"Wait!" Major Moore said. "Let me make a deal with you."

"I'm listening."

"Let me send over a file from the project you'd be involved in. If, after reading the file, you're still not interested, I'll never pester you again." Now he wasn't being a major, just a man trying to keep her attention.

Well, I guess that can't hurt, she thought. "Okay, send the file over. I'm ready to receive."

"I can't do that, Ms. MacTavish. I'll have to have it hand delivered, and we'll have to set up some time where you can guarantee that you will be the only person to accept the delivery."

Samantha couldn't resist. "Oooh, sounds like some really big military secret stuff, huh? Very well. Tomorrow evening at, oh, 1837 hours exactly, no sooner, no later, my apartment. I'll be here then."

He ignored her sarcasm entirely. "My courier will be there at precisely 1837 hours tomorrow evening. Have a nice day." He broke the connection.

She spent the rest of the evening both convincing herself that, no matter what, she wouldn't work for the military, and also wondering just what the hell this file was going to contain.

She hadn't slept well. It had been one of those nights where you toss and turn and drift from deep sleep to just barely conscious, always pursued by dreams that seem to make perfect sense even as they play the impossible out before your eyes.

In one particular dream, Samantha saw a System Patrol battleship land just outside Luna City, and she thought that was interesting because such ships didn't land, but it didn't bother her. Then the side of the ship opened up and Steve walked out, in shirtsleeves, as the crescent Earth shone over his shoulder, and he said, "Hey, my own sweet Sunshine, when are you going to come and join me?" And as she ran out to join him, Major Moore stuck his head out the door and dragged Steve back, and she was left standing alone as the ship lifted once again for the heavens.

The dream was on her mind as she left for work that morning. She played it back through her head while taking the overland corridor to the science dome. Most of Luna City was underground, but five domes sat on the surface, the caps to very large cylinders that went down a hundred meters, and contained most of the living space. She could have gone the whole way to work via the subsurface transit system, but this morning Samantha preferred to walk through the surface corridor since from it she could see outside. She stopped at one of the windows and gazed out at the sharp, bright surface, the magnificent desolation, and felt a small stab of disappointment; there wasn't a battleship sitting out there.

Once at work, she stopped in her cubicle briefly to turn on her workstation, and then went right into the lab to check on her cultures. Even if her personal life was in disarray, her work for the Martian atmosphere project had been going remarkably well for the past few months.

She peered into the sealed chamber that contained her culture. Inside was a dish filled halfway with Martian surface soil, scooped very carefully right off the Martian desert and returned to Luna undisturbed. Inhabiting the soil, now, was a very carefully (and ingeniously, her boss would add) tailored virus/bacteria symbiont, designed by Samantha. Observing the monitor, she noted that the free oxygen had gone up since yesterday. She knew that a scan of the soil would show an excess of pure iron. Yes, this bug looked like another success.

The field of genano engineering was only twenty-five years old, but looked like it would finally make good on some of the promises made by the prophets of nanoengineering at the close of the last century. Nanoengineering, dealing with machines measured on scales of a billionth of a meter, had long been hailed as the technological solution to all ills. Diseases would be healed, pollution eliminated, and wealth beyond imagination available to everyone, all provided on the backs of trillions of self-replicating, virus-sized slaves. The promises were still there eighty years later, but the problems of both controlling and powering nanoscopic machinery had proved to be almost ridiculously difficult. Advances were made, but never the critical breakthroughs.

And then in 2071 a genius named Chang genetically reengineered a virus to "operate" a nanoscale tool, and thus the full marriage of genetic engineering and nanoengineering took place.

Samantha was remarkably adept at the new art. Originally, she'd gone to school to be a doctor, but her biology courses had exposed her to the world of research science, a world she found she didn't want to leave. Her excellence got her a full ride to Tokyo University and Chang himself as her advisor. She earned her doctorate by making genano bugs that assembled for her a perfect cube of diamond, ten centimeters on a side. That got her both attention and a job in Luna City at the best laboratory for applied genano engineering in the Solar System, working in the atmosphere division of the Martian Terraforming Project.

And now another of her bugs had come through. This particular strain was designed to separate iron oxide into its constituent elements since the sands of Mars were full of the stuff. Bugs that broke down compounds into elements were nothing special, but this breed would also be able to live, reproduce, and work in the Martian environment with no need for additional care. In her symbiont, the bacteria lived in the Martian soil, and the virus lived on the bacteria, and while so doing, each manufactured and operated nanotools to accomplish its task. And if the iron oxide bug worked, others would follow to break down other molecules, and thicken the Martian atmosphere.

She smiled in delight, the first time this morning that her famous smile showed itself.

"I see you over there, pleased with yourself again, no doubt!" The voice came from behind. It was Martha, fellow researcher, friend, and mother surrogate.

"What?" Samantha said. "I'm just happy for the project."

Martha brought her cushiony self over to the chamber and looked in. "I checked your culture this morning myself. I couldn't wait to see that smile when you showed up." She gave Samantha a hug.

