He looked down at his own body, half expecting to see that he too had turned to mercury, but he hadn’t. He recognized the blue-and-gray suitskin he seemed to be wearing as one of his own, but it was not the one he had been wearing when Steve Grayson had carried him away to Rajuder Singh’s island.

“Who are you?” Damon demanded of the mercury man. The shape of the apparition’s face did not seem familiar, although he was not sure that he could have recognized someone he knew reasonably well were their features to be transformed to a fluid mirror in this remarkable fashion.

“I think you can probably figure that out,” the other replied. “My name doesn’t matter. It’s what I am and where we are that counts. You did very well. Not everyone can learn to cope with worlds like this, and few can adapt so quickly—but the real test will come when you try to fly. That requires genuine artistry and limitless self-confidence.”

“So whatare you?” Damon demanded, determined to take matters one at a time and to follow his own agenda.

“I like to think of this as Mount Olympus,” the mercury man told him, ignoring the question. “Up there, the palace of Zeus—impossible, of course, for mere human eyes to figure—where Apollo, Aphrodite, Ares, and Athena have their separate apartments. Down there, the earth, unquiet even by night with the artificially-lit labor and the radiant dreams of billions of men.”

“The illusion’s magnificent,” Damon conceded. “Far better than anything I ever thought Icould make—but you’ll spoil it all if you insist on talking nonsense. You went to a great deal of trouble to bring me here. Why not tell me what it is that you want?”

“Fair enough,” said the mirror man agreeably. “I’d like you to get a message to your father. We can’t find him, you see—and while we can’t find him, it’s rather difficult to negotiate with him. We’ve tried talking to his underlings, but they simply aren’t licensed to be flexible. We rather hoped he might be hiding out on that artificial island, but he isn’t; all we found was you.”

“Conrad Helier’s dead,” Damon said wearily.

“We’re almostready to believe that,” the apparition conceded, “but not quite. It isconceivable that it’s only his spirit that lives on and that Eveline Hywood is pulling the strings herself, but you’ll understand our scepticism. We live in a world of deceptive appearances, Damon. You only have to look at me to realize why we aren’t prepared to take anything on trust.”

Damon didn’t have any ready answer to that.

“It’s the same with the people at Ahasuerus,” the mercury man continued. “They’re obsessed with the continuation of Adam Zimmerman’s plan, and they refuse to see that all plans have to adapt to changes in the world’s circumstances. That’s why we sent you to them—we figured that we might as well trap both wayward birds with a single net, if we can. There’s always the possibility, of course, that the foundation has your father salted away in the same cold place as Adam Zimmerman, but we don’t think it’s likely. Your father isn’t the kind of man to settle for an easy ride to Ultima Thule via suspended animation.”

By this time, Damon had found his answer. “If Conrad Helier isn’t dead,” he said, “he’s certainly not disposed to let me know it. Karol doesn’t trust me, and neither does Eveline. Even Silas never gave me the slightest reason to think that Conrad Helier is alive. Anyhow, if you think he’s still guiding Eveline and Karol, you only have to leave your message on their answerphones.”

“It’s not as easy as that, as you know very well. When I say that we want you to get a message to him, I mean that we want you to get throughto him. We want him to listen. We think that you might be the person to do that for us. Karol and Eveline are only his hirelings, and they’ll be dead within thirty or forty years. You’re his son, and he must at least hope, if he doesn’t actually believe, that you might live for a thousand years. I know that he poses as a lover of all mankind, making no discrimination between rich and poor, worthy and unworthy, but he took the trouble to have a son and to deliver that son into the patient care of his most trusted confidants. Doesn’t that suggest to you that the plans he makes for the future of mankind are really plans for yourfuture—or at least that he imagines you as a central figure, somehow symbolic of the race as a whole?”

“If he did, and if he werealive, I’d be a great disappointment to him,” Damon said shortly. “I’ve my own life to lead. I’m not interested in delivering messages for you.”

“It’s a little late to make that decision,” the mirror man observed.

Damon could see what he meant. What his captors wanted, apparently, was to get through to whoever was running Conrad Helier’s operation—and Damon had obligingly hopped on a plane to Molokai, calling in on the Ahasuerus Foundation en route. He’d also unleashed Madoc Tamlin—and thus, in all likelihood, every outlaw Webwalker on the West Coast. He’d already collaborated as fully as anyone could have desired in the mission of getting throughto Karol Kachellek. The only person he hadn’t quite got through to, yet, was Eveline Hywood.

“None of this makes sense,” Damon complained. “None of it was necessary. You’re just playing games.”

“Perhaps we are,” the mirror man admitted, “but we aren’t the only ones. Your father started this, Damon—our moves have been made in response to his, and he’s still responding to ours. He should have come to the conference table the night we took Silas Arnett hostage, but he called our bluff. I suppose you realize that the second tape of his supposed confessions was theirs, not ours? It was a move we hadn’t anticipated—a sacrifice we thought he wouldn’t be prepared to make. We didn’t anticipate that Karol Kachellek would send you off to the island either, but that may have worked out to our advantage. Naming you was a rather crude response, but the Operator one-oh-one pseudonym was about to become useless and it seemed politic to increase the general confusion. We’re suitably impressed by your father’s initiative and his fighting spirit, but it doesn’t alter the situation. He shouldn’t try to keep us out. He mustn’ttry to keep us out, Damon. It’s not that we want to stop what he’s doing—but we can’t let him do it alone. The world has changed, Damon. We can’t tolerate loose cannons. The day of littleconspiracies, like your father’s and Adam Zimmerman’s, is long gone. Now they have to submit to the same discipline as the rest of us.”

“I don’t have the least idea what you’re talking about,” Damon said, “and I still believe that Conrad Helier’s been dead for nearly fifty years.” The latter statement was a straightforward stalling move, intended to slow things down while he tried to fathom the implications of what the mirror man was saying.

“We have confidence in your ability to figure it out,” the apparition told him. “We also have confidence in your ability to see reason. You’re fully entitled to resent the way we’ve used you, but we hope that you might be prepared to forgive us.”

“I’m not the forgiving type,” Damon retorted, although he knew that it wasn’t the diplomatic thing to say.

The mirror man ignored the futile threat. “What do you think of the quality of the VE?” he asked.

“It’s forced me to revise my estimate of what can and can’t be done,” Damon admitted. “I didn’t think anykind of bodysuit would ever get this close to reproducing the minutiae of tactile experience. It makes the kind of work I do seem rather childish.”

“It’s next-generation technology. Now that you know it canbe done, can you guess how?”

“Not exactly. I suppose it has to be done with some kind of new nanotech, using a synthesuit that’s even thinner than a suit-skin.”

“It’s an interesting idea, but it’s headed in the wrong direction. You’re not in any kind of bodysuit. You’re lying down on a perfectly ordinary bed, fast asleep. This is a lucid dream.”