“Yes,” Lisa admitted, “but it’s a perfectly commonplace phrase.”

“Maybe it is,” Smith agreed, “but the Real Women were great enthusiasts for physical culture, weren’t they? Very militant too, I believe.”

“They weren’t Nazis,” Lisa said firmly. “I think you might be letting your imagination run away with you.”

Smith obviously resented that comment, perhaps because it had a little too much accuracy in it for comfort. “Why did Leland take you along with the two women?” he asked sharply. “Even if it hadn’t been obvious that you weren’t one of them, he had only to glance at your ID. Why didn’t he leave you behind with Ginny and me, to sleep it off in the parking lot?”

“I think he wanted to explain himself,” Lisa told him judiciously. “He wanted a quick word with the ambushers before turning them in, but he didn’t want us to think they might have been spirited away by their friends. He doesn’t want us chasing after him with the same fervor we’re devoting to the task of trying to find Morgan Miller. He’d rather we thought of him as an ally. He took me with him so I could bear witness to his good intentions. He might, of course, have fed me a complete pack of lies.”

“But you think he was on the level—or as near to it as a man of his type ever is?”

“Probably,” Lisa admitted, thinking that Smith was a pompous fool whose attitudes, instincts, and modes of expression were so twentieth-century as to be almost beyond belief. “While we’re still searching for Morgan, we can use all the help we can get, and whoever he’s working for, Leland does seem to be running a parallel investigation. If I’m right and this whole thing is some kind of silly mistake, it probably won’t matter who he reports to.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

Lisa looked away, feebly pretending that the view from the window had attracted her attention. The helicopter had already begun its descent and the lights of Swindon were displayed beneath her, their brightness and variety testifying that the town was booming, as it had been for half a century. It had owed its first spurt of growth to the fact that it was the halfway point between the original termini of the Great Western Railway, and it advertised itself nowadays as the bridge between the two great cityplexes of England—a claim that excited a certain amount of resentment and scorn in the Birmingham metropolitan area and United Manchester. At the moment, it looked more like an island than a bridge; the threads of illumination connecting it to Chippenham and Reading seemed as frail as spidersilk in comparison to the blaze emitted by the glittering hub where the leisure spots of the town’s twenty-four-hour society were clustered. Lisa blinked her eyes, fighting tiredness.

“If I’m wrong,” she said, as much to herself as to Peter Smith, “and Morgan really has stumbled onto the kind of technology that can create some kind of a New Order—without bothering to tell me about it—the government doesn’t stand much chance of keeping it secret from anyone Leland might be working for, although the reverse might be a different matter. I still think the Ice Age Elite is a silly myth, but if there really are people in the world who are anxious to set themselves up as inheritors of post-Crisis Earth, our job is to make sure they don’t get away with it, whoever they are. Isn’t it?”

“Of course it is,” Smith answered—as he would surely have done even if he hadn’t been under the assumption that Leland had planted camouflaged bugs in Lisa’s clothing. He was, after all, a loyal servant of king and country. If he couldn’t be trusted to put matters of duty above personal considerations, who could?

SIXTEEN

There was a uniformed policeman waiting for them at the helipad. As soon as Smith descended from the craft, the man handed him a plastic bag, which he immediately passed on to Lisa.

“Change in the helicopter,” he commanded. “Put your belt and wristwatch in with the old clothes.” Lisa hesitated, wondering whether to raise an objection, but Smith was right. If Leland had planted anything, it was as likely to be in her belt or watch as in Jeff ’s shirt and trousers. If she had to be phoneless for a while, she had to be phoneless. She moved back to the second rank of seats so that she’d be shielded by the first, although she felt slightly shamed by her obsolete modesty.

It wasn’t the first time she had ever put on one of the new garments, but she had found the previous tentative trial so uncomfortable that she had decided to stick with her “dead clothes” for a while longer. Now she wondered why she had reacted so negatively. Was she as much of a dinosaur as Peter Grimmett Smith? Of course not. She was a scientist, supposedly immune to the reflexive “yuck factor” that governed initial reactions to so many new biotechnologies. In a sense, her own response had had an opposite cause; she had always thought of the new fabrics in terms of “fashion,” because that was the lexicon the advertisers had used in order to push it, and she had always resisted the idea of being a slave to fashion, valuing newness for its own sake. Now, if the suspicions raised by Smith’s clumsy inquiries could be trusted, the advertising lexicon was about to undergo an abrupt change.

What Arachne West had told Lisa on the occasion of their first meeting didn’t seem quite as paranoid now as it had then. Now it was perfectly obvious to anyone with half a brain that the new global culture was a plague culture, and that smart clothing would soon have to be seen in terms of personal defense—not antibody packaging in the traditional sense, but in a significant new sense. Soon enough the first questions anyone would ask salespeople about the clothes on their racks would concern the quality of their built-in immune systems and the rapidity with which they could react to any dangerous invasion of the commensal bodies within their loving embrace.

The garment Lisa was struggling into wasn’t uncomfortable in the sense that ill-fitting clothes could be—although the way it hugged her flesh so cloyingly was slightly disconcerting—but it was worn without underwear and followed the contours of her body so carefully that she felt unusually exposed.She hesitated before dropping her belt into the plastic bag along with the clothes she had discarded, eventually retrieving her personal smartcards and tucking them into one of the pockets of her new suit. The smartcards ought to be clean, she reasoned, and it was one thing to be phoneless, another to be keyless and creditless.

Ginny reentered the copter just as Lisa finally let the belt drop in the bag. There was a conspiratorial gleam in the younger woman’s eye. She extended a gloved hand over the back of the front passenger seat, opening the palm to display two small white tablets. Lisa met her gaze suspiciously.

“It’s going to be a long night, Dr. Friemann,” Ginny said. “You need to stay alert.” Her free hand also came into view, clutching a plastic bottle filled with turbid fluid. “Fortified GM fruit juice,” she explained. “Calories, vitamins, ions … everything you could possibly need. The boss told me to give it to you.” Plainly, the boss hadn’t mentioned the side order of pep pills.

If only, Lisa thought as the comment about everything she could possibly need echoed in her skull—but she accepted the pills into her right hand and took the bottle in her left. She swallowed the pills and washed them down thoroughly.

“Keep it,” Ginny said. “Drink the rest on the way.”

Lisa nodded and followed the pilot out of the helicopter. She handed the plastic bag to the policeman who’d met them. “Better have them swept,” she said. “Tell the lab to be careful not to damage the goods—if the equipment is state of the art, it’ll probably come in handy. Send the proceeds back to the East Central Police Station.”