Becca: "A moving company?" And how did they know she didn't have that much?

The next morning, Becca was fifteen hundred kilometers from home. She'd been snatched, politely but firmly, and shoved into a private hopjet that had delivered her to the D.C. airport barely an hour later, a little after one o'clock in the morning, EST. Her "entourage"-she decided to think of them that way, instead of as her "handlers" or, worse, "captors"-had been pleasant, solicitous of her comfort, and entirely uninformative.

They'd hustled her off to a terrific hotel, where she was deposited in a luxury suite that contained a fresh change of clothes, which were her size and even her style, which struck her as efficient, considerate, and creepy. Clark had come with her. She recommended a hot shower before going to bed. "I've put in a seven o'clock wake-up call for you, so you won't be late for the meeting."

"What meeting?"

"The meeting," Clark said with a shrug.

Nine hours after getting on the train in Northfield, Minnesota, she was sitting in a White House waiting room decorated with paintings of former First Ladies. Clark was no longer with her, but another woman, this one named Marsden, from the same tribe as Clark, handed her a cup of coffee and said, "Relax."

"If you were in my shoes, would you relax?" Becca asked.

"I don't know exactly what shoes you're wearing," Marsden said. A navy officer was walking across the room toward them, and she added, in a low voice, "But if this guy is coming for you, my answer would be, 'No.'"

The officer was coming for her. His name was Rob, he was a lieutenant commander, and he shook her hand pleasantly and said, "You're up, you can bring your coffee," and to the escort, "I'm told she'll be half an hour or so."

Santeros was on her feet, talking to a fat man, when Becca was ushered into the Oval Office. Santeros smiled at her and waded across the carpet, extending a hand.

"Dr. Johansson, Rebecca," she said. "Good of you to come, on such short notice."

"Happy to," Becca said, biting back a less polite reply: Did I have a choice?

Santeros gestured to the fat man. "This is Jacob Vintner, my science adviser. We're going to have to make this quick. I brought you here because the United States needs your skills. We want you to design the power management system for a twenty-thermal-gigawatt reactor, and we need it rather quickly. Might you be interested? We want you badly enough to have rushed you here like this, but you're free to decline. We do have other candidates."

"I'm currently committed to a project with Minnesota Power-"

"We've already talked to your employer and they're happy to give you an indefinite leave of absence, with no loss of position or seniority, in the national interest," Santeros said.

"What kind of power plant is this?"

Vintner said, "We can't really go into the details because of national security. All I can-"

"Wait a minute," Becca said, jabbing her finger at Vintner. "This has got to be for the Mars mission! You need a big honkin' reactor, I bet. Hot damn. Okay, I'm in, on one condition."

Santeros asked Vintner, "Why do all these people have conditions?"

Vintner said, "Because they're important enough to have them, I guess."

Santeros was amused. She turned back to Becca and asked, "What's yours, Rebecca?"

"If I build your power plant, I get to go along."

Santeros nodded: "Okay."

Vintner, the bureaucrat: "Before we give you any more details or address your speculations, which we cannot confirm at this moment, we're going to need you to sign some documents." He handed her a slate.

"If this is about clearance, I'm already cleared for nuclear work," Becca said.

"We know that. This is a higher level of clearance. You were vetted for it last night," Vintner said.

Santeros walked around behind her desk, sat down, looked at a screen, tapped it a couple of times, and said to Becca, "Sit and read it."

Becca sat and gave it a quick scan. Boiled down to a few words, it said that if she talked out of turn, she was going to jail. She signed it, touched the ID square with her thumb, and handed it back to Vintner.

Santeros offered up the barest of smiles. "So we can give you a detail-and please remember what you just signed. We're not going to Mars-we're going to Saturn."

"Saturn?" Becca was dumbfounded. "Why Saturn? You can't just be one-upping the Chinese. Jupiter'd be closer. What's at Saturn?"

Santeros said to Vintner, "You're right. She is pretty smart." And to Becca: "More by accident than anything else, one of our astronomical observatories saw what we believe to be an alien starship going into Saturn-and we believe there's something else there, possibly a station."

"Holy shit!"

"Exactly. I'm sure you can work out the implications."

"But . . ." Becca rubbed her forehead with a knuckle, thinking, then said, "It'll take us years to get out there."

"Not with the power plant you're going to design," Vintner said.

