, don’t you?”

Ozone opened her huge jaws with a damp smack and held them gaping like a baby bird waiting for the worm to drop. The piece of pancake fell onto Ozone’s tongue with a plop and the big dog’s jaws snapped gratefully shut. Gabe looked up with a grin to see if Jesse was watching. The smile on his face died instantly.

From the center of the kitchen she stared at him and when his smiling eyes met hers, her heart jumped wildly and then sank heavy inside her. She hadn’t expected any of this. Gabe wasn’t at all what she’d thought he’d be . . . and Sam . . .

She was the first to speak and the stress of the moment left her breathless. “Gabe, before I say anything else I want to thank you for yesterday. It was beautiful. Beyond words it was beautiful and . . . and thank you too for . . . these last few days.” She sucked in a long shaky breath. “I . . . I’m a burden to you, Gabe,” she told him in a choking little voice, nervously pushing a spoon back and forth in her fingers. “I’m an obligation. I honestly didn’t expect to even still be here. Neither of us gave enough thought to what this is going to do to you and Sam if you fulfill your promise. What if I collapse in front of Sam? What if I die? What a terrible thing to do to him. What a selfish thing to do to him. And to you.”

On Christmas day when she turned to face her computer, ever so hesitantly accepting his offer, Gabe fully expected her to leave soon. Yet now he found himself facing the moment like it was a mortal enemy. Her words came at him with the force and power of a threat. A rush of adrenaline and dread cut through him at the sight and sound of her standing there saying those things and he had to fight the urge to fight, to respond with aggression and anger, to threaten her with the very things she feared most; illness, loss of control over her body, death.

With slow careful movements he camouflaged his reaction to her words. He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest and regarded her steadily, fighting the urge to tell her she could not make it without him, fighting the urge to make her need him. Though he had been angry enough the day before yesterday to tell her to leave, that definitely was not something he wanted. He also didn’t want to wound her more or make her weaker. He wanted to make her stronger.

But more than anything he didn’t want her to leave. It occurred to him that his two desires might not be compatible. It was almost more than he could do to remain seated and unmoving in the kitchen chair when what he really wanted was to rise up and take her in his arms and hold her there with him by force. He wanted to kiss her sad frightened face senseless, kiss her until her fears fell away from her like burning chaff. But he sat utterly still staring at her steadily. He turned his head and looked out the kitchen window for a moment. Then he swung his head halfway back, looked at her sideways with a fierce little grin and said, “Hmph. Fix a lady breakfast for a few days and this is what I get, no respect. Service not good enough for you, Jesse?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “How can you joke? That’s not what I meant at all! I’m not complaining! You and Sam have both been wonderful to me. I am so grateful for everything you’ve done for me. These last few days have been such a gift. But I don’t want to hurt you. Or Sam. I don’t want to bring anything bad into your lives . . .”

He was days ahead of her with these thoughts. He leaned forward intently, cutting her short with a wave of his hand. “Relax, Jesse! Like I said before, if you need to leave we can start looking for a place for you today. If you need to stay a little longer, you can stay. We want you to stay. But relax will you? I can take care of myself. And Sam is stronger than you think. I’m offering you a place to stay and work until your grant comes through. That could be any day now. You’re not sick now. You’re going to make yourself sick anticipating it the way you do. Quit trying to outguess life. You’re alive. That’s all that matters. Take it one day, one hour, one minute, one second at a time. Don’t analyze, don’t try to predict, don’t try to control, don’t even try to understand. Live! Live here. Live now. Live . . .” Abruptly Gabe stopped talking. Sam was standing in the kitchen doorway.

They ate breakfast in silence, Sam staring at them, afraid to ask about the things he heard them say. Silently the boy left the house for the school bus, his terrible questions heavy in his heart. Silently Jesse and Gabe returned to their work, both of them acting like the conversation that morning had never taken place. But it had.

Chapter Ten

The afternoon temperature was close to fifty out between the protected walls of Box Canyon, a short five minute drive west of Socorro. It was a gorgeous little canyon, a deep sheer fissure in the earth whose hundred and thirty foot red granite walls were perfect for bouldering and technical rock climbing. Climbers came to Box from all over the United States, from France, from Italy and Germany, even from Japan. They came to face the challenges of Stream Bed, The Jones, The Louge, Ride the Lightening, Yellowman, Jah Lives and dozens of other climbs, some rated 5.13 and at least one rated 5.14.

Taking advantage of the warm afternoon sun Max, Luke and Brandon were out in Box bouldering among the other students, along with a few foreigners and people from Albuquerque. Luke was in his third lap of the long Stream Bed traverse. Max and Brandon were spotting Luke, when behind them, a student watching Luke’s progress spoke.

“Hey Max, those two FBI guys are still looking for Dr. Wren. Do you know where she is?”

“Nope,” Max answered truthfully, carefully following Luke’s progress with his hands up, ready to break Luke’s fall should his strength finally give out.

The student continued, “A few minutes ago I heard them questioning Ramona Garcia in Weir Hall. And get this! Ramona said Dr. Wren is out in San Antonio living right next door to her. You will never believe who she’s living with. Gabriel Hunter!”

Without missing a move of his elaborate and infinitely graceful dance along the rock wall Luke continued his lap to the end. Max and Brandon followed him, all three of them concealing their astonishment. The student was right, they didn’t believe him.

While out in San Antonio, sitting in front of her computer, impatiently pushing her hair back from her face for what seemed to her must be the thousandth time, Jesse studied the statement, wLT µ u µ o1 / 2. For two days now she had been working around that description of ionization parameters, luminosity and the time scale for variation, and the pages and pages of contradictory data she had discovered in her information from her time on the VLA. A solution to the contradiction was eluding all of her efforts to deal with it.

A few feet away from her Gabe sat in the kitchen working on the problems he’d agreed to tackle for his friends. She was oh so tempted to ask him to look at what she was working on, but after what she said to him about the others coming to him for help she was also hesitant. Her only other alternative besides pointlessly beating her brains against the problem was to contact Max.

She actually had her hand on the phone in the kitchen with her modem wire trailing behind her when it rang. She yelped and jumped away from the phone, her nerves jangling in fear. She looked to Gabe. It wasn’t for her. No one knew she was there.

He rose from his work, crossed to the phone and picked up the receiver, his eyes twinkling in amusement at her startled anxious stare. “Hello? Speaking.” Then he was silent, listening.

She watched the color drain from his face. She watched him turn ashen and hollow eyed over what he was hearing. She watched twin dark blue veins pop out like neon on his now gray forehead. She could hear the other person’s excited rapid speech, she listened with alarm to Gabe’s urgent response, “Ok! Ok, Eddie, I’ll be there in a few minutes!”

He slammed down the receiver and ran through the living room grabbing up his coat from the couch, crying out, “That was Eddie Garcia, Jesse. Sam cut school this afternoon. He entered a house while the owners were out and used the phone to call 911. He asked for Officer Wilson, a guy we’ve both had trouble with. When he got Wilson on the line he proceeded to yell obscenities at him.”

She followed him out of the house. He tore open the Jeep door, leapt in and started up the motor, shouting, “Wilson didn’t miss a beat. He knew who he had on the phone. He was out on the streets in less than a minute. He hunted Sam down and threw him in jail. They’ve got him for breaking and entering and it’s a federal offense to use 911 for anything other than an emergency.”

Stunned, Jesse watched Gabe and the Jeep roar out of the driveway, the tires spitting gravel and plumes of dust.

Anxiously she waited. Anxiously she thought again about leaving. But her car was long gone, now sitting in Monette’s pre-owned parking lot. She couldn’t leave until Gabe returned. And the simple truth was even now Jesse did not want to leave the protective circle Gabe offered her. Still? How could she be here in this house with these people who had trouble with the police? It seemed almost beyond her reckoning. She guessed that this thing today with Sam and the phone call had also to do with what Sam overheard in the kitchen that morning. They should have talked about it. They should have reassured the boy. How bad could it be? He was only eleven. Round and round her thoughts wobbled in a crazy dizzy orbit, circling her fears for herself, her fears for Sam and Gabe.

The forty-five minutes Gabe was gone seemed like an eternity to her. The Jeep pulled into the drive in another cloud of dust and skidded to a stop, Jesse waiting in the open doorway. Even from where she stood she could see that Sam had been crying. Hard.

Gabe sprang from the Jeep and hit the ground running, barking orders as he exploded up into the house. “Sam, you haven’t got time to mope. If you want any of your clothes or toys then get your skinny ass in gear and get moving. Now!”

Gabe ran past her into the bedroom. He pulled two duffel bags from under Sam’s dresser and threw them into the middle of the room. “Get your clothes in there pronto, boy,” he told Sam.

Gabe rushed around the house throwing their meager possessions into boxes and hauling them out to the Jeep as fast as he could. Jesse followed him in a funk. “They’re going to take Sam away from me,” he told her. “We’re leaving here now. They’ll be here tomorrow morning if they’re not here this afternoon.”

“How? How can they do that? For such a trivial . . . nothing thing? He didn’t even know, he can’t have known what an offense it is. He’s just a boy. They can’t. I’m telling you Gabe, they can’t take Sam away from you like that. They can’t.”

“Yes they can. This is the excuse they’ve been waiting for. They’ve been threatening me with this ever since I got back. And now they’re going to do it.”

Jesse stood shivering in the center of the living room in a terrified fuddle, her arms wrapped around her middle, her eyes enormous and uncertain. She was speechless and in the way. Gabe stopped in front of her with a box of kitchen things in his arms. “You can do your work wherever you are, can’t you?” he asked her. “All you need is your information, your computer, the Internet and your grad student, right?”

“Right,” she answered.

“Well, get your things together Jesse, we’re leaving.”

She didn’t hesitate, not even for a second. Like they were the words she’d been waiting for she joined the frantic rush, grateful to be doing something, anything. In the bedroom she helped Sam stuff her clothing into the bags on the floor along with everybody else’s. Then as fast as she could she packed her computer, her printer, her fax, her research and the rest of her things and helped to load up the car.

In less than an hour Jesse, Sam and Ozone piled into the Jeep while Gabe handed the remaining puppy over to a somber sad-faced Leonard. They pulled out of the drive, Jesse in the front with Gabe, Sam in the back seat and Ozone behind that and almost every other space in the Jeep packed to the ceiling, and bicycles and toys strapped to the roof. Sam stared mournfully at a bicycle and skateboard still laying in the yard where he left them.

“Shoulda thought of that before you made that phone call,” Gabe growled unsympathetically at his son. They were headed down the gravel road when a police car turned off the blacktop and drove toward them. “Get down, Sam! Jesse, throw that blanket over him,” Gabe ordered, preparing to lie or even to drive on regardless of the consequences. It was a long tense moment before they realized it was Eddie Garcia in the car approaching them.

The vehicles stopped opposite each other. Gabe and Eddie rolled down their windows and leaned out. Eddie spoke first. “They’ve got the paperwork done and they’re on their way over to Judge Chase’s to get his signature. They’re talking about sending him to Springer now. Take the back road down by the river so you don’t meet them on the way out.”

“I’m on my way,” Gabe told him. “And thanks Eddie, for calling me and . . . for all your help. We’ll never forget what you did for us today.”

Halfway to Socorro they stopped right where Jesse stopped only days ago to lie down in the forest to die. Gabe leapt out of the Jeep and ran back into the trees. Sam sighed unhappily. Gabe returned with two large heavy-duty black plastic trash bags full to the stretching point. He opened the back end of the Jeep and gently stuffed the bags into place right where he’d left room for them. He covered the bags with a blanket, slammed the back end shut and the pungent smell of marijuana filled the car.

Stunned again, Jesse fumed. How could he? This is all his fault. If he didn’t sell dope, he would never have gone to the pen, Sam wouldn’t be so messed up, he wouldn’t have made that phone call and none of this would be happening! Ice cold fear coursed through her. Fear for herself and Sam. She glanced angrily at Gabe but his face was set like granite, concentrating on getting them past Socorro. What could she say? He offered to help and she accepted. He also made it clear she was not to tell him how to live his life.

Just south of Socorro they turned off the back road to drive through town because the ditch bank road does not continue past Escondida. They drove down California Street with their hearts beating in their throats, holding their breaths all the way. They were passing Kentucky Fried Chicken with three blocks to go when Jesse noticed at the gas gauge. Without a word she touched Gabe’s arm and pointed to the gauge. They were driving on empty.

“Jesse, I could kiss you!” he exclaimed. He was so intent on getting through Socorro he hadn’t checked. They pulled into the last station on the north end of town next to McDonalds. Gabe gave Sam the money to pay for the gas while he filled up the tank and Jesse cleaned the windshield.

They sat in the Jeep watching California Street. What on earth was keeping Sam? Gabe pulled away from the pumps, parked and went into the gas station to get Sam. Jesse got out of the Jeep. She leaned nervously against the car door, glanced up and down California Street and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally Gabe appeared hauling Sam by the arm.

“I had to go!” Sam wailed.

They pulled out onto I-25 each of them heaving a sigh of relief. They made it out of town. If they made it past the Bernardo turnoff, they would be home free each thought silently.

Still Gabe was enormously relieved. He smiled and tapped the steering wheel, he whistled, he laughed, he turned on the radio. He turned around and smiled at Sam and then reached back and tousled his hair telling him, “We made it, kid.”

“Don’t!” Sam growled and angrily pushed his father’s hand away.

They topped the hill above the 19 mile rest stop. Gabe groaned. A State Police roadblock was stopping traffic just down the hill from them.

“What is it?” Sam cried. “Is it the police? Are they going to take me away?” he asked in a high terrified voice. His beautiful gray eyes grew enormous and tear-filled again.

Gabe turned off the radio and answered him lifelessly. “No, it isn’t the Socorro Police. It’s a State Police roadblock and no matter what happens, Sam, do not say anything. Don’t say a word.”

Gabe’s life was about to collapse around him once again. He groaned again and dropped his head to the steering wheel. He slowed down and pulled off the road behind the car ahead of him. This was as bad as anything that ever happened to Gabe. If he’d had anything in his stomach he would have puked then and there. What could he do? If he tried to turn around on the highway, that wouldn’t be too suspicious now would it? He rolled his head in agony on the steering wheel.

Abruptly he dug into his coat pocket, turned to Jesse and stuffed a wad of bills wrapped up in a rubber band into her palm. “Whatever you do, Jesse, whatever you say, the money is yours, it has nothing to do with me.” He inched the Jeep forward. “You can live on that for . . . for weeks. I was headed up to Albuquerque. 9223 Corrales Road, that’s Dennis Blake, my landlord’s address. My ex-partner.”

A State Police Officer approached the Jeep. Gabe rolled the window down. “Sam, put the leash on Ozone. Dennis and his wife are expecting us, Jesse. You can stay with them for a day or two, maybe a week. They know Sam. If anything happens to you, he can stay with them. Officer Lopez, fancy meeting you here.” Gabe handed Officer Lopez his driver’s license and proof of insurance.

Even from several feet away Officer Bernie Lopez smelled the marijuana. He leaned down and looked into the Jeep and the skunky odor wafted out into his face like a cloud of perfume. “I want you to pull up further off the road, Mr. Hunter, and I want everyone in the vehicle to get out. We want to search your car for an illegal substance. Do we have your permission?”

Gabe pulled off the road far onto the shoulder muttering to himself, “Illegal substance. Wonder what that could be?” Gabe got out and signaled everyone else to get out. He didn’t speak, he didn’t try to reassure Sam, since he knew the situation was hopeless. He reached into the back seat, grabbed Ozone’s leash and she followed him out of the car. Jesse got out and put her arm around an unresisting Sam, pulling him close.

First they endured the humiliation of a pat down and search of their clothing and pockets, then they stood at the side of the road in the darkness while the officers searched the Jeep.

A continuous line of cars passed them, stopping for a moment before driving on, including one Federal Government vehicle driven by FBI Agent Turney. Turney handed over his license to a State Police Officer all the while complaining to Foster about having once again just missed catching Dr. Wren, this time out in San Antonio, ten miles south of Socorro. Pulling away from the roadblock Turney continued his endless complaint, “If we hadn’t, if you hadn’t insisted we stop for coffee we would have been there in time to question her. This is all your fault, Foster. You keep insisting there’s something to this idiotic . . .”

Foster peered through the pitch-black night at the silhouette of three people and a dog huddled on the far side of the Jeep they were passing. He stretched sleepily under the confines of his seatbelt and turned to Turney with his apology. “I’m sorry, Mac. But how could I know? We’ll catch up with her one of these days.”

Jesse watched Officer Lopez walk by her clearly on purpose. Bernie had tried to take a class from her last spring but it proved too difficult for him and he’d ended up dropping the course.

“Dr. Wren?” he asked in disbelief, peering at her through the darkness.

“Bernie.” She smiled at Officer Lopez and hugged Sam, kissing the boy on the cheek, holding him protectively, her stance, her expression, her every movement and gesture a picture of injury and insult.

Bernie Lopez hemmed and hawed and cleared his throat uncomfortably.

“Please tell them to be careful with my computers,” Jesse told him.

Minute by minute their possessions piled up on the roadside as the officers searched everything for the marijuana they knew must be there; every box, book and bag, every article of clothing. One by one the officers moved the objects to a different pile while they searched. Despite the fact that the drug dog repeatedly signaled the presence of the drug either in the back end of the Jeep or in the blanket now heaped on the side of the road, the officers persisted. With flashlights and sticks tapping they crawled under the car examining every inch of the engine and body of the car. Still they found nothing.

Gabe, no longer mumbling, stood tense and alert next to Jesse and Sam. They should have discovered the dope the moment they opened the back end. What the hell is going on here?

Gabe wasn’t the only one wondering what was going on. Bernie Lopez decided it was his duty to find out. He stepped close to Jesse, shining his light on the three of them. “Going on a trip, Dr. Wren?” he asked conversationally.

Jesse put her arm around Gabe’s waist and Gabe jumped a little at the unexpected gesture. Jesse would have laughed out loud at Gabe’s startled reaction if this hadn’t been such a desperate moment. She leaned against him affectionately hoping his expression would not give her away. “Gabe and Sam and I are driving out to California. As you know I have leave until next fall and my professor at Berkeley has invited me to come out there to live and work and I accepted his invitation. You know how much I miss Berkeley.” She looked shyly at Officer Lopez and then smiled sweetly up at Gabe. Gabe and Sam said nothing.

Officer Lopez was deeply embarrassed. The search was turning up nothing.

To make certain Officer Lopez harbored no doubts, Jesse stepped away from Gabe and Sam, all the while talking to Officer Lopez quietly and earnestly. “I know what you’re thinking, Bernie, but you’re wrong. He’s a good man. He’s gentle and generous, patient and kind. Just because a man makes a mistake or two in life that doesn’t give you people the right to always assume he’s guilty of something. Frankly I’m very hurt and disappointed.”

The officers who searched the Jeep approached Jesse and Officer Lopez. “The Jeep is clean,” they told him. They stepped closer and talked quietly, admitting the paucity of their search. “ . . . not a single seed, not a leaf, no roaches, no ashes, no--”

Officer Lopez ordered them to put everything back exactly the way they found it. Bernie Lopez was thankful for the darkness. His face was scarlet and burning. Curtly he apologized, “Mr. Hunter, Dr. Wren, I’m sorry for the inconvenience of the search.”

Jesse stood stiffly, the picture of innocence wrongly accused.

Cars and trucks continued to pass slowly through the roadblock. A salesman on his way from the Midwest to California handed his license and proof of insurance to one of the State Police Officers. The officer examined the papers and leaned over to look through the darkness at the salesman’s small passenger. “Traveling with your father?” the officer asked the child conversationally.

The girl remained silent.

“Yeah, that’s right,” the salesman spoke for her. “Sometimes she makes the run to California and back with me. Otherwise, since the divorce we wouldn’t get to see each other at all. Isn’t that right, Stella?”

“That’s right, Daddy,” the child spoke at last.

The salesman pulled away from the roadblock. He knew, with all that manpower back there, he would not encounter another officer of the law for many miles to come. He stared over at the little girl’s profile. “Kinda lonely over there isn’t it, Stella?” he asked.

She remained silent, staring straight ahead as though the man had not spoken.

“Daddy doesn’t give out cross country rides for free, you know,” the man sneered.

She hunched closer to the door.

“What did you think? That I would pick up a little piece of trash like you and haul your ass all the way across country for nothing?” he growled.

Still the child did not respond.

Finally he demanded, “Get over here and pay up, I’ve waited long enough for this.”

Still she did not respond. He reached over, grabbed her by the neck, dragged her across the seat and forced her head down towards his crotch. “Unzip my pants,” he ordered squeezing hard, causing enough pain to ensure compliance, or so he thought.

She struggled silently, arms flying, fingers scratching. Twisting and fighting against his grip, she managed at last to face his wrist and bit him there, her teeth grinding down on his flesh as hard as her jaws were able. He screamed and let go of her neck trying to shake her off, the car swerving as he did so. At last, spitting and gagging at the taste of his blood in her mouth, she released him. Instantly he backhanded her with enough force to slam her back against the door.

“I’m bleeding to death, you little bitch! Now you’re really going to pay,” the man yelled, reaching for her again.

Terror stricken beyond silence the girl screamed, “Let me out! Stop the car!” She kicked at the man and the dashboard. The dash cracked under impact of her pounding feet, knobs and dials popping, flying through the car. She grabbed his papers from the dash and ripped them to shreds, kicking and screaming all the while, “Let me out! Stop! Let me go!”

“Stop it, you little whore! Stop it, or I’ll kill you! I’m gonna get you!” the man was screaming himself now.

He tried to grab her again, now merely to stop the havoc she was wreaking, but screaming, kicking and fighting she scrambled into the back seat, ripping and tearing at the clothes hanging there. Screaming she ripped open his briefcase and shredded his papers. She grabbed his laptop and banged it repeatedly against the car window. The window cracked under the third blow of the laptop. With the fourth blow the window shattered and the laptop flew from the car bouncing and clattering along the highway.

Back on the road, Gabe drove. Jesse and Sam sat in tense silence for a few moments. Finally, “Where is it?” Gabe demanded.

“In Socorro,” she told him. “I threw the bags in the McDonalds trash bin back there.”

“Did anyone see you do it?” he asked, his voice low and angry.

“No. The guy in the gas station was busy watching what you and Sam were doing. And McDonalds was a mad house as usual. It’s dinner time.”

He snarled at her, “Do you know how much money that stuff was worth?”

Gabe was angry. Angry with Sam for starting this horrible chain of events. Angry with Jesse for being there and greatly complicating his life. And most of all Gabe was raging blind angry with himself.

Jesse on the other hand was truly astonished that he had not stopped the car to throw her out on the road. Even now she fully expected him to. She spit back anyway, “No, and I don’t care!” She threw his wad of money at him, “ And take your rotten money back too!”

“Oh you’re so pure and good, you’re far too pure to touch my dirty money. But I’ve noticed you enjoy the food it buys and the roof it keeps over your head. I suppose you thought I would thank you!”

“Yes! Seeing as how you and I could both be sitting with our hands cuffed behind our backs in the back of a State Police car and Sam could be on his way to Springer, it did occur to me that you might express a little gratitude. Don’t you get it? You almost got arrested back there. You are so arrogant. Everybody told me you were arrogant and, man, were they right. You think laws and rules are for everybody but you. You’re above them all. You get arrested and go to jail for growing dope and here you are growing it again. That is so screwed. And you know the worst thing about all this? The very worst thing?”

“No, but I’m sure I’m about to find out.”

“You give those people power over you, Gabe. By choosing to do what you do, you give men with minds not even a tenth of yours power over you. They’re idiots compared to you and you hand it all over to them. You might as well stand there and say, hey screw me, guys. It’s just what I’m waiting for. Why do you do it? What are you punishing yourself for? It’s their job, Gabe. You give them the right to interfere in your life, you give them the power to decide what’s going to happen to you and Sam. Sam needs you! You cannot do this to him. You are all he has. You want him to act like there are laws and rules, but apparently you don’t have to obey any of them. What kind of logic is that for a boy to follow? I need you! You are no good to me at all in a jail cell.”

“I’m no good to you without any money either. Tell me this, miss high and mighty, exactly what are we going to live on, how are we going to buy food? Did you think of that when you were throwing away ten thousand dollars worth of dope?”

“Well now, I guess we’re about to find out how good you are at taking your own advice, aren’t we? This’ll be a real test of your words, won’t it, Gabe?”

“What words?”

“Step out of the light into the darkness, you said. You don’t always have to be in control, you said, and uh, something about new and unexpected things around the corner.”

“Shut up, Jesse, just . . . shut up. I have to figure out how we’re going to eat!” he snapped managing to make her feel guilty despite her righteous position.

The Jeep swerved slightly when he tried to avoid the pieces of the laptop. She faced the road making some calculations of her own.

On a long open stretch a few miles ahead of them a car slowed down, pulled off the highway, stopped for a moment and then drove on, leaving behind a small figure. The hitchhiker raised a hand, thumb out, as the Jeep’s lights swept past. Everyone in the Jeep saw the hitchhiker clearly. Gabe and Jesse looked at each other astonished.

Sam turned to watch the receding figure. “It’s a kid!” he exclaimed.

Gabe sighed heavily, slowed down, pulled off the road and backed up. The figure ran toward them. Sam opened the car door, the slight figure scrambled in, shut the door and huddled silently in the corner, her hand twisting around the door handle while they pulled back out onto the highway. It was a girl about twelve years old and she wasn’t wearing a jacket.

Jesse turned around and asked the child, “What on earth are you doing out on the road alone at night like this in the middle of the winter? Where is your coat? My lord, child, don’t you know it’s dangerous? Why did they let you out like that? Was that your parents? Where are your parents? Where are you going?”

The girl shook her head and began to cry. Her sobs were soft barely audible harsh little choking sounds followed by shaky in breathings. But when a curious Ozone popped her head up over the back of the seat and pressed her nose onto the girl’s head, sniffing and snuffing at her hair, an incredibly high pitched unending scream of absolute terror burst from the child.

Sam and Jesse yelled at Ozone and the child, everyone but Gabe and Ozone making noise and adding to the pandemonium. Back, Ozone! Get back! Stop it! No! Bad dog! No, no, she won’t hurt you. She just wants to smell you. It’s all right. You’re all right. The Jeep literally swelled, the doors, windows, sides and top expanding explosively from the noise and chaos inside.

Gabe groaned and twisted his hands on the steering wheel until finally, he yelled, “SHUUUUTTTUPPPP!”

Silence fell for a moment in the car.

Jesse shot Gabe a fiery look and then turned back to the child who had begun to snuffle again. “Aw, what’s the matter?” Jesse asked. “Don’t cry. Don’t be afraid. That’s Ozone. She wanted to smell you, that’s all. You’re safe with us,” she assured the child. But no matter how she cajoled and pleaded she could not get the child to stop weeping and respond to her. Jesse turned around and faced front, giving up for the moment.

Gabe began to mumble, “Man, as if things aren’t bad enough we have to get stuck with jailbait back there, who can’t stop crying or even tell us where she wants to go. She was probably raped by the driver of that car, or her father, or diddled by her uncle and the minute we let her out of the car she’s going to accuse every one of us of hopping in the sack with her and forcing her . . .”

“Shut up, Gabe. We couldn’t leave her on the road and you know it. What if somebody horrible had picked her up? She’s very lucky it was us.”

“Oh yes, she’s sooo lucky it was us! Less than two minutes ago you were telling me I’m just about the worst lowest most horrible person in the world. A terrible father, a dirty low down . . .”

“Shhh!”

The girl had stopped crying and was listening, her eyes enormous. Jesse turned around and the child shrank away from her stare. Jesse turned back shaking her head.

Gabe continued, “If she doesn’t talk before we get to Albuquerque we’re going to Dennis’ first. You and Sally can take her to the police. I don’t want to have anything to do with this. Maybe you can figure out why. Listen to me talking about going to the police! I can’t believe it,” he finished with an angry grumble.

At the mention of the police though, the child began to cry again in earnest, speaking at last, sobbing and begging, “Mr., please don’t take me to the police!” Screaming and sobbing, she grabbed Jesse’s shoulder. “Mrs., don’t let Mr. take me to the police. Please, please, please you can’t--.”

The child wailed hysterically and Gabe whose nerves along with everyone else’s in the car had long ago turned to crystal and shattered barked, “Ok! No police! We won’t go to the police. For tonight, we won’t go to the police.”

Instantly she was silent. They continued on to Albuquerque all of them drained and exhausted. Both children fell asleep before they reached their destination. Dennis Blake and his wife Sally were waiting for them. The lights were on outside their old Corrales adobe on the far outskirts of Albuquerque and they had a place for everyone, even the little hitchhiker.

“A little something we picked up between Socorro and the Bernardo turn off,” Gabe explained to Dennis, Sally and Will, their 16 year old son. “Can’t get a word out of her and she flips completely out at the mention of the police, so I guess we’re stuck with her for the night.”

To Jesse’s surprise Dennis and Sally accepted this without further explanation, making up another bed for the child on the floor of the room where Jesse was to sleep. After dinner and showers for everyone Sam disappeared almost instantly into Will’s room. Jesse would sleep in the extra bedroom and Gabe could have the couch in the living room.

For the first time in several days Jesse slept in a room of her own. Almost. She stared at the ceiling thinking about the child who lay on the floor next to her, thinking about what it would be like to be running away at the ripe old age of twelve. Then she almost laughed out loud at herself. Here she was running away at twenty-nine. She looked back over the past few days of her life. What an incredible . . .

At a light touch on her shoulder she turned to see the child standing in the dim light from the open bedroom door, staring at her. She’d cleaned up nicely. Though she was a blond with thick curly honey colored hair and heavily lashed enormous green eyes, her features and dusky golden skin spoke of a multiracial heritage. Jesse stared back at the child, experiencing a wave of empathy and sympathy unlike anything she had ever before experienced in life. She lifted the covers and the little girl slipped into bed with her. After a shaky sigh the child snuggled close and gratefully closed her eyes.

Jesse lay awake listening to Gabe talk with his friends in the kitchen. He told them everything, from Sam’s troubles at school and the 911 call, to Jesse’s getting rid of the dope at the gas station. When Dennis and Sally heard this they were speechless for a moment, until Gabe told them about the roadblock. Then they both burst out laughing. You lucky sonovabitch! Dennis told him over and over again. She heard Gabe say, I know. Who is she? they asked. After a moment’s silence he said, She’s a physicist from Tech. She could just see his big shoulders shrug as he answered them. She waited for him to tell all, but he said no more.

Jesse was so torn. She hadn’t expected to still be alive. Yet she was alive . . . because Gabe asked her to be. He kept her alive by promising to help her when and if she needed it. The doctors said she barely had minutes to live, to be conscious, yet here she was alive and feeling better, more alive than she had ever felt in her entire life. What was going on? She was still terrified of being beyond Gabe’s reach for even a minute or two, but when she examined that feeling she found it oddly detached from her fear of becoming paralyzed. At the same time she saw herself as a burden. It was a new and uncomfortable feeling for her. She couldn’t live off this man indefinitely without contributing to the group’s well being. And what if she did live for a much longer time than anticipated? What then?

She fell asleep listening to Dennis and Sally and Gabe discussing Dennis’ parents’ house. “ . . . in the field next to the river about a block north of this house. It’s been shut up for the last two months since Dennis’ mother died. It’s an old rattle trap, nothing fancy, but you’re welcome to stay there for a few days, maybe even a week or two. It’s so hard to find a place to rent when you have a big dog like Ozone . . .”

Chapter Eleven

Dark and deep, the night sky burned alive with billions upon billions of galaxies and stars, shining, seething, spinning, and far, far below headlights from a bus lit up a millimeter of road ahead of it, creeping like a luminescent microbe over the high flat floor of the caldera. Inside, passengers sipped coffee from thermoses or slept, while ahead of them, the VLA tracked the distant stars with the turning of the Earth. Twenty four hours a day, 365 days a year.

The bus turned into the complex and drove past Agents Turney and Foster parked in the visitor parking lot. The two agents had been waiting for the bus from Socorro for a little over half an hour.

Inside the administration building they questioned the Director of the VLA.

“Would it be possible for us to look at the information you received at a specific moment?” Foster asked.

“No problem. If you know the moment you want to look at we can show it to you,” he told them.

“We want to see what you have for December 20, 14:03:44 and 14:03:45. And we want to look at late yesterday afternoon, 17:31:15 and 17:31:16.”

The Director lifted his eyebrows and nodded. “You want to look at the increase in amplitude that happened when those two little earthquakes hit the Socorro area, don’t you? We noticed the one yesterday and then we went back and looked at December 20. Unusual stuff. Very unusual.”

“What do you mean by unusual? What does it mean to you people?”

“You people?”

“You physicists.”

“It doesn’t mean anything. We can’t tell you a thing about either event,” the administrator admitted.

“You mean you can’t or you won’t,” Turney asked, a slight edge to his voice.

The Director’s mouth turned down, he shook his head. “Can’t. We have no idea what it means. Both events are anomalies. We’ve never seen anything like it before. Happens all the time in physics. Shit happens and we have no idea what it is or why it happened . . .”

Up in Albuquerque, a little before dawn, Will caught the bus to school. Half an hour later Dennis left for work and a little after that Sam and the girl sat eating a late breakfast while Sally, Gabe and Jesse looked on as the little hitchhiker wolfed down three full plates of bacon and eggs and toast.

Between famished gulping bites that filled her mouth to overflowing, she told her story. Though they could hardly believe it, the child insisted she had made it to New Mexico all the way from Miami.

“My mom’s dead,” she blurted out, her expression turning hard and cynical. “She died back there in Miami a year and a half ago. She died of the pneumonias. We didn’t have any money for doctors or hospitals or nothing like that, so she died. I wasn’t with her when she died. They just called the foster place where I was at and told me she was dead.”

Her face turned even harder and more cynical. “I don’t know who my dad was. Neither did my mom. She was a whore,” she said in a flat voice. She paused mid chew waiting for their reaction, waiting for the censure she knew was coming, waiting for the slightest gesture away from her. No one at the table moved. She scowled and belligerently thrust her chin out guessing at their thoughts. “I don’t got AIDS or nothin. I been tested. Lotsa times. You’re not gonna get nothin from me. I don’t do drugs and I’m not a whore. I ain’t done it yet. And I ain’t smoked nothin or done none of that stuff either. My mom protected me when I was little. She protected me and I know all about it. I know all about all that stuff. And I protected myself at those foster places. Ain’t nobody gonna get me if I don’t want it!” she exclaimed tears filling her eyes.

When the people sitting at the table with her still did not speak or move, her belligerence and hostility grew. “I ran away lotsa times. They took me away from her. But before she died and after she died I ran away. And I’m gonna run away. Put me in one of those places and I’ll run away,” she promised. Her green eyes glittered with hatred. “This is the farthest I ever got. I had a lot of practice. This time I made plans. I baby-sat and saved the money. I stole from those bastards and saved it. I caught a bus out of Miami. Made up the papers I needed for the bus man, signed em myself and stayed on the buses til I ran outta money. Got as far as Turner Falls, Oklahoma before I had to start hitchin. Told my rides I was only goin to the next town to meet my dad. That way they’d believe me. Then I’d catch another ride. Had it all planned out. Slept under one bridge and I ain’t had no trouble with my rides til last night when that bastard tried to make me suck his dick.”

Here the child reached up and grabbed her tangled hair up into a makeshift ponytail. She twisted in her chair and pointed revealing the back of her neck. “See what that bastard did to me?”

Her scrawny neck was covered in bruises, scratches and deep cuts. Appalled, Jesse stood up.

But the child would have none of it. She gestured Jesse back to her chair with a hostile dismissing wave of her hand and a tough, “Aw forget it. I’ve had lots worse. Lots. And you shoulda seen what I done to him! Bit the hell out of him til he let go of me, tore the shit out of his car and all his papers, broke his back window and threw his plastic box out. So he kicked me out on the road. Sonovabitch kept my coat and backpack too. Now I gotta get new maps. I’m headed for Las Vegas. I’m gonna be a singer there.” She paused again waiting for their reaction to the singer part. When there was none she went on. “My name is Stella Jones.”

They all thought the same thing at the same moment. The only thing she was lying about was her name.

She studied the four of them. Then she said, “Stella, you know from the movie, where the man yells . . .” here she stood and holding her arms and fists out in front of her like a big man she screamed, “STELLA! STELLA!” giving a flawlessly agonized imitation of Marlon Brando in A Street Car Named Desire.

At last, a reaction. She smiled and laughed at their expressions. Her laugh was a throaty satisfied sound. She flopped back down in her chair and explained nonchalantly, “My mom was just crazy about that guy. You know, I coulda been a contenda. So she named me Stella. Said I’d be lucky if I ever had a man yell after me like that some day.”

The adults stared. She was a charming and disarming conundrum, tough as nails, sharp as a razor and no more than a little girl. Despite her playfulness concerning her name and her coarse bravado over her life in Miami and her adventures on the road, she continued to cry openly, fearfully, pitifully at the mention of police or other authorities.

Sam grumbled about crybaby tactics but neither Jesse nor Gabe had the stomach to face dealing with her that morning. Each time they broached the subject the child vehemently and tearfully denied that any one was looking for her. “Who would be lookin for me here? I’m from Florida. They don’t want me. Nobody wants me. They just want to stick me back in a foster home where I get treated like shit. I won’t go back. I won’t. I can take care of myself. You see how far I got. Please, please, please let me stay with you for another day or two. I won’t bother you for more than two or three days. I can do a little work for you and you can pay me so I can make it to Las Vegas,” she pleaded.

Jesse looked at Gabe and he sighed a deep put upon sigh, which she knew was very justified.

But he surprised her again. “Ok,” he agreed shaking his head at his own stupidity. “What’s the difference between being thrown in jail for kidnapping or . . . whatever?” he mumbled pushing his chair away from the table.

He stood in the center of Sally’s kitchen as though he was suddenly undecided whether to go or to stay. Then he blurted, “I have errands to run today. Will you be all right, Jesse, with Sally here? Is that all right with you?”

Jesse’s expression registered first, her surprise, then the brief flash of fear that stabbed at her. She wanted to ask him if he meant to be gone all day but she knew that if he announced it like that he did indeed plan to be away all day.

Sally witnessed this exchange with incredulous interest.

Jesse looked down at her coffee cup then up at Gabe. “It’s Ok Gabe, go ahead. I’ll be all right.” After the last few days with Gabe and Sam, and especially after yesterday, her certain and immanent collapse now seemed less certain, less immanent to both of them. And for the first time in days, Jesse had plans of her own.

In little over an hour they moved their few possessions into Dennis’ parents’ house and Gabe was on his way into Albuquerque.

At the Blake’s house, Jesse offered to pay Sally to watch Sam and Stella and asked if there were buses running from Corrales into Albuquerque. “I have to see my lawyer,” she explained, telling Sally briefly about the hold up on her grant since her collapse.

“Nonsense, take my car. I’ll be glad to watch the kids for you,” Sally told her.

While she drove into Albuquerque, Agents Turney and Foster were back down in Socorro, investigating yet another strange physical event apparently connected to Dr. Jesse Wren. In the Geology Department’s Map Room at New Mexico Tech, the agents examined a map spread out over the top of several huge map cabinets.

“The center of this one was right here, a little over twelve miles from here, just outside San Antonio,” the head of the Geology Department explained, drawing a small x to mark the exact location of the quake. “It wasn’t much, just a 1 on the Richter scale. Didn’t last more than a second or two.”

Turney and Foster stared, identical expressions of frustration and disgust passing over their faces.

“We were there yesterday when it happened!” Foster exclaimed. “Either we were there when it happened or we missed it by minutes. Would you say it was similar in intensity to the earthquake that shook the NRAO building on December 20th?” he asked.

“Yeah, the two events were similar. It was a small, and around here, common event,” Dr. Sable explained in a disinterested voice. But he could see the agents were very interested. “You wouldn’t have felt or seen anything,” he tried to explain. “You would notice a vehicle passing on a nearby road more than you would a quake that low on the Richter scale.

The “idiotic” case Turney and Foster were working on grew more bizarre by the minute. Yet they remained uncertain of their quarry or even if there was a quarry. This last detail was too bizarre to believe. Anomalous jumps in electromagnetic amplitudes above the sites of earthquakes? Earthquakes that followed people? For the second time in as many days, they looked through Gabe’s now empty house, finding only one wet greasy receipt for groceries from Furrs stuck to the bottom of a plastic pail under the sink, a broken metal detector propped behind a door and a few forgotten toys under the furniture. Nothing of any use to them.

Standing in exactly the spot where Jesse stood on several occasions to play her violin, they turned in a circle among the greasewood, Turney alternately studying the map in his hand and checking his handheld DGP. “According to this map we are at ground zero.”

Slowly, meticulously, they walked through the greasewood, sage and mesquite, searching the ground minutely, open to anything that might be a clue to anything. Mostly they found footprints in the damp sand. Sam and Leonard’s footprints, Gabe and Jesse’s footprints. Ozone’s, the puppies’ and the neighbor’s dog’s footprints. They saw pieces of plastic and paper, rusted cans and glittering bits of broken glass and a few small green plastic army men belonging to Sam. Several yards out though, Turney spied a small pile of loose soil beneath a greasewood. He squatted down and dug with his hands.

“It’s a rat hole or something one of the kids buried,” Foster said.

“Could be,” Turney conceded, but he kept on digging. “Go get the shovel out of the trunk,” he ordered.

They excavated a two foot hole before Turney donned a pair of plastic gloves and reached down to pick up a small object. The two men stood up, examining it in the sunlight. It looked like a small metallic lozenge, but it had no brand name, nor any other identifying marks on it. It could be something. It could be nothing. Turney dropped it into a plastic bag. Then step by step they repeated the search. They found nothing more.

As their car turned left on the blacktop a quarter of a mile away, a very tall slender man with a thick mane of snow white hair appeared on that high desert floor above the Rio Grande. For a long moment he remained quiet and utterly still in the low brush. Then like the two men who had been there moments earlier he turned in a circle examining the horizon all a round him.

Satisfied that he was alone and unobserved he bent down beside the two foot hole the agents left beneath the creosote bush. He reached far down into the hole touching the earth there, digging and sifting the soil with his fingers. He stood and brushed his hands off, shaking his head unhappily, his gaze following the distant glint of Turney and Foster’s car as it drove north.

Much later, back up in Albuquerque, Regional Director Raymond Burke frowned down at the papers on his desk. He looked up at Agents Foster and Turney. “If I read this right, you’re starting to believe there’s something to Scot Swineburn’s moronic story. What I want to know is, how is it a perfunctory and no more than nominal investigation into some pimply faced kid’s insane story is taking this much time? One day. One day is all you should have spent on this!” He shook his head. “What are you, a couple of pussies? I can’t believe you two are having this much trouble locating a goddamned female academic for a simple interview. I want you to wind this thing up. Find that woman and do it soon or I’m going to kill the whole thing! There are more important things for you to work on.”

Agent Foster was not about to let the time spent on this case go undefended. “But what about the physicians’ reports? What about the incoming radiation jumping around like that? And the earthquakes? You have to admit it’s strange. What about the fact that she has eluded us? She has to know we’re looking for her. We’ve talked to her colleagues, her students, the people who work in both the buildings where she offices, her lawyer. She’s made no effort to contact us and she’s always a step ahead of us. Now she’s hooked up with this Hunter, this felon. What if we do find her and she refuses to cooperate?”

Burke shoved their report aside muttering, “Find her and bring her in. I’ll contact Bethesda. Consider her hostile and bring her in!”

Chapter Twelve

Slicing a tomato at the kitchen counter and humming along to Ry Cooder and V. M. Bhatt’s A Meeting by the River, Jesse swayed against the kitchen counter, her thoughts flowing mellifluently with the sensuous conversation between guitar, sitar, tabla and dumbek. She thought about getting a guitar when her grant money came through and wondered if Sam would like to learn to play an instrument. Then she laughed out loud at herself. Look at me. Dreaming about tomorrow. Counting on tomorrow.

Gabe opened the kitchen door to the smell of lasagna and garlic bread. A yellow hard hat swung from his hand and he was smiling. “I feel like celebrating,” he announced stepping into the room, “How about we all go out to . . .” He paused taking in the fact that Jesse had dinner already prepared.

Jesse studied the hard hat in his hand.

He crossed to the refrigerator and opened it, staring at the contents that hadn’t been there that morning. Eggs, milk, bread, fruit, meat, vegetables and more. “Where did all this come from?” he asked. “Did Sally and Dennis bring this stuff over?”

“No, I bought the groceries,” she told him.

“Holding out, eh? Had a little cash in reserve? Saving it for an emergency?” he teased.

“No, I didn’t have any reserves.” She stared down at the salad she was preparing.

“Then where did all this come from?” He glanced around noticing that her things were set up and ready for work in the next room. He also noticed the neat pile of cash on the counterpane next to her research papers.

“That’s for you,” she admitted, her heart sinking into the pit her stomach.

He set the hard-hat down on the counterpane and picked up the money, counting it. She watched his face in the mirror, watched his expression darkening, hardening.

“Don’t bother,” she whispered. “It’s nine thousand three hundred. It’s to pay for the stuff I threw away. It’s not ten thousand. I had to pay my attorney a thousand and then I bought some groceries and I kept some for . . .” As she spoke his expression grew more grim. “We can live on it for months, Gabe. I told Sally we have some money now and she said she and Dennis were thinking about renting this place. They just hadn’t gotten around to cleaning it up and painting it since his mother died. She said she’d talk to Dennis about it tonight, but she was certain he’d say yes, since we have the money . . .”

“Where did you get this?” he demanded.

He looked around for her violin case. That morning before he left, he placed both her violin and her telescope on top of a glass fronted bookcase that stood against the wall in the living room.

Jesse told him, “I don’t need those things, Gabe. All I need is my computer like you said. What good are those things to me when I’m dead? It’s not like I sold my hair or anything,” she joked trying to lighten the mood.

“You’re not dead, Jesse, and that hardhat isn’t a comb,” he growled.

“I can get them back. When my grant money gets out of court and they start paying me I’ll get them back. Mr. Pimentel said he’d hold my violin for me. We can live on this money, Gabe. I expected to be paralyzed, dead by now. I really did. I never expected to be a burden to you like this. Who knows how long I’ll continue this way. You have to let me contribute. At least pay my own way . . .”

“You’re not a burden to me. Did I say you were a burden? I got a job today. You didn’t need to sell your things like some destitute . . .”

“I’m not destitute! And I can take care of myself, thank you. At least I was doing a good job of it before all this started happening. Better than . . .”

He finished for her, “Better than I? Well of course. Pick anybody in the world and you’ll find someone who can take care of things better than I!”

“Oh don’t be so melodramatic. If you weren’t so low about yourself you’d see how ridiculous this all is. If you and I were a couple . . . or something . . . any income I contributed would be welcome, not an insult. What’s so important about you doing it all anyway? Have you got some kind of stake in me being dependent on you or what? What’s in this for you, Gabe? Some kind of acceptance like you said. You know, to me, that may be the weirdest thing about this whole damn thing. You wanting that from me or anyone else. You talk about not being accepted by a bunch of drunken yahoos in a bar that anybody else would say who cares what they think? But apparently you care. And here I’ve been with you for . . . almost a week and all I see is that people do love you, Gabe. Dozens of people love you and accept you. Many more people love you than love me. Good people. Kind and generous people. Some of the things you’ve done in your life may have cut you off from those who are your peers in your field but from my experience they aren’t any better than the people I see around you who love you. So whence this black hole in your heart, Gabe?” She up grabbed her coat and swung out the kitchen door. “I’m going to find Sam and that girl. Dinner is ready if you can bring yourself to eat something I provided!”

She headed out through the cottonwood trees toward the riverbank. Even before the trees and grass thinned at the river’s edge she could see the brilliant spot of blue of Sam’s coat. He was sitting despondently on a fallen log sunk in the sand near the water.

She sat down on the log next to him. He stared out over the muddy red water of the Rio Grande.

She picked up a stick and drew the letters SAM in the mud, watching them slowly fill with water. “He’s mad at me too,” she confessed, hoping for a response.

Still, he stared at the water. But Jesse saw tears well up in his eyes. He looked down at his hands and tears dropped from his lashes.

“Guess we’re both in the dog house,” she tried again. She sighed. So many unhappy people when two days ago they were hiking and picnicking and watching the stars together.

She sidled closer to him. He didn’t move. She put her arm around him. Again he didn’t move. She pulled him close. He pulled away, but not very hard. She opened her coat and wrapped him in it, holding him inside the circle of her warmth. His tears fell faster. At last he moved even closer, holding her tight, sobbing against her shoulder.

“Here now, what’s going on? Tell me, Sam, what’s the matter? Maybe I can help.”

He pulled away enough to look her in the eyes, his own begging her to tell him the truth. “What’s the matter with you, Jesse? Are you going to die?”

In that stunning moment she understood even more what Sam had done. The breaking into the house. The 911 phone call. She had to be honest. In a few short sentences she told him what happened to her in her office a few days before Christmas, not as graphically as she told Gabe, but she told him. He listened, his face growing more and more horrified. By the time she finished he was sitting at the other end of the log fully two yards from her.

“You mean the doctors think you’re going to die?” he demanded angrily.

“No. They think I’m going to fall into a coma and be paralyzed like I was before.”

Now it was Sam who understood all to well. “You are going to die!” he screamed. “I hate you! How could you do this? You’re just like she was! I hate you! I hate you!”

He jumped up from the log and ran down the sandy river’s edge and Jesse ran after him. He stumbled. She caught him and pulled him close as he beat his fists against her back and sobbed his heart out.

She held him, talking all the while, “Sam, nothing is certain. They told me this thing that’s going to happen to me would happen within hours, within days. It hasn’t happened yet. Maybe they’re wrong. Maybe it’s not going to happen. Stop crying. I’m beginning to think they were wrong. I think you’re father thinks they’re wrong. Did you know he got a job today?”

He calmed down enough to listen to her. She sat down again by the river’s edge and pulled him down to sit beside her. “Who am I like, Sam?” she asked.

“My mother,” he told her his golden gray eyes staring into hers. Then he looked away. He picked up a stone and threw it into the river. He mumbled, “No, you’re not. You’re not like her, not at all.”

“I know,” she admitted. She had looked through Gabe’s photo albums. In all of Gabe’s pictures, Annie was an incredibly beautiful woman, one of those tall statuesque blondes with the perfect features one associates with images of goddesses and movie stars. “Your mother was very beautiful, Sam,” she said quietly.

“No, that’s not what I mean,” he told her. “You don’t . . . you aren’t . . .” he hesitated. Sam had never talked about his mother to anyone, let alone admit something negative about her. Yet now he had someone to compare her to and the difference was so stark, so obvious, it simply made his life and his father’s life all the more puzzling to him. “She was crazy,” he admitted out loud for the first time.

Jesse said nothing, but he could see the shock on her face. “She was. You don’t act like she did. Nobody acts like her. She . . . she was crazy.”

She started to object. What could a child know about things like that? But her own memories stopped her. A child could know plenty. “How was she crazy? Tell me, Sam.”

“She committed suicide,” he told her matter of factly. “She tried it lots of times. It wasn’t an accident at all when she died. She did it on purpose. She left a note and everything.”

Her heart sank. How could Gabe do this to this child? Take her on? And how could he not? In that instant so many puzzling things about Gabe and Sam fell into place for Jesse. The chaotic shambles of their lives. Gabe’s single cryptic remark about his wife on the day of their winter picnic in the ruins. That day when Jesse shyly teased Gabe about the apparent lack of women in his life he’d glared at her for a long angry, deeply unhappy moment and said, “Annie was all I ever wanted. She’d a been good enough for me if she hadn’t been . . .” then he looked away at the far horizon, his jaw clenching. He’d sighed, shrugged sadly and finished his sentence, “if she hadn’t died in that car accident.”

