For a second I’m sure he’s pulling my leg. This eerie place seems perfect for a haunting.

Only then … Yes, a faint murmur. I hear it now.

Scanning below, I finally glimpse figures moving down there amid a distant row of shelves. Some are jet black and others the color of steel, carrying instruments and clipboards, peering amid stacks of warehoused killing apparatus.

Chen whispers a curse. “Shards! They must be doing an audit! But why now?”

“I think I can guess.”

He looks at me with dark eyes under heavy, apelike ridges. Abruptly, comprehension dawns.

“The hoodoo missile! The one that fried your archie and your home. I figured it for another homemade job, like urban punks and criminals make in their basements. But the brass must suspect that it was stolen from here. Damn, I should have thought of that!”

What can I say? The possibility occurred to me a while ago. But I didn’t want to spook Chen when he’s being helpful.

“Why would anyone in the military would want me dead? I admit, Clara’s threatened to break my arm a few times …”

The joke goes flat. Chen’s ape-ditto writhes.

“We gotta get out of here. Right now!”

“But you promised to take us—”

“That was when I thought the place’d be empty! And before it occurred to me that military hardware might be involved. I’m sure not takin’ you straight into a team of tight-ass rule enforcers!” Chen grabs my arm. “Let’s get Miss Maharal and—”

The sentence falls flat as we both turn and stare.

Ritu had been right behind us.

Now she’s gone. The only vestige is a rustling commotion along one long row of hanging armor coveralls — a fading wavelet in a rippling sea of shrugging torsos and helmets that nod and bow politely in her wake.

It can be hard to penetrate the mind of a genius.

That’s usually no cause for worry, since true brilliance has a well-known positive correlation with decency, much of the time — a fact the rest of us rely on, more than we ever know. The real world doesn’t roil with as many crazed artists, psychotic generals, dyspeptic writers, maniacal statesmen, insatiable tycoons, or mad scientists as you see in dramas.

Still, the exceptions give genius its public image as a mixed blessing — vivid, dramatic, somewhat crazy, and more than a little dangerous. It helps promote the romantic notion, popular among borderline types, that you must be outrageous to be gifted. Insufferable to be remembered. Arrogant to be taken seriously.

Yosil Maharal must have watched too many bad movieds while growing up, for he swallowed that cliché whole. Alone in his secret stronghold, without anyone to answer to — not even his real self — he can ham up the mad scientist role, to the hilt. Worse, he thinks something about me offers the key to a puzzle — his sole chance at eternal life.

Trapped in his laboratory, helplessly shackled down, I start to feel a well-known pull — the salmon reflex. A familiar call that most high-level golems feel at the end of a long day. The urge to hurry home for inloading, only now amplified many times by strange machinery.

I’ve always been able to shrug it off, when necessary. But this time the reflex is intense. An agonizing need, as I yank against the bonds holding me down, struggling heedless of any damage to my straining limbs. A million years of instinct tell me to protect the body I’m wearing. But the call is stronger. It says this body doesn’t matter any more than a cheap set of paper clothes. Memories are what count …

No. Not memories. Something more. It’s …

I don’t have a scientist’s terminology. All I know right now is craving. To return. To get back into my real brain.

A brain that no longer exists, according to ditYosil, who informed me a while ago that the real body of Albert Morris — the body my mother spilled into the world more than twelve thousand days ago — was blown to bits late Tuesday. Along with my house and garden. Along with my school report cards and Cub Scout uniform. Along with my athletic trophies and the master’s thesis I always meant to finish someday … and souvenirs from more than a hundred cases that I solved, helping to expose villains, sending the worst of them to therapy or jail.

Along with the bullet scar in my left shoulder that Clara used to stroke during lovemaking, sometimes adding toothmarks that would fade gradually from my resilient realflesh. Flesh that is no more. So I’m told.

I have no way to know if Maharal is telling the truth about this calamity. But why lie to a helpless prisoner?

Damn. I worked hard on that garden. The sweet-pit apricots would’ve ripened next week.

Good, I’m getting somewhere with this approach — distracting myself with useless internal chatter. It’s a way to fight back. But how long can I keep it up before the amplified homing reflex tears me apart?

Worse, the golem-Maharal is talking too. Jabbering on while he labors at his console. Maybe he does it for his nerves. Or as part of a devilish plot to harass mine.

“… so you see it all started decades before Jefty Annonas discovered the Standing Wave. Two fellows named Newberg and d’Aquili traced variations in human neural function, using primitive, turn-of-the-century imaging machines. They were especially interested in differences that appeared in the orientation area, at the top rear of the brain, during meditation and prayer.

“They discovered that spiritual adepts — from Buddhist monks to ecstatic evangelicals — all apparently learned how to quell activity in this special neural zone, whose function is to weave sensory data together, creating a feeling of where the self ends and the rest of the world begins.

“What these religious seekers were able to do was eliminate the perception of a boundary or separation between self and world. One effect — a presentiment of cosmic union or oneness with the universe — came accompanied by release of endorphins and other pleasure chemicals, reinforcing a desire to return to the same state again and again.

“In other words, prayer and meditation induced a physicochemical addiction to holiness and unity with God!

“Meanwhile, other investigators plumbed for the seat of consciousness, or the imaginary locus where we envision our essential selves to exist. Westerners tend to picture this locale centered behind the eyes, looking out through them, like a tiny homunculus-self riding around inside the head. But some non-Western tribes had a different image — believing that their true selves dwelled in the chest, near the beating heart. Experimenters found they could persuade individuals to shift this sense of locality, where self or soul resides. You could be trained to envision it outside your body. Riding some nearby object … even a doll made of clay!”

Amid this ongoing rant, the professor occasionally pauses to offer me a smile.

“Think of the excitement, Albert! At first, these clues came with no apparent connection. But soon, brave visionaries began realizing what they were onto! Pieces of a great puzzle. Then a gateway to a realm fully as vast as the grand universe of physics … and just as full of possibilities.”

Helplessly, I watch as he cranks a big dial up another notch. The machine above me gives a preliminary groan, then sends yet another jolt into my little red-orange head. I manage to choke back a moan, not wanting to give him any satisfaction. For distraction, I keep mumbling this running commentary … even though I have no recorder and the words are futile, vanishing into entropy as I think them.

That’s beside the point. I keep telling myself to find a habitual behavior and stick to it! Venerable advice for the helpless prisoner, offered long ago by a survivor of far worse torment than Maharal could ever dish out. Advice that helps me now as -