Prey

DAY 1
10:04 A.M.

Things never turn out the way you think they will.

I never intended to become a househusband. Stay-at-home husband. Full-time dad, whatever you want to call it-there is no good term for it. But that's what I had become in the last six months. Now I was in Crate Barrel in downtown San Jose, picking up some extra glasses, and while I was there I noticed they had a good selection of placemats. We needed more placemats; the woven oval ones that Julia had bought a year ago were getting pretty worn, and the weave was crusted with baby food. The trouble was, they were woven, so you couldn't wash them. So I stopped at the display to see if they had any placemats that might be good, and I found some pale blue ones that were nice, and I got some white napkins. And then some yellow placemats caught my eye, because they looked really bright and appealing, so I got those, too. They didn't have six on the shelf, and I thought we'd better have six, so I asked the salesgirl to look in the back and see if they had more. While she was gone I put the placemat on the table, and put a white dish on it, and then I put a yellow napkin next to it. The setting looked very cheerful, and I began to think maybe I should get eight instead of six. That was when my cell phone rang.

It was Julia. "Hi, hon."

"Hi, Julia. How's it going?" I said. I could hear machinery in the background, a steady chugging. Probably the vacuum pump for the electron microscope. They had several scanning electron microscopes at her laboratory.

She said, "What're you doing?"

"Buying placemats, actually."

"Where?"

"Crate and Barrel."

She laughed. "You the only guy there?"

"No…"

"Oh, well, that's good," she said. I could tell Julia was completely uninterested in this conversation. Something else was on her mind. "Listen, I wanted to tell you, Jack, I'm really sorry, but it's going to be a late night again."

"Uh-huh…" The salesgirl came back, carrying more yellow mats. Still holding the phone to my ear, I beckoned her over. I held up three fingers, and she put down three more mats. To Julia, I said, "Is everything all right?"

"Yeah, it's just crazy like normal. We're broadcasting a demo by satellite today to the VCs in Asia and Europe, and we're having trouble with the satellite hookup at this end because the video truck they sent-oh, you don't want to know… anyway, we're going to be delayed two hours, hon. Maybe more. I won't get back until eight at the earliest. Can you feed the kids and put them to bed?"

"No problem," I said. And it wasn't. I was used to it. Lately, Julia had been working very long hours. Most nights she didn't get home until the children were asleep. Xymos Technology, the company she worked for, was trying to raise another round of venture capital-twenty million dollars-and there was a lot of pressure. Especially since Xymos was developing technology in what the company called "molecular manufacturing," but which most people called nanotechnology. Nano wasn't popular with the VCs-the venture capitalists-these days. Too many VCs had been burned in the last ten years with products that were supposedly just around the corner, but then never made it out of the lab. The VCs considered nano to be all promise, no products.

Not that Julia needed to be told that; she'd worked for two VC firms herself. Originally trained as a child psychologist, she ended up as someone who specialized in "technology incubation," helping fledgling technology companies get started. (She used to joke she was still doing child psychology.) Eventually, she'd stopped advising firms and joined one of them full-time. She was now a vice president at Xymos.

Julia said Xymos had made several breakthroughs, and was far ahead of others in the field. She said they were just days away from a prototype commercial product. But I took what she said with a grain of salt.

"Listen, Jack, I want to warn you," she said, in a guilty voice, "that Eric is going to be upset."

"Why?"

"Well… I told him I would come to the game."

"Julia, why? We talked about making promises like this. There's no way you can make that game. It's at three o'clock. Why'd you tell him you would?"

"I thought I could make it."

I sighed. It was, I told myself, a sign of her caring. "Okay. Don't worry, honey. I'll handle it."

"Thanks. Oh, and Jack? The placemats? Whatever you do, just don't get yellow, okay?"

And she hung up.

I made spaghetti for dinner because there was never an argument about spaghetti. By eight o'clock, the two little ones were asleep, and Nicole was finishing her homework. She was twelve, and had to be in bed by ten o'clock, though she didn't like any of her friends to know that.

The littlest one, Amanda, was just nine months. She was starting to crawl everywhere, and to stand up holding on to things. Eric was eight; he was a soccer kid, and liked to play all the time, when he wasn't dressing up as a knight and chasing his older sister around the house with his plastic sword.

Nicole was in a modest phase of her life; Eric liked nothing better than to grab her bra and go running around the house, shouting, "Nicky wears a bra-a! Nicky wears a bra-a!" while Nicole, too dignified to pursue him, gritted her teeth and yelled, "Dad? He's doing it again! Dad!" And I would have to go chase Eric and tell him not to touch his sister's things. This was what my life had become. At first, after I lost the job at MediaTronics, it was interesting to deal with sibling rivalry. And often, it seemed, not that different from what my job had been.

At MediaTronics I had run a program division, riding herd over a group of talented young computer programmers. At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person's job. So I managed the team, and it was a full-time job; like most Silicon Valley programmers, my team seemed to live in a perpetual crisis of crashed Porsches, infidelities, bad love affairs, parental hassles, and drug reactions, all superimposed on a forced-march work schedule with all-night marathons fueled by cases of Diet Coke and Sun chips.

But the work was exciting, in a cutting-edge field. We wrote what are called distributed parallel processing or agent-based programs. These programs model biological processes by creating virtual agents inside the computer and then letting the agents interact to solve real-world problems. It sounds strange, but it works fine. For example, one of our programs imitated ant foraging-how ants find the shortest path to food-to route traffic through a big telephone network. Other programs mimicked the behavior of termites, swarming bees, and stalking lions. It was fun, and I would probably still be there if I hadn't taken on some additional responsibilities. In my last few months there, I'd been put in charge of security, replacing an outside tech consultant who'd had the job for two years but had failed to detect the theft of company source code, until it turned up in a program being marketed out of Taiwan. Actually, it was my division's source code-software for distributed processing. That was the code that had been stolen.

We knew it was the same code, because the Easter eggs hadn't been touched. Programmers always insert Easter eggs into their code, little nuggets that don't serve any useful purpose and are just put there for fun. The Taiwanese company hadn't changed any of them; they used our code wholesale. So the keystrokes Alt-Shift-M-9 would open up a window giving the date of one of our programmers' marriage. Clear theft.

Of course we sued, but Don Gross, the head of the company, wanted to make sure it didn't happen again. So he put me in charge of security, and I was angry enough about the theft to take the job. It was only part-time; I still ran the division. The first thing I did as security officer was to monitor workstation use. It was pretty straightforward; these days, eighty percent of companies monitor what their workers do at terminals. They do it by video, or they do it by recording keystrokes, or by scanning email for certain keywords… all sorts of procedures out there.

Don Gross was a tough guy, an ex-Marine who had never lost his military manner. When I told him about the new system, he said, "But you're not monitoring my terminal, right?" Of course not, I said. In fact, I'd set up the programs to monitor every computer in the company, his included. And that was how I discovered, two weeks later, that Don was having an affair with a girl in accounting, and had authorized her to have a company car. I went to him and said that based on emails relating to Jean in accounting, it appeared that someone unknown was having an affair with her, and that she might be getting perks she wasn't entitled to. I said I didn't know who the person was, but if they kept using email, I'd soon find out. I figured Don would take the hint, and he did. But now he just sent incriminating email from his home, never realizing that everything went through the company server and I was getting it all. That's how I learned he was "discounting" software to foreign distributors, and taking large "consultant fees" into an account in the Cayman Islands. This was clearly illegal, and I couldn't overlook it. I consulted my attorney, Gary Marder, who advised me to quit.

"Quit?" I said.

"Yeah. Of course."

"Why?"

"Who cares why? You got a better offer elsewhere. You've got some health problems. Or some family issues. Trouble at home. Just get out of there. Quit."

"Wait a minute," I said. "You think I should quit because he's breaking the law? Is that your advice to me?"

"No," Gary said. "As your attorney, my advice is that if you are aware of any illegal activity you have a duty to report it. But as your friend, my advice is to keep your mouth shut and get out of there fast."

"Seems kind of cowardly. I think I have to notify the investors." Gary sighed. He put his hand on my shoulder. "Jack," he said, "the investors can look out for themselves. You get the fuck out of there."

I didn't think that was right. I had been annoyed when my code had been stolen. Now I found myself wondering if it actually had been stolen. Maybe it had been sold. We were a privately held company, and I told one of the board members.

It turned out he was in on it. I was fired the next day for gross negligence and misconduct. Litigation was threatened; I had to sign a raft of NDAs in order to get my severance package. My attorney handled the paperwork for me, sighing with every new document.

At the end, we went outside into the milky sunshine. I said, "Well, at least that's over."

He turned and looked at me. "Why do you say that?" he said.

Because of course it wasn't over. In some mysterious way, I had become a marked man. My qualifications were excellent and I worked in a hot field. But when I went on job interviews I could tell they weren't interested. Worse, they were uncomfortable. Silicon Valley covers a big area, but it's a small place. Word gets out. Eventually I found myself talking to an interviewer I knew slightly, Ted Landow. I'd coached his kid in Little League baseball the year before. When the interview was over, I said to him, "What have you heard about me?" He shook his head. "Nothing, Jack."

I said, "Ted, I've been on ten interviews in ten days. Tell me."

"There's nothing to tell."

"Ted."

He shuffled through his papers, looking down at them, not at me. He sighed. "Jack Forman. Troublemaker. Not cooperative. Belligerent. Hot-headed. Not a team player." He hesitated, then said, "And supposedly you were involved in some kind of dealings. They won't say what, but some kind of shady dealings. You were on the take."

"I was on the take?" I said. I felt a flood of anger, and started to say more, until I realized I was probably looking hotheaded and belligerent. So I shut up, and thanked him. As I was leaving, he said, "Jack, do yourself a favor. Give it a while. Things change fast in the Valley. Your rйsumй is strong and your skill set is outstanding. Wait until…" He shrugged.

"A couple of months?"

"I'd say four. Maybe five."

Somehow I knew he was right. After that, I stopped trying so hard. I began to hear rumors that MediaTronics was going belly up, and there might be indictments. I smelled vindication ahead, but in the meantime there was nothing to do but wait.

The strangeness of not going to work in the morning slowly faded. Julia was working longer hours at her job, and the kids were demanding; if I was in the house they turned to me, instead of our housekeeper, Maria. I started taking them to school, picking them up, driving them to the doctor, the orthodontist, soccer practice. The first few dinners I cooked were disastrous, but I got better.

And before I knew it, I was buying placemats and looking at table settings in Crate Barrel. And it all seemed perfectly normal.

Julia got home around nine-thirty. I was watching the Giants game on TV, not really paying attention. She came in and kissed me on the back of my neck. She said, "They all asleep?"

"Except Nicole. She's still doing homework."

"Jeez, isn't it late for her to be up?"

"No, hon," I said. "We agreed. This year she gets to stay up until ten, remember?" Julia shrugged, as if she didn't remember. And maybe she didn't. We had undergone a sort of inversion of roles; she had always been more knowledgeable about the kids, but now I was. Sometimes Julia felt uncomfortable with that, experiencing it somehow as a loss of power.

"How's the little one?"

"Her cold is better. Just sniffles. She's eating more."

I walked with Julia to the bedrooms. She went into the baby's room, bent over the crib, and kissed the sleeping child tenderly. Watching her, I thought there was something about a mother's caring that a father could never match. Julia had some connection to the kids that I never would. Or at least a different connection. She listened to the baby's soft breathing, and said, "Yes, she's better."

Then she went into Eric's room, took the Game Boy off the bed covers, gave me a frown. I shrugged, faintly irritated; I knew Eric played with his Game Boy when he was supposed to be going to sleep, but I was busy getting the baby down at that time, and I overlooked it. I thought Julia should be more understanding.

Then she went into Nicole's room. Nicole was on her laptop, but shut the lid when her mother walked in. "Hi, Mom."

"You're up late."

"No, Mom…"

"You're supposed to be doing homework."

"I did it."

"Then why aren't you in bed?"

"Because-"

"I don't want you spending all night talking to your friends on the computer."

"Mom…" she said, in a pained voice.

"You see them every day at school, that should be enough."

"Mom…"

"Don't look at your father. We already know he'll do whatever you want. I'm talking to you, now."

She sighed. "I know, Mom."

This kind of interaction was increasingly common between Nicole and Julia. I guess it was normal at this age, but I thought I'd step in. Julia was tired, and when she was tired she got rigid and controlling. I put my arm around her shoulder and said, "It's late for everybody. Want a cup of tea?"

"Jack, don't interfere."

"I'm not, I just-"

"Yes, you are. I'm talking to Nicole and you're interfering, the way you always do."

"Honey, we all agreed she could stay up until ten, I don't know what this-"

"But if she's finished her homework, she should go to bed."

"That wasn't the deal."

"I don't want her spending all day and night on the computer."

"She's not, Julia."

At that point, Nicole burst into tears, and jumped to her feet crying, "You always criticize me! I hate you!" She ran into the bathroom and slammed the door. That woke the baby, who started to cry.

Julia turned to me and said, "If you would please just let me handle this myself, Jack."

And I said, "You're right. I'm sorry. You're right."

In truth, that wasn't what I thought at all. More and more, I regarded this as my house, and my kids. She was barging into my house, late at night, when I'd gotten everything quiet, the way I liked it, the way it should be. And she was raising a fuss.

I didn't think she was right at all. I thought she was wrong. And in the last few weeks I'd noticed that incidents like this had become more frequent. At first, I thought Julia felt guilty about being away so much. Then I thought she was reasserting her authority, trying to regain control of a household that had fallen into my hands. Then I thought it was because she was tired, or under so much pressure at work. But lately I felt I was making excuses for her behavior. I started to have the feeling Julia had changed. She was different, somehow, tenser, tougher.

The baby was howling. I picked her up from the crib, hugged her, cooed at her, and simultaneously stuck a finger down the back of the diaper to see if it was wet. It was. I put her down on her back on top of the dresser, and she howled again until I shook her favorite rattle, and put it in her hand. She was silent then, allowing me to change her without much kicking. "I'll do that," Julia said, coming in.

"It's okay."

"I woke her up, it's only right I do it."

"Really honey, it's fine."

Julia put her hand on my shoulder, kissed the back of my neck. "I'm sorry I'm such a jerk. I'm really tired. I don't know what came over me. Let me change the baby, I never get to see her."

"Okay," I said. I stepped aside, and she moved in.

"Hi, Poopsie-doopsie," she said, chucking the baby under the chin. "How's my little Winkie-dinkie?" All this attention made the baby drop the rattle, and then she started to cry, and to twist away on the table. Julia didn't notice the missing rattle caused the crying; instead she made soothing sounds and struggled to put on the new diaper, but the baby's twisting and kicking made it hard. "Amanda, stop it!"

I said, "She does that now." And it was true, Amanda was in the stage where she actively resisted a diaper change. And she could kick pretty hard.

"Well, she should stop. Stop!"

The baby cried louder, tried to turn away. One of the adhesive tabs pulled off. The diaper slid down. Amanda was now rolling toward the edge of the dresser. Julia pulled her back roughly. Amanda never stopped kicking.

"God damn it, I said stop!" Julia said, and smacked the baby on the leg. The baby just cried harder, kicked harder. "Amanda! Stop it! Stop it!" She slapped her again. "Stop it! Stop it!" For a moment I didn't react. I was stunned. I didn't know what to do. The baby's legs were bright red. Julia was still hitting her. "Honey…" I said, leaning in, "let's not-" Julia exploded. "Why do you always fucking interfere?" she yelled, slamming her hand down on the dresser. "What is your fucking problem?"

And she stomped off, leaving the room.

I let out a long breath, and picked the baby up. Amanda howled inconsolably, as much in confusion as in pain. I figured I would need to give her a bottle to get her to sleep again. I stroked her back until she settled down a little. Then I got her diaper on, and brought her into the kitchen while I heated a bottle. The lights were low, just the fluorescents over the counter. Julia was sitting at the table, drinking beer out of a bottle, staring into space. "When are you going to get a job?" she said.

"I'm trying."

"Really? I don't think you're trying at all. When was your last interview?"

"Last week," I said.

She grunted. "I wish you'd hurry up and get one," she said, "because this is driving me crazy." I swallowed anger. "I know. It's hard for everybody," I said. It was late at night, and I didn't want to argue anymore. But I was watching her out of the corner of my eye. At thirty-six, Julia was a strikingly pretty woman, petite, with dark hair and dark eyes, upturned nose, and the kind of personality that people called bubbly or sparkling. Unlike many tech executives, she was attractive and approachable. She made friends easily, and had a good sense of humor. Years back, when we first had Nicole, Julia would come home with hilarious accounts of the foibles of her VC partners. We used to sit at this same kitchen table and laugh until I felt physically sick, while little Nicole would tug at her arm and say, "What's the funny, Mom? What's the funny?" because she wanted to be in on the joke. Of course we could never explain it to her, but Julia always seemed to have a new "Knock knock" joke for Nicole, so she could join in the laughter, too. Julia had a real gift for seeing the humorous side of life. She was famous for her equanimity; she almost never lost her temper. Right now, of course, she was furious. Not even willing to look at me. Sitting in the dark at the round kitchen table, one leg crossed over the other, kicking impatiently while she stared into space. As I looked at her, I had the feeling that her appearance had changed, somehow. Of course she had lost weight recently, part of the strain of the job. A certain softness in her face was gone; her cheekbones protruded more; her chin seemed sharper. It made her look harder, but in a way more glamorous.