“But that’s not . . .” Sam continued. “That wasn’t . . . she did crazy stuff all the time. Sometimes she was really happy. I mean really happy. Nuts happy about nothing at all. She would stay up all night and clean house, run around town, go out drinking and take pills. She didn’t sleep. For days and days she wouldn’t sleep. If Dad wasn’t there she would take me in the car and drive around all night, stop in bars and leave me in the car. She would bring men home and still leave me out in the car. Then for a while she would be Ok. She would be normal like everybody else. She was really beautiful then, like you said, Jesse, like you. Then all of a sudden she would be real unhappy. For no reason. Nothing was any different, she would just be unhappy. She would go to bed and not come out of her room for weeks. I used to come home from school and find her standing in her closet, crying in the same spot where she was standing when we left in the morning. She was always fighting with Dad and accusing him of doing things behind her back, having other women, going out drinking all day and night, when all he did was go to work. She accused him of trying to get rid of her, even of trying to murder her, when he never touched her. She attacked him with knives and hammers . . . boiling water, scissors . . . books, lamps, anything . . . everything.”

Sam began to cry again. “Once she took all of my things, my clothes and my toys and threw them out on the street and burned them. She tore up my dad’s books and notebooks. She hit me all the time and told me I was no good. She said everything was my fault. She said that if I’d never been born her life would have been good. Then . . . all of a sudden she would be really sorry, like she knew how weird she was. And she would tell us she was going to kill herself . . .”

Jesse pulled Sam, who was crying hard now, into her arms again.

“She tried lots of times. Every time the bathroom door was shut we wondered, was she doing it? My dad took all the locks off all the doors, even the outside ones, so she couldn’t lock us out. Then one day when I came home from school she was dead. She . . . she drove the car off the road into the bottom of the overpass.”

Jesse held Sam, rocking him gently. “Sam, your mom sounds just like my mom,” she whispered softly.

He pulled away to look at her, his eyes full of tears and disbelief. “She does?”

“She does. One time my father and I came home from one of my music lessons and every window in the house was broken, every mirror, every piece of glass in fact, and she was lying there on the floor all bloody and dead like.”

“Was she dead?” His eyes were enormous.

“No. But she wanted to be. And I wished she was dead. I used to really hate her.”

“You did?”

“With a passion. When I was little I believed her when she said it was my fault. I used to wonder why she didn’t love me. I tried so hard to make her love me. And she did love me, but only once in a while for very short periods. I couldn’t stand it. I wasn’t like my dad. I couldn’t understand and I couldn’t forgive the things she did. I was glad when she died. I’m not saying, I didn’t feel guilty and sad. I did. But my strongest feeling was relief. I lay there in bed the night she died and all I felt was relief and joy that she was dead. I was glad that it was finally over and our lives could be normal. No more living with what would she do next. No more waiting for her to attack me. Physically or verbally. No more listening to her attack my father. No more wondering would she be dead when I got home from school? Would she be lying sprawled across the kitchen table in a drunken or drugged stupor mumbling about dying, about how she wanted to die, about how she was going to do it. Oh how I hated her. Sure, I loved her, more than just about anything, but I hated her too. Sometimes I still hate her.”

“You do?” His eyes grew even larger. His tears were drying, fading into dirty streaks on his cheeks.

“I do, Sam. That’s probably never going to change. Those feelings may always be with me. As you get older they’re not as strong as they used to be, but they’re still there. I look at it this way. I saw a side of life that many people don’t ever see and in the end it made me a stronger person. It’s Ok to be angry, Sam. It’s even Ok to hate. But don’t hold onto that feeling so hard. Just kind of let it be . . . without holding on so hard. It’s when you hold on hard to something that you can’t see the moment for what it’s bringing you that’s new. That’s when it’s bad. That’s when things become destructive. Your dad told me, live now, live this minute. It’s the probably the best thing anybody ever told me.”

“It is?”

“It is,” she whispered, “I understand, Sam. I understand.”

He held her tightly. “Don’t die, Jesse,” he begged, “Please don’t die.”

With a gentle touch she turned his tear streaked face up to hers, “I tell you what, Sam, I don’t want to die. If I can help it at all I’m not going to die. But you know what?”

He shook his head.

“It was your dad who convinced me to stick around for a little while longer. When I found out there was something wrong with me I was so scared I didn’t want to live any more. Maybe I was a little bit like my mom and your mom. They must have been scared and sad most of the time. But now I’m glad to be alive. I’m so glad I got to be with you and know you for these past few days. I think I’m a little bit in love with you, you know that?”

He hiccuped and smiled tearfully at the notion.

“We all die someday, Sam. But I tell you this, as crazy as it’s been, what with me being sick, and then meeting your dad and meeting you and the 911 phone calls and road blocks and everything . . . well . . . the truth is, I wouldn’t trade this time with you and your dad for anything, not even for a Nobel Prize. What do you say we both do what your dad asked me to do? Take things one day at a time, live here and now, do the best we can and deal with tomorrow when it comes? How does that sound? Dinner’s ready and it’s getting dark and cold out here. Do you have any idea where Stella is? I thought she was with you.”

He looked around behind her. Jesse turned. Wrapped up in two of Jesse’s sweatshirts and an old jacket of Gabe’s and looking much smaller and younger than her twelve years, Stella stood less than three feet from Sam and Jesse, staring at them with big green almond shaped eyes.

“Wash your face, Sam, it’s all dirty. And wash your hands both of you,” Jesse followed the children into the house. Gabe had finished the salad she started and placed it along with the lasagna and garlic bread on the table. Sam headed for the bathroom with Stella trailing after him.

Before anything else could transpire, Gabe stepped in front of Jesse. He took her hand and gently placed the money she offered him earlier into her palm. “Thanks, Jesse,” he told her. “You keep it for now. If we need it . . . you’ll know it. Otherwise you keep it.”

She started to object but he wouldn’t let her, “No, you keep it. That dope you . . . got rid of wasn’t anything you would ever buy. I don’t feel right about you paying me for it. But . . . obviously if you want to contribute to our food and housing situation, that’s a different story.”

She nodded and slowly, hesitantly, she put the money back in her purse on the counterpane.

She stared at him. He stared at her and what each saw in the other’s gaze was a revelation to them both. They both looked away and then looked back. What the hell? she thought. “Did I ever mention that my mother was crazy?” she asked, sliding into the booth.

His jaw sagged. He sat down opposite her, staring in disbelief, both that it might be true and that she should bring it up at this moment.

She picked up the children’s plates and served up the food, continuing as though talking about the weather or local gossip, “What an incredible coincidence, don’t you think? When I was sixteen she shot herself in the head in the middle of our living room one night when my dad and I were in downtown San Francisco playing with the symphony there. She was manic-depressive. Nobody knew much about it back then. Didn’t know anything until Patty Duke came out with all that stuff about her life. So we kind of pretended it wasn’t happening. We hid it, coped with it the best we could. I can’t imagine anything more destructive. I really can’t. What I’m going through right now doesn’t begin to compare to the violence, the guilt, the shame, the hatred, the horror and the terror we all three shared. My dad tried so hard. He thought . . .”

She paused in dishing out the food and looked right at him. Tears filled her eyes, her voice tightened. “For a long time he was convinced he could do something. He thought that if he could figure it out right, he could fix it. And she wanted him to feel that way. When she was sickest she was desperate for someone, anyone, to fix it, mostly my dad or me. He tried everything, anything. Whatever she wanted he was willing. We know now the drugs and the drinking only make it worse for everybody. And we know that even with the lithium treatments they have now it can still be hopeless, because . . . many times they simply refuse to take it.

“My dad was willing to try anything to make things normal or even tolerable for us. It destroyed him. The fact that he couldn’t fix it. One time in one of his less distracted moments, when he was trying to console a little girl whose heart was broken he said, sometimes it feels to us on this side of what’s happening that your mother is one of those plate spinners. You know those people who get a dozen or more plates spinning on top of a bunch of sticks? We’re the plates and she’s the juggler and the only time she feels alive is when she’s got us all spinning. We spin and she feels . . . alive . . .happy. It isn’t you, and it isn’t me, Jesse. It’s her. You could slit your throat right in front of her, lay there bleeding and she’d say, that’s fine, that’s good, but what’re you going to do next for me? Sometimes, Jesse, love isn’t enough. The fact that we love her isn’t enough.

“You know? A thing like that does damage. A lot of damage. It takes time to recover from a thing like that. Kids are resilient, they’re growing, and that growing process is on their side. It destroyed my dad. What happened to my mother. Her sickness. Her paranoia, her misery, her irrational erratic behavior, her violence. How she died. His feelings of guilt and inadequacy. He didn’t have the strength or the time to recover. It lasted too long. He gave it all to her. Now you, Gabe, you’re holding on to that failure to fix it. Like him. You might have been part of it. But you weren’t all of it and it was never yours to fix. You live in the aftermath. You and Sam have been washed up on the shores of a disaster. And you’re still reeling. You go blindly from one chaotic self-destructive situation to the next without giving yourself a chance to even catch your breath. And that description includes me.”

The children slid into the booth, Sam guiltily avoiding his father’s eyes.

Gabe stared at Jesse every bit of his astonishment at her words still on his face. Finally he sneered, “Well thank you very much for that omniscient, erudite and preternaturally accurate analysis, Dr. Freud!”

Stella giggled and Gabe and Jesse both looked at her. Instantly the child looked down at her plate. As the meal progressed though Gabe’s expression grew warmer and more mellow. Here he was the one who told Jesse to live, to be more accepting of what came floating down the river in her direction and look what just floated smack into him.

Later, after dinner, Jesse sat facing her computer, once again considering the problem she’d been working on when their lives were turned upside down by a phone call. Gabe sat at the other end of the table working on the problems he’d offered to do for his friends, neither of them managing to concentrate enough to solve even part of a problem. She glanced up and he was staring at her.

“What do you want to do about Stella?” he asked.

“I was going to go down to the police station tomorrow and check out their lists and photographs of missing children,” she told him.

“You might not have to go to a police station for that. You might be able to do it on the Internet,” he suggested.

After dinner they had all three sat at the table, Gabe and Jesse questioning Stella, and she told the same story she’d told that morning. She swore no one was looking for her and no one wanted her. She announced defiantly that if they went to the police she would run away and they would never find her. Angrily she declared that no one would ever put her in a foster home again. She would have become hysterical except for Jesse and Gabe’s assurances that they would not go to the police.

Jesse shook her head at what she was thinking.

Gabe smiled. “Go ahead. Say it.”

“Well, if it’s really the case that no one is really looking for her . . . then . . . why don’t we let her stay with us for a while . . . if that’s all right with you. And Sam of course. And if Stella wants to. Maybe she won’t want to.”

She could see the hesitation in his eyes. “You took me in when I was up against it, Gabe.” Still he hesitated. “One day at a time, isn’t that what you said?”

At last he nodded. Then before either saw the love in the other’s eyes, they looked back down at their work. He smiled to himself. He was sitting in a chair that squeaked. The tiniest shift in his weight was accompanied by a squeak. Squeak, squeak.

She looked up, annoyed.

He looked up with a small innocent squeak.

She looked back down.

He looked down again. Squeak. Then squeak, squeak, squeak, like a cricket in her ear.

She looked up again, scowling.

He grinned at her and rocked back and forth, squeak, squeak, squeak before finishing up the symphony with an exuberant flourish and an especially snide smirky squeeeak.

She laughed.

“I still feel like celebrating,” he told her. “It’s Friday night. I start work on Monday. I’m going out for a beer and a game of pool. Want to come along? Do you know how to play?”

It was her turn to hesitate. “No.”

“I’ll teach you. Come on, Jesse, it’ll be fun.”

“I don’t . . .”

“I know, I know, you don’t drink much. Neither do I any more. But I love the game. Come on. One beer and a game of pool. We’ll ask Will to come over and stay with the kids.”

He had obviously been there before.

With quick glances over their shoulders and short mutterings of his name, a few dark figures standing at the bar greeted him as they passed through to the pool tables. Gabe glared back and prowled and Jesse couldn’t resist. She grabbed his hand and lifted it to her eyes, minutely examining the tops of his knuckles.

“What are you doing?” he asked, scowling down at her, pulling his hand from hers.

“Looking for calluses,” she laughed. “Oohoho, this is serious stuff,” she teased when his scowl deepened.

The stares of the patrons followed them past the bar to the pool tables. “Well, at least they know we’re here,” she whispered conspiratorially. Then she laughed again, because despite his ferocious expression she could see the smile lurking in his eyes and around the corners of his mouth.

He set up a game and proceeded to demonstrate how it was played to her.

Until that moment she hadn’t thought about or pictured the consequences of accepting his invitation. The consequences were Gabe’s hands on her arms and hands, guiding her. The consequences were Gabe standing directly behind her, a wall of heat and flesh, skin to skin and cloth to cloth with her, his every move matching, paralleling hers. Gabe’s arms around her, strong and warm. Gabe’s face next to hers. Gabe’s lips close to hers. Gabe’s breath on her neck and cheek. Gabe’s body, big and inviting, almost enveloping her, moving with her in a graceful dance around the pool table. Mesmerized by his touch Jesse followed the gentle pressure of his hands, learning the game and learning the feel of Gabe.

It was a mathematical game, all lines and angles and triangles. It was a game of Newtonian physics, force and movement, action and reaction, energy and momentum. She was entranced by the game’s elegance and complexity. Instantly she understood his love of it. And he was a superb player. She watched him move around the table scoring multiple hits and impossible bank shots.

“I don’t know,” she teased, “how fair is this? Me, a rank beginner against a pro.”

He circled the table, effortlessly sinking the last three balls, his face lighting up with pleasure that she noticed his skill.

“Ok. Now we’ll play a real game,” he announced. “You break and take the first two shots,” he told her giving her every chance to play. While she broke and laboriously considered her plays and made her shots, he went to the bar and returned with two beers.

“Just one,” she told him grinning, holding up a finger. She dropped two easy balls and missed the next. He made three incredible shots then deliberately missed the fourth, letting her play.

They started another game and Jesse played, improving exponentially, almost miraculously with every move she made and gradually a small audience gathered around them, including some of the people who knew Gabe. They joked with him during the next two games and a few of them placed bets on Jesse against Gabe, to taunt him. With each shot she tried, Jesse’s game improved, until finally, Gabe won, but only barely. Thrilled with her progress Jesse giggled, clapped and twirled like a child, she was so delighted to be playing so well so rapidly. The game was so much easier than she thought it would be!

Curiously Gabe watched her move around the pool table. It was beginning to occur to him that she was hustling him. If she was it was a seamless performance. He would never have thought she had a con like that in her. But what else could explain the speed with which she learned the game? Learned, hell! She was suddenly playing as well as he. He laughed at himself for having fallen for it, and he was having more fun than he’d had in years.

She stood opposite him smiling at him under the lights, her pool cue straight up beside her in one hand and her beer in the other. She finished up the last of her beer, set down her mug with a clunk and passed her sleeve over her mouth in an exaggerated imitation of masculine challenge. He laughed and she cocked an eyebrow at him as though to say, laugh now, because later . . . she bent over the table and broke the triangle with a crack that reached all the way out onto the street. It was electric.

They played. For real. The audience grew larger. The betting mounted and this time he joined the more serious betters against her. She couldn’t possibly beat him. No way. But he was wrong. She absolutely shone. And she won! Gabe couldn’t believe it. Jesse couldn’t believe it. She squealed and clapped her hands and jumped around like a little girl, oblivious to the ominous silence that settled around the table when she finished up the game with a casual double shot off the bank.

The faces of the men around the table lengthened and hardened, turning ugly. To put it mildly some of the betters were suspicious. They lost money, some of them, a lot of money, on what they thought was a sure thing. One man called for a rematch. He wanted to bet again, this time on Jesse.

And Gabe was starting to think about leaving. “I think we should go,” he told her.

“Cluck, cluck, cluck.” She flopped her elbows in the air at him. Unaware of the darkening dynamics of the situation she threw fifty dollars down on the edge of the table betting on herself.

Too late now. Grimly Gabe laid fifty down on himself, thinking that way they couldn’t possibly be suspicious. But from the expressions on their faces, he knew, either way, they were up the creek. One of the men who lost the most bet against Gabe, two of them bet against Jesse. Man, were they fucked.

They shot for the break. Jesse won. They played. Jesse floated. She was magnificent, untouchable. Gabe played. Grimly. What could he do? She played like a master. Gabe played like a pro and he played to win. She was winning by one. She missed. There were three balls left, one of them the cue ball.

Jesse watched him move around the table analyzing angles, deciding on how to make the shot. He swayed imperceptibly and almost stumbled. Her jaw fell open in surprise. Gabe was inebriated! She knew he’d had more than one beer but she hadn’t been paying attention. Until now. He leaned over the table, lost his balance, recovered, took aim and shot. The movement was the action of a drunk and the sinking of the balls an incredible accident. He won.

With an exaggerated pout of disappointment she moaned and slumped. He took the cue from her hand and laid both their cues down. His hand was heavy on her arm. “Less go home,” he told her swaying noticeably. She snatched up his bet and they walked away from the table.

“At least we didn’t lose any money,” Jesse crowed, counting the bills.

Gabe cringed.

Like large flat eyed gape mouthed sharks circling in the water, the three men shadowed them out of the bar onto the deserted parking lot, muttering among themselves, their sinister words reaching out to them through the cold night air . . . “a hustle’s a hustle, don’t matter if it’s a man or a woman . . .”

Gabe threw his arm around her shoulders and leaned on her.

“. . . a real pretty little woman. A little action like that might make up for a hustle . . .”

She tried to speed up their progress, but in his drunken condition Gabe was awkward, slow and heavy across her shoulder. “Gabe, I think we should . . .” she tried to shift his weight and hurry him along.

“Gabe, oh Gabe,” the men only a step behind them mocked her, their voices high, bone chilling.

Gabe lurched away from her, swaying and stumbling, his arms swinging wide and falling like timbers around the necks of two of the men. “Whaddya want?” he slurred. He swerved and staggered dragging the men with him in a drunken dance. “Did somebody call my name?” he mumbled and jerked and their heads cracked together like two bowling balls in his embrace.

“Whoops!” he exclaimed in slow surprise. One of them slipped instantly down, his face connecting with Gabe’s knee when Gabe woozily tried to catch him. “Oh look out!” he exclaimed helplessly as the man’s head flipped back and he fell to the ground.

The other man reeled and Gabe turned to catch him, clipping him in the throat with his elbow instead. The man’s head wobbled, his throat gurgled and he sank to the ground in a boneless puddle.

Gabe swayed over him in dumb surprise. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean . . . how clumsy of me.”

The third man stood with his mouth hanging open in shock.

Gabe stumbled drunkenly toward him, “ I’m so sorry.”

The man fled just as Gabe’s hand clutched his jacket ripping the sleeve completely off. He swayed again, looking down at the two fallen men, the sleeve dangling from his limp fingers. “Oh, dear,” he mumbled and dropped the sleeve on top of one of the men.

“Less go, Jesse,” he linked his arm in hers, whipped her around and began walking with her to the Jeep. She tried to look back but he propelled her toward the car mumbling all the way, “No, no, no, don’t look at them, Jesse. They’ll be up in no time. They’re all right. They need to rest a minute. Get in the car. Now, Jesse!”

“I’m driving,” she told him contentiously, almost out of breath, her hand on the driver’s door.

“I think you should,” he agreed and happily clambered up into the passenger side.

It took her a few moments to recover from shock over what transpired in the parking lot, but when her nerves finally calmed, Jesse smiled. She grinned, thinking about how she played pool that night. She grinned, thinking about how unexpected and thrilling it was, how much fun it was to win like that. She shook her head. She could still hardly believe it. She giggled remembering how those men got in the way of Gabe’s drunken peregrinations.

Gabe leaned his head back against the window. Staring at her through half closed lids, he broke the silence, “Must have been fun having your dad for a teacher, Jesse. Teaching you to play the violin and shoot pool like that.”

“What are you talking about?” She turned to stare at him. It took a moment for the look of him to sink in. She swung her head back to face the road exclaiming, “You’re not drunk! I thought you were drunk. Those three men thought you were drunk!”

He shrugged and continued in that droll amused voice. “I suppose they did. It’s dangerous to hustle in a place like that. I know you were having fun but you shouldn’t have done it. Those men were dangerous. Anybody who plays pool as well as you should know that. You got us all. Even me, Jesse. I didn’t think you had that much play in you.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You know,” he said lightly. “Winning like that. The hustle.”

She was indignant. “My dad didn’t teach me to shoot pool! I never played the game before tonight in my entire life.”

Suddenly he was very close to her, his face less than two inches from hers, his body hot next to her, hot enough to steam up the windshield, his fingers on the back of her neck making soft little circles on her skin, sending chills down her spine. His gaze was hard, sharp, focused. He smiled at her. “I don’t believe you, Jesse. You shot pool like a pro tonight. You beat me once. In a real game.” He shook his head. “The odds against a first time player doing that . . . playing as well as I play . . .” he shook his head again. “They must be about the same as the odds against the Belousov-Zhabatinski chemical clock being an accident. Jesse, I’m a mathematician. I know. It couldn’t happen. It plain flat out could not happen. So come on. Tell me. How many years have you been playing? Did you ever compete? Do you hold any titles?”

Her mouth hung open, her eyes were wide. She looked back at the road, inhaling indignantly, “I never . . . I . . . Gabe, tonight is the first time I’ve ever in my life held a pool cue in my hands. The first time!”

He slid back away, a little angry with her. What was the point of continuing the hustle? He was also puzzled. A hustle. It didn’t seem like Jesse, not the Jesse he knew any way. He studied her profile. Her face was grim far beyond serious. He stared ahead wondering.

The car veered slowly off the road heading for the ditch. “Jesus, Jesse!” He grabbed the steering wheel and turned sharply back. Barely avoiding an accident, the Jeep lurched and stopped with a jerk at the side of the road. Shaking uncontrollably, Jesse dropped her face into her hands.

Gabe got out and stepped around the Jeep to the driver’s side. “Maybe I was wrong,” he suggested, pulling back out onto the road, trying to take back what he said, “Maybe it could happen. Maybe you’re a natural. Maybe the fact that you play the violin like you do has trained your mind and hands and it’s all about action and reaction. Maybe the fact that you’re a physicist combined with the fact that you play the violin--.” But he might as well have been talking to her from the next state. In her terror over what was happening to her, Jesse couldn’t hear him.

Will snagged the five dollar bill Gabe held out to him and breezed out the door. “The kids have been asleep since ten. Thanks, Gabe. ‘Night guys.”

The door closed quietly. The house was silent except for the slow tick of the clock on the kitchen wall. Immobilized by terror and dread, Jesse stood trembling. Whatever it was that was wrong with her, it was still there, it was still happening.

And Gabe would have given anything not to have said what he said. He touched her shoulder and said quietly, “Come on, Jesse, it’s late. Time for bed.”

Jesse turned, her arms creeping up around his shoulders, clinging to him as though her life depended on it, as if by holding tightly to him, somehow, together, they could ward off the strange things that were happening to her. Because of this man she was still alive. Because of him she wanted to live. He made her feel so alive, so joyful to be alive. She wanted more, not less. She didn’t want the paralysis and death that seemed to be creeping up on her. She didn’t want the odd otherworldly things that were happening to her. She wanted life! She began to cry. “I was beginning to think it never happened . . . that it wasn’t going to happen.”

Consumed by overwhelming fear, a conviction that for a while that evening, her mind and body had not been completely hers, Jesse trembled uncontrollably. Ironically, if anything like this had occurred in direct conjunction with her collapse, without her days with Gabe and Sam intervening, she would not have experienced such fear. She would merely have been all the more coldly determined to end her life. But now stark terror leached away the starch in her bones and bled away the strength in her limbs. She clung to Gabe like he was a great tree and she the last leaf spinning at the end of a branch in a winter storm.

His arms encircled her. His hands spread wide across her back. He lifted her from the floor and carried her down the long dark hall. The light of a new moon spilled through the window, filling the bedroom with a soft blue glow. He lowered her to the floor and slowly she slid against him, that sweet moment of friction and heat starting the dance, setting them both in mysterious orbit around each other.

Her arms around his neck, her lips pressed against his flesh there, the whisper of her breath against him, the feel of her breasts flattened against his chest, the sense that even with her coat on his arms could encompass the curve of her waist twice, the way when he lowered her to the floor his groin moved against her belly and dipped into her, the slide of her thighs against his. It was all too much. Though he had meant only to comfort her, Gabe was deeply aroused. Reluctantly he loosed his hold, preparing to step away from her.

With his hands on her arms, he pulled her trembling away from him. But when he looked down into her eyes and saw the mindless terror there, in that moment Gabe changed his mind. “Aw Jesse,” he whispered, “Don’t be scared. I’m here. I won’t leave you.”

Then Gabe did what came naturally. Slipping his hands inside the warmth of her coat and down around her hips, he pulled her close, lifting her, sliding her unmistakably against him. His gaze dropped to her lips and his head dipped to follow, his lips brushing hers softly, his breath mingling with hers sweetly. Once, twice, three times his lips brushed hers with a velvety touch, a tender invitation and each time he pulled his head away to look down into her eyes he saw a little less terror and a little more wonder, until at last there was only wonder in her gaze. And he thought her eyes were moonlight? They shone up at him now with the light of a hundred billion stars. The rose petal lips he questioned with his parted, her breath quickened, an answering invitation.

He growled, his mouth closing over hers, his tongue invading, touching her lips, her teeth, her tongue and pleasure blasted through her. His tongue danced with hers and she melted, turning molten.

With each touch of his lips the terrors that held Jesse in their coils dissolved around her like so much fog being burned away by the sun. Each time his lips touched hers, the dull heavy things of her world fell away from her as though they were no more than wispy phantoms composed of smoke. Each time his lips touched hers, her world spun and whirled and she spiraled down into an ever more singular point of pure pleasure. She was a shimmering, scintillating liquid thing. She moved against him in waves that were never close enough. Her arms tightened around his neck and he lifted her again, rising up under her, their bodies touching, teasing, engorging that part of them that ached most for the other. They fed on each other, on the scent and taste of their mingling breaths, on the fire between their bodies, fire hot enough to ignite a galaxy.

He stood back, his hands sliding up and her coat slipped the floor. He touched the buttons running down the front of her and the two halves of her blouse fell apart like a film of water evaporating away at a lick from the sun. He bent down, his dark head dipping low, and her blouse, her skirt and slip and panties spilled down around her feet. Now she wore only a satin chemise, a delicate feminine garment very unlike the dark clothing puddled at her feet. He straightened, slowly running his hands up the sides of two of the loveliest legs he had ever seen.

He stared. Her silvery eyes sparkled up at him. Her lips were rosily soft from his kiss. And her skin. The most perfect petal of a white rose was not as beautiful as Jesse’s skin. Caught between shining curtains of jet black hair her face glowed like the moon in the night and that peach colored chemise and all the rest of her down to her toes shimmered like mother of pearl.

His fingers and palms feathered up over the chemise, sliding narrow strips down over luminous shoulders and arms. Still the trembling garment clung to her, the shadow of her navel peeking out under a ribbon of lace, her soft flat belly glowing white, her hips flaring and at the apex of those lovely legs the soft, night black triangle of her sex pulled at his gaze.

“Ah Jesse,” he sighed, his eyes resting at last on the treasures she hid under layers of loose indeterminate clothing. He lifted his hands and passed them over her hair like a prayer, his fingers mapping contours, following stretches of moonlit skin over delicate bones and downy cheeks, dipping into shadowy depressions, encircling her pulse, caressing hollows and curves his eyes had lingered on seconds before, until with a concentration as singular and focused as a laser he touched her breasts where the chemise still clung and the garment dropped to form a river of peach at her waist while his hands and gaze lingered, touching, feeling, caressing, loving at last.

She watched his face tighten, while with delicate touches his fingers coaxed her breasts into nubby buds. Then his hands passed hungrily over her ribs and waist and down around her buttocks and thighs and back up between her legs, his fingers just grazing there before returning to cover her breasts. She moaned at the bright spiraling pleasure ignited by that touch. She leaned into him like a hot wave. His arm snaked around her and his head dipped low. Her fingers threaded through his hair and closed in fists. Her breast was hot and wet in his mouth.

His clothes fell away from him like torched ashes and he reached behind him. The covers flew back and they floated down between layers of moonlight and white, his hands roaming in trembling disbelief, searching, caressing, learning ever millimeter of her, touching her in places and ways she’d never been touched before, his fingers circling at her breasts, then passing in a long caress down her belly to gently explore the flesh both hidden and announced by the dark triangle between her legs.

He knew secrets about her body that she had never guessed existed. When he touched her there with those feathery touches and that delicate knowing pressure she thought she would self-destruct at the pleasure that coursed through her. It started at his fingers tips and spiraled out to every cell in her body and all she wanted was more. More touching. More of him. His touch reduced her to a simple drive for more. She whispered, please . . .

He grabbed her hands and placed them flat on his chest in eloquent demand. Slowly, shyly she slid her fingers slid down the great expanse of skin and muscle, down the lean contours of his belly to the dark hair of his groin. Tentatively, hesitantly she explored that incredible male organ, now enormous, like something alive and separate almost in her hand, stiff and hard in his need for her, yet oh so silkily hot, both a terror and delight to touch. He grunted at the sweetness of her touch and rose above her, his hands beside her head, you do it, he told her. She shifted and the movement was like a spinning burning disc of stars turning beneath him, opening to him. Still he held himself poised above her, waiting. She touched him again, her warm fingers enclosing, fitting him, mixing flesh and molten liquid.

Caught then in gravity’s pull like two galaxies passing through one another, she rose up to meet him, curling around him as he sank down into her, spreading her apart, stretching her, filling her, pressing down on her. His hips locked with hers and when his flesh and bone touched her there, she ignited against him and they tumbled, careening inward, crashing, smashing, grinding against each other in ever tighter, hotter, more hungry circles of pleasure, until it seemed they came together with the force of all the matter in their universe. And exploded outward, their individuality annihilated, their identities destroyed in the purest, most violently exquisite moment either had ever experienced. Out and out they expanded in wave after wave of ecstasy, their atoms mingling, burning, shining with the stars.

“Oh God, oh God,” she gasped while one by one her separate atoms fell back together on the bed, her chest heaving under his weight. He rolled with her and she was on top of him. She lifted her head and stared down into his eyes. She was stunned, shattered. Still liquid with pleasure. She laid her ear down on his chest and listened to his heart beat like thunder. “No wonder they call it the Big Bang,” she whispered and his laughter rumbled through her.

Early morning light streamed through lace curtains and across the bed. Frost sparkled in the corners of the windows. Gabe opened his eyes blinking at the brightness.

Jesse was propped on an elbow staring at him, her face shining with all the love and wonder she felt. She lifted a hand and placed it flat on his chest, her palm, her hand, her fingers, her whole body luxuriating in the beat of his heart. She slid her hand slowly up his chest, her fingers exploring the feel of him, the heat of him, the rocky lump of his Adam’s apple, the prickly feel of the stubble on his jaw and chin, the sweet feel of his lips under her fingertips.

He covered the hand she held to his lips with his own, pressing her fingers hard against his mouth.

“This doesn’t change a thing,” she whispered, knowing the instant the words were out that everything was changed.

He stared at the ceiling for a moment. He swallowed, his jaw clenching against the sudden knot in his throat. Jesse had brought life back to Gabe in a way that he had given up on. Last night did change things and they both knew it. She was looking for assurances. “It doesn’t change a thing,” he told her, lying outright. There was nothing Gabe would not do to keep Jesse alive. Nothing. He reached for her pulling her toward him and she flowed like hot lava covering him.

Chapter Thirteen

After breakfast, Gabe and Jesse and Sam and Stella walked the block to Dennis and Sally’s house. The sky was a wild high flat gray and though the wind blew hard from the south, it had the cold bite of January in it. Around them, bare riverbank cottonwoods swayed and swooshed angrily. Winter leaves rattled past in pale yellow-brown eddies, coming to rest in small piles along the edges of the gravel road. Ahead of them a dust devil swirled, lifting dirt, rocks, leaves, plastic and paper trash high as it twisted crazily hither and yon in their direction. Jesse, Gabe and Sam lowered their heads, lifted their collars and wrapped their scarves around their faces.

But Stella was a different story. “Look at that thing!” she cried in a high excited squeal, pointing at the tiny whirlwind. She charged straight into the little twister, shouting, spinning and twirling with it, lifting arms and face and laughter to the sky in a bizarre dance with the wind.

They stopped to watch her and Jesse asked in a voice full of wonder, “How can she do that? She has nothing. But she has so much joy.” They walked on, Stella running ahead.

When they arrived at the Blake’s house, Will came bounding out the front door down the steps and without any more than a rushed, let’s go, I’ve got a tree house, the boy drew the two younger children into his circle and the three of them ran around to the back towards the river.

Sitting with Dennis and Sally at their kitchen table, Jesse connected up her modem and laptop to their phone and while they sat drinking coffee and talking, Jesse roamed the electronic highways searching for information on Stella Jones. She accessed the International Web Text, World Wide Web Form and only seconds passed before she announced, “You were right, Gabe. I found it.”

They got up from the other side of the table and stood behind her. They were looking at the files from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

“Jennings, Johnson, Johnson . . . here it comes, Jones, Jones, Jones. Sandra, Sean, Simone. There she is. Stella Jones, missing from Miami, Florida since December 26th . . . she ran away the day after Christmas . . . imagine that.”

They leaned over her shoulders to better study the little photograph of Stella now lighting up Jesse’s computer screen. Clearly she was several years younger in the photograph than she was now. The eight or nine year old child in the picture wore a worn and dirty Miami Dolphins T-shirt. She smiled out at them from the grainy black and white image, her teeth too big for her face, her hair a raggedy halo of matted curls and in her eyes a look that belied her childish lopsided grin.

They read the text that accompanied the photograph. “Have you seen Stella Jones? Stella is currently three years older than the photograph pictured here. Height: 4'11". Weight: 80 lbs. Hair: dark blond and curly. Eyes: green. Was last seen wearing a plain white sweatshirt, blue jeans and red high top tennis shoes. Mother deceased. Father unknown. No living relatives. Stella disappeared from her foster home in Miami on December 26. Since being placed in foster homes Stella has run away four times. It is possible she has run away this time as well. She might be trying to get to Las Vegas or Los Angeles. If you see Stella Jones please contact Dade County Welfare.”

“Wow,” Dennis and Sally both whispered, exchanging looks with Gabe over Jesse’s shoulders. Combine that text with the story Stella told them and it didn’t take much imagination to fill in the grief and hardship written between the lines there. They watched and read while Jesse accessed two other URL addresses. The Missing Children Database, and the Heidi Search Center. In both, she discovered the same message with the same grainy photograph and the same pathetic text.

And while Jesse, Gabe, Dennis and Sally were learning more about the little runaway, Agents Turney and Foster were getting warmer too. Turney slid the pile of magazines on the table in front of him closer. He thumbed through back issues of Woman’s Day, Good Housekeeping, Vogue and Newsweek before choosing finally to look at a copy of People Magazine. Looking up from the most recent article on Gwyneth Paltrow, he glanced at the secretary sitting at her desk.

On the other side of the door beyond the secretary’s desk, Jesse’s attorney, Sharon Carnes spoke to Agent Foster, “No, I don’t know anything about this man, Hunter, and as I told you the other day, I don’t know where she is. She may have gone out to California to do her research, I don’t know. Considering recent events here I certainly wouldn’t blame her.”

“How do you communicate with her?”

“She contacts me. Is Dr. Wren under investigation for something? Do you people have a warrant for her, a subpoena? As her attorney, I have the right to know and so does she. If you’re going to be asking all these questions you’d better have your paper work done and you’d better start answering some of my questions.”

Back in reception, the secretary returned to the office after a quick trip to the restroom. Smiling at Agent Turney, she sat back down at her desk. Having just sat down himself after rifling through her rolodex, Agent Turney smiled back at her.

Out on the street Turney handed Foster a scrap of paper with a name, a local telephone number and an address on it. Foster stared down at the little slip of paper.

Turney clapped him on the back, “Don’t look so glum, Albert. You said she was still here. She’s here. You said we’d catch up with her. We got her. Bethesda here we come.”

If anything the weather was turning worse as the day wore on. The sky had lowered, the clouds were thick and dark and the wind, though diminished and warmer, was coming straight from the west now. It wasn’t snowing yet, but the smell of moisture was heavy in that cold wind. They practically had the place to themselves on that late winter afternoon.

In the gift shop at the entrance, Gabe bought Sam a sweatshirt with a tiger on it. He bought Stella a sweatshirt with a lobo on it and a small silver necklace with a small pendant of a bee. Stella was ecstatic.

Sam walked sedately down the path between Gabe and Jesse, frowning at Stella with all the injured dignity he could muster. Still dressed in blue jeans, Jesse’s sweatshirts and Gabe’s old coat, she was without a doubt an unusual sight. But it wasn’t that that was bothering Sam. It was her behavior. Acting more like a child of four or five than a girl of twelve, she ran from habitat to habitat exclaiming and squealing in delight at the sight of the animals in the Albuquerque Zoological Gardens.

Jesse laughed at Sam, “Come on, give her a break, Sam. You saw her face when we said we might go to the zoo today. You heard her say she’s never been to a zoo before.”

Sam grumbled, “She’s an idiot. A moron. She’s crazy.”

“How so?” Gabe and Jesse exchanged glances. Sam’s words were not an auspicious beginning.

“She doesn’t know anything. All she talks about is Miami, living on the streets, homeless shelters and those stupid foster homes. You heard her. And she said we were just like Full House. We’re not! We’re not like that bogus show.”

Jesse shrugged, “Well maybe that’s all she knows. Is that all?”

“Is that all what?”

“Is that all you don’t like about her?”

“All she ever wants to do is build a fort. She won’t play anything else.”

“That’s it? That’s why you don’t like her?”

“She told me she’s in love with me. She said that when we grow up and she’s twenty and I’m twenty-five she’s going to marry me!”

Jesse smiled and Gabe laughed.

“See?” Sam sneered, “I told you she’s crazy. She can’t even do simple math.”

“Is that all?” Jesse asked again.

“Why are you asking all these questions?”

Gabe answered this time with a question of his own. “She said she’s never going back to a foster home. She’s big enough to run away every time she gets an opportunity. If we turn her over to the police or social services they’re going to send her back to Florida and put her in a foster home, maybe even a detention center this time. What’s going to happen then?”

“She’s going to run away like you said! Like she said!” Sam snapped.

“Then what?”

“Or she’ll have to stay there, like prison.” Sam shrugged angrily. He didn’t want all of this put off on him. He didn’t want to think about what would happen to Stella if she continued run away. It wasn’t his problem.

Jesse told him. “Sam, I have asked your father if it’s all right if Stella stays with us for a while. If she wants to. She may not want to.”

Shocked and instantly threatened and jealous Sam looked at his father and Jesse. Then his false dignity fell away like a discarded garment and he took off like a jackrabbit across the brown winter grass.

“Let me,” Jesse said, putting her hand on Gabe’s arm. She followed Sam down past the tiger compound.

Jesse caught up with Sam. “Sam, we haven’t made a decision and we won’t without you. All you have to do is say no.”

He was crying, “Then I say no!” he exclaimed, claiming his option instantly.

She accepted instantly. “All right. I’ll go tell your dad.”

“No wait,” he stopped her. “Then what?”

“Then nothing, Sam. Don’t be so upset. We didn’t do this to upset you. We wanted to know how you felt about it and now we do. It’s Ok, Sam, don’t cry. None of this is your doing, none of it is your responsibility.”

“Then why did you ask me?” the boy raged.

“Because you’re too old to ignore in a situation like this. A decision like this is going to affect you, it’s going to have consequences for you. You have all the natural rights. Gabe is your father. You come first with him. Not me. And certainly not Stella. You are far more important to him than either this girl or I could ever be.” She reached for him, once again coaxing him into her arms without much of a battle. They sat down on a bench, ignoring the stares of the few other people who were at the zoo that gray winter day. Still crying he leaned into her embrace. A few large wet snowflakes drifted down.

At that moment just about everything in life seemed confusing and difficult to Sam. Everything seemed fraught with immanent disaster. And this being consulted, he didn’t know if he liked that or not. Still Jesse was right, it was only fair that they ask him.

“What if . . . we don’t know her . . . maybe . . .”

“I know, Sam, I know. We don’t really know anything about her. And sometimes things can turn out to be awful even with people we know and love, let alone strangers. You and I know that, and so does your dad. So if you don’t want to do this, don’t worry about it. You’ve had enough turmoil and sorrow for a while. You certainly don’t need any more. And we haven’t asked her. She might not want to be with us for more than a few days any way.”

“Well, maybe we could try it for just a little while and see how it works?” he suggested shakily.

Jesse considered this. It wouldn’t do for Stella. A child needs much more than provisional care that can be rescinded when things get ugly and tough.

A few yards in front of the bench they were sitting on, Stella and Gabe talked together next to the wall at the edge of the tiger compound. As Sam and Jesse watched Stella, looking every bit the five year old she’d been acting all day, shyly slipped her hand into Gabe’s and gazed up at him, her face beaming with adoration. Then she noticed the snowflakes. With a squeal of delight she lifted her hands to the sky, threw her head back and stuck out her tongue to catch the tiny crystals as they fell.

“Look, she acts like she’s never even seen snow before. What a dummy,” Sam grumbled snuggling closer to Jesse.

“She’s from Florida, Sam. She hasn’t ever seen snow before.” In that moment as she stared at Gabe and Stella and held Sam in her arms, Jesse was pierced by a feeling of deep longing that this little moment in time so unspeakably sad and so utterly beautiful might go on forever. It was such a terrible sharp sensation that she felt for a moment that she might be split in two by the pain of it, that she might stand and the two halves of her would simply topple to the ground in different directions. She wondered, What am I doing here with this man and these children? Am I insane? Am I going crazy? Why has Gabe accepted me like this? I would not have done the same for him. How can I even consider taking on that child when I might be dead tomorrow?

Suddenly, again, she saw herself as totally and utterly selfish. Because she was frightened and unwilling to suffer, Sam and Gabe would suffer. And she had accepted that. She was a coward through and through. How wrong she was when she told Gabe that morning that nothing was changed. Everything was changed “Maybe you’re right, Sam. Maybe we will wait on this decision.”

They joined Gabe and Stella at the wall. Gabe looked at Jesse. She shook her head. No. He nodded, a little surprised.

“We’ll talk,” she told him.

Driving home Gabe glanced more than once over at Jesse, sensing in her a difference, a resolve he’d not felt before. He watched her lean her head against the window, on her face an infinitely weary and sad expression. It broke his heart. He knew she was making up her mind to leave and he would have to let her go. He could not force her to accept his help. Or his love.

Morose and silent, driving, grieving already his terrible sorrow, mourning already his and Sam’s loss, and because it was already dark, one of the darkest winter nights of the year, Gabe almost missed seeing it. Almost.

About a half a block further up, a gray van was parked in front of the Gonzales’ house, Dennis and Sally’s closest neighbors. It was the only vehicle parked on the otherwise night black deserted rural street. With his eye on the van, silently cursing the fact that every bit of cash he and Jesse possessed between them was still inside the house, Gabe turned into the driveway and drove around to the back.

The house remained dark except for one dim light somewhere deep inside, when minutes later the van pulled up to park directly in front of the house. The only other light was the outdoor light in the back yard. Then, just as Agents Turney and Foster stepped out of the van the light inside the house went off.

Moving quickly, urgently then, the agents stepped lightly up the steps onto the porch and knocked on the door. They waited. The house was silent. They tried the door. It was locked. They knocked again. Harder. Louder. Silence. They looked in the windows. The curtains were drawn, the house was dark. They tried the windows. They were locked.

They trotted around to the back door, disappointment gripping their guts again. The Jeep was gone. An enormous outdoor light brightened the back yard, fields and trees behind, flooding into the kitchen through the half French door and the windows. They knocked on the back door. Silence. They tried the door. It was locked. The windows were locked. The agents were beginning to fear they had lost their quarry again, when inside a shadow slipped across the kitchen wall.

Turney spoke through the kitchen door, “Dr. Wren? Mr. Hunter? We’re Special Agents Turney and Foster. We’re with the FBI. We want to talk with Dr. Wren about what happened at the NRAO.” Silence was their only answer. Now what? Clearly if they were in there, they were not going to open the door. On the other hand there was no phone in the house. Turney signaled to Foster to return to the front. The agents were not about to fail in their mission this time.

Acting fast, almost in a panic, Turney fished a round of tape from his coat pocket. He taped the pane above the doorknob, cracked it with one tap of his gun and shoved his hand through the broken glass. With his gun high in his hand he pushed the door open, stepped into the house and quietly shut the door behind him. “Dr. Wren?” he called. “We want to talk with you. We’re from the government. The FBI. There’s nothing to be afraid of. We want to ask you some questions about -- .”

With his gun in his hand, Agent Foster stood to the side of the front door waiting, listening. He watched the door tensely. The doorknob moved. Foster waited. Nothing more happened, not another movement, not another sound. He reached over, turned the doorknob and slowly pushed the door open. He stepped into the pitch-black living room and instantly a deeper darkness fell down around him.

When Turney came to, he was lying on the cold linoleum kitchen floor facing the room, his eyes focusing on disaster. He was looking straight into the eye of a minicam perched on a tripod, only a few feet away. The camera was pointing directly at him and Agent Foster. The red light was on and the camera was recording everything as it happened.

Turney’s ankles were tied and his hands were cuffed behind him with his own handcuffs. Except for his shirt, tie, T-shirt, and socks he was naked. Foster lay on the floor facing him, his mouth and eyes were taped shut, his hands were cuffed in front of him and his ankles were tied. Foster was also naked from the waist down. Turney craned his neck to look at the boots of the man standing near their heads.

Gabe moved around behind Foster positioning himself carefully so as not to block the camera’s view of transpiring events. He held one of their guns in his hand.

“You know,” Gabe spoke conversationally, “If you guys were DEA, you’d know there is no one in the world more paranoid than an old dope grower. And if you’d only been a few minutes longer in breaking in here none of this unpleasantness would be taking place. But you see, I just have to mention this. I was under the impression that this is my house. That I am living here, not you two.”

Turney started to speak.

“Ah, ha!” Gabe lifted a finger to his lips and pointed at the camera. “Think. Think before you speak. Your breaking and entering is all on camera. And furthermore your calling out to Dr. Wren proves that not only did you break and enter, you did so when you were convinced that she was in the house. And by the way, thanks for bringing the duct tape.” Gabe pointed to their badges and identification on the table, “None of that is recorded. Yet.” He smiled.

“You’re fucking crazy!” Turney snarled.

Gabe’s eyes bugged out and faster than light he stepped over Foster and crouched between the two men breathing hard. “You are so right! That’s what they called me in the pen. The crazy guy. And I am, you know. I get really angry and nervous sometimes. I’m a lot worse since I went to the pen. I can’t control myself, I start to shake,”

His eyes rolled insanely, the hand holding the gun shook and trembled next to Turney’s face. He grabbed Turney by the shirt and pulled him up a little from the floor. The gun wobbled around Turney’s face always pointing at it. “I get spasms I can’t control. I don’t know what to do! And you know what makes me especially angry? And nervous? Guys breaking into my house. And guns. Especially guns. I got sent to the pen because of a gun that didn’t even belong to me. It was a muzzle loader, so old it wouldn’t even work. I bet this one works. I have a lot of bad karma when it comes to guns. Guns really make me nervous. I get so nervous I black out.”

He held Turney very still for a moment. Then he lowered him carefully to the floor. “Now, I’d really like to know what it is you boys want with Dr. Wren. Tell me and this will all end in a civilized way.”

Turney stared at Gabe. Gabe’s eyes bugged out again, his hand holding the gun trembled and shook. He stood and lurched around groaning and growling. The gun went off and Foster screamed through the tape over his mouth, squirming on the floor.

“You sonovabitch, you bastard, you shot him!” Turney screamed.

The hairy pink shell of Foster’s left ear was nicked by the bullet. Foster groaned and sobbed.

Gabe was instantly remorseful and very jumpy and nervous. “Jesus! I am so sorry. I told you! See? You never know when a gun is going to go off or what it’s going to hit.”

He squatted above Turney, the gun in his hand wobbling all over the place, pointing first at Turney’s head, then his genitals, then his knees, then back to his genitals. “If you’d only tell me what it is you want with Dr. . . .”

“We’re investigating the incident at Tech,” Turney couldn’t get the words out fast enough.

The gun was still. “The incident at Tech?” The gun wobbled.

“Yes, the earthquake and Dr. Wren’s collapse. The two events might be connected.”

“Might be connected?”

“Yes, connected. At least one eye witness swore that the tremor that shook the NRAO building came from above the building not below it.”

“One witness?”

“Yes, and when we looked at Dr. Wren’s research, the information the VLA pulled from the sky during the two seconds of the earthquake, there was a huge increase in the radiation coming down at the Earth from the sky. We asked the research assistant to give us a copy of Dr. Wren’s research, but when we looked for the jump in radiation on the hard copy, it was gone. It simply wasn’t there, like it never happened. We asked him to bring up the original program again and it was gone from there too.”

“Oh my, sounds like a cover up to me, maybe even a conspiracy.”

“ Exactly! Then Dr. Wren’s collapse, her coma. All the tests performed on her except the biopsy showed that she was brain dead. She should have been dead, but she got up and walked away like nothing happened to her.”

Gabe controlled himself. “So you fellas want to talk with her for a minute, is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“You want to find out if she’s, you know, really human, not tainted by energy waves or little gray guys from . . . up there?”

“Well, yes, we’d like . . .”

Suddenly Gabe was in the man’s face again. He held Turney by the shirt and was nose to nose with him, pressing the gun right into his temple. Gabe was breathing hard and looking very insane. “Tell me exactly how you are going to find out that she is human? Are you going to ask her? How are you going to know? Hmmm? What can she say that could prove it to you? What if she says she’s human and that doesn’t satisfy you? What can you do? A little coercion maybe? Hours, days, weeks of interrogation? A little secret imprisonment until she admits it?”

“No! No, the doctors at Bethesda -- .”

Foster squealed loudly from behind the tape that covered his mouth.

“Doctors? Bethesda? You’ve got a little trip planned for her to Bethesda? Is that what the van and the cot are all about? What if she doesn’t want to go? If she doesn’t want to cooperate, a little discrete surgery, a little slice here, a little slice there? Take another peek at her brain, her liver, her heart? Do a few tests. She’ll never even notice, hmm, boys?” Breathing harder and looking crazier by the minute Gabe dropped the gun and pressed it directly against Turney’s testicles. Turney closed his eyes and held his breath, only a tiny squeak of terror escaping him.

Gabe stood up. He placed the gun and the one still on the table, up high above the kitchen cupboards. “Well boys, it’s been fun. But I guess all good things must end and all’s well that ends well, or some such horse shit.”

He bent over Turney who yipped fearfully when Gabe grabbed him by the arms and flipped him over onto his other side. Then Gabe grabbed Foster and he too whimpered in terror when Gabe slid and twisted him across the floor so he ended smack up behind Agent Turney, the two men fitting against each other spoon style. Gabe looped Foster’s arms up over Turney’s head and down around Turney’s torso, then slipped a noose of rope through Foster’s cuffed wrists and looped the rope down between Turney’s legs. Both Turney and Foster jumped and grunted in terror at Gabe’s actions.

“S’cuse me, pardon me,” he told them as he worked. He looped the rope through Turney’s cuffs and down between their legs again and proceeded to pull the rope tight. When each man’s hands were positioned directly on top of the other man’s genitals he carefully arranged them so they cupped each other intimately, the two of them screaming and grunting their objections. “Don’t fight me on this boys, it’s for your own good,” he explained tightening the rope so they were inexorably caught in this position, “to give you both a little something to do during the long night ahead,” he told them solicitously. He looped the rest of the rope around their ankles tying them together securely.

