Nate tried to stifle a laugh but could only stifle half of it. "Okay, I'll give you that." He went to the next page. "Huh, what's this? The sudden pounding told them where the monster was at ..."

Even Elisha was horrified to see the sentence in her own writing. "I can't believe I did that."

"It's not in a quote this time, sweetheart."

Elisha was mortified. "No. It sure isn't."

"Never put where and at ... ," he began and she joined in unison with her father, "in the same sentence."

"So what should it be?"

She made the correction even as she said it. "The sudden pounding told them where the monster was. "

"Very good."

Nate laid the pages down on the table in front of him and leaned back. "So tell me. What does the monster represent?"

Elisha was disappointed. "You don't get it?"

Nate smiled. "I want you to tell me."

She twisted her mouth in thought, then answered boldly, "Mankind without truth, without G.o.d-given morals. He has strength, he can think, he can even feel things emotionally-but if he isn't given a good, solid standard for right and wrong, then there's nothing to keep him from using strength and reason and feelings in selfish ways, even destructive ways."

"So, on the one hand, we tell ourselves that none of us are subject to any moral law outside of ourselves, and then we wonder ... ," Nate prompted.

"We wonder why people do such evil things, why there's so much violence in the world, why people rob and cheat and betray each other. But when we erase truth from our thinking and say there's no right or wrong except for what each person thinks is right or wrong, well, we get the kind of world we deserve."

"And who ends up making the rules when we reject truth?"

Elisha adopted a grim, guttural voice. "The biggest, meanest, toughest dude." She used her own voice to add, "Whoever has the most power-the biggest army, the most money, the most votes, the most newspapers or television networks. When there's no truth that applies to everyone, then there's no way to argue for the rightness or wrongness of anything, and when that happens, whoever has the most power calls the shots."

"Like a monster running amok."

She brightened. Her father got the point. "Right."

Nate nodded, quite satisfied. "Well done, Elisha. Very well done." She grinned from ear to ear. "And now, I'm sure your brother would like to get some riding in before the day's gone."

"Yes!" Elisha exclaimed, jumping up, hugging her father, grabbing her cowboy hat, and heading for the door.

"Don't slam the screen-"

The screen door shut with a bang.

Elijah Springfield, Elisha's twin-the one with the "finely toned muscles"-had saddled the horses. His own steed, a chestnut named Charlie, stood patiently, oh so patiently, in the center of the Springfields' big barn, waiting for Elijah to make still another attempt at an experiment. Holding a long rope suspended from a ceiling beam, Elijah stood atop a towering stack of hay bales, staring, thinking, and staring again at the strawstrewn floor of the barn, then at the high, post-and-beam walls surrounding him, then at the ceiling beam to which the rope was secured, and then at his horse-still standing obediently, but only for so long.

The big question: Launching from this location, would he have enough inertia to kick off from the north wall, swing over to the west wall, swing in a downward spiral, and finally return to where Charlie was waiting at the very limit of the rope's decaying swing, thus coming into contact with the saddle while in a state of near weightlessness? If Charlie felt nothing, and mostly, if Elijah felt nothing, then his prediction based on the available data would be correct and the experiment would be a success-not a n.o.bel prize winner, but a success. He could see the trajectory in his head, as clearly as if he'd drawn it on his eye's view of the barn with bright yellow chalk.

Ready.

He gripped the rope tightly, checked the diagram in his mind one last time, and then started with a quick run off the hay bales.

He was flying, suspended, the north wall approaching, the rope moaning against the beam.

BAM! His feet hit the wall, his legs flexing like springs, and he bounded off like a billiard ball. Perfect angle.

He was lower now. The arc of the swing was decaying, but that was all in the plan. The west wall was coming at him.

BAM! Second rebound successful. I should work for NASA.

Now, one last spiral down, coming back toward his starting point, but below it now, right along the base of the hay bales, and there was Charlie's hind end, like the planet Earth from a s.p.a.cecraft window, and just above it, the saddle, ready for a soft landing ...

The approach of a leg-kicking, blue jeaned, leather-brimmed s.p.a.cecraft spooked planet Earth, and he trotted out the barn door just as Elijah reached the last, dying inch of the rope's swing, that minuscule moment of weightlessness when a landing would have been perfect....