"Thanks, Martha."

"Did you get a letter from Steve yesterday?"

That brought clouds across the sunshine. "No . . . no, I didn't," Samantha said.

"Oh Sammi, I'm sorry. I was so sure you'd hear from him yesterday . . . ."

"It's okay, Martha. I'll probably get a letter from him today. It's just that it's been so long."

Martha gave her another hug, compassionate and motherly this time. "I know, honey. I know." She

brightened. "Why don't you come over to my place for dinner tonight? Ted always likes it when you

visit, and then maybe the three of us can go down to Entertainment Central afterwards."

Samantha thought about it, then remembered her call yesterday. "I'd love to, Martha, but I can't. I got a call from Major somebody yesterday and I promised I'd be at my place tonight when his courier drops a file for me to look at."

"A file on what?"

"I don't know. This major, I think he said his name is Moore, wants me to work for him. I told him I

wasn't interested in military work, but he was persistent, so I agreed to look at this file just to get him off my back."

"Didn't you tell him how you feel about the war?"

"That didn't faze him a bit. He even told me he was the one responsible for getting Steve drafted."

"I'm surprised you didn't just cut him off," Martha said.

"I am too. But I admit that I'm kind of curious to know what's in that file he's sending over. Say, why

don't I call you after the file gets dropped off, around 1900 or so? If it turns out to be nothing we could

still get together."

This was agreed to, and they both got down to work. * * *

Dinner in front of the TV, alone, with no letter from Steve to cheer her, was a considerably depressing business. A post-dinner sundae failed to help, and Samantha was just about to attempt the last ditch effort of a hot bath when the door buzzer went off. "Damn . . . that messenger." With a sigh she went to answer the door. A glance at the clock told her it was exactly 1837 hours. She kind of liked having the military kowtow to her orders like that.

At the door stood a handsome young man in a military uniform. She thought he was a lieutenant. She looked again; a really handsome young man. That in itself cheered her a little, but she wasn't the sort to find comfort in the arms of another man, so she fought off her desire to flirt and said coldly: "Yes?"

"Ms. MacTavish?"

"The one and only."

"May I come in?"

"No."

"I see. I'm Lieutenant Robert Nachtegall, Major Moore's courier. I have a file for you." Samantha couldn't help but notice Nachtegall's own coldness. Well, she deserved that. She was surprised to see the proffered file was a hard copy. She took the folder from his hands.

"Hard copy? Is the military still in the last century, Lieutenant?" And why am I being such a bitch? She wondered. It's not this guy's fault that Steve didn't write.

"Hardly, Ms. MacTavish. Major Moore directed me to tell you that this file is for your eyes only, and you are not to discuss the contents with anyone. Ever. Do you understand this?"

The lieutenant's manner, and his statement, knocked all the sarcasm out of her. "It really is that important, huh?"

"It is, Ms. MacTavish."

"All right. I understand the restrictions. When do I need to get this back to you?"

"You don't. That's the reason for the hard copy. Tonight before you go to bed, leave the entire file in your sink. Tomorrow morning you can rinse the residue away. Major Moore will contact you tomorrow. Good evening, Ms. MacTavish." He turned smartly and strode off down the corridor, not waiting for her to acknowledge the end of the conversation.

Samantha took the file to the couch, shut off the TV, which was annoying her with war news, and opened it up.

And she didn't quite get it. The file contained a potpourri of different reports. In addition to twenty pages of close-print text were dozens of photos, many of which looked like cell cross-sections seen under a microscope. There were also lists of composition materials, calculations, and equations that looked like something out of her freshman physics class or her husband's journals, and a brief subsection that referred to three hundred different references ranging over the last century and a half.

The only thing she could immediately recognize as normal in the entire file was a photo of some guy named Richard Michaels, whoever he was.

After her brief survey of the contents, she decided to concentrate on the photos. The first was of a corpse, badly desiccated, of some kind of animal. She read the caption: ALIEN BODY AS FOUND UPON INITIAL BOARDING OF OEV 1. "What is this stuff? Something out of a bad movie?" she muttered. She went through more of the photos. She realized that they showed the "alien" body in various stages of dissection.

She didn't get it. No one believed in aliens anymore. If they existed, they should have been here by now, was how the old argument went. Steve had never believed in BEMs as he called them: bug-eyed monsters. He'd never explained how the term had originated either. Until now she hadn't been interested.

But unless this was some kind of elaborate hoax, what the major had given her was a file on humanity's first contact with an alien species.

She dug into the section on the alien biology.

The call signal went off. It chimed half a dozen times before Samantha recognized it and answered. It was Martha.

"Sammi? What's going on, honey? I was expecting you to call half an hour ago."

"Oh, Martha, I'm sorry. It completely slipped my mind. That file I told you about-the one the major was going to send over. Well, it turned out to be a much bigger deal than I expected, and . . . I guess you shouldn't expect me tonight. I'm going to be busy for quite some time."