Her clothes were different, too. Julia was wearing a dark skirt and a white blouse, sort of standard business attire. But the skirt was tighter than usual. And her kicking foot made me notice she was wearing slingback high heels. What she used to call fuck-me shoes. The kind of shoes she would never wear to work.

And then I realized that everything about her was different-her manner, her appearance, her mood, everything-and in a flash of insight I knew why: my wife was having an affair. The water on the stove began to steam, and I pulled out the bottle, tested it on my forearm. It had gotten too hot, and I would have to wait a minute for it to cool. The baby started to cry, and I bounced her a little on my shoulder, while I walked her around the room. Julia never looked at me. She just kept swinging her foot, and staring into space. I had read somewhere that this was a syndrome. The husband's out of work, his masculine appeal declines, his wife no longer respects him, and she wanders. I had read that in Glamour or Redbook or one of those magazines around the house that I glanced through while waiting for the washing machine to finish its cycle, or the microwave to thaw the hamburger. But now I was flooded with confused feelings. Was it really true? Was I just tired, making up bad stories in my mind? After all, what difference did it make if she was wearing tighter skirts and different shoes? Fashions changed. People felt different on different days. And just because she was sometimes angry, did that really mean she was having an affair? Of course it didn't. I was probably just feeling inadequate, unattractive. These were probably my insecurities coming out. My thoughts went on in this vein for a while.

But for some reason, I couldn't talk myself out of it. I was sure it was true. I had lived with this woman for more than twelve years. I knew she was different, and I knew why. I could sense the presence of someone else, an outside person, some intruder in our relationship. I felt it with a conviction that surprised me. I felt it in my bones, like an ache. I had to turn away. …

The baby took the bottle, gurgling happily. In the darkened kitchen, she stared up at my face with that peculiar fixed stare that babies have. It was sort of soothing, watching her. After a while she closed her eyes, and then her mouth went slack. I put her on my shoulder and burped her as I carried her back into her bedroom. Most parents pat their babies too hard, trying to get a burp. It's better to just rub the flat of your hand up their back, and sometimes just along the spine with two fingers. She gave a soft belch, and relaxed.

I set her down in the crib, and I turned out the night-light. Now the only light in the room came from the aquarium, bubbling green-blue in the corner. A plastic diver trudged along the bottom, trailing bubbles.

As I turned to go, I saw Julia silhouetted in the doorway, dark hair backlit. She had been watching me. I couldn't read her expression. She stalked forward. I tensed. She put her arms around me and rested her head on my chest.

"Please forgive me," she said. "I'm a real jerk. You're doing a wonderful job. I'm just jealous, that's all." My shoulder was wet with her tears.

"I understand," I said, holding her. "It's okay."

I waited to see if my body relaxed, but it didn't. I was suspicious and alert. I had a bad feeling about her, and it wasn't going away.

She came out of the shower into the bedroom, toweling her short hair dry. I was sitting on the bed, trying to watch the rest of the game. It occurred to me that she never used to take showers at night. Julia always took a shower in the morning before work. Now, I realized, she often came home and went straight to the shower before coming out to say hello to the kids. My body was still tense. I flicked the TV off. I said, "How was the demo?"

"The what?"

"The demo. Didn't you have a demo today?"

"Oh," she said. "Oh, yes. We did. It went fine, when we finally got it going. The VCs in Germany couldn't stay for all of it because of the time change, but-listen, do you want to see it?"

"What do you mean?"

"I have a dub of it. Want to see it?"

I was surprised. I shrugged. "Okay, sure."

"I'd really like to know what you think, Jack." I detected a patronizing tone. My wife was including me in her work. Making me feel a part of her life. I watched as she opened her briefcase and took out a DVD. She stuck it in the player, and came back to sit with me on the bed.

"What were you demoing?" I said.

"The new medical imaging technology," she said. "It's really slick, if I say so myself." She snuggled up, tucking herself into my shoulder. All very cozy, just like old times. I still felt uneasy, but I put my arm around her.

"By the way," I said, "how come you take showers at night now, instead of in the morning?"

"I don't know," she said. "Do I? I guess I do. It just seems easier, honey. Mornings are so rushed, and I've been getting those conference calls from Europe, they take so much time-okay, here we go," she said, pointing to the screen. I saw black-and-white scramble, and then the image resolved.

The tape showed Julia in a large laboratory that was fitted out like an operating room. A man lay on his back on the gurney, an IV in his arm, an anesthesiologist standing by. Above the table was a round flat metal plate about six feet in diameter, which could be raised and lowered, but was now raised. There were video monitors all around. And in the foreground, peering at a monitor, was Julia. There was a video technician by her side. "This is terrible," she was saying, pointing to the monitor. "What's all the interference?"

"We think it's the air purifiers. They're causing it."

"Well, this is unacceptable."

"Really?"

"Yes, really."

"What do you want us to do?"

"I want you to fix it," Julia said.

"Then we have to boost power, and you have-"

"I don't care," she said. "I can't show the VCs an image of this quality. They've seen better pictures from Mars. Fix it."

Beside me on the bed, Julia said, "I didn't know they recorded all this. This is before the demo. You can fast forward."

I pushed the remote. The picture scrambled. I waited a few seconds, and played it again.

Same scene. Julia still in the foreground. Carol, her assistant, whispering to her.

"Okay, but then what do I tell him?"

"Tell him no."

"But he wants to get started."

"I understand. But the transmission isn't for an hour. Tell him no."

On the bed, Julia said to me, "Mad Dog was our experimental subject. He was very restless. Impatient to get started."

On the screen, the assistant lowered her voice. "I think he's nervous, Julia. I would be, too, with a couple of million of those things crawling around inside my body-"

"It's not a couple of million, and they're not crawling," Julia said. "Anyway, they're his invention."

"Even so."

"Isn't that an anesthesiologist over there?"

"No, just a cardiologist."

"Well, maybe the cardiologist can give him something for his nervousness."

"They already did. An injection."

On the bed beside me, Julia said, "Fast forward, Jack." I did. The picture jumped ahead.

"Okay, here."

I saw Julia standing at the monitor again, with the technician beside her. "That's acceptable," onscreen Julia was saying, pointing to the image. "Not great, but acceptable. Now, show me the STM."

"The what?"

"The STM. The electron microscope. Show me the image from that."

The technician looked confused. "Uh… Nobody told us about any electron microscope."

"For God's sake, read the damn storyboards!"

The technician blinked. "It's on the storyboards?"

"Did you look at the storyboards?"

"I'm sorry, I guess I must have missed it."

"There's no time now to be sorry. Fix it!"

"You don't have to shout."

"Yes I do! I have to shout, because I'm surrounded by idiots!" She waved her hands in the air. "I'm about to go online and talk to eleven billion dollars of venture capital in five countries and show them submicroscopic technology, except I don't have a microscope feed, so they can't see the technology!"

On the bed, Julia said, "I kind of lost it with this guy. It was so frustrating. We had a clock counting down to the satellite time, which was booked and locked. We couldn't change it. We had to make the time, and this guy was a dimbus. But eventually we got it working. Fast forward."

The screen showed a static card, which read:

A Private Demonstration of

Advanced Medical Imaging by

Xymos Technology

Mountain View, CA

World Leader in Molecular Manufacturing Then, on the screen, Julia appeared, standing in front of the gurney and the medical apparatus. She'd brushed her hair and tucked in her blouse.

"Hello to all of you," she said, smiling at the camera. "I'm Julia Forman of Xymos Technology, and we're about to demonstrate a revolutionary medical imaging procedure just developed here. Our subject, Peter Morris, is lying behind me on the table. In a few moments, we're going to look inside his heart and blood vessels with an ease and accuracy never before possible." She began walking around the table, talking as she went.

"Unlike cardiac catheterization, our procedure is one hundred percent safe. And unlike catheterization, we can look everywhere in the body, at every sort of vessel, no matter how large or small. We'll see inside his aorta, the largest artery of the body. But we'll also look inside the alveoli of his lungs, and the tiny capillaries of his fingertips. We can do all this because the camera we put inside his vessels is smaller than a red blood cell. Quite a bit smaller, actually. "Xymos microfabrication technology can now produce these miniaturized cameras, and produce them in quantity-cheaply, quickly. It would take a thousand of them just to make a dot the size of a pencil point. We can fabricate a kilogram of these cameras in an hour. "I'm sure you are all skeptical. We're well aware that nanotechnology has made promises it couldn't deliver. As you know, the problem has been that scientists could design molecular-scale devices, but they couldn't manufacture them. But Xymos has solved that problem."

It suddenly hit me, what she was saying. "What?" I said, sitting up in bed. "Are you kidding?" If it was true, it was an extraordinary development, a genuine technological breakthrough, and it meant"It's true," Julia said quietly. "We're manufacturing in Nevada." She smiled, enjoying my astonishment.

Onscreen, Julia was saying, "I have one of our Xymos cameras under the electron microscope, here"-she pointed to the screen-"so you can see it in comparison to the red blood cell alongside it."

The image changed to black-and-white. I saw a fine probe push what looked like a tiny squid into position on a titanium field. It was a bullet-nosed lump with streaming filaments at the rear. It was a tenth of the size of the red blood cell, which in the vacuum of the scanning electron microscope was a wrinkled oval, like a gray raisin.

"Our camera is one ten-billionth of an inch in length. As you see, it is shaped like a squid," Julia said. "Imaging takes place in the nose. Microtubules in the tail provide stabilization, like the tail of a kite. But they can also lash actively, and provide locomotion. Jerry, if we can turn the camera to see the nose… Okay, there. Thank you. Now, from the front, you see that indentation in the center? That is the miniature gallium arsenide photon detector, acting as a retina, and the surrounding banded area-sort of like a radial tire-is bioluminescent, and lights the area ahead. Within the nose itself you may be able to just make out a rather complex series of twisted molecules. That is our patented ATP cascade. You can think of it as a primitive brain, which controls the behavior of the camera-very limited behavior, true, but enough for our purposes."

I heard a hiss of static, and a cough. The screen image opened a small window in the corner, and now showed Fritz Leidermeyer, in Germany. The investor shifted his enormous bulk. "I'm sorry, Ms. Forman. Tell me please where is the lens?"

"There is no lens."

"How can you have a camera with no lens?"

"I'll explain that as we go," she said.

Watching, I said, "It must be a camera obscura."

"Right," she said, nodding.

Camera obscura-Latin for "dark room"-was the oldest imaging device known. The Romans had found that if you made a small hole in the wall of a dark room, an upside-down image of the exterior appeared on the opposite wall. That was because light coming through any small aperture was focused, as if by a lens. It was the same principle as a kid's pinhole camera. It was why ever since Roman times, image-recording devices were called cameras. But in this case"What makes the aperture?" I said. "Is there a pinhole?"

"I thought you knew," she said. "You're responsible for that part."

"Me?"

"Yes. Xymos licensed some agent-based algorithms that your team wrote."

"No, I didn't know. Which algorithms?"

"To control a particle network."

"Your cameras are networked? All those little cameras communicate with each other?"

"Yes," she said. "They're a swarm, actually." She was still smiling, amused by my reactions.

"A swarm." I was thinking it over, trying to understand what she was telling me. Certainly my team had written a number of programs to control swarms of agents. Those programs were modeled on behavior of bees. The programs had many useful characteristics. Because swarms were composed of many agents, the swarm could respond to the environment in a robust way. Faced with new and unexpected conditions, the swarm programs didn't crash; they just sort of flowed around the obstacles, and kept going.

But our programs worked by creating virtual agents inside the computer. Julia had created real agents in the real world. At first I didn't see how our programs could be adapted to what she was doing.

"We use them for structure," she said. "The program makes the swarm structure." Of course. It was obvious that a single molecular camera was inadequate to register any sort of image. Therefore, the image must be a composite of millions of cameras, operating simultaneously. But the cameras would also have to be arranged in space in some orderly structure, probably a sphere. That was where the programming came in. But that in turn meant that Xymos must be generating the equivalent of"You're making an eye."

"Kind of. Yes."

"But where's the light source?"

"The bioluminescent perimeter."

"That's not enough light."

"It is. Watch."

Meanwhile, the onscreen Julia was turning smoothly, pointing to the intravenous line behind her. She lifted a syringe out of a nearby ice bucket. The barrel appeared to be filled with water. "This syringe," she said, "contains approximately twenty million cameras in isotonic saline suspension. At the moment they exist as particles. But once they are injected into the bloodstream, their temperature will increase, and they will soon flock together, and form a meta-shape. Just like a flock of birds forms a V-shape."

"What kind of a shape?" one of the VCs asked.

"A sphere," she said. "With a small opening at one end. You might think of it as the equivalent of a blastula in embryology. But in effect the particles form an eye. And the image from that eye will be a composite of millions of photon detectors. Just as the human eye creates an image from its rods and cone cells."

She turned to a monitor that showed an animation loop, repeated over and over again. The cameras entered the bloodstream as an untidy, disorganized mass, a kind of buzzing cloud within the blood. Immediately the blood flow flattened the cloud into an elongated streak. But within seconds, the streak began to coalesce into a spherical shape. That shape became more defined, until eventually it appeared almost solid.

"If this reminds you of an actual eye, there's a reason. Here at Xymos we are explicitly imitating organic morphology," Julia said. "Because we are designing with organic molecules, we are aware that courtesy of millions of years of evolution, the world around us has a stockpile of molecular arrangements that work. So we use them."

"You don't want to reinvent the wheel?" someone said.

"Exactly. Or the eyeball."

She gave a signal, and the flat antenna was lowered until it was just inches above the waiting subject.

"This antenna will power the camera, and pick up the transmitted image," she said. "The image can of course be digitally stored, intensified, manipulated, or anything else that you might do with digital data. Now, if there are no other questions, we can begin." She fitted the syringe with a needle, and stuck it into a rubber stopper in the IV line.

"Mark time."

"Zero point zero."

"Here we go."

She pushed the plunger down quickly. "As you see, I'm doing it fast," she said. "There's nothing delicate about our procedure. You can't hurt anything. If the microturbulence generated by the flow through the needle rips the tubules from a few thousand cameras, it doesn't matter. We have millions more. Plenty to do the job." She withdrew the needle. "Okay? Generally we have to wait about ten seconds for the shape to form, and then we should begin getting an image… Ah, looks like something is coming now… And here it is." The scene showed the camera moving forward at considerable speed through what looked like an asteroid field. Except the asteroids were red cells, bouncy purplish bags moving in a clear, slightly yellowish liquid. An occasional much larger white cell shot forward, filled the screen for a moment, then was gone. What I was seeing looked more like a video game than a medical image.

"Julia," I said, "this is pretty amazing."

Beside me, Julia snuggled closer and smiled. "I thought you might be impressed." Onscreen, Julia was saying, "We've entered a vein, so the red cells are not oxygenated. Right now our camera is moving toward the heart. You'll see the vessels enlarging as we move up the venous system… Yes, now we are approaching the heart… You can see the pulsations in the bloodstream that result from the ventricular contractions…" It was true, I could see the camera pause, then move forward, then pause. She had an audio feed of the beating heart. On the table, the subject lay motionless, with the flat antenna just over his body.

"We're coming to the right atrium, and we should see the mitral valve. We activate the flagella to slow the camera. There the valve is now. We are in the heart." I saw the red flaps, like a mouth opening and closing, and then the camera shot through, into the ventricle, and out again. "Now we are going to the lungs, where you will see what no one has ever witnessed before. The oxygenation of the cells."

As I watched, the blood vessel narrowed swiftly, and then the cells plumped up, and popped brilliantly red, one after another. It was extremely quick; in less than a second, they were all red. "The red cells have now been oxygenated," Julia said, "and we are on our way back to the heart."

I turned to Julia in the bed. "This is really fantastic stuff," I said.

But her eyes were closed, and she was breathing gently.

"Julia?"

She was asleep.

Julia had always tended to fall asleep while watching TV. Falling asleep during your own presentation was reasonable enough; after all, she'd already seen it. And it was pretty late. I was tired myself. I decided I could watch the rest of the demo another time. It seemed pretty lengthy for a demo, anyhow. How long had I been watching so far? When I turned to switch off the TV, I looked down at the time code running at the bottom of the image. Numbers were spinning, ticking off hundredths of a second. Other numbers to the left, not spinning. I frowned. One of them was the date. I hadn't noticed it before, because it was in international format, with the year first, the day, and the month. It read 02.21.09.

September 21.

Yesterday.

She'd recorded this demo yesterday, not today.

I turned off the TV, and turned off the bedside light. I lay down on the pillow and tried to sleep.

DAY 2
9:02 A.M.

We needed skim milk, Toastie-Os, Pop-Tarts, Jell-O, dishwasher detergent-and something else, but I couldn't read my own writing. I stood in the supermarket aisle at nine o'clock in the morning, puzzling over my notes. A voice said, "Hey, Jack. How's it hanging?" I looked up to see Ricky Morse, one of the division heads at Xymos. "Hey, Ricky. How are you?" I shook his hand, genuinely glad to see him. I was always glad to see Ricky. Tanned, with blond crewcut hair and a big grin, he could easily be taken for a surfer were it not for his SourceForge 3.1 T-shirt. Ricky was only a few years younger than I was, but he had an air of perpetual youthfulness. I'd given him his first job, right out of college, and he'd rapidly moved into management. With his cheerful personality and upbeat manner, Ricky made an ideal project manager, even though he tended to underplay problems, and give management unrealistic expectations about when a project would be finished. According to Julia, that had sometimes caused trouble at Xymos; Ricky tended to make promises he couldn't keep. And sometimes he didn't quite tell the truth. But he was so cheerful and appealing that everyone always forgave him. At least, I always did, when he worked for me. I had become quite fond of him, and thought of him almost as a younger brother. I'd recommended him for his job at Xymos.