With a cry of frustration and despair, he clung to the rope as it carried him backward. He let go and fell into a pile of soft straw carefully placed there-in case something went wrong. By this time, although he hadn't mastered a weightless landing in a saddle, he had become quite skilled at landing in straw when something went wrong. He rolled into it, head over heels, half disappearing under the swishing stuff, the world going dark as his cool leather hat with the rattlesnake band scrunched down over his eyes.

With an angry growl he sat upright, brushing the straw off his arms and shoulders. "Charlie! You keep throwing variables into the equation!" He lifted his brim, letting the daylight back in. "If you'd only spook at a uniform rate-"

There stood his sister, weight shifted to one hip, hat c.o.c.ked back on her head, watching him with great amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Hey, Einstein, let's do some riding."

"It's about time, Hemingway!"

She gave him a hand up. "So let's go, before something else stops us."

They hurried out of the barn. Charlie and Pardner, saddled and ready, awaited them by the fence. The afternoon sun was still high and the Montana sky deep blue. There would be time to ride the ridge behind the ranch, and maybe even get as far as the tree line where they'd spotted bear tracks just two days ago. Elijah mounted Charlie in quite the conventional way-Charlie didn't mind that. Elisha put her foot in the stirrup- And the dinner bell rang. Not for dinner. This was a special ring, calling them to the house for something important. Elisha, her hand on the saddle horn, wilted, and then let go. "I hope it's you this time!"

Elijah dismounted, slightly miffed. "Hey, I turned in my paper yesterday, and I fixed that fence rail! I owe no man anything! "

They came around the barn and looked across the pasture toward the big log ranch house. A rental car was parked in front, and Mom and Dad stood on the veranda with ...

Was that Mr Morgan?

They gathered in the lofty, rough-hewn family room-Nate and Sarah Springfield, Elijah and Elisha, and the rarely seen Mr. Morgan-settling into the couch and chairs and on the big stone hearth while Morgan showed them photographs, doc.u.ments, and other information he and his little Washington staff had gathered. Then he slipped a DVD into their home entertainment system.

"The clips you're about to see were videotaped at Harborview Hospital in Seattle by a friend of mine, Dr. Madison. I sent this footage to the White House along with our proposal, and you've seen the response I got: Under no circ.u.mstances were we to investigate this. Then lo and behold, within minutes, I found the entire contents of the videotape copied onto this DVD and hidden between the pages of my morning newspaper, along with a handwritten note."

The Springfields looked at each other.

"I don't get it," said Elisha.

"Believable denial," said Nate.

"Exactly," said Morgan. "If anything goes wrong, if the wrong people find out about this, the president can always say he told us not to get involved, that his administration had nothing to do with our investigation. Whoever sent the DVD did so without the president's direct knowledge, and he can say so."

"Sounds shady to me," said Elisha.

"It is. But it's obvious this whole operation has to be conducted with the same kind of caution, in the utmost secrecy"

"Why?" Elijah asked.

"I don't know," Morgan replied. "That's the rub. You're being asked to find out some things without knowing entirely why, or who knows why, or why such information is so important to ... whomever."

Sarah, in her gardening clothes, her blond hair tied in a scarf, shrugged her shoulders and said, "Sounds like a government project to me."

"It does indeed."

"So let's see what's on the disk," Nate said.

Morgan pressed a b.u.t.ton on the remote control and the widescreen television came to life. Upon seeing the very first image, the Springfields leaned forward in their seats, eyes riveted to the screen.

They were watching the mindless, blank-eyed behavior of Alvin Rogers. He was in hospital pajamas, standing in the center of the padded room and twitching nervously, looking at nothing, as a hospital nurse tried to start a conversation.

"Can you raise your arms for me?"

"I don't know."

"Don't you want to put on a fresh shirt?"

"I don't know."

"We'll get you changed, and then you can have some lunch. Would you like that?"

"I don't know."

The recording played on for several minutes, showing the nurse feeding him, Dr. Madison examining him, a therapist exercising him, and all of them trying to get through to the boy, trying to get him to acknowledge knowing something, knowing anything.

They all failed.

"He sounds like a skeptical philosopher," Elisha cracked. They all looked at her strangely, so she tried to explain. "You know: the ones who say nothing is true, that truth doesn't exist. If truth doesn't exist, then you can't know anything."

"Watch what happens next," said Morgan.

A man and a woman entered the padded room, and the kid, crazy or not, fell into their arms and started crying.

