Perfect alibi."

"And n.o.body else knew."

"No, of course not," he lied. Could Pepe's research have some kind of weapons application?

Something developed from those gamma-ray bursters? Norman didn't know much about it. Maybe a burst of gamma rays could catch someone on fire.

"So what about opportunity? Usually linked to motive and weapon. If this is just a criminals-killing-criminals thing, the timing of it has to be explained."

"Because it's so propitious?"

He nodded. "And risky. In broad daylight, in a neighborhood full of criminal activity, someone sneaks around behind a house, breaks a window and kills three people inside, setting the house on fire, and walks away."

"There will have been witnesses."

"Most likely, but not models of good citizenship. And they probably don't want to get on the wrong side of whoever did this. Would you?"

"But wait. There's going to be a record of your having come to my house and catching this guy, Solo, w.i.l.l.y Joe's right-hand man. Then you wind up in a house with both of them dead."

"True. Except, as far as I know, there's nothing in police records linking the two. That would have been a real red flag. He was ID'ed as an out-of-towner." He breathed out, a loud puff. "We may get lucky. That fire was so intense it probably didn't leave anything useful, DNA or skeletal remains."

"Which might in itself be suspicious."

"It happens. They had all kinds of weapons in the war that made it impossible to identify remains.

Usually intense heat and chemical action." He tapped his lower teeth with a thumbnail. "It's an angle. A possible angle."

"That someone in the military wanted to get rid of Capra?"

"Or someone with access to sophisticated weapons. I mean, suppose I just tell the truth, the part of it having to do with the weapon. Make the military connection, if no one else does."

"But then what puts you there, watching it all? Tied to a chair? Why did he kidnap you?"

"I've already got that part worked out. Fortunately, my partner and I are part of an observation team tracking drug distribution, designer drugs, inside the city limits. Capra was in it up to his elbows.

"I already told the patrolman at the hospital that's what happened: they'd followed me home and s.n.a.t.c.hed me, and once it was dark they planned to kill me in a dramatic way. That much is true. But it wasn't for being on the drug task force."

"Yeah." Norman touched his hand. "Sorry I got you into all of this."

He said something in Arabic. "What will be will be. This is not something either of us had any say in.And the evil are punished, for a change."

"Funny att.i.tude for a cop."

He smiled and nodded. "You better get back. I'll be in touch if anything happens."

Norman couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't a variant of "I hope I don't hear from you," so he just shook hands and headed back toward the house.

Should he confront Pepe with what he knew? Or just leave well enough alone. Curiosity versus grat.i.tude, with a sprinkling of fear.

When he came back into the dining room, they were clearing away dessert.

"He didn't need the string?" Dove Slidell asked.

"What?" Norman was still holding his prop. "Oh, no-he'd found one by the time I got there. We just tuned up and went through a few difficult pa.s.sages."

"Is he going to be all right?" Rory asked, trying to keep the quaver out of her voice.

"He'll be fine. I think he can go the rest of the way alone."

She nodded slowly, her eyes on his. "We're going to pick up some coffee at Nick's and go check the observatory. I won't even ask. You need your beauty sleep."

"Actually, I have to work for a bit. Started a new direction on the second part.i.ta."

"Well ... party away." They said their good-byes.

Aurora She told the car to go to Nick's place. "He'll probably be sawing away at the cello if I get home at three."

"Hard to live with an artiste?" Dove said.

"Hard to live with somebody who doesn't keep regular hours. As if I did!" She turned around in the driver's seat. "But Norm's really odd. He never sleeps more than a few hours at a time. Naps now and then, no particular schedule."

"Like Edison," Lamar said.

"No lightbulbs or phonograph. But he's a heck of a good cook."

They murmured a.s.sent. "You'll be glad when this thing's over?" Dove said. "Get back to doing actual research."

"Not as much of that as I'd like. "This 'thing' has kindled a new interest in astronomy in the young.

I've bowed to pressure and agreed to take on two sections of elementary."

"That's a lot of kids."

"Fifty apiece. But I get two new grad a.s.sistants, so I just have to lecture."

"The rest of your load stays the same?" Lamar asked.

"Yeah, but it's not bad. A graduate seminar and a small cla.s.s on nonthermal sources. And I'm getting a good bonus for the two extra sections.

