Glowing with food and good fellowship, Edwin laughed. "It sure gives a guy confidence when he borrows his car. I'rn glad you enjoyed the evening.

We'll drive them to the airport next week, and then we can start. That will give us plenty of time to scare up supplies."

Only a few more bureaucratic obstacles remained for that last week. Even renting a privately owned car involved filling out forms and getting minor officials to sign off on them. For a while it looked like the entire expedition would collapse for want of the signature of a deputy assistant undersecretary. Rob had been ready to get tough, but the more experienced Edwin came to the rescue with cigarettes and chocolate bars.

A week later Rob drove cautiously north out of Zarafshan. Until he actually took the wheel, he hadn't realized how disconcerting a right-hand drive could be. If traffic in the former USSR had run on the left, then he could have just made a complete switch. But driving on the right, in a car with the steering wheel on the right, was endlessly confusing. The Land Rover persisted in drifting into the center of the road. Luckily traffic was sparse, mostly pedestrians, with donkeys and camels and one bicycle.

Beside him Edwin wrestled with Anatoly's map. It was very large, paper backed with cloth, and lettered in Cyrillic. Correlating it with the National Geographic map and the photocopy of the 1918 hand-drawn site map was no easy task. "As long as we keep heading north it should be all right," he decided at last. "I told you the compass would be useful."

The old gray Land Rover was fully loaded. By Edwin's advice, jerricans of gasoline and plastic canisters of water made up most of the load. That and the food had made a big hole in Rob's hoard of casino dollars. Since he didn't know how many days the trip would take, he had gone long on staples: potatoes, strange Central Asian noodles, and bags of the flat local bread.

"You won't mind eating lean for a week or so," he joked to Edwin.

Zarafshan was too small to have suburbs. The country began when the asphalt quit and the dirt road carried on. Goats and sheep grazed on the tamarisk as they passed, and the shepherds stared at them. By afternoon the land had become true desert. Rob saw now why "Kyzylkum" meant "Red Sands." The road meandered across stark red rocky ridges and down into sand-choked valleys where only tough camel thorn and saxaul grew. A stiff wintry wind stirred the pinkish dust into the air and carried it along for miles. The horizon was hazy and brown with it. Even when he looked straight up, the sky didn't seem perfectly blue.

Before the short winter day began to end they stopped for the night in a steep little valley. The wind whistled down at what felt like a hundred miles an hour. "Wow, it's cold," Rob remarked as he stepped down. "I'm glad we're sleeping in the Rover. A tent would blow right away."

"Let's light a fire so we can have a hot meal. Oh, for my LP camp stove!

Open wood fires are the dickens in windy weather."

"Just build it downwind of the car."

"Trust me, Rob. Do I look like a greenhorn?" Edwin gathered pale brittle twigs from under the saxaul bushes and expertly lit a cooking fire. They toasted lamb kebabs over the fire and ate them on flat bread. "How long will the meat hold out?" Edwin asked.

"I got half a lamb's worth at the market. Even in this cold it'll probably go bad before we can eat it all."

"Good, then let's barbecue a few more!"

Rob felt very strange, sitting cross-legged on a rug in the desert eating slightly gritty grilled lamb and drinking Uzbek wine. Edwin reclined on one elbow like an ancient Roman, nibbling on a sword-shaped skewer, perfectly at ease. Rob couldn't help saying, "I can't believe we're doing this. What if it doesn't pan out?"

"You worry too much, Rob," Edwin said lazily. "Take it as it comes. If Aqebin turns out to be a bust, we'll have had an extended camping trip. A vacation."

"In the Kyzylkum Desert in Uzbekistan."

"You've spent too much time in Atlantic City. Exotic and unusual vacations are the best. That casino jaunt with you was the tamest trip I've made since I was a kid, when we went to see the Hoover Dam."

Rob paused to chew. The local lamb was sinewy-tough, even after marinating all day in oil and spices in one of Edwin's Ziploc bags. "What do you think our destination will be like?"

Edwin waved his skewer around. "Probably it'll look like this-a rocky desert. But maybe ..." He sat up straight and pointed with his free hand at Rob. "Maybe there'll be, I know, a large starship lying crash-landed on the sands. The surviving space-travelers need the human race's help to get back to Beta Centauri. So they call on you for help, and give you the muscle to persuade the United Nations for them. Am I right?"

Rob applauded, laughing. "Or how about a more H. Rider Haggard scenario-a lost city of adepts in the desert, all of them tarnhelming like mad to keep out of view."

"They'd have a problem with surveillance satellites. Maybe an underground city, that would be very cool. Ruled by a babelicious native queen."

"I'm a married man, so she'll have to fall madly in love with you."

"Carina will mount an expedition to rescue me. She'd like that-she approves of breaking down gender barriers."

The only camping equipment available in the local market was cheap woolen rugs. Rob had picked up half a dozen of these for sitting and sleeping on.

The idea was to transfer all the fragile baggage, like Edwin's laptop and the bread, into the Rover's front seat. Then they could spread some rugs and the mattress pads over the load in back and sleep on them under cover, the bed of the old-fashioned Rover being just long enough for this.

