“That doesn’t mean he’s on our side,” Smith reminded her sharply. “The fact that you and this Leland character seem to have embarked on some kind of conspiracy—”

“That’s bullshit,” Lisa was quick to put in. “I’m happy to let Leland follow his own priorities while freeing Morgan is number one on his list, but I’m under no delusions as to whose side he’s on. I’m in no sort of conspiracy with anyone. The only reason Geyer was eager to talk to me was that he didn’t like the way you were talking to him.You were right to cut it short when the new information came in. Once you’ve purged the data relating to Stella’s contacts, the true guilty parties will be easy enough to identify. The priority now is making sure they don’t do anything too stupid when they’re cornered. They haven’t killed anybody yet, but they’ve come close enough to suggest that Morgan may still be in a mortal danger.”

“That’s not the only issue,” Smith said grimly.

It is for me, Lisa thought. But that was because she wasn’t yet prepared to believe that whatever Morgan had taken to Goldfarb and Geyer had had any military or commercial value.

The lights of Swindon were fading into hungry darkness as the helicopter reached its cruising altitude, but Lisa looked in vain for any hint of dawn on the horizon they were fleeing. For the first time, she felt the lack of the personal equipment she had abandoned to the plastic bag when she had been forced to change her tainted clothing. She had lost contact with the patient cycle of the hours; the pills that had banished her fatigue had disconnected her from any sense of passing time.

She had to raise her head over the top of the front seat and scan the red lights of Ginny’s instrument panel in the hope of catching sight of a clock face or digital display. When she finally found one, she was startled to observe that it was five to four, twenty-four hours to the minute since the panic had set in. A single day was all it had required to crack and bruise the veneer that sixty-one years had ingrained upon the surface of her life. It was undoubtedly the most eventful day she had ever lived—but while she watched, the display changed.

It was now four minutes to four, and a new day had begun: a day that would likely wrench the cracks apart, turn the bruises into bloody wounds, and shatter to smithereens everything she had patiently made of herself.

“It’s not just a matter of identifying the ringleaders,” Smith added, following his own train of thought into the tunnel of silence. “We need to know how wide the conspiracy extends. If Stella Filisetti did remove a number of mice from the university, they might already have been split into several different consignments and moved out of the cityplex. We need to cover the Institute and Ahasuerus, of course—but how many other possible destinations are there, and how many potential couriers? They obviously want the data as well as the animals, but losing the animals might be a serious breach of security in itself. It’s a pity that mice are so small.”

“If they weren’t” Lisa pointed out drily, “Mouseworld would never have been a possibility.” Smith was right, though; unless Stella could be persuaded to tell them exactly how many mice she’d taken and how they’d been dispersed, it would never be possible for the MOD to be sure they’d plugged the leak. Without a record of exactly how the mice had been transformed and how they had fared, it would be a long and difficult process to work back from a DNA analysis to the production of a new transformer.

“But you’re right, of course,” Smith said, switching to a conciliatory tone with all the subtlety of a charging hippopotamus. “Our first priority is to liberate Morgan Miller, and if Herr Geyer is trying to do that too, he’s not our enemy—at least not for the time being. I might have misjudged him—but you have to admit that his organization merits suspicion. What did you mean about my ‘knee-jerk response to the mention of Nietzsche’?”

“That’s what Herr Geyer seems to think,” Lisa was quick to say, conscious that it would benefit her to be a little more diplomatic. “He seemed to assume that you hadn’t quite understood the relationship between algeny and Nietzschean morality. He probably thinks your interpretation of the term übermenschis a little on the vulgar side.”

“So educate me,” Smith said acidly. “What does hethink it means?”

“Nietzsche’s idea of the overman was rather vague,” Lisa told him, “but he would certainly have been horrified by the subsequent usurpation of the idea by the Nazis. Nietzsche seems to have thought of overmen—and he did mean menin the narrow sense, although I hope that modern Algenists are more generous—as intellectuals and creative artists, definitely not swaggering oafs in jackboots. Nietzsche’s critique of moral systems is complicated, but one of its fundamental observations is that the old moral systems tend to see good in negative terms, as the absence of manifest evils like hunger, pain, injury, and death. That was perfectly reasonable in societies so primitive that they were perpetually assailed by all the ills that made even human life nasty, brutish, and short—but it no longer makes much sense in advanced societies that have the means to oppose the elementary evils and drastically reduce their role in everyday life.

“Nietzsche thought, and Morgan Miller agreed with him, that there comes a point in social and personal evolution at which one has to stop thinking of good merely as the absence of manifest evil—the so-called ‘ethics of the herd’—and begin thinking of good in positive, active, and creative terms. It’s a fundamental tenet of algenist philosophy that instead of merely trying to insulate ourselves from suffering, we have to start thinking about what we actually want to makeof ourselves. We have to stop being content to be merely human and decide exactly what kinds of superhumans we intend to become. Nietzsche would have agreed with Morgan that the two most obviously mistaken models are political tyrants and plutocrats—and I think Herr Geyer would like us to believe that his Institute of Algeny takes the same view.”

“Does it?” Smith wanted to know.

“You’re the one who commissioned the background check.”

The MOD man curled his lip skeptically. “What about the other stuff?” he asked. “That crack about the elixir of life not being as simple as fantasists made out. He seemed to be trying to make a point.”

“He was,” Lisa admitted, and hesitated only briefly over the question of how honest she ought to be in explaining her interpretation of the point in question. “As far as I could judge, he was suggesting that finding ways to live longer would be futile if we continued trying to live in the same old way. That’s why he was rather contemptuous about Ahasuerus. If Adam Zimmerman really has had himself frozen down until his Foundation can find a way to make him emortal, Herr Geyer might concede that the man’s an enterprising and ingenious coward, but would nevertheless find his cowardice deplorable. I daresay that he said much the same to Morgan in the course of the conversation he was too scrupulous to tape—and he seems to think that he struck a chord. Herr Geyer presumably wants to believe there’s more to Morgan’s imperfect discovery than the possibility of extending the life span—but that might be wishful thinking on his part. He might have been misled by his optimism into mistaking the actual import of Morgan’s reservations.”

Smith thought about that for a moment or two. “You mean that if Miller has discovered a way of extending the human life span, it may have some unfortunate side effect that renders it less than wholly desirable. Like the Struldbruggs in Swift.”

Lisa was mildly surprised by the literary reference, but all she said was “Yes.” She had gone as far as she was willing to go—but it was far enough. She looked out the window again, but there was still no sign of first light. How can dawn be dragging its feet, she wondered, when time is racing at such a headlong pace? Have I somehow cut myself adrift from order and continuity?