The tide of figures was irresistible, and by the time Miller began to speak to his students about the predicament of the modern world, there was no room left for doubt that the crisis of contemporary civilization was new and unprecedented in only one significant respect: the fact that it was global.

“The numbers are larger than they have ever been before, of course,” he said with awesome casualness, “and the technological efforts that have permitted their inflation have been bolder than could ever have been conceived in any earlier era—but the only truly significant difference is that the impending collapse, which we cannot avert, but only postpone, will not be localized. We shall not be making a little desert, or laterizing the soil of a single plain; we shall be laying waste to the entire world. The survivors will hate and despise us for it. We shall seem far worse in their eyes than the conquering hordes of Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan, because we are motivated not by dreams of glory, but by cowardice and willful blindness. They will be right to hate and despise us, because we know what we are doing, and will not refuse to do it. They will know that we had a choice, and that what we chose to do was to destroy the world. Our gift to the children whose presence will bring about that destruction is a poisoned chalice from which billions will drink premature death. How can they help thinking of us as perverse as well as evil? Why should they?”

The seminars supporting the lectures were not, of course, as livery as Morgan Miller hoped. In that respect, at least, he was a poor prophet, misled by residual optimism. The audiences were thin, and most of the students who actually bothered to turn up spent their time meekly waiting to write down what he said, in case they needed to reproduce it in an essay or a final exam.

Lisa rarely bothered to write anything down at all. She had never made any conscious concession to tradition or ritual, and her policy was never to make a note of anything that could be looked up on the net or in a library. Life was too short.

“It might not be as bad as you suppose,” she once suggested to Miller, though not in any public arena. “The traditional Malthusian checks are making new progress in their long war of attrition. The poor are starving in ever-greater numbers now that compassion fatigue has firmly set in, and the war business is booming. Even the bacteria are striking back now that they’ve developed immunity to so many antibiotics, and global warming is increasing the violence of the weather by leaps and bounds. Maybe the rate of increase will level off at a sustainable level.”

“Too little too late,” was his gloomy retort. “Medical science is far too efficient to let the bacteria catch up. The war business is far too businesslike. Compassion fatigue is localized. We have no reason to think that the existing population can be sustained in the long term.”

“But you admit that the same advances in biology that underlie medial science will transform the war business,” Lisa pointed out. “As the territorial imperative gradually overwhelms us and sends the whole world crazy, we’ll surely have the weapons we need not merely to reduce but to manage the population. You and I might be on the side of the angels in terms of what wedo with DNA, but Porton Down is less than fifty miles away.”

“It’ll be too little too late,” Miller insisted. “In any case, the last people who ought to be in charge of demographic management are generals and politicians. In time, no doubt our children’s children might make the kinds of social adjustments that the citizen mice of Mouseworld have made—but like the citizen mice of Mouseworld, they won’t be able to do it until they’ve been through at least one population crash, and maybe more than one. With luck, I’ll be a very old man by the time I see my nightmares coming true—but you’re twelve years younger than I am. You stand to lose that much more than I do.”

“I’ll go down fighting,” Lisa said flatly.

“I know you will,” he replied.

It was the first real compliment he had paid her. Unfortunately, it remained the best for far too long.

If Lisa had been asked, in the summer of 2003, whether she really intended to go down fighting, she would have said “Yes” and said it very firmly—but if anyone had asked her to specify exactly what the fight would entail, she would have been unable to do so.

She knew even then that there was bound to be a fight of some sort, but she could not tell who or what the enemy might be with whom she could actually become engaged.

When she completed her work at the university, she moved to a brand-new lab faculty that was only two miles away, but it was like stepping into a different world.

The rapid advancement of forensic science since the advent of DNA fingerprinting and its importance in supplying evidence for criminal prosecutions had necessitated a radical overhaul of its institutional structure. The lab into which Lisa moved was part of a series of experiments attempting to discover by trial and error the ideal relationship between the CID’s operations and the evidential analysts. It had been placed in the same building, and every plausible measure had been taken to ensure that scientists and policemen would become parts of a single tight-knit community. The intention was a noble one, and the hazard proved in the long run not to be a total loss, but for those abruptly thrown in at the deep end and required to make the dream come true, it was a taxing challenge.

The police force was not a happy organization in 2005. For ten years and more, it had been bruised and battered by attempts to root out corruption, institutional racism, and institutional sexism, and its officers were all too well aware of the fact that one of the most widely publicized effects of the introduction of new methods of scientific analysis had been to expose numerous cases of wrongful conviction in which police evidence had been shown to be manufactured. The siege mentality adopted by the police in response to seemingly never-ending criticism of their attitudes and methods ensured that a large minority among them—perhaps even a majority—saw the arrival in their staff operations of a legion of laboratory workers as an invasion of potential fifth columnists. Everyone recognized the necessity of working together, and everyone recognized that the new partnership was capable of delivering considerable rewards, but the necessity was tinged with bitterness and the rewards seemed, in the beginning, to be the rations of Tantalus.

In spite of her own best intentions, Lisa found that she had to cling hard to the relationships she had formed at the university in order to provide some relief from the constant stress of her new workplace. She continued to seek what solace she could in the arms of Morgan Miller, but exposing her new troubles to the commentary of his abrasive mind made her feel as if she were trapped “between the devil and the deep blue sea.” She often found it more restful to see Ed Burdillon or Chan Kwai Keung on a purely platonic basis. Their advice was worthless—Burdillon suggested she immerse herself more fully in her work and focus her attention on the quest for promotion, while Chan wondered whether she might not be a great deal happier if she returned to the groves of academe in order to climb the postdoctoral ladder to tenure—but they were unfailingly sympathetic.

Unfortunately, Lisa was well aware that her continued reliance on old friends was part of her problem rather than any kind of solution. She had to form new relationships within the station, not merely with the laboratory staff alongside whom she had been set to work, but with the officers whose Herculean labors she was supposed to be supporting. She certainly did not want to embark upon any new sexual relationship—within the police force, such liaisons were generally considered to be unhealthily incestuous—but she did need to set up productive and satisfying professional alliances.