Ricky was pushing a shopping cart filled with disposable diapers in big plastic bundles; he had a young baby at home, too. I asked him why he was shopping and not at the office. "Mary's got the flu, and the maid's in Guatemala. So I told her I'd pick up some things."

"I see you've got Huggies," I said. "I always get Pampers, myself."

"I find Huggies absorb more," he said. "And Pampers are too tight. They pinch the baby's leg."

"But Pampers have a layer that takes moisture away, and keeps the bottom dry," I said. "I have fewer rashes with Pampers."

"Whenever I use them, the adhesive tabs tend to pull off. And with a big load, it tends to leak out the leg, which makes extra work for me. I don't know, I just find Huggies are higher quality."

A woman glanced at us as she pushed past with her shopping cart. We started to laugh, thinking we must sound like we were in a commercial.

Ricky said loudly, "So hey, how about those Giants?" to the woman's back as she continued down the aisle.

"Fuckin' A, are they great or what?" I said, scratching myself. We laughed, then pushed our carts down the aisle together. Ricky said, "Want to know the truth? Mary likes Huggies, and that's the end of the conversation."

"I know that one," I said.

Ricky looked at my cart, and said, "I see you buy organic skim milk…"

"Stop it," I said. "How are things at the office?"

"You know, they're pretty damn good," he said. "The technology's coming along nicely, if I say so myself. We demoed for the money guys the other day, and it went well."

"Julia's doing okay?" I said, as casually as I could.

"Yeah, she's doing great. Far as I know," Ricky said.

I glanced at him. Was he suddenly reserved? Was his face set, the muscles controlled? Was he concealing something? I couldn't tell.

"Actually, I rarely see her," Ricky said. "She's not around much these days."

"I don't see much of her either," I said.

"Yeah, she's spending a lot of time out at the fab complex. That's where the action is now." Ricky glanced quickly at me. "You know, because of the new fabrication processes."

The Xymos fab building had been completed in record time, considering how complex it was. The fabrication building was where they assembled molecules from individual atoms. Sticking the molecule fragments together like Lego blocks. Much of this work was carried out in a vacuum, and required extremely strong magnetic fields. So the fab building had tremendous pump assemblies, and powerful chillers to cool the magnets. But according to Julia, a lot of the technology was specific to that building; nothing like it had ever been built before. I said, "It's amazing they got the building up so fast."

"Well, we kept the pressure on. Molecular Dynamics is breathing down our necks. We've got our fab up and running, and we've got patent applications by the truckload. But those guys at MolDyne and NanoTech can't be far behind us. A few months. Maybe six months, if we're lucky."

"So you're doing molecular assembly at the plant now?" I said.

"You got it, Jack. Full-bore molecular assembly. We have been for a few weeks now."

"I didn't know Julia was interested in that stuff." With her background in psychology, I'd always regarded Julia as a people person.

"She's taken a real interest in the technology, I can tell you. Also, they're doing a lot of programming up there, too," he said. "You know. Iterative cycles as they refine the manufacturing."

I nodded. "What kind of programming?" I said.

"Distributed processing. Multi-agent nets. That's how we keep the individual units coordinated, working together."

"This is all to make the medical camera?"

"Yes." He paused. "Among other things." He glanced at me uneasily, as if he might be breaking his confidentiality agreement.

"You don't have to say," I said.

"No, no," he said quickly. "Jeez, you and I go way back, Jack." He slapped me on the shoulder. "And you got a spouse in management. I mean, what the hell." But he still looked uneasy. His face didn't match his words. And his eyes slid away from me when he said the word "spouse."

The conversation was coming to an end, and I felt filled with tension, the kind of awkward tension when you think another guy knows something and isn't telling you-because he's embarrassed, because he doesn't know how to put it, because he doesn't want to get involved, because it's too dangerous even to mention, because he thinks it's your job to figure it out for yourself. Especially when it's something about your wife. Like she's screwing around. He's looking at you like you're the walking wounded, it's night of the living dead, but he won't tell you. In my experience, guys never tell other guys when they know something about their wives. But women always tell other women, if they know of a husband's infidelity.

That's just how it is.

But I was feeling so tense I wanted to"Hey, look at the time," Ricky said, giving me a big grin. "I'm late, Mary'll kill me, I've got to run. She's already annoyed because I have to spend the next few days at the fab facility. So I'll be out of town while the maid's gone…" He shrugged. "You know how it is."

"Yeah, I do. Good luck."

"Hey, man. Take care."

We shook hands. Murmured another good-bye. Ricky rolled his cart around the corner of the aisle, and was gone.

Sometimes you can't think about painful things, you can't make your mind focus on them. Your brain just slips away, no thank you, let's change the subject. That was happening to me now. I couldn't think about Julia, so I started thinking about what Ricky had told me about their fabrication plant. And I decided it probably made sense, even though it went against the conventional wisdom about nanotechnology.

There was a long-standing fantasy among nanotechnologists that once somebody figured out how to manufacture at the atomic level, it would be like running the four-minute mile. Everybody would do it, unleashing a flood of wonderful molecular creations rolling off assembly lines all around the world. In a matter of days, human life would be changed by this marvelous new technology. As soon as somebody figured out how to do it.

But of course that would never happen. The very idea was absurd. Because in essence, molecular manufacturing wasn't so different from computer manufacturing or flow-valve manufacturing or automobile manufacturing or any other kind of manufacturing. It took a while to get it right. In fact, assembling atoms to make a new molecule was closely analogous to compiling a computer program from individual lines of code. And computer code never compiled, the first time out. The programmers always had to go back and fix the lines. And even after it was compiled, a computer program never ever worked right the first time. Or the second time. Or the hundredth time. It had to be debugged, and debugged again, and again. And again.

I always believed it would be the same with these manufactured molecules-they'd have to be debugged again and again before they worked right. And if Xymos wanted "flocks" of molecules working together, they'd also have to debug the way the molecules communicated with each other, however limited that communication was. Because once the molecules communicated, you had a primitive network. To organize it, you'd probably program a distributed net. Of the kind I had been developing at MediaTronics. So I could perfectly well imagine them doing programming along with the manufacturing. But I couldn't see Julia hanging around while they did it. The fab facility was far from the Xymos headquarters. It was literally in the middle of nowhere-out in the desert near Tonopah, Nevada. And Julia didn't like to be in the middle of nowhere. I was sitting in the pediatrician's waiting room because the baby was due for her next round of immunizations. There were four mothers in the room, bouncing sick kids on their laps while the older children played on the floor. The mothers all talked to each other and studiously ignored me.

I was getting used to this. A guy at home, a guy in a setting like the pediatrician's office, was an unusual thing. But it also meant that something was wrong. There was probably something wrong with the guy, he couldn't get a job, maybe he was fired for alcoholism or drugs, maybe he was a bum. Whatever the reason, it wasn't normal for a man to be in the pediatrician's office in the middle of the day. So the other mothers pretended I wasn't there. Except they shot me the occasional worried glance, as if I might be sneaking up on them to rape them while their backs were turned. Even the nurse, Gloria, seemed suspicious. She glanced at the baby in my arms-who wasn't crying, and was hardly sniffling. "What seems to be the problem?"

I said we were here for immunizations.

"She's been here before?"

Yes, she had been coming to the doctor since she was born.

"Are you related?"

Yes, I was the father.

Eventually we were ushered in. The doctor shook hands with me, was very friendly, never asked why I was there instead of my wife or the housekeeper. He gave two injections. Amanda howled. I bounced her on my shoulder, comforted her.

"She may have a little swelling, a little local redness. Call me if it's not gone in forty-eight hours." Then I was back in the waiting room, trying to get out my credit card to pay the bill while the baby cried. And that was when Julia called.

"Hi. What're you doing?" She must have heard the baby screaming.

"Paying the pediatrician."

"Bad time?"

"Kind of…"

"Okay, listen, I just wanted to say I have an early night-finally!-so I'll be home for dinner. What do you say I pick up on my way home?"

"That'd be great," I said.

Eric's soccer practice ran late. It was getting dark on the field. The coach always ran practice late. I paced the sidelines, trying to decide whether to complain. It was so hard to know when you were coddling your kid, and when you were legitimately protecting them. Nicole called on her cell to say that her play rehearsal was over, and why hadn't I picked her up? Where was I? I said I was still with Eric and asked if she could catch a ride with anybody.

"Dad…" she said, exasperated. You'd think I had asked her to crawl home.

"Hey, I'm stuck."

Very sarcastic: "Whatever."

"Watch that tone, young lady."

But a few minutes later, soccer was abruptly canceled. A big green maintenance truck pulled onto the field, and two men came out wearing masks and big rubber gloves, with spray cans on their backs. They were going to spray weed killer or something, and everybody had to stay off the field overnight.

I called Nicole back and said we would pick her up.

"When?"

"We're on our way now."

"From the little creep's practice?"

"Come on, Nic."

"Why does he always come first?"

"He doesn't always come first."

"Yes he does. He's a little creep."

"Nicole…"

"Sor-ry."

"See you in a few minutes." I clicked off. Kids are more advanced these days. The teenage years now start at eleven.

By five-thirty the kids were home, raiding the fridge. Nicole was eating a big chunk of string cheese. I told her to stop; it would ruin her dinner. Then I went back to setting the table. "When is dinner?"

"Soon. Mom's bringing it home."

"Uh-huh." She disappeared for a few minutes, and then she came back. "She says she's sorry she didn't call, but she's going to be late."

"What?" I was pouring water into the glasses on the table.

"She's sorry she didn't call but she's going to be late. I just talked to her."

"Jesus." It was irritating. I tried never to show my irritation around the kids, but sometimes it slipped out. I sighed. "Okay."

"I'm really hungry now, Dad."

"Get your brother and get into the car," I said. "We're going to the drive-in." Later that night, as I was carrying the baby to bed, my elbow brushed against a photograph on the living-room bookshelf. It clattered to the floor; I stooped to pick it up. It was a picture of Julia and Eric in Sun Valley when he was four. They were both in snowsuits; Julia was helping him learn to ski, and smiling radiantly. Next to it was a photo of Julia and me on our eleventh wedding anniversary in Kona; I was in a loud Hawaiian shirt and she had colorful leis around her neck, and we were kissing at sunset. That was a great trip; in fact, we were pretty sure Amanda was conceived there. I remember Julia came home from work one day and said, "Honey, remember how you said mai-tais were dangerous?" I said, "Yes…" And she said, "Well, let me put it this way. It's a girl," and I was so startled the soda I was drinking went up my nose, and we both started to laugh.

Then a picture of Julia making cupcakes with Nicole, who was so young she sat on the kitchen counter and her legs didn't reach the edge. She couldn't have been more than a year and a half old. Nicole was frowning with concentration as she wielded a huge spoon of dough, making a fine mess while Julia tried not to laugh.

And a photo of us hiking in Colorado, Julia holding the hand of six-year-old Nicole while I carried Eric on my shoulders, my shirt collar dark with sweat-or worse, if I remembered that day right. Eric must have been about two; he was still in diapers. I remember he thought it was fun to cover my eyes while I carried him on the trail.

The hiking photo had slipped inside its frame so it stood at an angle. I tapped the frame to try and straighten it, but it didn't move. I noticed that several of the other pictures were faded, or the emulsion was sticking to the glass. No one had bothered to take care of these pictures. The baby snuffled in my arms, rubbing her eyes with her fists. It was time for bed. I put the pictures back on the shelf. They were old images from another, happier time. From another life. They seemed to have nothing to do with me, anymore. Everything was different now. The world was different now.

I left the table set for dinner that night, a silent rebuke. Julia saw it when she got home around ten. "I'm sorry, hon."

"I know you were busy," I said.

"I was. Please forgive me?"

"I do," I said.

"You're the best." She blew me a kiss, from across the room. "I'm going to take a shower," she said. And she headed off down the hallway. I watched her go. On the way down the hall, she looked into the baby's room, and then darted in. A moment later, I heard her cooing and the baby gurgling. I got out of my chair, and walked down the hall after her.

In the darkened nursery, she was holding the baby up, nuzzling her nose.

I said, "Julia… you woke her up."

"No I didn't, she was awake. Weren't you, little honey-bunny? You were awake, weren't you, Poopsie-doopsie?"

The baby rubbed her eyes with tiny fists, and yawned. She certainly appeared to have been awakened.

Julia turned to me in the darkness. "I didn't. Really. I didn't wake her up. Why are you looking at me that way?"

"What way?"

"You know what way. That accusing way."

"I'm not accusing you of anything."

The baby started to whimper and then to cry. Julia touched her diaper. "I think she's wet," she said, and handed her to me as she walked out of the room. "You do it, Mr. Perfect." …

Now there was tension between us. After I changed the baby and put her back to bed, I heard Julia come out of the shower, banging a door. Whenever Julia started banging doors, it was a sign for me to come and mollify her. But I didn't feel like it tonight. I was annoyed she'd awakened the baby, and I was annoyed by her unreliability, saying she'd be home early and never calling to say she wouldn't. I was scared that she had become so unreliable because she was distracted by a new love. Or she just didn't care about her family anymore. I didn't know what to do about all this, but I didn't feel like smoothing the tension between us. I just let her bang the doors. She slammed her sliding closet-door so hard the wood cracked. She swore. That was another sign I was supposed to come running. I went back to the living room, and sat down. I picked up the book I was reading, and stared at the page. I tried to concentrate but of course I couldn't. I was angry and I listened to her bang around in the bedroom. If she kept it up, she'd wake Eric and then I would have to deal with her. I hoped it wouldn't go that far.

Eventually the noise stopped. She had probably gotten into bed. If so, she would soon be asleep. Julia could go to sleep when we were fighting. I never could; I stayed up, pacing and angry, trying to settle myself down.

When I finally came to bed, Julia was fast asleep. I slipped between the covers, and rolled over on my side, away from her.

It was one o'clock in the morning when the baby began to scream. I groped for the light, knocked over the alarm clock, which turned the clock radio on, blaring rock and roll. I swore, fumbled in the dark, finally got the bedside light on, turned the radio off. The baby was still screaming.

"What's the matter with her?" Julia said sleepily.

"I don't know." I got out of bed, shaking my head, trying to wake up. I went into the nursery and flicked on the light. The room seemed very bright, the clown wallpaper very yellow and burning. Out of nowhere, I thought: why doesn't she want yellow placemats when she painted the whole nursery yellow?

The baby was standing up in her crib, holding on to the rails and howling, her mouth wide open, her breath coming in jagged gasps. Tears were running down her cheeks. I held my arms out to her and she reached for me, and I comforted her. I thought it must be a nightmare. I comforted her, rocked her gently.

She continued to scream, unrelenting. Maybe something was hurting her, maybe something in her diaper. I checked her body. That was when I saw an angry red rash on her belly, extending in welts around to her back, and up toward her neck.

Julia came in. "Can't you stop it?" she said.

I said, "There's something wrong," and I showed her the rash.

"Has she got a fever?"

I touched Amanda's head. She was sweaty and hot, but that could be from the crying. The rest of her body felt cool. "I don't know. I don't think so."

I could see the rash on her thighs now. Was it on her thighs a moment before? I almost thought I was seeing it spread before my eyes. If it was possible, the baby screamed even louder. "Jesus," Julia said. "I'll call the doctor."

"Yeah, do." By now I had the baby on her back-she screamed more-and I was looking carefully at her entire body. The rash was spreading, there was no doubt about it. And she seemed to be in terrible pain, screaming bloody murder.

"I'm sorry, honey, I'm sorry…" I said.

Definitely spreading.

Julia came back and said she left word for the doctor. I said, "I'm not going to wait. I'm taking her to the emergency room."

"Do you really think that's necessary?" she said.

I didn't answer her, I just went into the bedroom to put on my clothes.

Julia said, "Do you want me to come with you?"

"No, stay with the kids," I said.

"You sure?"

"Yes."

"Okay," she said. She wandered back to the bedroom. I reached for my car keys.

The baby continued to scream.

"I realize it's uncomfortable," the intern was saying. "But I don't think it's safe to sedate her." We were in a curtained cubicle in the emergency room. The intern was bent over my screaming daughter, looking in her ears with his instrument. By now Amanda's entire body was bright, angry red. She looked as if she had been parboiled.

I felt scared. I'd never heard of anything like this before, a baby turning bright red and screaming constantly. I didn't trust this intern, who seemed far too young to be competent. He couldn't be experienced; he didn't even look as if he shaved yet. I was jittery, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. I was beginning to feel slightly crazy, because my daughter had never stopped screaming once in the last hour. It was wearing me down. The intern ignored it. I didn't know how he could.

"She has no fever," he said, making notes in a chart, "but in a child this age that doesn't mean anything. Under a year, they may not run fevers at all, even with severe infections."

"Is that what this is?" I said. "An infection?"

"I don't know. I'm presuming a virus because of that rash. But we should have the preliminary blood work back in-ah, good." A passing nurse handed him a slip of paper. "Uhh… hmmm…" He paused. "Well…"

"Well what?" I said, shifting my weight anxiously.

He was shaking his head as he stared at the paper. He didn't answer.

"Well what?"

