Lisa’s first interview with Peter Grimmett Smith took place in a ground-floor seminar room. The setting would have seemed incongruous in any case, but it happened to be a room in which she had once chaired population-dynamics seminars for Morgan Miller. It had been redecorated and refurbished long ago, but the smart bio-plastic on the floor bore exactly the same pattern as the dumb vinyl that it had replaced, and it was easy enough for her mind’s eye to substitute a lumbering TV-and-video and a primitive OHP for the station electroepidiascope that had replaced them.

The chairs were very different, being tastefully upholstered in a smart fabric whose soft texture and maroon hue could hardly have contrasted more strongly with the old gray-plastic monstrosities, but at the end of the day, a chair was just a chair: something to sit on. The desk across whose teak-finish surface she faced the man from the Ministry of Defence was likewise just a desk, similar to any number of desks that had formed barriers between her and the world during years past.

Smith looked almost as tired as Lisa felt, although he, like Mike Grundy and Judith Kenna, must have had the opportunity to get somesleep before the alarm bells began ringing. The apparent tiredness took the edge off his interrogative manner. “For form’s sake, Dr. Friemann,” he said, “I have to ask you whether there’s a possibility that the people who ransacked your apartment early this morning could have found any classified material.” He wasn’t quite as good-looking at close range, and the harsh light of the seminar room exposed every sign of his age.

“There was nothing classified for them to find,” Lisa assured him truthfully. “Nothing in the least sensitive, in fact. Everything work-related stays at work, in the office or the lab.”

Smith nodded. Lisa was reasonably certain that he believed her; even Judith Kenna had to concede that she had a hard-won reputation for method, discipline, and good organization. “Do you have anyidea of what these people might have been looking for?” he asked. He gave the impression that he was asking again purely for form’s sake, knowing exactly what the answer would be—but she knew it might be a ploy, to set her at ease while he developed his suspicions more subtly.

“I’m not sure that they were looking for anything,” she said pensively. “They may have been putting on a show. It’s possible that the real purpose of their visit was to leave that stupid message on my door.”

She noticed the ghost of a smile on the MOD man’s face. “Why would they do that?” he asked.

“I think they might have been trying to discredit me,” she said. “Perhaps they think that I’m the most likely person to figure out what’s going on here, because I probably know Morgan Miller better than anyone else in the world does and I certainly care more about him than anyone else in the world does. I think they wanted to set things up so the people in charge of the investigation wouldn’t entirely trust me and might decide to keep me on the sidelines just in case. Have they succeeded?”

“They might have,” Smith told her with apparent frankness, “if the circumstances hadn’t been quite so awkward.”

Lisa raised her eyebrows, waiting for an explanation, but all Smith said was: “Considering your record, Chief Inspector Kenna doesn’t seem to have a very high opinion of your abilities.”

“I can’t help that,” Lisa said. “It’s what we twentieth-century leftovers used to call ‘a clash of personalities.’ Does she say I can’t be trusted?”

Smith shook his head. “Not at all. She did make some vague observations about lack of objectivity—something about it not being helpful to be so closely involved—and obsolescence of expertise. I got the impression that obsolescence of expertise might be one of her favorite phrases.” He made a slight gesture with his right hand, intended to draw attention to the gray hair that an unwary youth cultist might have taken as a symptom of his own impending obsolescence.

“I strongly disagree about the helpfulness of my past involvement with Morgan Miller,” Lisa said flatly.

“Good,” Smith said. “As for the other thing… well, I find myself confronted with a desperate shortage of up-to-date expertise. Every biologist we had on call is working full time on the emergency. I need an adviser who knows her way around Morgan Miller’s field, and there’s at least a possibility that expertise as out of date as his will be the most useful kind. In brief, Dr. Friemann, I need your help far too desperately to worry too much about the fact that someone on the other side took time out to write Traitor’ on your door. Time is pressing. Whatever reason they had for snatching Miller, we have to get him back quickly if we can, and we have to take whatever action may be necessary if we can’t. Are you willing to be seconded to my unit?”

“Yes,” she said, “I certainly am.”

Lisa hadn’t expected it to be quite as easy as that. She guessed it wasn’t just Peter Grimmett Smith who had found himself short of resources; his employers probably thought they were scraping the bottom of the barrel by appointing him to investigate. From the viewpoint of the MOD, this was a minor distraction—a nuisance they would have been glad to leave alone, had they only dared.

On the other hand, she couldn’t let his willingness to take her aboard lull her into a false sense of security. The fact that he needed her didn’t mean that he trusted her.

“In that case,” Smith said, “I have to impress upon you that everything that passes between us from this moment on is confidential. You don’t repeat it—not even to Chief Inspector Kenna or Detective Inspector Grundy. Is that clear?”

“As crystal,” she said. “What have you got that Kenna hasn’t?”

He nodded, presumably approving her businesslike attitude. “We commandeered Miller’s phone records,” he said. “Two calls leaped out screaming—both made within the last week, both to institutions he’d never contacted before, both asking for appointments to visit. And before you ask—no, we didn’t have his phone tapped. He put a tape on the calls himself.”

That wasn’t easy to believe. “Morganset a tape to record his own phone calls?”

“Not a permanent one. He just activated his answerphone during those particular calls. As if he wanted to make sure there was a record. As if he knew he might need one—even though he only asked for appointments to visit. He got the appointments within minutes, but that’s not surprising. He’s a biologist of some standing, even if he hasn’t published much recently.”

“Who did he call?” Lisa wanted to know.

“The first call was to the local offices of the Ahasuerus Foundation.”

Lisa had heard of the Ahasuerus Foundation. It had been set up by some buccaneering sleazeball who’d made a fortune playing the stock market during the Great Panic of ’25, ostensibly to sponsor research into technologies of longevity and suspended animation. At least a dozen similar outfits had been set up during the last half-century by aging millionaires offended by the thought they couldn’t take their ill-gotten gains with them.

“And the other?”

“That’s a little weirder—some crackpot outfit in Swindon called the Institute of Algeny. Algeny apparently—”

“I know what the word means,” Lisa told him.

Smith raised his eyebrows slightly. “Perhaps you could explain it to me,” he said mildly. “The on-line dictionary wasn’t very clear.”

“It was a coinage of the 1990s that never really caught on, although Morgan approved of it. It was derived by analogy with alchemy. Alchemy was a pseudoscience of inorganic transformations that assumed all metals were evolving gradually into gold, and might be given a helping hand to fulfill their aspirations if only the art could be properly understood and mastered. Algeny is an organic equivalent that assumes all organisms are striving to better themselves, and that we’re already in the process of mastering the art that will allow men to become supermen.”