"He knows who Mom and Dad are," said Sarah, getting a tear in her eye.

"So he knows something," said Nate.

"And immediately he started talking," said Morgan, "but check this out."

The recording cut to a later scene. Now the kid, frightened and agitated, was spilling a torrent of words to his folks as they sat on the floor beside his bed. "I, I come to see the sky, but it was upside down. And I run, but not swimming, just, you know, running, and climbing ... scratch myself. It was dark, too, hurt my eyes."

"Could you wind that back?" Elijah asked.

"Don't worry," said Morgan, "there's more just like it."

The kid kept going. "Terrible. Terrible. I kept falling, going up, never stopped and it hurt and I just didn't know."

"Where was this?" his father asked.

"Bending down, couldn't reach it ... couldn't climb, either ... had to go swimming ... but the door wasn't there."

His father said to someone off-camera, "Where in the world has he been? Who did this to him?"

Morgan interjected, "Listen to this."

"Nightmare," said Alvin Rogers.

Alvin's mother asked, "What?"

"Nightmare." The boy began to tremble. "Nightmare Academy" His eyes grew wide as if looking into a h.e.l.l only he could see-and no more words came, only a long, pitiful wail. He began to kick and struggle, trying to back away from whatever he was seeing.

"Turn ... turn the camera off," said his father while trying to hold the boy down.

The image shook, then blinked out.

Morgan pressed the stop b.u.t.ton. "One month before this was recorded, Alvin Rogers was a fairly normal high school soph.o.m.ore in Thousand Oaks, California. He was bright, did well in math and science, and stayed out of trouble. For whatever reason, maybe just for something crazy to do, he and a friend named Harold Carlson ran away from home and got as far as Seattle before disappearing altogether. Now Alvin has turned up crazy and Harold is still missing. I guess you can figure out what your a.s.signment is going to be, if you want it."

"Find out what happened to Alvin," Nate responded.

"And what became of Harold," Sarah added.

"And what the Nightmare Academy is," Elijah said.

"And what the truth is behind the whole thing," Elisha concluded.

Morgan nodded. "We'll put you in touch with a youth shelter in Seattle where the boys were last seen, and see if you can pick up their trail from there. I'll help you in any way I can, but remember, we're hunting for something that cannot know it's being hunted or it might disappear before we can find it."

"And we don't even know what it is," Elijah said. "Cool."

Nate leafed through the doc.u.ments spread out on the coffee table, reviewing each one and pa.s.sing it along to the others. "We're going to have a lot to discuss."

"Guess I'd better unsaddle the horses," Elisha said, a hint of disappointment in her voice.

Seattle, Washington, is a beautiful city at night-a blanket of jewels mirrored in water-and when the sky is clear, the glimmering towers of downtown mingle with the stars.

But like every city, Seattle has its darkside-its troubled streets, its districts of decay that become gathering places for those who have nowhere else to go. In the cold glare of the streetlights, in the shadows of the alleys, the homeless, the lost, the dest.i.tute, and the runaways walk up and down the blocks, hands in pockets, eyes downward. They are lonely, but afraid of strangers, without shelter and hoping to find a lonely curb, porch, landing, or doorway to call their own for the night. Sometimes they cl.u.s.ter with other wanderers, either for company or simply because there is only one place available out of the rain.

This night, two wanderers apparently found each other while trying to stake a claim to a small stretch of concrete sidewalk and marble building that were still warm from the daytime sun. One was a boy about sixteen, dressed in ragged jeans, stocking cap, and tattered, oversized mackinaw The other was a girl about the same age, with black, stringy hair, wearing a khaki jacket, jeans with holes in the knees, and a second-hand wool cap. Her only luxury was a pair of headphones, apparently her way of shutting out the outside world. They spoke little, but curled up against the exhaust-blackened marble of the old publishing firm, trying to share the same precious piece of ground without getting too close or too friendly.

Across the street and up half a block, in the doorway of a bygone brewery, a tired old vagrant relaxed on the concrete steps, his back against the bricks, just watching the never-stopping traffic. He coughed, pulled the collar of his old coat closer around his face, and spoke in a quiet voice, "Are you warm enough?"

Down the street, the girl heard the question through her headphones and called softly to the boy, "Dad wants to know if we're warm enough."

"Plenty," said the boy.

"We're fine," she spoke to the air.