"Not right now, Ed. I don't think I can take it in." Rob hardly heard him, staring wearily out the window. He was bitterly ashamed of himself. With great power comes great responsibility. He was as bad as Julianne with her White House ambitions, as contemptible as Denton MacQuie smoking hash in his Santa Fe-style New York penthouse. Every time he made progress on one front things seemed to collapse somewhere else. And what about Edwin? With typical courage Edwin had ignored his own peril, but Rob knew what he had been capable of. He would have swatted his only friend like an annoying bug. The self-contempt was crushing. Even moving to Antarctica wouldn't solve this one. The monster in the sub-basement would go with him everywhere, lying and murdering. No matter where I run, I meet myself there.

The wind blustering through the broken window rapidly made the car unbearably cold. Edwin turned into a restaurant parking lot and swept the broken crumbs of safety glass out of the back seat with his gloved hands.

Rob worked to plug the window with duct tape and a plastic garbage bag.

"Here's a little souvenir for you," Edwin said. He held it out on the palm of his hand-a misshapen bullet. "You can see where it punched right through the side there. Don't look so miserable, okay? You really saved our bacon."

Rob picked the bullet up between thumb and forefinger. "You never would be in such a situation, except for me. I don't think I'm good for you to know, Ed."

"Too late now-I already know you. I think we've gone as far as we can with duct tape. Let's go have some dinner."

CHAPTER 5.

". . . so I should be moving out in a couple days, as soon as I find a furnished room."

"Oh Rob, I am so very glad!" Mrs. Ruppert's eyes were moist with gentle emotion. "You know you never were one of our more usual residents, quite a different caliber. It's the Open Door Center's mission to be a turning point for the homeless, and to fulfill it just moves me more than I can tell."

"You've taught me things I want to hang on to," Rob said honestly. "And that brings me to a favor I'd like to ask. I noticed that the front porch is really shot."

"Oh, isn't it terrible? Pastor Phillipson is worried that it'll blow right off this winter."

"I'd like to rebuild it," Rob said. "Even if I'm not living here I could come over a couple days a week, maybe keep the tools here."

"Why-that would be marvelous, but-won't it be very difficult? And expensive?"

"It would be the biggest carpentry job I've ever tried," Rob admitted. "But I'd supply all the materials, so if it's a bust the Center won't lose much.

The porch'll fall off any day now, the pastor's right about that. And if the front of the building gets spruced up, your neighbors won't mind."

"They'd certainly be less catty! Oh, I don't see how we can say no, Rob!

Let me just run the idea by the church. Thank you, thank you so much!"

"Please don't thank me, Mrs. Ruppert." Rob smiled down at her. "It's my pleasure, believe me."

So that was one lifeline secured. With Edwin and Mrs. Ruppert as references, Rob had no problem renting a partly-furnished room in the back basement of a house a mile away. It was dark and prison-like, the one window barred with an iron security grille, but Rob didn't care. For him any place that was not home was a sorry substitute, and where he slept didn't matter. "I'll say this for you, Rob," Edwin said at the end of November, when he saw the Spartan room with its single bed. "You have simple needs. You're going to embarrass me when we get to my place."

"Let me guess." Rob pulled the ill-fitting apartment door shut with a firm tug. He'd have to plane it down one of these days and install weatherstripping. "Your place looks just like your NIH office, piled with stuff. An explosion in a scientific supply warehouse." He led the way up the steep flight of concrete steps to the street.

"It's my co-authors' fault," Edwin said. "If they hadn't sent me all their

chapters to collate and organize I'd be tidier.".

"What's the name of your book?"

"It's a college textbook: Eukaryotes and Prokaryotes."

"Oh!"

"That's the usual reaction," Edwin said grinning. "I can't imagine why.

They're unicellular organisms. You've seen one-the poster in my office.

That was Euglena."

"Was that what it was? I thought it was a close-up of food gone bad."

Edwin laughed so hard at this that he almost missed the turn into the computer superstore. After borrowing Edwin's laptop for a couple of solo blackjack trips Rob had decided it was silly not to buy one of his own. The salesman tried to steer him to a fancier machine than he needed but Rob knew exactly what he wanted. "Gee, you're fast," Edwin said. "It took me weeks to make up my mind, and I exchanged the thing twice."

"Read up on it in Byte at the library," Rob explained. He counted out twenty-three hundred dollars in worn fifties and handed it to the cashier.