This done, he grabbed their badges and IDs from the table, held them in front of the camera and read aloud their names and identification numbers. Then he stood and flipped the back yard light off and on four times. He hurried into the living room and returned carrying a box full of books.

Turney was unwilling to let go. High and frantic his voice followed Gabe as he hurried past them out the door, obviously moving their belongings out of the house. “Tell us this, Hunter, what’s she like? Has she done anything unusual? Outside of still being alive when she should be dead? Is there anything extraordinary or different about her at all?”

Gabe’s feet stopped above their heads. “You people are dangerous you know that? Berzhinsky is in jail. McVeigh is dead. Bin Laden and his buddies are either dead, on the run, or plotting something new. Don’t you have any terrorists out there to go after? You think Dr. Wren is one of the little gray guys you’ve got hidden away in Locker 19, is that it? What did you say your names were? Scully and Mulder? Another case for the X Files! Like I said you people are dangerous. A little education wouldn’t hurt you guys a bit. Might even help. Unless the little gray guys have figured out something about the world that we haven’t figured out yet, the distances between stars are so great that the notion of interstellar travel is complete bullshit. Our fastest rockets travel about 0.01% of the speed of light. At that speed it would take more than a hundred thousand years to reach the nearest stars which may or may not have planets. So to even consider interstellar travel we have to at least approach the speed of light, like say 98%. To do that with a payload that could support life, the total energy required, no matter how you obtain it or how fast it is expended, is equal to enough energy to supply the entire world’s needs at present expenditure for the next two hundred years and this would require the complete annihilation of matter. You’re telling me you think Dr. Wren is somehow involved in something like that? Something from outer space? Another planet? Tell me this. Why would any little gray guys from another planet even consider dropping in on us for a visit? Even if they could? They would have to know if they’re out there, what we’re like. We’re the toughest, meanest, most avaricious, voracious, vicious, ruthless little thing this planet has yet to evolve. Look at how we treat the other creatures here. Look at how we treat each other. Pretty soon we’ll be the only things left here if we don’t kill ourselves first. They wouldn’t stand a chance against us. We would descend on them like piranha and dissect them down to the last atom, just like I suspect you plan to do to Jesse Wren.”

Turney was unmoved by Gabe’s logic. “Well, what about that second earth quake last Thursday? The one in San Antonio? It was centered just yards from where you were living. It had to have happened only minutes after you left the place. Maybe you were there when it happened!” Turney persisted.

Foster started to moan and growl and squeal again.

Turney ignored him and continued with his questions. “What about the fact that there was another jump in electromagnetic amplitude in the sky above that one too?”

Foster writhed and moaned. Gabe reached down and ripped the tape first from his eyes and then from his mouth. He screamed. Gabe patted him on the head, “That smarts, I know. But we wouldn’t want all your sweet nothings to go to waste now would we? It’s going to be a long cold night. Come about three a.m. you two are gonna be so glad I was a boy scout. Now, what’s this about another earthquake?”

Turney started to talk. “Jesus, Albert, quit moving around! Thursday--.”

“Shut up, you idiot!” Foster growled

Gabe smiled. “Is that any way for such close friends to talk? I want you boys to know that if J. Edgar were alive today he would be real proud of you.”

Headlights shone into the open kitchen door as a vehicle drove around to the back of the house. Moments later, Sam and Stella stepped quietly through the kitchen door. Gabe targeted Stella with a ferocious stare and gesture, signaling her not to give her presence away. The little girl needed no more warning than that. She backed out of the house without a sound.

Cautious at first and then merely curious, Sam crossed around to face the men on the floor. He squatted down in front of Agent Turney to observe the two men for a moment. Slowly, experimentally Sam poked Turney in the nose, then placed his forefinger on the man’s lower lip, wiggling it like it was a button in a computer game until Turney snapped at him. Grinning, quick as light, Sam pulled his hand back.

“Don’t do that, Sam, it’s not nice. Come on, help me load up the Jeep,” Gabe ordered, passing by with another load of boxes for the car.

Ozone rushed into the kitchen, skidding and scuttling on the linoleum in surprise at the sight of the two men huddled together on the floor. She sniffed Agent Foster’s bare ass, licked him there, then sniffed the two men’s feet, then casually licked their faces and finally snuffled their hair moistly.

They shouted, ducked and squirmed in a vain attempt to avoid the curious dog, despite the fact that even their tiniest movement was a disastrous reminder of their compromised position. “Hunter! Call the dog off! Get this bitch--,” they yelled, but their complaints were ignored.

Behind them Sam examined their badges and identification cards. He was impressed. “Can I have these?” he asked his father.

“No,” Gabe told him, “They’re going to need them to pick up their retirement checks.”

Jesse came through the door. She stared at the two men on the floor.

“Go on, Sam, get your things.” Gabe grabbed Sam, fishing Agent Foster’s badge out of the boy’s coat pocket as he passed.

At last Jesse found her voice. “Gabe! Who are these people?”

Heading into the living room for another load, Gabe pointed to their badges and ID’s on the table and tossed over his shoulder, “The guys from the van.”

Jesse picked up their ID’s, her expression growing more horrified by the second. “What do they want?”

Gabe’s voice reached her from the other end of the house, “They want you, Jesse. They think you’re from outer space.”

“We want to talk to you, Dr. Wren. About what happened at the NRAO. About your illness,” Agent Turney explained.

Jesse stared incredulously at the men. “Gabe, you shouldn’t have done this. You should have let me talk to them.” She was appalled. Now it was her presence that was a direct cause of disaster in Gabe’s life. She could see nothing but trouble ahead for him because of this. “Gabe, you must untie them. You cannot do this to them. This is going to cause so much trouble for you. I can’t stand to think that this has happened because of me. They’re going to send you to jail over this. I’m nothing but trouble for you. A terrible, terrible burden.” She pressed trembling fingers to her lips and tears flooded her eyes.

“You better listen to her, Hunter,” Turney warned ominously.

Back in the kitchen, Gabe stopped in front of Jesse. He dropped the bags in his hands to the floor, pulled Jesse close and kissed her . . . tenderly, passionately, hungrily. Her arms slipped up around his neck.

Sam stopped on his way out to the car to stare at them. “Wow,” he whispered.

Gabe drew back to gaze down into Jesse’s eyes. “Any way you look at it, Jesse, coming or going, staying or leaving, you are the best thing that’s come into my life since Sam and nothing can change that. I wouldn’t change any of this for anything.”

“But --.”

“They’re not going to send me to jail. Everything they’ve done is outside the law, a violation of your Constitutional rights and mine. They have no warrants, no justification for search and seizure and nothing to seize but you. And I’ve got it all on tape. Apparently I didn’t go to the pen for nothing. They had a great law library there, if nothing else. That reminds me, they were planning on a little trip for you to Bethesda.”

“Bethesda? I don’t want to go to Bethesda. I won’t go to Bethesda!”

“They’re prepared for that. My guess is, the doctors there can’t wait to get their hands on you. And that’s not figurative. Sam, get that flashlight on the table there and follow me. Come on, Jesse, I want you to see this.”

Gabe grabbed up the minicam, unscrewed it from the tripod and headed for the front of the house. Turney and Foster groaned out loud.

Outside the three of them crowded around the back of the van. “Shine the light on the license plate, Sam. Great. It’s a federal plate.” Gabe laughed, taping the numbers and reading them out loud. “Open up the back end, Sam, and shine the light in there.”

Sam opened both doors and aimed the flashlight. Jesse looked on in silence, fear worse than any she had ever experienced knifing through her. The flashlight revealed a medical cot, its webbed restraints hanging to the floor. Gabe climbed up into the van to retrieve a small gray valise, conspicuous as the only other object in the van. He opened it and laid it on the back end of the van. “Shine the light on this thing, Sam,” he instructed. With the light shining down, Gabe filmed the contents of the valise. There were two small glass vials, several syringes, and one envelope.

“Pick up that bottle there, Jesse, and read what it says on the label. Hold it in front of the camera. Shine the light here, Sam.”

Jesse held up the vial reading while Sam shone the light and Gabe filmed. Her voice and hand shook as she turned the bottle under the light, “Sodium pentathol, to be administered intravenously, not to exceed one cc for every fifty pounds of body weight. Do not administer to persons with--.”

Gabe plucked the envelope out of the valise and handed it to her, “Pull those papers out of there, Jesse, and lay them down on the floor there. Hold them out flat. Let’s see what they say.”

Sam shone the light and Gabe read and taped. “My, my, my, look at all those seals and signatures. Wonders never cease. It’s military transport for one Dr. Jesse Wren and Special Agents McArthur Turney and Albert Foster. Look, there’re your names. You hit the jackpot, Jesse. A free trip from Kirtland Air Force Base to Bethesda, Maryland. Imagine that. That’s VIP treatment! Almost as good as Air Force One wouldn’t you say? I don’t see any return tickets here.”

They whisked past the agents on their way out of the house, Jesse dropping the afghan from the couch over them. “That’s more than you deserve,” she told them coldly.

“Wait! Wait!” they called. “You can’t leave us here like this all night.”

“It’s already done, boys,” Gabe paused at the door, filming them even as he left the house.

They craned their heads around trying to see him standing there. “What about your landlord? Doesn’t he know we’re here?”

“I didn’t tell him, did you?” Gabe joked. Then more seriously he said, “He has no idea you’re here. Why would I involve him? None of this is any of his doing.”

“But somebody’s got to know.”

“I’ll call someone in the morning, how’s that? In the meantime, here’s something to think about. Remember the Rodney King tape? Remember Waco? Remember how many times those tapes were seen on television? All over the world? Your buddies in D.C. are going to be so proud of you, I can tell you that right now.”

He waved the envelope containing their permission to fly Jesse to Bethesda in his hand. “And your air tickets back to Bethesda? You’ll have to get those reissued, just for the two of you of course. I’ll send you both a copy of the tape. Good family viewing don’t you think?” Gabe flipped off the outside light. “Come on, Ozone, the boys want their privacy. Too bad about this broken pane. Snuggle up, guys, it’s going to be a cold one.”

The door clicked quietly shut behind him. The two men lying on the kitchen floor heard Sam ask, “Where’re we gonna go now, Dad?”

Gabe’s answer was barely audible to them, “Guess we’ll head out to California like Jesse said.”

They listened to the jangle of snow chains as Gabe and Sam moved around the Jeep installing them on the tires. Turney and Foster watched the headlights light up the trees in a slow wide circle. In the moving lights they could see the white flurries of the season’s second winter snowstorm. The bare trees bent, the wind gusted and the taped broken glass in the door swung inward, snow and cold air whirling into the kitchen.

A few blocks from the Blake’s house, Jesse spoke, “I don’t have anybody expecting me out in California, Gabe. I don’t have anywhere for us to go.”

“I know, Jesse, I know.”

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“We’re going to find out how good I am at taking my own advice, like you said.”

“What advice?” Things had a way of happening so fast since she met Gabe that even their flight from Socorro two days ago seemed lost in the distant past to her.

“Step out of the light into the darkness? We’re going to jump into the abyss and hope that someone is there to catch us.” Gabe turned and looked back at Stella. “Stella, you’re welcome to stay with us if you want. In fact, we’re inviting you to stay with us. We just asked the Blakes not to mention you to anyone, so people looking for you with us shouldn’t be a problem. But we’re also giving you a chance to get out of this now. If you want we’ll drop you off at the Shelter for Women and Children or the home of the head of Social Services in town here. Jesse will take you in, introduce you and get you settled. Whatever you want. But we won’t let you out on the street.”

“Where are we going?” Stella asked.

He shook his head, “Can’t say, Stella, if you’re not going with us. Which is it? What do you want to do? Do you want us to drop you off somewhere? Where we’re headed is not going be all that fun for someone your age. No malls, no stores, no movies, no zoos, no school, no library, no playgrounds, no children.”

“No school! Yeah! All right!” Sam beat his fists on the back of the front seat.

Stella frowned. It seemed to her that Gabe had eliminated pretty much the entire world.

“What will there be?” she asked.

“Can’t say if you’re not going with us. And not only will there not be anything fun to do, there’ll be work to do instead. Chores for everyone.”

“If I don’t like it, can I leave?” she asked.

“Stella, obviously you’ve already figured out that one way or another you can always leave. We have no hold on you. You’re not obligated to go with us. But we’re offering you shelter and food for as long as you need or want it, as long as you behave yourself,” he finished with a qualifier.

She considered this for a moment. These people were not like anyone she had ever met before. No one besides her mother had ever offered to care for her without expecting to be paid for it. “I want to go with you guys.” She looked at Sam, “But only if Sam says yes.”

Sam fell back against his seat with a scowl, his arms crossed tightly.

In the silence that followed, Jesse asked, “Will there be electricity?”

“Electricity and a phone, yes.”

“How do you know?”

“I was there a few years ago.”

More silence. The Interstate was only blocks away.

“We need to know now, Stella,” Gabe said.

“Where we’re going, is this going to be forever?” Sam asked angrily.

“A few months, Sam. Maybe six or seven, no more. Just till Jesse gets her work done.”

Stella and Sam stared at each other.

“Yes!” Sam exploded. Then, “Don’t you touch me, Stella!” he growled when she looked like she was about to throw her arms around him.

They pulled out onto I-25 and headed south, the unfamiliar sound of the snow chains slapping rhythmically over the highway. The snow was coming down hard. On the radio people were being warned to stay off the streets, to come in off the highways and seek shelter for the night.

Gabe answered the question in Jesse’s eyes. “Remember I told you about that old guy in the pen who spent about all his life there? The one from back east, the steel worker who killed a man back in the sixties? Jim?”

“The one who told all the lies? You said he wrote you and said he’d bought a place?”

He smiled and nodded. “That’s the one.”

A shiver of dread knifed through her. “He told all those lies and you believed them for weeks? You said he never told the truth once as far as you could remember?”

Gabe shrugged. “Sometimes he told the truth, sometimes he lied. Lying was his way of playing. Got to have something to do when you’re in there that long. It amused him. Anyway he used to say that when he got out he wanted to go where there weren’t any people. He didn’t really know where that might be anymore but that was where he wanted to go. To entertain him sometimes I’d tell him about New Mexico. About miles where there isn’t a soul and a little land can be had for dollars. About out of the way places like Chloride, Datil, Reserve. Ghost towns like Pie Town and Horse Springs.”

“Where’re we going, Gabe?” Jesse asked.

“We’re going to the Gila.”

Though Jesse had been in New Mexico for a year and a half she had never heard of the Gila.

Gabe prayed, “And man, I hope he’s there. He said we were welcome. He said he’d be waiting for us. Said we could hide out there anytime.” Gabe laughed.

“When did he write?”

“The last letter I got from him was a little over a year ago.”

Chapter Fourteen

Two Albuquerque Police cars were parked on either side of the government van. Lit up by the whirling red lights, pink snow flurries fell heavily through the darkness before dawn. Mr. and Mrs. Gonzales, the neighbors from a half a block to the north stood in the street shivering in their pajamas, boots and overcoats.

With their guns out and ready, four police officers in flak jackets cautiously approached Dennis’ parents’ house from the front and back. The Gonzales struggled through the snow to stand with the van between them and the house. They watched two of the officers step cautiously up onto the front porch, try the front door, then moving to either side of it, the officers crouched and waited. Moments later the front door opened and the two officers waiting outside entered the house. The Gonzales listened to the sound of raucous laughter and angry shouts coming from inside the house.

Trudging through the snow from their house a block to the south, Dennis and Sally, also in pajamas, boots and overcoats, arrived on the scene. “What’s going on? Why did you call?” Dennis asked.

Mr. Gonzales lifted his hands. “We have no idea what’s going on. We got a call from your friend, Gabe, a few minutes ago. He said he was on his way to California and when he was about to leave last night he caught two intruders breaking into the house. He tied them up and left them there to think about it. He called to ask one of us to call the police or said we could go over and untie them ourselves, whichever we thought best.” Mr. Gonzales threw down his hands. “Man, that Gabe is one strange dude.”

At that moment four police officers and two FBI agents, now fully dressed, emerged from the front door of the house. All four of the police officers were smiling broadly. Chilled to the bone and livid with humiliation and rage, Agents Turney and Foster were, to put it mildly, hopping mad.

The officers of the law converged on the citizens in the street, Agent Turney waving his badge and demanding loudly, “ Who reported this situation to the police?”

A police officer asked, “Mr. Gonzales, aren’t you the one who called this morning requesting we come out here to investigate a break and entry?”

“Yes,” Mr. Gonzales answered, “I called the police.”

Literally foaming at the mouth Turney whipped around and faced the police officers, his eyes almost bugging out of his head, his arms waving madly, spit flying everywhere. “This is strictly a federal affair! You have no jurisdiction over anything to do with this incident. It is within our rights as federal officers protecting the security of the nation to request that none of this appear on any official reports.”

“Hey, no complaints here!” one officer remarked. All of them stepped back. “Saves us a lot of paper work,” the four officers readily surrendered the remainder of the investigation to their federal counterparts. Laughing out loud and making jokes about the unfortunate fact that their camera man was sick with the flu that morning, they returned to their cars and drove off, their hilarity only serving to enrage Turney and Foster more.

Once again flashing their badges, the agents rounded on Dennis and Sally. “Where the hell are Gabriel Hunter and Jesse Wren? What do you know about last night?” Turney demanded.

“We don’t know anything about last night except Gabe and Jesse stopped by around eleven or a little later to say they were taking off for Berkeley. Apparently Jesse has a place to stay out there,” Dennis answered mildly. “Do you mind if I ask a question? That is our house. Where are the intruders? The two guys that were tied up? Are they still inside or what? Why didn’t the police take them with them? Why are you here? How long have you been here?”

The two agents drew themselves up stiffly and glared at Dennis. Turney blurted, “We were the intruders. We are investigating Dr. Wren’s collapse at the NRAO. We wanted to ask her some questions.”

Dennis frowned and asked, “You broke into the house?” Then with even more disbelief, “When Gabe was in there?”

A dead silence fell over the group. Dennis started to speak and then stopped.

Sally pursed her lips, crossed her arms over her overcoat and turned away to watch the trees dance in and out of the falling snow.

Speechless at the thought of what must have transpired last evening Dennis lifted his eyebrows high. He inhaled deeply over bared teeth, licked his lips and closed them tightly, bulging all the muscles around his mouth in a hard straight grimace. Then he squinted, nodded and said mildly, “Well . . . nobody said anything about you guys, that’s for sure.”

Still in a frothing rage Turney and Foster rounded simultaneously on Mr. and Mrs. Gonzales. “Do you have call tracing?” they both demanded at once.

“Nope,” Mr. Gonzales answered.

In the driver’s seat of the van, Turney beat his fists against the steering wheel, fuming, “Jesus fucking Christ, he did something with the goddamned fucking keys!”

At the Police Station in downtown Albuquerque, Agents Turney and Foster filed an official request to be informed immediately if local or State Police discovered the whereabouts of Dr. Jesse Wren or Gabriel Hunter. As they walked down the halls and out of the station they passed a gauntlet of ridicule and sarcasm.

“ . . . all night like a couple of lovebirds.”

“ . . . what they say about J. Edgar and the G Men must be true. It’s a real cozy bunch.”

“The nation is definitely more secure with those two . . .”

Their rage against Gabe could not have been hotter. They conjectured, “They mentioned it several times so there’s no way they’re headed for California. They’re still in the area.”

And they were. Still in the area. The Jeep laboring up the mountainside above Mogollon through more than a foot of fresh snow. After driving all night through the statewide storm, Gabe was exhausted, tense. They were only a mile or two from their destination, but the old mining road was treacherous, slippery and difficult to follow. They topped the pass and Gabe heaved a sigh of relief. After the first hairpin turn they descended, crawling down the icy grade in first gear.

Then, inching around the second switchback, the Jeep began a creeping slide toward the edge of a sheer thousand foot drop. Gingerly Gabe pumped the brakes, then flat out mashed them trying to avoid the yawning death that opened out in slow motion below them. Jesse gasped and grabbed the dashboard. Sam and Stella grabbed the back of the seat in front of them, both of them crying out in terror. But the Jeep slid on, ever more gradually, until finally, it hung over the precipice like a broken twig swinging in the breeze.

“Don’t move!” Gabe growled. “Nobody move!” He shifted into reverse. The rear wheels spun in the snow and gravel and caught. The Jeep tottered at the edge and then, inch by inch, it jerked back away from the precipice.

The children laughed nervously. Jesse watched Gabe out of the corner of her eye. Grimly he stared ahead concentrating on navigating the rest of the descent.

Though it was warm in the Jeep, Jesse shivered. She had never been on a wilderness mountain road like this before, let alone try to travel on one through a blizzard. It didn’t take much imagination to know they wouldn’t be driving back up that road any time soon. The place was miles from nowhere. She was beginning to wonder if their journey would ever end, when the road at last bottomed out in a dip in the mountaintop to become little more than a narrow treeless white path twisting through a canyon.

She was thinking there can’t possibly be anyone or anything up here when they rounded a bend and came upon the old mining community of Mogollon. About thirty small frame and log buildings lined the sides of the snow covered vein of road. Each and every building was noticeably posted with no trespassing signs. Some of the buildings were derelict. Some were in good repair. The tree trunks were black against the snow and the cabins were dark foreboding spots of emptiness and abandonment, their snow covered roofs blending with the falling snow and the snow drifted mountains and trees behind them. All were boarded up and unoccupied. All was soft and silent and vacant.

Gabe’s heart sank. They were arriving with their lives, but only barely. They wouldn’t be able to get back up out of there for at least a day, maybe two. And when they did leave, where would they go? They were going to have to break into one of the cabins for shelter. At least they had some food with them. His thoughts were already up out of Mogollon and down in Hillsborough where he knew there would be a place to rent even though the likelihood of their being discovered and interfered with was much greater when . . .

“Look, Dad!” Sam exclaimed. “There’s smoke coming from that cabin. There’s got to be somebody in there.”

Up the double row of houses, in the middle on the left, past what had once been a hotel, was a solid two story log cabin with a porch wrapped around the entire building. An enormous wall sized picture window faced the road. The thin spiral of smoke curling up from the cabin’s chimney was barely visible through the falling snow.

The front door to the cabin opened and an old man stepped out.

“Jim, you old sonovabitch,” Gabe talked to himself, his voice unmistakably exultant, “you told the truth! For once in your sorry old life, you told the truth.”

The Jeep crunched to a halt in front of the cabin. Sam opened his door and Ozone leapt out. The old man bent over, peered down into the Jeep at them and like the sun coming out he recognized Gabe. Smiling and waving excitedly for them to come on in, he stood waiting with an old gray dish towel in his hands and laughter in his eyes as they mounted the steps.

Gabe knew the old man. Jim’s appearance was not a shock to him. The children were not experienced enough to be shocked. Gabe threw his arms around Jim’s bony shoulders and Jesse stared.

Jim Grant was transparent. Almost bald, with a fuzzy halo of white hair sticking out all over his head, he looked like one of those leaves that can be found in the spring or late summer, a leaf that has been preserved beneath layers of its brothers, protected from wind and other forces of destruction while rain and snow leach away all but the skeleton, until there is nothing left but a trace of it, a thin lace of leafy veins as beautiful as a snowflake or a butterfly’s wing. Jim was a thin wispy lace of an old man, ethereal, almost unreal in his insubstantiality.

He was laughing. “I been waitin for you, Gabe. What took you so long?”

“Waiting for us?” Gabe was puzzled. He had tried to call the old man but had been unable to reach him.

The old man teased, “Yeah, I wrote a coupla times. Didn’t you get my letters? Been expectin you.”

Gabe looked guilty. He had not answered the old man’s letters.

“I’m teasin, Gabe. Everybody, come on in out of the cold. I’m so happy to see you! This is just like Christmas! Better than Christmas,” Jim chuckled and laughed. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you folks. Come on in.”

They followed him into the cabin’s main room. Though there were doors leading to other rooms and a stairway leading upstairs, it was clear that this was where the old man lived. What they could see of the first floor was generous, with a large kitchen at the back, a dining area and an enormous front room. Over to the right of the front door, a big black wood burning stove dominated the corner. The stove’s doors were open and a single log burned feebly there. There was a tattered couch in front of the stove, the pillows and rumpled bedding on it testifying that here was where the old man slept. Against the wall beyond the stove, a small television on a stand was turned on and Charles Osgood was quietly waking up America. On the other side of the front door in the corner opposite the stove, an oak roll top desk stood in the light of the window. The roll top was open and the desk was littered with magazines, newspapers, junk mail and scraps of paper. The air in the cabin was smoky and stale. The cabin was spacious and could have been comfortable, but at the moment it was cold. They shivered, taking in the shabby depressing disorder when Ozone thumped up after them into the cabin. Once inside she shook, sending a fine spray of snow and water everywhere.

“Ozone!” Gabe and Sam scolded.

“Never mind,” the old man laughed again and did a little jig, so happy he couldn’t contain himself. “Ya runnin, Gabe?” he asked with a chuckle.

Jesse was surprised at the question, but not Gabe. What else would they be doing driving up into that isolated place, along that torturous road in the worst snowstorm of the winter, but running?

Jim didn’t wait for an answer. “Well, you’re welcome here, all of you. I got room for you and more. This is a big old place. Four bedrooms, three upstairs and one down. Ain’t nobody gonna find you here neither, that’s for sure. You can stay as long as you want. You can stay for months. For years, for all I care.”

“We’ll pay you rent, Jim,” Gabe told him.

“You will?” The offer surprised the old man and for some reason it amused him even more. He laughed again and repeated his jig. “How much? How much will you pay me?”

“How much do you want?” Gabe asked.

Jesse was beginning to suspect that Jim was crazy, as he greeted everything Gabe said with ever increasing hilarity.

“Three hundred a month’ll do.”

Gabe fished his wallet out of his pocket and counted out three hundred dollars, paying the old man in advance. Jim accepted the money with another laughing jig.

“We brought groceries and supplies, so we have our own food. Plenty for you too, if you need any.” Gabe told him.

Again the old man laughed. “Good, good. I was about out myself. Gonna have to drive into town to get some as soon as the snow melts.” More laughter. “Oh my, my, my,” he exclaimed, “Just like Christmas. Better than Christmas!” He shone like a lit up candle, he was so happy.

He turned to Sam who was staring and frowning, “So this is your boy, Gabe.” Jim extended his hand with a gentle smile and a wondering nod of his head, “I’m mighty pleased to meet you, Sam, mighty pleased. I heard so much about you.” Sam reluctantly accepted the old man’s hand. “Who’re all the rest of these folks?” Jim asked as he pumped Sam’s arm.

Gabe made the introductions. “Jesse and Stella, meet Jim Grant.”

Jim asked, “Well, Jesse, Stella, you two ladies hungry? I take it you been drivin all night. How about some grub?”

After breakfast, Gabe and Jim sat at the table talking and Jesse cleaned up the dishes, while Sam and Stella explored the upstairs before unloading their possessions from the Jeep.

Jim talked again of how happy their arrival made him, of the happy weeks and months ahead of them. He told Gabe about his financial enterprise in Mogollon. He bought the cabin and hotel with the little bit of money he earned from a lifetime spent in prison. During the last two summers he ran the old hotel as a tourist attraction for campers and hunters who occasionally drove through Mogollon. He’d actually made a little money on the business he did at the hotel, selling junk to tourists and food to the summer residents of Mogollon, enough to pay his property taxes and make it through two winters anyway. This winter though, he admitted to Gabe, was especially lonely. He welcomed them all.

“Is there a phone?” Jesse asked.

“Ain’t that like a woman, always worrying about talking on the phone,” Jim remarked, more than forty years on the wrong side of politically correct. “There’s no phone in the cabin but there is one in the store.”

“What about mail and laundry and groceries?” Jesse asked.

Jim chuckled, thoroughly pleased with the novelty of talking no matter how mundane the subject. “The mail comes through on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday whenever the road is clear enough. There’s a washing machine in the utility room on the other side of the bathroom, but I ain’t got no drier. There’s a line out back. The nearest grocery store is twelve miles away in Glenwood.”

“Gabe,” the old man continued, “why don’t you move the Jeep around to the north side at the back of the cabin. You can use my pickup when you need to drive to Glenwood. That way the Jeep won’t give you away and by the time the tourists and summer people get here you’ll be regular residents. I told folks around here you were coming. I told em you’re family. They been expectin you.”

Stella bounded down the stairs screaming and laughing followed by a very angry Sam. She had on Sam’s tiger sweatshirt and his winter coat was in her hand.

“That’s my shirt! Take it off! That’s my coat! I need it!”

Gabe intercepted Stella and handed Sam’s coat to him. Jesse and Gabe looked at each other. Things had happened so fast there hadn’t been time to get Stella much more than a few T-shirts and some underwear and socks. They’d already told Sam he would have to share his clothes, at least until the storm cleared and they could get back up out of Mogollon to do some shopping. In the meantime, Mogollon at its nine thousand foot elevation was sometimes very cold. Layers of sweatshirts and Gabe’s flimsy old jacket simply wouldn’t be enough. Stella had to have a coat of her own.

“Two kids and one set of clothes, huh?” Jim chuckled.

“She can wear my coat,” Jesse volunteered.

“Then what will you wear?” everyone asked.

“Clothes ain’t no problem,” Jim told them. “There’s dozens of chests and boxes up in the attic in the hotel. When I bought this place I bought everything in the attic too. The owners lived up here in Mogollon for almost fifty years before they passed away a few years ago. After that the hotel and cabin were empty until I bought the place. I opened one of the chests and it was full of clothes as far as I could tell. I didn’t look any further than that one box. It was too damn depressing. While they were living up here and raisin children and accumulating clothes to store away, I was rotting in prison,” he admitted with an embarrassed laugh. “You’re welcome to anything that’s up there,” he offered.

Outside, the snow was still falling heavily. Jim unlocked the padlock hanging between the shop doors. “This building here is one of the main reasons I bought the place. Along with the mountains here,” he explained pulling weakly on one of the doors. Gabe moved to help him and the two of them dragged the door through the snow until it stood open a few feet. Then Gabe stood behind the door and pushed it the rest of the way, letting light and cold fresh air into the shop.

Breakfast had invigorated them all. Ready for work, Gabe was after Jim’s chain saw. The five of them turned on the dirt floor of Jim’s shop looking at the table saws, the work tables, the walls hung with hundreds of neatly arranged tools. Acetylene tanks and torches, two old wood burning stoves and more boxes of tools and equipment lined the walls and stood piled in the corners.

“Wow, look at all this stuff!” Sam exclaimed. He ran over to the nearest table saw and flipped the switch there. The saw roared on, the visible edge of the huge blade spinning to a blur.

“Sam!” Gabe scolded.

Sam flipped the machine off and it whined down to silence.

Jim laughed. “Aw, let the boy look. Just don’t get hurt, Sam.” Jim crossed to where the chain saws hung on a wall and lifted the bigger of the two down for Gabe. “Yep, I thought I was gonna build a lotta stuff with this shop. The whole time I was in prison I dreamed about a shop like this and making things. Remember, Gabe? Remember how we used to talk about making things?” the old man asked, his voice turning wistful. He laid the chain saw on a worktable. “Nothin I like better than good tools and making things. Bring me that red can over there will you, Sam?” Sam ran to fetch the can while Jim placed a funnel in the opening of the saw’s fuel tank.

“All this stuff works,” Jim continued conversationally. “Bloom sure knew his tools. Took dang good care of em, too. They were in perfect condition, even after sitting here unused all that time. I tried my hand at making a few little things when I first got here, but . . . I lost interest. Didn’t have the strength or the energy any more, I guess,” Jim’s old eyes lifted to meet Jesse’s and Gabe’s over the chain saw. “What’s the point of making something for just yourself anyways?” he asked with a rueful laugh. He screwed the cap down on the fuel tank and stepped back from the saw. “You give it a pull, Gabe, see if she starts up. It’s a chore for me. Bit off more than I could chew with this one.”

Something behind Gabe caught the old man’s attention and his rheumy old eyes widened fearfully. “Here now! You kids get away from that stuff! Don’t touch that!” Jim moved with amazing speed then, crossing to where the two children were crouched over a large tattered and sagging cardboard box next to the wall. The box was filled with what looked like merely a dusty pile of rubble and garbage.

Gabe and Jesse quickly followed.

“Stand back away from that box, you two!” Jim ordered gruffly. The children backed away from the box, their faces showing their surprise at the old man’s tone.

“Aw, don’t worry I ain’t mad at you,” he explained. “I just didn’t want you to get killed or kill us all, that’s all.”

“Jesus, Jim, what is that stuff?” Gabe asked.

“An old mine was part of the deal when I bought this place. It’s up the mountain behind here a few hundred yards. The first summer I was here, I spent a few days investigating, walking back through the tunnels. I found that stuff scattered in the rocks way back in there. It’s a bunch of old blasting caps and dynamite. Stuff is probably close to a century old now. Who knows if it would even blow up now? But it might. That’s why I brought it down here and why this building is locked. I didn’t want some fool hiker or kid blowing themselves up on my place. I didn’t know what else to do with it. You can detonate it, Gabe, or we can find another place for it. Whatever you like.” Jim turned fiercely to Sam and Stella. “But you kids stay away from it, you hear? I don’t want you goin near that stuff.”

Nodding Sam and Stella left the shop, suddenly more interested in the snow outside than the dusty contents of a cardboard box.

Minutes later the roar of the chain saw and the crash of falling trees ripped through the forest behind the cabin. Gabe worked, felling nearby dead trees and cutting them up for the nearly depleted woodpile stacked next to Jim’s satellite dish.

Inside the old hotel Jesse, Sam and Stella followed Jim through a dark labyrinth of junk covered tables to the rear of the building. They climbed up and around two flights of stairs past two windows from dark to light and dark to light all the way to the attic.

“I ain’t been up here except that once back when I first bought the place,” the old man told them, pushing on the heavy door. It creaked open and they stepped into a cavernous room that stretched the length and width of the building. Their breaths steamed tiny fogs suspended in front of their mouths. Except for their own breathing and the muffled sound of the chain saw coming from outside, the place was utterly still.

The low dark ceiling was formed of open timbers. Jim’s footprints from over two years ago were clear and undisturbed in the dust on the pine board floor. Eight large dormer windows, two on each side of the building pierced the dark walls with big brilliant rectangles of white snowy daylight. Dusty furniture was propped against the walls and littered the floor in piles and groupings. Huge wooden and tin chests and stacks of cardboard boxes were scattered about the room.

Jim left new footprints crossing to the center of the room where a stove stood alone in a wide open space. He knelt beside the stove, tinkered with it, then signaled to Sam who carried a tin of kerosene. In a few moments the stove lit up with a whoosh and Jim stood, dusting off his hands. “That oughta get rid of the bite. It’ll be warm up here in no time,” he descended the stairs his voice trailing up to them. “Help yourself to anything you find….”

Jesse and Stella followed the first set of Jim’s footprints to a bookcase full of family albums. They could see the spot where Jim knelt on the floor and the scuffled dust where he laid the albums down and opened them. His footprints traveled to only one other place in the room, one chest that stood separate and alone, making Jesse think that perhaps it was the albums and not boxes of clothing that drove Jim away from the attic. One album still lay open on the floor. Jesse and Stella knelt beside it and Sam leaned over their shoulders. Jesse turned the pages and they looked at photographs from more than half a century ago. A courtship, a wedding, early careers, two children.

They came to Mogollon from New York City of all places. He was a writer and she was once an actress on Broadway. The albums of photographs, newspaper photographs and articles told the story of the writer’s and actor’s unions, of Senator McCarthy’s fanaticism, the Senate hearings and finally the destruction of both their careers by the government witch hunts of the early fifties.

Infinitely bored with this discovery Sam began poking around the rest of the attic. But Jesse and Stella sat down in the dust and continued to learn about the former owners of the hotel and cabin.

The Blooms and their two children left the ruins of their lives in New York for the isolation and anonymity of New Mexico. They settled in Mogollon. Harry Bloom wrote for small newspapers in the area. He even managed to continue to write for Broadway and Hollywood, though never at the level of his former success. Marilyn Bloom’s career as an actress on Broadway was over. She and Harry started a summer theater in Mogollon for the tourists. The faded sign for the theater still hung outside the old hotel. When they first arrived the Blooms lived on the top floor of the hotel where Jesse and the children knelt nosing around their possessions at that very moment. Then Mr. Bloom built the shop down below, and later together, they all helped to build the cabin.

Pages of photographs attested to their slow progress. There were photos of walls going up and backyard picnics amid the rubble of ongoing construction. Photos of cooling summertime dips in a huge watering tank turned pool or in the creek that ran straight alongside the street of Mogollon. A Thanksgiving feast inside walls but no roof and finally that first Christmas inside the completed cabin.

Still, tragedy haunted the Blooms all their lives, even in New Mexico. The boy adjusted to life in the wilderness, if the photographs of him and his hunting and trapping trophies were evidence to go by. But the last images of Ricky Bloom were not pictures taken in New Mexico. There were photographs of the basic training camp in El Toro and later officer training school in Quantico. Then page after page of little black and white Polaroid’s of countless young men living in tents in a Southeast Asian jungle. Picture after picture of shirtless, nameless young men standing smiling into the camera in the burning sunlight and suffocating heat that photographs cannot depict, tags hanging from scrawny teenage necks, a beer or a shovel or a rifle dangling from a hand here and there. Then finally on one page there was only a letter from President Lyndon Baines Johnson, sending his deep regrets and thanks.

The girl, Leslie, too came to love New Mexico, learning to take her trophies with a camera instead of a gun. She too left the place of her parent’s exile, taking her skill with a camera to Africa and Asia. The family’s last albums were filled with her photographs and articles she wrote for National Geographic and other wildlife magazines. But she did not take the final photograph. The very last picture in the very last album came from a newspaper. Not pasted in like the rest, the last picture simply lay loose in between empty pages. It was a photograph of the remains of a bombed vehicle and a shattered building on the streets of a far off foreign city. The accompanying story was an epitaph for a talented young photographer, an absurd casualty in an absurd war, killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Jesse and Stella examined the photograph and newspaper story for a moment. Then Stella got up from her place beside Jesse and started looking through the boxes and chests in the attic.

Jesse studied that last terrible image. In those first few photographs of them together, the Blooms had looked so sweet, so young and hopeful, so full of joy and promise. Life seemed infinitely sad to Jesse at that moment.

Slowly she closed the last album and placed it back in the bookshelf next to the others. Wearily, reluctantly she moved on to the task of searching for clothes that Stella might wear. Somehow now, she was tired to the bone and out of the mood. She was depressed by the story she had discovered, depressed by her own presence in that cold lonely abandoned place so far from everywhere, depressed by the fact the she along with just about everyone else there seemed to be constantly on the run. And now that she had seen the FBI agents face to face and learned the true reason for their interest in her, well it simply boggled the mind, it seemed beyond belief.

But she saw the van with the cot, the webbed restraints with her own eyes, she held the vials containing sodium pentathol in her own hands, she read the papers granting Agents Turney and Foster permission to fly her to the Naval Hospital in Bethesda. So she couldn’t deny it, much as she wanted to. She knew she should have felt terror, but she was too depressed and tired for terror. In fact she was just about all out of terror or any other emotion for that matter. What she felt most at that moment, besides depression and a bone chilling weariness, was numb.

She sighed heavily, stood up and crossed the room to the nearest chest, the one Jim’s footprints led to and from. She lifted the lid and the smell of naphtha floated up out of the chest, mingling with the still musty air in the attic. On the very top inside the chest there were military uniforms, lots of them, neatly pressed, folded and stacked, some with rows of colorful ribbons and medals still pinned to them. Beneath these, Jesse discovered long underwear, wool coats, scarves, sweaters, mittens, gloves and several beautiful old Pendleton wool blankets. Jim was right, there was clothing and bedding enough for everyone.

In front of Jesse under one of the dormer windows, Stella opened another chest. Jesse heard her push aside the tissue paper she discovered there. Then the child gasped aloud and Jesse looked up to see Stella galvanized, staring down at the contents of the chest as though she’d discovered a treasure. She had. The chest was full of evening clothes; gowns, shawls, wraps and tuxedos fancy enough to attend an opening on Broadway or in Hollywood.

Suddenly Stella’s coat and shirts were falling away from her like cherry blossoms in the wind. She couldn’t get them off fast enough. It was literally only a matter of seconds from the moment she opened the chest before she lifted a glimmering satin evening gown from its depths and slipped it over her head and down over her skinny little torso, her head and shoulders emerging from snow white billows like a smiling curly headed sunflower. Then she bent over the chest and rummaged through it, the gown hanging like a loose bag from her tiny frame while she dug deeper in the chest. She stood up, in her hands a pink, gold and silver silk shawl that shimmered and glistened like water with the sun on it. She wrapped the shawl twice around her middle pulling the gown snug and tied the shawl in the back leaving the ends and fringes spilling down behind her in a shimmering river of silver and gold. Once more she dipped into the chest, this time coming up with a red velvet evening gown. Stella held it up for Jesse to see and then walked toward her like a little moon goddess, the skirt of her dress lifted high in one hand, the red velvet dress in the other and a big grin on her face.

The velvet dress was beautiful beyond any garment Jesse had ever seen. How could she resist?

They fitted the red dress to Jesse with a peacock blue silk scarf tied around her middle like Stella’s. Soon they had Sam dressed in an old top hat and tuxedo, the sleeves and pants in triple rolls at his wrists and ankles. They discovered an armoire, its drawers full of costume and even some real jewelry. In front of an old full length standing mirror, all dusty and faded and cracked around the edges, they tried on hats and coats, scarves and shawls and jewelry.

Standing behind Sam, Jesse hummed The Wheels of Love and draped a long white silk scarf around the boy’s neck giving each end of the scarf a dramatic toss. He laughed and Jesse hummed when suddenly Stella joined Jesse, singing the words to Emmy Lou’s song. The child sang effortlessly in a stunningly strong and beautiful voice.

Jesse smiled and sang with her, their eyes meeting first in the mirror and then as they faced each other. Still singing, they lifted their arms around Sam’s shoulders and his encircled their waists and they all three danced, gliding in circles around the attic their feet stirring up the dust until it seemed the very air and light in the attic danced with them. Their arms and heads, dresses and tuxedo were covered with jewelry; silver and gold bracelets and necklaces, glass beads, rhinestones, semiprecious stones and even a few real diamonds that sparkled and shone like the stars and moon, and the air swirled around them, a galaxy of shining dust motes. Round and round they sang and they danced and they laughed, unaware of the light and the air, strangely, strangely dancing, laughing with them. Their singing and dancing carried them around to what had been keeping Sam quiet for so long and they paused, the shining dust, the sparkling laughing air settling down, disappearing.

Sam had discovered the toys. There was a complete Lionel electric train, an erector set with a motor, Lincoln logs, a chemistry set, a doll house, a box full of dolls, boxes of school books and completed lessons to go with the report cards and diplomas Jesse and Stella had seen proudly featured in the photo albums. There were boxes and boxes of books and toys.

“Boy, you’ve been busy!” Jesse teased. “This is better than Christmas,” she declared and Sam turned again to the strapped chest he had been trying to open at the very moment Jesse and Stella demanded he put on the tuxedo.

He thumbed back the top hat, pushed his sleeves up and went to work on the straps again. At last they dropped to the floor and he raised the lid. He reached down into the chest and pulled out a fairly large object that had been carefully wrapped in a blanket. The blanket fell away revealing a large blue case. Sam set the case on the floor, opened it and the sheen of velvet lining and the shine of gold and silver met his eyes.

“Wow! This is so cool!” he exclaimed lifting a gleaming tenor saxophone from the case. He blew experimentally and unsuccessfully on the horn. Jesse picked up the mouthpiece and fit it to the horn for him, explaining that the reed was probably too old. He inhaled deeply and blew again producing a horrible screeching noise. They laughed.

Sam continued to experiment with the horn while Jesse retrieved another blanket wrapped case from the open chest where the saxophone had been. She unwrapped the case and whispered, “I don’t believe it.”

Holding her breath she opened the case. This time the gleam of old wood greeted their eyes. Reverently, as though she were receiving a fabulous gift, Jesse raised the violin from its case and examined it. With tears in her eyes, she lifted the bow from the case, fit the violin to her chin and drew the bow across the strings. The bowstrings disintegrated like cobwebs, the brittle violin strings snapped and shattered like glass and Jesse began to cry. She cried and laughed at the same time. She got up, crossed to one of the attic windows overlooking the cabin, opened it and leaned out into the falling snow.

Below her, Gabe swung the ax in an arc over his head and split the log with a dull thud. He bent over and lifted another log into place and swung again splitting the wood in one continuous easy movement.

She watched him for a long moment. The fluid grace of his labor, the tightening stretch of the shirt across his back, the sinewy bulge of his forearms, the torque of his wrists, the power of his hands on the ax handle, the supple curve of his body when he bent to lift another log, the strength of his thighs flexing and turning beneath him.

“Gabe, can you help us?” she called down to him. “We have lots of stuff to carry over.”

He turned and looked up at her, his head thrown back, his thick brown hair sticking to his forehead in sweaty curls, his brown eyes full of surprise. Standing there like that with his legs spread wide in the snow, his chest heaving and his eyes shining up at her with the sun in them, he looked like a Viking, a mountain man, he looked like he belonged to the mountains and the forest.

He stared up at her, stunned by the sight of her in the red velvet dress. She was a vision pulsing with life and beauty. She hung from the window like a blood red rose, a bleeding heart pierced by a blue arrow. Her cheeks were matching roses, her lips were scarlet petals, her silvery eyes sparkled down at him full of diamonds and starlight. She glowed with life. He dropped the ax in the snow.

He mounted the dark stairs at the back of the hotel two at a time. He could hear Sam and Stella above him their voices and footsteps descending the stairs toward him. They met him at a turn and a window. Sam passed him first still wearing the jet-black tuxedo over his T-shirt. His arms were stretched around the box containing the electric train and the saxophone case dangled from one hand. He bounded down the stairs passing Gabe with the non sequitur, “Jesse’s gonna get me a reed and teach me to play!”

Then Stella floated past him in that magnificent white dress looking like an apparition composed more of light than flesh. Her arms and neck were covered in shimmering rhinestones, sparkling faux rubies and emeralds, real diamonds. Multiple pairs of sparkling earrings clung to every available curve of her ears and a rhinestone tiara glittered atop her honey colored curls. The touches of reality? Her blue jeans, her red high top tennis shoes and an old army duffel full of more clothes thumping down the stairs behind her.

He stepped up into the attic and looked around the enormous room, taking in the stillness, the deep somber quiet, the dark browns of the ceiling and walls, the dusty gray of the furniture and floor, the blinding white light from the eight dormer windows and finally, Jesse in the scarlet dress, a brilliant blood red drop of life and color still standing by the window overlooking the cabin. Her back was to him, her blue black hair glimmered white flashes at him in the window light. Her slender arms were twisted behind her, her hands working at the knot in the blue scarf. “Leave it on, Jesse. I want to see you,” he told her from where he stood.

She whirled around, her face aglow. “Gabe!” She smiled and ran to him, the scarlet dress rippling and flowing around her like a river in the wind. “You should see what we found!”

She took his hand and pulled him after her to where the violin lay in its open case on the floor. “Look!” She lifted the violin from the case and handed it to him. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked.

“I don’t know anything about violins,” he turned the violin in his hands. “Is it beautiful?”

“It’s a fine instrument,” she told him. “A Mathias Neuner. See? There’s the mark. It’s not as good as my violin but it’s . . . good.” Her tone said it all. He handed the violin back to her and she placed it back in its case and stood up.

He reached out and touched her cheek with his fingers and her lips with his thumb. “You’re covered in roses, Jesse. You look like a rose. That’s a good color for you. A pretty dress,” he told her his voice growing softer, his fingers reveling in the silk of her flesh. He crossed his arms over his chest and smiled down at her. “Looks like you’ve been having fun up here.”

She pirouetted away from him, the dress spreading out around her like a scarlet lake. “We found so much stuff.” She bent over the chest where the wool things were stored and rummaged around in it. Gabe followed her and watched her push aside piles of young Bloom’s camouflage fatigues and dress uniforms.

She stood up with a beautiful brown and red wool scarf in her hands. She held it out to Gabe. He bent his head and she looped the scarf around his neck and tied it. “Some of it we can use at least until we get into town. And, yes,” she admitted somewhat reluctantly, a little embarrassed at the childishness of it all, a little appalled at herself for being so happy after everything else, amazed that she felt so joyful after being so depressed barely minutes before, “We’ve been having fun. Silly stuff. Kid stuff.”

His mouth twitched at her obvious embarrassment. He couldn’t help himself. Did she think he would resent her having fun? Did she consider herself too old for fun and silliness? Was there something different, less worthy about having fun with two children? He had to tease her. “Silly stuff? Kid stuff?”

“Yeah,” she said with a meek little lilt in her voice. He watched her pack up a box of things for him to carry down for her. “You know, dressing up. Singing and dancing.”

Gabe continued the tease with just the right amount of subtle condemnation in his voice. “Dressing up?”

She glanced up at him and caught his smile before he rearranged it into a sour deadpan.

Gabe, unaware that the game was up, continued the tease. “Singing?”

“Yeah, Stella can really sing. We sang . . .”

The sight of his crossed arms and superior expression changed her mind. Instead of shyly continuing her explanation she raised an eyebrow in unmistakable challenge. She lifted bare delicate shoulders and her hips swayed sending ripples down the length of the red velvet dress. Rhythmic movements turned to steps bringing her slowly closer to him. “Like this,” she whispered, a sultry fire in her eyes.

And Jesse sang. Just for Gabe. She sang, Tougher Than The Rest, a sweet sexy little song by the Boss. She gave it all she had and by the time she was done she was standing so close to him that he was breathing in her breath as she sang.

He stared down at her, his mouth hanging open with just a little smile off to one side of his parted lips and there was the sun burning in his eyes again. He could not remember ever wanting anyone like he wanted Jesse.

“Nice,” he whispered lifting his hands, touching her hair, the silk of her neck, the velvet of her dress with just the tips of his fingers traveling along her shoulders down her arms, feathering the red velvet covering her breasts, then slipping between her arms and the rest of her, embracing her ribs, reveling in the warmth of her, the delicious feel of the dress.

“Sweet. So sweet,” he whispered, staring down into those incredible silvery eyes. He stepped closer, his body coming into brushing contact with hers. His hands tightened on her ribs and he pulled her close and the supple easy way she leaned into him brought him one degree from meltdown.

“Ah Jesse,” he whispered and bent to kiss her, his lips covering hers, his hands sliding down around her hips to hold and move her against him. The way her arms twisted up around his neck and her tongue danced with his, the way her body slipped beneath his hands and the velvet and moved against him brought him one second from lift off. Gabe growled.

Then came breathless laughter and a heavy thumping up the stairs. Sam burst up into the attic yelling, “Beat ya! Beat ya!” followed by a huffing, puffing Stella.

Reluctantly his hands loosened their hold on her. Slowly they stepped away from each other. He stared down at her, his eyes full of wanting. She was the most beautiful sight on earth to him.

Chapter Fifteen

“So sorry to get you up and out on a Sunday morning like this, but this morning is when I could finally get around to this and you said to call, no matter what, if I found anything interesting.”

Up in Albuquerque, deep inside the very nearly deserted bowels of Sandia Labs that snowy morning, “You’re absolutely positive?” Turney and Foster asked in shocked unison.

“Yes. I repeated both tests a second time on different machines and with a different terminal,” analytic specialist, Dr. Ruth Stephens gestured toward the console next to hers, “to eliminate the possibility of error. Either with the equipment or the console that gives me access to the computer. And look.”

The object Agents Turney and Foster found buried just outside Gabe’s house near San Antonio had a thin organic coating on it, a few molecules stuck here and there, more than enough to show up in her analysis. Ruth brought up the results of her tests, pointed to the computer’s analyses of the organic substance and announced, “That thing has blood all over it. Human blood. But look. Look at this incredible chemistry.”