Crow had never allowed himself to get tired, when he didn't have to. Other people could get tired, but not him: he'd taught himself to sleep, anytime, anyplace. He'd slept on helicopters on combat missions, he'd slept in fighter planes, he'd deliberately put himself to sleep in the President's private office, waiting for her to return from a meeting.

His wrist-wrap tapped him, and his eyes popped open. The limo was easing through the narrow, rotting streets of the Ninth Ward, reading the address sensors buried in the street. Crow popped a piece of breath-cleaning gum, poured a palmful of water from a bottle, wiped it across his eyes, checked the time: he'd gotten a solid forty-five minutes rolling in from Louis Armstrong International.

A minute later, the limo eased to a stop outside a dilapidated faux-Restoration house. Crow picked up his slate, stuck it in his jacket pocket, got out, walked up the badly cracked sidewalk, pushed the doorbell, and stood back to look at the moss.

Moss everywhere, including fine tendrils advancing across the windows. The Restoration style became popular after Hurricane Clarence flooded the city in 2044. New Orleans had been submerged three times in the first half of the century, and each time, the levees were built higher, the pumps made bigger, and the city fathers swore that once and for all they'd solved the problems born of rising seas and eroding deltas.

The residents hadn't believed them in 2044, any more than they had the two previous times, but that hadn't stopped them from rebuilding. Now, with almost a quarter century gone since the last wipeout, houses that had been new in 2045 were beginning to sink into the landscape.

There was no response to the doorbell. Crow leaned on it again, and this time, heard a muffled bellow from inside; unintelligible, but not panicked or in pain. Crow tried the doorknob, which was unlocked, and as the door swung open he heard a more intelligible bellow: ". . . open, let yourself in!"

"Mr. Clover?"

"I'm in the kitchen. Come on back. Don't kick the cat."

Crow stepped inside, closed the door, stepped over an old, scruffy gray cat sleeping on the floor next to an ottoman, and threaded his way through a mass of paper-books, magazines, journals, legal pads-that occupied all visible surfaces but one: an easy chair.

The kitchen was at the rear of the house, and the man in the kitchen, his wide back to Crow, called, "Who is it?"

Crow found the question interesting: first, "Come in," followed by "Who is it?"-he'd never in his life done things in that order. The man hadn't even turned to check him out: he was stirring something on a stove, and whatever it was, smelled wonderful.

"My name is Crow," Crow said. "I work for the President. We've been trying to get in touch with you."

Now Clover turned, a wooden spoon in his hand. He was a heavyset man, but not overly fat. He'd played pro football for a couple of years, a tackle, and had stayed in okay but not great shape. He had a beard and was wearing eyeglasses; the combination suggested a taste for anachronism.

He looked at Crow for a few seconds, then said, "Sonofabitch, you're real? I thought you were a spammer."

Crow began, "Maybe you should have-"

"Give me a minute. I just started sauteing the tomatoes and I don't want them to burn. Take that green wooden chair there-not the red one, that's for the cat."

The air was faintly blue with smoke, and smelled of cumin, pepper, oregano, and marijuana. Crow picked up a copy of Nature that was sitting on the green chair, sat down, looked for a place to put the magazine, and finally put it on the cat's chair. Crow's stomach rumbled; he hadn't had a decent meal since Darlington had taken him to a Mexican restaurant in Pasadena.

He said, "So . . . do you usually assume the Office of the President of the United States is a spammer?"

"Well, wouldn't you?" Clover asked. "You're sitting in a restaurant in the French Quarter, your mouth is open, you're about to stick the most delicate cream puff into it, with the flakiest butter crust, your computer dings, and it says, 'Greetings from the President of the United States.' What would you do? I deleted it and ate the bun."

"I see a certain logic in that," Crow admitted, "which is why we have authentication certificates."

"Yeah, well, my neighbor boy could produce one of those in about five minutes."

"Anyway, Mr. Clover-"

"Call me John."

"We'd like you to go to Mars with us."

Clover didn't say anything, but turned and gave Crow a long, steady look, then said, "Bullshit." And, "One more comment like that, I'll kick you out of here and eat by myself. So don't lie to me anymore. Just tell me the truth about what you want, and we'll work from there."

Crow crossed his legs and said, "That was the truth."

"Bullshit . . . well, hmm. Give me a minute. What you're telling me is, the reason the Chinese are going to Mars is that you've all found out that Deimos is a hollow shell left there by the LGMs, and so the race is on."

"What's Deimos? What're LGMs?"

