"He diabetic?"

"No."

"Raynaud's?"

"No."

Nieto went over to the bedside, looked at the fingers. "Only the tips are involved. All the damage is distal."

"Right," she said. "If he wasn't found in the desert, I'd call that frostbite."

"You check him for heavy metals, Bev? Because this could be toxic exposure to heavy metals. Cadmium, or arsenic. That would explain the fingers, and also his dementia."

"I drew the samples. But heavy metals go to UNH in Albuquerque. I won't have the report back for seventy-two hours."

"You have any ID, medical history, anything?"

"Nothing. We put a missing persons out on him, and we transmitted his fingerprints to Washington for a database check, but that could take a week."

Nieto nodded. "And when he was agitated, babbling? What'd he say?"

"It was all rhymes, the same things over. Something about Gordon and Stanley. And then he would say, " `Quondam phone makes me roam.' "

"Quondam? Isn't that Latin?"

She shrugged. "It's a long time since I was in church."

"I think quondam is a word in Latin," Nieto said.

And then they heard a voice say, "Excuse me?" It was the bespectacled kid in the bed across the hall, sitting with his mother.

"We're still waiting for the surgeon to come in, Kevin," Beverly said to him. "Then we can set your arm."

"He wasn't saying `quondam phone,' " the kid said. "He was saying `quantum foam.' "

"What?"

"Quantum foam. He was saying `quantum foam.' "

They went over to him. Nieto seemed amused. "And what, exactly, is quantum foam?"

The kid looked at them earnestly, blinking behind his glasses. "At very small, subatomic dimensions, the structure of space-time is irregular. It's not smooth, it's sort of bubbly and foamy. And because it's way down at the quantum level, it's called quantum foam."

"How old are you?" Nieto said.

"Eleven."

His mother said, "He reads a lot. His father's at Los Alamos."

Nieto nodded. "And what's the point of this quantum foam, Kevin?"

"There isn't any point," the kid said. "It's just how the universe is, at the subatomic level."

"Why would this old guy be talking about it?"

"Because he's a well-known physicist," Wauneka said, coming toward them. He glanced at a sheet of paper in his hand. "It just came in on the M.P.D. Joseph A. Traub, seventy-one years old, materials physicist. Specialist in superconducting metals. Reported missing by his employer, ITC Research in Black Rock, around noon today."

"Black Rock? That's way over near Sandia." It was several hours away, in central New Mexico. "How the hell did this guy get to Corazón Canyon in Arizona?"

"I don't know," Beverly said. "But he's-"

The alarms began to sound.

It happened with a swiftness that stunned Jimmy Wauneka. The old man raised his head from the bed, stared at them, eyes wild, and then he vomited blood. His oxygen mask turned bright red; blood spurted past the mask, running in streaks across his cheeks and chin, spattering the pillow, the wall. He made a gurgling sound: he was drowning in his own blood.

Beverly was already running across the room. Wauneka ran after her. "Turn the head!" Nieto was saying, coming up to the bed. "Turn it!" Beverly had pulled off the oxygen mask and was trying to turn the old man's head, but he struggled, fighting her, still gurgling, eyes wide with panic. Wauneka pushed past her, grabbed the old man's head with both hands and wrenched hard, twisting him bodily to the side. The man vomited again; blood sprayed all over the monitors, and over Wauneka. "Suction!" Beverly shouted, pointing to a tube on the wall.

Wauneka tried to hold the old man and grab for the tube, but the floor was slick with blood. He slipped, grabbed at the bed for support.

"Come on, people!" Tsosie shouted. "I need you! Suction!" She was on her knees, shoving her fingers in the man's mouth, pulling out his tongue. Wauneka scrambled to his feet, saw Nieto holding out a suction line. He grabbed it with blood-slippery fingers, and saw Nieto twist the wall valve. Beverly took the neoprene probe, started sucking out the guy's mouth and nose. Red blood ran up the tubes. The man gasped, coughed, but he was growing weaker.

"I don't like this," Beverly said, "we better-" The monitor alarms changed tone, high-pitched, steady. Cardiac arrest.

"Damn," she said. There was blood all over her jacket, her blouse. "Paddles! Get the paddles!"

Nieto was standing over the bed, holding the paddles in outstretched arms. Wauneka scrambled back from the bed as Nancy Hood pushed her way through; there were people clustered all around the man now. Wauneka smelled a sharp odor and knew the man's bowels had released. He suddenly realized the old man was going to die.

"Clear," Nieto said as he pushed down on the paddles. The body jolted on the table. The bottles on the wall clattered. The monitor alarms continued.

Beverly said, "Close the curtain, Jimmy."

He looked back, and saw the bespectacled kid across the room, staring, his mouth open. Wauneka yanked the drapes shut.

An hour later, an exhausted Beverly Tsosie dropped down at a desk in the corner to write up the case summary. It would have to be unusually complete, because the patient had died. As she thumbed through the chart, Jimmy Wauneka came by with a cup of coffee for her. "Thanks," she said. "By the way, do you have the phone number for that ITC company? I have to call them."

"I'll do that for you," Wauneka said, resting his hand briefly on her shoulder. "You've had a tough day."

Before she could say anything, Wauneka had gone to the next desk, flipped open his notepad, and started dialing. He smiled at her as he waited for the call to go through.

"ITC Research."

He identified himself, then said, "I'm calling about your missing employee, Joseph Traub."

"One moment please, I'll connect you to our director of human resources."

He then waited on hold for several minutes. Muzak played. He cupped his hand over the phone, and as casually as he could, said to Beverly, "Are you free for dinner, or are you seeing your granny?"

She continued to write, not looking up from the chart. "I'm seeing Granny."

He gave a little shrug. "Just thought I'd ask," he said.

"But she goes to bed early. About eight o'clock."

"Is that right?"

She smiled, still looking down at her notes. "Yes."

Wauneka grinned. "Well, okay."

"Okay."

The phone clicked again and he heard a woman say, "Hold please, I am putting you through to our senior vice president, Dr. Gordon."

"Thank you." He thought, Senior vice president.

Another click, then a gravelly voice: "This is John Gordon speaking."

"Dr. Gordon, this is James Wauneka of the Gallup Police Department. I'm calling you from McKinley Hospital, in Gallup," he said. "I'm afraid I have some bad news."

Seen through the picture windows of the ITC conference room, the yellow afternoon sun gleamed off the five glass and steel laboratory buildings of the Black Rock research complex. In the distance, afternoon thunderclouds were forming over the far desert. But inside the room, the twelve ITC board members were turned away from the view. They were having coffee at a side table, talking to one another while they waited for the meeting to begin. Board meetings always ran into the night, because the ITC president, Robert Doniger, was a notorious insomniac and he scheduled them that way. It was a tribute to Doniger's brilliance that the board members, all CEOs and major venture capitalists, came anyway.

Right now, Doniger had yet to make an appearance. John Gordon, Doniger's burly vice president, though he knew why. Still talking on a cell phone, Gordon began to make his way toward the door. At one time Gordon had been an Air Force project manager, and he still had a military bearing. His blue business suit was freshly pressed, and his black shoes shone. Holding his cell phone to his ear, he said, "I understand, Officer," and he slipped out the door.