She poked her finger at her computer screen pointing out aberrant percentages in the chemical composition of the blood scraped off the object. She continued excitedly, “And the computer, both computers, insist that it’s . . . well it is human. It simply couldn’t be anything else.”

“How can that be?” Foster asked.

“I have no idea,” she said with a shake of her head, “but let me show you.”

She split her screen bringing up an almost twin image to the first. “Here’s what the regular, average chemical composition of human blood looks like,” she pointed to the left side of her screen, “and here’s what the little gray guy’s chemistry looks like,” she told them, pointing to the right half.

“What do you mean by that? Little gray guy?” Turney snapped.

Ruth looked up in surprise. “It was a joke. It’s not anything I’ve ever seen, that’s all. It’s not anything anybody on Earth has ever seen. But despite the differences in chemistry, the computer insists on classifying this side,” she tapped the right side of her screen, “ as human. See? Here’s a genetic analysis. It’s human. No doubt about it.”

She brought up the results of the genetic analysis showing that the computer classified the genetic material as human despite the unusual mix of elements in the blood composition. Again her fingers touched the mouse and the screen divided, displaying on the right side a genetic analysis of the organic material scraped off the object and on the left, a genetic analysis of a known human subject. She pointed and explained again, “Here’s an example of human genetic material and on this side you see the genetics of the blood scraped off the object.”

They leaned close, studying the images on her computer screen.

“Watch,” she said, touching the mouse again and the division between the two halves of the screen dissolved, the two images overlapping gene for gene so they could easily see the match.

“And if you think that’s weird, get a load of this.” After a quick glance at the agents’ grim expressions she brought up the results of the gas chromatographic analysis of the other elements scraped from the outside of the object, elements that were part of the object itself.

“Ok, all these are ordinary metals, iron, aluminum, titanium, elements that you could expect to find in a metallic object like this,” with a wave of her hand she dismissed most of the elements listed from her scraping.

“But look here,” she pointed, “you’re aware of the controversial nature of elements 104-106?” She glanced up to see if they were following her. “You know they don’t exist in a stable form that we know of. But the structure of the periodic table predicts their existence. And scientists at Berkeley have discovered, or more correctly, have created them in an accelerator?”

Turney and Foster nodded.

“Ok. So they exist as far as we know only under experimental conditions and they have a life of nanoseconds. They will not be part of a stable alloy. But look here.” Ruth touched her screen. “The last two elements by percentage, contained in the scraping from that object are unnilpentium and unnilhexium. What you are seeing is impossible by any technology that we have today. Furthermore with these very unstable elements in it, this object should be highly radio active.” She passed a Geiger counter over the object with no affect.

She looked at them curiously, “Gentlemen, what is this thing? Where did you get it? Did it fall from the sky?” Then in a cautious hesitant voice she admitted, “Because . . . I don’t think it came from Earth.”

Foster picked up Ruth’s partially completed report and the two men read.

Ruth held the object under the magnifying lamp on her workstation turning it under the light. “It looks like a metal pill, or maybe even a small strange watch battery,” she muttered, “but when you look at it with your naked eye or even under this magnifier you can’t detect a seam in it. X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance both reveal that the object is not a solid, but all my attempts to cut it open or to pry it open mechanically have failed.”

She moved to another work surface where a large complex machine rested. Placing the object on a small platform, it passed automatically through a double membrane into a glassed isolation unit. Ruth then slipped her hands into rubber gloves that were part of the unit and secured the object in a small vice inside. Pulling her hands from the gloves, she flipped the machine on. It hummed quietly. “This is a laser capable of removing layers of a thing a molecule at a time,” she told the agents. “Do you want me to try to open it?”

“I don’t think so,” Foster said quickly.

“Now wait a minute.” Turney pulled Foster off to one side and they argued quietly.

“I say send it back to Washington and let them deal with it,” Foster whispered.

“Are you crazy? Sandia Labs is the top facility for this sort of thing. Washington isn’t going to do any better than this place. Stephens is the best in the business.” Turney whispered back, before nodding at the young scientist.

Ruth manipulated the robotic arm of the laser, moving it toward the object like a dental instrument, while on a small television screen she watched a magnified version of what was happening. Foster and Turney stepped a little closer to the screen. Ruth powered the laser up, the machine humming more loudly. At last, the laser blipped on and Ruth brought the beam of light to bear on the object.

Minutes passed by with no results. Turney and Foster shuffled restlessly.

“This should have worked by now. Something should have--,” Stephens, who’d been about to give up, said, when suddenly with a blinding flash of light the object cracked open, glowing a deep red. Then Ruth, the stool she was sitting on, the machine and the object simply disappeared. This all happened in far less than a second.

Turney and Foster stared at the space where Ruth, her stool, and the machine had been. Experimentally Turney passed his hand over, then touched the table top where the machine was only seconds before. There was no heat.

Both men pulled plastic gloves from their coat pockets and donned them. Foster turned to the computer terminal where Ruth was working and deleted all evidence of her work and her presence in the lab that day. Then he turned off her computer. That done he moved to the other terminal and repeated the process. Then he circled the lab wiping away their fingerprints and making certain all of the other machines were off.

With equal urgency Agent Turney pulled off his wristwatch. Prying it open, he removed the battery and dropped it into the plastic bag that a short time before had held the object. He zipped the bag closed and placed the bag back in the drawer at Ruth’s workspace.

They left the lab, taking with them all of the papers she worked on that day.

Down the hall, using one of their passes, they entered the building’s main computer room. Inside, they accessed the main terminal, deleting all evidence of their presence in the building, in the lab and in the computer room that day.

At the building’s entrance, Foster stood on a chair and removed the tape from the security camera facing the door, eliminating further proof of their presence in the building that day.

The snow continued to fall all that Sunday.

After lunch Sam and Stella built a snowman, dressing him in the top hat and scarf Sam wore that morning in the hotel attic. Clothed in a navy pea coat, a blue and white hounds tooth wool scarf, blue mittens and a blue angora beret, Stella looked as though she just stepped off the cover of a vintage 1950’s Glamour or Vogue. Except of course for her faded blue jeans and the heavy green rubber work boots she now wore.

The snowman completed, the children’s play evolved into an exchange of snowballs. From the front porch Jim watched the game, ducking the occasional snowball that came sailing his way. Ignoring the snowballs exploding against him Gabe trudged between the jumbled stacks of cut and split timbers to the neat stack of firewood growing beside the cabin.

Upstairs, Jesse knelt on the bedroom floor searching through one of the duffels from the Jeep. Finding what she needed, she pushed aside her bedding, Gabe’s sleeping bag and pillow and sat down on the bed.

She could hear the children laughing and playing outside. She sighed and stared out the window, watching the snow fall for a moment. Then she pulled Gabe’s pillow into her lap, crushing it to her breast, pressing it to her face, breathing in the smell of him. She shivered in delight remembering that moment in the attic when his eyes devoured her. And that sweet, sweet kiss. With her face buried in his pillow, like a pebble caught in flood, she tumbled under the wave of passion and desire the mere thought of that kiss brought her.

A moment later, she lifted her head and pushed aside the pillow, carefully arranging it at the head of the bed. Aching with doubt and uncertainty, she smoothed the pillow into neatness.

She bent to the floor and retrieved the violin, the bow and the two plastic covered packages of string she’d found in the duffel. With the easy skill of a professional she strung the bow first.

Downstairs Gabe and Jim came into the house. Jesse tuned the violin, listening to the quality of its sound and to the two men talking. Gabe scolded Jim for not having a phone in the cabin. “What if you had an emergency? What if you were sick or hurt and needed help? What if you couldn’t make it through the snow to the hotel?”

Jim mumbled a reply Jesse couldn’t quite make out over the sounds of the violin. Then she heard the noise of drilling and hammering.

Much later, Jesse and Gabe glanced up occasionally from their preparations of the evening meal to watch the two children. Despite his earlier objections to Stella, Sam appeared to be enjoying Stella’s company. The space on the floor beside Jim’s roll top desk, right in front of the picture window, had been designated the spot for the electric train and at that moment the two knelt together on the floor constructing the track and discussing the order of the cars. Jim sat on an old chair in front of the stove feeding the fire with the wood Gabe cut that day. The fire crackled and burned brightly. Jim closed up the stove.

Pushing the Lionel Engine along the partially completed track, Sam asked,

“Dad said you killed a man. Is that true, Jim?”

“Yep, I killed him,” Jim admitted. “That was a long time ago, son. And I paid for it.”

“How come you killed him?”

“He was gonna kill me. He worked for the union I belonged to. He was kind of like a union cop. I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me and he was using his position and power to make my life miserable. He told me he was gonna get me. I told him I wasn’t gonna lay down and die for him. He came for me. We fought. He died and I went to prison. I couldn’t afford no high powered lawyer.”

Stella sat back on her heels and frowned. “That’s not fair. Guys kill each other all the time down in Florida and they don’t hardly go to prison at all. Not for all their life, that’s for sure. I knew a kid in Miami, Rafael . . . I can’t remember his last name, he killed two other guys and he didn’t go to prison at all, because he was too young, they said.”

“That’s true,” the old man agreed with a chuckle, “Life don’t seem to be about being’ fair.”

In the kitchen, Jesse and Gabe talked quietly about the alarming things they saw in Jim’s life. Silently Jesse opened the cabinet beneath the sink and pulled out the garbage to reveal nothing but empty cans of beans. She opened the door to the pantry and gestured at the food lining the shelves. “All ours except for that little bit of flour he had left,” she whispered. She opened the refrigerator her hand sweeping the contents. “All ours,” she whispered again.

“I know,” Gabe responded, “he was literally on his last three pieces of fire wood when we arrived.”

“He looked pretty spry this morning but now he’s . . . faded.” Jesse commented. They had both noticed the old man’s growing exhaustion as the day progressed.

After dinner Jesse and Gabe sat on the floor and Jim lay on his couch in front of the stove watching The Nature Show while the children played with the train.

“You folks don’t mind me if I fall asleep here watching TV,” Jim told them handing the remote to Gabe. “It’s what I do every night. Nothin like a little TV to put you to sleep. Go ahead and do what you want, watch what you want, it won’t bother me. And Gabe? Jesse? That was the best food I’ve had in years. I can’t thank you enough for that meal. And I want to tell you again how glad I am that you’re here.”

Within minutes the old man nodded off. But a few minutes later he was awake and looking around at all of them with that Christmas expression on his face again. “Jesse,” he said, “I sure did like the sound of your fiddling this afternoon. Both my pa and ma could fiddle. Heck, just about everybody in my family did something musical except me. Well, I used to sing a little. But it’s been a long time since I heard live music. Would you mind playing something for me, Jesse?” he asked wistfully.

Gabe turned off the TV and Jesse climbed the stairs to the bedroom and brought down the violin.

“What would you like to hear?” she asked.

“Anything, as long as it’s as pretty as what you was playing earlier.”

She’d played a short piece by Brahms that afternoon for herself, to explore the instrument’s range and power. Despite what he said, Jesse was certain Brahms was not Jim’s cup of tea when it came to music. Standing in the center of the room she searched her mind for something Jim might enjoy and suddenly, the old Bill Monroe piece, Blue Moon of Kentucky was pouring into the room, spilling like water from Jesse’s fingers in a joyous flood.

Stella whirled around from her play to listen raptly.

Jim’s face lit up like a lantern at the first few notes and in a raspy shaky voice, he joined in with the lyrics. Then the old man threw back his covers, stood up in his bare feet and baggy long johns and invited Stella to dance with him. Then Gabe and Sam joined the dance and Gabe sang along with Jim all of them laughing at Jim prancing around in his long underwear with Stella in his arms and at last,in a pure clear country voice, Stella joined the singing, as familiar with the words as the adults.

Jesse followed that with Doc Watson’s Shady Grove and after that Riley Pucket’s Ragged but Right. Finally it was only Stella singing and in each case she sang with a strong bluegrass sound and a perfect command of both melody and lyrics. She even had the phrasing and expression down.

Gabe looked at Jesse in an exchange that Stella didn’t miss.

She explained shyly when the music was over and Jim was back on his couch under his covers. “I told you I’m gonna be a singer. My mom said I just gotta be a singer and Shirley, my third foster mother, said the same thing. I mighta stayed with her but the state shut her down cause it got reported that her old man was getting some of the kids.

“Anyways, she wanted to be a singer too. She had Austin City Limits on all the time. She loved it all. Country, jazz, bluegrass, rock and roll. She taught me a lot. She used to practice, you know, sing along with the television and the radio all the time. She had a lot of tapes and records. She had a guitar. She always made me sing with her. She said I have a nice voice and a talent for music. Lots of people have told me that.” Stella looked hopefully at Jesse, her expression begging approval, “Do you think I could be a singer, Jesse?”

Jesse hesitated. Stella’s singing was indeed remarkable, her talent unquestionable and her voice displayed an incredible range moving with ease from soprano to alto. That afternoon up in the attic, in the surprise of the moment, Jesse even briefly entertained the idea of Stella’s being a singer.

But now, in a more realistic moment, she considered Stella running off to Las Vegas. Las Vegas? Once she hit the streets of that city how long would it be before the child was forced into prostitution and drugs? Days? Hours? Minutes? How much more misinformed and ignorant could you be? Trying to get into show business by running away to Las Vegas? How could Jesse possibly encourage this twelve year old homeless child in the notion that she was going to be a singer? In Las Vegas?

Jesse opted for tact. “Your mom and Shirley were right, Stella. You have a good voice. And you sing beautifully too. Someday, maybe, after lots of work and practice and after working your way up, you can make a living being a singer.” Then evasion. “You know? I’m really tired. I think we’re all tired. I say it’s time for bed.”

No one objected. They were all exhausted.

Drying the dishes and putting them away, with her eyes following her work around the kitchen, trying not to look at him, but seeing only him, Jesse could not have been more aware of Gabe. His shoulders and arms, his sleeves rolled up, the hair on his arms, his hands submerged in the hot sudsy water, turning dishes, scrubbing silverware, his downcast eyes, the slash of his jaw, the shape of his mouth. The heat of him standing near her. The smell of him.

Inside her, a war was raging. She was nervous, apprehensive, excited, hot and cold, in a word, ambivalent . . .

They talked a little, Gabe assuring her that for the time being they were safe. Perhaps in the spring they would have to move on, but for now they were safe.

She sighed. So much ambiguity and uncertainty in her life. In her heart. Too much. With a shaky smile she suggested that if she were still alive in a month or so maybe she would go back to Socorro for more tests. She had to go back for more tests, if she were still alive and well to get paid for her research, to sign her contract for the fall. Maybe Gabe and Sam and Stella would come with her.

He scrubbed at a scorched blackened pan with a gritty cleanser. Maybe, he said.

By the time they put away the last dish and wiped the counter clean the cabin was quiet. The children were upstairs in bed, the television was off and Jim had been asleep on the couch for over an hour. She draped the washcloth over the faucet and spread the dishtowel out on the edge of the counter. She turned around. There he was in the middle of the kitchen, looking at her, holding his toothbrush with toothpaste already on it.

“Go ahead, Jesse,” he poked his toothbrush in the direction of the bathroom. “I’ll use the kitchen sink and uh . . ..” He wagged his head at the back door. “…go outside.”

She nodded and slipped shyly past him. She could hardly believe they were being so awkward and self-conscious with each other. Especially after the memory of that night with him rushed through her like boiling rocket fuel. And then the kiss in the attic that morning if the children hadn’t interrupted them…. Her cheeks burned. She bent over the sink in the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face, half expecting the water to hiss when it touched her skin.

She stepped out of the bathroom into a dark, still cabin. She paused a moment letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. There was a light on at the top of the stairs to guide her. Then she noticed the dim line of light at the bottom of the door to the downstairs bedroom. Who turned that on? And why? Her hand was almost on the bedroom doorknob when she heard a sound, a rustle on the other side of the door. Had Jim decided to sleep in one of his bedrooms?

She moved through the darkness into the front room. She had to stand directly over the couch to discern the old man almost hidden under the rumpled bedding on the couch. It took less than a second then for her to realize who was in the downstairs bedroom and the fire of desire in her cheeks was instantly replaced by a hot stain of embarrassment. She was appalled at what she had assumed and so grateful that darkness and solitude hid her embarrassment. And thankful that she had not opened that bedroom door to shut off the light.

Upstairs she discovered she was right. Gabe’s bedding was no longer on the bed next to hers. The children had unloaded the Jeep. Probably Sam or Stella simply lumped their bedding together without a thought.

She walked around the bed to the side nearest the window and sat down on the edge in the darkness and stared out the window. The snow outside glowed and evanesced, lighting up a moon white landscape around the cabin, illuminating the dark bedroom, magically lighting up the frost on the windowpane, turning ice crystals into fluorescent diamonds. She remembered the kiss in the attic and blushed again at how she openly flirted with Gabe.

Why did he kiss her then? If he didn’t want her? Was it simple kindness? Was his only motivation compassion or worse? Pity? She watched the occasional snowflake flutter down past the frosted pane. She was pierced to the heart by the loveliness of this place where Gabe had brought her and ironically, achingly lonely for the first time in her adult life. She longed for, of all things that first house of Gabe’s, where things seemed from this angle to be so simple compared to now, where they all slept in the same room and she had to step over their sleeping forms to get to her mattress. Where no one gave any of that a second thought. She longed to be enveloped in the smell and the sound of Gabe. She even longed for the feel of Ozone at the foot of the bed.

Chapter Sixteen

The next morning before anyone else was up, Gabe cleared away the nick knacks and junk from two of the utility tables in the old hotel and carried them over to the cabin for Jesse. He placed them in an L under the window and against the short wall between the living and dining areas.

Once again she sat in front of her computer with her data, research and books spread out over the tables. She listened to the roar of the chain saw and the crash of trees falling behind the cabin. Out front Jim and the children walked down the road past the front window.

Early that morning at the breakfast table, Jim offered to show the children around the old mining town, to explain to them where they could play, which buildings they could go into and which they could not. There were dangers up there in that little mountaintop village. Big dangers for the overly bold, the ignorant and the curious. Buildings too rotten to support the weight of a human, abandoned mining shafts that were bottomless pits, and surrounding them, miles of wilderness where a person could become lost and after dark, freeze to death in a matter of minutes. During a lull in the buzz of the chain saw they walked by the cabin and Jesse could just make out some of what Jim was saying.

He waved his hand around at the surrounding mountaintops. “ . . . starts to snow, come home, no matter where you are, no matter what you’re doing. You can become lost in minutes in a heavy storm. And for now always stay where you can see Mogollon. That way you can’t get lost. I’m sure your dad and Jesse wouldn’t appreciate having to call in the State Police to rescue you. Always tell somebody if you’re goin for a hike. Figure out how long you’re gonna be gone and when half the time is up, start home. A horn honking down in Mogollon will be a signal for you to come home right then. We only got one neighbor for you to look out for. Just moved in like you folks. Lives up the road a piece. So far he keeps to himself mostly.”

They walked the two blocks of Mogollon down to the south end and back up past the cabin to the north end, Jim explaining dangers and urging caution. At the north end, the road forked to the left, up around behind the last lonely straggle of abandoned cabins and sheds. The children followed Jim up the side of the hill away from the main road, asking questions, now mostly about the wildlife.

He laughed at their obvious interest. “You ain’t gonna have to go a lookin for em. Most days at dawn and dusk, especially in the summertime, you’re gonna see any number of critters come a sauntering down the road right through the middle of town. Or you can be in the back yard minding yer own business and something will come crashing down through the trees and into the yard with you. It’s pure hogwash about them animals being quiet. They’re noisy suckers. You’ll jump and scream and it’ll jump and scream and you’ll both go a running, you into the cabin and it down the--.”

“What is this place?” Stella asked curiously.

They were on top of a small hill, more a flat middle ground on the side of the mountain overlooking Mogollon on its northwest end. Blooming here and there in the snow like last year’s dried weeds, bleached gray and white by the passing years, broken and worn wooden crosses, many of them now merely single sticks, leaned sadly under gravity’s call. In a few places the snow humped up over a sagging or fallen tombstone.

“It’s the graveyard, stupid,” Sam informed her kindly.

Stella ran to one of the tombstones and brushed away the snow. The stone was local sandstone not marble. Almost smooth from its years of exposure on the mountainside, the crude faint engraving read, Henry Talbott 1843-1871. Then she and Sam ran from mound to mound uncovering the engravings on the few fallen tombstones. All bore the names of young men and four out of the five of them showed 1871 as the year of their death.

“They had a epidemic up here that winter. The flu or diphtheria or something killed a lot of em that year,” Jim explained.

“Look!” Stella called. She stood at the edge of a snow filled hole, beside it, a small mountain of snow covered earth. “An empty grave!” she exclaimed. “What happened to it? Did somebody come and rob it?”

Jim teetered at the edge of the hole and laughed. He laughed so hard that in the end he almost collapsed under the hacking choking fit that followed. “That ain’t no old grave,” he explained between coughs before breaking into another fit of laughter . . .

Jesse sighed and looked down, once more considering the data she had been working on the day Sam cut school and called 911. She was right back where she was that day. When was it? It seemed like it was years ago. She needed help. She would have to contact Max. She glanced around the room. Then she remembered. The only phone in Mogollon was over in the cold dark empty store on the bottom floor of the hotel.

Suddenly, unaccountably, deeply depressed she lifted her elbows to the table in front of her, rested her forehead in her fingers and stared down at her keyboard. She swallowed unhappily. Without Max to help her, her research would be enormously slowed down and more difficult. It was a small and temporary setback compared to everything else that had happened, yet she felt undone by it. Tears came to her eyes.

“What’s the matter, Jesse?”

She turned in her chair. There was Gabe, standing in the kitchen behind her, a dripping glass of water in his hand, his hair all sweaty, curling and sticking to his forehead, his skin ruddy and healthy, a crackled layer of snow caked on his jeans all the way up to his thighs.

She turned back to face her computer and hastily swiped at her eyes. “Nothing. Nothing’s the matter,” she told him busily placing her fingers on her keyboard. She’d be damned if she wanted any more of Gabe’s goddamned pity! Angrily she blinked back more tears and concentrated on the problem in front of her. The symbols on the screen swam before her eyes

“Come on, Jesse, I know something’s wrong. Tell me. Maybe I can help.” He was standing beside her now.

She refused to look at him. “It’s nothing I told you!” she snapped. “You can’t fix everything! You know that? Can you melt the snow? Clear the road? Cure what’s wrong with me?” she hissed through set teeth. He stood silently beside her. Instantly she regretted her outburst. She stammered, “It’s nothing, Gabe. Nothing urgent. I need to contact Max. I need a phone. It’s no big deal. You’re dripping on the floor.”

He took his empty glass back into the kitchen and went back outside. He had many hours of work ahead of him before they would have enough firewood for the remaining winter months.

Breathing hard, Sam and Stella peered down over the edge of the cliff at the snow covered tops of the buildings and the white ribbon of road a thousand feet below. The climb had been a challenge. Even Ozone, standing up to her belly in the snow beside them, was panting hard.

Stella turned in a circle, taking in the dazzling snow covered mountaintops, the shadowed forests and shimmering cliffs. She shook her head in amazement. “Man, this place is so beautiful,” she whispered reverently. “You are so lucky, Sam.”

Their eyes skimmed along the horizon, following the dark waving tree covered ridges set against the blue, blue sky, the deep purple shadows of the crevices and valleys, the brilliant sunlight on the snow. They breathed in. Looking out across the mountains, Stella sighed, twisting her hands into tight little fists, pressing them hard against the woolly breast of her coat. Tears of ecstasy filled her eyes. She groaned, completely unaware that Sam was now staring at her, his mouth hanging open. “Look! Look, look,” she shouted, grabbing his arm and pointing at the ridge on the other side of Mogollon.

In a fit of impatience he fought her grasp growling, “What?”

“Look,” she cried pointing, “the mountain is alive! It breathes and its breath is full of diamonds. Did you ever see anything like it? Look, Sam, look!”

He squinted into the sunlight following the direction of her outstretched hand and indeed, it was just as she said. Across the way a gusty wind raced along the ridge whipping up a flurry of snow, whirling and swirling the sparkling crystals, blowing them like daylight stars down the mountainside.

He twisted free of her grasp, staggering away from her, but his anger and impatience were lost on Stella, for suddenly she was falling down in the snow, rolling in it, laughing like a mad person, her fast throaty laugh echoing out across mountains and treetops.

“You’re crazy,” he sneered contemptuously. All the same he watched the swirling rivers of sparkling snow stars dance across the ridges, smiling in spite of himself at the sound of her laughter.

A series of explosions ripped through the air followed by another series of smaller blasts, so startling Sam that he almost fell over. Stella sat up with a quick look of surprise. Ozone crouched and barked down at Mogollon. Stella stood, both she and Sam guessing instantly what had happened.

Sam swore. “Goddammit!” He glared down at the tops of the buildings and the gray puff of smoke rising from a hillside south of Mogollon. The moment they were gone Gabe had taken advantage of their absence to destroy Jim’s box of dynamite and blasting caps. Sam would dearly liked to have been there. He turned his back on Mogollon.

“Hey, where are you going? We promised we wouldn’t go anywhere that was out of sight!” Stella complained.

He humped through the snow away from the cliff and back through the trees. She stepped in his footprints, following him. “What if we get lost?”

“We’re not gonna get lost. We’re not going very far. Besides we can’t get lost in the snow. All we have to do to find our way back is follow our tracks. I want to look around that’s all.”

Thirty minutes into the forest she exclaimed, “Wow, look at that, Sam!”

She pointed through the trees to a bare rock cliff several hundred yards ahead of them. Halfway up, the huge yellow and white cliff face was honeycombed with countless small shallow caves. They looked at each other and grinned.

“Those aren’t mines. They’re caves. Do you wanta go explore? Do you think we can get up there?”

“We can get up there all right. I see a path already.”

He took the lead up the south side following a jagged zigzagging path through boulders and up snow covered screes. They made their way along narrow ridges investigating the caves, most of which proved to be merely shallow holes in the cliff.

Leading the way to the fifth little hole in the wall a few yards up ahead of them, Sam stepped around a boulder that lay on the path to their goal and disappeared on the other side. Stella followed him around the boulder.

She looked around for him. Now that they were close enough she could see that the cave they were heading for was only another shallow depression in the rock. And Sam was nowhere in sight.

“Sam?” she called, suddenly feeling frightened.

“What?” came his voice strangely small and dampened.

“Where are you?”

“In here. Behind you.”

She continued around the boulder.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago, the boulder fell straight down to its resting place against the face of the cliff, directly in front of one of the cave like depressions in the rock. She squeezed between boulder and cliff into icy darkness.

“What do you think?” his voice asked her. She stumbled and he caught her, his hand holding her steady.

“It smells like smoke in here,” she said.

“Yeah, there’s been fires in here.”

Her eyes adjusted to the darkness. The cave was a little larger than the others, about nine feet wide, ten feet deep, and not much taller than the children themselves.

She whispered, “Sam, this is so neat. It’s a perfect fort and we didn’t even have to build it.”

“Yeah!” he agreed enthusiastically. “Next time we’ll bring some wood and build our own fire . . . Listen!” Outside, beyond the cave somewhere they could hear Ozone barking excitedly.

They slipped out between the boulder and cliff side and listened, blinded for a moment by the sunlight on the snow. Below the cliff, down among the trees, Ozone was still barking. Sam took off around the boulder.

“Be careful, Stella!” he ordered even as he headed pell-mell down the mountainside in the direction of the commotion.

Twisting through pines and around bare scrub oak they bounded toward the sound of barking. Then they spied her up ahead of them, circling a dark spot in the snow. Drawing closer they saw the spot was alive.

Sam rushed up to Ozone and grabbed her by the collar. “Quiet. Hush! Sit. Sit, Ozone. Good girl.”

The moment the dog was quiet the flapping screeching spot became quiet.

Sam held the dog and Stella carefully approached. She crouched down near it, watching it. “Omigod, Sam, it’s hurt. Look at all the blood. Do you think Ozone did that?”

“Only if she can fly,” Sam muttered angrily.

The red tailed hawk’s wings were spread out to their full four and a half feet, its head was up, it’s fierce golden eyes watched them intently. Its little pointed tongue hung out, panting hotly. Many feathers were missing from its freshly injured, still bleeding left wing.

Sam started to unzip his blue down coat.

“No,” Stella told him. “It’ll bleed all over it and rip it to shreds. This is an old coat. It doesn’t matter.”

She stood and stripped off her coat. She crouched again and with the coat spread out, she slowly, an inch at a time, moved up on the bird. When she was less than a foot away she pounced, dropping her coat neatly over the bird, instantly folding it up in the garment, the whole procedure greatly aided by the fact that Ozone had worried the great bird into exhaustion. Stella stood up with the hawk wrapped in her coat.

“It doesn’t weigh anything!” she told Sam excitedly.

“Wow!” he exclaimed now that she had the bird in her arms. “That was neat, Stella.” He let Ozone go and the dog ran to the spot where the bird had been, sniffing the blood spattered snow excitedly. Then she sniffed at the bottom of the coat in Stella’s arms. Stella shivered.

“Let’s go.” Sam told her. “You’re getting cold.”

They turned in a circle, both of them realizing in exactly the same stunned moment that they had no idea which way to go. It had all happened so quickly. The excitement of the moment. Ozone’s barking. The running to investigate. They were instantly chastised by the sobering realization that in mere seconds they had become disoriented. The trees were thick and deep. If it weren’t for the snow it would only be a matter of luck for them to find their way back to the cliff. If it weren’t for the snow they would have been totally lost.

Back in Mogollon, they used a leather thong to tie the injured hawk to a dowel that Gabe fixed up for them in the coop behind the cabin north of them.

Stella and Sam worried about leaving the bird in an outdoor building. “It’ll freeze to death!” they wailed as Jim swung the door to the coop shut and latched it.

“Nonsense,” the old man told them. “If that’s so why ain’t it froze to death livin out in the trees? That bird’s gonna be fine in there.”

With dinner over, the kitchen cleaned up, the children in bed and Jim asleep on the couch, Jesse returned to the problem that had her stumped. Gabe sat at the dining table working on the last of the problems his friends had asked him to do. He glanced up at her occasionally, very aware of her frustration over not being able to communicate with Max and others at the NRAO.

At last he spoke. “A lot of the snow melted today, Jesse,” he told her. “I’ll drive into Glenwood first thing tomorrow and we’ll get enough phone wire to string between the hotel and here. If it isn’t available in Glenwood I know we can get it in Silver City.”

She looked up at him, tears filling her eyes again. “Thanks,” she told him softly.

They stared at each other for a long moment, both of them consciously maintaining careful neutral expressions, neither wanting the other to see the hunger, the want. Together they broke eye contact, both looking back down at their work.

Finished at last and on his way to the kitchen, he leaned over her figures on the tablet beside her, assessing her efforts to deal with a series of intricate complex formulas.

As he paused behind her she thought about asking him to help her, but again she hesitated. If she asked him to help her, then wasn’t she like his so-called friends? Asking him to do something for nothing, when he should be getting paid for his skill and knowledge?

He came out of the kitchen, Dos Equis in hand, and stood behind her, this time openly studying the problem she was working on. At last he asked, “What’s that you’re working on?”

She could hardly contain her sigh of relief. “Well I have all this data on the variability of the broad emission lines La and C IV l1549 in high-luminosity QSOs. And since the observed emission-line spectra are essentially independent of luminosity, then the ionization parameter G and electron density qe are supposed to be independent of o and that means that the statement wLT µ u µ o1 / 2 should be an accurate way to describe the time scale for variation. But my observational data doesn’t show this dependence. My data suggests that the time scale for variation is also nearly independent of luminosity. And that’s where I’m stuck. I simply don’t know where to go with it.”

He reached for the pages of data that lay beside the tablet she was working on. “Can I look at this?” he asked.

“Would you please? I would be so grateful for any suggestion you might have,” she handed him the tablet she had been figuring on.

He sat back down at the dining table to look at her work and she watched him bend over her figures. She sighed. It would be hours if not days before he had any ideas concerning her problem.

She turned back to her computer to work on an interpretation of the smaller size and consequent higher densities derived from her time variations, time flying for her now that she could work with data that didn’t have her stumped . . . if the ray from the varying nucleus to the gas with the corresponding variation makes angle q to the ray from the nucleus to the observer, then the time lag of the variation by its element of gas--.

“You know, Jesse . . ..”

She looked up, startled by him sitting down beside her

He laid the tablet down in front of her and proceeded to explain his ideas, “I think you need to try a variable density and then approach the whole thing through a non-spherical geometry. Like this.” He bent over her work, reconstructing the problem she had been working on. In minutes he moved her research days, weeks, possibly months ahead of her own efforts.

Instantly she saw what he had done. She was about to ask him to look at the rest of her data when he anticipated her.

“Would you mind if I looked at all of this?” he picked up the printout of the information she had from her time on the telescope.

“Would you?” she asked.

“Be glad to,” he told her. She stared up at him longing for him to touch her, kiss her. He stared down at her longing to do just that. This time he broke first, taking the printout back to the dining table. She flipped back her notebook to a fresh page and recorded the date and time, to the minute, that he started working on that first problem for her.

For the next few hours they worked together, Gabe familiarizing himself with her project and goals while she began fitting his mathematics into her modeling program. Every once in a while he got up and stood behind her while she explained what she was doing on the computer. At one point she asked him, “You want to do it?” making a move to get out of her chair.

He frowned, backing away. “I need to understand the whole thing a lot better first,” he explained, returning to his spot at the dining table, his eyes avoiding hers.

Jesse sat stunned for a moment, thinking. If her memory served her right, Gabe had turned her computers on exactly two times. All the other times she had turned on the laptop when he and Sam played Street Fighter together. An incredulous little smile lifted the corners of her mouth.

He fell asleep in his chair with his cheek plastered against a page of her printout, his arms spread out over the table. He had worked hard outside all day, cutting and stacking firewood, and with Jim, replacing broken and rotted boards in the front and back porch steps.

When she turned and saw him sound asleep at the table, the sight of him sprawled across her papers like that filled her with a terrible longing. Just to touch him. She rose to stand beside him. She watched the slow rise and fall of his chest, the glint of the light on his hair and eyebrows and eyelashes. Even in his sleep he looked the giant to her. He looked so warm and strong and vital. She lifted her hand and slowly passed it close over his hand, his arm, his neck, his cheek and hair. She closed her eyes sensing the heat and energy of him.

When she came out of the bathroom, the chair at the table was empty and the downstairs bedroom door was closed. A thin line of light once again bled out the crack at the bottom of the door.

Upstairs, she sat alone on the edge of the bed staring out at the snow and again, a deep sadness welled up inside her. After a moment though, she fought it, deciding that she might not know what to do about her feelings for Gabe, but she did have a solution to another problem. She flipped on the bedside lamp and moved around the bed to where her unpacked boxes of books were stacked.

The next morning, at Jim’s request they all drove into Glenwood. Merely a widening of the road, Glenwood wasn’t much larger than Mogollon. But Glenwood wasn’t an abandoned mining town high up in the mountains. The tiny two block long community boasted a Chevron Gas Station in front of the Trading Post. Across the street, the Blue Front Bar and Café and another block down the Los Olmos Guest Ranch and the Lariat Motel served the summer tourists who stopped to see the Catwalk, a little white water section of the Gila River a few miles east of Glenwood. There was even a post office.

A large wood burning stove stood directly left of the door inside the Trading Post, heating the whole place. One half of the store was dedicated to small displays of outdoor clothing, tools, house ware, tackle – both horse and fishing, guns and knives, camping and hunting supplies, veterinary supplies and curios. Small aisles of groceries filled the other half.

Jim introduced them to Rick and Brenda Daly, both in their late sixties, lifelong residents of Glenwood and owners of the old store. He gossiped and talked with the Dalys making a show of Gabe and Sam, Jesse and Stella, telling how they arrived two mornings ago in the middle of the snowstorm.

“Mr. Daly, Mr. Daly we found a hawk. Somebody shot him and we’re gonna keep him until he’s well. What should we feed him?” The children pestered Rick Daly about the feeding of the bird.

Rick tilted his head, looking down through his bifocals at them. “Organ meats,” he told them. “They aren’t expensive and your bird will eat them right down. I rescued a horned owl when I was about your age and that’s what I fed him.” They followed him through the store to the old-fashioned glass meat case where he wrapped up several pounds of calf’s liver for them. “Now, I wouldn’t feed it any more than six ounces or so, once a day,” he continued with his instructions.

Jesse conversed with Brenda who wanted to talk about Jim, “ We are so glad you and Mr. Hunter are here,” she told Jesse. “We were afraid Jim was going to be alone again this winter, and him not having a phone in his cabin! We tried to get him to rent a room here in Glenwood, just for the winter, but he wouldn’t hear of it. At least you’re putting an end to that no phone business.” Brenda clucked and shook her head disapprovingly. “All by himself for the winter! You can see how he is. We drive up to check on him if he doesn’t make it into town once a week. But, it didn’t seem right to us that Mr. Hunter not be here.” She winked at Jesse and said, “You understand.”

Jesse was not certain she did understand, but she and Brenda continued to talk, the subject turning eventually to Sam and Stella and school. Very shortly Jesse had Brenda laughing and telling her, “Go ahead use the phone, darlin’. Call direct. We’ll add it to Jim’s bill here at the store.”

Done with her phone call, Jesse purchased a money order from Brenda and filled out the ancient order forms she had found in the attic of the hotel. She told Brenda in a low confidential voice, “The woman on the phone said these forms would do just fine,” and both women laughed.

Over at the other end of the store, Gabe outfitted Stella with a down winter coat and a pair of rugged, waterproof hiking boots. He also bought the children a pair of padded leather elbow length gloves to use when handling the hawk.

Jim continued to describe the two days since Gabe’s arrival in the snow with a car full of people, one dog and food. He laughed and boasted companionably to Rick, “They’re gonna pay me rent. Three hundred dollars a month. Already paid the first month in advance.”

For some reason this revelation amused both old men enormously. Rick pulled Jim to one side and whispered, “You mean you ain’t told him?”

“No, I ain’t,” Jim answered testily. “And I don’t want no one else a telling him neither! I want things to go along the way they are for the time being.” Jim stared hard at his friend, then changed the subject. Throwing a spider thin arm around Gabe’s shoulders, he announced, “You’d never believe it to look at him, but this handsome feller here is quite the cook. Cooked a green chili stew yesterday that fairly busted my gut. Couldn’t get enough of it.”

Across the highway, the front door of the Blue Front Bar and Café opened to the bar. Two pool tables and a small dance floor occupied the center of the restaurant and the café was at the rear. Jim introduced them to the owners, and Bill and Susan Ames welcomed them to Glenwood like long lost relatives. After taking their order, Bill sat down at the table with them. “So? You folks planning to stay with Jim for a while up in Mogollon?” he inquired not so subtly.

“Bill!” Jim scolded, disallowing Gabe and Jesse’s response. “Course they’re staying. Why else would they be here? Now don’t be so damn nosy. Don’t be scaring em away with your damned old busy body ways!” the old man warned Bill off the subject.

“All right,” Bill laughed. “But we’re real glad you folks are finally here,” he told them with an unmistakable look at Jim.

Stella picked up the Albuquerque Journal from her chair and sat down next to Sam. In a reversal of roles Sam poked and teased and for once she did her best to ignore him. Pushing his hand away, she laid her arm and forehead on the table, and with her legs swinging beneath her chair she read the paper in her lap. Relishing Sam’s discomfited attempts to garner her attention, she skimmed indifferently over the headlines. There was a story about a five fatality car crash, a headline about India and Pakistan’s never ending nuclear stand off over Kashmir, another about the disappearance of a laser and a lab technician from Sandia Labs, a story about the President’s latest stop in Albuquerque and one about the continuing global war against terrorists . . .

At last tired of the game Sam turned his back on Stella. Stella shoved the paper to the floor, lifted her head and asked, “Do you know how to play pool? My mom taught me. You want to play? I’ll teach you.”

“I know how to play,” Sam responded scornfully. “My dad taught me and he could be a champion!”

“Can we play, Gabe? Please?” Stella begged.

“Go ahead kids, it’s on the house,” Bill Ames told them. The children jumped from their chairs and raced to the cue rack.

Bill shook hands with Gabe and Jesse again “Enjoy your meal now,” he said before crossing to the next table where a very tall slender man with a thick mane of snow white hair now sat looking at the menu.

Jesse came out of the restroom. She paused to watch Sam and Stella play pool. She shivered. It seemed like years, but it was only four days ago. What a bizarre glorious night. What fun she had had playing and winning so unexpectedly. And how terrified she had been afterwards. Terrified of losing everything she had gained with Gabe. Life . . . and love . . .

She shuddered unable to shake a sudden oppressive, almost overwhelmingly edgy feeling. She watched Sam and Stella move quickly, expertly around the pool table, a direct reminder of the oddity and otherworldliness of that night’s events. She watched them play. They were both surprisingly skillful.

And it happened again.

She felt herself being drawn into the game. This time she was aware of it happening and she was aware of the monstrousness of it. She felt herself analyzing angles and shots as though she were an expert player. She felt herself disagree with Sam on his next play and she watched Stella on the follow up. She felt herself tense up at a perfect opportunity for a double bank shot. In her mind, in her body, she bent over the table with Stella. Watching Stella slide her cue back and forth in her fingers, analyzing, practicing, she held her breath. It seemed to Jesse she could almost feel the cue sliding back and forth between her own fingers.

Concentrating with an almost comical grimness Stella looked quickly up at Jesse and everyone else in the room to see who was watching and then, whack!

“Aw shit!” Stella groaned and swore.

She had been trying for a single straight shot and she missed even that. Jesse breathed again and shivered, knowing for certain that had she been the one behind the cue she would not have missed, though it would be only the second time in her life that she played the game. For the millionth time she wondered what really was happening to her. Despite her collapse, despite the incredible anomaly of the pool game, she felt well, she felt strong and healthy. She didn’t feel like there was anything wrong with her. What did she feel?

Out of place . . . out of time . . . creepy, crawly. She . . . felt like someone was watching her. She turned. Gabe and Jim were talking with Bill again and Gabe was watching her. And the white haired stranger was watching her. Or was he watching the children play pool? She couldn’t tell. She stared back at him, struck by the sudden feeling that she knew the man. But she didn’t know him. She shook her head and shuddered again. One more freakish inexplicable moment to add to all the rest.

On the way back to Mogollon, Stella alternately looked out the window of the back seat of the king cab and stared down at her new coat, running her hands reverently over the down filled material. She stuck her hands in the coat’s pockets and pulled out matching green mittens. She put the mittens on and wiggled her fingers, feeling the warmth and softness inside. She pulled them off and lifted them to her nose, smelling their newness. She wiggled her toes and stared down at her new boots. Then she looked out the window again until Sam finally announced, “ Hey, Dad, Jesse. Stella’s crying.”

At first she refused to explain her tears. But after a little begging and coaxing she admitted some of the truth in a high tight voice, “You guys. You’re so nice to me. Nobody’s ever been so nice to me before. Nobody’s ever treated me like you treat me.”

“Oh gawd!” Sam complained.

Back in Mogollon they all, including Jim, crowded into the chicken coop to see if the hawk would eat. Stella and Sam fought so hard over who would be the first to feed the bird that Gabe made them draw straws. Sam won.

Jesse cut off a generous piece of liver and laid it out on Sam’s gloved arm. In the dim light of the coop, with his eyes as big as dinner plates, Sam inched close to the magnificent bird.

It lowered its head and spread its wings, hissing and snapping at his approach.

“It’s very afraid of us, Sam,” Gabe explained. “It’s the one that’s caught, not you, and it knows it. Don’t make any fast moves. Move very slowly. That’s right.”

Close enough now the child lifted a trembling arm while the huge golden eyed bird made violent flapping lunging passes at him. Resisting the urge to duck or step back, Sam ever so slowly spread the sticky chunk of liver over the dowel and just as slowly backed away. The bird continued to rock back and forth on its perch until Sam was several feet away and blended with the other bodies again. Only then did the threatening wings flutter, fold and ruffle angrily back into place.

The bird stared at them, then cocked its head, eyeing the meat inches from its foot. Bending its sleek head it picked at the liver. Then in one quick movement it snatched up the entire piece in its beak, lifted its head and swallowed it whole in one head-bobbing gulp.

The children gasped in surprise and the adults laughed.

“I guess that answers our question about whether it’s gonna survive,” Jim cackled.

“More, let’s feed it more,” both children begged.

“Maybe later,” Jesse told them.

They groaned and hopped out of the dark coop into the sun.

“And before you run off anywhere,” Jesse called after them, “you and Stella have a little school to do today.”

“School!” Sam complained loudly. The children squinted back at her as she emerged from the shed. Their mouths hung open in gaping, horrified O’s.

“Yes, school. I’ve got two computers in the house there. There is no reason you both shouldn’t learn to use them. A half hour of lessons a day isn’t going to kill either of you.”

Their expressions widening into grins, they bounded toward the house ahead of her.

Stepping out of the coop behind her, Gabe wiped the surprised look off his face, hiked up his pants, cleared his throat and formally announced that instead of working outside that afternoon he intended to spend the rest of the day looking over Jesse’s material. She smiled a little smile at the sound of his footsteps following her up the porch stairs.

He sat at the outside edge of the tables, a position that gave him an open view of what she was doing. With her papers on the table in front of him Gabe read and listened and watched while she taught Sam and Stella the basics of how to use a computer. How to turn the machine on and off, how to get into and out of a program, how to start a document. How to name and save a document. How to use the toolbar, the ribbon, the format arrows, the mouse and cursor. How to use the keyboard’s arrows and other symbols.

She set up the laptop next to the Gateway and supervised while both children practiced the few simple things she had taught them. The promised half hour stretched into an hour and a half, during which she had to reassure them several times that they would be allowed to use her laptop when she wasn’t using it. Finally two hours after the lesson began, it ended, but only when she suggested the hawk might be hungry again.

Filling a pan with water for a pot of tea, Jesse turned and glanced toward the tables. There Gabe sat in front of the laptop looking back and forth from the screen to the User’s Guide to Word for Windows, his fingers hesitantly tapping out commands.

She set a steaming cup of tea down next to the laptop. He glanced up, surprised to see her beside him, so deep had been his concentration on learning how to use the machine. He made a move to stand but she stopped him. “No, no, go ahead. Play with it. Mess with it. The only way to learn how to use a computer is to use it. Do it. There is no theory. Only doing.”

She settled smoothly into the chair next to him in front of the Gateway and went on with the lesson as though there had been no interruption.

“Let me show you one thing. It might take you a while to get to it in the Guide. Right now you’re in Microsoft Word. You’ve got a document going. One of the things you might want to know most is how to work with a document and a calculator at the same time. Minimize your file. That’s right. Now you’re back in the main Windows environment. Move your cursor to Accessories. Click twice. Now click twice on the word calculator.”

The next hour passed like minutes. They sat close, their arms almost touching, their heads bent over their machines while she fed long series of numbers from her time on the VLA into her modeling program, pausing every few minutes to answer his questions and demonstrate procedures, his mind and hands working at warp speed, devouring the information and skills she offered him.

Finally, he closed the User’s Guide and announced, “I’ve had enough of this thing for a while. I want to do something now. Something real. I don’t want to just mess around.”

Shoving aside the remaining user’s guides, she retrieved a small paperback entitled Chaos, Fractals, and Dynamics / Computer Experiments in Mathematics from the bottom of the pile and handed it to him, explaining. “I thought I might want to make one of these once. Halfway through I got bored. Fractals aren’t stars.”

“Bored!” he exclaimed with a disbelieving grin, taking the book from her like she was handing him a key to a room full of treasure. He leafed through it, the pages fluttering past, then he paused to stare at a series of brilliantly colored photographs of Julia sets, Mandelbrot sets, exploding exponentials, and Collapsing Siegel Dishes, before looking up at her with a stare so warm, so sweet and inviting that for a moment she was certain he was going to kiss her. For the briefest second he even leaned toward her. Her heart jumped into her throat, she held her breath.

The moment ended when instead he said significantly, “But stars are fractals.” He glanced at the table of contents and opened the book to the second chapter, Iteration Using the Computer.

The sun slipped behind the western ridge, the sky deepened and darkened and the temperature outside dropped quickly to well below freezing. The children and Ozone came in from the cold. Sam turned the television on. Jim woke up from his afternoon nap. Jesse prepared dinner while Gabe continued to work at the laptop, breaking his concentration only to stoke up the stove and later to wolf down a bowl of chili and cornbread.

The stars shone in a shimmering veil above the mountains. Inside the kitchen was clean, the cabin was quiet, the children were long in their beds and Jim was again asleep on his couch. Still Jesse and Gabe worked on.

It had been at least an hour since he had asked a question. Things were very quiet next to her. She glanced up, bleary eyed from staring at computer screens all afternoon.

He had pushed his chair back a little and now he was looking at her with the most incredible light in his eyes. She smiled shyly. Still he looked at her with a gaze that warmed her like a flame. She melted a little inside. She closed her eyes, rolled her head around tiredly, then opened her eyes and his stare had enough light and heat in it to turn midnight to noon. She blushed.

Slowly he turned the laptop so she could see.

The large black sphere on the screen was an elaborate thing, an intricate new sea creature, a delicate undiscovered plant, an improbable black spore with a complex filigreed edge, the whole thing, edge and all, floating like a vacuum in a fiery orange-red space, the filigree at the edge exploding outward in tiny black spheres that sizzled rhythmically in the red mandala throbbing around the black hole of the Mandelbrot set.

He pressed enter, setting up an infinite loop. The screen began to metamorphose, each new image bringing into focus a magnification of the edge of the preceding image. Like a space ship dropping down onto the surface of a strange new world, the computer brought them in closer for ever more intimate views of the never ending edge of the fantastic object.

The main lobe cut across the lower left corner of the screen like the black rim of a planet. A satellite growing at its circumference jutted out diagonally, dominating the screen. Inside the fractured blue edge small black spheres, soldiers born at the points of juncture between planet and satellite marched along the edge around the entire form.

Closer. The black rims of planet and satellite curved up away from each other like two black mountains split by a throbbing valley of red-gold light. Twin armies of black spheres grew from the bottoms of the mountains their forms growing larger and more detailed as they climbed the rims of their parents like tiny black elephants, their electric blue edges rimmed with green, curling elaborately up to form trumpeting trunks.

Closer. And a single elephant was transformed by magnification into a fantastic lacy Cyclops, its body one small black sphere on top of a larger sphere, the eye of the Cyclops rising into space above the body from the end of a filament formed by a series of ever more tiny spheres and all of this rimmed by even tinier black spheres and surrounded in that blue green edge, the blue now stretching outward from every form in clear lacy patterns.

Closer yet. The blue-green eye of the Cyclops filled the screen like a giant flower pulsing in the red gold space surrounding it. The blossom’s center, a minuscule black pupil inside a faceted red and purple iris was set like a spinning jewel inside a blue-green halo of petals that stretched out long delicate filaments, each filament repetitively, rhythmically forming ecstatic cascading bursting waves of color and form . . .

Jesse’s mouth fell open a little. She had seen photographs of this computer generated mathematical object many times, the latest only hours ago when Gabe opened the book. But now, to see it there glowing, slowly growing, changing from one incredibly brilliant beautiful complex view to another on her screen as though it were somehow a living thing. It was suddenly a very shocking image. It looked like what it felt like to . . . make love.

“Chaos,” he leaned close and spoke in a soft voice as the images slowly changed, “created by iteration, the repetition of a simple mathematical operation countless times, using the output of the previous operation as the input for the next. In this case, the orbit of 0 under z ® z2 + c for each different value of c. The essential ingredient of a chaotic system? Sensitive dependence on initial conditions. The initial value of c. Something as small and seemingly inconsequential as the movement of my lips. The outcome? Chaos, unpredictability, extremely complicated results. Fractals. Self similar objects with fractional dimensions. Each one somehow the same, yet each one different. Snowflakes, mountains, coastlines, leaves, ferns. Dynamic systems. The motions of stars and galaxies, hurricanes, eddies in a stream, the changes chemicals undergo, the rise and fall of populations, smoke.

