“I think what Dr. Friemann means, sir,” Ginny put in, her voice only slightly muffled by the loose-set mouthpiece of her helmet, “is that it might work only on females. That would explain the radfem motivation.”

Lisa didn’t know whether to curse the pilot silently or congratulate her audibly, but she settled for saying: “It’s a possibility—but even if that’s so, it might be far more complicated. That’s why Geyer was so keen to stress that you can’t change one aspect of human life without changing others, sometimes unpredictably. But we can’t forget that this is about what Morgan’s kidnappers thinkhe’s got, not what he actually hasgot. There might be a world of difference. I may be foolishly naive, but I cannot believe, even for an instant, that Morgan could have made a discovery of this magnitude without telling me—or, indeed, anyone else.”

“But we don’t know that he didn’t tell anyone else,” Ginny pointed out, carried away by the flood of her own ingenuity. “Dr. Chan obviously knows something—and it seems to be something he’s reluctant to confide in us before he’s explained it to you.”

Not just a pretty face, Lisa thought. But if you’re right, Ginny darling, and Morgan really does have a technology of longevity whose only downside is that it doesn’t work on people with balls, whose side will you be on come the time when the fat lady sings?Aloud, she said: “I still don’t believe it. Chan wouldn’t keep something like that from me anymore than Morgan would. We go back a long way.”

“As friends,” Smith reminded her.

“As friends,” she echoed. The words obviously meant more to her than they did to Peter Grimmett Smith—but the real question was how much they meant to Chan. Where the hell is Chan?she wondered. And what kind of stupid game is he playing?The sky was brightening again, but it was only the lights of the cityplex looming up in the west, far more perverse than any natural sunrise.

“This is all rather fanciful,” Smith complained. The tone of his voice suggested that he didn’t think much of Ginny’s hypothesis, and not because of Lisa’s lukewarm endorsement. Ginny was, after all, only his driver—and Lisa was a woman on the wrong side of middle age. He didn’t have the same imaginative reach as the flirtatious Matthias Geyer did, and nothing like the same imaginative reach as Stella Filisetti and Arachne West. Perhaps that was a virtue, given that Stella Filisetti’s imagination seemed to have carried her away to ludicrous extremes, and allowed her to persuade at least, half a dozen otherwise sensible individuals that her runaway paranoia mightbe justified. Could she have been so effective if the world hadn’t been trembling on the brink of plague war? Maybe not. But the world wason that edge, and the knowledge that the men who controlled global commerce—and it probably wasmen, in the narrow sense—had a solution ready for the marketplace wasn’t as much of a comfort to Lisa as it might have been to Peter Grimmett Smith.

“We’ll find out the whys and wherefores soon enough,” Lisa told him, trying hard to sound as if they weren’t important enough to warrant much expenditure of intellectual effort. “What we need to do is make sure that we’re ready to act when your people have sorted out the good data from the bad. We need some sleep. I do, at any rate.”

She saw Ginny’s helmeted head turn halfway, as if the pilot intended to favor her with a long, hard stare—but the gesture was never completed. Ginny’s eyes went back to her instrument panel, and her lips remained sealed.

“Imagine how I feel,” Peter Grimmett Smith complained, evidently of the opinion that he’d had the harder day. “You’re right, of course—we all need to get our heads down for a while. I was right to insist on seeing the Algenist tonight, though—and however crude and vulgar my understanding of Nietzsche may be, I don’t think they’re the kind of people who ought to be entrusted with whatever Morgan Miller has discovered … if he’s discovered anything at all.”

“They probably think the same about the Ministry of Defence,” Lisa couldn’t help observing.

“What’s thatsupposed to mean?” Smith asked impatiently.

“Merely that ourprimary interest is national security,” Lisa replied, knowing that it would be wise to reemphasize the fact that she was still on Smith’s team. “That’s our sworn duty, and Geyer has to respect it—but he undoubtedly imagines that he’s serving a higher cause, not merely because it’s global rather than parochial, but because it’s progressive rather than conservative.”

“Pie in the sky,” was Smith’s immediate retort. “If he thinks we can simply forget about the old evils and move on, he’s sadly mistaken. Hyperflu is coming fast, and worse things loom in its wake. Our first priority—and for the time being, our onlypriority—is to protect as many of our own people as we can from the murderous kind of chaos that’s already taking hold in the poorer parts of the world. Unless Morgan Miller’s hypothetical discovery bears on thatproblem, we’re all wasting our time here.”

Again Ginny’s head jerked, as if she were going to look around—this time, presumably, at her boss rather than at Lisa—but she thought better of it, perhaps because she was already being guided into her final approach.

“That may well be true,” Lisa said, her voice firm, although its volume was hardly above a murmur. “In the context of the war effort, this is probably no more than a domestic dispute flared up in consequence of an absurd mistake. I can’t see that it’s likely to have any defense implications at all. Even if Morgan’s problematic discovery has anything to do with antibody packaging—and I doubt very much that it does—it won’t allow you to stop hyperflu at the far end of the Channel tunnel. If it could, he’d have been knocking on your door instead of the Algenists’, and he wouldn’t have waited so long before doing it.”

It was impossible to tell whether Smith was prepared to take her at her word, but Lisa was past caring. In his position, she would have reserved judgment, and she assumed that he would do exactly that—but she didn’t give a damn. With or without the aid of Judith Kenna’s computer crime division, his spooks ought to be able to penetrate the smoke screen laid down to delay the identification of Miller’s kidnappers within a few hours, and then they’d still have to track down the culprits. If there was anything to be recovered that might assist the defense of the realm, they’d doubtless recover it in their own good time—but Lisa had her own far more urgent agenda to follow.

“I don’t like all this talk of a New Order,” Smith said reflectively. “Talk of a New Order always implies that the existing order needs to be swept away. It’s a fine line that separates the mere conviction that it’s bound to happen from the desire to help it along—and what you’ve told me about what Geyer might reallyhave meant doesn’t make me any less anxious about his organization.”

“The line may seem fine to you,” Lisa said irritably, “but it’s firm enough to Morgan Miller, and to every other sufferer from the Cassandra Complex. Knowing that something is certain doesn’t anesthetize the knower from an acute consciousness of its tragic dimension. I can’t speak for Geyer, or for the Real Women, but the kind of interest Morgan had in the kind of global society that might emerge in the wake of the population crisis didn’t make him enthusiastic about hurrying the crisis along. He would have moved heaven and earth, if he could, to delay the day when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would increase their pace to a gallop. I’ve no reason to think Geyer wouldn’t do the same. He’d probably argue that we were more vulnerable to moral criticism because we’re servants of the Crown rather than champions of the entire human race. Even Leland took time out to give me a little lecture on the virtues of one worldism.”