"I've always enjoyed elementary. I just don't look forward to being spontaneous with the same lecture, three days a week."

Dove nodded. "I had to do two sections a couple of years back, when that boy genius from Princeton jumped ship. It's a strange sensation."

The car pulled up in front of Nick's, and the three went in for their coffee: burned, sweet, and rich.

Nick waved at Rory. "Just a second, Professor." She'd phoned in the order, not sure how late he stayed open.

She said h.e.l.lo to the only other customer, not certain whether she knew him. She'd seen him before,writing by hand in a bound journal.

The historian He nodded back at Professor Bell. She would be in the last chapter.

He returned his attention to the book, up to the 1990s now.

In August 1990, Gainesville had a week of horrid fame, all over the world. Over the s.p.a.ce of forty-eight hours, a madman captured, tortured, mutilated, and killed five students.

The bodies were rent with sixty-one slashes and stab wounds.

He carefully cleaned them up afterward-even the girl whose head he sawed off and placed at eye level on a bookshelf, for the police. Then he arranged the bodies into obscene positions.

The perversion eventually proved his undoing: he left s.e.m.e.n at the scene, and its DNA identified him with no doubt.

He'd been free for months, before being arrested on another charge. A quarter of the student body had left in fear, or in response to parents' fears. The town was haunted by terror: gun sales skyrocketed while real estate plummeted. It was a good time to buy property in the student ghetto; a bad time to live there.

In November Alarming hair growth had continued in young white males since August, when a musical mime group, the Epileptics, had been briefly popular. What caught on was not their semirandom twitching, now admired and imitated only by the very young, but their odd facial hair: each of them had a braided rope of beard growing from one cheek, and were otherwise clean-shaven. Of course it would take years to achieve a really long rope, but many adherents had managed four to six inches. They dyed it odd colors and some waxed it with a heavy pomade, so it lolled from the cheek like a spare p.e.n.i.s, much to the delight of their parents.

Two movies inspired by the Coming appeared. Second Coming was aimed at the Christian audience, and succeeded; To Serve Man, blatantly stolen from a century-old "first contact" story, did not do quite as well, once the joke of the t.i.tle became common knowledge.

Europe treaded further down the path to open war. Every member present in the German parliament died on 17 November, victims of a swift bioagent that turned their bones to jelly. No one claimed responsibility for the ma.s.sacre. The next day the Eiffel Tower came down, four people freighted with high explosives sacrificing themselves simultaneously, at the monument's four corners.

No one took credit for that, either. Official denials were discounted by most German and French citizens, as was the sober a.s.sertion that a third party was likely responsible for both atrocities; someone who would benefit from the two countries destroying one another.

Both armies ma.s.sed along the border, doing maneuvers.

Insect restaurants opened all over California, Oregon, and Washington State. One chain, Eat More Bugs, was openly xenophobic, relating bugs with the Coming-cows and pigs and chickens are your relatives; eat something alien.

Most of the survival stores were failing. People who stocked up on water and bullets and nitrogen-preserved beans only went to the store once. So it was one month of huge profits followed by bankruptcy. Some of them hung on grimly, hoping for bad news. But there was no news from s.p.a.ce; just the unchanging signal.

Norman told Aurora a version of the truth that did not include Pepe or weapons of incredible ferocity. The police investigation of the murder/arson did not publicly acknowledge that the bodies had been burned beyond even molecular recognition. The station scuttleb.u.t.t was that w.i.l.l.y Joe had arrangedthe arson to make it look as if he had died, a cover for disappearing out of sight. That was consistent with Rabin's fantastic testimony and the absolute lack of organic residue: the "men" who were holding him hostage were just convincing dummy robots, loaded with something like thermite. It would have been an expensive masquerade, but well within w.i.l.l.y Joe's budget, or at least the budget of his bosses.

Rabin had one more clandestine meeting with Norm, where they discussed the unlikelihood of that explanation. Of course, Rabin had gone along with it during the investigation, because it turned the spotlight away from him: w.i.l.l.y Joe had only picked up a cop so he would have an unimpeachable witness to his dramatic "demise."