"It's not an infection," he said. "White cells counts all normal, protein fractions normal. She's got no immune mobilization at all."

"What does that mean?"

He was very calm, standing there, frowning and thinking. I wondered if perhaps he was just dumb. The best people weren't going into medicine anymore, not with the HMOs running everything. This kid might be one of the new breed of dumb doctor. "We have to widen the diagnostic net," he said. "I'm going to order a surgical consult, a neurological consult, we have a dermo coming, we have infectious coming. That'll mean a lot of people to talk to you about your daughter, asking the same questions over again, but-"

"That's okay," I said. "I don't mind. Just… what do you think is wrong with her?"

"I don't know, Mr. Forman. If it's not infectious, we look for other reasons for this skin response. She hasn't traveled out of the country?"

"No." I shook my head.

"No recent exposures to heavy metals or toxins?"

"Like what?"

"Dump sites, industrial plants, chemical exposure…"

"No, no."

"Can you think of anything at all that might have caused this reaction?"

"No, nothing… wait, she had vaccinations yesterday."

"What vaccinations?"

"I don't know, whatever she gets for her age…"

"You don't know what vaccinations?" he said. His notebook was open, his pen poised over the page.

"No, for Christ's sake," I said irritably, "I don't know what vaccinations. Every time she goes there, she gets another shot. You're the goddamned doctor-"

"That's okay, Mr. Forman," he said soothingly. "I know it's stressful. If you just tell me the name of your pediatrician, I'll call him, how is that?"

I nodded. I wiped my hand across my forehead. I was sweating. I spelled the pediatrician's name for him while he wrote it down in his notebook. I tried to calm down. I tried to think clearly.

And all the time, my baby just screamed. …

Half an hour later, she went into convulsions.

They started while one of the white-coated consultants was bent over her, examining her. Her little body wrenched and twisted. She made retching sounds as if she was trying to vomit. Her legs jerked spastically. She began to wheeze. Her eyes rolled up into her head. I don't remember what I said or did then, but a big orderly the size of a football player came in and pushed me to one side of the cubicle and held my arms. I looked past his huge shoulder as six people clustered around my daughter; a nurse wearing a Bart Simpson T-shirt was sticking a needle into her forehead. I began to shout and struggle. The orderly was yelling, "Scowvane, scowvane, scowvane," over and over. Finally I realized he was saying "Scalp vein." He explained it was just to start an IV, that the baby had become dehydrated. That was why she was convulsing. I heard talk of electrolytes, magnesium, potassium. Anyway, the convulsions stopped in a few seconds. But she continued to scream.

I called Julia. She was awake. "How is she?"

"The same."

"Still crying? Is that her?"

"Yes." She could hear Amanda in the background.

"Oh God." She groaned. "What are they saying it is?"

"They don't know yet."

"Oh, the poor baby."

"There have been about fifty doctors in here to look at her."

"Is there anything I can do?"

"I don't think so."

"Okay. Let me know."

"Okay."

"I'm not sleeping."

"Okay." …

Shortly before dawn the huddled consultants announced that she either had an intestinal obstruction or a brain tumor, they couldn't decide which, and they ordered an MRI. The sky was beginning to lighten when she was finally wheeled to the imaging room. The big white machine stood in the center of the room. The nurse told me it would calm the baby if I helped her prepare her, and she took the needle out of her scalp because there couldn't be any metal during the MRI reading. Blood squirted down Amanda's face, into her eye. The nurse wiped it away.

Now Amanda was strapped onto the white board that rolled into the depths of the machine. My daughter was staring up at the MRI in terror, still screaming. The nurse told me I could wait in the next room with the technician. I went into a room with a glass window that looked in on the MRI machine.

The technician was foreign, dark. "How old is she? Is it a she?"

"Yes, she. Nine months."

"Quite a set of lungs on her."

"Yes."

"Here we go." He was fiddling at his knobs and dials, hardly looking at my daughter. Amanda was completely inside the machine. Her sobs sounded tinny over the microphone. The technician flicked a switch and the pump began to chatter; it made a lot of noise. But I could still hear my daughter screaming.

And then, abruptly, she stopped.

She was completely silent.

"Uh-oh," I said. I looked at the technician and the nurse. Their faces registered shock. We all thought the same thing, that something terrible had happened. My heart began to pound. The technician hastily shut down the pumps and we hurried back into the room. My daughter was lying there, still strapped down, breathing heavily, but apparently fine. She blinked her eyes slowly, as if dazed. Already her skin was noticeably a lighter shade of pink, with patches of normal color. The rash was fading right before our eyes. "I'll be damned," the technician said. …

Back in the emergency room, they wouldn't let Amanda go home. The surgeons still thought she had a tumor or a bowel emergency, and they wanted to keep her in the hospital for observation. But the rash continued to clear steadily. Over the next hour, the pink color faded, and vanished. No one could understand what had happened, and the doctors were uneasy. The scalp vein IV was back in on the other side of her forehead. But Amanda took a bottle of formula, guzzling it down hungrily while I held her. She was staring up at me with her usual hypnotic feeding stare. She really seemed to be fine. She fell asleep in my arms.

I sat there for another hour, then began to make noises about how I had to get back to my kids, I had to get them to school. And not long afterward, the doctors announced another victory for modern medicine and sent me home with her. Amanda slept soundly all the way, and didn't wake when I got her out of her car seat. The night sky was turning gray when I carried her up the driveway and into the house.

DAY 3
6:07 A.M.

The house was silent. The kids were still asleep. I found Julia standing in the dining room, looking out the window at the backyard. The sprinklers were on, hissing and clicking. Julia held a cup of coffee and stared out the window, unmoving.

I said, "We're back."

She turned. "She's okay?"

I held out the baby to her. "Seems to be."

"Thank God," she said, "I was so worried, Jack." But she didn't approach Amanda, and didn't touch her. "I was so worried."

Her voice was strange, distant. She didn't really sound worried, she sounded formal, like someone reciting the rituals of another culture that they didn't really understand. She took a sip from her coffee mug.

"I couldn't sleep all night," she said. "I was so worried. I felt awful. God." Her eyes flicked to my face, then away. She looked guilty.

"Want to hold her?"

"I, uh…" Julia shook her head, and nodded to the coffee cup in her hand. "Not right now," she said. "I have to check the sprinklers. They're overwatering my roses." And she walked into the backyard.

I watched her go out in the back and stand looking at the sprinklers. She glanced back at me, then made a show of checking the timer box on the wall. She opened the lid and looked inside. I didn't get it. The gardeners had adjusted the sprinkler timers just last week. Maybe they hadn't done it right.

Amanda snuffled in my arms. I took her into the nursery to change her, and put her back in bed. When I returned, I saw Julia in the kitchen, talking on her cell phone. This was another new habit of hers. She didn't use the house phone much anymore; she used her cell. When I had asked her about it, she'd said it was just easier because she was calling long distance a lot, and the company paid her cellular bills.

I slowed my approach, and walked on the carpet. I heard her say, "Yes, damn it, of course I do, but we have to be careful now…"

She looked up and saw me coming. Her tone immediately changed. "Okay, uh… look, Carol, I think we can handle that with a phone call to Frankfurt. Follow up with a fax, and let me know how he responds, all right?" And she snapped the phone shut. I came into the kitchen. "Jack, I hate to leave before the kids are up, but…"

"You've got to go?"

"I'm afraid so. Something's come up at work."

I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter after six. "Okay."

She said, "So, will you, uh… the kids…"

"Sure, I'll handle everything."

"Thanks. I'll call you later."

And she was gone.

I was so tired I wasn't thinking clearly. The baby was still asleep, and with luck she'd sleep several hours more. My housekeeper, Maria, came in at six-thirty and put out the breakfast bowls. The kids ate and I drove them to school. I was trying hard to stay awake. I yawned. Eric was sitting on the front seat next to me. He yawned, too.

"Sleepy today?"

He nodded. "Those men kept waking me up," he said.

"What men?"

"The men that came in the house last night."

"What men?" I said.

"The vacuum men," he said. "They vacuumed everything. And they vacuumed up the ghost."

From the backseat, Nicole snickered. "The ghost…"

I said, "I think you were dreaming, son." Lately Eric had been having vivid nightmares that often woke him in the night. I was pretty sure it was because Nicole let him watch horror movies with her, knowing they would upset him. Nicole was at the age where her favorite movies featured masked killers who murdered teenagers after they had had sex. It was the old formula: you have sex, you die. But it wasn't appropriate for Eric. I'd spoken to her many times about letting him see them.

"No, Dad, it wasn't a dream," Eric said, yawning again. "The men were there. A whole bunch of them."

"Uh-huh. And what was the ghost?"

"He was a ghost. All silver and shimmery, except he didn't have a face."

"Uh-huh." By now we were pulling up at the school, and Nicole was saying I had to pick her up at 4:15 instead of 3:45 because she had a chorus rehearsal after class, and Eric was saying he wasn't going to his pediatrician appointment if he had to get a shot. I repeated the timeless mantra of all parents: "We'll see."

The two kids piled out of the car, dragging their backpacks behind them. They both had backpacks that weighed about twenty pounds. I never got used to this. Kids didn't have huge backpacks when I was their age. We didn't have backpacks at all. Now it seemed all the kids had them. You saw little second-graders bent over like sherpas, dragging themselves through the school doors under the weight of their packs. Some of the kids had their packs on rollers, hauling them like luggage at the airport. I didn't understand any of this. The world was becoming digital; everything was smaller and lighter. But kids at school lugged more weight than ever. A couple of months ago, at a parents' meeting, I'd asked about it. And the principal said, "Yes, it's a big problem. We're all concerned." And then changed the subject. I didn't get that, either. If they were all concerned, why didn't they do something about it? But of course that's human nature. Nobody does anything until it's too late. We put the stoplight at the intersection after the kid is killed.

I drove home again, through sluggish morning traffic. I was thinking I might get a couple of hours of sleep. It was the only thing on my mind.

Maria woke me up around eleven, shaking my shoulder insistently. "Mr. Forman. Mr. Forman."

I was groggy. "What is it?"

"The baby."

I was immediately awake. "What about her?"

"You see the baby, Mr. Forman. She all…" She made a gesture, rubbing her shoulder and arm.

"She's all what?"

"You see the baby, Mr. Forman."

I staggered out of bed, and went into the nursery. Amanda was standing up in her crib, holding on to the railing. She was bouncing and smiling happily. Everything seemed normal, except for the fact that her entire body was a uniform purple-blue color. Like a big bruise. "Oh, Jesus," I said.

I couldn't take another episode at the hospital, I couldn't take more white-coated doctors who didn't tell you anything, I couldn't take being scared all over again. I was still drained from the night before. The thought that there was something wrong with my daughter wrenched my stomach. I went over to Amanda, who gurgled with pleasure, smiling up at me. She stretched one hand toward me, grasping air, her signal for me to pick her up. So I picked her up. She seemed fine, immediately grabbing my hair and trying to pull off my glasses, the way she always did. I felt relieved, even though I could now see her skin better. It looked bruised-it was the color of a bruise-except it was absolutely uniform everywhere on her body. Amanda looked like she'd been dipped in dye. The evenness of the color was alarming.

I decided I had to call the doctor in the emergency room, after all. I fished in my pocket for his card, while Amanda tried to grab my glasses. I dialed one-handed. I could do pretty much everything one-handed. I got right through; he sounded surprised. "Oh," he said. "I was just about to call you. How is your daughter feeling?"

"Well, she seems to feel fine," I said, jerking my head back so Amanda couldn't get my glasses. She was giggling; it was a game, now. "She's fine," I said, "but the thing is-"

"Has she by any chance had bruising?"

"Yes," I said. "As a matter of fact, she has. That's why I was calling you."

"The bruising is all over her body? Uniformly?"

"Yes," I said. "Pretty much. Why do you ask?"

"Well," the doctor said, "all her lab work has come back, and it's all normal. Completely normal. Healthy child. The only thing we're still waiting on is the MRI report, but the MRI's broken down. They say it'll be a few days."

I couldn't keep ducking and weaving; I put Amanda back in her crib while I talked. She didn't like that, of course, and scrunched up her face, preparing to cry. I gave her her Cookie Monster toy, and she sat down and played with that. I knew Cookie Monster was good for about five minutes.

"Anyway," the doctor was saying, "I'm glad to hear she's doing well."

I said that I was glad, too.

There was a pause. The doctor coughed.

"Mr. Forman, I noticed on your hospital admissions form you said your occupation was software engineer."

"That's right."

"Does that mean you are involved with manufacturing?"

"No. I do program development."

"And where do you do that work?"

"In the Valley."

"You don't work in a factory, for example?"

"No. I work in an office."

"I see." A pause. "May I ask where?"

"Actually, at the moment, I'm unemployed."

"I see. All right. How long has that been?"

"Six months."

"I see." A short pause. "Well, okay, I just wanted to clear that up."

I said, "Why?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Why are you asking me those questions?"

"Oh. They're on the form."

"What form?" I said. "I filled out all the forms at the hospital."

"This is another form," he said. "It's an OHS inquiry. Office of Health and Safety."

I said, "What's this all about?"

"There's been another case reported," he said, "that's very similar to your daughter's."

"Where?"

"Sacramento General."

"When?"

"Five days ago. But it's a completely different situation. This case involved a forty-two-year-old naturalist sleeping out in the Sierras, some wildflower expert. There was a particular kind of flower or something. Anyway, he was hospitalized in Sacramento. And he had the same clinical course as your daughter-sudden unexplained onset, no fever, painful erythematous reaction."

"And an MRI stopped it?"

"I don't know if he had an MRI," he said. "But apparently this syndrome-whatever it is-is self-limited. Very sudden onset, and very abrupt termination."

"He's okay now? The naturalist?"

"He's fine. A couple of days of bruising, and nothing more."

"Good," I said. "I'm glad to hear it."

"I thought you'd want to know," he said. Then he said he might be calling me again, with some more questions, and would that be all right? I said he could call whenever he wanted. He asked me to call if there was any change in Amanda, and I said I would, and I hung up. …

Amanda had abandoned Cookie Monster, and was standing in the crib, holding on to the railing with one hand and reaching for me with the other, her little fingers clutching air. I picked her up-and in an instant she had my glasses off. I grabbed for them as she squealed with pleasure. "Amanda…" But too late; she threw them on the floor. I blinked.

I don't see well without my glasses. These were wire-frames, hard to see now. I got down on my hands and knees, still holding the baby, and swept my hand across the floor in circles, hoping to touch glass. I didn't. I squinted, edged forward, swept my hand again. Still nothing. Then I saw a glint of light underneath the crib. I set the baby down and crawled under the crib, retrieved the glasses, and put them on. In the process I banged my head on the crib, dropped down low again.

And I found myself staring at the electrical outlet on the wall underneath the crib. A small plastic box was plugged into the outlet. I pulled it out and looked at it. It was a two-inch cube, a surge suppressor by the look of it, an ordinary commercial product, made in Thailand. The input/output voltages were molded into the plastic. A white label ran across the bottom, reading PROP. SSVT, with a bar code. It was one of those stickers that companies put on their inventory. I turned the cube over in my hand. Where had this come from? I'd been in charge of the house for the last six months. I knew what was where. And certainly Amanda didn't need a surge suppressor in her room. You only needed that for sensitive electronic equipment, like computers.

I got to my feet, and looked around the room to see what else was different. To my surprise, I realized that everything was different-but just slightly different. Amanda's night-light had Winnie-the-Pooh characters printed on the shade. I always kept Tigger facing toward her crib, because Tigger was her favorite. Now, Eeyore faced the crib. Amanda's changing pad was stained in one corner; I always kept the stain bottom left. Now it was top right. I kept her diaper-rash ointments on the counter to the left, just out of her reach. Now they were too close; she could grab them. And there was moreThe maid came in behind me. "Maria," I said, "did you clean this room?"

"No, Mr. Forman."

"But the room is different," I said.

She looked around, and shrugged. "No, Mr. Forman. The same."

"No, no," I insisted. "It's different. Look." I pointed to the lampshade, the changing cloth. "Different."

She shrugged again. "Okay, Mr. Forman." I read confusion in her face. Either she didn't follow what I was saying, or she thought I was crazy. And I probably did look a little crazy, a grown man obsessing about a Winnie-the-Pooh lampshade.

I showed her the cube in my hand. "Have you seen this before?"

She shook her head. "No."

"It was under the crib."

"I don't know, Mr. Forman." She inspected it, turning it in her hand. She shrugged, and gave it back to me. She acted casual, but her eyes were watchful. I began to feel uncomfortable. "Okay, Maria," I said. "Never mind."

She bent over to scoop up the baby. "I feed her now."

"Yes, okay."

I left the room, feeling odd.

Just for the hell of it, I looked up "SSVT" on the Net. I got links to the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple, the Waffen-SS Training School at Konitz, Nazi Regalia for sale, Subsystems Sample Display Technology, South Shore Vocational-Technical School, Optical VariTemp Cryostat Systems, Solid Surfacing Veneer Tiles for home floors, a band called SlingshotVenus, the Swiss Shooting Federation-and it went downhill from there.

I turned away from the computer.

I stared out the window.

Maria had given me a shopping list, the items scrawled in her difficult hand. I really should get the shopping done before I picked up the kids. But I didn't move. There were times when the relentless pace of life at home seemed to defeat me, to leave me feeling washed out and hollow. At those times I just had to sit for a few hours.

I didn't want to move. Not right now.