"What's in the file, Sammi?"

"I can't tell you that. I'm sworn to secrecy."

Martha was old enough to have been a little girl during the last big war, the Belt War of Independence. Her father had taught her well that sometimes you accept that a secret is a secret and don't pry. She said, "Okay, I understand." Then: "Do you think you might work for the major now?" There was concern in her voice.

Samantha hadn't gotten that far in her thinking yet. She was too fascinated by the file's contents to have considered what she was going to tell Major Moore tomorrow. "I don't know, Martha," she finally answered. "I just don't know."

The biological data was both fascinating and puzzling. Most of what she found was utterly unlike anything she'd encountered before. Since this was an alien, that made sense. But there were also tantalizing similarities. The amino acids and the protein structures were oddly similar to terrestrial life. And the genetic structure of the alien cells was a double helix. "Good Lord," Samantha whispered. "All God's children got the helical stairway." She also noted similarities in the relative chemical abundances of the alien's whole body with that of mammalian bodies, except for the amount of iron; the alien body had a huge amount of iron.

She found the answer to that puzzle in the section on anatomy. The aliens' bones were made of tubular steel, cross-hatched on the inside for great strength. "A steel skeleton. And it's natural. Instead of calcium they build bone out of iron." She couldn't help but realize that her work on the Martian atmosphere project and the abundance of iron in the alien body must have been what had put Major Moore onto the idea of recruiting her. She didn't know why yet, though. There were plenty of other scientists who could work on this, and obviously a great many already had; the reports she was looking at were first-rate.

Other anatomical facts were equally fascinating, but didn't seem to fall into her area of expertise like the iron bit did. The alien didn't have muscles, but a system of hollow tubes and pistons, and several heartlike pumps; the steel skeleton was driven by hydraulics. She also noticed that the elbows and knees bent backwards, unlike a human's.

And the people who had worked on it had failed to come to a consensus on what the alien used for a brain.

Additional reports in the file dealt with alien technology and the whole story of how Intelligence had come into possession of the alien body. Samantha only had time to skim these sections; it had been hours since she'd opened the report, and the paper was starting to disintegrate. She remembered that Nachtegall had told her to put the file in the sink, and very reluctantly she did so, but not before the pages had discolored themselves to the point where she could no longer read them.

That night she lay awake for some time. "Tomorrow I'm going to have to make a big decision," she said to the ceiling. "I don't want to work for the military. But, dammit, I want in on this thing, too."

The following day in the lab did not go quickly. Her cultures were still doing just fine, and Samantha busied herself most of the day with writing up results and working on a paper. But she found it hard to concentrate as her mind kept drifting to the contents of the secret file.

At one point Martha came over from her work to talk. Wrapped up in her own thoughts, Samantha hadn't even noticed that Martha had failed to greet her earlier, as was her custom. Last night she'd had a stray idea or two that Martha would be angry with her about not coming over, but then decided that was silly.

"So how is our resident genius doing today?" Martha asked. She sounded cheerful enough, but Samantha thought she detected an undercurrent of tension in Martha's manner.

"I'm no genius, Martha. I just work hard and I get lucky."

"Did that file keep you busy all night?"

"Yes, it did. I'm sorry again, Martha. I would have liked to have gone out last night, but . . ." She had been just about to say that the file was timed to disintegrate, so she had to look at it last night, but then Samantha wasn't sure if Major Moore would want her to release that particular fact. I'm not even working for the military and already I'm censoring what I say, even to my friends, she thought. She didn't like that one bit. Instead, she said, "I just couldn't pull myself away. And the major wanted me to read all of it last night." That wasn't quite a lie, but it was hardly the truth either.

"That's all right, Sammi," Martha said. "I know what it's like when the military wants you and there's a war on. My dad used to spend half his time telling us kids what kind of questions we couldn't ask him. I won't pry into your secrets." She walked away.

They're not my secrets, Samantha wanted to say. But if she did work for the military, they would be.

By the time she got home she had pretty much made up her mind to tell Moore to go stuff his alien where the Sun didn't shine, but then was disappointed when she found the major hadn't left her any messages during the day. She recognized that she wanted it both ways-to work on the alien, but not be working for the military. What's the big deal? she thought. So it's the military. I wouldn't actually be doing war work. This alien is bigger than my personal feelings.

She was half done with eating when she realized that she hadn't even noticed that she still hadn't gotten a letter from Steve. By the time she finished eating, she still hadn't gotten a call from the major, either.

At exactly 1837, the call signal went off. She answered.

"Well, I see you have a sense of humor, Major, calling at 1837 hours. Or was it just a coincidence?"

"Why, Ms. MacTavish, I'm sure you know that we in Intelligence don't believe in coincidences." A smile broke out across his face.

"Point made, Major. And I'm sorry for giving you a rough time the last time you called. So where do we go from here?"

"Have you made up your mind to work with us on this project, Ms. MacTavish?"