Eveline Hywood wouldn’t have bothered—or, if she had, would certainly have affected an infinitely more patronizing tone.

“Sure,” Damon said. “Thanks. I’m sorry I got under your feet—but I’m glad I came.”

“So am I,” said Karol—and he might even have meant it.

Thirteen

K

arol Kachellek took time out from his busy schedule to drive Damon out to a small private airstrip near the southeastern tip of the island. Damon couldn’t help thinking, churlishly, that the gesture had less to do with courtesy than a keen desire to see the back of him, but there was no hostility in his foster father’s manner now. The Eliminator broadcast had knocked all the stiffness out of the bioscientist, who was visibly anxious as he bounced his jeep over the potholes in the makeshift road. Damon had never seen him so obviously distressed.

“Bloody road,” Karol complained. “All it needs is a man with a shovel and a bucketful of gantzing bacs. He could take the dirt from the side of the road—there’s plenty of it. Nobody ever admits responsibility without a fight, and when they have to, it’s always going to be done tomorrow—the kind of tomorrow that never comes.”

“Wouldn’t be tolerated in Los Angeles,” Damon agreed, with a slight smile. “If the city couldn’t take care of it immediately the corps would race one another to get a man out there. OmicronA would be determined to win, in order to demonstrate that Pico-Con’s ownership of the patents is merely an economic technicality. The staff in the California offices pride themselves on being hands-on people, always willing to get involved in local issues.”

“I bet they do,” Karol muttered tersely. “Nanotech hands by the trillion, at work in every last nook and cranny of the great showcase of the global village—it’s different here, of course. No Silicon Valley-type monuments to the Third Industrial Revolution, no social cachet. We’re still the backwoods—the kind of wilderness that isn’t even photogenic. Nobody gives a damn about what happens out here, especially the people who live here.”

“You live here,” Damon pointed out. He refrained from adding an observation to the effect that Karol could have packed his own bucket and spade, pausing to repair the potholes on his way back to the lab. After all, Karol was verybusy just now.

“Here and hereabouts,” Karol admitted grimly.

Damon relented slightly. “Actually,” he said, “the corps are selectively blind even on their own doorstep. Until the deconstructionists move into the LA badlands in earnest nobody’s going to tidy them up. Filling in a hole downtown counts as an ad—filling one in where the gangs have their playgrounds wouldn’t win a nod of approval from anyone. You know how corpthink goes: no approval, no effort.”

“If only the world were as simple as that,” Karol said sadly. “The real problem is that too many people spend their entire lives sweating blood for the best possible causes and end up being denounced as enemies of mankind.”

That was more like the Karol he knew of old, and Damon was perversely glad to see the real man surfacing again, filling in his psychological potholes with great globs of biotech-cemented mud. Karol wasn’t sweating yet because the sun was too low in the eastern sky, but Damon knew that he’d be sweating by noon—not blood, to be sure, but beads of good, honest toil. Para-DNA had no chance of keeping its secrets, no matter how fervently it clung to the fugitive backwoods of the global village, and no matter how hard it tried to disguise itself as the detritus of a twentieth-century oil spill. Moves like that couldn’t possibly divert the curiosity of a true scientist.

As the jeep lurched onto the lawn beside the strip a flock of brightly colored birds grudgingly flew away, mewling their objections. Damon couldn’t put a name to the species but he had no doubt that Karol could have enlightened him had he cared to ask.

The two of them said their good-byes brusquely, as if to make sure that they both understood that their mutual mistrust had been fully restored, but there was a manifest awkwardness in their lack of warmth. Damon suspected that if he’d only known exactly what to say, he might have made a better beginning of the process of reconciliation, but he wasn’t certain that he wanted to try. Karol might be showing belated signs of quasi-parental affection, but he hadn’t actually told Damon anything significant. Whatever suspicions Karol had about the identity and motives of Silas Arnett’s kidnappers he was keeping to himself.

Damon would rather have sat up front in the cockpit of the plane, but he wasn’t given the choice. He was ushered into one of the eight passenger seats by the pilot, who introduced himself as Steve Grayson. Grayson was a stocky man with graying temples and a broad Australian accent. Maybe he thought the gray made him look more dignified, or maybe it was a joke reflecting his surname; at any rate, he was certainly no centenarian and he could have had his hair color reunified without recourse to the new generation of rejuvenation techniques. Damon took an immediate dislike to the pilot when Grayson insisted on reaching down to fasten his safety harness for him—an ostensible courtesy which seemed to Damon to be an insulting invasion of privacy.

“We’ll be up and down in no time at all,” Grayson told Damon before taking his own seat and fastening his own belt. “Might be a little rough in the wind, though—I hope your IT can cope with motion sickness.”

“I’ll be fine,” Damon assured him, taking further insult from the implication that in the absence of his IT he’d be the kind of person who couldn’t take a few routine aerial lurches without losing his breakfast.

While the plane taxied onto the runway Damon watched Karol Kachellek jump back into the jeep and drive away, presumably hastening back to the puzzle of para-DNA. Damon had a puzzle of his own to play with, and he had no trouble immersing himself within it, taking up the work of trying to figure out whether there mightbe something in what Karol had said to him that might lead to a fuller understanding of the game that Operator 101 was playing.

He was so deep in contemplation that he took no notice of the plane’s banking as it climbed. He watched the island diminish in size until it was no more than a mere map, but even then it did not occur to him that there was anything strange in the course they were taking. Ten or twelve minutes had elapsed before it finally occurred to him that the glaring light which had forced him to raise his left hand to shield his face should not have been so troublesome. Once Grayson had settled the plane on its intended course the sun ought to have been almost directly behind them, but it was actually way over to port.

“Hey!” he called to the pilot. “What’s our course?”

Grayson made no reply.

“Isn’t Honolulu due west of Molokai, away to the right?” Damon asked. He was beginning to doubt his knowledge of geography—but when Grayson again failed to turn around and look him in the eye, he knew that something was amiss.

He tested his safety harness and found that it was locked tight. The belt which Grayson had advised him to keep locked couldn’t be unlocked; he was a prisoner.

“Hey!” he shouted, determined not to be ignored. “What’s going on? What are you doing? Answer me, you bastard.”

At last, the pilot condescended to turn his head. Grayson’s expression was slightly apologetic—but only slightly.

“Sorry, son,” he said. “Just take it easy—when there’s nothing to be done, that’s what you might as well do.”

The homespun philosophy was a further annoyance, but Damon still couldn’t unfasten the seat belt. Like Silas Arnett before him—and possibly Surinder Nahal, not to mention Catherine Praill—he was being kidnapped. But why? And by whom? The mystery briefly overwhelmed the enormity of the realization, but the brute fact of what was happening soon fought back, insistently informing him that whoever was responsible, he was in danger. Whether he was in the hands of Eliminators or not, he was being carried off into the unknown, where any fate at all might be waiting for him.