I wondered if Julia was going to call me tonight, and I wondered if she would have a different excuse. I wondered what I would do if she walked in one of these days, and announced she was in love with someone else. I wondered what I would do if I still didn't have a job by then. I wondered when I would get a job again. I turned the little surge suppressor over in my hand idly, as my mind drifted.

Right outside my window was a large coral tree, with thick leaves and a green trunk. We had planted it as a much smaller tree not long after we moved into the house. Of course the tree guys did it, but we were all out there. Nicole had her plastic shovel and bucket. Eric was crawling around on the lawn in his diapers. Julia had charmed the workmen into staying late to finish the job. After they had all gone I kissed her, and brushed dirt from her nose. She said, "One day it'll cover our whole house."

But as it turned out, it didn't. One of the branches had broken off in a storm, so it grew a little lopsided. Coral is soft wood; the branches break easily. It never grew to cover the house. But my memory was vivid; staring out the window, I saw all of us again, out on the lawn. But it was just a memory. And I was very afraid it didn't fit anymore. After working for years with multi-agent systems, you begin to see life in terms of those programs.

Basically, you can think of a multi-agent environment as something like a chessboard, and the agents like chess pieces. The agents interact on the board to attain a goal, just the way the chess pieces move to win a game. The difference is that nobody is moving the agents. They interact on their own to produce the outcome.

If you design the agents to have memory, they can know things about their environment. They remember where they've been on the board, and what happened there. They can go back to certain places, with certain expectations. Eventually, programmers say the agents have beliefs about their environment, and that they are acting on those beliefs. That's not literally true, of course, but it might as well be true. It looks that way.

But what's interesting is that over time, some agents develop mistaken beliefs. Whether from a motivation conflict, or some other reason, they start acting inappropriately. The environment has changed but they don't seem to know it. They repeat outmoded patterns. Their behavior no longer reflects the reality of the chessboard. It's as if they're stuck in the past. In evolutionary programs, those agents get killed off. They have no children. In other multi-agent programs, they just get bypassed, pushed to the periphery while the main thrust of agents moves on. Some programs have a "grim reaper" module that sifts them out from time to time, and pulls them off the board.

But the point is, they're stuck in their own past. Sometimes they pull themselves together, and get back on track. Sometimes they don't.

Thoughts like these made me very uneasy. I shifted in my chair, glanced at the clock. With a sense of relief, I saw it was time to go pick up the kids.

Eric did his homework in the car while we waited for Nicole to finish her play rehearsal. She came out in a bad mood; she had thought she was in line for a lead role, but instead the drama teacher had cast her in the chorus. "Only two lines!" she said, slamming the car door. "You want to know what I say? I say, 'Look, here comes John now.' And in the second act, I say, 'That sounds pretty serious.' Two lines!" She sat back and closed her eyes. "I don't understand what Mr. Blakey's problem is!"

"Maybe he thinks you suck," Eric said.

"Rat turd!" She smacked him on the head. "Monkey butt!"

"That's enough," I said, as I started the car. "Seat belts."

"Little stink-brain dimrod, he doesn't know anything," Nicole said, buckling her belt.

"I said, that's enough."

"I know that you stink," Eric said. "Pee-yew."

"That's enough, Eric."

"Yeah, Eric, listen to your father, and shut up."

"Nicole…" I shot her a glance in the rearview mirror.

"Sor-ry."

She looked on the verge of tears. I said to her, "Honey, I'm really sorry you didn't get the part you wanted. I know you wanted it badly, and it must be very disappointing."

"No. I don't care."

"Well, I'm sorry."

"Really, Dad, I don't care. It's in the past. I'm moving on." And then a moment later, "You know who got it? That little suckup Katie Richards! Mr. Blakey is just a dick!" And before I could say anything, she burst into tears, sobbing loudly and histrionically. Eric looked over at me, and rolled his eyes.

I drove home, making a mental note to speak to Nicole about her language after dinner, when she had calmed down.

I was chopping green beans so they would fit in the steamer when Eric came and stood in the kitchen doorway. "Hey Dad, where's my MP3?"

"I have no idea." I could never get used to the idea that I was supposed to know where every one of their personal possessions was. Eric's Game Boy, his baseball glove, Nicole's tank tops, her bracelet…

"Well, I can't find it." Eric remained standing in the doorway, not coming any closer, in case I made him help set the table.

"Have you looked?"

"Everywhere, Dad."

"Uh-huh. You looked in your room?"

"All over."

"Family room?"

"Everywhere."

"In the car? Maybe you left it in the car."

"I didn't, Dad."

"You leave it in your locker at school?"

"We don't have lockers, we have cubbies."

"You look in the pockets of your jacket?"

"Dad. Come on. I did all that. I need it."

"Since you've already looked everywhere, I won't be able to find it either, will I?"

"Dad. Would you please just help me?"

The pot roast had another half hour to go. I put down the knife and went into Eric's room. I looked in all the usual places, the back of his closet where clothes were kicked into a heap (I would have to talk to Maria about that), under the bed, behind the bed table, in the bottom drawer in the bathroom, and under the piles of stuff on his desk. Eric was right. It wasn't in his room. We headed toward the family room. I glanced in at the baby's room as I passed by. And I saw it immediately. It was on the shelf beside the changing table, right alongside the tubes of baby ointment. Eric grabbed it. "Hey, thanks Dad!" And he scampered off. There was no point in asking why it was in the baby's room. I went back to the kitchen and resumed chopping my green beans. Almost immediately:

"Daa-ad!"

"What?" I called.

"It doesn't work!"

"Don't shout."

He came back to the kitchen, looking sulky. "She broke it."

"Who broke it?"

"Amanda. She drooled on it or something, and she broke it. It's not fair."

"You check the battery?"

He gave me a pitying look. " 'Course, Dad. I told you, she broke it! It's not fair!"

I doubted his MP3 player was broken. These things were solid-state devices, no moving parts. And it was too large for the baby to handle. I dumped the green beans on the steamer tray, and held out my hand. "Give it to me."

We went into the garage and I got out my toolbox. Eric watched my every move. I had a full set of the small tools you need for computers and electronic devices. I worked quickly. Four Phillips head screws, and the back cover came off in my hand. I found myself staring at the green circuit board. It was covered by a fine layer of grayish dust, like lint from a clothes dryer, that obscured all the electronic components. I suspected that Eric had slid into home plate with this thing in his pocket. That was probably why it didn't work. But I looked along the edge of the plastic and saw a rubber gasket where the back fitted against the device. They'd made this thing airtight… as they should.

I blew the dust away, so I could see better. I was hoping to see a loose battery connection, or a memory chip that had popped up from heat, anyway something that would be easy to fix. I squinted at the chips, trying to read the writing. The writing on one chip was obscured, because there seemed to be some kind ofI paused.

"What is it?" Eric said, watching me.

"Hand me that magnifying glass."

Eric gave me a big glass, and I swung my high-intensity lamp low, and bent over the chip, examining it closely. The reason I couldn't read the writing was that the surface of the chip had been corroded. The whole chip was etched in rivulets, a miniature river delta. I understood now where the dust had come from. It was the disintegrated remains of the chip. "Can you fix it, Dad?" Eric said. "Can you?"

What could have caused this? The rest of the motherboard seemed fine. The controller chip was untouched. Only the memory chip was damaged. I wasn't a hardware guy, but I knew enough to do basic computer repairs. I could install hard drives, add memory, things like that. I'd handled memory chips before, and I'd never seen anything like this. All I could think was that it was a faulty chip. These MP3 players were probably built with the cheapest components available.

"Dad? Can you fix it?"

"No," I said. "It needs another chip. I'll get you one tomorrow."

" 'Cause she slimed it, right?"

"No. I think it's just a faulty chip."

"Dad. It was fine for a whole year. She slimed it. It's not fair!" As if on cue, the baby started crying. I left the MP3 player on the garage table, and went back inside the house. I looked at my watch. I would just have time to change Amanda's diaper, and mix her cereal for dinner, before the pot roast came out.

By nine, the younger kids were asleep, and the house was quiet except for Nicole's voice, saying, "That sounds pretty serious. That sounds pretty serious. That sounds… pretty serious." She was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, staring at herself and reciting her lines.

I'd gotten voice mail from Julia saying she'd be back by eight, but she hadn't made it. I wasn't about to call and check up on her. Anyway, I was tired, too tired to work up the energy to worry about her. I'd picked up a lot of tricks in the last months-mostly involving liberal use of tinfoil so I didn't have to clean so much-but even so, after I did the cooking, set the table, fed the kids, played airplane to get the baby to eat her cereal, cleared the table, wiped down the high chair, put the baby to bed, and then cleaned up the kitchen, I was tired. Especially since the baby kept spitting out the cereal, and Eric kept insisting all through dinner that it wasn't fair, he wanted chicken fingers instead of the roast.

I flopped down on the bed, and flicked on the TV.

There was only static, and then I realized the DVD player was still turned on, interrupting the cable transmission. I hit the remote button, and the disc in the machine began to play. It was Julia's demo, from several days before.

The camera moved through the bloodstream, and into the heart. Again, I saw that the liquid of blood was almost colorless, with bouncing red cells. Julia was speaking. On the table, the subject lay with the antenna above his body.

"We're coming out of the ventricle, and you see the aorta ahead… And now we will go through the arterial system…"

She turned to face the camera.

"The images you have seen are fleeting, but we can allow the camera to cycle through for as much as half an hour, and we can build up highly detailed composites of anything we want to see. We can even pause the camera, using a strong magnetic field. When we are finished, we simply shunt the blood through an intravenous loop surrounded by a strong magnetic field, removing the particles, and then send the patient home."

The video image came back to Julia. "This Xymos technology is safe, reliable, and extremely easy to use. It does not require highly trained personnel; it can be administered by an IV nurse or a medical technician. In the United States alone, a million people die each year from vascular disease. More than thirty million have diagnosed cardiovascular disease. Commercial prospects for this imaging technology are very strong. Because it is painless, simple, and safe, it will replace other imaging techniques such as CAT scans and angiography and will become the standard procedure. We will market the nanotech cameras, the antenna, and monitor systems. Our per-test cost will be only twenty dollars. This is in contrast to certain gene technologies that currently charge two to three thousand dollars a test. But at a mere twenty dollars, we expect worldwide revenues to exceed four hundred million dollars in the first year. And once the procedure is established, those figures will triple. We are talking about a technology that generates one point two billion dollars a year. Now if there are questions…" I yawned, and flicked the TV off. It was impressive, and her argument was compelling. In fact, I couldn't understand why Xymos was having trouble getting their next round of funding. For investors, this should be a slam dunk.

But then, she probably wasn't having trouble. She was probably just using the funding crisis as an excuse to stay late every night. For her own reasons.

I turned out the light. Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling in the dark, I began to see fleeting images. Julia's thigh, over another man's leg. Julia's back arched. Julia breathing heavily, her muscles tensed. Her arm reaching up to push against the headboard. I found I couldn't stop the images.

I got out of bed, and went to check the kids. Nicole was still up, emailing her friends. I told her it was time for lights out. Eric had kicked off his covers. I pulled them back up. The baby was still purple, but she slept soundly, her breathing gentle and regular.

I got back into bed. I willed myself to go to sleep, to think of something else. I tossed and turned, adjusted the pillow, got up for a glass of milk and cookies. Eventually, finally, I fell into a restless sleep.

And I had a very strange dream.

Sometime during the night, I rolled over to see Julia standing by the bed, undressing. She was moving slowly, as if tired or very dreamy, unbuttoning her blouse. She was turned away from me, but I could see her face in the mirror. She looked beautiful, almost regal. Her features looked more chiseled than I remembered, though perhaps it was just the light. My eyes were half-closed. She hadn't noticed I was awake. She continued to slowly unbutton her blouse. Her lips were moving, as if she were whispering something, or praying. Her eyes seemed vacant, lost in thought.

Then as I watched, her lips turned dark red, and then black. She didn't seem to notice. The blackness flowed away from her mouth across her cheeks and over her lower face, and onto her neck. I held my breath. I felt great danger. The blackness now flowed in a sheet down her body until she was entirely covered, as if with a cloak. Only the upper half of her face remained exposed. Her features were composed; in fact she seemed oblivious, just staring into space, dark lips silently moving. Watching her, I felt a chill that ran deep into my bones. Then a moment later the black sheet slid to the floor and vanished.

Julia, normal again, finished removing her blouse, and walked into the bathroom. I wanted to get up and follow her, but I found I could not move. A heavy fatigue held me down on the bed, immobilizing me. I was so exhausted I could hardly breathe. This oppressive sense of fatigue grew rapidly, and overwhelmed my consciousness. Losing all awareness, I felt my eyes close, and I slept.

DAY 4
6:40 A.M.

The next morning the dream was still fresh in my mind, vivid and disturbing. It felt utterly real, not like a dream at all.

Julia was already up. I got out of bed and walked around to where I had seen her the night before. I looked down at the rug, the bedside table, the creased sheets and pillow. There was nothing unusual, nothing out of order. No dark lines or marks anywhere. I went into the bathroom and looked at her cosmetics, in a neat line on her side of the sink. Everything I saw was mundane. However disturbing my dream had been, it was still a dream. But one part of it was true enough: Julia was looking more beautiful than ever. When I found her in the kitchen, pouring coffee, I saw that her face did indeed look more chiseled, more striking. Julia had always had a chubby face. Now it was lean, defined. She looked like a high-fashion model. Her body, too-now that I looked closely-appeared leaner, more muscular. She hadn't lost weight, she just looked trim, tight, energetic.

I said, "You look great."

She laughed. "I can't imagine why. I'm exhausted."

"What time did you get in?"

"About eleven. I hope I didn't wake you."

"No. But I had a weird dream."

"Oh yes?"

"Yes, it was-"

"Mommy! Mommy!" Eric burst into the kitchen. "It's not fair! Nicole won't get out of the bathroom. She's been in there for an hour. It's not fair!"

"Go use our bathroom."

"But I need my socks, Mommy. It's not fair."

This was a familiar problem. Eric had a couple of pairs of favorite socks that he wore day after day until they were black with grime. For some reason, the other socks in his drawer were not satisfactory. I could never get him to explain why. But putting on socks in the morning was a major problem with him.

"Eric," I said, "we talked about this, you're supposed to wear clean socks."

"But those are my good ones!"

"Eric. You have plenty of good socks."

"It's not fair, Dad. She's been in there an hour, I'm not kidding."

"Eric, go choose other socks."

"Dad…"

I just pointed my finger toward his bedroom.

"Shees." He walked off muttering about how it wasn't fair.

I turned back to Julia to resume our conversation. She was staring at me coldly. "You really don't get it, do you?"

"Get what?"

"He came in talking to me, and you just took over. You took over the whole thing."

Immediately, I realized she was right. "I'm sorry," I said.

"I don't get to see the children very much these days, Jack. I think I should be able to have my interaction without your taking control."

"I'm sorry. I handle this kind of thing all day, and I guess-"

"This really is a problem, Jack."

"I said I'm sorry."

"I know that's what you said, but I don't think you are sorry, because I don't see you doing anything to change your controlling behavior."

"Julia," I said. Now I was trying to control my temper. I took a breath. "You're right. I'm sorry it happened."

"You're just shutting me out," she said, "and you are keeping me from my children-"

"Julia, God damn it, you're never here!"

A frosty silence. Then:

"I certainly am here," she said. "Don't you dare say I am not."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute. When are you here? When was the last time you made it for dinner, Julia? Not last night, not the night before, not the night before that. Not all week, Julia. You are not here."

She glared at me. "I don't know what you're trying to do, Jack. I don't know what kind of game you are playing."

"I'm not playing any game. I'm asking you a question."

"I'm a good mother, and I balance a very demanding job, a very demanding job, and the needs of my family. And I get absolutely no help from you."

"What are you talking about?" I said, my voice rising still higher. I was starting to have a sense of unreality here.

"You undercut me, you sabotage me, you turn the children against me," she said. "I see what you're doing. Don't think I don't. You are not supportive of me at all. After all these years of marriage, I must say it's a lousy thing to do to your wife." And she stalked out of the room, fists clenched. She was so angry, she didn't see that Nicole was standing back from the door, listening to the whole thing. And staring at me, as her mother swept past.

Now we were driving to school. "She's crazy, Dad."

"No, she's not."

"You know that she is. You're just pretending."

"Nicole, she's your mother," I said. "Your mother is not crazy. She's working very hard right now."

"That's what you said last week, after the fight."

"Well, it happens to be true."

"You guys didn't used to fight."

"There's a lot of stress right now."

Nicole snorted, crossed her arms, stared forward. "I don't know why you put up with her."

"And I don't know why you were listening to what is none of your business."

"Dad, why do you pull that crap with me?"

"Nicole…"

"Sor-ry. But why can't you have a real conversation, instead of defending her all the time? It's not normal, what she's doing. I know you think she's crazy."

"I don't," I said.

From the backseat, Eric whacked her on the back of the head. "You're the one who's crazy," he said.

"Shut up, butt breath."

"Shut up yourself, weasel puke."

"I don't want to hear any more from either of you," I said loudly. "I am not in the mood." By then we were pulling into the turnaround in front of the school. The kids piled out. Nicole jumped out of the front seat, turned back to get her backpack, shot me a look, and was gone. I didn't think Julia was crazy, but something had certainly changed, and as I replayed that morning's conversation in my head, I felt uneasy for other reasons. A lot of her comments sounded like she was building a case against me. Laying it out methodically, step by step. You are shutting me out and keeping me away from my children.

