"But you still need your drugs."

"You must know somebody."

"I could get it at the hospital pharmacy."

"They'll be watching for us there."

"Well, shit."

I'd almost never heard her use profanity. Maybe it came with the blue jeans. Maybe she shed her demure exterior with her silk skirts and blouses.

"I know a doc in North Durham who'll give us some samples," she said.

We'd already left Durham behind and were well on our way to Raleigh. My knowledge of Geli Bauer made me reluctant to linger in the area longer than necessary. Also, paradoxically enough, something in me did not want the dreams to stop. My last one had saved our lives, and though I'd never confess it to Rachel, I felt somehow that my dreams-however frightening they might be-were giving me information about our plight, information I could gain in no other way.

"We're not going back," I said.

"What if you pass out at the wheel?"

"You saw how it works at the house. It doesn't hap¬pen instantly."

"You weren't driving then."

"I usually have a couple of minutes' warning. I'll pull over the second I feel something wrong."

Rachel was clearly unhappy. As though to drain off some anger, she put one foot up on the dash, untied her shoe, then retied it. Then she did the same to the other. This compulsive ritual seemed to calm her.

I took the 440 loop around Raleigh, then merged onto U.S. 64, which would take us all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. The highway was generic Southern: two broad strips of cement running through pine and hardwood for¬est. It would be another two hours before the land started to drop toward the Outer Banks. Fielding would have been traveling this road today if he hadn't died, a road he had traveled before, to a destination my wife and I had visited twelve years earlier. Thoughts like that showed me the needless ambiguity of words like space-time. The average person heard a word like that and figured he'd never understand it. But it was so simple. Every place you ever saw was linked to a specific time. The Nags Head cabin Fielding and his wife had honeymooned in appeared to be the same one my wife and I had used- but in reality it was not. In the fabric of space-time, it was altogether different. The school you visited twenty years after you graduated, the football field you played on, the track you ran-none of them was the same. If they were, you would collide with the generations that had run on them before and after you. The lover you kissed was not the same person he or she was sixty seconds before. In that minute, a million skin cells had died and been replaced by new ones. The smallest slices of space-time separated thought from action. Life from death.

"I don't want to make things worse," Rachel said, "but since you can't call the president anymore, what exactly can you do? Where can we go?"

"I'm hoping something at the cabin will give me a clue. Right now I'm just trying to keep us alive."

"Why don't we just go public? Drive to Atlanta and tell it all to CNN?"

"Because the NSA could just say I was lying. What can I really prove at this point?"

She folded her arms. "You tell me. Would a Nobel laureate like Ravi Nara perjure himself to cover all this up?"

"He wouldn't hesitate. National security is the ulti¬mate rationalization for lying. And as for the Trinity building, it could be totally empty by now."

"Lu Li Fielding would support you."

"Lu Li has disappeared."

Rachel's face lost some color.

"Don't assume the worst yet. She had a plan to escape, but I have no idea whether she made it or not."

"David, you must know more than you're telling me."

"About Lu Li?

"About Trinity!"

She was right. "Okay. A couple of weeks ago, Fielding decided that the suspension of the project was just a ruse to distract the two of us. He thought the real work on Trinity was continuing elsewhere, and maybe had been for a long time."

"Where else could they be working on it?"

"Fielding's bet was the R and D labs at Godin Supercomputing in California. Godin's been flying out there quite a bit on his private jet. Nara 's gone with him several times."

"That doesn't prove anything. For all you know, they're playing golf at Pebble Beach."

"These guys don't play golf. They work. They'd sell their souls for what they want. When you think of Peter Godin, think Faust."

"What do they want?"

"Different things. John Skow was about to be canned by the NSA when Godin asked that he administer Project Trinity. That resurrected his career."

"Why would Peter Godin want a man like that?"

"I think Godin has something on Skow. He probably compromised him a long time ago and knows Skow will keep quiet about anything he's told to. Working at the NSA doesn't make you rich. But being the man who deliv¬ered a Trinity computer to the agency would put Skow in the director's chair. And after that, he'd be invaluable to private corporations. Skow will do anything necessary to make Trinity a reality."

"And Ravi Nara?"

" Nara demanded a million dollars a year to come on board. What the government wouldn't pay, Godin made up in cash. Beyond that, Nara 's contribution to Trinity would give him a lock on another Nobel. Shared with Godin and Jutta Klein, of course. Fielding would deserve it the most, but the Nobel committee doesn't give posthumous awards. Tack on unlimited research funds for life, Nara 's name in the history books…"

"And this Jutta Klein?"

"Klein is straight. She's an older German woman, and she already shared a Nobel with two other Germans back in 1994. She's on loan to Trinity from Siemens. That's the way it's set up with several companies. Godin wanted the best people in the world, so he borrowed them from the R and D divisions of the best computer companies. Sun Micro. Silicon Graphics. In exchange, those companies will get to license certain parts of the Trinity technology once it's declassified. If it's declassified."

"If Jutta Klein is straight," Rachel said, "maybe she's the person who can help us."

"She couldn't if she wanted to. They'll have her sewed up tight."

Rachel gave a frustrated sigh. "And Godin? What does he want?"

"Godin wants to be God."

"What?"

I eased into the left lane to pass a motor home. "Godin doesn't care about Trinity making a profit. He's a billionaire. He's seventy-two years old, and he's been a star since he was forty. So forget being the father of arti¬ficial intelligence or anything like that. He wants to be the first-maybe the only-human being whose mind is ported into a Trinity computer."

Rachel pushed a dark strand of hair out of her eyes. "What's he like? An egomaniac?"

"He's not that simple. Godin is a brilliant man who believes he knows what's wrong with the world. He's like the people you knew in college who thought Atlas Shrugged was the answer to the world's problems, only he's a genius. And he's made major contributions to science. So far, America is truly a better place because Peter Godin lived here. His supercomputers played a signifi¬cant role in winning the Cold War."

"It sounds like you admire him."

"He's easy to admire. But he scares me, too. He's practically killing himself to build the most powerful computer in the world, and he doesn't care that he won't understand how it works when it finally does. Godin's building Trinity to use it himself. And I don't know if there's anything more dangerous than a powerful man obsessed with remaking the world in his own image."

As I reached out to set the Audi's cruise control, my vision started to blur. A wave of fatigue washed through me, and Rachel's last words slipped out of my head. My eyesight cleared, but the familiar high-pitched humming had begun in my head. I braked and swerved onto the shoulder.

"What is it?" asked Rachel.