“A simple equation calculated over and over again with ruthless mechanical efficiency. How does the richness, the unpredictability, the chaos of nature arise from such a simple deterministic system? Systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom? Nature expressing itself in a waterfall or an unpredictable brain? These things require a phase space of infinite dimensions, infinite modes. In a word. Turbulence. A mess of disorder at all scales, small eddies in large ones, highly dissipative, draining energy, creating drag. A plume of smoke rises smoothly from burning incense accelerating until it passes a critical velocity and splinters into wild eddies. How does the flow of smoke cross the boundary from smooth to turbulent? By piling up competing rhythms. More energy comes into the system. Where in phase space do phase transitions take place? At what point does the black vacuum of the set become the fantastic forms at its edge?

“Phase transitions, macroscopic behavior that is hard to predict by looking at microscopic behavior. At a certain temperature and pressure, change becomes sudden and discontinuous. Stretching ropes break. Crystals dissolve, the molecules sliding away from each other, obeying fluid laws that cannot be inferred from any aspect of the solid, a smooth flow turns turbulent; these must all reflect patterns explained by laws. The dissipation of energy in a turbulent flow leads to a contraction of phase space, a folding and squeezing of space. A pull toward an attractor. Not a fixed point, because the flow never comes to rest. Energy pours into the system as well as drains out. An assumption of homogeneity gives way to an assumption of intermittency, a highly fractal picture with intermixed regions of roughness and smoothness on scales running down from the large to the small in spiraling loops, every loop, every orbit moving toward a single point in phase space. A periodic attractor, a limit cycle, an orbit that attracts all other nearby orbits, a flap of a butterfly’s wing . . . my lips . . . the value of c, a--.”

His words were technical, scientific, a description of a process. Yet somehow he reached inside her with meanings that came in layers and those soft, soft words, touching, caressing, igniting. His face was so close to hers that she felt the warmth of his breath on her lips. The sweet smell of him enveloped her. Drawn by the caress of his voice she dragged her gaze away from the images on the screen. Her eyes met his and her breath caught in her throat. His gaze was hot enough to initiate fusion.

The focus of his gaze dropped to her open lips, the heat of that stare poured into her setting her on fire inside. His face was centimeters from hers. Then his lips were separated from hers by less than a millimeter. He lowered his voice yet again and she felt the vibrations of his next words against her lips as he whispered, “a strange attractor,” and his lips covered hers in a sweet kiss that pushed her over the edge.

Transformed by the scent, taste and feel of him she was a river of need, a vacuum of desire. Then the heat of desire shimmering off her face was sucked away by cool air. She opened her eyes to see him leaning back in his chair, his warm brown eyes staring back at her, this time inscrutably. Without another word or gesture he stood up, crossed to the door of the downstairs bedroom, entered and quietly closed the door behind him.

Stunned she stared openmouthed at the closed door. He’d done it again! Right in front of her! And after that kiss! She glared at the slowly changing image of the Mandelbrot set. He’d seduced her! With mathematics, for Chrissakes! She struck the table with her fist. And she’d fallen for it! How could she? Strange attractor, my ass! Rage erupted inside her, raced like nuclear fuel through her. With every ragged breath she drew, rage ignited more of her. She blasted off from her chair and through the door at the speed of light and stood there, radiating, scintillating.

He had his back to her, his arms high, entangled in the sweatshirt and T-shirt he was struggling to pull off. He turned at the sound of her entrance, his head popping free of the shirts at last. He faced her with his hair all tousled and the most incredibly sweet smile on his face. He stood there in his bare feet, his broad chest bare, his tangled shirts dangling from one enormous arm, his unsnapped jeans hanging loose at his waist.

“You . . . you!” she seethed and bubbled and stuttered. Her stare sizzled and crackled like lightening around him. “Damn you!” she exploded. “Don’t ever kiss me like that again. I’ve had enough of your damn pity. I don’t need anymore of it. If you don’t want me, don’t kiss me!”

His expression was amused, quizzical. “Why would I pity you, Jesse?”

“Because I’m dying, you dolt!”

He laughed a short barking laugh. “Like I told you before, Jesse, we’re all dying. It’s the one thing we can be certain of. If I pity anyone on that account it’s me and Sam and now Stella,” he told her with brutal honesty. He took a step toward her. She took one step back. “Don’t live your death a thousand times, Jesse. Live your life. Once. Now.”

He smiled at her furious stare, pulled the shirts loose from his arm, dropped them to the floor and stepped toward her again. She stepped back. “You think that kiss had something to do with pity?” He shook his head and his stare was so hot it was radioactive. “I don’t pity you, Jesse. Never have. I have a lot of feelings concerning you but pity is not one of them. Compassion, yes. But believe me that kiss had nothing to do with compassion. I want you.”

He lifted his hands to his jeans and another metal button fell open. Her eyes widened, her startled gaze focusing on the dark line of glistening hair that was being revealed button by button.

She scowled stepping back again. “What about…. Why did you kiss me and then?”

His expression turned ferocious, his tone low and passionate and one degree from anger. He advanced on her, taking one step forward for her every step back. “Because I wanted to. Because I’m getting tired of waiting for you to make up your mind. You keep stepping away from me, Jesse. Why do you step back?”

She bumped into the edge of the door and stopped.

“A door is a door, Jesse. All you have to do is open it and step in. And if you do open it, if you do step in, if you’re in here, it’s because you want to be. That’s why I came in here. That’s why I shut the door. I don’t want pity any more than you do. And I don’t want ambiguity or ambivalence either. I don’t want to hear afterwards that you didn’t really want me. I don’t want to hear that I took advantage or that I forced you. If you come in here then we both of us know why you’re here, don’t we, Jesse?”

“Right! The man who grows dope for a living, grabs tits in the Cap and hog-ties the FBI is suddenly concerned about being politically correct!” she sneered.

“Trivial bullshit!” he dismissed her words with a slash of his hand. “This isn’t about political correctness and you damn well know it! This is about you and me.” He was so close to her that she could see the little flecks of gold and red that made the brown of his irises so rich and deep. His every word was a sweet blast of his breath against her face and the warm fur of his chest brushed against her blouse.

She resisted the urge to flinch when his arms lifted abruptly. But he made no move to touch her. Instead with one swift lean movement so quick and clean it could hardly be noticed he shucked his jeans and stepped out of them even closer to her.

She pressed back against the edge of the door. Then she did flinch and her mouth fell open with a yelp when he grabbed her wrist and brought her hand around to his groin and ran her palm up and down the length of his erection. “Does any of this look or feel like pity to you?” he asked leaning into her stiff resisting hand.

Then just as quickly he dropped her hand.

She rubbed her wrist and stared up at him her anger gone. He walked away, the beauty of his naked backside pulling at her shocked gaze like gravity.

He threw back the covers and lay down facing her, propped on one elbow, a big shoulder jutting up, he was naked and fully erect. They stared at each other for such an eternity that she jumped when he spoke, telling her, “If you’re going, turn out the light and close the door when you leave.”

Reaching behind, she stepped back, closing the door. Then she stood with her palms and back flat against it as though holding it closed against an enormous force that waited on the other side.

“You know, this whole death thing is strange,” she whispered stepping into the room.

He stared, his expression intense, serious.

“It’s a neon edge, a flashing arrow pointing at here and now, it’s a lens that forces us to focus. Every detail acquires significance before the blank ground of death.” Her hands floated up to the top button on her blouse. The material fell open as she moved. “Death is a verb, an imperative that makes time precious, that gives the moment power--.” she stopped at the edge of the bed and her blouse whispered to the floor, “resonance.”

His was gaze as hot as the midday sun. His arm lifted slowly like a flare swirling away from the burning surface. His fingers curved around first one perfect breast then the other, his thumb circling each rosy tip. With the power of dynamite his touch set off explosions, destroyed dams, released floods inside her.

Feather light his fingers traced a path between her breasts down the exact middle of her setting up a shuddering flutter of pleasure as they passed. He traced her skin along the top of the soft dark green warm-ups she wore. Then his fingers slipped between elastic and flesh twisting the material at her hip, peeling it down.

She leaned against the bed naked, the soft green material bunched at her knees while he devoured her flesh with a stare hot enough to vaporize steel. His palm followed the path of his eyes up the smooth white contour of her thigh to her hip and across her belly to the jet black triangle that pointed and said touch here. His hand slipped between her legs in a slow caress traveling up and down the satin skin, his fingers grazing the delicate flesh hidden in the dark curly triangle. His hand swept down to push at the material still entangling her knees, then slowly crept back up again to tease and cup the place that throbbed and wept for his touch. Her eyes slid shut when with trembling fingers he gently explored the wet engorged folds.

One more sweeping push and the garments around her knees dropped to her ankles. He thrust his arm through her legs and curled his hand around her thigh, exploring upward, feeling, spanning, holding, pulling her toward him in a demand as old as life itself, his forearm pressing and grinding against her.

With her fingers on the bed on either side of his arm she raised a foot at a time stepping on her clothes and the thick wool socks she wore. She had one foot free when patient no longer, he launched her and she sailed, her clothes trailing like a kite’s tail, her hands slapping flat on his chest, her knees touching down astride him, her thighs spread over him, the soft center of her touching the silky length of him.

He lifted his hands to her waist and slid them up her ribs, his eyes watching first her face then the treasures beneath his fingers. Up and around his hands slipped, grasping and lifting, pushing her breasts up against her, then releasing and pulling softly at their tips. Her head fell back at the pleasure his touch brought her, her mouth open, her eyes shining silvery stars glinting down at his. He arched up sliding and grinding.

Every cell, every atom in her body spun and swirled. She was a black hole of want for this moment, this event in time and space, this odd fantastic joining of their bodies, this strange dance of ecstasy. She leaned forward, her hands on his chest supporting her, her eyes and movements more eloquent than words. His hands slipped around to the place of their joining, his fingers touching, teasing, caressing, then fitting himself to her. Slowly deliciously with tiny, tiny movements she sank down around him enclosing him, pulling him in as he rose up inside her.

The bones of their hips met, their bodies mingling like stars in colliding galaxies collapsing together at the point of their joining and she spiraled inward settling down around him like the wild whirling Jovian atmosphere, a swirling fiery vortices of want.

They poured movement like energy into the strange object they had become and with every push they spun tighter and faster and everything else, every thought, every feeling but one was reduced to excess angular momentum flying away from them like jets pluming away from giant galaxies. Still they plunged inward in that hot almost unbelievable coordination of effort and desire, their movements setting up loops of reactions flooding through them, each loop, each jarring round of pleasure bringing them closer, focusing them into an ever tighter more chaotic coil.

Down they fell, plunging, each toward the other, exchanging matter and energy as they tumbled, passing through one another in a vast vacuum. Closer, tighter, the hunger of their hearts and bodies squeezed and folded them in a single collapsing core of matter that fell inward now in one long violent wave of ecstasy. And bounced back outward in huge echoing explosions, wave after wave of sharp star-bright pleasure.

From somewhere far away, perhaps as far as the edge of the galaxy the separate atoms of Jesse’s body returned to her, coalescing, coming together until she lay stretched like a calm ocean over him.

“Mmmmm,” she moaned in pleasure and disbelief. She shook her head limply where it lay on his shoulder, his fingers threading gently through her hair. She pushed lazily with her free foot at the clothes that still clung to her other ankle thinking, a moment to die for. The perfect moment to die. Wishing it could be so. Then . . . a moment to live for too.

She thought about life on earth, all the living things, all the seething swarming life. How many things shared that moment of ecstasy with them? How many even now were sharing another such moment? Trillions and trillions of swarming plants and creatures shining, shimmering, exploding ecstatically. Add to that layer, the minds and bodies of mammals, and on top of that the consciousness of human beings and you had . . . a highly fractal picture, with intermixed regions of roughness and smoothness on scales running down from the large to the small in spiraling loops, every loop, every orbit moving toward a single point in phase space. It boggled the mind. Billions upon billions of conscious creatures. Burning up in ecstasy. It’s continuous. It must be. Constant and continuous at least here on earth. Now there was a reason to be! She giggled at the notion and lifted her head announcing, “I figured it out! I know what it is!”

A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. He opened the brown eye closest to her face and mumbled, “What?”

“Ninety nine percent of the universe! All that stuff we can’t see. Dark matter. I know what it is!”

He lifted his free arm, fluffed and stuffed the pillows behind his head, rested his head on his hand and smiled down at her. “What is it?”

“This,” she told him, her eyes sparkling at him like a starry night. She ran her hand lovingly across his chest her fingers luxuriating in the silky softness there. “This,” she said leaning close, her lips covering his in a shatteringly sweet kiss. “This,” she whispered, moving her body like a warm wave over his, slowly, deliciously. “It is the longing for this,” she whispered kissing him again. She lifted her head, her eyes studying, memorizing him. “Desire is the dark matter that permeates every corner of the universe . . . that is the universe. Every atom of matter, every photon of light, every living thing floats in, is part of an infinite sea of desire, an endless relentless longing in the heart of us all.”

“Longing for what?”

“It doesn’t matter. Anything. Everything. Life. Being. Knowledge. Understanding. Happiness. Love. Friendship. Success, power, recognition, respect. Depends on the individual. But the longing part, that’s universal. It’s everywhere.” She kissed him again and the touch of her lips was full and rich with honeyed longing.

His eyes twinkled. “What about the strange attractor?”

She suppressed a smile. “What about it? That’s part of it. Obviously.”

“But which part?” he persisted. “Is it this part?” He arched rubbing against her the part of him that even now swelled in longing for her and watched with satisfaction the look of surprise that skimmed across her face.

“Well, yeah,” she admitted with a chuckle, “that could be part of it!”

She squeaked and laughed out loud when he rolled over with her, suddenly, quickly pushing her back into the pillows. He leaned over her spreading her legs with a sweep of his hand, his gentle touch once again exploring. He kissed her hungrily and asked with his fingers touching her, “Or is this the strange attractor?”

“Could be,” she answered in a low voice.

He stared at her, his lips and fingers working their magic. “I suggest we find out.”

He kissed her neck, her breasts, her belly, the hair of her mound. She squirmed and bubbled with laughter at his every touch. “Which part is it, Jesse? Is it this part? Or this part? How about we conduct a series of experiments? We’ll research the subject. What d’you think? We’ll write up our conclusions in a paper entitled Parts and Strange Attractors. Tell me, Jesse, is it this part . . .”

Her laughter caught in her throat. For many long moments the room was silent. Then she whispered, “That’s close. Very close.”

Later, outside, beneath a moon that lit up the mountains and canyons with a magical blue light, a tall slender man walked along the narrow road, his snow white hair fluorescing in the moonlight like a lantern. He stopped and stood in front of a cabin. A thin silvery line of smoke rose from the chimney and a single light glowed dimly somewhere at the back of the cabin. Inside at the front, a dog sounded a deep growling warning to her clan.

The light in the cabin went out. Seconds later, with Jim’s loaded rifle cocked and ready in his hand and Ozone at his side, Gabe stood bare chested and barefooted in his blue jeans on the cold boards of the front porch. But the bright blue road was empty and quiet. Jim’s wavery old voice called out from the warmth and darkness inside the cabin. “It was probably a deer or something, Gabe. Go back to bed. Close the door. It’s cold out there.”

Gabe closed the cabin door. He padded up and down the porch watching the road and the forest, looking for movement, listening for the slightest break in the night silence. He looked down at the dog following, him her toes clicking restlessly on the boards, her eyes glimmering up at him. In the still winter night their breaths were white pluming clouds in the moonlight.

He gave her the signal she’d been waiting for. “What’s that?” he asked urgently. “Get em, Ozone, go get em!” With a low growl the dog leapt like a shadow from the porch and disappeared up the road and into the forest. Gabe listened intently, shivering at last in the frigid air. Minutes passed. With barely a sound Ozone reappeared out of the night, her search apparently unsuccessful.

Chapter Seventeen

0600 Hours. Conference Room 101. Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Though the hour was early and the halls were mostly empty, four armed soldiers, top ranking members of the Army Air Force Special Forces stood guard outside the conference room doors. Inside over fifty men and women were present, including more than a dozen local FBI agents. FBI Director Carl Green had arrived only minutes ago from Washington.

Arriving shortly before that from the Pentagon, were Assistant Chief of Air Staff-2 Major General Percy Maxwell, Army Air Force Intelligence Officer General Edward Davidson and Director of Army Air Force Special Forces Captain Colonel Charles Cummings. And from Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio Texas, Captains David Hirsch and John Roberts, officers in charge of two Special Forces units.

Every hand held a top security copy of Agents Turney and Foster’s report, a report that included eyewitness accounts of Dr. Jesse Wren’s collapse at the NRAO simultaneous with a small earthquake/atmospheric disturbance at the site, medical analyses of her subsequent condition, the search for her, analyses of a small metallic object found buried at the site of the second quake, and finally the disappearance of that object, a lab technician and a laser from Sandia National Laboratory last Sunday afternoon.

His briefing on the report over, Regional FBI Director Raymond Burke stood in front of three photographs shining behind him. Written in light, Jesse’s passport photo, Gabe’s mug shots and Sam’s seventh grade school photo slid over the man like strange camouflage as he spoke, “ . . . depending on whether we locate Dr. Wren in an urban or a rural area. In either case, once we have located her we want to proceed with speed and discretion. Mr. Hunter has figured twice now in Dr. Wren’s disappearance and on at least one of those occasions Dr. Wren escaped only because Mr. Hunter was greatly underestimated. That is an error we will not repeat.” Director Burke stared pointedly at the front row where Agents Foster and Turney were seated.

“Gabriel Hunter is to be considered armed and dangerous. So is Dr. Wren. And since we do not know the nature of the forces we are dealing with, the boy, too, is to be considered dangerous. Because the man and the boy have been with Dr. Wren for several days now, they will all three be brought in for examination. You see behind me and have attached to the back of the report you hold in your hand our most recent photographs of Dr. Wren, Mr. Hunter and his son. If Dr. Wren is discovered in an urban location we will not alarm Mr. Hunter. An area of several miles around their location will be secured by several hundred undercover officers. No less than twenty agents will approach the location. Before they can communicate with anyone they will be surrounded, placed in custody and in the isolation of proper transport.”

Though none gave any sign of it, some of the soldiers and FBI agents studying the photographs, listened uneasily, their sense of conflict and doubt growing with every word Raymond Burke spoke. “. . . if they are discovered in a rural setting, the entire area will first be secured by no less than two units of the Army Air Force Special . . .”

Later. Up on a mountainside just above Mogollon, “Wow, look at that!”

“What? What do you see? Let me look. You’ve had them long enough. It’s my turn.” Stella grabbed Gabe’s binoculars, wrestled them away from Sam and directed them down. The mail Jeep from Glenwood was parked in front of Jim’s cabin. The mailman had just delivered one large cardboard box from the Jeep to Gabe’s arms and was even now leaning into the vehicle for another box to hand to Jesse.

He reached for the binoculars but she swerved away. “I get to carry them for a while. Gabe said we have to share,” she told him, refocusing on Gabe and Jesse carrying the boxes into the cabin.

“Gabe said we have to share,” he mimicked.

She ignored his teasing and asked, “What do you think’s in the boxes? Should we go back down and see?”

“Nah. It’s probably something for Jesse. We’ll see soon enough.” He turned away from the overlook above Mogollon to follow their now familiar path up into the forest.

East of Mogollon a mile or two past the honeycombed cliffs and the furthest from home they had yet ventured, they stood at the foot of a twenty foot tall smooth gray Ponderosa stump, arguing.

“Come on, Stella, give me a leg up to that first branch. If you don’t help me I’ll go get a log and get up there by myself. It’s not that dangerous. Even if I do fall I won’t get hurt,” he promised.

She leaned against the tree and bent over, offering the loop of her hands to him. “Well, I’m not going to carry you home if you fall and get hurt,” she warned, grimacing, boosting him up to the first branch.

He caught the stub then scrambled upwards digging his boots against the sides of the tree. She watched him climb, sure, graceful, ape-like, from one broken branch to the next. Near the top he slowed, becoming more cautious and quiet. At last he pulled himself up, stepped on a sturdy old limb, grabbed the worn rounded lip of the top and peered up, over and down into the old hollow tree. Instantly he jerked his head back away from the hole his eyes staring down at her in amazement.

“There’s something down there,” he whispered, “and it’s huge!”

“What is it? Come down, Sam! You might get hurt,” she whispered up at him.

Ever so slowly he moved to peek down into the tree again.

“Don’t do that. Leave it alone, Sam. Come down!” she warned, then turned breathlessly silent while he stared down into the tree for the longest time.

He pulled away from the lip and whispered down, “ It’s a big old raccoon and it’s sound asleep. It’s huge! I can see it breathing. I could touch it if I wanted. It’s all curled up in a nest of leaves and stuff. Stella, you should see it, it is so neat. I’ll come down and help you get up here. You have to see it.”

“You don’t think it will wake up and attack me?”

“Not if it didn’t wake up with me climbing up its house. This whole thing shook and thumped like a drum. If that didn’t wake it up nothing will.” He peered down into the hollow tree for one long final look.

Somewhere in the trees a little further east of them, Ozone howled and her cry bore no resemblance to the sound she made when she found the hawk. This was the howl of a terrified animal, an animal pain and in trouble. Instantly, without a word, without even another glance up at Sam, Stella took off running in the direction of the commotion.

He slid and scrambled down the tree as fast as he could, yelling at her all the while, “Wait, Stella, wait for me!” He took off after her yelling, “Wait, Stella, you don’t know what it is. Wait!”

Stella burst into the clearing where Ozone crouched, howling for all she was worth. The dog’s hind quarters were bunched and straining and one front leg was stretched far from her body as she pulled with every ounce of her hundred and forty-five pounds against the steel trap that held her paw in its jaws.

Behind Stella, Sam’s footsteps pounded. He yelled, “ Don’t, Stella, don’t go near her!” but without hesitation Stella ran full speed up to the walleyed panic stricken animal and Sam ran on horrified, unable to do anything should Ozone attack Stella as she bent beside the yelping, wailing dog and tried to open the jaws of the trap.

Her mittens slipped against the icy metal. In a panic almost as great as Ozone’s, Stella ripped them away and stuffed them in her pockets. She grunted, working at the trap with her bare hands until it opened enough to let Ozone’s paw slip free, just as Sam skidded to a halt beside the pair.

Instantly Ozone was silent. She limped a few feet from the children and sat in the snow shaking all over, her brown eyes blinking in agony. She lifted her trembling foot, then set it down, then lifted it. The children knelt and examined her foot, fully expecting to see a terrible injury.

But Ozone had been lucky. Her feet were large, horny and tough, her pads thick. The trap had caught her foot exactly between her heel and toe pads slicing off a bit of her heel pad and cutting her deep between her pads. Aside from those two cuts and the pain caused by the crushing jaws of the trap she was not badly injured.

Deeply relieved the children sat down in the snow next to her, holding and comforting her. Slowly her trembling subsided and she lay down between them to lick her injured paw.

Sam scolded Stella, “Don’t you know anything? Never! Never, never, never run up to an animal like that when it’s hurt.”

But Stella was unmoved by his anger. “She was calling us. She wanted us to come and help. She wasn’t gonna hurt me, I know it.” Stella threw her arms around Ozone’s neck and buried her face in the dog’s fur. “What if we hadn’t been here? What would she have done?” she cried into Ozone’s neck.

Sam shrugged and answered tightly with an angry twist to his mouth, “She would have frozen to death, or starved to death.”

Stella moaned, “It’s so cruel.” She turned to stare for a moment at the mechanical device that had very nearly destroyed Ozone’s foot. The trap lay on top of the snow where it had been hidden, its steely jaws proclaiming at least to the children’s eyes its dangerous potential. Drops of Ozone’s blood and bloody footprints were all around it.

Stella glanced around. The snow from the storm they had arrived in was slow to melt at this altitude. Still, enough of it had melted and evaporated away to reveal some of what lay beneath it. Spying what she wanted near the trap, Stella rose and crossed to the snow covered mound. She bent over, brushing away the snow with her hands. Then grunting at the weight of it, she lifted an enormous stone from the ground and right before Sam’s astonished eyes, before he could even finish shouting, “Stella, no!” she hoisted the boulder above her head and dropped it with a thud, dead center on the trap.

Sam sprang up to stand beside her, his mouth hanging open. Stella shoved aside the stone and squatted beside the trap to assess the damage. One hinge was crushed and the lever that both held the trap open as well as holding the bait was broken entirely away.

She stood, grimly surveying the snow covered earth around them.

“What are you doing, Stella?” he asked apprehensively. This was a Stella he had not seen before.

She spied tracks and without a word set off following them and he could only run after her asking, “What are you doing, Stella? Where are you going? It’s getting late. It’s time to go home.” But his words had no more power to move her than the wind. Limping slightly Ozone trotted after them.

The traps were several hundred yards apart and easy to find. The trapper’s footprints led straight to them. The trapper had scented and baited the traps, covered them with snow and brushed the area around the trap, precautions that might fool an animal but not a human child.

The second trap was still set beneath the snow. Sam caught up with her just as she lifted another stone from the ground. “Stella, don’t do that. You can’t do that,” he yelled breathlessly, shoving her hard enough to make her drop the stone.

She turned on him with a growl, bared her teeth and shoved him back, following up her shove with a flurry of blows aimed at his face. She was wild, crazy with rage and full of an astonishing adrenaline produced strength that made her Sam’s equal and more. He could only stand by and watch as she destroyed the second trap.

The third trap held a gray fox in its jaws. The little animal lay stiff and grotesque in blood blackened snow. Its fur, the prize it had been killed for, shimmered softly in the afternoon sunlight. The trap had caught the fox across the muzzle, crushing its jaws and gouging out one bright eye. The eye, now a shriveled trophy, was stuck like a crusty scab inside the teeth of the trap. Despite the terrible injury of that first snap of the trap the fox lived to struggle for many long minutes before it suffocated, the bloody trampled snow around the trap proof of its struggle. Stella pried the trap open and pulled the little corpse from its jaws before destroying this trap just as she had the first two.

Doggedly Sam followed her, trying to deter her. “You can’t do this, Stella. Those traps don’t belong to you. We’re gonna get caught. They’re gonna know who did this. We’re leaving tracks all over. We’re gonna be in big trouble. We’ve been gone too long. It’s getting late. We better go home.”

“Then go home,” she told him simply. “You don’t have to stay.”

But he would not leave her.

A sable colored mink lay broken and twisted in the fourth trap. The fifth trap was empty. The sixth trap held only a paw and a stump jutting out all bloody and jagged where the animal had chewed through its own leg, bone and all, to escape. The badger hadn’t gotten far though. It lay dead at the end of a trail of blood a few yards from the trap. Stella had to drop the stone three times before the stone fell with a satisfying crack, destroying the trap.

“What the hell do you two think you’re doing?” a voice muttered behind them.

They whirled around to see a man standing in the snow behind them. He was tall and thin with dirty sallow skin and small deep-set eyes. His hair hung down his neck in greasy snarls of an undetermined color and his clothes, even his down coat, were grimy and smoke blackened. He had a hunting knife strapped to his thigh and a rifle in his hand. The children stared in wide-eyed astonishment at his sudden appearance. Ozone stood between the children, her posture tense and alert.

“You kids are gonna pay for those traps. You’re nothin but a couple of thieves and juvenile delinquents. Why ain’t you in school? What’re your names? Where do you live?” the man demanded fiercely.

Ozone growled at the man’s threatening tone. She flattened her ears, bared her teeth past her gums, lowered her head and took one step toward the man before Sam caught her by the collar and held her back with a sharp command, “No, Ozone!” Trying to respond to the man, Sam stuttered, “ W . . .we . . . I . . . uh . . . she . . .”

But Stella interrupted his lame attempts to diffuse the situation with a question of her own. “Did you shoot a red-tailed hawk a few days ago?” she demanded.

“I did. Damn thing was raiding my traps and destroying my pelts.”

“You’re the thief, you’re the criminal!” Stella shouted, her hands balled into fists. “How dare you? How dare you shoot that bird and trap these animals? You come here into their home and trap them. You murder them for their skins. When there is no need! You’re the one who should be skinned and worn as a coat. Except you’re so disgusting no one would want your ugly old hide!”

Struggling to hold Ozone back, Sam stared openmouthed at her, amazed again at this Stella he had never seen before.

The man was not about to take this kind of insult from the child he had just seen destroy one of his traps. “I ain’t no thief. This here’s public property and I got full permission from the state to trap here--!”

“Murderer!” Stella flew at the man headfirst, cutting him off mid-word, knocking him flat, sending his rifle in a spin across the snow. She landed astride him and fearlessly continued her attack, pummeling him, beating him in the face with her fists for all she was worth. He snarled and backhanded her, knocking her aside. Quick as a mink she whirled around on her knees behind him, grabbing his hair, pulling him back down and ramming his head against the ground once, twice, three times before his hands snaked out to grab her wrists while Sam fought valiantly to control Ozone. The huge dog barked and growled, lunging against Sam’s grip, dragging the boy three feet per leap in an attempt to enter the fight.

Twisting and turning, the man rolled over, yanking Stella’s hands away from his head along with hands full of his hair. He screamed and let go of her and she jumped back away from the reach of his arms. He tried to stand and she kicked him twice, once in the back of the knee and when he staggered, again in the neck. He sprawled in the snow face first this time, his hand landing on his rifle, Stella still kicking him. He curled up and rolled onto his knees and Sam screamed, “Stop, Stella, stop! He’s going to shoot you!”

At last she backed off, but only because the man’s rifle was pointing straight at her.

He stood slowly, breathing hard, keeping the shooting end of his rifle two inches from her nose. His hollow eyes glittered hatefully at her, the menace on his face vying with disbelief, “You’re a regular little green-eyed bitch from hell, ain’t you girl?”

Breathing hard herself, Stella glared back at him. Convinced that he would not shoot her, she tensed, preparing to attack him again.

He read her movement. “I wouldn’t if was you,” he warned, his rifle turning away from her to point directly at Ozone. “Come at me again, girl, and that dog is dead.”

The twilight outside the cabin was fast turning to a cold midwinter night. “I think I hear something,” Jim mumbled into the growing darkness. The cabin door was open and Jim stood at the north end of the porch looking up and down the road. Gabe was throwing on his coat.

“How long should we wait before we call the State Police?” Jesse asked, following Gabe out of the cabin.

“Here they come! I see em,” Jim sang out. “They’re a coming.” He trotted to meet Gabe and Jesse at the door. The three of them waited under the porch light.

The children and Ozone emerged on the road out of the growing darkness, followed by a man with a rifle in his hand. A noisy metallic jangling accompanied each step the man took.

The children climbed the porch stairs with their heads down, their eyes averted. Sam ushered Ozone into the cabin and closed the door, shutting her in with a sigh of relief.

The man stomped boldly up the stairs behind the children. He leaned his rifle against a log pillar, unfastened the half dozen broken traps from his belt and dropped them to the floor of the porch with a clatter. He looked angrily around the group of adults and said, “Name’s Lamance. Harve Lamance. I’m yer neighbor. I live up the road a piece. I caught them kids destroying my traps. Somebody’s gotta pay for what they done. I ain’t leaving til I’m paid. Each one of them traps cost me eight bucks. They busted six of em. That’ll be forty-eight bucks.”

A long stunned silence followed the man’s words.

Gabe turned to the children and asked, “Is this true? Did you destroy this man’s property? If this is true, then that’s the end of your hikes. You won’t be going anywhere but Mogollon.”

Sam looked up, on his face all the anger he felt at this gross miscarriage of justice. But before he could blurt out even one indignant word of protest, still full of fight, her eyes blazing, Stella stepped forward, “I did it! And I’d do it again.”

The look on Gabe’s face cut her short. He reached into his pocket for his wallet, pulled it out and counted out the bills.

Again Stella could not contain her outrage. “You can’t pay him, Gabe. He’ll buy more traps,” she cried. “He’s the thief! He’s the destroyer, not me. He kills them for their fur and they suffer. For what? So their pelts can lay around in a bin in some junky store for a bunch of snot nosed sticky fingered kids to paw over? Or for some idiot whore of a woman who has to have a real fur coat hanging from her fat old neck? He’s a murderer. A killer. He’s the bad one, not me!”

The man reached into his own pocket and pulled out a greasy tattered piece of paper. He unfolded the paper and held it out in the porch light. “This here’s my permit to trap this whole area. I ain’t doing nothing illegal,” he told Gabe with a flinty glare.

Stella was crying now. She reached for Gabe, clinging to his wrist as he handed the trapper fifty dollars.

Gabe grabbed the hysterical child by the shoulders silencing her, “Stop it, Stella. Straighten up. You cannot destroy other people’s property. You owe this man an apology.” When she hesitated, Gabe barked, “Now, Stella!”

She looked at them all, her eyes wide and full of incredulous tears. “Property? This isn’t about property. He’s the thief, not me. He steals from Sam and me. He steals from you. He steals from all of us. I won’t apologize. I won’t!” she wailed. She wrenched away from Gabe’s grasp, whirled around, ran into the cabin and up the stairs to her room sobbing her heart out all the way, leaving Sam to once again push and drag a murderous Ozone back into the cabin. Her bedroom door slammed shut with a loud thump just as Sam managed to close the front door, this time escaping inside with Ozone.

Out under the porch light Gabe and Jesse stared at Harve Lamance in a dumbfounded, embarrassed silence and Jim rocked back and forth on his heels with a barely contained look of amusement twitching at the corners of his mouth.

“Mr. Lamance, we’re so sorry . . .” Jesse started to apologize.

But the trapper wasn’t interested. Holding his permit in one hand and the fifty dollars in the other the trapper scowled blackly. “I ain’t no thief!” he yelled shaking his permit at the cabin door. He rolled the permit and the fifty dollars together and stuffed the wad into his back pocket complaining all the while, “I got full permission to trap this area. I paid for the right to trap here.”

He grabbed up his rifle, then looked at Gabe and Jesse as though something important had just occurred to him. He advanced on them, waving the rifle, angrier still. “And let me tell you!” he exclaimed, “That little missy you got in there is a real hellcat. She attacked me. Knocked me down, pulled out half my hair and even kicked me. Woulda kept on kicking me too if I hadn’t threatened to shoot the damn dog.”

The man clumped angrily down the porch stairs and back up the street muttering all the way, “Damn kids. Destroying my shit. Come all the way out here to get away from . . . you better teach them damn kids some manners. They should be in school. Why ain’t they in school? And tell em to stay the hell away from my traps. The next time I won’t be so . . .”

Jim ran after him to the north end of the porch, calling after the man, “Nice ta meetcha, Lamance! Sorry about the traps. Don’t worry, the kids won’t bother em again. Ya wanta stay for dinner?”

His answer came to them out of the darkness. “Just keep them damn kids away from my traps.”

When they stepped back into the cabin Sam was waiting for them just inside. “Stella locked her door,” he informed them with big eyes.

Jesse and Gabe looked at each other. If the news of Stella’s behavior had been a shock, the locked door was even more ominous. Jesse, Gabe, Sam, all three of them knew that terrible things could be happening behind that locked door. Gabe and Jesse took the stairs two at a time.

“Aw, leave her be,” Jim called after them, “she’s upset, that’s all.”

“We have nothing against her being upset, but there’ll be no locked doors in this house,” Jesse told him from the top of the stairs.

Gabe tried the door. It was locked all right.

Jesse called out, “Open the door, Stella, right now. If you don’t open this door at the count of three, Gabe is going to break it down. One, two . . .”

The doorknob rattled, turned and the door swung open. Stella stood on the other side, her eyes red and swollen from crying.

Jesse stepped into the room and repeated what she said to Jim. “The rule is, no locked doors in this house, Stella. Never. And Gabe and I understand that the way you grew up in Miami . . . well, it must have been pretty rough. Maybe you had to defend yourself and fight to survive. But now you’re with us. As long as you are with us we expect you to respect other people’s property. And you are never to attack anyone like that again. Never, except in self-defense. Do you understand?”

With her eyes downcast, Stella nodded, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Look at us, Stella.”

Stella looked up at them, sobbing and hiccuping like an infant.

“What do you understand? We want to hear you say that we are all in agreement on these things.”

“I w. . . won’t ever attack anybody again, I promise. And I won’t destroy other people’s things. And I won’t lock my door.”

Both Jesse and Gabe relaxed visibly. The child was behaving rationally, sanely.

Gabe stepped into the doorway and spoke, “Stella, you jeopardized everything you have with us by what you did this afternoon. The only thing that saved you from being discovered by the State Police and being sent back to Florida today is the fact that our neighbor, Mr. Lamance, has no interest in reporting your behavior. He would be very justified in doing exactly that. But apparently all he wanted was to be paid for his property. He could have called the police and reported you. He may yet call the police. We don’t know, do we? And if they should come, if they should start asking questions about you, what can Jesse and I say? About who you are? How could we prove that you belong with us? Do you see how serious this is?”

Stella nodded, still crying silently.

“You are welcome to stay with us, Stella, for as long as you want and as long as you behave. It’s entirely up to you. Dinner’s ready, child. Come down and eat,” Jesse told her.

Gabe and Jesse walked down the stairs together, their eyes locked intently, both of them wondering and worrying.

“ . . . then she kind of flew at him like a football player. She landed right on top of him and started hitting him.” Sam stopped talking long enough to stuff his mouth and swallow.

Jesse and Gabe ate and listened to Sam’s description with wide-eyed disbelief. Jim smiled and chuckled as though he’d never before in all his life heard anything so entertaining.

“He knocked her off him but she jumped around behind him and grabbed his hair and beat his head on the ground.” Another big bite. Another fast gulp. A hasty swipe with a napkin at a stew covered chin. “He had to rip her hands away from his head. Man, that must have hurt! Then she kicked him, really quickly, like Jackie Chan. He went down again and came up with his rifle in his hand . . .”

At a significant look from Gabe, Sam fell silent. Stella was coming down the stairs behind him.

Quietly, with downcast eyes she pulled out her chair and sat down at her place beside Sam. Jesse ladled stew and noodles into a bowl and passed it across the table to her. Stella mumbled a quiet, “Thanks.” Without lifting her eyes the child started eating hungrily. Next to her Sam stared, his expression full of a new respect. The adults just stared. Then everyone was eating.

“I . . .”

“Stella . . .”

Both Stella and Jesse started to speak at once. Jesse smiled, “Go ahead, Stella.”

Stella spoke to her plate. “I . . . I want to say I’m sorry for what I did. And tomorrow I will go and tell that man I’m sorry too.” She looked up at Gabe. “And I want to earn the money to pay you back for the traps, Gabe. You said we would have chores. Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

Gabe needed no more prompting than that. “You can start by keeping the kitchen clean.”

“Ok.” Stella looked at Jesse.

Jesse responded, “I wanted to tell you, Stella, that if you feel that strongly about the animals, about the wildlife, then you should do something more about it than attacking Harve Lamance and dropping rocks on his traps. Tomorrow we’ll look in my computer for some groups that you can join. They’ll have all kinds of suggestions for you. Publications. Organizations. Careers you can look into. Congressmen you can write to, to get laws passed or changed to protect animals and their habitat. Programs that will lead to you being a person who makes their living caring for wildlife or programs that will lead you to getting into Congress yourself. You can talk with these people right on the computer. Or write to them. Whatever. But that will be part of our lesson for tomorrow. For both of you. Or you can write songs about how you feel and when you get famous you can sing your songs. Popular culture is very powerful, Stella.”

Stella’s eyes grew wide. “Really? You mean it? Wow. Me . . . in Congress? Me, writing songs?” Tears came to her eyes again. “You people….” She shook her head in disbelief. “And I wanted you to know that Sam tried to stop me. He didn’t do anything. I did it all. So, there’s no reason not to let him go hiking. You know, to make him stay in Mogollon.”

“Yes, there is,” Gabe announced getting the full attention of both children now. “See those boxes behind you?”

They turned in their chairs. Two large cardboard boxes were stacked against the wall under the stairs. The mailman! The boxes! They’d forgotten all about them. They turned back to look at Gabe.

“That’s your school in those two boxes.”

“School!”

Gabe ignored Sam’s horrified open-mouthed wail. “The eighth grade. Tomorrow you start regular lessons. Jesse and I will be your teachers. There will be no more hikes. For the next week at least. Maybe more. When we see that you are both working hard at your lessons and progressing then, maybe, you can go hiking again.”

“School!” Sam wailed again.

“Yes, Sam, school.” Jesse told him. “And don’t go blaming your father. I ordered it without his knowing it. We’re here because of me. I couldn’t let you go without an education because of me. Close your mouth, Sam, this isn’t the end of the world. I know of several families in Socorro who home school their children, including my next door neighbors. It takes no more than two or three hours a day. After that you’ll be free to do whatever you want for the rest of the day.”

“But you promised!” Sam yelled.

“We promised no such thing, Sam,” Gabe told him. “What we said was, there wouldn’t be a regular school for you up here.”

Sam shoved his chair back from the table and stood up. “I won’t do it! I won’t! You can take that goddamned school and shove it, for all I care. I will go hiking! It’s the best thing I ever did. I won’t do any damn school! You can’t make me!” He turned and ran up the stairs to his room. His door slammed shut with another loud thump.

Jim chuckled out loud. “I’d forgot what wild little critters kids is. You gotta be young and strong to raise em. You gotta have energy. Whooee! Takes my breath away just thinking about it.”

Stella stood and began clearing the table.

Later she knocked on Sam’s bedroom door. When she didn’t get a response she turned the knob and pushed the door open.

He was on the floor playing with his superheroes and monsters. “Bff, bff! Kawham! Kapow!” Lord Zed was currently beating the piss out of everyone else. Sam looked up at her entrance, glared at her and looked back down. “Whadda you want?” he demanded coldly. “Pow! Pow!”

“Just . . . I’m sorry about today, Sam.”

“What for? You’re the one who got in trouble, not me.”

“Well, I’m sorry about school, too.”

“Aw forget it. You didn’t have anything to do with that. That stupid old Jesse did that.” He glared up at her again. “Well, what the hell are you standing there for? Get out!”

“I could help you,” she offered shyly.

“Help me with what?”

“School.”

He nearly fell over laughing at her. It was loud, mirthless, cruel laughter. “You? You help me with school? You’re going to be busy with your own. And you can’t even add. You’re so weird, I bet you can hardly even read.”

She left the room, quietly shutting the door behind her.

Meanwhile, up in Albuquerque, at The Quarters on Yale Street, located midway between the Sunport and UNM, things were hopping. The place was jumping, jam packed with students from the university, students from the nearby vocational institution, young men and women from Kirtland Air Force Base and even some scientists and researchers from Sandia Labs. The music blared. Young people drank, shouted, laughed, danced and courted. Loudly. Exuberantly. Tirelessly.

“ . . . don’t see the connection between what happened to Dr. Wren at the NRAO and what happened at Sandia Labs. And I went to school with Gabriel Hunter. He’s the smartest guy I ever met. He was goddamn weird, but he was out of this world brilliant.”

“ . . . but then don’t you think you should say something about it, don’t you think that’s a conflict . . .”

“ . . . about the disappearance of that lab tech at Sandia? Do you believe it?”

“ . . . sounds pretty screwy to me . . .”

Back in the farthest corner of the bar sitting low in the last booth, three young people who happened to ‘accidentally’ meet there that night were sharing a moment over a beer. Despite the noise and pandemonium they talked quietly. Two of them were part of Army Air Force Special Forces on temporary assignment from Texas to Kirkland AFB. The other was an up and coming Special Agent for the FBI, currently located in this his very first assignment in Albuquerque. With their heads leaning close over untouched drinks they were deep in the middle of an argument over the nature of scientific and empirical evidence, career objectives, conflicts of interest, personal ambition, the politics of their jobs and a project they were involved in. They argued and they argued and they argued. Over the pursuit and persecution of private citizens. Over the existence or nonexistence of moral imperatives.

“ . . . and you can bet your ass old General Percy Pusgut Maxwell knows that the one who can claim to have been the first to contact or even kill one of them will have made his name. He’ll be famous for fucking ever.”

Chapter Eighteen

“Write an essay! I hate to write. I can’t write. I won’t do it. Why do I have to write?” Sam grumbled at the far end of the worktables.

Gabe smiled at Sam’s moaning and groaning. He looked up from the problem he was working on to watch the three of them. Sam rolled his head, slapped his tablet with his hands and shoved his pencil away. It was all very dramatic. Jesse sat between the two children. Ignoring Sam’s outburst, Stella was already hard at work, her head studiously bent over her tablet, her arms spread, her pencil moving slowly as she concentrated.

Next to Gabe, Jesse’s communications with Max at the NRAO in Socorro were still up on Jesse’s Gateway, how to use a fax, how to use a modem, how to get into the Internet and write and send e-mail having been part of that morning’s lessons. Together Jesse and the children sent Max some of the work she and Gabe had completed so far, along with Jesse’s instructions to Max. Apparently working with the computer on the Internet, writing e-mail and mailing documents was a great deal of fun. At least Gabe hadn’t heard any complaints. And just as apparently writing essays was not fun.

“Because if you can write you can think,” unmoved by Sam’s histrionics, Jesse explained patiently. “If you can write you’re capable of having an idea worth listening to and you’re able to communicate that idea clearly to others. Furthermore you are able to persuade and convince others.”

“But I don’t want to convince anyone. What will I write about? I don’t have anything to say.”

“You’re trying to convince me that you shouldn’t have to write right now, Sam. If you had more experience building an argument you might succeed in convincing me. Besides we’re not asking you to write a whole essay. Just a paragraph. A descriptive paragraph. Last night at the dinner table you were doing pretty well with a description of what happened yesterday afternoon. Why don’t you write a paragraph about that?”

“Really?”

“Sure. Now remember. The major thing is limit what you’re going to describe, describe something very specific and use carefully observed details.”

“ . . . look this stuff over A.S.A.P. I’ll contact you again soon. Doc.” The message that Jesse had typed moments ago lit up the screen of Max’s computer in the Student Room at the NRAO in Socorro. Sitting in front of his computer Max studied a printout of the four pages of material Jesse had moments ago sent him.

“I don’t believe it!” Max mumbled. He was astonished at her progress. And the math Jesse used to solve the problem concerning the dependence/independence of time, luminosity and ionization parameters . . . well it was flat out uncharacteristic of any of Jesse’s previous work. It was much more sophisticated and complex than any of the mathematics he had seen her come up with before this. He shook his head at what he saw. Could this really be just Jesse’s work? Had she come up with the math all by herself? She was a brilliant physicist. Her understanding of the mechanics of things could not be beat. But the mathematics! He himself would have been pressed to the limit to come up with it. “Wow!” he mumbled.

Dan and another graduate student pushed away from their computers and rolled their chairs over to beside Max. They peered over his shoulders at Jesse’s material. Max pointed and the two read intently. Dan whistled softly. The other muttered, “Very impressive. She’s moving right along.”

As they continued to read over his shoulder Max remembered. He typed an urgent message. “Doc! The FBI, every police officer in the State, even the military are looking for you. Luke, Brandon and I were hauled up to Albuquerque for separate formal interviews with the FBI and the Air Force. They questioned each of us for three hours. This is no joke. THEY WANT TO KNOW WHERE YOU ARE!”

Gabe looked up at the suddenly changing Gateway screen and read the message as it appeared. He looked over at Jesse talking quietly with the children.

He slid the Gateway keyboard over in front of him and typed, “You don’t know where I am. So no problem, right?”

Max answered, “No problem. I told them I am no longer working with you or in communication with you, but who knows? I’m going to delete any communications that might give you away the minute we’re done with them. Ok?”

Gabe typed, “Ok.” He smiled when Max’s message about the FBI and the Air Force disappeared.

Dan looked up from reading Jesse’s fax and urgently touched Max’s keyboard. “Ask her how she came up with the idea for the non-spherical geometry.”

Max typed in the question.

Without giving it a thought Gabe responded.

The students studied Gabe’s explanation as it appeared, all three of them nearly falling out of their chairs in astonishment.

“That’s not Dr. Wren,” Dan whispered.

Max waved his hand impatiently, motioning for silence. Then he typed, “Did you hear about that guy at Princeton who finally proved Fermat’s Last Theorem? How’s your work coming on it? Any breakthroughs?”

Dan and the other student laughed. Dan whispered, “She’s never worked on Fermat’s Theorem! What the hell are you talking about?”

But Gabe didn’t know any of this and he was delighted to be communicating with yet another person about math. He typed, “Darn. No, I didn’t hear. This is as far as I ever got. The key is to start with Wiles’ search for patterns and Tanayama Shimura’s understanding that all elliptical curves are modular. So then it follows: If n is a positive integer greater than two, the equation xn + yn = zn. . .(1), cannot be satisfied by integer values for the unknowns x, y, and z unless one of them is zero. If any two of the unknowns have a common factor k, then the third unknown is also divisible by k. Putting x, y, z= kx, kh, kz respectively in equation (1) . . .

Fascinated the students watched Gabe’s proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem appear before them on the screen. They followed his work with excited whispered exclamations and agreements, Yes. Yes. Yes. All right. Wait! That’s not the same. Look at that. She’s going in a different direction . . .

Enormously excited Max tapped out a command starting up the process of copying Gabe’s work as it appeared. Then grabbing up a pen and a tablet he pushed aside his keyboard and followed Gabe on paper, whispering, wow! and wow! again. Spellbound the students watched Gabe finish up his work on the theorem and type, “And that’s about as far as I’ve gotten.”

That’s not Dr. Wren! No way! That’s not her work, I don’t believe it, the students expressed their disbelief.

Still following Gabe with paper and pencil, Max muttered, “That’s it! Goddammit, he’s done it too! It’s valid!” Then at the excited response of the little crowd gathered around his terminal he exclaimed, “Shhh! Everyone, shut up for a second!” He breathed deeply and typed, “Your work looks great, Gabe. In fact I’ve been following everything you’re doing and I think you got it too.”

They waited in silence for a response on the screen. It came. A simple, “Thanks.” Then Max returned to his warning. He typed, “Maybe Doc doesn’t take it seriously but she should. And so should you. THEY are REALLY looking for you guys. THEY are NOT kidding!”

The little crowd around Max’s computer watched the words, “I have an idea,” appear on Max’s screen. Then everything, the entire communication between Max and Gabe including Gabe’s work on Fermat’s Last Theorem disappeared.

Seconds later Gabe stood up from the table and announced, “I’m going into Glenwood to pick up some supplies. Anybody want anything from the store? Jim, you want to go with?”

Jesse looked up from reading what Sam had written so far. “Wait a minute and I’ll give you a list,” she told him.

Stella glanced up from her work. “Rocky Road ice cream!” she piped.

“A paragraph,” Sam grumbled.

After the first ten minutes of some very serious moping and half-assed bickering the children jumped at Jesse’s suggestion that they spend the afternoon baking. They would make bread and while the bread was rising the children would bake two cakes, one for dessert that evening and another to give to Mr. Lamance as part of Stella’s apology.

As soon as the cakes were set on plates, cooled and frosted, one was carefully lowered into a paper bag and Sam and Stella proudly set off up the gravel road, both of them taking turns carrying the heavy confection the two miles to Lamance’s cabin.

Sam balked at taking part in the actual delivery though. “You’re the one who needs to apologize, not me,” he told her, steadfastly refusing to walk up to the cabin with her. “I’ll wait for you right here in the road. Then if he decides to shoot you, Ozone and me can make a quick get away and tell everybody what happened to you.”

“Very funny, Sam. Ha, ha, ha.” Cautiously Stella sidled up to the cabin door. With the cake in her hands she couldn’t knock on the door. She turned around and indicated to Sam with her head that he should come and help her. From the safety of his spot in the road he grinned and shook his head mouthing the words, no way!

Scowling, she set the cake down on an old wooden chair beside the door. After a deep breath she knocked on the door. The inside door swung slowly open and she stepped back.