I am here, you just don't notice.

I'm a good mother, I balance a very demanding job with the needs of my family.

You are not supportive of me at all. You undercut me, you sabotage me.

You are turning the children against me.

I could easily imagine her lawyer saying these things in court. And I knew why. According to a recent article I had read in Redbook magazine, "alienation of affection" was currently the trendy argument in court. The father is turning the children against the mother. Poisoning their little minds by word and deed. While the Mom is blameless as always. Every father knew the legal system was hopelessly biased in favor of mothers. The courts gave lip service to equality, and then ruled a child needed its mother. Even if she was absent. Even if she smacked them around, or forgot to feed them. As long as she wasn't shooting up, or breaking their bones, she was a fit mother in the eyes of the court. And even if she was shooting up, a father might not win the case. One of my friends at MediaTronics had an ex-wife on heroin who'd been in and out of rehab for years. They'd finally divorced and had joint custody. She was supposedly clean but the kids said she wasn't. My friend was worried. He didn't want his ex driving the kids when she was loaded. He didn't want drug dealers around his kids. So he went to court to ask for full custody, and he lost. The judge said the wife was genuinely trying to overcome her addiction, and that children need their mother. So that was the reality. And now it looked to me as if Julia was starting to lay out that case. It gave me the creeps.

About the time I had worked myself into a fine lather, my cell phone rang. It was Julia. She was calling to apologize.

"I'm really sorry. I said stupid things today. I didn't mean it."

"What?"

"Jack, I know you support me. Of course you do. I couldn't manage without you. You're doing a great job with the kids. I'm just not myself these days. It was stupid, Jack. I'm sorry I said those things."

When I got off the phone I thought, I wish I had recorded that. I had a ten o'clock meeting with my headhunter, Annie Gerard. We met in the sunny courtyard of a coffee shop on Baker. We always met outside, so Annie could smoke. She had her laptop out and her wireless modem plugged in. A cigarette dangled from her lip, and she squinted in the smoke.

"Got anything?" I said, sitting down opposite her.

"Yeah, as a matter of fact I do. Two very good possibilities."

"Great," I said, stirring my latte. "Tell me."

"How about this? Chief research analyst for IBM, working on advanced distributed systems architecture."

"Right up my alley."

"I thought so, too. You're highly qualified for this one, Jack. You'd run a research lab of sixty people. Base pay two-fifty plus options going out five years plus royalties on anything developed in your lab."

"Sounds great. Where?"

"Armonk."

"New York?" I shook my head. "No way, Annie. What else?"

"Head of a team to design multi-agent systems for an insurance company that's doing data mining. It's an excellent opportunity, and-"

"Where?"

"Austin."

I sighed. "Annie. Julia's got a job she likes, she's very devoted to it, and she won't leave it now. My kids are in school, and-"

"People move all the time, Jack. They all have kids in school. Kids adapt."

"But with Julia…"

"Other people have working wives, too. They still move."

"I know, but the thing is with Julia…"

"Have you talked to her about it? Have you broached the subject?"

"Well, no, because I-"

"Jack." Annie stared at me over the laptop screen. "I think you better cut the crap. You're not in a position to be picky. You're starting to have a shelf-life problem."

"Shelf life," I said.

"That's right, Jack. You've been out of work six months now. That's a long time in high tech. Companies figure if it takes you that long to find a job, there must be something wrong with you. They don't know what, they just assume you've been rejected too many times, by too many other companies. Pretty soon, they won't even interview. Not in San Jose, not in Armonk, not in Austin, not in Cambridge. The boat's sailed. Are you hearing me? Am I getting through here?"

"Yes, but-"

"No buts, Jack. You've got to talk to your wife. You've got to figure out a way to get yourself off the shelf."

"But I can't leave the Valley. I have to stay here."

"Here is not so good." She flipped the screen up again. "Whenever I bring up your name, I keep getting-listen, what's going on at MediaTronics, anyway? Is Don Gross going to be indicted?"

"I don't know."

"I've been hearing that rumor for months now, but it never seems to happen. For your sake, I hope it happens soon."

"I don't get it," I said. "I'm perfectly positioned in a hot field, multi-agent distributed processing, and-"

"Hot?" she said, squinting at me. "Distributed processing's not hot, Jack. It's fucking radioactive. Everybody in the Valley figures that the breakthroughs in artificial life are going to come from distributed processing."

"They are," I said, nodding.

In the last few years, artificial life had replaced artificial intelligence as a long-term computing goal. The idea was to write programs that had the attributes of living creatures-the ability to adapt, cooperate, learn, adjust to change. Many of those qualities were especially important in robotics, and they were starting to be realized with distributed processing. Distributed processing meant that you divided your work among several processors, or among a network of virtual agents that you created in the computer. There were several basic ways this was done. One way was to create a large population of fairly dumb agents that worked together to accomplish a goal-just like a colony of ants worked together to accomplish a goal. My own team had done a lot of that work.

Another method was to make a so-called neural network that mimicked the network of neurons in the human brain. It turned out that even simple neural nets had surprising power. These networks could learn. They could build on past experience. We'd done some of that, too. A third technique was to create virtual genes in the computer, and let them evolve in a virtual world until some goal was attained.

And there were several other procedures, as well. Taken together, these procedures represented a huge change from the older notions of artificial intelligence, or AI. In the old days, programmers tried to write rules to cover every situation. For example, they tried to teach computers that if someone bought something at a store, they had to pay before leaving. But this commonsense knowledge proved extremely difficult to program. The computer would make mistakes. New rules would be added to avoid the mistakes. Then more mistakes, and more rules. Eventually the programs were gigantic, millions of lines of code, and they began to fail out of sheer complexity. They were too large to debug. You couldn't figure out where the errors were coming from.

So it began to seem as if rule-based AI was never going to work. Lots of people made dire predictions about the end of artificial intelligence. The eighties were a good time for English professors who believed that computers would never match human intelligence. But distributed networks of agents offered an entirely new approach. And the programming philosophy was new, too. The old rules-based programming was "top down." The system as a whole was given rules of behavior.

But the new programming was "bottom up." The program defined the behavior of individual agents at the lowest structural level. But the behavior of the system as a whole was not defined. Instead, the behavior of the system emerged, the result of hundreds of small interactions occurring at a lower level.

Because the system was not programmed, it could produce surprising results. Results never anticipated by the programmers. That was why they could seem "lifelike." And that was why the field was so hot, because"Jack."

Annie was tapping my hand. I blinked.

"Jack, did you hear anything I just said to you?"

"Sorry."

"I don't have your full attention," she said. She blew cigarette smoke in my face. "Yes, you're right, you're in a hot field. But that's all the more reason to worry about shelf life. It's not like you're an electrical engineer specializing in optical-drive mechanisms. Hot fields move fast. Six months can make or break a company."

"I know."

"You're at risk, Jack."

"I understand."

"So. Will you talk to your wife? Please?"

"Yes."

"Okay," she said. "Make sure you do. Because otherwise, I can't help you." She flicked her burning cigarette into the remains of my latte. It sizzled and died. She snapped her laptop shut, got up, and left.

I put a call in to Julia, but didn't get her. I left voice mail. I knew it was a waste of time even to bring up moving to her. She'd certainly say no-especially if she had a new boyfriend. But Annie was right, I was in trouble. I had to do something. I had to ask. I sat at my desk at home, turning the SSVT box in my hands, trying to think what to do. I had another hour and a half before I picked up the kids. I really wanted to talk to Julia. I decided to call Julia again through the company switchboard, to see if they could track her down. "Xymos Technology."

"Julia Forman, please."

"Please hold." Some classical music, then another voice. "Ms. Forman's office."

I recognized Carol, her assistant. "Carol, it's Jack."

"Oh, hi, Mr. Forman. How are you?"

"I'm fine, thanks."

"Are you looking for Julia?"

"Yes, I am."

"She's in Nevada for the day, at the fab plant. Shall I try to connect you there?"

"Yes, please."

"One moment."

I was put on hold. For quite a while.

"Mr. Forman, she's in a meeting for the next hour. I expect her to call back when it breaks up. Do you want her to call you?"

"Yes, please."

"Do you want me to tell her anything?"

"No," I said. "Just ask her to call."

"Okay, Mr. Forman."

I hung up, stared into space, turning the SSVT box. She's in Nevada for the day. Julia had said nothing to me about going to Nevada. I replayed the conversation with Carol in my mind. Had Carol sounded uncomfortable? Was she covering? I couldn't be sure. I couldn't be sure of anything now. I stared out the window and as I watched, the sprinklers kicked on, shooting up cones of spray all over the lawn. It was right in the heat of midday, the wrong time to water. It wasn't supposed to happen. The sprinklers had been fixed just the other day. I began to feel depressed, staring at the water. It seemed like everything was wrong. I had no job, my wife was absent, the kids were a pain, I felt constantly inadequate dealing with them-and now the fucking sprinklers weren't working right. They were going to burn out the fucking lawn.

And then the baby began to cry.

I waited for Julia to call, but she never did. I cut up chicken breasts into strips (the trick is to keep them cold, almost frozen) for dinner, because chicken fingers were another meal they never argued about. I got out rice to boil. I looked at the carrots in the fridge and decided that even though they were a little old, I'd still use them tonight. I cut my finger while I was chopping the carrots. It wasn't a big cut but it bled a lot, and the Band-Aid didn't stop the bleeding. It kept bleeding through the pad, so I kept putting on new Band-Aids. It was frustrating.

Dinner was late and the kids were cranky. Eric complained loudly that my chicken fingers were gross, that McDonald's were way better, and why couldn't we have those? Nicole tried out various line readings for her play, while Eric mimicked her under his breath. The baby spit up every mouthful of her cereal until I stopped and mixed it with some mashed banana. After that, she ate steadily. I don't know why I never thought to do that before. Amanda was getting older, and she didn't want the bland stuff anymore.

Eric had left his homework at school; I told him to call his friends for the assignment, but he wouldn't. Nicole was online for an hour with her friends; I kept popping into her room and telling her to get off the computer until her homework was done, and she'd say, "In just a minute, Dad." The baby fussed, and it took a long time for me to get her down. I went back into Nicole's room and said, "Now, damn it!" Nicole began to cry. Eric came in to gloat. I asked him why he wasn't in bed. He saw the look on my face, and scampered away. Sobbing, Nicole said I should apologize to her. I said she should have done what I told her to do twice before. She went into the bathroom and slammed the door. From his room, Eric yelled, "I can't sleep with all that racket!"

I yelled back, "One more word and no television for a week!"

"Not fair!"

I went into the bedroom and turned on the TV to watch the rest of the game. After half an hour, I checked on the kids. The baby was sleeping peacefully. Eric was asleep, all his covers thrown off. I pulled them back on him. Nicole was studying. When she saw me, she apologized. I gave her a hug.

I went back into the bedroom, and watched the game for about ten minutes before I fell asleep.

DAY 5
7:10 A.M.

When I awoke in the morning, I saw that Julia's side of the bed was still made up, her pillow uncreased. She hadn't come home last night at all. I checked the telephone messages; there were none. Eric wandered in, and saw the bed. "Where's Mom?"

"I don't know, son."

"Did she leave already?"

"I guess so…"

He stared at me, and then at the unmade bed. And he walked out of the room. He wasn't going to deal with it.

But I was beginning to think I had to. Maybe I should even talk to a lawyer. Except in my mind, there was something irrevocable about talking to a lawyer. If the trouble was that serious, it was probably fatal. I didn't want to believe my marriage was over, so I wanted to postpone seeing a lawyer.

That was when I decided to call my sister in San Diego. Ellen is a clinical psychologist, she has a practice in La Jolla. It was early enough that I figured she hadn't gone to the office yet; she answered the phone at home. She sounded surprised I had called. I love my sister but we are very different. Anyway, I told her briefly about the things I'd been suspecting about Julia, and why.

"You're saying Julia didn't come home and she didn't call?"

"Right."

"Did you call her?"

"Not yet."

"How come?"

"I don't know."

"Maybe she was in an accident, maybe she's hurt…"

"I don't think so."

"Why not?"

"You always hear if there's an accident. There's no accident."

"You sound upset, Jack."

"I don't know. Maybe."

My sister was silent for a moment. Then she said, "Jack, you've got a problem. Why aren't you doing something?"

"Like what?"

"Like see a marriage counselor. Or a lawyer."

"Oh, jeez."

"Don't you think you should?" she asked.

"I don't know. No. Not yet."

"Jack. She didn't come home last night and she didn't bother to call. When this woman drops a hint, she uses a bombsight. How much clearer do you need it to be?"

"I don't know."

"You're saying 'I don't know' a lot. Are you aware of that?"

"I guess so."

A pause. "Jack, are you all right?"

"I don't know."

"Do you want me to come up for a couple of days? Because I can, no problem. I was supposed to go out of town with my boyfriend, but his company just got bought. So I'm available, if you want me to come up."

"No. It's okay."

"You sure? I'm worried about you."

"No, no," I said. "You don't have to worry."

"Are you depressed?"

"No. Why?"

"Sleeping okay? Exercising?"

"Fair. Not really exercising that much."

"Uh-huh. Do you have a job yet?"

"No."

"Prospects?"

"Not really. No."

"Jack," she said. "You have to see a lawyer."

"Maybe in a while."

"Jack. What's the matter with you? This is what you've told me. Your wife is acting cold and angry toward you. She's lying to you. She's acting strange with the kids. She doesn't seem to care about her family. She's angry and absent a lot. It's getting worse. You think she's involved with someone else. Last night, she doesn't even show up or call. And you're just going to let this go without doing anything?"

"I don't know what to do."

"I told you. See a lawyer."

"You think so?"

"You're damn right I think so."

"I don't know…"

She sighed, a long exasperated hiss. "Jack. Look. I know you're a little passive at times, but-"

"I'm not passive," I said. And I added, "I hate it when you shrink me."

"Your wife is screwing around on you, you think she's building a case to take the kids away from you, and you're just letting it happen. I'd say that's passive."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"I told you." Another exasperated sigh. "Okay. I'm taking a couple of days and coming up to see you."

"Ellen-"

"Don't argue. I'm coming. You can tell Julia I'm going to help out with the kids. I'll be up there this afternoon."

"But-"

"Don't argue."

And she got off the phone. …

I'm not passive. I'm thoughtful. Ellen's very energetic, her personality's perfect for a psychologist, because she loves to tell people what to do. Frankly, I think she's pushy. And she thinks I'm passive.

This is Ellen's idea about me. That I went to Stanford in the late seventies, and studied population biology-a purely academic field, with no practical application, no jobs except in universities. In those days population biology was being revolutionized by field studies of animals, and by advances in genetic screening. Both required computer analysis, using advanced mathematical algorithms. I couldn't find the kind of programs I needed for my research, so I began to write them myself. And I slid sideways into computer science-another geeky, purely academic field.

But my graduation just happened to coincide with the rise of Silicon Valley and the personal-computer explosion. Low-number employees at startup companies were making a fortune in the eighties, and I did pretty well at the first one I worked for. I met Julia, and we got married, had kids. Everything was smooth. We were both doing great, just by showing up for work. I got hired away by another company; more perks, bigger options. I just rode the advancing wave into the nineties. By then I wasn't programming anymore, I was supervising software development. And things just fell into place for me, without any real effort on my part. I just fell into my life. I never had to prove myself.

That's Ellen's idea of me. My idea is different. The companies of Silicon Valley are the most intensely competitive in the history of the planet. Everybody works a hundred hours a week. Everybody is racing against milestones. Everybody is cutting development cycles. The cycles were originally three years to a new product, a new version. Then it was two years. Then eighteen months. Now it was twelve months-a new version every year. If you figure beta debugging to golden master takes four months, then you have only eight months to do the actual work. Eight months to revise ten million lines of code, and make sure it all works right. In short, Silicon Valley is no place for a passive person, and I'm not one. I hustled my ass off every minute of every day. I had to prove myself every day-or I'd be gone. That was my idea about myself. I was sure I was right.

Ellen was right about one part, though. A strong streak of luck ran through my career. Because my original field of study had been biology, I had an advantage when computer programs began to explicitly mimic biological systems. In fact, there were programmers who shuttled back and forth between computer simulation and studies of animal groups in the wild, applying the lessons of one to the other.

But further, I had worked in population biology-the study of groups of living organisms. And computer science had evolved in the direction of massively parallel networked structures-the programming of populations of intelligent agents. A special kind of thinking was required to handle populations of agents, and I had been trained in that thinking for years. So I was admirably suited to the trends of my field, and I made excellent progress as the fields emerged. I had been in the right place at the right time.

That much was true.

Agent-based programs that modeled biological populations were increasingly important in the real world. Like my own programs that mimicked ant foraging to control big communications networks. Or programs that mimicked division of labor among termite colonies to control thermostats in a skyscraper. And closely related were the programs that mimicked genetic selection, used for a wide range of applications. In one program, witnesses to a crime were shown nine faces and asked to choose which was most like the criminal, even if none really were; the program then showed them nine more faces, and asked them to choose again; and from many repeated generations the program slowly evolved a highly accurate composite picture of the face, far more accurate than any police artist could make. Witnesses never had to say what exactly they were responding to in each face; they just chose, and the program evolved.

And then there were the biotech companies, which had found they could not successfully engineer new proteins because the proteins tended to fold up weirdly. So now they used genetic selection to "evolve" the new proteins instead. All these procedures had become standard practice in a matter of just a few years. And they were increasingly powerful, increasingly important.

