The officer nodded.

“The next generation of suitskins will probably have sweepers built in,” Ginny observed as she slammed the helicopter door. “The police will have to adopt smartfiber uniforms then.”

Lisa hadn’t heard the term “suitskin” before. She’d only heard smartfiber ensembles called “smartsuits.” She had to admit, though, that the one-piece she was now wearing did feel rather like a second skin. As the fibers of such garments accumulated more faculties, their quasisymbiotic relationship with the body’s own outer layer would become increasingly intimate as well as increasingly complex. The suits currently used to hook up to virtual-reality apparatus were much bulkier, restricted in their use to dedicated spaces, but the gap between organic and inorganic microtechnology was closing all the time.

Sometime within the next fifty years, it would be possible to talk of nanotechnology as having arrived rather than merely anticipated, and the bridges between the organic and the inorganic would be multitudinous. Even the best suitskins imaginable would be external technology, though: overcoats for ordinary people. Even gut-based nanotech would be external in a technical rather than in a topological sense. One day, if Algenists and other champions of evolution toward the superhuman got their way, none of it would be necessary. True overpeople presumably wouldn’t need overcoats to protect them, not from the elements or from all the hostile viruses that bio-armorers could devise.

“That’s better,” Smith said as she joined him in the elevator that would take them down to ground level. Lisa had already noted that however smart the fibers of her new suit might be, it was perfectly staid in cut and color. It hugged her figure tightly on the inside, but on the outside, it was shaped like a conventional jacket and trousers, and she didn’t suppose that its almost-black color would look significantly brighter in daylight than it did beneath the soft yellow lights of the elevator cab.

A patrol car was waiting for them. The driver switched his blue flashers on before setting forth into the traffic, but it didn’t accelerate their progress to any noticeable degree. The city streets were surprisingly busy, and the drivers of the other vehicles evidently didn’t feel under any obligation to get out of the way. Their onboard computers would be storing up instances of “contributory negligence” with the usual alacrity, but nobody seemed to care anymore. The improvements in road safety wrought by the ’38 Road Traffic Act had proved as temporary as the achievements of all its predecessors.

Lisa finished off the dregs of the drink Ginny had given her. It had taken the edge off her appetite, but the pills hadn’t kicked in yet and she was still engaged in a constant struggle to remain fully alert.

Unlike the Ahasuerus Foundation, the Institute of Algeny had not leased office space in an ultramodern building. Its governors had gone to the opposite extreme, buying a house in an upmarket residential area—which still looked like the private houses that surrounded it. The fact that its walls and gates were topped by razor wire didn’t seem at all unusual, given the similar levels of paranoia manifest by its neighbors. The tree-lined street in which it was located was obviously home to people who valued their privacy and took the business of property protection very seriously indeed.

After being admitted to the house, Smith and Lisa were ushered into a room that could have passed for an ordinary suburban living room had it been equipped with a homestation, although the mock-antique furniture was the kind usually advertised on the shopping channels alongside discreetly cabineted, twentieth-century TV sets. It wasn’t until they were seated that their host introduced himself.

“Matthias Geyer,” he said. “Delighted to meet you, Dr. Friemann. There are Friemanns in my family—perhaps we might be distantly related.” His accent was smooth and melodious, but quite distinct and deliberate.

“I doubt it,” Lisa said.

“But the ancestor who bequeathed the name to you never bothered to Anglicize it,” Geyer pointed out. Lisa wondered whether he was trying to recruit her as a potential ally, or making a point for Peter Grimmett Smith’s benefit.

“No,” she admitted. “He never did.”

Matthias Geyer was taller and slimmer than Dr. Goldfarb, but he wasn’t as tall or as angular as Peter Grimmett Smith. He was better looking and seemed considerably younger than either of them, although Lisa thought she detected signs of cosmetic somatic engineering on his cheeks and neck. If so, he was probably a forty-year-old determined to preserve the appearance of his twenty-five-year-old peak rather than a thirty-year-old devoted to clean living. He offered his guests a drink, and when they declined, he suggested that they might like something to eat, given that they must have missed dinner. When they declined that offer too, he bowed politely in recognition of their sense of urgency.

“I’m very sorry to hear that misfortune has visited Professor Miller,” he said, now addressing himself—with what must have been calculated belatedness—to Peter Grimmett Smith. “I will, of course, do anything I can to assist his safe recovery. I would be devastated to think that his contact with our organization had anything to do with his disappearance.”

“But you do recognize the possibility?” Smith said swiftly.

“I fear so. What he told me was inexplicit, but he was clearly attempting to use an element of mystery to engage my interest. I could not say that he was dangling temptation before me, but he did go to some length to hint that when he spoke of negative results and blind alleys, he was not telling the whole story.”

“And that’s what you reported back to Leipzig, is it?” Smith asked.

“I am not required to report back to anyone,” Geyer informed them loftily. “I make my own decisions. Ours is not a centralized organization, like the Ahasuerus Foundation. Nor has it any principal base in Germany. We have come a long way from our roots, Mr. Smith—in every way.”

Lisa wondered whether Geyer knew what they had been talking about in the helicopter. Even if there had been no other bug but Leland’s, it was possible that Leland was working for, or with, Geyer—but Geyer’s defensiveness was natural enough. He must have known that Smith would have made a comprehensive background check on his organization, and what it would have revealed.

“What was it that Miller was trying to sell you?” Smith asked, unwilling for the moment to be sidetracked into a discussion of the Institute’s shady origins.

“He made it perfectly clear that he was not trying to sellme anything,” Geyer corrected him. “He wanted to make a gift, of results accumulated over four decades, concerning a series of experiments he had conducted on mice and other animals.”

“What other animals?” Lisa was quick to put in. Nobody else had mentipned other animals, and it was a long time since Miller had been involved with the creation of transgenic rabbits and sheep.

“Dogs, I believe,” Geyer replied.

“Dogs?” Lisa echoed skeptically. “The university hasn’t used dogs as experimental animals since the 2010 riot.”

“What kindof experiments?” Smith asked, impatient with what seemed to him to be an irrelevant digression.

“Professor Miller was calculatedly vague,” Geyer said apologetically. “He was insistent, however, that the work had a direct bearing on our core endeavors. He expressed concern that if our researchers did not know what he had tried to do and failed, they might waste years of effort following the same sterile path. It had once seemed such a promising line of research, he said, but had disappointed him grievously—and by virtue of its time-consuming nature, he could no longer carry it forward himself.”

“Time-consuming nature?” Smith queried.