Edwin stared. "Tell me you're not carrying it all in cash."

"I don't worry about muggers, you know! But actually the money got really bulky to haul around in the duffel. I've made maybe sixty thousand since October. So I started a few savings accounts. As long as I spread my deposits around, the banks won't get suspicious."

They drove to Edwin's apartment in Takoma. It was on the second floor of a garden block near the park. Edwin flung open the door and said, "Behold my nemesis! If I don't whip the manuscript into shape by the new year the publisher will strangle me."

There did seem to be a lot of paper in the room, and also a lot of furniture and high-tech toys. A fancy motion sensor turned on the stereo automatically, so that a Wynton Marsalis septet filled the room as they came in. The apartment was spacious, with a balcony and a dining ell, but it held two sofas and half a dozen tables, big and small. Edwin also had another computer, an electronic music keyboard, two CD players, and innumerable stereo speakers trailing wires everywhere. Bookcases held fat textbooks on the lower shelves and paperback science fiction on the upper ones. Near the sliding doors, a Lifecycle stood draped with damp T-shirts and jogging shorts. Out on the balcony a mountain bike hung from a rack.

Packing boxes stood in towers in the corners. Everything was topped with piles of typescript and folders bulging with photographs of cells.

"Boy, I knew I didn't want to crash with you," Rob remarked. "How did you come by two sofas?" He tripped over a pair of rollerblades and sat down on the only clear space on a sofa.

"Oh, half this stuff is Carina's. It didn't make sense for her to keep an apartment when she was going to Peru for a year. And, speaking of archaeologists, I have something for you." Edwin turned the litter on one of the tables over like hay. "Here."

He handed over a sheet of paper. Clipped to it was Rob's own torn-out notebook sheet with the inscription copy on it. The paper had the same wedgy characters on it, printed out big on a laser printer. Beneath them were syllables in English. "A - Kwe - Ben - Ni (Silent)," Rob read aloud.

"Aqebin. Who is Aqebin when he's at home?"

"It's an archaeological site in the old USSR. Uzbekistan, one of those newly independent republics. During the heyday of the Empire, a team of British archaeologists began digging there in the late nineteen-hundreds.

Then the Communists came in and the Brits got tossed. Since then nobody much has worked there. So says the assistant professor of ancient Near Eastern studies who saw this on-line. He's mailing me a xerox of the team's preliminary survey. That was all they ever published." Edwin looked expectantly at Rob and rubbed his hands in anticipation. "Now it's your turn. How does a defunct dig in Asia figure in? Does a rabbit pop out of a hat, or what?"

Rob shook his head. "I'm sorry, Ed. It doesn't ring a bell for me at all.

Never heard of the place. I guess it was a waste of time, a dead end."

"Oh well-win some, lose some. Let's boot up your new toy and load the software. Does it take three-and-a-half inch diskettes?"

Rob dropped the paper into an overflowing wastepaper basket. "Of course-bring 'em on. I've made a few changes in your graph program, by the way ..."

It took several hours to set up the new laptop and transfer all the numbers Rob had been accumulating. On the bus back and forth from Atlantic City, Rob had written a graphics program to display the numbers in bar graph form. It printed out in a continuous sheet a couple of feet long. When the dot matrix's buzz stopped Edwin tore the paper off and spread it out over the litter on the table. "What do you think?"

"It's too easy to fool yourself with numbers," Rob said. "Massage your data right and you can get any result you want. But it sure looks good, doesn't it?" He noticed his voice was unsteady.

Edwin scanned the printout, pencil in hand. "Not any result," he said. "You can't get any old answer. You're definitely progressing here. If this is normal down here, and we draw a line here where you'll intersect it..."

"It'll take me years," Rob said sadly. "At the rate I've been going."

"Maybe it's like working out at the gym," Edwin said. "As you get stronger it gets easier. What you mustn't do is give up."

Rob leaned a shoulder against the wall and stared down at the graph. "It's just . . . it's the end of November already. The kids' second birthday is December twenty-fourth. And then it's Christmas. It's going to be hard to hang on to my courage."

"They arrived on Christmas Eve, how cool! But you poor guy, December's going to be a double whammy for you this year." Edwin began to fold the long sheet up. "Was it a bummer, going to Atlantic City for Thanksgiving?"

"If there's a rehearsal for hell, they have it there then. Commuting in from this area was the smartest decision I've made. Two or three day trips a week is plenty. If I had to live in Atlantic City, I'd lose my mind."