It was completely dark now, so cold that touching the metal of the car with bare fingers hurt. In the sky hung endless stars, more than Rob had ever seen. Repacking the car was difficult even in the 40-watt glow of Edwin's fancy camping lantern. The jerricans, water jugs and suitcases made an extraordinarily lumpy surface. Also the load was so high in back that there was hardly room to squeeze in under the roof, especially for Edwin's broad shoulders. With a lot of grunting and thrashing in the narrow space they rolled themselves in the down sleeping bags. "You wouldn't let me bring my tent," Edwin complained from close beside him. "It's from E.L. Bean, a geodesic that sleeps four."

"You're horribly spoiled, Ed. Believe me, this is miles better than Central Park."

"And you're going to do your sleeping like a baby bit, too, I can tell."

"You want me to make you sleep?"

"Oh, no thanks!"

Rob had to laugh at his tone. Contrary to expectation, Edwin began to snore almost immediately, a small comfortable noise like a young pig. Rob lay with his shoulders wedged against the roof of the Rover, his back in the sleeping bag pressed against the bulge of Edwin's shoulder in its sleeping bag. There was a simple comfort in lying so close to another human being.

It had nothing to do with sex. Some primitive, almost childlike hunger, unfed since he last slept beside Julianne, was assuaged now by just the contact, the warmth of another person. How could I ever be a hermit, he reflected drowsily. Stupid idea. I need people too much. And he fell asleep.

As they drove the country continued rough, but very gradually dropped, a slope that eventually would terminate hundreds of miles to the north and west at the Aral Sea. After a day or two, the road became a mere track, and sometimes vanished altogether under windblown sand. Only once in the distance did they see nomad shepherds with their flocks. There were no signs or postings to mark the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, but they were somewhere in that area when the country flattened out into a wild and dry plateau. Wind-hewn hills crowded it on the eastern side. "And look at that!" Rob exclaimed.

"Let me just get her out of this sandy bit... okay. So what is that?"

"Looks like the desert beyond this plateau's been hit by a hammer." Even from miles away the deep dimple in the land was visible. It looked like a gigantic cereal bowl set in the ground, half full of sand.

Edwin cut the engine. "Let's look at Anatoly's map. He didn't mark the site of the nuke test-I'm sure the exact spot is still way classified-but I think we've found it."

They got out and spread the various maps out on the hood of the car. "It would help if our maps were drawn to the same scale," Rob grumbled.

"And used the same artistic conventions, eh? It's taken me weeks to figure out the chicken scratches the archaeologists used ... As near as I can figure it, we're very close to the old site. It should be right around here someplace, at the edge of these hills." He scratched at his unshaven chin, where a sprinkle of dark stubble showed too uneven to ever make a decent beard.

Leaving Edwin to mutter and calculate mileage and direction, Rob walked a little way off. If you bring two magnets together, he thought, they don't have to touch. As soon as they're near enough they affect each other, to attract or repel. I had the entire population of the western hemisphere pouring through my hands. If there's another power of that caliber around here, it should have spotted me long ago. I should have spotted it. He reached out, searching, and the desert all around felt as desolate as it looked.

"I have no desire to see Ground Zero," Edwin announced. "Do you? Okay then, I think the old dig is around that way. If we can't find any ruins after a few passes, we may have to assume that Anatoly was right, and they got nuked to rubble."

The plateau was seamed with ravines and gullies. There was no road at all now. For another hour Edwin eased the Rover along in low gear, heading east to skirt the plateau. "The terrain's getting too rough," he finally said.

"I hate to think what Rev. Pallet would say if we broke his baby's axle.

And the land's changed so much, this old British map isn't much use. But we've got to be real near." He cut the engine and looked sideways at Rob.

"Can't you get weird, and find it?"

"I ought to be able to. I can't understand it. There doesn't seem to be anyone here. Maybe that atom bomb killed them."

Edwin sighed and undipped his compass from the dashboard. "Okay, where weirdness fails, orienteering may save the day. Let's take a little hike."

The wind was a little less strong now, and the sky overhead burned clear and blue. In the brilliant midday desert sunshine, the rocks and rosy-pink sand looked entirely ordinary. Decades of wind and weather had eroded any scars from the bomb test away. With his gift for living in the moment, Edwin seemed to be enjoying the exercise after driving so long. But Rob was too worried to relax. It occurred to him that he might be too late. Time ran at a different rate in inner space. How long had those messages been waiting there for somebody powerful enough to receive them? As long, perhaps, as it took for Aqebin to crumble into ruins? He hunched up in his green down parka and bent his head into the wind as they clambered up a long slope of reddish scree.

At the top Edwin consulted his compass again. "Do you think this could be the place? We've come far enough around the plateau." The pebbly ridge sloped downhill again to a flat place about the size of a football field.

The wind whipped sand up into little dust-devils over it. Beyond, the ground dropped sharply down again in a cliff, so that the space was like a terrace in the side of the hill. Eying in the middle of the flat was a long finger of rock, half buried in sand-drift.

Rob's breath hissed between his teeth as he sucked it in. "I've been here before," he whispered.

Edwin stared. "You have? Then this is it?"

But Rob was already moving, sliding down the shallow slope to the bottom.