“Whadda you want?” Lamance demanded from behind the screen door. The acrid odors of garbage, dirty laundry, smelly armpits, filthy toilets and dead fires seeped out of the dark cabin.

Stella could hardly keep from gagging. “I came to say I’m very sorry for the way I acted yesterday, Mr. Lamance.”

She waited a long silent moment for a response. Finally, “So, you said it. Now you can go on home and tell your folks you did as you was told.” The inside door started to close.

“Wait! We made you a cake.” Carefully she tore open the paper bag and lifted the cake, holding it up for him to see, half expecting him to close the door on her anyway.

She had to step aside quickly when the screen door swung open and Lamance stepped out with an enormous carious grin on his face, his eyes already devouring the cake. “Gollee! You made one a theyem? Fer me?”

He swiped a dirty finger through the frosting and stuck the chocolate covered digit in his mouth. He moaned and his eyes slid shut as the icing melted in his mouth.

“Sam and I made it. It’s a chocolate covered devil’s food cake.” She held the cake out to him.

Seriously, as though she was handing him a priceless gem, Harve Lamance accepted the cake from Stella. “My favorite!” he intoned reverently with his eyes on the cake. He looked at Stella. “You and the boy want to come in and have a piece?” he offered politely and somewhat insincerely.

“No thanks, Mr. Lamance. We made another one for dessert tonight. But thanks anyway,” she told him, backing away toward the road.

He was smiling broadly at them both now. “Well, I sure thank you kids for the cake. It was mighty nice of you. Tell your folks thanks too.” He lifted the cake high into the air. “I’m gonna enjoy this so much! It was almost worth you busting my traps to get a nice cake like this!” He laughed. “But don’t git no ideas! Don’t go doing it agin! Bye now.” He disappeared with the cake into his cabin and Stella, Sam and Ozone ran back down the road.

“Gollee! You made one a theyem? Fer me?” Sam mimicked and Stella broke out laughing. “Don’t git no ideas. Don’t go doing it agin.” Enormously pleased with that result Sam pursued his imitation of Harve Lamance with childish gusto, keeping the two of them laughing all the way back to the cabin.

It was almost evening before Gabe and Jim arrived home with a cab full of groceries and the back end of the truck full of lumber and other construction materials.

The next afternoon after lunch, Gabe shoved a huge roll of chicken wire from the rear of the pickup onto the ground and the children helped him roll it over to the coop. He pushed experimentally against a post. Sam and Stella followed, both of them imitating his push. They tested all of the posts in this manner and all were still set firmly in the ground. But the wire that had formed the enclosure was long gone.

“It’s cruel to keep an animal in a dark closed up space all the time,” Gabe explained. “You guys go find me an eight to ten foot tree stump, a strong sturdy one at least this big around,” he showed them with his arms the size tree he wanted. “ Make sure it’s not rotten and that it has several good solid branches on it with at least one long branch near the top. While you’re doing that I’ll dig the hole. We’ll cut it down and stand it up here in the middle of the pen. Then I’ll cut the wire and together we’ll cover the top and you guys can wrap the sides.”

It wasn’t long before an enormous multi-branched stump stood solidly in the middle of the chicken yard and all around it the children were busy stretching wire and pounding on posts.

A few yards south, Jim and Gabe dragged open the doors to the shop. Inside they surveyed the machinery and tools, talking quietly. Gabe threw his arm around Jim’s shoulders and announced, “ I’m going to need your help with this Jim, and that’s no kidding, especially with the welding and the cutting and shaping of the boards.”

The old man performed a dusty jig at Gabe’s words. He rubbed his leathery old hands together with relish. A few yards away the children stopped their hammering and listened to what they were saying.

“Unload the truck first. Then I’ll show you my drawings and you can give me your suggestions and we’ll get to work!”

They off loaded the lumber and the rest of the materials from the back of the truck, piling it on the ground between the shop and the cabin. Then they sat down at the picnic table and Gabe laid out a series of sketches he’d made for the old man to look at. Jim studied the drawings for a moment, then started to laugh.

Gabe laughed too and asked with exaggerated innocence, “What? What’s so funny?”

“Where in tarnation did you get the idea for this?” Jim asked, tapping the drawings with a bony finger.

Again the children suspended their activities to listen curiously.

“From the albums. Where else?” Gabe answered. “You saw the pictures.”

Jim cackled gleefully and exclaimed, “You’ll never catch me getting in a high fallutin contraption like that. What are you gonna use for heat?”

Gabe wagged his head toward the wood burning stoves standing unused against the back wall of the shop. Jim nodded and rubbed a whiskered chin. “How are you gonna separate the stove from the rest of it?”

Again Gabe gestured with his head, this time toward the engineless body of an old pickup that lay almost hidden among the trees on the hillside behind the chicken coop. A mere skeleton of a truck, its tireless wheels were half buried in the earth and snow and its hood stood open like a yawning mouth.

“That hood is still in good condition,” Gabe explained. “The doors aren’t that bad either. We’ll form the bottom of it, what’s going to lay over the top of the stove with a piece we make from the hood and doors and that’s what’ll get hot. I bought a shower drain to fit into the bottom.” While Gabe talked the children laid down their hammers and joined the men at the picnic table. They listened to Gabe and studied his drawings.

“Wow! This is so cool!” Sam and Stella exclaimed when they finally understood the drawings.

“Are you really going to make this thing?” Sam asked.

“Gonna try,” Gabe told him. “We have Jim here to help with the welding and the lumber. Those saws in the shop can make some pretty fancy cuts. All we need is an angled tongue and groove cut to make the sides fit together. I think we can do it. What do you think, Jim?”

The old man’s eyes twinkled. “We can do it all right, there’s no question there. It’s just, will it work or not?”

“It’ll work. What the hell, it’s worth a try. You kids want to help? We could sure use some help.” Gabe asked.

Oh yeah! You bet! came the chorus.

Gabe folded up his drawings and placed them back in his coat pocket. “Ok. As soon as you’re finished with the coop, there’ll be plenty more for you to do over here.”

Much later Jesse stepped out onto the back porch pulling on her coat and stretching stiffly. All afternoon while she worked, she’d listened to the sounds of lumber falling in piles, hammers beating on wooden posts and on metal, the whine of electric saws and occasionally the whoosh of an acetylene torch.

Chaos now ruled the back yard. One of the old wood burning stoves, the one whose flue exited at the back of the stove instead of the top, was strategically placed in the center just north of the picnic table. The hood of the abandoned truck lay on the ground next to the stove. Piles of lumber of all sizes were lined up before the open door of the shop. Next to the lumber more than half a dozen two inch tall, 5/8 inch thick steel rings at least eight feet in diameter were stacked one on top of the other, and beyond that, on the north side of the shop several feet of new chimney pipe and joints lay in a jumble.

At the moment they were up among the trees, working on the old truck. The acetylene torch was roaring and sparks were flying from the far side where Gabe and Jim worked. Sam and Stella were huffing, puffing, lifting and dragging the near door out from the trees and down into the yard.

“What’s going on out here?” Jesse called. “Sounds like a construction site. Looks like one too.”

Sam and Stella dropped the truck door and ran to the coop yelling. “Look what we built, Jesse. Come see what we made!”

She stepped around the piles of lumber. The children opened the outside gate to the coop, repaired that morning by Gabe, inviting Jesse into the newly enclosed space. Gabe had cut a hole in the coop itself at the level of the hawk’s perch, fitting the opening with a hinged door that opened up. The door was now fastened open and one of the branches of the stump stretched into the coop, the end of it disappearing inside.

“Beautiful!” Jesse breathed admiringly and the children beamed at her praise. She peered through the opening trying to see the bird, but the darkness inside was impenetrable.

“He doesn’t come out. Should we make him come out?” Sam asked.

“No. There’s too much noise. He’s probably scared. He’ll come out when he’s ready. What’s everybody doing out here? What is all this stuff?”

Sam and Stella ran back to the car door and Jesse followed. Grinning and grunting, they lifted the big piece of metal. “It’s a surprise, Gabe said,” they told her, grimacing with their effort, dragging the door down into the yard. She walked past them up and around the diminishing frame of the pickup. On the far side Jim held the remaining door open and steady while Gabe torched it free.

She shouted above the roar. “What are you guys doing? The kids said you’re making a surprise.”

The door clung by an inch-long flange of metal to the body of the truck, the whole thing groaning and creaking while Gabe cut at the metal with the torch. Finally the door fell to the ground with a soft thud, Jim controlling its short descent.

Gabe switched off the torch and laid it down. He lifted the goggles onto his forehead and stood up. Despite the cold winter air, sweat ran in rivulets down his cheeks. He grinned down at her. “Yeah a surprise. It’s going to be work. If they think it’s a surprise for you, that’ll keep them interested.”

She slipped into his arms and looked up at him with a smile. “Does this mean you’re not going to tell me what you’re making?”

He kissed her sweetly. “That’s what it means.”

Two hundred and thirty miles east of Mogollon, Luke parked his faded beat up Sprint outside Max’s apartment on School of Mines Road in Socorro. The door to Max’s apartment swung open and he stood waving his arms and yelling in a loud whisper, “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”

What’s the deal? What’s so damn urgent? What’s the big secret? Luke and Brandon demanded.

Max followed them into his apartment. The drapes were pulled, leaving his small living room dramatically dim. “Wait’ll you see this! You won’t have to ask!” Grabbing the remote for his VCR he signaled them to sit down in front of the television.

The picture blipped on, showing the inside of a night dark room. The camera was focused on an old-fashioned kitchen door, the top half of it formed by a half a dozen small panes of glass. Beyond the door a backyard light shone brightly. Outside a few snowflakes could be seen fluttering past the yard light. Suddenly two men stood outside the door. They knocked, then tried to open it. They tried the windows on either side of the door.

“Do you believe this? They’re trying to break in. Hey, isn’t that--? Look! That’s Agent Turney!” Brandon exclaimed.

Max had already viewed the tape twice through its entirety. “Wait,” he told them again. “Just wait. This is nothing compared to what’s coming.”

Luke and Brandon listened to the agents assure Jesse that they meant her no harm. They watched Agent Turney break the window and enter the house, his gun held high, his silhouette darkening the kitchen even more while for the second time he assured Jesse he meant her no harm. They watched the tape to the end. Then without a word they rewound the tape and watched it a second time.

They looked at Gabe’s note. It read, “They know we have this and it hasn’t stopped them. No press. Her life is a big enough mess enough without those bastards. Still there must be something we can do.”

“He’s asking us for help,” Max said.

Brandon was angry. “Why not the press? They deserve it. How corrupt can you get? How scary can you get?”

“No, there’s got to be a better way,” Max responded. “If we give this tape to the press then he’s made them look like idiots.”

“They are!” Brandon insisted hotly.

But Luke agreed with Max. “Yeah, but right now they’re only a mindless machine in pursuit of its quarry. Expose them and…. They’re a big enemy to make. Dr. Wren doesn’t need enemies that big. Neither does Gabe. As long as we don’t expose them, that’s always an option. There’s got to be a better way. Think. Is that our only power? To turn Dr. Wren’s life into a circus for the media? Imagine what it would be like for her. Her face on the front page of every newspaper, on every TV news story, tabloid headlines claiming she’s an alien. They wouldn’t leave her alone. They’d never leave her alone. Her life would never be the same. Her life’s work would be discredited. She’d be nothing more than an embarrassing amusement to her peers. Gabe could have gotten this to the press any time after he taped it. He didn’t. He sent it to us. Obviously he thinks there’s something we can do with it that he couldn’t.”

Chapter Nineteen

Jesse lifted her head. Beyond the window, brilliant sunlight glinted on melting snow. All around patches of glistening stone and damp earth were emerging from the disappearing covering of ice and snow. She thought about opening the window to let in the sweet smell of water soaked earth.

She sighed, wishing that time would stand still, that nothing would change, that none of the unhappy things that seemed to be hanging over their horizon would ever materialize, wishing that she could go on living with these people forever. She studied the dark patches of wet earth wondering what kind of flowers would grow outside the window. She wondered what they would have to do to the soil before they could grow vegetables. She thought about fresh tomatoes, cucumbers and melons. She wondered how many years a fruit tree had to grow at this altitude before there was fruit on it. Then she laughed out loud at herself for thinking so far ahead, for even believing she might still be alive in the spring. But then she went right on daydreaming, allowing herself the luxury of simple hope.

She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of voices and the resounding ring of a hammer beating on metal coming from behind the cabin. She considered turning off her computer and going outside to join the others in their labors. She could hear Sam and Stella arguing over something. The two of them easily completed their lessons before noon and after lunch they hurried outside to work with Gabe and Jim. She smiled, thinking how a week of punishment had been transformed into something entirely different.

Undecided about whether to stay in and continue to work on her research or go outside she looked down at her screen steeling herself to concentrate on the modeling problem she was working on.

Behind her Ozone lifted her head and barked softly. The dog leapt up from her place by the stove and ran to the front door where she scratched and looked expectantly back at Jesse.

Over the sounds coming from the back yard Jesse heard the hum of an unfamiliar engine gearing down, the crunch of tires on gravel and her stomach lurched in a nauseating wave of fear. She rose and crossed to the window at the front of the cabin wondering if she would ever get over this feeling that her life was sliding toward disaster.

Ozone growled.

“Shh! Come here, sweetie.” Ozone trotted to her side. Jesse patted her head and watched a green Ford Bronco pull off to park in front of the little red house about a block away. A man got out of the Bronco. He stood for a moment as if listening before walking up the street toward the cabin. Again her stomach flip-flopped in terror. Had Lamance reported Stella’s behavior after all? “Come on, Ozone!” she whispered and ran toward the back door of the cabin.

“Don’t go so fast! I can’t keep up! I’m going to drop it!” Stella complained from her end of a timber, while Sam struggled to hold up his end. The timber swung between them, suspended from their stretched out arms and straining hands as they straddled it and waddled together, moving it to the place appointed by Jim.

In the middle of the yard Gabe bent over the hood of the old truck, his shirt a wet rag on his back, the huge hammer in his hands arcing through the air over and over, beating the metal into sheets flat enough to satisfy Jim.

From that moment yesterday afternoon when they sat around the picnic table looking at Gabe’s plans, Jim was in charge. The old man let it be known that he thought the whole thing was a dubious and frivolous project. Still they could tell he was thrilled to be building something. Suddenly there was a spring in his step, a strength in his reedy old voice and a sparkle in his eyes. He gave orders like a sergeant and lessons with the patience of a born teacher.

The whine of an electric table saw joined the din in the back yard. Jim lowered the goggles over his eyes. His thin gnarly hands pushed expertly on a heavy plank and slowly, steadily it passed by the spinning disc, starting the first of many cuts, filling the air with sawdust and the sweet smell of freshly cut lumber.

“If I drop it and it falls on my foot I’m going to get you!” Stella threatened, shouting over the din of Gabe’s hammer and the scream of the saw.

With a thud, Stella’s end fell to the earth.

“Stella!” Sam yelled angrily.

The timber jerked painfully in Sam’s hands forcing him to let go and jump back as his end hit the earth with another dull thud. He’d seen it coming. Stella got a strange look on her face, she stumbled, the timber slipped from her hands and she clumsily jumped back away from it just before Sam was forced to jump away as well. Now she stood over the fallen post staring past Sam with a closed wary expression on her face.

Sam turned the same moment Gabe stilled his hammer and straightened to look in the direction of Stella’s stare. Inside the machine shop the saw whined to a halt and Jim lifted the goggles from his eyes to look too. The back door of the cabin swung open and Ozone burst out and clattered down the stairs. At the top of the stairs Jesse threw on her coat before she too stepped down into the yard to cross and stand near Sam and Stella. The two children stepped inside the protection of Jesse’s arms.

The stranger had walked around the cabin and now he stood off to one side of the back yard in front of the machine shop.

“Ozone!”

The dog ran straight up to the man, merely curious now after Gabe’s quick low call. The man stooped and held out the back of his hand for the dog’s inspection. She sniffed the proffered hand then ducked his attempt to pet her, backing up exactly three feet to sit between him and everyone else.

All was quiet in the yard. Wearing sunglasses, tall, slender and well tanned with a thick mane of white hair the stranger looked to be in his late seventies. He was dressed in faded blue jeans, well worn hiking boots and a new turquoise and purple down jacket.

Jesse examined him from under the shade of her hand. “Do I know you? Weren’t you at the restaurant in Glenwood a few days a go?” she asked breaking the sudden deep stillness and startling everyone, including herself with the unexpected hostility, the chilly authority of her tone.

He smiled. He had very white teeth. His smile was beautiful, charming, disarming. When he spoke, his voice too was beautiful. “Yes, I remember you folks. You were sitting in the Blue Front Café talking with the Ameses. Right around lunch time. The kids were playing pool.”

He shook his head at Jesse. “No, I don’t think we’ve ever met. Maybe we have, but I don’t remember it. I didn’t mean to startle you. My name’s Homer Rorty. Dr. Homer Rorty. I’m a retired biology professor. I taught for the Forestry Department in Silver City for the last thirty-eight years. Anyway, I guess we’re neighbors now.”

He wasn’t a state police officer come to take one or both of the children away! At his words the children relaxed inside the shelter of Jesse’s embrace. Jesse heard the man speak above the roar of her own heartbeat and let out the breath she hadn’t even known she was holding, almost fainting in her relief.

Gabe’s posture was suddenly a hair less threatening, the danger emanating from him lower by one or two very visible degrees. The stranger wasn’t there to try to take the children away. He wasn’t there to try to take Jesse away or even to question her.

Still, no one there but Jim was charmed by the stranger.

Quite the contrary, the man’s words fell from his lips and lay there dead on the ground with all the shocking presence of an elephant that has suddenly fallen straight from the sky. Everyone there but Jim had begun to think of Mogollon as their own private village, the mountains their own private mountain range. For everyone but Jim, the presence of the stranger was an unwelcome intrusion.

Gesturing behind him toward the road he continued conversationally. “I’ve been eyeing a piece of property here in Mogollon for quite a few years now. The little red cabin back down the road? The Olsons promised me way back when, that they’d inform me the minute they were ready to sell. Before they put up any signs or did any advertising. We closed the deal today and I’ll be moving in over the next few days.” He paused to let the news sink in. Then he looked at Jim. “You must be Mr. Grant. The Ameses told me you were living up here all year round. I heard you working back here and thought I’d drop by to introduce myself.”

Jim was the first to recover from his surprise. Smiling his wide loose-lipped almost toothless grin he wiped his palm on his jacket and the pants of his coveralls and stepped around the table saw out into the sunlight, holding out his hand to the stranger. “Jim, Jim Grant, Mr. Rorty. Or would you’d rather I called you Dr. Rorty? Anyhow, welcome to the neighborhood. These folks here’s my little family,” Jim proudly told the man.

Gabe switched the hammer to his left hand, stepped forward and stretched out his right hand. “Gabriel Hunter,” he said eyeing the man with his usual cold and penetrating stare, a stare as hard and steely as the two pound hammer in his left hand. Gabe gestured toward Sam with the hammer and said, “My boy, Sam.”

Then Jesse stepped forward. “Jesse Wren,” she told him with her hand in his. No one said a word then when like Gabe, Jesse merely nodded in Stella’s direction and said, “My girl, Stella.”

Stella’s eyes widened in surprise. Quickly though the child dropped her gaze and shifted back and forth on her feet, nervously kicking at the snow and dirt under her boots.

But the stranger didn’t notice Stella’s surprise. “Homer. Please call me Homer,” he said taking a step backwards, “ I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I wanted to introduce myself and say hello and tell you know how glad I am not to be completely alone up here. My wife and I planned for years to retire up here in the mountains, but she recently passed away and….” He paused at the instant look of sympathy on Jim and Jesse’s faces, twisting his mouth in sudden embarrassment. “Don’t worry though. I won’t make a nuisance of myself. I’m going to be busy. Even though I retired from the university, I still work for several conservation organizations. I plan to continue my work with the wildlife up here, so I won’t be at the house much.”

“Hogwash, we’re glad to have you as a neighbor,” Jim announced still smiling, unaware that he spoke only for himself. “We’re getting to be a regular city up here with two whole neighbors,” he joked, “ you and Harve Lamance, two miles up the road.”

The stranger paused in his preparations to leave. “Mr. Lamance lives up this road?” he asked, mildly surprised.

“Yep,” Jim nodded.

A brief look of disdain and disgust passed over the stranger’s features. “I had no idea he was actually living up here. Perhaps it’s fortuitous. I’ve been hoping to meet him.”

Jim and the rest of them gawked. Even Stella looked up from the ditch she was scratching in the dirt with the heel of her boot. Jim spoke for them all when he asked, “You wanta meet Harve Lamance?”

The stranger smiled at the obvious incongruity. “I’ve been trying for years to get the government to put an end to the trapping in the National Forests in this region. So far I’ve been unsuccessful. There are so few people involved and the Forest Service wants even that little bit of income. Anyway all of the trapping permits used to pass my desk so I’ve been aware of Mr. Lamance for a while now. Whenever I get a chance I try to persuade these men to find a different line of work. I’m rarely successful though,” he added ruefully.

Sam’s face grew animated. He and Stella had ammunition to use against Harve Lamance’s trapping of the animals. He stepped forward excitedly, “He shot a hawk last week! Stella and me rescued it. That’s not trapping is it? Can he do that? He told us he did it. Stella asked him and he admitted it. Then Stella---”

Stella’s hand closed over Sam’s mouth. She grabbed his arm hauling him away, muttering urgently in his ear, “Shut up! If you tell what I did they’re going to come and take me away.”

Sensing at last the unease and tension in the back yard the stranger smiled tolerantly at the whispering children. He stepped back again, continuing the process of departure, “Well, I’ll leave you folks to get back to your work.” He waved his hand at the jumble of construction materials littering the yard and still making conversation said, “Looks like you’ve got a big project going here. What are you making?” Then catching himself being nosy he stepped back again and added, “That is if you don’t mind my asking.”

“No! Don’t tell him! It’s a surprise!” Stella shouted whipping away from Sam so fast he almost fell over. Quick as a lynx then she was in the center of the group between the man and the rest of them, facing him stiffly, staring at him, her eyes burning with hatred and resentment. “You can’t know,” she told the man, stepping aggressively toward him, advancing on him right before everyone’s astonished eyes. Ozone stood and followed close on Stella’s heels. “It’s a surprise for Jesse,” she said and before anyone could do a thing to stop her, Stella gave the man a shove and told him, “We’re not going to tell you! So why don’t you leave?”

The tension created by the man’s arrival simply would not abate. They continued almost against their will to reel from one ugly moment to the next. When Stella shoved the man it was like she did it for all of them and they were all, including Jim, deeply embarrassed by it.

Jesse tried to save the situation. “Stella!” She moved to Stella’s side, pulling her away, “Stella, child! It’s not important. Don’t be rude. He was only making conversation. He didn’t mean anything by it. I’ve already guessed what you’re making anyway.”

Instantly Stella’s face sagged dramatically, her eyes filled with tears, registering Jesse’s revelation and rebuke as if both events were part of a deep tragedy. With disappointment, guilt and embarrassment warring almost comically on her face she turned to Jesse and wailed, “It was supposed to be a surprise!” Looking for someone, anyone beside herself to blame for her sudden humiliation Stella raged irrationally, “Why did he have to come here and ruin it?”

Jesse continued to try to salvage the situation. “Honey, it’s not his fault. He didn’t ruin anything. I guessed yesterday. And did you hear? He’s a biologist. He works for environmental groups. Maybe he can convince Mr. Lamance not to trap anymore. He can teach you all about the animals and help you--.”

But Stella was inconsolable. “I don’t want him to teach me! I don’t want him to help me! He did ruin it! He did! I hate him!” she cried wrenching her arm away from Jesse’s hand. She fled to the privacy of the cabin clumping noisily up the stairs and into the house. The screen door swung shut behind her with a resounding bang.

Again the silence of the forest fell down around them. A raven flew high across a perfect blue sky overhead. Its low hoarse call floated down to them like mocking laughter.

The stranger was the first to speak. “I wouldn’t be twelve again for all the money in the world,” he joked.

Jim, Gabe and Jesse all started to speak at once. They fell all over themselves trying to repair the situation, their desire to mollify and smooth much higher than if Stella hadn’t behaved so appallingly.

“Aw, don’t pay no--.”

“We’re--.”

“Dr. Rorty, we’re so sorry.”

He held up his hands and smiled. “Don’t worry about it. She’s like my daughter was at that age. My son too. Miserable, both of them. If my memory serves me right I wasn’t any different. Don’t give it another thought. In ten minutes she will have forgotten what it was she was so upset about and we should do the same.”

From the corner of her eye Jesse watched Sam stiffen and frown at hearing Stella’s tears dismissed in this manner. When Sam stepped forward declaring hotly, “Stella doesn’t forget anything!” Jesse’s heart sank further. Sam was just as hostile as Stella! On the other side of her Gabe’s mouth hung slightly open at his son’s outburst, his brow blackened. Now there really was going to be a fight! Jesse stuffed her icy hands in her pockets to keep from wringing them. The man was their neighbor. If things went any further in this direction . . .

Sam glanced at Jesse and Gabe and just as quickly as he’d exploded in anger the boy spoke to the stranger again and this time his voice was full of inquiry and conciliation. “We fixed a tree outside for the hawk but he doesn’t come out. Maybe he’s sick or something.”

Dr. Rorty lifted his eyebrows in quick surprise. Still he readily accepted this olive branch being offered by so unexpected a source. “Would you like me to look at him, Sam?” he asked.

Sam nodded and Jesse suppressed an urge to hug the boy. Dr. Rorty followed Sam across the yard to the newly fenced chicken coop.

After that it was as the stranger said. Each day he came and went quietly from Mogollon, moving his possessions a few at a time into the red cabin without further contact, except to wave if he saw one of them.

Sam and Stella were done with their lessons by noon and every afternoon that week they threw their energy into Gabe’s project with puppy like enthusiasm.

Jesse gave up her ambivalence and allowed herself to be swept up in the zeal surrounding the project. During the afternoons the chairs in front of her papers and computers remained empty while she worked and learned outside right along with the children.

They hauled lumber and sheets of metal, they measured and steadied lumber and metal for cutting and sawing, they learned how to weld, they brushed resin over lumber, they sprayed paint over metal, they dug holes starting with pick axes to break up the ground, they mixed and poured cement, they set posts, they sanded and they hammered.

In the mornings when Jesse got stiffly out of bed, muscles and joints she didn’t know she had making howling complaints, Gabe teased her. He called her an old woman and laughed at the sight of her hobbling painfully across the cold floor. In the evenings after dinner while Jim slept on the couch, Stella and Sam opened their books on the floor in front of the television and bent their heads together to compare blisters on their palms and pull splinters from their fingers. In the next room at the long tables Jesse and Gabe sat together working with the computers, studying Jesse’s numbers, making models, searching for an understanding of the radio waves created by a galactic plume of hot gas that was 300 million light years away and 110 million light years across.

On the last afternoon of the week of punishment they were all still at it, working hard, working late. The winter shadows of the trees touched the edge of the yard and would soon reach them turning the air icy cold.

Jesse, Sam, Stella and Jim hammered away, setting in place the final boards of the deck and Gabe hung over the side spraying a few small spots on the metal bottom where the paint had been nicked while they worked. Constructed over the old wood burning stove, the circular tub was formed by a series of two inch thick four foot vertical timbers each fitted tightly to the next by angled tongue and groove cuts, all of them held standing upright in place by six steel rings, three on the outside and three on the inside, spaced one above the other at eighteen inch intervals. Gabe fashioned the bottom of the tub from the hood and doors of the old pickup, welding the big metal disc directly onto the top of the stove and welding the bottom inside ring directly on top of the disc so all of it was securely held in place and watertight, and all of this was supported and held in place by a series of steps, decks and benches constructed around the huge tub.

Wham! Wham! Sam and Jesse finished hammering the last nail in the last board of their section of the deck. They looked up to the other side of the deck where opposite them Jim and Stella still worked. The deck was completed except for the few boards Stella and Jim had yet to nail into place.

Sam dropped his hammer. “C’mon, Jesse,” he told her. “Let’s hook up the hose.”

“Wait.” With the spray paint can waving in his hand Gabe squirmed up from hanging over the deck down into the tub. “There’re two more steps. Then you can hook up the hose. First you and Jesse help me. We have to drop the boards into place. Now we’ll see how well Jim cut those pieces,” he said teasing Jim.

They all laughed. Because of Jim’s skill and advice the whole thing had come together as perfectly and easily as a child’s puzzle. It was even a handsome thing sitting there in the back yard with its multileveled pine decks, railings, benches and stairways surrounding the tub and stove, all of it blending quite naturally with the cabin and the trees and mountains around it.

Gabe had known that the bottom of the tub would be too hot for their feet to touch and Jim designed the solution. He cut a series of boards to rest on top of the bottom ring at least two inches from the steel bottom of the tub. Each board would have a two inch gap between it and the next board allowing the hot water to rise through the spaces between the boards and circulate in the tub. The boards lay in a circle on the ground beside the deck, each board waiting to be lifted and set down into the one and only place in the tub where it would fit.

Gabe dropped with a light metallic thump into the tub. Jesse and Sam held the first board in place above one side of the tub and Gabe guided the heavy board down. Jim and Stella left their work to climb up on the deck and watch the boards drop into place. It was a very tight fit at the bottom, one end of the board refusing to drop into place.

“That’s good,” Jim remarked watching Gabe struggle with the board. “That’s what we want. Sam, go get that mallet for your dad. You’re gonna have to beat it into place, Gabe. That’s right,” the old man instructed, “Whack it a good one. Again.”

Seeing how tight the fit was Gabe said, “Maybe we don’t have to weld that last ring in.”

“Oh no,” Jim objected. “We don’t want those boards floating up outa there once that thing is full of water. You gotta weld it.”

Everyone groaned. That was one more step to be completed before they could start filling the tub.

Within the hour though Sam stood importantly on top of the deck holding the hose, impatiently watching the glistening tube of water stream down to splash against the boards, ever so slowly filling up the narrow space between the boards and the metallic bottom. Everyone else picked up tools and building materials from the yard, making certain in the waning light that there was a clear path from the back door of the cabin to the deck of the tub. Gabe broke from making big cleaning sweeps across the yard to hop up on the deck and study the level of the water. Satisfied he made a quick pass around the entire structure looking for leaks. Satisfied with that too he stooped at the narrowest edge of the deck and opened the doors of the wood burning stove.

It was another moment they’d all been waiting for. Everyone dropped what they were doing, including Sam, who finally relinquished the hose, letting it fall with a plop into the tub to continue its labors by itself. They gathered around Gabe. Early that morning in anticipation of this moment each of them carried pieces of firewood to add to the neat stack beside the deck. Gabe struck a match against one of the stove doors and placed it on the kindling inside.

Jim had assured them the stove would draw despite the long chimney that extended more than seven feet straight out from the flue before angling up. But Gabe had had his doubts. So when the fire caught with a whoosh and the kindling burned brightly in the growing darkness they all let out a cheer.

Later while they ate, Jesse got up from the kitchen table to fetch the forgotten parmesan. After staring out the back window for a moment she reached over and flipped off the kitchen light.

“Hey!” voices objected to the sudden darkness.

“Come look,” she told them.

Their chairs scraped across the floor and they crowded around the window. At first all they could see was the dark unfamiliar mass of the deck blossoming strangely off to one side of the back yard. Slowly the broad faintly glimmering geometric planes and surfaces, even the individual boards of the deck emerged in the faint starlight and the boards of the top edge of the tub itself bloomed like short tiny petals around a narrow black eight foot ellipse at the top level of the deck. Then all at the same time they saw what it was that Jesse wanted them to see. Smoke drifting away from the chimney at the far edge of the deck. And steam. They could see glorious hot steam rising from the black hole of the tub into that freezing cold starlit night.

“Ohhh!” they all, including Jim, groaned.

“Let’s go!” Sam declared already on his way, with Stella not far behind.

The kitchen light switched back on catching them at the door. “Eat!” Jesse ordered. “It’s not going anywhere.”

“Then why did you ask us to look?” they complained, blinking and groaning still more as they sat back down.

“So you could see how pretty it is.” She twirled her fork in her spaghetti while the rest of them scooped and slurped. “Jim, I can’t believe after all that work you’re not going to get in,” she teased. “It wouldn’t have been nearly so nice without your help. You have to get in,” she cajoled.

Yes, come on, Jim. You helped build it. You have to get in. We couldn’t have done it without you. Why don’t you try it at least once? the rest chimed in as usual.

The old man swiped at the spaghetti sauce on his chin with his napkin. Each time they asked he had a different answer. “Oh, no. You ain’t getting’ me in that gol derned contraption! I ain’t no fish! And I ain’t no hot tub yuppy neither. Sides, if I got as clean as that thing’d get me there might be nothin left of me.”

They left their clothes in piles on the kitchen floor, threw their robes and coats on over their underwear and tiptoed across the yard, their unlaced boots crunching over ice and gravel, their breaths hanging in steamy clouds in the velvet night air. Gabe stopped to put more logs in the fire while giggling and holding hands against the darkness Jesse and the children clumped aboard the deck. Shivering and sighing in anticipation they stepped out of their boots at the edge of the steaming black circle. They knelt close to the water testing the temperature first with timid hands and then with cold bare toes, each gasping at the surprising inviting heat of it.

Gabe climbed the steps to join them and Jesse crouched unmoving on the deck beside the stygian black hole of water. “It’s so dark. I hadn’t imagined how dark it was going to be. Maybe we should wait and get in tomorrow when it’s light,” she whispered, dipping her hand again into the deliciously hot water, her shivering words admitting for the children the fear they suddenly felt when faced with that utterly black pool.

Experiencing no such fears Gabe snorted loudly, dropped his coat and robe on the deck, stepped out of his boots and dropped with splash and a grunt of pleasure into the steaming tub. His big body sluiced noisily and shimmered clearly there, his pale floating form magically turning the black water transparent.

Jesse, Sam and Stella giggled again at their own foolishness. They dropped their coats and robes behind them on the deck and slipped into the steaming blackness, their bodies cutting through the dark water like Gabe’s, their collective groan of pleasure rising up through the night along with the steam.

A long moment of stunned silence followed.

Jesse leaned her head back against the boards at the edge of the tub and stared up at the foamy white wave of stars and galaxies splashed by the billions across the dark and infinitely deep sky above them. Following Jesse’s lead they all leaned back and looked up, their breaths mingling with the rising steam.

It was a separate moment. A sense of the passage of time, of the beauty and singularity of the moment took hold of each of them. It was as though they each of them for just that moment could feel the slow spin of the earth, the turn of the galaxy, the whirling expanding dance of matter and space. For just that tiny moment each of them sensed deep within them, far down in the warm thrum of the very cells of them, a slow echoing turn, they felt within them the sweet twisting pull of the star dance stretching out from them into a great weaving of time, movement and matter, the shimmering dancing web spreading to the farthest reaches of space and time where at the very edge--.

Jesse squealed, startled by Gabe’s arm sliding through the darkness to haul her through the water toward him.

Startled by Jesse’s squeal Sam and Stella screamed too, both of them kicking and splashing in the water, everyone instantly breaking into laughter.

He settled her in the crook of his body, his arm enclosing her, covering her middle, holding her back pressed close to his front, his hand slipping up under her floating shirt to span and caress her back and ribs while little waves of hot dark water lapped and sparkled around their necks. He pushed aside her wet hair and buried his lips and nose in her neck. She twisted in his arms her cold lips meeting his in a kiss that surrounded them in a sweet dizzy echo of that magic moment of silence only seconds before.

Sam and Stella giggled at the dark profile of the kiss and Stella sighed a long loud sigh. Sam moved around on his belly in the hot water actually managing to float and swim in place.

“This is so cool,” he whispered, languidly dog-paddling, studying the sharp black edge of the trees and mountains against the sapphire sky.

Stella sighed again and said in a soft voice, “I never, ever, ever thought in all my life to be here in a wonderful place like this. To build a thing like this . . .” She paused, then pronounced with utmost authority and satisfaction. “This thing is a lot better than a fort. I’m gonna be a builder when I grow up.”

Everyone laughed.

“I thought you said you’re going to go to Las Vegas to be a singer,” Sam teased, still dog-paddling.

The light of a flashlight shone inside the back door of the cabin. The screen door creaked open and the light and Jim hobbled down the stairs.

“Jim’s coming!” Sam whispered.

“Go ahead and turn on the light, Jim,” Gabe called.

The light wobbled and Jim crunched across the yard. “Nah. I didn’t wanta ruin the starlight for Jesse,” the old man’s voice preceded his footsteps up the stairs of the deck. “Besides, a man has to have his privacy,” he chuckled, clumping in his boots to the edge of the tub. The flashlight blinked off and landed on the deck. “This way you can’t see the color of m’ skivvies,” he joked dropping his coat onto the pile of clothes behind him.

“Eeeyow! That’s cold! You ladies cover yer eyes and don’t peek now,” he said half seriously, standing there looking incredibly frail, with his thin sunken chest, skeleton arms and legs, all white and shivering in a baggy old pair of shorts.

Gabe moved away from Jesse’s side and stood up in the tub, holding out his hand to the old man. Accepting Gabe’s hand, Jim first crouched then sat on the edge, then slowly scooted into the hot water with a long howl of surprise and pleasure.

“Ooowee! That’s hot! My, my, my, that’s nice,” he chortled and laughed and crowed moving around in the water. “Oh my, I never thought it would be so nice. Just look at the stars. Oh my, oh my. Why didn’t you people tell me how nice it is? Here I go and help you build this wonderful thing and nobody even tells me how nice it is or invites me . . .”

“We invited you! We begged you! How can you say that? All last week we did nothing but beg and fight,” everyone objected at once.

Jim laughed and laughed. He laughed so hard he coughed. Then he dog paddled around like Sam exclaiming over and over, “My, this is so nice. So nice.” He floated on his back and declared, “Oh my. Wonderful! Beautiful! Whoever would have thought it would be like this? To see the stars like this--.” He floated silently for a long moment looking up as the others did when they first got in.

Then he said, “You know? Floating here like this and looking up there at all those stars, you kind of feel this is one of the best--.” Then he was silent again for a long moment. Finally he gave up on expressing the thought and after a brief struggle he sat up in the water and moved to settle against the side of the tub next to Gabe announcing, “I ain’t gonna stay out here long. I gotta get my beauty rest you know. So I was kinda wondering would you ladies sing a song? Just for me. It’s been a while. Whadya say, Jesse? Stella?”

“What would you like to hear?” Jesse asked.

After another very long silence he spoke at last and his voice coming to them out of the darkness sounded tired, “You know, Jesse, one of the old timey songs from the mountains, one of the--.”

“In that beautiful golden somewhere--.” Stella’s pure clear soprano rose up from her dark profile to be joined by Jesse’s soft breathy alto.

“Ah, that’s a good one,” Jim breathed and the two men and the boy listened in utter enchantment to the lovely song floating up from that tiny drop of warm water, that sweet song winging up through the ink black night past immense black forests and oceans of dark mountains, straight up into the deep, deep sky to the very heart of the stars.

They sang two more songs before Gabe said quietly, “He’s asleep.”

Inside the supporting sling of Gabe’s arm Jim sloshed awake. “Who’s asleep?” he asked.

“Time for bed, kids,” Gabe announced.

Sam and Stella groaned.

Gabe jumped up out of the tub, stuck his feet in his boots, grabbed up his coat, threw it on and offered his hand down to Jim. “Let me help you, Jim, so you don’t get cold,” he said, hauling the old man up out of the water as effortlessly as if he were a small child.

“Easy, easy. These old bones and joints ain’t what they used to be,” Jim complained while Gabe wrapped him up in his coat and helped him slip on his boots.

“Yeah, but I don’t want you to slip and fall and I don’t want you to get cold,” Gabe explained. He grabbed up the flashlight and with his arm around Jim he guided the old man down the steps and across the yard.

“Cold? I’ve been cooked! Stewed. I’m well done. The meat’s tender and falling off the bones. I’ll never be cold again. And I walked out here all by myself.” Jim laughed and complained all the way into the house, while in the tub nobody made a move to leave despite Gabe’s instructions.

Minutes later the screen door banged and Gabe’s running steps crunched toward them through the darkness. The metal doors to the wood burning stove creaked open and they could hear the wood being stuffed into the stove, they could feel it chunking and vibrating through the deck, they could see the tiny waves vibrate and glitter across the water. Then Gabe was up on the deck, shedding his coat and boots and dropping with a quiet splash and a gasp back into the black water. He glided over to Jesse and slipped behind her spooning their bodies intimately together as before. He moved silkily, sensuously against her, his body floating beneath her, supporting her, touching her, sliding, suddenly shockingly hungrily naked beneath her in the darkness there.

“Thought I told you guys to go to bed,” he said to Sam and Stella who had been hoping he’d changed his mind, either that or that he wouldn’t notice them submerged up to their noses and lolling so quietly way over on the other side of the tub.

You just put more wood on the fire. It’s gonna stay hot for a long time. Can’t we please stay out here. Please, please, please? their steaming heads emerged complaining and begging.

“It’s almost eleven o’clock. You worked hard all day. The tub will be here tomorrow. Go!”

“Ohhh,” sloshing up out of the water they continued to moan and complain. Jesse and Gabe watched the steam rise in clouds from their smooth young bodies. They listened to their teeth chattering groans and watched them struggle hurriedly into robes and coats and boots and clunk down the wooden stairs and across the yard. The screen door creaked and shut quietly. In the sky above them a few soft gray almost indiscernible low clouds floated by, touching the mountaintops, dancing among the trees.

“Now I’ve got you,” he whispered into her ear, his hands suddenly moving over her in the most delicious ways.

“Got me what?” she giggled, pretending innocence.

“Alone,” he whispered, kissing her ear. He grabbed a fistful of her T-shirt and pulled it up over her head. She ducked down under the water sliding out of the shirt, emerging to watch it hit the water with a splash, then float like a white jellyfish slowly sinking. Then Gabe’s hands were at her waist and hips, skinning her panties down her thighs and calves and off her feet. Suspended in the middle darkness there, the small white garment sank to the bottom with her shirt.

He held her by the hips pulling her close, his heart against her back, the silk of his thighs against the backs of hers. He rubbed against her, the gentle buoyancy of the water softening the results, heightening the teasing affect of touching her there, the warm velvet head of him sliding back and forth against her. His hands slid around to hold her, his fingers slipping through the dark floating triangle of hair, pressing, touching, caressing, teasing just as that other part of him teased. She moaned and arched, moving in ancient response to his touch. He pressed her down against him mashing them together, the pressure of his hands rhythmic, subtly insistent, knowing.

Her eyes slid shut. Her head fell back on his shoulder and he buried his lips in the cool wet flesh of her neck, his hands never letting up on the magic they were working.

She hadn’t thought about it happening this way, she wouldn’t have believed it could, yet the hunger in her body curled in tight response around the pressure of his fingers and the grinding, smashing sluice of his body against hers. Her eyes were closed, her face pointed straight up and their bodies were pressed together in that hot black water so closely that they were more one than two.

Jesse exploded then behind closed eyes, and in the very center of her suns and planets danced, formed and unformed, matter coming together and flying apart in hot contracting, expanding bursts of pleasure that were an echo, a parallel, a small internal version of the ecstatic dance of the stars all around them.

She laughed softly and relaxed limp and boneless as a jellyfish in his arms.

He turned her in the water to face him spreading her legs around him, draping her arms around his neck. He pulled her close and pressed against the center of her, rubbing, caressing, opening, pushing inside her as easily as if she were suddenly composed of hot honey. He held her face kissing drops of water away from her cheeks, her eyelids, her nose, her lips, leaving trails of more water. He moved against her, the water making the movement gentle, languorous like a great fish swimming.

“Go ahead, Jesse,” he whispered kissing her, sucking on her lips, his fingers threading through her hair holding her head.

“I already did,” she smiled under the touch of his lips.

“Go again,” he urged, moving again.

“But . . . I did . . . the water . . . there’s nothing to push against. You did it right the first time . . . it was perfect.”

He smiled, his hands gliding down to her hips to hold her against him. “I’ll provide the leverage. Move, Jesse,” he urged. His half closed eyes glittered at her darkly. “Move. It’ll be easy this time. You’ll see. It’s right there.”

He held her tight and she ground down against him using the strength in his hands and hips to move and roll that soft thin flesh of hers between them in just the right way.

Through half closed lids she watched the pleasure on his face, knowing the moment when, inside her, his boundaries dissolved with each spurting thrust, his sense of self obliterated, gone. And she went with him on that inward, outward journey. They became one sensation, an essence, a musical note, an explosive paean of pure pleasure, the physical result of every moment that preceded that moment. A singularity. Time stood still as they bloomed out into the universe at the speed of light.

They relaxed together slowly drifting apart to rest their heads against the rough boards behind them, Jesse nestled inside his arms, her hip pressed close to his, their feet floating like four shimmering white fish in the dark water.

“My hair is frozen,” she laughed. His hand sloshed up to touch it, his hot wet fingers melting the frozen strands of her hair. “It is!” she insisted.

“Look,” he said, leaning back and gazing up at the sky. She glanced up and a snowflake dropped on her eyelash.

The few low clouds had become many. The sky was now a soft blurry gray. Between the clouds though, big patches of the infinitely dark starry universe were still visible and all around them fat lacy white ice crystals fell from the sky like stars, making the softest whispering sound as hundreds of them struck the steaming black water.

Chapter Twenty

The front door opened to let Ozone out and Jesse opened her eyes to a room filled with blinding sunlight. It hadn’t snowed much but the thin blanket of fresh snow turned the world outside the cabin a dazzling white. She reached for Gabe’s pillow and encountered the warmth of his body. She curled around the pillow, buried her face in it and listened to the early morning sounds of the house.

Gabe stepping out onto the front porch to fetch wood for the fire. Gabe outside, talking to Ozone as she raced around in the snow. The creak of the stove doors opening. The thump and clunk of logs going into the stove.

When she passed into the kitchen Gabe was crouched in front of the stove blowing on the coals and talking to Jim who was still asleep on the couch behind him. Behind them, sunlight fell across the porch and into the front room. Cold pine scented air hovered in the open door there.

Within minutes the smell of brewing coffee and frying bacon filled the cabin. She glanced out into the front room.

“Coffee’s ready, you two. Breakfast will be ready in a minute. The front door’s open, Gabe.” From the bottom of the stairs she called up, “Breakfast!”

She glanced at Gabe and Jim. Gabe now sat on the edge of the couch, staring into the open stove at the fire. Behind them a little breeze lifted snow from the porch and carried it into the cabin. It sparkled in the morning sunlight and settled on the cabin floor. Ozone rushed through the door skidding and sliding through the thin dusting of ice.

Jesse picked up the broom leaning against the door and swept the snow and Ozone’s tracks out of the cabin and closed the door. She turned around.

Gabe still sat motionless with his back to her staring into the fire. The stove doors remained open, the heat of the fire roaring up the chimney.

Ozone smiled a big tongue lolling grin directly in front of Gabe’s face. She shook, sending a spray of water around the room much of it landing with a hiss on the hot stove. Still neither Gabe nor Jim moved.

Jesse crouched in front of the stove to close the doors. When she turned to face Gabe, the sorrow in his face sent a shock sizzling through her.

“Gabe!” she moved close, her hands covering his.

He lifted his eyes and they focused on her briefly. “He’s dead, Jesse. Jim’s dead,” he told her tonelessly, his gaze shimmering out of focus again.

“No! He can’t be!” she choked, her eyes filling with tears, her hand moving to touch the old man.

Jim’s hand was cold, stiff, lifeless.

Her heart squeezed tight inside her. How could she have grown to love the old man so quickly without even being aware of it? How could they bear the loss?

“He was fine when we came in last night!” she exclaimed, as though that fact could alter what had happened since. “Y . . . you built up the fire. You covered him up and he spoke to you . . .” she said still trying to change things with her words.

She looked again at Gabe slumped on the couch, his face now covered in his hands, his posture one of despair and defeat and she grew more alarmed with each passing second. Nothing they had faced thus far had had an affect like this on Gabe.

He spoke and his voice was heavy, broken with guilt and grief, “He must have known he was dying. That’s why there wasn’t any food or wood when we arrived. I thought it was because the storm had caught him unprepared. Because he was too old to be living alone out here like this.”

He rubbed his head slowly, vigorously, attempting with that motion to erase the pain. “He was here for us when we came, Jesse. He was here for me when I needed him. Where was I when he needed me? He wrote me while I was still in prison telling me all about this place, inviting me and Sam to visit when I got out. Then he wrote me again telling me how lonely the winters were.”

She brushed at her tears, “Aw Gabe, it’s not your fault,” she said, touching his cheek. When he didn’t respond she stood and leaned to kiss his forehead and hands. He was barely aware of her presence. She went into the kitchen to turn the flame off under the bacon. Then she climbed the stairs to tell the children.

She met Stella coming out of her room. She signaled the girl, then knocked and they stepped into Sam’s bedroom. He was still asleep, encased in his sleeping bag without even his head showing. The sun sparkled warmly through the frost on the windowpanes.

Jesse sat on the edge of the bed. “Sam,” she said pushing gently against his shoulder. “Wake up, Sam.”

He turned over, his head and arms emerging from his bag, a look of mild surprise on his face.

“Sit down, Stella,” she told the girl. Sam scooted up in bed and Stella sat beside him, both the children’s faces growing grim and frightened.

“Jim is dead,” Jesse told them quietly. “He died last night in his sleep.”

Their mouths fell open. This was not the bad news they had been expecting.

“He can’t be dead. He’s going to teach me to build things. He promised!” Stella cried, tears of grief welling in her eyes and Jesse couldn’t help it then. Her own eyes filled again with tears.

Sam’s eyes too brimmed brightly. He slumped back down in the bed and turned away from them. Stella and Sam both began to cry.

Jesse had no words to stop the grief. The tears must flow. She said, “I’m going back downstairs to fix breakfast now. You can eat if you want. If you don’t want, fine. But you will eat sometime today,” she told them softly. “And I don’t want either of you to be upset with Gabe. If this is hard for us, it’s ten times harder for him.”

At these words Sam turned back over to face her. Both children looked at Jesse with solemn tear streaked faces. That news seemed too much for Stella. She collapsed on the bed moaning and sobbing heartbrokenly, “Whatever are we going to do now?”

Jesse stood up from the bed.

When she reached the door Sam called to her in a tight voice. “Wait, Jesse. He told us what he wants done.”

Jesse turned. “Who told you what, Sam?”

“Jim. He told us that first day. When we went for the walk around Mogollon. He showed us the place and told us what to do. He said not to bother you until now. We thought he was kidding. That it was a joke or something. He said all the people in Glenwood know what he wants too. Because he didn’t know we were coming.”

Jesse sat down on the bed and pulled Stella into her arms, “Tell me, Sam. Tell me all about it.”

She listened to the story the children haltingly told her of that second morning in Mogollon and their walk with Jim. Slowly it dawned on her that four phone calls were all that remained for her to do. Jim had long ago arranged the rest.

Downstairs she found Jim’s hand written instructions along with the results of his last medical exam lying in a folder in the bottom drawer of his desk. She stood at Jim’s desk reading his instructions.

She looked up at Gabe. He had not moved from his place on the couch beside Jim’s still form. She looked down and read on.

Jim wanted to be buried on the hilltop without leaving Mogollon, without undertaker or embalming fluid coming between him and his mountains. According to New Mexico law the old man had to be buried no less than twenty-four hours after his death if it was to happen as simply as he wished it to happen. She read Jim’s medical documents, crossed over to Gabe and laid the papers on his lap.

Following Jim’s instructions Jesse called the County Coroner’s Office and the carpenter in Glenwood. Then she called Rick and Brenda Daly and Bill and Susan Ames. While she talked on the phone Gabe remained with his back to her on the couch, unmoving, unaware of what she was doing, unaware of the papers on his lap.