So, yes, I had been in the right place at the right time. But I wasn't passive, I was lucky. I hadn't showered or shaved yet. I went in the bathroom, stripped off my T-shirt, and stared at myself in the mirror. I was startled to see how soft I looked around the gut. I hadn't realized. Of course I was forty, and the fact was, I hadn't been exercising as much lately. Not because I was depressed. I was busy with the kids, and tired a lot of the time. I just didn't feel like exercising, that was all.

I stared at my own reflection, and wondered if Ellen was right.

There's one problem with all psychological knowledge-nobody can apply it to themselves. People can be incredibly astute about the shortcomings of their friends, spouses, children. But they have no insight into themselves at all. The same people who are coldly clear-eyed about the world around them have nothing but fantasies about themselves. Psychological knowledge doesn't work if you look in a mirror. This bizarre fact is, as far as I know, unexplained. Personally, I always thought there was a clue from computer programming, in a procedure called recursion. Recursion means making the program loop back on itself, to use its own information to do things over and over until it gets a result. You use recursion for certain data-sorting algorithms and things like that. But it's got to be done carefully, or you risk having the machine fall into what is called an infinite regress. It's the programming equivalent of those funhouse mirrors that reflect mirrors, and mirrors, ever smaller and smaller, stretching away to infinity. The program keeps going, repeating and repeating, but nothing happens. The machine hangs.

I always figured something similar must happen when people turn their psychological insight-apparatus on themselves. The brain hangs. The thought process goes and goes, but it doesn't get anywhere. It must be something like that, because we know that people can think about themselves indefinitely. Some people think of little else. Yet people never seem to change as a result of their intensive introspection. They never understand themselves better. It's very rare to find genuine self-knowledge.

It's almost as if you need someone else to tell you who you are, or to hold up the mirror for you. Which, if you think about it, is very weird.

Or maybe it's not.

There's an old question in artificial intelligence about whether a program can ever be aware of itself. Most programmers will say it was impossible. People have tried to do it, and failed. But there's a more fundamental version of the question, a philosophical question about whether any machine can understand its own workings. Some people say that's impossible, too. The machine can't know itself for the same reason you can't bite your own teeth. And it certainly seems to be impossible: the human brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe, but brains still know very little about themselves. For the last thirty years, such questions have been fun to kick around with a beer on Friday afternoons after work. They were never taken seriously. But lately these philosophical questions have taken on new importance because there has been rapid progress in reproducing certain brain functions. Not the entire brain, just certain functions. For example, before I was fired, my development team was using multi-agent processing to enable computers to learn, to recognize patterns in data, to understand natural languages, to prioritize and switch tasks. What was important about the programs was that the machines literally learned. They got better at their jobs with experience. Which is more than some human beings can claim. The phone rang. It was Ellen. "Did you call your lawyer?"

"Not yet. For Christ's sake."

"I'm on the 2:10 to San Jose. I'll see you around five at your house."

"Listen, Ellen, it really isn't necessary-"

"I know that. I'm just getting out of town. I need a break. See you soon, Jack." And she hung up.

So now she was handling me.

In any case, I figured there was no point in calling a lawyer today. I had too much to do. The dry cleaning had to be picked up, so I did that. There was a Starbucks across the street, and I went over to get a latte to take with me.

And there was Gary Marder, my attorney, with a very young blonde in low-cut jeans and crop top that left her belly exposed. They were nuzzling each other in the checkout line. She didn't look much older than a college student. I was embarrassed and was turning to leave when Gary saw me, and waved.

"Hey, Jack."

"Hi, Gary."

He held out his hand, and I shook it. He said, "Say hello to Melissa."

I said, "Hi, Melissa."

"Oh hi." She seemed vaguely annoyed at this interruption, although I couldn't be sure. She had that vacant look some young girls get around men. It occurred to me that she couldn't be more than six years older than Nicole. What was she doing with a guy like Gary? "So. How's it going, Jack?" Gary said, slipping his arm around Melissa's bare waist.

"Okay," I said. "Pretty good."

"Yeah? That's good." But he was frowning at me.

"Well, uh, yeah…" I stood there, hesitating, feeling foolish in front of the girl. She clearly wanted me to leave. But I was thinking of what Ellen would say: You ran into your lawyer and you didn't even ask him?

So I said, "Gary, could I speak to you for a minute?"

"Of course." He gave the girl money to pay for the coffee, and we stepped to one side of the room.

I lowered my voice. "Listen, Gary," I said, "I think I need to see a divorce lawyer."

"Because what?"

"Because I think Julia is having an affair."

"You think? Or you know for a fact?"

"No. I don't know for sure."

"So you just suspect it?"

"Yes."

Gary sighed. He gave me a look.

I said, "And there's other things going on, too. She's starting to say that I am turning the kids against her."

"Alienation of affection," he said, nodding. "Legal clichй du jour. She makes these statements when?"

"When we have fights."

Another sigh. "Jack, couples say all kinds of shit when they fight. It doesn't necessarily mean anything."

"I think it does. I'm worried it does."

"This is upsetting you?"

"Yes."

"Have you seen a marriage counselor?"

"No."

"See one."

"Why?"

"Two reasons. First, because you should. You've been married to Julia a long time, and as far as I know it's been mostly good. And second, because you'll start to establish a record of trying to save the marriage, which contradicts a claim of alienation of affection."

"Yes, but-"

"If you're right that she is starting to build a case, then you have to be extremely careful, my friend. Alienation of affection is a tough argument to defend against. The kids are pissed at Mom, and she says you're behind it. How can you prove it's not true? You can't. Plus you've been home a lot, so it's easier to imagine that it might be true. The court will see you as dissatisfied, and possibly resentful of your working spouse." He held up his hand. "I know, I know none of that's true, Jack, but it's an easy argument to make, that's my point. And her attorney will make it. In your resentment, you turned the kids against her."

"That's bullshit."

"Of course. I know that." He slapped me on the shoulder. "So see a good counselor. If you need names, call my office and Barbara'll give you a couple of reputable ones." I called Julia to tell her that Ellen was coming up for a few days. Of course, I didn't reach Julia, just her voice mail. I left a longish message, explaining what was happening. Then I went to do the shopping because with Ellen staying over, we'd need some extra supplies. I was rolling my cart down the supermarket aisle when I got a call from the hospital. It was the beardless ER doctor again. He was calling to check on Amanda and I said her bruises were almost gone.

"That's good," he said. "Glad to hear it."

I said, "What about the MRI?"

The doctor said the MRI results were not relevant, because the machine had malfunctioned and had never examined Amanda. "In fact, we're worried about all the readings for the last few weeks," he said. "Because apparently the machine was slowly breaking down."

"How do you mean?"

"It was being corroded or something. All the memory chips were turning to powder."

I felt a chill, remembering Eric's MP3 player. "Why would that happen?" I said. "The best guess is it's been corroded by some gas that escaped from the wall lines, probably during the night. Like chlorine gas, that'd do it. Except the thing is, only the memory chips were damaged. The other chips were fine."

Things were getting stranger by the minute. And they got stranger still a few minutes later, when Julia called all cheerful and upbeat, to announce that she was coming home in the afternoon and would be there in plenty of time for dinner.

"It'll be great to see Ellen," she said. "Why is she coming?"

"I think she just wanted to get out of town."

"Well, it'll be great for you to have her around for a few days. Some grown-up company."

"You bet," I said.

I waited for her to explain why she hadn't come home. But all she said was, "Hey, I got to run, Jack, I'll talk to you later-"

"Julia," I said. "Wait a minute."

"What?"

I hesitated, wondering how to put it. I said, "I was worried about you last night."

"You were? Why?"

"When you didn't come home."

"Honey, I called you. I got stuck out at the plant. Didn't you check your messages?"

"Yes…"

"And you didn't have a message from me?"

"No. I didn't."

"Well, I don't know what happened. I left you a message, Jack. I called the house first and got Maria, but she couldn't, you know, it was too complicated… So then I called your cell and I left you a message that I was stuck at the plant until today."

"Well, I didn't get it," I said, trying not to sound like I was pouting. "Sorry about that, honey, but check your service. Anyway listen, I really have to go. See you tonight, okay? Kiss kiss."

And she hung up.

I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and checked it. There was no message. I checked the phone log. There were no calls last night.

Julia hadn't called me. No one had called me.

I began to feel a sinking sensation, that descent into depression again. I felt tired, I couldn't move. I stared at the produce on the supermarket shelves. I couldn't remember why I was there.

I had just about decided to leave the supermarket when my cell phone rang in my hand. I flipped it open. It was Tim Bergman, the guy who had taken over my job at MediaTronics. "Are you sitting down?" he said.

"No. Why?"

"I've got some pretty strange news. Brace yourself."

"Okay…"

"Don wants to call you."

Don Gross was the head of the company, the guy who had fired me. "What for?"

"He wants to hire you back."

"He wants what?"

"Yeah. I know. It's crazy. To hire you back."

"Why?" I said.

"We're having some problems with distributed systems that we've sold to customers."

"Which ones?"

"Well, PREDPREY."

"That's one of the old ones," I said. "Who sold that?" PREDPREY was a system we'd designed over a year ago. Like most of our programs, it had been based on biological models. PREDPREY was a goal-seeking program based on predator/prey dynamics. But it was extremely simple in its structure.

"Well, Xymos wanted something very simple," Tim said.

"You sold PREDPREY to Xymos?"

"Right. Licensed, actually. With a contract to support it. That's driving us crazy."

"Why?"

"It isn't working right, apparently. Goal seeking has gone haywire. A lot of the time, the program seems to lose its goal."

"I'm not surprised," I said, "because we didn't specify reinforcers." Reinforcers were program weights that sustained the goals. The reason you needed them was that since the networked agents could learn, they might learn in a way that caused them to drift away from the goal. You needed a way to store the original goal so it didn't get lost. The fact was you could easily come to think of agent programs as children. The programs forgot things, lost things, dropped things. It was all emergent behavior. It wasn't programmed, but it was the outcome of programming. And apparently it was happening to Xymos.

"Well," Tim said, "Don figures you were running the team when the program was originally written, so you're the guy to fix it. Plus, your wife is high up in Xymos management, so your joining the team will reassure their top people."

I wasn't sure that was true, but I didn't say anything.

"Anyway, that's the situation," Tim continued. "I'm calling you to ask if Don should call you. Because he doesn't want to get rejected."

I felt a burst of anger. He doesn't want to get rejected. "Tim," I said. "I can't go back to work there."

"Oh, you wouldn't be here. You'd be up at the Xymos fab plant."

"Oh yes? How would that work?"

"Don would hire you as an off-site consultant. Something like that."

"Uh-huh," I said, in my best noncommittal tone. Everything about this proposal sounded like a bad idea. The last thing I wanted to do was go back to work for that son of a bitch Don. And it was always a bad idea to return to a company after you'd been fired-for any reason, under any arrangement. Everybody knew that.

But on the other hand, if I agreed to work as a consultant, it would get rid of my shelf-life problem. And it would get me out of the house. It would accomplish a lot of things. After a pause, I said, "Listen, Tim, let me think about it."

"You want to call me back?"

"Okay. Yes."

"When will you call?" he said.

The tension in his voice was clear. I said, "You've got some urgency about this…"

"Yeah, well, some. Like I said, that contract's driving us crazy. We have five programmers from the original team practically living out at that Xymos plant. And they're not getting anywhere on this problem. So if you're not going to help us, we have to look elsewhere, right away."

"Okay, I'll call you tomorrow," I said.

"Tomorrow morning?" he said, hinting.

"Okay," I said. "Yes, tomorrow morning."

Tim's call should have made me feel better about things, but it didn't. I took the baby to the park, and pushed her in the swing for a while. Amanda liked being pushed in the swing. She could do it for twenty or thirty minutes at a time, and always cried when I took her out. Later I sat on the concrete curb of the sandbox while she crawled around, and pulled herself up to standing on the concrete turtles and other playthings. One of the older toddlers knocked her over, but she didn't cry; she just got back up. She seemed to like being around the older kids. I watched her, and thought about going back to work.

"Of course you told them yes," Ellen said to me. We were in the kitchen. She had just arrived, her black suitcase unpacked in the corner. Ellen looked exactly the same, still rail-thin, energetic, blond, hyper. My sister never seemed to age. She was drinking a cup of tea from teabags that she had brought with her. Special organic oolong tea from a special shop in San Francisco. That hadn't changed, either-Ellen had always been fussy about food, even as a kid. As an adult, she traveled around with her own teas, her own salad dressings, her own vitamins neatly arranged in little glassine packs.

"No, I didn't," I said. "I didn't tell them yes. I said I'd think about it."

"Think about it? Are you kidding? Jack, you have to go back to work. You know you do." She stared at me, appraising. "You're depressed."

"I'm not."

"You should have some of this tea," she said. "All that coffee is bad for your nerves."

"Tea has more caffeine than coffee."

"Jack. You have to go back to work."

"I know that, Ellen."

"And if it's a consulting job… wouldn't that be perfect? Solve all your problems?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Really? What don't you know."

"I don't know if I'm getting the full story," I said. "I mean, if Xymos is having all this trouble, how come Julia hasn't said anything about it to me?"

Ellen shook her head. "It sounds like Julia isn't saying much of anything to you these days." She stared at me. "So why didn't you accept right away?"

"I need to check around first."

"Check what, Jack?" Her tone conveyed disbelief. Ellen was acting like I had a psychological problem that needed to be fixed. My sister was starting to get to me, and we'd only been together a few minutes. My older sister, treating me like I was a kid again. I stood up. "Listen, Ellen," I said. "I've spent my life in this business, and I know how it works. There's two possible reasons Don wants me back. The first is the company's in a jam and they think I can help."

"That's what they said."

"Right. That's what they said. But the other possibility is that they've made an incredible mess of things and by now it can't be fixed-and they know it."

"So they want somebody to blame?"

"Right. They want a donkey to pin the tail on."

She frowned. I saw her hesitate. "Do you really think so?"

"I don't know, that's the point," I said. "But I have to find out."

"Which you will do by…"

"By making some calls. Maybe paying a surprise visit to the fab building tomorrow."

"Okay. That sounds right to me."

"I'm glad I have your approval." I couldn't keep the irritation out of my voice.

"Jack," she said. She got up and hugged me. "I'm just worried about you, that's all."

"I appreciate that," I said. "But you're not helping me."

"Okay. Then what can I do to help you?"

"Watch the kids, while I make some calls."

I figured I would first call Ricky Morse, the guy I'd seen in the supermarket buying Huggies. I had a long relationship with Ricky; he worked at Xymos and he was casual enough about information that he might tell me what was really going on there. The only problem was that Ricky was based in the Valley, and he'd already told me that the action was all at the fab building. But he was a place for me to start.

I called his office, but the receptionist said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Morse is not in the office."

"When is he expected back?"

"I really couldn't say. Do you want voice mail?"

I left Ricky a voice-mail message. Then I called his home number. His wife answered. Mary was getting her Ph.D. in French history; I imagined her studying, bouncing the baby, with a book open on her lap. I said, "How are you, Mary?"

"I'm fine, Jack."

"How's the baby? Ricky tells me you never get diaper rash. I'm jealous." I tried to sound casual. Just a social call.

Mary laughed. "She's a good baby, and we didn't have colic, thank God. But Ricky hasn't been around for the rashes," she said. "We've had some."

I said, "Actually, I'm looking for Ricky. Is he there?"

"No, Jack. He's been gone all week. He's out at that fab plant in Nevada."

"Oh, right." I remembered now that Ricky had mentioned that, when we had met in the supermarket.

"Have you been out to that plant?" Mary said. I thought I detected an uneasy tone.

"No, I haven't, but-"

"Julia is there a lot, isn't she? What does she say about it?" Definitely worried.

"Well, not much. I gather they have new technology that's very hush-hush. Why?"

She hesitated. "Maybe it's my imagination…"

"What is?"

"Well, sometimes when Ricky calls, he sounds kind of weird to me."

"How?"

"I'm sure he's distracted and working hard, but he says some strange things. He doesn't always make a lot of sense. And he seems evasive. Like he's, I don't know, hiding something."

"Hiding something…"

She gave a self-deprecating laugh. "I even thought maybe he's having an affair. You know, that woman Mae Chang is out there, and he always liked her. She's so pretty." Mae Chang used to work in my division at MediaTronics. "I hadn't heard she was at the fab plant."

"Yes. I think a lot of the people who used to work for you are there, now."

"Well," I said. "I don't think Ricky is having an affair, Mary. It's just not like him. And it's not like Mae."

"It's the quiet ones you have to watch out for," she said, apparently referring to Mae. "And I'm still nursing, so I haven't lost my weight yet, I mean, my thighs are as big as sides of beef."

"I don't think that-"

"They rub together when I walk. Squishy."

"Mary, I'm sure-"

"Is Julia okay, Jack? She's not acting weird?"

"No more than usual," I said, trying to make a joke. I was feeling bad as I said it. For days I had wished that people would level with me about Julia, but now that I had something to share with Mary, I wasn't going to level with her. I was going to keep my mouth shut. I said, "Julia's working hard, and she sometimes is a little odd."

"Does she say anything about a black cloud?"

"Uh… no."

"The new world? Being present for the birth of the new world order?" That sounded like conspiracy talk to me. Like those people who worried about the Trilateral Commission and thought that the Rockefellers ran the world. "No, nothing like that."