Norm and Rabin stropped Occam's razor and concluded it must have been some clandestine military device that had fallen into the hands of an enemy of w.i.l.l.y Joe's. Norm was still thinking privately about gamma-ray bursters, but he left well enough alone there.

(An aspect of it that no one else was privy to was that the chief of police had a cousin in Washington who was high up in U.S. Army weapons research. He said there was nothing in the a.r.s.enal, or even on the drawing boards, that would do what Rabin had described. So it must have been fake.) 1 December Aurora Image of President Carlie LaSalle Image of Governor Samuel H Tierny Professor Aurora Bell Image of Dr. Grayson Pauling University of Florida Chancellor Malachi Barrett Dean of Sciences Deedee Whittier "This should be entertaining." Rory snapped off the screen.

Norman was in the supplicant's chair. "Well, I'm impressed. The leader of the Western world up at nine." He sipped coffee.

"Oh, since eight at least, putting on makeup." Rory leafed through a thin stack of papers and slid them into a plastic portfolio. She reached for his cup. "May I?"

He pushed it an inch toward her. "No sugar."

"I stand in awe of your willpower." She took a sip. "Ugh. Delicious."

"Take it along."

"They'll have some there." She gave him a good-bye peck and took her jacket off the peg. "Wasn't it raining out?"

"Stopped before I left." She'd come to the office about four and saw lightning over the horizon.

Crazy weather.

The elevator had a sharp scrubbed smell; first of the month. She put the scruffy jacket on over her businesslike meet-the-president dress, feeling bohemian. But who in Florida bothers with fancy cold-weather clothes?

The sky was gray with fast-moving clouds, the air damp and cool. It might rain again. She hurried along with the students hustling to their nine-o'clocks, some of them resolutely wearing shorts. Maybethey didn't have anything else.

She got to the conference room early and was startled to see the president already there. "It's just a test holo," Deedee said from the other side of the room. "Coffee?"

"Half a cup, sure." The holo looked absolutely real. Its eyes seemed to follow you. "I wonder how much science the holo knows. We could just go ahead and get started."

"Ye of little faith." Deedee handed her a plastic cup as she sat down, and took her own place across the table. "Let's hope it's just a pro forma pep talk."

"Not a funding cut," Rory said. "That's the first thing that occurred to me."

"It's been a real windfall for you guys."

She blew on the coffee. "You know it. Half our salary load this semester's covered by the federal grant. Of course it's generated a lot of paperwork. People trying to justify their ongoing research in terms of the Coming."

"I didn't hear that." Chancellor Barrett walked into the room.

"I didn't say it, Mai." She smiled at him. "I was temporarily in the thrall of millennial demons."

"That was last month." He poured some coffee and squeezed past Deedee to get to his a.s.signed chair. "I hope we won't have to address the spiritual side of it this time."

"G.o.d willing," Deedee said.

"Amen." The meeting a month ago with Reverend Kale had been harrowing. You were either with him or against him, and he had come to the meeting knowing that it would be a confrontation with his strongest enemies.

He tried to turn it into a ground-shaking media event, but fortunately, the press was tired of dealing with him. So it was a lot of sound and fury and no airtime.

There was a soft gong and the president came to life, a few inches higher, her hair unchanged but her blouse lavender instead of teal. Governor Tierny and Grayson Pauling appeared at the same moment.

The governor had a green suit with a red tie, Christmas coming. The science adviser always wore gray.

This morning, his skin seemed a little gray.

"Good morning," the president said, as if she meant it. A smile that revealed just a trace of her perfect teeth. "Let's get right down to business." She reached outside of the holo field and someone handed her a leather folder.

Rory had expected the Oval Office, but this was some other room, oil paintings of the presidents looking down from windowless walls.

"This is top secret. You may not discuss it with the media. A few days ago, the secretary of defense asked me to convene a secret cabinet meeting."

"Oh, no," Rory said, at the edge of audibility. Pauling looked up at her, but the president didn't seem to notice.

" ... about our preparedness for what amounts to an alien invasion. Clearly, we are not prepared, he admitted, but just as clearly, we can be."

She looked around the room as if daring anyone to speak. "We reviewed your testimony on this, and the corroborating testimony f the National Science Foundation and the American a.s.sociation for Science-"

"The Advancement of Science," Pauling corrected.