Things happened remarkably fast after that. She and the children barely finished picking at their breakfast before the Dalys and the Ameses were there. They arrived with their arms laden with food. There were sliced meats and cheeses, fruit and cakes and breads from the Daly’s store, along with paper plates and cups. There were whole roasted chickens and turkeys, casseroles, salads and pies from the Blue Front Café.

Jesse could hardly believe it. When she called Jim’s friends she merely thought they would want to be there when Jim was buried. She hadn’t thought about what was going to happen when they actually arrived. She stepped out onto the porch to greet them and tears filled her eyes again when Susan and Brenda handed the food they were carrying to their husbands and folded her into their arms.

The two women eyed Ozone, sniffing curiously at their skirts and shoes.

“That’s a mighty big dog,” Brenda commented.

“There’s going to be a lot of people here today. A lot of coming and going. A lot of confusion. Why don’t you tie her up?” Susan suggested to Sam who stared at her from the open doorway. That was only the beginning. After that moment the two women simply took over the proceedings.

Inside Rick and Bill carried the food into the kitchen and then pulled chairs up close to the stove to sit beside Gabe, both of the men talking to him, telling him of Jim’s illness, forcing him to hear them.

Brenda Daly got on the phone and called more people to let them know what had happened and Susan Ames distracted the children with questions about their hikes in the wilderness, the rescued hawk, their school. After that Brenda rolled up her sleeves and she and Susan marched the children into the kitchen and the two women and Jesse and the children began preparing and setting out the food they had brought for the day.

The County Medical Officer and a State Police Officer arrived. Rick and Bill hauled Gabe away from beside Jim’s body to the long work tables where he and the others sat one by one answering the State Police Officer’s questions, while in the front room the medical officer examined Jim.

What is your relationship to Mr. Grant? How long did you know Mr. Grant? How long have you been living here with Mr. Grant? Was Mr. Grant ill?

Sick at heart with grief and guilt; apprehension, dread, hopelessness and loathing roiling in his gut, Gabe sat at the table next to Jesse’s computers answering the state police officer’s questions. He looked the man right in the eye. Then he placed his elbows on the table and ran his hands slowly through his hair. He continued to answer in dull monosyllables and stared blindly at the table and the computers, thinking about the hell that was about to reach out and engulf them all.

“What’s up Doc?” Max’s usual question opening his correspondences with Jesse appeared across her screen. The children had been showing Susan Ames how to send e-mail and they had simply left the machine on and the modem connected when they got up to go into the kitchen. It had been two days since Gabe’s last private communication with Max. Max’s message to him then was, “We’re working on it.” Even yesterday Gabe had thought they were safe in Mogollon. He thought they had all the time in the world. He was so wrong.

The state police officer looked on as Gabe typed a brief phrase, merely part of a sentence common to all beginning typing lessons. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their . . . then he typed his name, closed the program and turned off the machine almost laughing at himself for the feebleness of his gesture. He had little faith in his message bearing any results if Max was merely working on it. Besides what could a graduate student in physics do to help now?

Moments later the Ameses and Dalys answered the police and medical officer’s questions, adding what they knew about Jim’s illness.

Then the carpenter was there with Jim’s simple pine box resting in the back of his pickup. Minutes after that, others from Glenwood began arriving. The front door was left open. People stepped into the cabin and stood on the porch. Some wandered through the back yard looking curiously at the wooden hot tub, the beautiful angles of its decks now strangely softened under an inch of new fallen snow.

Their neighbor, Dr. Rorty, stopped by to see what was happening. Recovering quickly from the shock of the news he slipped his arm around Jesse for a moment and did the same with Sam and Gabe too. But Stella quickly moved away from the man before he could touch her. Not wanting to intrude again Dr. Rorty quietly expressed his sympathy to the mourners and just as quietly returned to his cabin.

Papers were signed, stamped and sealed. Jesse fetched Jim’s only suit from the closet where her clothes hung next to Gabe’s. The men dressed Jim and his suit stood out around his spare flesh and bones like stiff paper. The pine box was carried into the cabin and laid open on the floor behind the couch.

The County Medical Officer and the State Police Officer shook hands and offered condolences as they stepped through the crowd and out of the cabin.

Jim was lifted from the couch, laid in the box and the wooden cover was nailed in place with eight blows of a hammer. Then Gabe, Sam, Bill and Rick lifted the box, so light it seemed to contain nothing, from the floor and carried it outside to the back of Jim’s pick up.

Everyone gathered near the tailgate. In that early snow bright morning two dozen and more mourners followed the truck and coffin on foot slowly north through Mogollon.

Two blocks south of there the State Police Officer geared down preparing for the steep climb up out of Mogollon. Seconds after that he called in his report.

On top of the little hill Stella insisted and Rick, Gabe, Sam, Bill and Stella lifted the coffin from the back end of the pickup and laid it on top of the ropes next to the open grave. Slowly, gently the pine box was lowered into the earth.

Gabe spoke and his first words made everyone cry. “Jim, you old liar. You were a liar to the end. You should have told us. I guess it wouldn’t have made any difference. You were a good friend, Jim. The best . . .”

The very moment those words were being spoken Ray Burke, the head of the FBI in Albuquerque, was throwing on his overcoat and rushing out of his office to alert the agents seated at their desks and gathered around the coffee machine.

“We got em!” he shouted punching his fist up through his coat sleeve. “They’re burying some old geezer in Mogollon. I just called Washington. Maxwell is on his way. He’ll be there in less than three hours. We have a go ahead!”

Minutes after that a circle of State Police blockades formed exactly fifteen miles out on all roads, paved and unpaved, leading away from Mogollon.

Back in Mogollon, Jesse played her violin and Stella sang. They played and sang just for Jim. They played the music he loved. Walking in Jerusalem, The River Jordan, Amazing Grace and with their music they poured out their thanks to Jim for his kindness and generosity. Light and radiant and full of joy and sweet longing, the music touched the mourners deeply. Enthralled by the unexpected beauty of Jesse’s playing and Stella’s singing, the mourners floated with the music high above the mountains, their spirits lifted by the utter perfection, the pure redemption of that glorious music.

Up on the northeast cliff, the children’s favorite perch above Mogollon, Dr. Homer Rorty looked down on the proceedings. He listened to that lovely music drifting up to him. He listened to the sounds of shovels striking the mountainside. He listened as the earth Jim had slowly lifted with his thin old arms last summer was lifted again and dropped on top of a simple pine box. He listened and he wondered about what he felt when he touched the people down there. It was the second time he had touched Jesse, Gabe and Sam and it only confirmed what he had felt earlier. Even the boy he thought.

Later, when almost all the funeral guests were gone . . . “You should eat the chicken and potato salad for dinner tonight,” Brenda Daly instructed from inside the refrigerator. Her stout rear end moved back and forth while the front half of her busily arranged the leftovers. “And the pie. There’s probably enough for tomorrow night too. After that it’ll spoil.”

She straightened up and closed the refrigerator door. It was a little after twelve and only the Dalys remained. “And don’t worry about the children. They’ll be fine.” Brenda removed the towel from her waist and gave the counter top another quick swipe. She folded the towel and laid it over the back of a chair. “They’re young. They’ll recover quickly from this. Like you said about your mother and father, Jesse. In time the pain is less. Jim was an old man and he was sick. It was his time.” She retrieved her coat and her husband’s coat from the back of another chair and Jesse followed her out of the kitchen.

With his elbow on the desk and his hand on his forehead Gabe’s shoulders were slumped again under a burden too great to bear. He appeared to be studying some papers on the desk in front of him. Rick Daly and the children leaned over his shoulder, all of them looking with him at the papers. Everyone but Gabe looked up when Brenda and Jesse finally emerged from the kitchen.

“That’s it? Did you tell him?” Brenda asked her husband. She held out his coat to him. At his nod she opened the front door. “Then we’ll be going. Give me a call, Jesse, if you need anything.”

The door closed quietly and they were alone in the cabin. Outside the sun shone brightly, warming the afternoon air. The thin layer of snow was rapidly melting. They listened to the crunch of tires on gravel.

Jesse studied Gabe’s defeated posture. A shiver traveled down her spine. He seemed to be doing so well after Rick and Bill arrived. While everyone was there he had coped so well.

“Tell you what, Gabe?” she asked.

He continued to hold his head and stare down at the papers on the desk. She could see tears clinging to his lashes. Sam and Stella looked at her with big eyes. “What, Gabe? What did Rick tell you?” Still he did not respond.

“Sam. Stella. Put a couple of logs on the fire, will you please? It’s cold in here,”

They moved to do her bidding.

“No.” Gabe stood slowly as though with his standing he lifted an enormous weight and when he spoke, what he said next was so unexpected, so incongruous, such a non sequitur to all that had preceded it that day that Jesse actually began to fear for his sanity. “We’re leaving. Right now. There isn’t time to take anything. Get your coats. Let’s go!”

No one moved. They simply stood there with their mouths hanging open in a dumbfounded funk.

“Go, go!” he ordered waving his arms at them.

“Gabe, couldn’t we at least wait a day. Take a little time to recover from all this and pack our things . . .” Jesse tried to return a degree of sanity to the proceedings. She could understand now that Jim was gone they could no longer stay, but did they have to leave so quickly like this? Again?

“No way!” he declared with stony finality. “Hurry! It might be too late even now. Sam, go get Ozone. Stella, get out there and open up the coop and let that bird loose.” Gabe grabbed Jesse’s coat from the hook behind the door and shoved it at her. He threw Stella’s coat at her and Sam’s at him. Then he grabbed up his own and began throwing it on, heading for the door.

“No, I won’t go!” Sam shouted at his father, stunning them all even further.

Gabe stopped with his hand on the door.

Sam threw down his coat and turned to Jesse. “Jesse, make him stay! It’s his! The place is his. Jim left it to Dad. He left it all to him. It’s his! The hotel, the cabin, at least half of these buildings here in town, five acres of the mountain behind us. It’s all his. Why does he want to leave? Make him stay, Jesse, make him stay.”

She looked at Gabe. “Is this true? The place is yours?”

Before Gabe could stop him, Sam snatched up the papers from the roll top and shoved them into Jesse’s hands.

“You can read those in the car.” Gabe said grabbing her by the shoulders, preparing to forcibly move her outside.

She shrugged him off, moving to the window to study the papers. It was a two page document, the kind that can be bought in any stationary and business supply store. She looked at the last page. It was signed by Jim and signed and witnessed by Brenda Daly, Bill and Susan Ames, and one other person Jesse didn’t know. She turned to the first page. The document itself was incredibly short. In two short sentences Jim left all of his property to Gabe with Rick Daly as the executor. She looked up at Gabe in disbelief. “Why do you want to go?”

There wasn’t time for rationalizing and explanations. His hands cut through the air. “Jesse, I don’t care about it. I did nothing to deserve it. I don’t want it . . . It’s not important. They’re coming to get . . .”

“Not important!” Her eyes flashed in a way that Gabe had never seen. “Not important? What in the world is the matter with you? Are you crazy? What? What is it?” She advanced on him, her color rising to little flaming spots on her usually pale cheeks.

“For the first time in years something really good comes your way and you’re going to run away from it? You don’t deserve it? Who deserves anything good in this life? Nobody deserves it. It just happens. Take it when it comes, Gabe. Isn’t that what you told me? Why do you punish yourself for things that aren’t your responsibility? Do you think it’s your fault that Jim died? He was an old man. He was sick. You’re not responsible for his death. You’re not responsible for the fact that his life was lonely and hard. But you did make the very last days of his life easier and happier. Finally something good comes to you and not really out of the blue, but directly because of the kindness and compassion you gave to an old man in prison. You accepted me. You accept my illness. You have protected me and helped me in my need. You’re willing to take on any horrible load that comes down the line, but you can’t take something good when it comes along? Is that it? Are you going to punish yourself like this when I die? Is it going to be your fault? Will you throw away my computers and my music because you don’t deserve them? What about Sam . . .”

“Goddamn it, Jesse!” he howled, “you’re not going to die! I won’t let you!” He grabbed her arm and started pulling her toward the door. “We can talk about all of this in the car. We’re leaving because of you! Because I can’t . . .”

She struggled in his grasp. “Because of me?” She jerked furiously away from him. “You want to leave here because of me?” She couldn’t have been more shocked. “You really are crazy.”

She rubbed her wrist angrily. “Are you going to drag me back to some doctor who knows how to fix dead brains? Are you going to stop death in its tracks? You can’t! Oh I release you, Gabe. Here and now. You are no longer my keeper. I will not let you run away from this place because of me!”

“Keeper?” The world of hurt in his eyes caused by her words made her flinch. “Keeper? Is that what you think?” He loomed over her. She backed away. He reached for her anyway, his big hands grasping her arms inexorably this time. “Aw Jesse. You’re the good thing, the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Lover, Jesse. I’m your lover, not your keeper.” His face expressed a pain and sorrow that were beyond words. “And yes, I would. If I could, I would stop death. I would do anything to keep you alive.”

Her eyes filled with tears at the hurt she had given him. Slowly he pulled her into his arms, folding her up in his embrace, his entire body seeming to surround her and the sorrow of him melted her against him. She leaned into him. They formed a single entity, Gabe crying at last in his grief over Jim’s death. And in fear and pain at the thought of losing Jesse. “You’re not going to die, Jesse,” he sobbed into her hair, swaying under the burden of his sorrow. “I don’t believe it. Not after all this time. You’re not going die. I won’t let you. It’s not going happen. There’s nothing wrong with you. It was a mistake. And . . . and we can come back here if you want. When it’s safe. But we have to leave. We have to hurry. We have to go back to Socorro.” He tried to explain what he had not explained seconds earlier. But the damage was done.

The children stared. Gabe and Jesse were holding each other as if their fast embrace was their only barrier against impending disaster. Gabe’s words to Jesse seemed to exclude them. Sam was deeply hurt and both the children were frightened. Once again their world was collapsing around them. First Jim’s death and now this.

Sam grabbed up his coat from the floor and flew out the front door and Stella followed, both of them running like deer up the street and on up the side of the mountain.

“Damn!” Gabe followed them through the open door out onto the porch. But he could go no further than that from Jesse’s side. “Sam! Stella! Come back! We have to leave. We’ll come back to Mogollon. I promise! Sam! Stella!” His huge voice echoed up the street and into the trees, booming through the mountains.

“Listen to that,” Jesse whispered sadly behind him. “Stella’s mother gets her wish. A great big hunk of a man is calling Stella. This hasn’t been a good day, Gabe. Not for you. Not for me. Not for them. Maybe we should let them go for a little while. Maybe the mountaintop is the best place for them right now.”

He whirled around. There she stood, looking so sad and so incredibly radiant in her lacy white blouse and soft flowing black wool skirt, the winter sunlight pouring through the window, shining on her blue black hair, in her silver eyes, lighting up her skin, turning her into a pearl. She was the thing he desired most in the world. He pleaded with her, “Jesse, you don’t understand. We have to leave. We have to go back to Socorro. Now!”

He lifted his hands then just as quickly grabbed her to him, his arms like steel around her. He couldn’t believe it. He wanted her. Even now he wanted her. He dropped his face into her hair, breathing her in, holding her close. “It’s been three hours since that State Police Officer and I stood eye to eye. They’re coming, Jesse. As sure as you and I are standing here a whole lot of people are coming to Mogollon to get you. I can’t protect you from what’s coming. I should never have brought you here. I should have taken you straight back to Socorro where everything there, your colleagues, your students, your place in the community.”

She lifted her fingers to his lips, her eyes flooding again. “If you had taken me back to Socorro the night we left Albuquerque we wouldn’t be together now, would we?” She stared up at him. “You would have had to leave me there and go on with Sam. And don’t you think I haven’t figured out what I’m up against? I can be made to disappear just as neatly and completely from the streets of Socorro as from anywhere else. You’ve been my only protection, Gabe. And these few weeks with you have been the best of my life. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.”

She smiled wanly and shrugged up at him. “I already made up my mind days ago that I was going back to Socorro in May. To face another medical exam and, if I’m all right, to sign my contract for next year. Then we’ll spend the summer here in Mogollon and go back to Socorro in August.”

He scowled down at her.

“But only if you come with me.”

His scowl deepened. “We can do it, Gabe. You and I and Sam and Stella. We’ll take it a day at a time, a problem at a time just like we have been. I’ll be responsible for Sam right along with you. They don’t dare try to take Sam away from me as well as you. And Sam doesn’t have to go back to public school as far as I’m concerned. Or Stella. But that’s up to them. What’s the matter? You don’t think we can do it? We shouldn’t even try?”

She pressed close letting him know with her every movement how aware she was of his longing for her. She slipped her arms around his neck and kissed the whiskered hollow beneath his jaw, breathing him in just as he had her seconds ago. She moved against him, soft and warm and full of her own longing.

“Jesse, Jesse,” he groaned, bending into her in quick hot answer. His hands slipped down to her hips and he moved her against him, glorying in the silky slide of her skirt and slip beneath his hands, her body against his. He moaned at the pleasure blasting through him. She lifted her face to his and he covered her lips in a kiss hot enough to ignite them both.

Jesse too thought she might explode right there in her want for him, the feeling was so intense, so urgent, so lush and strong. If they couldn’t believe what was happening to them, they couldn’t stop either.

Raining kisses like sunlight on her, he muttered in one last moment of sanity. “You don’t understand, Jesse. They’re coming. Right this minute they’re on their way.” Belying his words he dipped down low grabbing up fists full of her skirt and slip peeling them up around her waist, lifting her, pressing her against him in that most delicious way.

“Let them. I hope they do,” she said curling around him, raining kisses of her own on his eyes, his cheeks, his lips. “I hope they come right now while we’re doing it. What a way to go,” she whispered into his neck. She twisted and tightened and whirled down around him like a star being sucked into a black hole. Her head fell back, her hair swung in a black curtain away from her face and her eyes shining at him. “We’ll die together one more time.”

He growled, desire and adrenaline turning his face feral, one big hand twisting in the lacy garment at her hips, shredding it as easily as if it were paper, pushing aside his clothing to gain access to her and she spread apart like honeyed sunlight for him.

They stood utterly still for a moment glorying in the sensation of their joining. Then she groaned, hungrily grinding against him searching for bone against bone, moving in hunt of that perfect pressure.

He walked with her the few steps to their bedroom through the open door to the bed, his hips rocking inside the cradle of hers. He fell with her across the mattress shoving her through piles of unmade bedding, pushing against her as she moved up to meet him, so hot, so hungry, each for the other, they reached that volcanic point of exploding ecstasy in seconds. And time stood still for them. For one long moment they fell into each other and then bloomed out to edges of the universe.

They lay panting. Almost hidden in the bedding they’d burrowed through, she giggled shyly at his attempt to straighten her clothing. She helped him pull down her slip and skirt. He kissed her neck and whispered, “What now, Jesse?”

She tightened her arms around him. “No more running, Gabe. We’re not criminals. We’ve broken no laws. And--.”

He pulled back away, far enough to study her face. “And?”

“Well,” she suggested, her eyes wavering away from his and then back. “I was thinking maybe it would be best for every one concerned if, when they get here, I simply give myself up to them.” Her eyes slid away from his frown and back again. “I could give myself up to them. Then at least you and the children--.”

He stared at her for a long hard moment, his gaze narrowing. “Not a chance!” he growled. “No way!” He rolled away from her and stood up from the bed. He leaned over her. Everything about him was menacing. “I’m going to get us safely out of here and you back to Socorro. Get up out of that bed and get your coat on, Jesse. We’ve got work to do.”

By the time he reached the northeast cliff above Mogollon, Sam was crying hard. Dread and rage kept him going and ahead of Stella. At last, deep in the forest far above Mogollon, he collapsed against the trunk of a ponderosa. He pressed his face against the tree, coughing, sobbing, choking, reveling in the pain of the bark cutting his cheek. He turned and with his back to the tree slid down to the damp earth sobbing his heart out.

Behind him on the path, Stella’s approach ground down to a walk. She reached the tree and slumped to the ground, leaning against it facing him. Breathing hard, she watched him cry, his terrible grief bringing more tears to her eyes.

Slowly his sobs subsided, both of them catching their breaths.

He stared straight ahead. She stared at him.

“What’s happening, Sam? What were Jesse and Gabe talking about? What’s the matter with Jesse?” she asked.

He swiped the sleeve of his coat across his face several times and heaved a long shivering sobbing sigh.

“Come on, Sam, you’ve got to tell me,” she begged.

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” he snuffled.

“Please tell me, Sam. You’ve all kept this whole thing a secret from me. Nobody’s said a word about any of this since we left Corrales. I’m part of the family now too. Jesse said I was her girl. She said it again today with the police officer. You heard her. That makes me part of the family.”

“What family?” he eyed her coldly. “He said she was the best thing that ever happened to him. Not me! There isn’t any family!” he snarled, his voice loaded with the pain he felt.

“Sam….” She put her hand on his arm but stopped mid-sentence to listen to the forest around them. They became utterly still, then turned their heads, listening. There was a sound, a rustle, something moving through scrub oak, dry leaves and crusty snow.

Off to the right less than forty feet from them, five mule deer moved quietly in the direction of Mogollon. The deer stopped for a moment and stared with liquid black eyes at the children, listening to the forest, their long ears twitching back and forth. Then slowly they moved on through the trees.

And for a moment the children remained silent, listening.

Then Stella continued, “Sam, he didn’t mean it. Not that way. Jesse is a good thing for your dad. And for you. And for me. She’s wonderful for all of us. But, between them, the love they have…it’s so important when you find something like that. That’s all your dad was saying. He wasn’t saying you’re not important. He was trying to let Jesse know how he feels about her.”

“Love,” he snarled contemptuously. “Where do you get off talking about love? You’re nothing but a street kid. Your mother was a whore. You don’t know anything about it.”

She hesitated, pursing her lips. “Yes I do, Sam. It doesn’t matter who I am. I loved my mother and she loved me. That’s what counts. Everybody needs love. Sometimes we don’t always know when we have it, but we do know when we don’t have it. I know an awful lot about not having love and that makes me really good at recognizing it.”

He jerked his arm away from her hand. “You are so weird, Stella, sometimes you don’t even talk like--.” He stopped speaking.

They heard another, this time a lighter, fainter rustle. Looking left in the direction of the sound they caught sight of two coyotes about thirty feet from them, trotting west through the underbrush. Again the animals stopped to stare with golden eyes at the children seated on the ground beneath the giant tree. Then the coyotes trotted on, their coats glistening golden and silver before disappearing in the underbrush.

They turned to stare at each other and they couldn’t help it, they grinned. “Wow,” they whispered together.

Instantly though, Stella took advantage of the moment to plead her case again, “Please Sam, tell me what’s going on. What’s wrong with Jesse.”

Sam breathed a long heavy hearted shaky sigh trying to control himself. But there were the tears in his eyes and he started to cry again. Then haltingly, stopping every once in a while to hold back a sobbing breath he told her what happened to Jesse and how she came to live with him and Gabe.

When he finished, her head hung low and forward in her concentration to hear and understand him. She scowled at him as seriously as he’d ever seen her scowl, on her face a look of utter disbelief. Her mouth hung open stupidly before she finally asked, “You mean everybody thinks Jesse’s going to die?”

“That’s what I just said, didn’t I?” he growled furiously between sobs.

At that her eyebrows lifted, her wide mouth spread in a hilarious grin and she burst out laughing. That fast funny infectious laugh. She laughed so hard her laughter filled the forest, peel after peel of it ringing through the trees. She laughed so hard she fell over on her side and lay there like a little fallen Buddha, laughing in the melting snow.

It was the last blow for Sam. He jumped on top of her in a rage. “You think it’s funny?” he screamed, straddling her, pummeling her face. She tried to fight him off but still she could not stop laughing. “You think it’s funny?” he screamed, swinging at her for all he was worth. “She saved your butt and you’re laughing that she’s dying?”

“Sam!” she fought to contain his hands. “Stop it, Sam. She’s not dying. Jesse’s not dying.” She caught his hands and held them. “The only time she was in danger of dying was that moment when she collapsed. And those two boys saved her. Jesse is not sick. She’s not dying.”

Breathing hard he glowered down at her. Breathing hard she smiled up at him. Her lower lip was bleeding and her right eye was swelling and turning blue at the outside edge.

“What the hell do you know about it?” he snapped. He studied the bright red drop of blood on her lower lip.

“I just know,” she said shifting under his weight. Her torso moved beneath his legs. He felt her words vibrate up through him. “Believe me, Sam. Believe me,” she whispered staring up at him with eyes brim full of love.

He wanted to believe her. Oh how he wanted to believe her. And oh how he was drawn to that green eyed stare.

He dipped toward her pausing inches from her face to study her curiously at this close range. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were almost white where they emerged from the soft gold of her skin. Her hair too was a pale creamy color where it sprang from her scalp before curling like dark honey around her face. Her green eyes sparkled expectantly. Her mouth with that bright red drop of blood at the corner was full and soft and rosy looking.

Slowly he dipped lower and . . . Sam and Stella’s lips met in the sweetest softest touch either had ever experienced. He lifted his head and frowned down at her.

They heard a rustling and a panting very close, only feet from where they were on the ground. Turning their heads in the direction of the sound, they froze.

Curving around the tree at a trot a cougar passed barely a foot from them. It stopped in its tracks as startled by them as they were by it. Its eyes too were golden and sparkling deep like the coyotes’. It was panting and its tongue was gloriously pink with prickly white hairs all over it. The edges of its muzzle were dark and its black whiskers sprang from little white dots in the dark muzzle. The children stared at it, dumbfounded to be so close to one of the big cats. Then it was gone with barely another rustle.

He moved, abruptly releasing Stella from his straddle over her. She sat up next to him. They each stared at the other, both of them curious now. Sam licked his lips and tasted Stella’s blood.

Then there was yet another quiet rustle very close to them and they froze again when at least a dozen wild turkeys, the shyest most cautious creatures in the wilderness walked from around both sides of the tree less than two feet from them. The big birds did not pause on their way, they simply walked quietly, steadily over the dappled sunlit forest floor, their feathers flashing subtly with all the colors of the rainbow.

At last Sam jumped to his feet, startling two straggling birds into a short flight to catch up with the others. He lifted his head smelling the air. “Is there a fire?” he asked anxiously. “Do you smell a fire?”

“No.” She stood up beside him, brushing snow and soil from the seat of her pants.

Understanding of his father’s word’s hit Sam like a bolt of lightening exploding inside him. He knew. Without a word he grabbed Stella’s hand and ran. They ran fast and they ran hard. They ran like their lives depended on it. If only they were fast enough he thought desperately. If only he’d been more quick to realize what was happening. He knew that anyone heading for Mogollon from the direction the animals were coming from would have to come all the way around either side of the cliff. They could not come straight down. There might yet be time to escape detection. Safety was only a few yards away. If only they were fast enough.

Before the run and scramble up over the rocks was over, their gasping ragged breaths entered their throats like fire and tasted like blood. With bursting, heaving lungs they careened behind the boulder and fell into the pitch black darkness, collapsing on the dusty floor to lay there coughing and sobbing.

Suddenly one of them whispered, “Shhh!” They held their breaths, then breathed painfully through their noses, listening to the sounds of men’s voices. Fear stopped their hearts and froze the blood in their arteries. They scrambled through the dust to far corner of the cave hoping to escape detection should anyone decide to search the cliff side. They huddled together, shivering and listening to the men talk, the click and hiss of their radios passing close below the cliffs. They listened in terror for the sounds of approaching footsteps, the passing minutes seeming like hours to them. Long after the men’s voices and footsteps were gone they continued to shiver in the darkness and listen.

At last they rose from the dust and moved cautiously to the mouth of the cave. They stepped outside but remained in the shadow behind the boulder and listened again. Sam peeked around the boulder and quickly he pulled his head back. “I can see them down in the trees moving away from us,” he told her with wide frightened eyes.

“Here!” She fished Gabe’s binoculars from her coat pocket.

Grabbing the binoculars Sam poked his head around again. Lifting the binoculars to his eyes he scanned the mountain below them all the way to the horizon. After a long moment he pulled back into the shadow of the boulder and grimly handed the binoculars to her.

Stella leaned around the rock and peered through the instrument and her heart sank with dread. One by one she watched the moving backs of soldiers disappear as they descended the mountainside, dropping by the hundreds down into Mogollon. When the last of them was gone she scanned the land searching for any who might remain above Mogollon to look for them. She held her breath again. A quarter of the way between the cave and the trees above Mogollon she thought she saw a movement, a flash of color. Sam reached impatiently for the glasses but she pulled away from him, suddenly desperate to relocate what she thought she saw.

The glasses careened over the land. There! There was the little patch of turquoise. She focused the instrument and watched Dr. Rorty step out from behind the very ponderosa they sat under minutes ago. The white haired man looked up at her as though he could see her staring down at him, though she knew from the little bit of her that was poking around the boulder that was impossible. Yet she could see him as clearly as if they were looking at each other from a distance of less than three feet and he was staring right at her! He lifted his hand in a sign of greeting. Her hair stood on end. Breathing hard, sweat popping out all over her suddenly graying skin, she shrank back into the shadows.

“What? What?” he demanded, alarmed by her sudden pallor, when, pop! op! The distant sound of gunfire or small explosions rang through the mountains.

They stared at each other, their stomachs sinking, the earth opening black at their feet.

“I’m going back down there to be with Dad and Jesse,” he announced hoarsely, his fear of being separated from Gabe and Jesse now far greater than his fear of anything else.

She blocked his way past the boulder. “No, Sam! Gabe and Jesse would have honked the horn if they wanted us to come back. There was plenty of time for them to let us know they wanted us to come back. It’s too dangerous. We’re safe here. If those men catch us, they can use us to control--.”

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! Five enormous echoing explosions reached them from the direction of Mogollon. Without a word Sam brushed past Stella nearly knocking her down. She turned and followed him, the two of them scrambling helter-skelter down the cliff.

They stumbled through the trees their chests heaving, their legs pumping wearily, their feet pounding heavily over the earth one more time. Once again she was far behind and this time it was she who was crying. “Sam!” she called out, his name escaping her in tight jagged sobs. She screamed again as she ran. “Sam!”

He stopped. She stopped. He turned to face her where she stood in the trees far behind him. “What?” he called angrily.

“I left the binoculars at the cave,” she shouted. “I have to go back and get them. Wait for me.”

“Forget it!” he yelled back enraged by her trivial concern. He turned and ran on without her.

“Sam! Wait! Wait for me!” Catching her breath and crying hard now, she watched him disappear through the trees. Then she became quiet. She waited in the great silence beneath the trees she loved so well, listening for a long while for the sounds of Sam’s returning footsteps.

“He won’t be back,” a voice spoke from behind her.

Chapter Twenty One

Dozens of screaming helicopters converged low in the sky over the Gila to drop soldiers by the hundreds out onto the desert plains and mountains in a ten mile slow shrinking bull’s eye, with Mogollon as dead center. A ten mile walking ring of men, coiling like a constrictor around its prey, seventeen hundred heavily armed men in camouflage walking in close formation, so close that no soldier was ever more than a hundred feet from the next. Closing in around Mogollon, they separated like rivers of ants to stream down around the faces of sheer cliffs and come together again in ever tighter coils. They walked in silence except for the steady slither and crunch of their boots and the mumble and hiss of their radio communications.

Suddenly though, at the north end of Mogollon, there was a disturbance in the orderly progression of men and vehicles. Harve Lamance, caught in their net marched with the rest toward the center of Mogollon. Raging and unafraid, Lamance ranted and raved over what was happening to him. Soldiers shoved and kicked and even struck him with the butts of their guns and still Lamance refused to cease fighting.

Line by line the men divided at either end of town to let Humvees and hospital isolation units rumble through their ranks. The vehicles passed Lamance and he shouted his rage at them.

“You got no right!” he screamed managing to break from his jailers and jump in front of the first vehicle. It skidded to a halt, Lamance beating his fists on the hood and kicking at the front of the vehicle. “You sonovabitches got no right! I done nothin wrong!” He scrambled up on the Humvee’s hood and beat on the windshield screaming and frothing in his rage. “I done nothin, I tell you! I ain’t done nothin!”

Inside the Humvee Regional FBI Director, Raymond Burke instinctively shrank back from this apparition of madness and pulled out his gun. Four soldiers grabbed Lamance and peeled him spitting and screaming off the windshield. Agent Burke leaned out of the Humvee.

“He claims he’s a trapper, sir,” a soldier explained. “He lives in the cabin a little under two miles back up the road. You just passed it, sir.” Director Burke settled back in his seat, placed his gun back in his holster and signaled the driver to move ahead.

Lamance screamed on, “I done nothin wrong! I got every right to be here! That’s my place up there. I got my permits right here.”

The Humvees reached the buildings at either end of town and slowed to a crawl. Men on foot caught up with the vehicles and a few of the soldiers broke into the first buildings they encountered, beginning the process of searching each and every structure in Mogollon inch by inch. Foot by foot, step by step, circles of men contracted around the cabin, the only place in town where a fire burned in the stove and a thin line of smoke curled up from the chimney.

Two small explosions at either end of town happened almost simultaneously, the sound of one bleeding into the sound of the other. Both explosions were followed instantly by the wailing of injured men calling for medics and Harve Lamance’s renewed barrage of rage.

“Halt! All units, stop where you are!” Officers in vehicles and on foot barked orders into their radios.

Vehicles stopped, soldiers on foot stopped. Medics rushed in the directions of the shouting. Five mule deer burst from their hiding place in the brush behind the red cabin and ran a few yards down the road before veering off into the brush on the other side of the road. Officers, soldiers and FBI agents talked back and forth on their radios. Soldiers rushed to the Humvees nearest them to give a first hand report on the explosions and the injuries.

At the south edge of town Assistant Chief of Air Staff-2 Major General Percy Maxwell rolled down the window of his Humvee. “The building appears to have been booby trapped, sir. When private Wilson opened the back door of the building, the knob and part of the door blew off in his hand, burning him, sir . . .”

As the men in the vehicles on either end of town listened to identical explanations, a third and fourth soldier ran up to each of the two vehicles with another development. “Captain Hirsch sent me, sir, . . .” the soldier at the south end of town began.

“Captain Roberts wants me to tell you,” the soldier at the north end of town began, “Dr. Wren is out on the front porch of a cabin in the middle of the town. She’s sitting there . . . like she’s waiting for us. It looks like they’ve been digging all around the cabin, sir,” both soldiers reported.

Less than a second after the two soldiers finished speaking, five enormous explosions blasted through Mogollon with the force of a small atomic bomb and to a man, officers, FBI agents and soldiers ducked where they sat or fell to the ground where they stood. They crouched in their vehicles and hugged the ground while rocks large and small, sand, dirt, branches and mud rained down from the sky in torrents.

In the moment of silence following the explosions, Lamance could be heard increasing the volume and rancor of his rage, and somewhere in the middle of Mogollon a very large dog began to bark.

Officers at either end of town remained low waiting for sounds or reports of injuries. When all remained silent except for Lamance’s angry shouts and the dog’s barking, they communicated on their radios from the floors of their vehicles. Some of the soldiers stood and at the same moment Major General Percy Maxwell was heard to shout into his radio, “You mean to tell me no one thought to bring a mine detector? All these personnel? All this equipment and we don’t have a goddamned fucking simple mine detector?”

The dog barked, Lamance yelled and word went out among the soldiers to remain where they were. They were not to continue to search the buildings. The first line of soldiers only was to proceed slowly toward the center of town. They were to stop a hundred yards from the cabin where Dr. Wren sat and all were to be cautious about where they stepped and what they touched. Gabriel Hunter had mined the place. General Percy Maxwell at the south end and Raymond Burke at the north end of town signaled soldiers and drivers to proceed. The vehicles inched forward on the road and the ring of soldiers constricted inward. The dog in the center of town stopped barking.

Jesse knew the moment the soldiers finally spotted her. In the confusion following the first two explosions they’d run like ghosts among the buildings at the far edge of town on either side of her, some of them catching a glimpse of her. Then, even though she knew what was coming, she shuddered in her chair when five big explosions ripped through the air and mud and stones hailed down on the cabin. Now she could hear the vehicles approaching, the voices of the men, their footsteps drawing near. Though sweat ran in rivulets down her sides, she shivered and pulled her coat around her, sucking in her breath at the sudden pain in her blistered, bleeding palms.

She licked her lips nervously and reached out to touch one of the stones resting on top of the railing at the edge of the porch. A straggly line of ordinary stones, they were small comfort, but they were all she had. Her target, one of several humps of dirt barely distinguishable from all the rest, lay off to the south of her less than twenty feet away. She had to be accurate enough to fool them. She had several rocks. That was the trick, Gabe said. Throw all of the stones all at once, he’d said. He’d be watching and he’d be ready.

At last the two Humvees crawled to a halt on either side of her. Officers and FBI agents stepped down out of their vehicles and accompanied by a few soldiers on foot they continued to approach her, stopping fifteen feet from the broad circle of disturbed soil and snow she had minutes ago frantically scratched around the cabin. Though the sweat ran in rivers now down her sides, she remained sitting in her chair on the front porch of the cabin, looking as serene as royalty while officers and agents drew near.

Backed by half a dozen foot soldiers, they faced her. Beyond them a line of soldiers stretched out to form a ring around the cabin. She breathed deeply through her nose, but behind her closed lips, her teeth chattered uncontrollably.

Raymond Burke stepped forward.

Adrenaline, terror and nausea rushed through her at what she knew was about to come. Gabe had said, give them every opportunity to behave within the law, but even more important had been his three little words, stall, stall, stall. She lifted a hand palm up warning Burke not to come any closer.

He stopped instantly. “Dr. Wren?” he asked in a tone that suggested he didn’t expect a human response from her.

She almost laughed. She couldn’t help it. His tone and obvious fear of her were too absurd. How could she fear these idiots? She smiled humorlessly and said, “You should have called. I would have fixed tea. Or do you prefer coffee?”

Burke persisted, “Dr. Wren, we’re here to request that you and Mr. Gabriel Hunter and the boy, Sam Hunter, surrender yourselves into the custody of the United States Government. Where are Mr. Hunter and the boy?”

Regally Jesse stood, one bright note singing in her heart. The man’s question about Sam meant that the children had escaped detection. She raked her gaze along the line of men in front of her. “They are inside the cabin. Am I under arrest?”

“No. You are not under arrest. We want to question you concerning the circumstances of your illness last December.”

She placed her hands on the railing next to her line of stones and leaned toward them. Officers and agents shifted.

“Gentlemen.” The word dripped with sarcasm. “I will not surrender myself to you or anyone else. I have committed no crime. Nor have Mr. Hunter or his son committed any crimes. We will not be treated like criminals. I intend to return to Socorro to resume my teaching duties in September. Before then I will submit to an examination by a physician of my choice. In May. You will have to be satisfied with that. And I must warn you that I have informed my lawyer, Sharon Carnes in Albuquerque, of your presence here.”

General Maxwell stepped forward and spoke to Burke in a low voice. “Let’s wrap this thing up.” He signaled a soldier standing near him and before Jesse could lift a hand the soldier preempted her next move.

Bending to the ground he picked up several large stones.

Waves of fear swept over Jesse. The only thing keeping the soldiers away from her right now was their conviction that Gabe had laid explosives around the cabin. He said they would have doubts and it was up to her to lay those doubts to rest. Now if she made a move to throw a stone herself they would know!

The soldier lobbed the stones toward the cabin. She backed away from the railing watching them arc through the air. Miracle of miracles! They were going to land approximately where they should. Gabe, please be watching, please be ready! Her arms flew up, she dropped to a crouch against the cabin wall and covered her head with her coat. At the quickness of her move, the men around the cabin fell to the earth.

Jesse had never been so close to several sticks of dynamite going off. It dazed her. The explosion deafened her. It blew her clothing tight against her. The porch floor beneath her rose and fell like an ocean wave and the cabin wall shuddered against her shoulder. The glass above her rattled so she feared the window would shatter all over her. A hail of rocks and debris fell around her on the porch, and on the men lying on the ground.

The instant the dynamite blew and the men around him dropped to the earth, Lamance leapt from his captors and headed at a dead run for the center of town. Jesse stood and moved quickly back to the railing. Some of the men were already standing up.

Suddenly General Maxwell was yelling furiously into his radio, “You tell them to get the hell out of here! This is a military operation! Get me a direct line to…. I don’t care who--.”

He ranted into his radio, his words, now an angry buzz, lost in the ever louder whirring of a helicopter clearing the ridge north of Mogollon. It hugged the trees, passing slowly overhead, pausing to hover directly above the cabin.

Jesse watched the trees sway around the cabins across the road and waited for the sounds of men’s feet hitting the roof above her as they dropped down out of the ‘copter. The men in the road ducked, their clothing whipping against them. Only General Maxwell stood tall. He waved his arms and screamed into his radio and Jesse thought she heard the words, “ . . . shoot the bastards down,” but she couldn’t be certain, and suddenly Maxwell and Burke were fighting over possession of the General’s radio.

Lamance burst into view running in the direction of the cabin. A soldier lifted his weapon to his shoulder and aimed, the gun cracked and Lamance crumpled. He writhed in the road holding his gut with both hands, gouts of blood gushing between his fingers. He rocked on the ground screaming, “You shot me! You sonovabitches! You shot me and I done nothing--.”

Bending to lift him, soldiers draped his arms over their shoulders and dragged him up the road, while Maxwell and Burke fought over the General’s radio, both of them yelling to be heard over the sound of the helicopter and each other. The helicopter floated north above Mogollon following the two soldiers and Lamance. “ . . . destroy a civi . . .” The argument between Maxwell and Burke wound down to an inaudible bristling exchange.

Jesse barely caught the General’s next enraged growl, “ . . .suggest we pull back and neutralize the whole area . . .” and she prayed now that Sam and Stella would stay far up on the mountaintop, safe in their little hideaway and for the second time that day she considered giving herself up.

Perhaps it wasn’t too late.

Abruptly a crashing, thrashing sound came from close behind her and for one heart stopping second she was certain that the soldiers had dropped out of the helicopter into the brush and simply walked over the line of dirt, and were now approaching the cabin from the rear.

Instead nine terrified mule deer burst from the trees making such a clatter that many of the soldiers lifted their rifles to their shoulders. In the same moment, down the road from the north, more than a dozen wild turkeys came running and flapping, heading in the same direction as the deer. The turkeys caught sight of the men in the road and taking flight they zoomed over ducking officers and agents. They fluttered to the ground directly in the midst of the panic stricken deer and turkeys and deer exploded outward scattering wildly back into the brush on either side of the road. One lone turkey landed on top of one of the Humvees. Nervous and undecided, it paced unhappily there. Two coyotes slunk out from behind a cabin and slithered under the farthest Humvee to shiver in terror in the darkness behind the wheels.

Major General Percy Pusgut Maxwell had had enough. Mottled with rage, his heavy jowls shook and that part of his anatomy responsible for his nickname trembled like a discarded bladder on a slaughterhouse floor. That he should fly all the way from Washington to this backwoods nowhere place on a silent mission, only to wait for a woman who might not be human to come down from a porch less than fifty feet away? He would put an end to this farce! She…it! would come down from there or be blown up. The doctors could sift through the rubble for its remains for all he cared.

He turned and barked and the half dozen soldiers standing in the middle of the road with the officers lifted their weapons including one shoulder rocket launcher and a flame thrower and pointed them directly at Jesse. She fully expected to be incinerated in the next moment. She knew Gabe was about to make his move. A dreary image of him sitting alone behind bars on a bare concrete bedstead staring at four concrete walls for the rest of his life flitted through her mind. Let it be over quickly she thought hopelessly.

Suddenly they heard the whirring of the helicopter returning. The general’s mouth was still open. The turkey lifted off from the top of the Humvee with a terrified cluck and a clumsy flutter of wings to disappear in the scrub.

The helicopter flew in slowly and down the road ahead of it loped a full grown mountain lion. Behind the lion a half a dozen terrified deer trotted. Instead of slowing when they saw the men in the middle of the road, this time the animals speeded up to a flat out run. The cat scrambled and the deer bounded past dodging men, the animals racing now for their lives. The lion skidded to a halt less than four yards from the line of soldiers blocking its escape at the south. The deer piled up behind the cat and milled nervously back and forth. The cougar crouched, screamed, lashed its tail and lowered its head even further, hissing and growling and beating its front feet at the men standing between it and freedom. It screamed again and charged the men. The soldiers waved back a step and aimed their weapons at the cat.

“No!” Jesse screamed. The soldiers hesitated and the big cat charged again, this time knocking over two soldiers as it broke through. Right on the heels of the escaping lion the two terror stricken coyotes leapt out from under the Humvee and zigzagged through a moving forest of deer legs to charge and nip at the men while the helicopter roared down out of the sky above them.

No final order had been given. The men standing in the road under the helicopter lowered their weapons and officers, soldiers and agents scattered. Running out from under the helicopter Ray Burke grabbed the radio from the officer standing nearest him and began screaming into it. All around the cabin and Mogollon, soldiers at last broke from their tight circles to let the terrified animals go. Deer bounded free by the dozens and hundreds of smaller animals scuttled through the underbrush past the soldiers’ feet to escape from the din of the descending helicopter.

General Maxwell refused to budge. He glared defiantly up at the plunging ‘copter while a single aide remained uncertainly by his side. Still the aircraft descended. The two men were about to be crushed. Jesse bit back a scream.

The aide panicked, turned and bolted directly into the general, both men crashing to the earth just beyond the runners touching down. Rising quickly and stooping under the spinning props the young officer hauled the General up out of the mud and slush attempting after an apologetic salute to brush the muck from his uniform. Furiously Maxwell pushed him aside, the two of them blending now with the others milling around the landed craft.

It was Jesse’s first full view of the ‘copter. She had assumed it was a military helicopter. But here was no dull green aircraft full of more soldiers. It was a small white craft with the logo ACTION SEVEN NEWS painted in red on its side. The prop spun around on its last turn, and for the first time in what seemed like hours to Jesse, though it had been only minutes, silence descended on the mountains and forests around her.

Some of the soldiers spoke out loud in shock then, when the first passenger emerged. Narrator of countless PBS programs on astronomy and often the interpreter of scientific discoveries for the national news, there was not a person there who didn’t know Dr. Eric Johannson.

When the second passenger stepped down holding a news camera in his hand, the soldiers responded, some moving back, many half raising their weapons. A few soldiers actually trained their weapons on the cameraman and a common groan went up among the officers and FBI agents. Unperturbed the cameraman turned in a circle spanning the entire scene, taking in everything with his camera; the vehicles, the soldiers and their weapons, FBI agents, officers, doctors, and finally Jesse standing small and alone on a cabin porch.

“Put those damn rifles down, you fools!” Maxwell barked.

The soldiers lowered their weapons and the third passenger hopped down out of the ‘copter. An astonished mumble passed through the men. ABC news anchor, Peter Jenson stood in the exact center of Mogollon.

He smiled at the men and joked in that famous voice, ever and always the epitome of intelligence and elegant courtesy, “By all means, men, don’t shoot. Percy, Agent Burke.” Peter held out his hand to Major General Percy Maxwell and Raymond Burke and the General and Director Burke clearly had to respond. He shook their hands warmly and asked, “What’s going on here? You boys rounded up a lot of animals. You working for the Forest Service now? I didn’t know national forests were designated sights for training missions. Too bad about that civilian your man gunned down a minute ago.”

“Dr. Johannson!” Jesse found her voice at last.

The old scientist held out his arms and stepped up onto the porch. “Jesse, my dear young woman. We were planning to arrive tomorrow morning in Peter’s mobile camper but then Max received Mr. Hunter’s e-mail this morning and I read my mail and we decided to hurry things up a bit. We do hope this isn’t an inconvenient visit.”

He hugged Jesse and she shuddered at last, nearly bursting into hysterical laughter.

“The poor girl is freezing standing out here in the cold like this,” the old man scolded.

But the officers and agents weren’t listening. They were riveted to their spots in the road by what Peter Jenson was saying and doing under the watchful lens of his man’s TV camera.

“Agent Turney, so good to meet you after seeing you on Mr. Hunter’s tape like that. Glad to see you up and about and fully dressed.” He was at that very moment holding a very surprised Special Agent McArthur Turney by the hand, vigorously pumping Turney’s arm up and down. At the newsman’s words Turney’s face flamed a dull red.

But Peter was already moving on to another quarry. With his cameraman following his every move, he turned and grabbed Special Agent Foster by the hand and happily congratulated him.

“Albert, Albert,” Peter told the astonished agent who had never before set eyes on the newsman except to watch him on television, “It’s good to see how well you’ve recovered from your injury. Your ear looks wonderful. Just a little scab there. It was a bloody mess on the tape Mr. Hunter made. What an unfortunate accident. Too bad about Mr. Hunter being so nervous around guns. But there you have it, some people simply can’t abide guns and violence. Have you a good image of Albert’s ear, Bob?” Peter asked his cameraman who was at the moment holding his camera inches from Foster’s head, focusing on his now scarlet ear.

“That reminds me!” Dr. Johannson spoke loudly, garnering everyone’s attention. “Where is Mr. Hunter? I want to congratulate him on the work he’s doing for you, Jesse. And on the proof he sent to us for Fermat’s Last Theorem. We typed it up and sent it on to the American Journal of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins. They accepted it. They’re going to publish it along with the work of that other fellow. I really want to meet this young man. Where is he?”

All eyes turned to Jesse. She sighed. What else could she do but answer the doctor? With downcast eyes, she spoke so soft and low he had to bend close to hear what she was saying. Out in the street soldiers and agents leaned forward trying to catch her words.

Dr. Johannson’s head came up with a snap, his face split ear to ear by an enormous grin, and they all jerked back. He strode down off the porch, the cameraman recording his every move.

“General Maxwell. Director Burke,” Dr. Johannson greeted the Director and the General, offering each a respectful handshake and a large yellow envelope extracted from the inside pocket of his jacket. “Here are copies of the material I received in the mail this morning. Excellent reading. One wonders what the Justice Department will make of it.”

Agent Burke pulled the contents from his envelope with Maxwell looking on. Grim astonishment settled over the two men’s faces. Burke flipped through the pages, revealing the complete FBI file and all of the memos and orders concerning Jesse, Gabe and Sam.

Then with that enormous grin once again plastered across his face, Dr. Johannson turned to the young aide standing next to General Maxwell, the very one who knocked the General out from under the helicopter. He draped his arm around Gabe’s shoulders and threw his head back and laughed out loud. He reached over with his free hand, pulled the 45 from the Gabe’s belt and held the gun out handle first to General Maxwell. “Your pistol, General. You must have dropped it in all the excitement.”

The general stared at Gabe standing next to him, shoulder to shoulder with him, dressed in Richard Bloom’s camouflage fatigues. Gabe smiled and shrugged innocently at the General and one of Ricky Bloom’s medals from Vietnam glinted in the sunlight on Gabe’s breast.

The general’s face swelled like a rotten melon. He whipped around to stare at Raymond Burke who turned to stare at Special Agents Mac Turney and Albert Foster who knew without a doubt that their investigating days were over.

Dr. Johannson laughed again. With his arm draped over Gabe’s shoulder, Dr. Johannson, Gabe, Peter Jenson, his cameraman and the helicopter pilot all passed back through the soldiers.

At the bottom of the porch steps, reaching into his coat pocket again, Dr. Johannson retrieved two more envelopes and handed them to Gabe and Jesse, saying, “You both should have a copy of these, since they’re all about you.” He turned to face the men in the road. “Don’t worry gentlemen, Mr. Jenson already has his copy,” he winked at Maxwell and Burke.

He paused to address the soldiers and agents standing close around the cabin. “You see, General Maxwell. Director Burke. Gentlemen. We simply wanted to tape some of Mogollon and the people living around here. You know the kind of thing ABC might use in their next Searching For America segment. We had no idea you people were down here conducting some sort of training exercise. We stumbled on it . . . accidentally.”