"She mention a black cloak?"

I felt suddenly slowed down. Moving very slowly. "What?"

"The other night Ricky was talking about a black cloak, being covered in a black cloak. It was late, he was tired, he was sort of babbling."

"What did he say about the black cloak?"

"Nothing. Just that." She paused. "You think they're taking drugs out there?"

"I don't know," I said.

"You know, there's pressure, working around the clock, and nobody's sleeping much. I wonder about drugs."

"Let me call Ricky," I said.

Mary gave me his cell phone number, and I wrote it down. I was about to dial it when the door slammed, and I heard Eric say, "Hey, Mom! Who's that guy in the car with you?" I got up, and looked out the window at the driveway. Julia's BMW convertible was there, top down. I checked my watch. It was only 4:30.

I went out into the hall and saw Julia hugging Eric. She was saying, "It must have been sunlight on the windshield. There's nobody else in the car."

"Yes there was. I saw him."

"Oh yes?" She opened the front door. "Go look for yourself." Eric went out onto the lawn. Julia smiled at me. "He thinks someone was in the car."

Eric came back in, shrugging. "Oh well. Guess not."

"That's right, honey." Julia walked down the hall toward me. "Is Ellen here?"

"Just got here."

"Great. I'm going to take a shower, and we'll talk. Let's open some wine. What do you want to do about dinner?"

"I've got steaks ready."

"Great. Sounds great."

And with a cheerful wave, she went down the hallway.

It was a warm evening and we had dinner in the backyard. I put out the red-checkered tablecloth and grilled the steaks on the barbecue, wearing my chef's apron that said the chef's word is law, and we had a sort of classic American family dinner.

Julia was charming and chatty, focusing her attention on my sister, talking about the kids, about school, about changes she wanted to make on the house. "That window has to come out," she said, pointing back at the kitchen, "and we'll put French doors in so it'll open to the outside. It'll be great." I was astonished by Julia's performance. Even the kids were staring at her. Julia mentioned how proud she was of Nicole's big part in the forthcoming school play. Nicole said, "Mom, I have a bad part."

"Oh, not really, honey," Julia said.

"Yes, I do. I just have two lines."

"Now honey, I'm sure you're-"

Eric piped up. " 'Look, here comes John now.' 'That sounds pretty serious.' "

"Shut up, weasel turd."

"She says 'em in the bathroom, over and over," Eric announced. "About a billion gazillion times."

Julia said, "Who's John?"

"Those are the lines in the play."

"Oh. Well, anyway, I'm sure you'll be wonderful. And our little Eric is making such progress in soccer, aren't you, hon?"

"It's over next week," Eric said, turning sulky. Julia hadn't made it to any of his games this fall. "It's been so good for him," Julia said to Ellen. "Team sports build cooperation. Especially with boys, it helps with that competitiveness."

Ellen wasn't saying anything, just nodding and listening.

For this particular evening, Julia had insisted on feeding the baby, and had positioned the high chair beside her. But Amanda was accustomed to playing airplane at every mealtime. She was waiting for someone to move the spoon toward her, saying, "Rrrrrrr-owwwww… here comes the airplane… open the doors!" Since Julia wasn't doing that, Amanda kept her mouth tightly shut. Which was part of the game, too.

"Oh well. I guess she's not hungry," Julia said, with a shrug. "Did she just have a bottle, Jack?"

"No," I said. "She doesn't get one until after dinner."

"Well, I know that. I meant, before."

"No," I said. "Not before." I gestured toward Amanda. "Shall I try?"

"Sure." Julia handed me the spoon, and I sat beside Amanda and began to play airplane. "Rrrrr-owwww…" Amanda immediately grinned and opened her mouth.

"Jack's been wonderful with the kids, just wonderful," Julia said to Ellen.

"I think it's good for a man to experience home life," Ellen said.

"Oh, it is. It is. He's helped me a lot." She patted my knee. "You really have, Jack." It was clear to me that Julia was too bright, too cheerful. She was keyed up, talking fast, and obviously trying to impress Ellen that she was in charge of her family. I could see that Ellen wasn't buying it. But Julia was so speedy, she didn't notice. I began to wonder if she were on drugs. Was that the reason for her strange behavior? Was she on amphetamines? "And work," Julia continued, "is so incredible these days. Xymos is really making breakthroughs-the kind of breakthroughs people have been waiting for more than ten years to happen. But at last, it's happening."

"Like the black cloak?" I said, fishing.

Julia blinked. "The what?" She shook her head. "What're you talking about, hon?"

"A black cloak. Didn't you say something about a black cloak the other day?"

"No…" She shook her head. "I don't know what you mean." She turned back to Ellen. "Anyway, all this molecular technology has been much slower to come to market than we expected. But at last, it really is here."

"You seem very excited," Ellen said.

"I have to tell you, it's thrilling, Ellen." She lowered her voice. "And on top of it, we'll probably make a bundle."

"That'd be good," Ellen said. "But I guess you've had to put in long hours…"

"Not that long," Julia said. "All things considered, it hasn't been bad. Just the last week or so." I saw Nicole's eyes widen. Eric was staring at his mother as he ate. But the kids didn't say anything. Neither did I.

"It's just a transition period," Julia continued. "All companies have these transitional periods."

"Of course," Ellen said.

The sun was going down. The air was cooler. The kids left the table. I got up and started to clear. Ellen was helping me. Julia kept talking, then said, "I'd love to stay, but I have something going on, and I have to get back to the office for a while." If Ellen was surprised to hear this, she didn't show it. All she said was, "Long hours."

"Just during this transition." She turned to me. "Thanks for holding the fort, honey." At the door, she turned, blew me an air kiss. "Love, Jack."

And she left.

Ellen frowned, watching her go. "Just a little abrupt, wouldn't you say?"

I shrugged.

"Will she say good-bye to the kids?"

"Probably not."

"She'll just run right out the door?"

"Right."

Ellen shook her head. "Jack," she said, "I don't know if she's having an affair or not, but-what's she taking?"

"Nothing, as far as I know."

"She's on something. I'm certain of it. Would you say she's lost weight?"

"Yes. Some."

"And sleeping very little. And obviously speedy…" Ellen shook her head. "A lot of these hard-charging executives are on drugs."

"I don't know," I said.

She just looked at me.

I went back into my office to call Ricky, and from the office window I saw Julia backing her car down the driveway. I went to wave to her, but she was looking over her shoulder as she backed away. In the evening light I saw golden reflections on the windshield, streaking from the trees above. She had almost reached the street when I thought I saw someone sitting in the passenger seat beside her. It looked like a man.

I couldn't see his features clearly through the windshield, with the car moving down the drive. When Julia backed onto the street, her body blocked my view of the passenger. But it seemed as if Julia was talking to him, animatedly. Then she put the car in gear and leaned back in her seat, and for a moment I had a brief, clear look. The man was backlit, his face in shadow, and he must have been looking directly at her because I still couldn't make out any features, but from the way he was slouching I had the impression of someone young, maybe in his twenties, though I honestly couldn't be sure. It was just a glimpse. Then the BMW accelerated, and she drove off down the street.

I thought: the hell with this. I ran outside, and down the driveway. I reached the street just as Julia came to the stop sign to the end of the block, her brake lights flaring. She was probably fifty yards away, the street illuminated in low, slanting yellow light. It looked as if she was alone in the car, but I really couldn't see well. I felt a moment of relief, and of foolishness. There I was, standing in the street, for no good reason. My mind was playing tricks on me. There was nobody in the car.

Then, as Julia made the right turn, the guy popped up again, like he had been bent over, getting something from the glove compartment. And then the car was gone. And in an instant all my distress came flooding back, like a hot pain that spread across my chest and body. I felt short of breath, and a little dizzy.

There was somebody in the car.

I trudged back up the driveway, feeling churning emotions, not sure what to do next. "You're not sure what to do next?" Ellen said. We were doing the pots and pans at the sink, the things that didn't go in the dishwasher. Ellen was drying, while I scrubbed. "You pick up the phone and call her."

"She's in the car."

"She has a car phone. Call her."

"Uh-huh," I said. "So how do I put it? Hey Julia, who's the guy in the car with you?" I shook my head. "That's going to be a tough conversation."

"Maybe so."

"That'll be a divorce, for sure."

She just stared at me. "You don't want a divorce, do you."

"Hell, no. I want to keep my family together."

"That may not be possible, Jack. It may not be your decision to make."

"None of this makes any sense," I said. "I mean the guy in the car, he was like a kid, somebody young."

"So?"

"That's not Julia's style."

"Oh?" Ellen's eyebrows went up. "He was probably in his twenties or early thirties. And anyway, are you so sure about Julia's style?"

"Well, I've lived with her for thirteen years."

She set down one of the pots with a bang. "Jack. I understand that all this must be hard to accept."

"It is, it is." In my mind, I kept replaying the car backing down the driveway, over and over. I was thinking that there was something strange about the other person in the car, something odd in his appearance. In my mind, I kept trying to see his face but I never could. The features were blurred by the windshield, by the light shifting as she backed down the drive… I couldn't see the eyes, or the cheekbones, or the mouth. In my memory, the whole face was dark and indistinct. I tried to explain that to her.

"It's not surprising."

"No?"

"No. It's called denial. Look Jack, the fact is, you have the evidence right in front of your eyes. You've seen it, Jack. Don't you think it's time you believed it?"

I knew she was right. "Yes," I said. "It's time."

The phone was ringing. My hands were up to the elbows in soap suds. I asked Ellen to get it, but one of the kids had already picked it up. I finished scrubbing the barbecue grill, handed it to Ellen to dry.

"Jack," Ellen said, "you have to start seeing things as they really are, and not as you want them to be."

"You're right," I said. "I'll call her."

At that moment Nicole came into the kitchen, looking pale.

"Dad? It's the police. They want to talk to you."

DAY 5
9:10 P.M.

Julia's convertible had gone off the road about five miles from the house. It had plunged fifty feet down a steep ravine, cutting a track through the sage and juniper bushes. Then it must have rolled, because now it lay at an angle, wheels facing upward. I could see only the underside of the car. The sun was almost down, and the ravine was dark. The three rescue ambulances on the road had their red lights flashing, and the rescue crews were already rappelling down on ropes. As I watched, portable floodlights were set up, bathing the wreck in a harsh blue glow. I heard the crackle of radios all around.

I stood up on the road with a motorcycle police officer. I had already asked to go down there, and was told I couldn't; I had to stay on the road. When I heard the radios, I said, "Is she hurt? Is my wife hurt?"

"We'll know in a minute." He was calm.

"What about the other guy?"

"Just a minute," he said. He had a headset in his helmet, because he just started talking in a low voice. It sounded like a lot of code words. I heard "… update a four-oh-two for seven-three-nine here…"

I stood at the edge, and looked down, trying to see. By now there were workers all around the car, and several hidden behind the upturned frame. A long time seemed to pass.

The cop said, "Your wife is unconscious but she's… She was wearing her seat belt, and stayed in the car. They think she's all right. Vital signs are stable. They say no spinal injuries but… she… sounds like she broke her arm."

"But she's all right?"

"They think so." Another pause while he listened. I heard him say, "I have the husband here, so let's eight-seven." When he turned back to me, he said, "Yes. She's coming around. She'll have to be checked for internal bleeding at the hospital. And she's got a broken arm. But they say she's all right. They're getting her on a stretcher now."

"Thank God," I said.

The policeman nodded. "This is a bad piece of road."

"This has happened before?"

He nodded. "Every few months. Not usually so lucky."

I flipped open my cell phone and called Ellen, told her to explain to the kids there was nothing to worry about, that Mom was going to be okay. "Especially Nicole," I said. "I'll take care of it," Ellen promised me.

I flipped the phone shut and turned back to the cop. "What about the other guy?" I said.

"She's alone in the car."

"No," I said. "There was another guy with her."

He spoke on his headset, then turned back to me. "They say no. There's no sign of anyone else."

"Maybe he was thrown," I said.

"They're asking your wife now…" He listened a moment. "She says she was alone."

"You're kidding," I said.

He looked at me, shrugged. "That's what she says." In the flashing red lights of the ambulances, I couldn't read his expression. But his tone implied: another guy who doesn't know his own wife. I turned away, looked over the edge of the road.

One of the rescue vehicles had extended a steel arm with a winch that hung over the ravine. A cable was being lowered. I saw the workers, struggling for footing against the steep slope, as they attached a stretcher to the winch. I couldn't see Julia clearly on the stretcher, she was strapped down, covered in a silver space blanket. She started to rise, passing through the cone of blue light, then into darkness.

The cop said, "They're asking about drugs and medicines. Is your wife taking any drugs or medicines?"

"Not that I know of."

"How about alcohol? Was she drinking?"

"Wine at dinner. One or two glasses."

The cop turned away and spoke again, quietly in the darkness. After a pause, I heard him say, "That's affirmative."

The stretcher twisted slowly as it rose into the air. One of the workers, halfway up the slope, reached out to steady it. The stretcher continued upward.

I still couldn't see Julia clearly, until it reached the level of the road and the rescue workers swung it around, and unclipped it from the line. She was swollen; her left cheekbone was purple and the forehead above her left eye was purple as well. She must have hit her head pretty hard. She was breathing shallowly. I moved alongside the stretcher. She saw me and said, "Jack…" and tried to smile.

"Just take it easy," I said.

She gave a little cough. "Jack. It was an accident."

The medics were maneuvering around the motorcycle. I had to watch where I was going. "Of course it was."

"It's not what you think, Jack."

I said, "What is, Julia?" She seemed to be delirious. Her voice seemed to drift in and out. "I know what you're thinking." Her hand gripped my arm. "Promise me you won't get involved in this, Jack."

I didn't say anything, I just walked with her.

She squeezed me harder. "Promise me you'll stay out of it."

"I promise," I said.

She relaxed then, dropping my arm. "This doesn't involve our family. The kids will be fine. You'll be fine. Just stay out, okay?"

"Okay," I said, just wanting to mollify her.

"Jack?"

"Yes, honey, I'm here."

By now we were approaching the nearest ambulance. The doors swung open. One of the rescue team said, "You related to her?"

"I'm her husband."

"You want to come?"

"Yes."

"Hop in."

I got into the ambulance first, then they slid the stretcher in, one of the rescue team got in and slammed the doors shut. We started down the road, siren moaning. I was immediately moved aside by the two paramedics, working on her. One was recording notes on a handheld device and the other was starting a second IV in her other arm. They were worried about her blood pressure, which was dropping. That was a great cause for concern. During all this I couldn't really see Julia, but I heard her murmuring. I tried to move forward, but the medics pushed me back. "Let us work, sir. Your wife's got injuries. We have to work."

For the rest of the way, I sat on a little jump seat and gripped a wall handle as the ambulance careened around curves. By now Julia was clearly delirious, babbling nonsense. I heard something about "the black clouds," that were "not black anymore." Then she shifted into a kind of lecture, talking about "adolescent rebellion." She mentioned Amanda by name, and Eric, asking if they were all right. She seemed agitated. The medics kept trying to reassure her. And finally she lapsed into repeating "I didn't do anything wrong, I didn't mean to do anything wrong" as the ambulance sped through the night.

Listening to her, I couldn't help but worry.

The examination suggested Julia's injuries might be more extensive than they first thought. There was a lot to rule out: possible pelvic fracture, possible hematoma, possible fracture of a cervical vertebra, left arm broken in two places and might need to be pinned. The doctors seemed most worried about her pelvis. They were handling her much more gingerly when they put her into intensive care.

But Julia was conscious, catching my eye and smiling at me from time to time, until she fell asleep. The doctors said there was nothing for me to do; they would wake her up every half hour during the night. They said that she would be in the hospital at least three days, probably a week.

They told me to get some rest. I left the hospital a little before midnight. I took a taxi back to the crash site, to pick up my car. It was a cold night. The police cars and rescue ambulances were gone. In their place was a big flatbed tow truck, which was winching Julia's car up the hill. A skinny guy smoking a cigarette was running the winch. "Nothing to see," he said to me. "Everybody's gone to the hospital."

I said it was my wife's car.

"Can't drive it," he said. He asked me for my insurance card. I got it out of my wallet and handed it to him. He said, "I heard your wife's okay."

"So far."

"You're a lucky guy." He jerked his thumb, pointing across the road. "Are they with you?" Across the street a small white van was parked. The sides were bare, with no markings or company logo. But low on the front door I saw a serial number, in black. And underneath it said SSVT unit.

I said, "No, they're not with me."

"Been here an hour," he said. "Just sitting there."

I couldn't see anyone inside the van; the front windows were dark. I started across the street toward them. I heard the faint crackle of a radio. When I was about ten feet away the lights came on, the engine started, and the van roared past me, and drove down the highway. As it passed, I had a glimpse of the driver. He was wearing a shiny suit of some kind, like silvery plastic, and a tight hood of the same material. I thought I saw some funny, silver apparatus hanging around his neck. It looked like a gas mask, except it was silver. But I wasn't sure.

As the car drove away, I noticed the rear bumper had two green stickers, each with a big X. That was the Xymos logo. But it was the license plate that really caught my eye. It was a Nevada plate.

That van had come from the fabrication plant, out in the desert.

I frowned. It was time for me to visit the fab plant, I thought. I pulled out my cell phone, and dialed Tim Bergman. I told him I had reconsidered his offer and I would take the consulting job, after all.

"That's great," Tim said. "Don will be very happy."

"Great," I said. "How soon can I start?"