"Deimos is the smaller of Mars's two moons and has some oddities. LGMs are Little Green Men. If you really don't know what Deimos is, then you were lying to me. Actually, you're lying to me either way-either you know about Deimos, or you don't want me to go to Mars."

"You're confusing me here."

"You don't look confused. By the way, do you have a badge?"

"Sure." Crow took an ID out of his pocket, held it up. Clover had a wrist-wrap on the kitchen counter and picked it up, waved it toward the ID, and a line in the wrap turned green. The ID was real.

"Okay, you're something," Clover said.

"Tell me why I'm lying," Crow said.

"Because there are two things I'm known for. The first is my studies of ancient Mayan hydraulic technology. It's brilliant work, if I do say so myself-and I often do. But it wouldn't be of much interest to the President of the United States." Clover took another sip of the jambalaya, swirled it in his mouth, swallowed, and continued. "The second is my entirely hypothetical work on how technologies and cultures might develop in alternate ways from ours, especially given different starting points, culturally, psychologically, and even physically. In other words, how alien civilizations might turn out. Mars has no LGMs. Mars doesn't even have living bacteria, as far as we know. We've mapped everything on the surface bigger than a baseball, and there are no hatches, doors, portals, ducts, or discarded pizza boxes. So there's no reason for an anthropologist to go there."

"All right."

Clover picked up the remnants of a joint, touched it to a flame from a burner, took a drag, adding to the mix of aromas in the room. "So what do you want, Mr. Crow?"

"We want you to sign a bunch of security regs that say you'll go to prison if you talk about what we tell you. Believe me, if you talk, you go to prison. If you don't talk, you become, in due time, the richest and best-known anthropologist on Earth."

"Wait: something popped out of the ice in Antarctica . . ."

"No. Nothing popped out of any ice."

"You found something on the sea floor?"

"No."

"Shit. I don't need the money-I mean, what could be better than this place?-but I wouldn't mind being famous," Clover said.

"That could happen," Crow said.

"You want some jambalaya?"

"Yes." Crow did; his meal schedule was leaning heavily on McDonald's.

"You want a hit on the joint?"

"No."

Clover carefully stubbed out the joint, saving the best for last. "Although Louisiana is one of only six states that outlaws weed for anything but medicinal purposes, I want you to know, I don't use weed for medicinal purposes. I use it strictly to get stoned."

"That confirms our research in choosing you for the Mars trip," Crow said. "We've got a specific slot for a weeder. Without that qualification, we'd have approached Jeb Rouser."

Clover bristled. "That charlatan? Let me tell you about Mr. Rouser, Mr. Crow. Anthropologically speaking, Rouser couldn't find his own asshole with both hands and a searchlight. He thinks-"

"He's the Morton K. Brigham Professor of Anthropological Research at Yale University."

"Fuck Morton K. Brigham and Yale University," Clover said. "You ever been to that place? You have to have a pole stuck up your ass before you're allowed to walk on campus. Seriously, they have a booth with poles. Before they hire you for a job, they stick a second pole up there."

"We were told you were perhaps the better choice, but there was an argument-"

"I'm better by a very wide margin, especially if this involves LGMs," Clover said. "But enough about me." The jambalaya smelled so good that Crow thought he might faint. "Give me what I need to sign, and fill me in."

Crow reached into his inside jacket pocket, extracted a mini-slate, and pushed it across the table to Clover.

"You can read them if you want, but I gotta tell you, they're pretty boring."

Clover was already flipping pages, dating and thumbing them. "Doesn't matter. I want to hear the whole story, and you know I want to hear the whole story, and if I don't sign our little tea party never happened and you don't exist. Anything else important?"

"Nope. That's about it."

"It'll be a while before the jambalaya is just right," Clover said. "I've got some chairs in there, somewhere." They moved into the other room, where Clover made another overstuffed chair appear out of the clutter. "So what's up?"

They sat down and Crow laid it out. Fifteen minutes later, Clover pushed himself out of his chair and asked, "You want a large bowl or a gigantic bowl?"

"Gigantic."

"Good man."

- Clover came back two minutes later with the jambalaya and two bottles of beer, and said, "If I didn't miss anything, the short version goes like this: something you think is a starship came and stopped in Saturn's rings and rendezvoused with some kind of 'whatever.' You haven't had any evidence of communication between your starship and the 'whatever.' Neither of these artifacts has made an attempt to contact or communicate with us-"

"We don't know that," Crow interrupted. "We don't know if we'd recognize an attempt to communicate."