He frowned slightly, “Or is something really happening here? Because if there is something interesting happening here, then Peter and incidentally all of the ABC stations he is affiliated with all over America and the rest of the world are prepared to begin broadcasting live from Mogollon at this very moment. And to add to this live broadcast, we have a certain tape of FBI Special Agents Turney and Foster attempting to seize Dr. Wren at the government’s behest, as well as the information we received this morning regarding the continued and I must add criminal investigation and pursuit of Dr. Wren and Mr. Hunter and Mr. Hunter’s eleven year old son, Sam. All of which makes you people look like little more than ignorant fools and thugs. This would all make such interesting viewing, don’t you think?”

He smiled sweetly. “You see? We are faced here with something like one of the great classical questions in physics. Is light a wave or is it a particle? Are you people criminals or are you public servants whose wages are paid by taxpayers? Are you thugs or are you guardians of our Constitutionally guaranteed freedom? It all depends on what we’re looking for and how we look. Which are you? It’s up to you.”

He finished up with one last remark. “I do think you people could have avoided this entire incident if there had been one top person among you who has the slightest inkling of basic logic and what it means to have real empirical evidence concerning an event. There is absolutely no logical or scientific connection between any of the incidents you people seem to regard as evidence of alien influence or invasion and Dr. Wren’s sudden illness last December. And you could have avoided all this expense and embarrassment if there was one of you who has taken a beginning course in physics or astronomy and who has even the most rudimentary understanding of the distances between stars. According to our current understanding of the situation, any real physical contact between creatures living in separate star systems is highly unlikely. It borders in fact on the physically impossible.”

When this final remark was greeted by another long moment of silence, Dr. Johannson turned his back on the men in the road and under the watchful eye of the camera he and Gabe and Peter Jennings climbed the porch steps together.

“Dad! Dad!”

The camera swerved to catch Sam running down the street followed by a single officer trotting after him. Sam catapulted up the porch steps into his father’s arms, everyone speaking at once. Sam! Are you all right? Dad! Jesse! Are you all right?

Gabe held Sam, grabbed his face, explored his arms, his back and then pulled him back into his arms again. “Are you all right?”

“I’m Ok! They didn’t do anything.”

Gabe buried his face in Sam’s hair, “Is Stella all right? Where is she?” he whispered, facing the officer who had followed Sam. The young officer avoided Gabe’s hard stare and Gabe held his own expression carefully blank. Gabe knew the man! He had tutored him in freshman calculus at Tech. They had played rugby together. The young officer had kicked the ball around with Sam when he was a toddler.

After a salute to the General, the officer turned and walked back up the road to his unit.

Sam hugged his father back and whispered, “Stella’s Ok. She was afraid to come down.”

“It’s nothing! It means nothing! That jump in incoming radiation!” Jesse’s anger started out as a small rumble. There was nothing challenging or difficult about the FBI file, the memos and orders spread out on the railing in front of her. They weren’t astrophysics. It took her seconds to see and understand all there was to see and understand.

She spoke, first to Dr. Johannson, then to everyone there, “I saw that the first day I brought my discs and hard copy home. I paid no attention to it. It’ll be off the tapes when the computer gets done cleaning all my information up. Completely gone. It’s an anomaly. I’ve seen things like it hundreds of times. So have you, Dr. Johannson. We all have. It’s meaningless! And they think there’s some connection between incoming radiation and earthquakes? Insane! It’s insane! This is what they’re pursuing me, us about?”

Tears of rage sparkled in her eyes. She looked at them arrayed against her on the other side of the porch rail. “And there is absolutely no connection between Gabe and Sam and me and the disappearance of this Ruth Stephens, this technician at Sandia. None. We were down here when that happened. What do we have to do with her? Nothing! Those two FBI agents were there when it happened. They’re the ones who should be under suspicion. Not us! You people are crazy!” She turned to Dr. Johannson and Peter Jenson. “They’re crazy!” She faced them in the street again. “After this, what can I ever do to persuade you to leave me alone? Us alone? What would convince you? If this is all you need to come after us like this? You want tests?” she growled. “Do them! Do them, I say! Right now!”

Jesse, you don’t have to . . . Dr. Wren, they have no right to ask you to . . . both Dr. Johannson and Peter Jenson spoke at once.

She cut them short, reaching over to touching Dr. Johannson’s hand, her eyes full of her next request. “Dr. Johannson, I don’t care what the results are. If that’s what those hospital isolation trucks are all about, I want it over with and I want these people out of here! What if they lie and say they’ve found something that suits their notion of what they think has happened to me? To us? My tests could be the same as they were at UNMH. What if they decide that alone is enough to justify their actions? They can do whatever they want with us.

“After what happened here today I know they wouldn’t hesitate. Please, Dr. Johannson, while you and Mr. Jenson are here to protect us, I want to do it. I know there’s nothing wrong with Gabe and Sam. This report, this top secret operation, whatever it is, is crazy. It’s insane. They’re insane. We can ask for copies of the results of every test they run on us. Or we won’t do the tests.

“In fact I insist they do the tests here and now or, Mr. Jenson, you have my permission to start broadcasting this minute. Because whatever is wrong with me, if you are here, if you are with us while they perform their tests, they can’t lie about what they find. And what happens to us afterwards will be a matter of public record. They can have all the blood and specimens and x-rays, Catscans, EEGs and MRIs they want. As long as they leave us alone afterwards. Gabe and Sam can do what they want, but I want this thing done. I can’t live with another day like this hanging over my head!”

She flew off the porch, moving so fast the cameraman had to run to keep up with her. She shot across the line she had raked around the cabin. Like a fury from hell she swooped down on the General and Agent Burke actually backing the two men down. “You brought those hospital trucks here so you could isolate us and start right in with your tests, right?” she shouted. “Here I am! Do them! Do your tests and then leave, damn you!”

High above, on the mountainside, Stella Jones was about to utter a few choice and very similarly hostile words. Stella turned to face Dr. Homer Rorty at last. She wondered whether this creature, this three thousand year old being standing less than two yards from her could still be considered human in any way. She knew she should be afraid. But she wasn’t. At that moment Stella had only one emotion in her young breast.

Seventy years is time enough to think about an event, to remember it, to analyze every detail second by second and come to an understanding of it. Seventy years is a long time to wait to meet someone. Stella had waited a lifetime for this moment. She was ready and they were alone. She could do what she had waited so long to do.

She walked straight up to Dr. Rorty, hauled back with her right hand and struck him with all the might she possessed, which was considerable. She might as well have struck a stone for all the response she got. But with that first blow it was like Stella punched a hole in a dam inside her, releasing seventy years of pent up rage.

“I remember you! You were there when it happened. You were there when it bonded to me instead of the idiot like it was supposed to. You did it. You caused it. This is all your fault! Because of me, because of that capsule I buried, a woman is dead. I may have to live with that, but so do you. And because of me those wonderful people down there are fighting for their lives with their own government!” she screamed.

Sobbing and crying in her rage she threw herself at him, her fists and feet flying at him as though with her blows she could annihilate him, as though she could pound him to dust right there on the forest floor above Mogollon. Unflinching and unaffected he endured her blows while she poured out her rage until finally wilted and exhausted, unable to lift a hand against him even one more time, she simply sobbed in front of him, her eyes spitting hatred at him from a bottomless well of rage inside her.

“J’nor, J’nor,” he said sadly at last reaching out with his hand to touch hers. “You behave like a child.”

She spun away from him and screamed. “Don’t call me that! I will never be called by that name again. I’m Stella. Stella Jones!” She began to cry harder. “I am a child! Don’t you see? I am a child. I’m twelve years old. It’s taken me more than seventy years to grow from six to twelve. My emotions are the emotions of a twelve year old. My body is the body of a twelve year old. I lived on that goddamned prison of a ship while the earth passed around the sun more than seventy times, never growing up, never really living. I was simply a tool for the empire. I never had a companion who wasn’t paid to be with me and who didn’t look on it as a burden, who didn’t look on it as virtually a prison sentence to be in exile on that ship with me. Do you see what you did to me? I’m a monster! I’m twelve years old and I’ve never gotten to be twelve until now. Or seven. Or eight or ten. Why? Why did you do it to me? I don’t even know what to call you. You’re not my father. My father is long dead. You’re my what? My ancestor. Well, screw you! Whatever it is you want from me, I haven’t got it. You were an adult when it happened to you. You and the other one. You’d already had wives and families. You came back to Llyssa and married again and had another family . . .”

She stopped and stared. Then she whispered, “You’re lonely. That’s why you did it. All the people you love get old and die.”

Many times she had considered the possibility that this man, this ancestor of hers had done this to her for the simple reason that he desired a companion who would be like him. Many millions of times she had posited this as the reason in her mind. That he was as lonely as she was, and then she had dismissed the idea as being too simple, too . . . human. But now looking at him she was certain of it. “Why don’t you go bother the other bondee who isn’t an idiot. Where the hell is he? Why aren’t you with him? He’s like you.”

“K’ran is dead, Stella. The 4th QoG is dead. He didn’t live more than a month after he left Llyssa. He was young and overly bold. The death of the 3rd QoG was not warning enough for him. He mistook our longevity for immortality. There was no caution in him. No fear. And, yes, Stella, I’m lonely,” he admitted. “But . . .”

“Too bad!” she interrupted with a slash of her hand, too angry, too full of hate to listen. “I don’t want you!”

Then, despite her seventy-six long years, despite her incredible education, her many languages and degrees Stella spoke like the twelve year old she was. She spoke with a bald and utter sincerity, she spoke passionately, wildly of the things that had been in her heart for so long. She held nothing back. “I have the people I want. If they’ll have me. They took me in and treated me like theirs when I was a stranger to them. They treat me better than I have been treated in seventy years. By my own people. This is my home now. My planet. I listened to it. I watched it like a treasure from three million miles away for almost three quarters of a century and I’m not giving it up. You cannot take me away from here. Not you. Not the entire Empire. I will die before I will leave this place. Before I will go back to being merely a transmitter for the Empire. I cast my lot with these people who took me in and loved me. Me, a total stranger.

“I pledge myself to this planet and its fate. Whatever happens here, it is my fate too. This is my home now. I’m going to grow up here. At last I’m going to be an adult. I’m going to be a part of this place. I’m going to live and love and die right here on this beautiful Earth. I’m twelve years old at last! With them I’m twelve years old and nothing more. With Sam, I’m a twelve year old girl. Do you have any idea how wonderful that is? Look! Look!” She pointed to her lip and eye. “We had a fight! Do you know how wonderful it was? How much fun it was?

“Do you have any idea how wonderful this place is? How beautiful it is? How wonderful it is to get up in the morning and see the sun pouring into your bedroom through a thin moveable pane of glass? Instead of looking always and forever at the moldy insides of a machine whose walls must be thick enough to protect you from being incinerated by radiation? Do you have any idea how wonderful it is to hold a stone in your hand? To drink water from a stream? To breath fresh air? To stand outside under the night sky and see the entire dome of the sky above you filled with stars? Instead of looking at it on a tiny screen? To actually see and feel the movement of this beautiful planet with the turning of the stars? The rising and setting of the sun? The moon? To watch snow fall? To eat snow? To watch a fire? To hear and smell a fire? To warm cold hands at a fire? To build a fire? To hear the wind in the trees? Do you have any idea how wonderful it is to climb mountains? Or look into the golden eyes of a red tailed hawk? Or the brown eyes of a dog? Or see a half a dozen deer walk by only a few feet away from you? Or fix breakfast, or bake a cake, or pop popcorn? Or build something? I helped build a hot tub. Me! My hands helped build it. We filled it with water and started a fire under it and heated the water. And then right out under the stars we got in. And I helped build it! Do you have any idea how wonderful it is to build something?

“I don’t want you. I hate you. I hate you for doing this to me. I will always hate you. I didn’t want this. I don’t want it now.” With her hand out and her eyes blazing she approached the man and shoved up her coat sleeve. “Here, you can have it. Take it. Can you take it from me? Take it!” and the silver bracelet Stella had worn every day, every minute, every second since that first magic afternoon in the attic of the old Mogollon hotel, suddenly came alive, sparkling and shimmering on her wrist like water. Then like a little snake of diamonds it flowed from her wrist and coalesced above her hand to float there like a pretty bauble.

Sadly he shook his head. “No, Stella, I can’t take it. You know I can’t.”

Without a sound the QoG slipped back around her wrist.

Dr. Rorty looked at the bracelet with an expression of bemusement. “You wear it?” It had been over a thousand years since Captain S’Phan Khan and his QoG had been separated in the way that Stella was now separated from hers. He doubted very much if he could call his up, separate it from the individual atoms in his body like that.

“I wear it!” she declared staunchly. “We’ve come to an agreement, the QoG and I. My wrist is where it stays for now. Until I grow up. Maybe always, I don’t know. It’s a truce I can live with.”

She stepped back preparing to leave. She’d said the things that were in her heart and though she had spoken brave words, now she was afraid. She knew this man was capable of moving her instantly to almost anywhere in the galaxy. Even more, Stella was deeply worried about what was happening to Sam and Jesse and Gabe. She wanted to be with them. She didn’t want them to be taken away without her. And if worse came to worse she was fully prepared to sacrifice herself for them. Whatever her concerns were for the changes a revelation of her presence would bring to the Earth, they were nothing compared to her need, her love for Jesse, Gabe and Sam.

The slender white haired man held out his hand to her in a gesture of appeal. “Stay, Stella,” he asked softly without moving toward her. “Stay a minute and hear me out.” When she stepped back again he tried to reassure her, “They’re all right, Stella. They’re fine. Over a week ago Gabe set in motion events that will render those who pursue you and Jesse powerless.”

She stepped back again.

At last he stepped toward her. He turned his hand palm up, changing his gesture of appeal to one of command. Still his words remained a soft spoken request. “I promise you, Stella, they are all right. Stay a moment and hear me.”

She paused scowling at him. “Speak then,” she commanded impatiently, imperiously.

He smiled. As her own words suggested, she was indeed an odd creature, more than seventy-six years old, yet barely twelve. He began by telling her the most important thing first. “Stella, I would never force you to do anything against your will.”

She snorted in disbelief. Her years of imprisonment had left her with more than a little cynicism concerning others’ motives toward her.

He continued and his tone was even quieter and more restrained. “Stella, I know you remember me being at your bonding. How could you not have noticed me? I stood next to you. Even though we wore masks we looked directly at each other several times. We made eye contact. You even held my hand for a moment. After it happened and you were taken away from your family and put on the transmission ship I realized you would eventually come to an understanding of who I am. I also realized you might think I had something to do with the fact that the QoG bonded with you instead of the intended savant. I tell you now, Stella, I had nothing to do with it. It was as far as I know an entirely accidental event. I would never have chosen a normal six year old child as a bondee. Never. The only two things I can think of that may have influenced what happened to you were your genius and or your own incipient desires. I did not orchestrate that bonding. I did not wish it on you. I was deeply dismayed when it happened. But I will be honest with you. Yes, I did indeed think that eventually you would . . .”

“I did not desire this! I did not!” she interrupted in fresh outrage. She didn’t want to hear any of this and not for one second did she believe him.

“Then how do you explain how the QoG bonded with Dr. Wren? It had to have been her desire that drew it across three million miles to bond with her.”

“Oh no you don’t! That kind of logic won’t float with me! If desire were the deciding factor the Chief Petty Officer standing right next to me on # 11 had enough desire in him to suck up all the antigravity and gravity there is in the universe, not to mention what would happen with all the other people who think it’s such a blessing to be a bondee. No, desire is not the deciding factor. I did not want it! At least I don’t remember wanting it. I was six years old. I had no idea what was going on. Besides . . . what happens with a QoG has nothing to do with our desires.”

He had her on his first point. “Then you admit, my child, that it was beyond any machinations or efforts on my part to affect either way what happened the day the QoG bonded with you.”

“No, I . . . you know that physics suggests our thoughts may after all be part of . . . damn you!” The contradiction she was suddenly caught in was too much for her. She was not ready to give up her well entrenched beliefs. She glared at him and stepped back again, preparing to test to the limit his promise not to force her to accompany him.

But he had a few more things to say before he let her go. “Stella,” he asked quietly, “Did you know that Jesse still has it?”

She was shocked. She had been hoping against hope that he hadn’t noticed.

He smiled again. “I touched them, Stella. Did you think I wouldn’t know? They are all three bonded. How can this be?”

“I don’t know!” she yelled. “You’re the one who just agreed with me that the physics of the QoG is beyond our understanding. I know when it happened. I have no idea how or why it happened.”

“When, then? Tell me when, Stella,” he said, willing to let events speak for themselves.

She sighed angrily. She had puzzled and puzzled over this. And obviously so had the man standing in front of her. In three thousand years nothing like this had ever happened with any of the bondees. It seemed to her that if it were as simple as it was the moment it happened with Sam, then everyone would have it. And she could only guess how it happened between Jesse and Gabe. And again if she were correct, just about everyone would eventually be QoG bonded.

“I first noticed that Gabe had it the day we went to the zoo, the same day we left Albuquerque. Then it happened with Sam the very next day, up in the attic of the old hotel. The first day we were here. We were singing and dancing together, Jesse, Sam and I, and…it…danced too. It kind of rose up out of Jesse and…was like light and air dancing…sort of. I wasn’t even trying to get it back. I tried the first night I was with Jesse. I thought and thought about the QoG that first night. And afterwards. I called it and called it. Nothing. But then we were dancing in the attic and having fun…spinning around and singing and laughing and it…rose up out of Jesse and danced too. I didn’t even notice it, I wasn’t even thinking about it when all of a sudden I had it back. And I didn’t notice until later that day when we were building a snowman that Sam had it too. And then later that night at the dinner table I realized that Jesse and Gabe still had it. Believe me it had nothing to do with anything I willed or--.” She paused, reluctantly acknowledging the man’s sudden knowing expression. “…did. And then I thought for sure Jim would have it. But he didn’t,” she finished sadly.

Then she was angry again. “I didn’t do it! You know I didn’t do it!” The fact that she was suddenly in the same position he had been in a moment ago simply enraged her further. “It doesn’t matter anyway! Enough time has passed now for Jesse that the shock of how it happened to her is long dissipated. And there wasn’t any shock for Sam or Gabe. It will be years, maybe centuries before they even notice it.”

“Stella,” his tone actually had a teasing quality to it. She really was after all only a child. “Centuries? They won’t notice the passing of centuries? You realize, child, that if you do not somehow manage to convey to Sam what has happened to him and what to do about it, he will be like you were. He will not age.”

“I’m going to tell him! I am. When the time is right I’m going to tell him.”

“And when you finally tell Jesse and Gabe? She is a brilliant physicist and he is a mathematician of equal power. They are true geniuses. You will not be able to tell them only part of it, Stella. You will change their world forever. When you tell Jesse and Gabe about yourself, you will propel Earth into a relationship with the rest of the Galaxy that they are perhaps not ready for.”

“No, no, no! I will not be blamed for this! I refuse to accept that kind of responsibility. I am not the only one responsible for the death of that woman!” She began to cry again at the heavy onus she both felt and wanted to deny toward planet Earth and its people. “I’m not! I buried that capsule two feet in the dirt. If it had remained there a few more weeks, the only thing that would have happened is a small depression in the soil there. Instead they dug it up and went at it with a laser. Well, I’m not the only one responsible for that! Or for what happens because of my presence here!

“In the first place it is the Empire who cut me off from my family and placed me out there in that prison of a ship, condemning me to more than seventy years of merely watching life pass me by while I remained a child. I am part of a historical process that put me out there with Earth as my only real connection to life. If I have escaped to this place then the Empire shares in the responsibility for the changes that come to Earth through me. Secondly, I’m not going to tell Jesse and Gabe anything about what has happened to them. My guess is twenty years can pass before they need to know. And in that time I suspect that Gabe and Jesse and their colleagues in the sciences are going to supersede any significance the QoG might have for them. They will have predicted its existence, described its nature and gone beyond a need for my explanations before they are even aware that it is already here.”

She laughed coldly and made a prediction she obviously relished. “Then I say, Empire beware. Because the people of this planet live openly. The speed of their discovery and invention outstrips the ability of their governments to control it. The knowledge they gain will be published in books and taught in schools. It will be broadcast across their airways, it will be sent over waves and wires straight into every radio, television and computer on Earth. Which means it will be free to anyone. Everyone. In the whole Galaxy. What can the Empire do? Whole fortunes are based on the broadcasts from Earth. They will have to stop broadcasting to maintain the secret of the QoG. And it will be too late anyway because the people of Earth will by then have also figured out the secret of traveling.

“You should read what these people are doing in physics and chemistry and biology! With their understanding of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and their own role as influences, as creators of reality they are on the edge of a revolution. With their acceptance of paradox and chaos as natural and generative rather than aberrant, with just their little rudimentary Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky experiment demonstrating the non-local quality of experience they’ve probably come closer to an understanding of what the QoG is in less than fifty years than the rest of the Empire has managed to come in three thousand years!”

Then like the twelve year old she claimed to be Stella changed directions. As quickly and as suddenly as an acrobat she went from talking about politics, physics and Heisenberg to yet another emotional declaration. “And that’s another reason I’m staying here! I want to be part of what’s happening here. I want their problems! I want to work with them on the solutions. I’m going to grow up. I’m going to be a part of this place. I am a part of this place. You can’t stop me!”

“Child, child,” Dr. Rorty spoke mildly, placatingly. “I do not intend stop you. I never did. But guessing what you must have been thinking all these years I simply wanted to plea my case. To give you something to think about…and to find out if you knew, what you know and what you planned concerning Jesse and Sam and Gabe. I am . . . satisfied with your answers. I want to add one little caution. I mentioned and I’m certain you are very aware that Jesse, Gabe and Sam are exceptionally bright and intelligent and perceptive. You may not be planning to tell them anything for many years but hasn’t it occurred to you, Stella, that they will eventually guess who you are?”

“Of course it has occurred to me! Do you think I’m an idiot? Do you think I don’t know that the twelve year old child of a whore from Miami would not understand what a reference to Freud is all about?” She growled and stamped her foot at the things about herself that were simply beyond her twelve year old ability to control. Seemingly simple little things like her sense of humor.

At this question he laughed out loud, relishing that moment even second hand like this. He knew there were many such incongruent events in the future Stella had chosen for herself and he longed to be there for some of them.

“I don’t care!” she declared. “I don’t care if they figure it out. Or if they suspect. Or…I don’t care! I love them and I’m staying with them and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it short of killing me!”

He lifted his hands in a gesture of acceptance. They stared at each other for a moment both knowing that the hostility between them, though not gone, was less. Then he asked almost plaintively, “Did you like my gifts?”

She shivered. It had been days since she had thought about the ship and her confinement there. She had put it behind her. It seemed like years and years ago to her.

The gifts he spoke of had always arrived at the moment when the old crew left and the new arrived. And though objects from Earth were strictly prohibited possessions throughout the Galaxy, those on the ship escaped that prohibition. For good reason. The first and only time a crew member objected to the obvious presence of the objects from Earth by reporting their presence to the proper authorities the results were disastrous.

A security force from the Empire arrived within hours of receiving the report. The ship was searched and the objects from the planet Earth were destroyed. Whereupon little Stella, well into her third year on Number Eleven, but still barely six years old rejected her QoG and quit eating. The Empire lost billions upon billions of fortunes and Stella came close to dying, despite all their attempts to force her to live.

Then one day as she lay on her bed, an entire pool table, numbered balls, cues and all appeared in the very center of her room, a few feet from where she lay dying. It was a move that was clearly a challenge to the Empire, by an invisible but not unknown adversary in this matter of the imprisonment and use of a normal, fully cognizant child for profit and gain. At the sight of that wonderful object in her room the child re-bonded instantly with her QoG and within an hour the Empire passed a law making it legal for artifacts from Earth to be present on Number Eleven.

Those had actually been fun moments for Stella when she ran through the ship discovering her newly arrived gifts in out of the way nooks and crannies or even simply sitting out in the center of an empty space in the ship. She discovered books by the thousands this way, toys, works of art, trinkets, things for her gymnasium like a Universal Machine, items of clothing, musical instruments, record players and later CD players along with thousands of recordings. In fact when she lived on the ship Stella had in her possession the most complete collection of Earth’s musical instruments, and library of Earth’s music in existence.

The gifts had been wonderful things for Stella. Aside from her telescope they had been her greatest treasures. Yet now they seemed paltry and trivial in comparison to the treasures she had discovered in life as it is lived on Earth. Dr. Rorty’s question merely served to emphasize the stark distinction between the poverty of her long years on the ship and the richness of her few days on Earth. It also reminded her of a question she had asked herself millions of times after she realized who was the source of the gifts and how the gifts were arriving.

“I liked the gifts,” she answered tonelessly, anger, even hatred simmering in her eyes again. She lifted her chin and demanded, “Why didn’t you take me away from that ship? You could have! Why didn’t you?”

He sighed unhappily. He knew his failure to rescue her when he could have done so effortlessly was a deep hurt to the child. He tried to appeal to the adult in her with a question of his own. “Why aren’t you going to reveal everything to Jesse and Gabe?”

“Because!” she shouted her anger rising exponentially with her instant understanding. Her desire to refuse and suppress the answer to his question made her voice shake with rage, “If I tell them, it would change everything. I would be stealing their discoveries from them. I would be stealing their struggle, their growth from them. They have created enormous problems for themselves and they must solve them if they are to continue to grow. And if they learn about the QoG through me, essentially the way the Empire learned about it, perhaps they will never.” She was suddenly speechless in her rage. She could not continue. What did all this have to do with how much she had suffered, how lonely she had been?

He now gave her the only answer he would ever give to the question he had been waiting for, “I used to do it, Stella. I used to do it all the time. For centuries, for millennia, thinking I was doing good, from a distance, I interfered in the fates of others, until I finally realized, like you, that I was merely stealing from them. Stealing their growth, stealing their experience. It took me a lot longer than it has taken you to realize that I was destroying their sense of life as a process of discovery and understanding. My gifts to you were a path, nothing more. Perhaps even then they were too much.

“Tell me, Stella, how did you come to be here? And how would you feel about your being here on Earth if I had given it to you at an earlier date? Even if, say, I had simply whisked you off to Earth a moment before you threw the QoG at the screen?”

She glared at him, knowing his question was merely rhetorical.

“Instead of you being the author of your presence here? Because it doesn’t matter how intuitively, how blindly or how unconsciously you managed to contrive it. You are here because you wanted to be here and you arranged it. You were ready to be here.”

“Are you denying the existence of the accidental?” she raged, her eyes shooting fire at him. “Because if you are that negates entirely your earlier claim that it was an accident that I was bonded instead of that drooling half headed no-brained monster savant!”

“Not at all,” Dr. Rorty answered her mildly. He shook his head and his eyes never left off looking into deeply into hers. She could tell he was genuinely puzzled. “It’s a paradox, isn’t it, Stella?” he asked and the question was clearly a challenge.

Intellectual lip service and rational acrobatics are quite a different thing from real understanding and acceptance. Abruptly Stella was twelve again and her exchange with this ancient creature was too great a burden.

“I don’t care!” she screamed. “I don’t care about what you say. I do not forgive you. I will never forgive you for leaving me there on that ship for so long. Never! I will always hate you. I don’t ever want to see you again. Never. If I see you I will not speak to you. I want you to leave me alone!”

Her passionate declaration ending the conversation, she turned and fled from the man, running through the trees and down the mountain toward Mogollon.

He watched her go. Then he smiled and whispered, “Always is a long time, my child, and never is even longer. But I can wait, Stella Jones, I can wait.”

Chapter Twenty Two

Outside officers barked orders and soldiers by the hundreds hopped up into trucks rumbling through the long shadows, fading light and the growing cold of a late winter afternoon. Two blocks south of the cabin, drivers geared down, motors roared and the trucks began the climb up around the hairpin switch-backs leading out of Mogollon.

Inside a celebration was going on. A fire crackled and popped in the stove. Ozone lay curled on her rug as close to the Wood Chief as she could get short of roasting herself. The rooms downstairs were warm. The food brought that morning for Jim’s burial was spread out over the kitchen counter again. Jim’s old cracked and chipped china and mix matched flatware were stacked next to the feast. Peter Jenson was first in line and behind him everyone but Jesse crowded around the counter, waiting their turn to pick up a plate and pile on the food.

At the far end of the utility tables, Jesse sat by herself, staring down at the results of the tests performed by the doctors, both military and civilian who accompanied the FBI and Special Forces up into Mogollon that day. The hospital isolation trucks were equipped with every testing machine and device known to twenty first century medicine. While soldiers were being treated for burned hands and Harve Lamance was having a bullet removed from his intestines, Jesse, Gabe and Sam were subjected to test after test. Blood and urine and tissue samples were taken, x-rays were taken, EEGs, MRIs were performed. Sam and Gabe’s tests were negative.

As were Jesse’s. The results of her tests were normal. Totally, completely, undeniably normal. There was not a single extraordinary or unusual thing about the results of Jesse’s tests, except that. They were normal. All of the images of her brain and spinal cord were clear, distinct and complete. There was no odd blankness nor any sign of a tumor anywhere. No abnormality whatsoever.

She could hardly believe it. Several times she got up from her chair to join the people now taking their places at the dining table. She even picked up a plate and put a drumstick on it, only to return to sit and stare again at the results of her tests. She was elated. Thrilled. And puzzled. What was wrong with her when she fell from her chair at the NRAO? What really did happen to her? Why did the images of her brain and spinal cord from UNMH show such strange results? Why? What about when she played pool with Gabe? What about that? What was happening to her?

And what now? With the astonishing results of her tests on the table in front of her, life blossomed out before her in a way that she had entirely given up on. Time was hers again. Fifty revolutions of the Earth around the Sun, give or take a few, stretched out ahead of her, a long wide river of life, beauty and discovery.

She turned in her chair to look at the people now sitting around the dining room table. If anyone had asked her at noon that day what she thought she and Gabe would be doing at five-thirty that evening, Jesse would have replied that she fully expected them both to be dead. Instead here was a room full of people celebrating a victory. And Gabe was looking at her.

She stood and lifted her coat from the back of her chair. He stood and retrieved his own coat. At her side he whispered, “You read my mind.”

“It’ll be dark soon, we’d better hurry,” she told him. “We’ll go out the back way. No one will see us. They’re almost all gone anyway.”

They paused in the dining room to apologize to their guests. “Sam, get your coat on, let’s go. You have to show us the way. Dr. Johannson, Mr. Jenson, you’ll have to excuse us for a little while.”

The kitchen door opened and Stella stepped quietly into the cabin. In less than a second she was inside the circle of Jesse’s arms.

Stella! Are you all right? Where have you been? We were starting to get worried. We were coming to get you. Did anyone see you? Who is this? What happened to your face? How did you get that black eye? The questions tumbled out.

Grinning up into their faces, Stella hugged Jesse and Gabe for all she was worth. She would have hugged Sam too but he dropped his coat and whipped back to his place at the table, already feigning a scowling indifference to her return. He looked up at her once to stare guiltily at her shiner.

She laughed. “Don’t get your balls all twisted. Sam and me had a fight. He wouldn’t tell what was wrong with you, Jesse, so we got in a fight and I lost. Then I had to go back to the cave to get the binoculars. When I got back to the ridge I watched you guys come out of that big white truck and go back into the cabin and just about everybody else was already gone so I went down around and came in from behind the cabin. Nobody saw me.”

At first she spoke only to Jesse and Gabe, but as her explanation progressed she looked around taking in the faces of their guests. Her eyes widened. “Wow! Wow!” was all she could say. Then, “I know you guys. I mean I know you two guys,” she said. She pointed at Dr. Johannson. “I saw you on Sesame Street. You were with the Muppets. You talked about the planets and the stars and things.” She pointed at Peter Jenson, “And you are on one of those news shows at dinnertime. What are you guys doing here? Is there gonna be a television show?” She looked up at Jesse. “I could sing, Jesse. I could sing for these guys. I could be on television. It would be my big break.”

At that everyone laughed. Her face fell instantly. Tears of embarrassment and humiliation filled her eyes.

But Jesse was ready with a distraction. She pulled the child back into her arms and stood behind her with her arms around her, both of them facing everyone there. With another reassuring squeeze, Jesse introduced her. “Dr. Johannson, Peter, Robert, Thomas, this is my cousin Stella, my father’s sister’s daughter. My aunt died recently out in California and Stella’s father has been dead for ten years now. She’s all alone except for me so I guess we’re stuck with each other, huh, Stella?”

With a gasp of surprise and a hasty swipe at the tears in her eyes, Stella turned and threw her arms around Jesse. “Wow, Jesse,” was all she could whisper. “Wow!”

Much later, the men leaned back in their chairs, their belts unfastened, the snaps and buttons at their waists undone, half drunk glasses of beer and empty bottles adding to the clutter of plates and dishes still on the table. The meal had been over for more than an hour. With an episode of Nova airing quietly on the television, Sam and Stella sprawled on the floor near the stove pretending to watch, but more, listening to the conversation loop over and over, around and back to the event that was the source of everything else that day.

Dr. Johannson answered the cameraman’s persistent questions, “No, Bob, I don’t think it’s a naive question. But it’s unfortunate that people so often ask questions of science that science cannot answer. Science is discovery. Meaning is created. I can’t say what I think death means. Understanding bare physical processes is not the same as meaning. It’s not the solace we seek when we are faced with the loss of loved ones. It’s not the reassurance of something beyond death that so many desire.

“But, the truth is, I do experience a sense of solace and reassurance when I consider that the matter and energy that are me, were born with the birth of this universe. When I consider that I am as old as this universe and that whatever we are, the matter and energy that we are, even after death, will continue to exist and be a part of the evolution of this universe for billions of years to come. That thought is to me truly wonderful. And it is comforting to me that the swirling foaming business of this universe came up with me, grew me and I am part of looking on it and wondering at it, growing with it, creating and knowing with it.

“I know, for many people, since what I have said does not include any reassurance of personal survival beyond death, the sense of wonder that is so elating and joyful to me is not enough. But it is for me. The awe and wonder I feel when faced with the raw fact of existence, with the mystery of existence and my consciousness of existence are enough for me. That doesn’t answer your question, Bob, except to say that science cannot ascribe meaning to things. Science measures and describes physical relationships and processes. That’s all. Life and death and our consciousness of them remain utterly mysterious to me despite the explanations and understandings we have achieved through science. No matter how deep we go in understanding the processes that form this universe and ourselves, the existence of something rather than nothing remains and will continue to remain fundamentally and irreversibly mysterious.

“Why questions are infinite regressions until you get to that one. Why is there something rather than nothing? And that’s not a question science will ever be able to answer. The answers we come up with about the existence of time, space, matter and energy are mathematical descriptions of processes and relationships. They have no meaning until we ourselves give them meaning. It’s a creative paradox, an oxymoron we cannot escape. Perhaps it is simply a language limitation, one that only metaphor, or myth, or even only silence can embrace. Of course in this I speak only for myself. Perhaps, Bob, the meaning of death wasn’t really the question you had in mind at all, but rather do I think that the existence of the universe, and consequently us, is a mindless accident? Or do I think otherwise? Emphatically otherwise.” Dr. Johannson smiled apologetically around the table.”

“Dr. Johannson! This is the first time I’ve ever heard you speak about any of these things. What do you mean by emphatically otherwise? Sounds very teleological to me!” Jesse couldn’t help but tease.

“Ah, the scientists’ sin. Teleology. Yes, I’m guilty. But only vaguely.”

Everyone at the table laughed. How can you be vaguely guilty? What does emphatically otherwise mean?

“It means I don’t think the universe is a brute fact, a mindless accident. There’s simply been too much fiddling with the dials, too much fine tuning in the laws that govern our universe for me to be convinced that existence, our existence is a mindless brute accident. In fact I feel quite the opposite. The laws that rule our universe are simple, elegant, uniform, beautiful, rational and consistent, resulting always in the constant emergence of richness, variety and complexity everywhere in nature. Not only am I convinced that the universe is not a mindless accident, I am convinced that the laws of physics that govern our universe are in their very essence, from the production of carbon inside the engines of stars to the fact that ice floats, these laws are bio-centric. Of course the only way we will ever know for certain if this is so is if we find proof of life elsewhere in the universe.”

Sam whispered a question to Stella and when she shrugged and shook her head he simply had to ask, “Mr. Johannson, what does that mean, bio-centric?”

“The infant earth was barely a billion years old when life began here, Sam. Almost the moment conditions would allow, the moment a solid crust began to form and water in the form of countless icy planetesimals fell to the Earth, life began as though it could not wait to get started. Bio-centric, Sam. It means I think the laws of nature that rule our universe result wherever possible in the formation of life. Wherever possible, life will form. Quickly! Consider the remainder of Earth time, the 3.5 billion years it took to evolve from anaerobic bacteria to humans? Phenomenal! And the speed at which human intelligence evolved? No more than 150,000 generations for apes to develop into the inventor of calculus. Utterly phenomenal!”

“Then you think there’s people like us on other planets?” Sam stood with the urgency of his question.

“Right now we’re finding wobbling stars just about everywhere we look in the sky, Sam. If a star wobbles that means it probably has at least one planet in orbit. Yes, Sam, with the numbers we’re looking at I think it highly likely that there is life elsewhere in the universe. There are 200 billion stars in our own galaxy, an every day average sized galaxy. There are over a billion other galaxies. That’s more than a hundred billion billion stars. But I doubt very much that the evolution of another planet would be so similar to the evolution of Earth that the planet would grow people like us, creatures that are exactly like us. They might evolve into symbol using, thinking creatures, but I don’t think they would necessarily resemble us.”

“Will we ever see them? Will they come here? Are they here already like on Star Trek and the X-Files?”

At this question all the previous tensions of the day broke open in an explosion of laughter around the table. In fact, the moment seemed so jolly that Sam laughed too, and then Stella. But despite his laughter, Sam was embarrassed. He slumped back down to the floor, scowling at Stella who was still laughing.

“It’s all right, Sam. That’s a question almost everyone is interested in. We laughed because everybody sitting here knows the distances between stars are simply too great. Unless we figure out a way to travel at the speed of light or faster, which is an impossibility as far as we know, traveling very far in space involves too much time and energy. If we ever know of the creatures in another star system, it will be because we will receive intelligible messages via radio waves on an instrument like the VLA.”

“So, Dr. Johannson, you’re vaguely guilty of teleology. Does that mean you think there is a God?” Peter Jenson’s cameraman wanted to return to his questions. It wasn’t everyday he got to talk with Dr. Eric Johannson.

The old man laughed. “It means I don’t know, Bob. Like I said, I’m fine with the ambiguity, the mystery of life and death. I don’t find life to be a bitter disappointment because I don’t have final answers or because I and everyone I love must die. That doesn’t mean I want to die. I don’t. But regardless of its terrible pains and sometimes insurmountable challenges I find life to be a gift, a privilege and an absolute delight. Nor do I think as some scientists do that the more we comprehend the universe the more pointless it becomes. I don’t feel bereft, lost or alone in a vast indifferent universe where I have come to be merely by chance. It does not create great paroxysms of doubt and grief in me that neither my destiny nor my duty have been written down somewhere. It does not make me feel frightened and alone that I must instead, constantly and always be the author and discoverer and creator of meaning for myself.

“Though answers can be momentarily very satisfying, the truth is I prefer good questions to definitive answers. What I do think is what I said before. Space, time, energy and matter have evolved toward ever greater organization and complexity leading to life, and here on Earth, consciousness. In fact, I think, that once the evolution of increasing complexity begins, the result will always be, given enough time, consciousness. Intelligence. Self awareness, curiosity, a search for understanding. What that means I can’t say. Maybe the only answer to what that means is individual. Maybe the only answer to what that means is a life lived. And looked on and thought about.”

“Exactly!” Gabe leaned forward in his chair, his eyes ablaze. “What if you were the supreme mathematician? The thought behind it all? The thought inside it all. In bringing this world into being and powering and maintaining it, is there anything you would want, desire, long for? Would it be to know everything before it takes place? Would it be to have determined and controlled the position and spin of every atom to the end of time? From my very simple ungodlike viewpoint that strikes me as enough boredom to annihilate any god let alone an intelligent creature. Or? Would you want experience itself? Real evolution? Real history? An unfolding of something undetermined, unknown, unexpected? Something surprising, something somewhat unpredictable, something new, something constantly growing and changing in time? Something you could grow with?”

Dr. Johannson smiled. Others at the table were not so sanguine. You make it sound like entertainment! Like a game! they objected.

“So? Or art. Or any intellectual or creative, or cultural activity whatsoever. Look at how much energy we put into entertainment. Once you get beyond mere survival, food and reproduction, I think a case could be made that it’s all entertainment. The more elaborate things get, the more entertained we are.”

“Is God entertained by our suffering?” the helicopter pilot demanded angrily.

Jesse leaned intently toward the pilot. “I tell you what, Thomas. Take all suffering away. Whisk it away. Anything that hurts, anything that’s hard or difficult, anything that’s disappointing or challenging, all pain, all suffering, every unhappiness, every tear, every sorrow, every hurt big or small. Remove it from this world and from our lives. Who and what would we be, besides I’m assuming according to you, happy?”

“Yes! We’d be happy!” the pilot insisted.

But the others understood otherwise. We’d be infants. We’d be idiots. We’d never grow! We’d be little more than baboons. We’d be bored!

“That’s not true! Infants and animals suffer. All creatures suffer.”

“Yes, but we human beings do not grow without suffering. We remain infantile,” Dr. Johannson interposed. “But even more basic. Without pain and suffering there are no limits to our behavior, no limits to what we do to each other and to our environment. Watch how fast we self-destruct then. Suffering is inextricably bound up in life, in physical existence, experience, evolution. You cannot survive as a physical entity if you ignore pain, what crushes, burns or cuts; if you do not perceive danger or hunger or the desire for a mate or the desire for the power that will get you food, a mate, a place at the watering hole. And! Intelligent social creatures with long infancies and childhoods such as ourselves do not survive if the group is sacrificed at the expense of the individual. Or, paradoxically, vice versa. And. We as the dominant species will not survive if we do not place the well being of the entire planet and all of its other creatures above our desires to consume, above our drives to attain food, sex, a place at the watering hole. Things. We cannot allow the consumption of this Earth to be our main form of entertainment. You’ve all heard the old joke, we haven’t met any people from other planets because the moment they get to our stage of development they destroy themselves or their environment. No, the basic facts of limitations, suffering and death are not flaws in a physical universe. It is an error on our part to judge them so.”

“Is that all there is then? Limitation? Survival? Suffering? And death?”

“No. Did anybody say that? What kind of logic is that? You’re the only one that said that. You’re a pilot! Don’t tell us you fly because it represents only survival, suffering and death to you!”

“It seems to me Gabe was implying quite the opposite!” Peter Jenson laughed.

“Implying? I said it! We have arrived at a point where for many of us survival is not an issue at all. For many human beings on this earth right now, there is air, water, food, and sex a plenty. The rest, including our miseries is entertainment. A very serious form of play, and in that, we are merely a reflection of something much larger. I say playfulness runs like thread, like the warp in a weaving throughout the universe from beginning to end. That’s why you fly, Tom, for the playfulness of it, not because you must make a living at it. And the limitation of flying not being natural for humans is exactly one of the things that makes it such a wonder and delight. Going beyond the limitation creates the delight. You could make a living doing almost anything, but you fly because it is play for you. And you can make a living at it.”

“Yes!” Dr. Johannson thumped the table emphatically. “Yes! I couldn’t agree more. There is a fundamental playfulness that permeates the universe, a playfulness . . . and a basic generosity if you will. The universe is extravagant, so much more than what mere necessity dictates. So much more elaborate, more complex, more interesting than necessity requires. I would even go so far as to say that not only is the universe generous and playful. It is essentially benign. Despite all our troubles and woes, which I do believe except for disease and accident are of our own creation, and even those in many cases we can blame on our own stupidity and greed; despite all our sorrows, despite the fact that we as a species might not make it much longer, despite entropy as the appointed end, existence is a gift that is given with the most tender of love. That of course is only a feeling I have and beyond that I can say no more.”

“You guys!” Jesse objected.

“Uh oh, I knew this was coming. She’s not going to let us get away with this, Dr. Johannson,” Gabe laughed.

“What? What?” Dr. Johannson asked with feigned innocence. He knew what Jesse was about to say.

“You couldn’t get any more anthropic if you tried, Dr. Johannson, no matter how much you deny it. And this playfulness business? You’re simply projecting qualities you possess; playfulness, generosity, benevolence onto the blank face of the universe.”

“I’m not, Jesse! The face of the universe is not blank. It is mystery. It is allurement. The universe calls to us. The universe seduces us with its beauty, with its mysteries. It says, come my darlings, my children, my sweet ones. Come follow me on a grand adventure to find out. What you are. What I am. What we are. Who we are.”

“Who calls? Who? It has to be God you’re referring to.”

“Jesse! Those were almost your exact words to Sam a few weeks ago. It’s an adventure, a party of investigation, a celebration you said and we are the guests of honor.”

“But I didn’t say anything about God.”

Dr. Johannson smiled. “A rose by any other name. We back away because of the word. The historical and political connotations. Like I said before, Jesse, nothing in all of science or any other discipline new or old comes near explaining the mystery of existence. Nothing. Every new step in science, every answer we find adequate or satisfactory to our questions simply opens out onto newer greater mysteries. It is The Great Seduction. And don’t we love it!”

“What about the Hawking and Hartle no-boundary universe where the laws of science determine entirely the probabilities of any possible history without recourse to singularities up to and including the Big Bang? The fact that we are able to predict events at all is evidence for the no-boundary theory and against singularities.”

“I’ve heard you tell Sam any number of times that our universe began with the Big Bang,” Gabe objected.

“Yes, it has a beginning and an end but in the no-boundary universe the Big Bang is not a singularity, a moment where the laws of physics do not apply. It is not a moment where we must conjure up a god to explain the existence of either the laws themselves or the universe that obeys those laws. The unification of the laws of physics all comes down to what we ultimately discover concerning quantum gravity and antigravity. And I am convinced we will do it.”

“Ah, but Jesse, you’ve only said part of it and you damn well know it,” Dr. Johannson interjected. “Even Hawking says if there is one set of laws governing the physical universe, a grand unified theory of everything, it is, in the end, only a set of equations. The mystery of existence remains. We’re back to my initial point. Science might tell us how the universe began but it cannot tell us why the universe exists. I agree with you though, gravity and antigravity are the key. But I don’t think it’s going to come to a unified theory. I favor Prigogine’s idea of matter and energy being created at the expense of a negative gravity pressure or energy field with no stable ground state at the cosmological level and universes appearing where the amplitude of the gravitational and matter fields have high values. Then the transformation of space-time into matter-energy would be the result of a dissipative irreversible process, in other words a burst of entropy. But this doesn’t allow for a truly unified theory, because it works only if the fields of gravity/antigravity play a different role than other fields like matter. Perhaps rather than a unified theory we need a more dialectical view of nature.”

“Yes!” Gabe exclaimed. “The universe, existence as something in conversation with itself! According to Bohm what we call empty space is the gravitational field, a huge background of energy where matter is a small quantified wavelike excitation on top of this background like a ripple on an ocean. And think of this! This absolutely knocks me over. If the gravitational field is constituted of wave/particle modes, each with a minimum zero-point energy and the shortest wavelength contributing to the zero-point energy of space is about 10-33cm? If you compute the amount of energy that would be in one cubic centimeter of this so-called empty space? It turns out to be far beyond the total energy of all the matter in the known universe!”

Sam whispered to Stella again and again she shook her head.

“Dad?” Sam interrupted the conversation from his place on the floor. “How big is a cubic centimeter?”

“It’s about this big,” Gabe held up his fingers pinching a small space, “about as big as the erasure at the end of a pencil.”

“And you think that’s where everything comes from? From tiny waves on top of a big sea of gravity?”

“Antigravity. Could be, Sam. We don’t know yet.”

“What would it look like?” Stella rose up on her knees with her question.

“What would what look like?”

“Quantum gravity or antigravity?”

“It wouldn’t look like anything to us, Stella. We’re talking about a thing so small, a discreet quantum of gravity or antigravity, that when you get down that small, the measurement of space and time becomes indefinable, space/time fades out, turns into something non-specific. Anyway you could never get a quantum of gravity or antigravity. That’s just our way of talking about a thing we might want to measure and figure into our understanding of the universe. It’s a measurement, a description, not the thing itself .”

Stella frowned, “But we might! Jesse said all the bigger elements are made inside stars when they burn and die. You guys said it. We don’t know everything. Mysteries happen. Maybe a really big star dying or maybe a black hole dying could make a quantum of gravity or antigravity. A separate one. Like a molecule or something. Then you would have just what you said! A thing where space and time don’t mean anything.”

When the adults laughed at her fanciful notion she gave up and rested back on her heels.

“Time for bed, kids,” Jesse announced.

“But I want to listen,” Stella objected.

Sam began gathering up his books.

Stella rose, crossed to the table and began stacking the dirty dishes. “Let me listen while I clean up the kitchen, please, Jesse, please?” she begged.

Quietly she cleared the table.

The conversation went on and on.

Much later in the darkness of the downstairs bedroom, when she lay at last in the crook of Gabe’s arm, her head resting on his chest, the cool slender length of her curled close to the warm solid length of him, Jesse smiled, thinking of the conversation that night. “How about those kids staying up and listening to us like they did tonight. Didn’t that surprise you, Sam helping Stella with the dishes so he could stay up too? And Stella’s question, the one about quantum gravity. What an imagination! A molecule of gravity or antigravity.”

But Gabe had more important pressing things on his mind than the children’s questions. After a long heavy silence he spoke, “Jesse?” He sighed. A weary heartfelt sigh. “Things have changed, you know. For the better.”

“Mm, hmm.”

Another heavy sigh. “Jesse, I’ll understand if--. Jesse, there is no longer any reason for you to stay with me. So, I’ll understand if want to go. If you want to leave. Return to Socorro. Whatever. You’re under no obligation to me. Or to Sam.”

“You speak for Sam now?” she teased.

“Well no. I mean, yes.”

“You release me? You are no longer my keeper? Fly away little wren, fly away?”

“Those were your words not mine. God knows I don’t want you to leave.”

“What about our research? Are you going to walk out on that?”

“It’s your research, not mine. Your grant not mine. You can go back to Socorro, you’ll have your grad assistants.”

This time it was Jesse who was ready. “No matter what, Gabe, I want your help with Cygnus A. But--.” She undulated closer to him lifting her thigh so it slid up to rest warm and soft directly over the middle of him. She crunched even closer, slipping her arm over across his chest, whispering with her lips pressed against his neck, “I was referring to our research on Parts and Strange Attractors. I know we’re not funded. But our work doesn’t involve any expense and we have so many questions. Years and years of questions.”

Her hand wandered back over his chest tracing a tickling path down his belly. She lowered her thigh to accommodate a tender exploration. “For example if we designate this an attractor with a set of zero volume in state space invariant under the action of the evolution equations and surrounded by a domain of nonzero volume so that any trajectory which starts here converges asymptotically onto the attractor.”

The room was quiet for a long moment, then Gabe asked, “Yes?”

“Then is it a Lorenz attractor? With nearby points, say these two, right here, this one and this one stretching apart in a certain direction, like this, creating the local divergence responsible for unpredictability but also folding together points that are at some distance causing a convergence of trajectories in a different direction, like what’s happening right here, or--.”

“Or?”

“Is it a Henon attractor, like this line here,” she asked, a sweet gentle touch preceding her every word, “stretching and refolding itself into a never-ending self similar object that intrudes into three dimensional space more than two but less than three . . . like this right here? Or, do we want to pursue the Lyapunov exponent, a small ball . . .”

“Small!”

“Pardon me. A ball, like right here, of initial conditions around a certain point in state space, like right here, where each point on the ball represents a small displacement from the central point whose evolution equations go round and round like this!”

With a growl of pleasure he scooped her up, and hauled her over on top of him. She could feel the smile he pressed into the curve of her neck. “Years and years of questions?” he asked.

“Thousands,” she whispered.