“ so for the third time they untied Cowboy Bob from the stake and let him speak to Thunder, his wonder horse.”

June Morgan’s eyes seemed to flash as she leaned toward Alex and Teresa.

“This time, though, Bob didn’t whisper in Thunder’s left ear. He didn’t whisper in the right. This time he held the horse’s face, looked him straight in the eye, and said — ‘Read my lips, dummy. I told you to go get a Posse! ”

As June sat back with an expectant smile, Alex had to bite his lower lip to contain himself. He watched Teresa sitting across the room, as her initial confusion gave way to sudden understanding. “Oh! Oh, that’s awful!” She laughed while waving at the air, as if to fan away a bad odor.

June grinned and picked up her glass. “Don’t you get it, Alex? See, the first two times, the horse brought back women…”

He held up both hands. “I got it, all right. Please, Teresa’s right. It’s bloody offensive.”

June nodded smugly. So far, she was having by far the best of it. No joke he or Teresa told was delivered half as well or elicited such approving groans of feigned nausea. Probably, her skill came from being Texan. The only nationality Alex knew who were better at this odd ritual were Australians.

As bearer of good tidings, June could hardly be begrudged. This party in Alex’s tiny bungalow was to celebrate an end to weeks of tension.

At least one hopes it’s over. I still feel twinges of paranoia, looking over my shoulder for men in snap-brim hats and trench coats.

June had arrived on Rapa Nui this morning with word of Colonel Spivey’s complete agreement to their terms. In exchange for their cooperation — and especially Alex’s expertise — all charges would be dropped against Teresa and Easter Island would be left alone.

Naturally, Spivey will smuggle in a spy or two. But at least Teresa and I are no longer on the run.

It was still an open question whether there was any place to run to. The struggles against Beta weren’t over yet. Still, even the most fatalistic of Alex’s technicians were starting to act as if they thought there might be a planet under them by this time next year.

Now if only they can convince me.

Things had changed since theirs was a tiny, tight-knit cabal, wrestling subterranean monsters all alone. Now they were part of a large official enterprise, albeit one still veiled under a “temporary” cloak of security. June was here to cement the partnership, conveying the determination of both Glenn Spivey and George Hutton to make it work, for now. In that role as emissary, she would leave again tomorrow with Alex’s chief token of cooperation — a box of cubes with fresh data for the other teams. Her courier route ought to bring her back every week or so from now on.

Teresa, for her part, had gone to great pains to make things clear to June — that her new, close friendship with Alex wasn’t sexual.

Not that the two of them hadn’t thought about it. At least he had. But on reflection he had come to realize that anything intimate between them would demand more intense attention than either could spare right now. For the time being, it was enough that they had a silent understanding — a link that had never been severed since they emerged hand in hand from that odyssey underground, like twins who had gestated together and shared the same act of being reborn.

For her part, June Morgan’s outwardly relaxed posture and easy humor surely overlayed anxiety. Alex’s relationship with her had been a wartime affair, mutual, uncomplicated. He had no idea where it stood now and didn’t mean to push it.

At least the two women appeared to have buried whatever tension once lay between them. Or most of it, at least. Alex was glad. For one thing, it meant he could stand up now and leave them alone together for a little while.

“If you ladies will excuse me,” he said, stepping to the door of the little bungalow. “I have to go see someone about an emu.”

June nodded briefly at him, but Teresa was already leaning forward in her chair, almost touching the other woman’s arm. “All right then,” she said. “Here’s one for you, while he’s out playing fire drill with the bushes.”

Moving quickly, Alex made it outside before she started telling the joke. A long one might have snared him and set off a crisis in his kidneys.

It was a balmy night, though winter had lingered a long time, turning this desolate island even more windblown and sere. Apparently spring would be late and blustery. Even the trees at the experimental reforestation zone up at Vaiteia seemed to shiver and cower whenever the gales picked up.

He didn’t bother walking downslope to the shower-commode, shared by five of the prefabricated cottages. Instead, he climbed the hill a ways to where the view was better. As he watered the scrub grass, Alex looked westward toward the lights of Hanga Roa town, just north of Rano Kao’s towering cliffs. The solitary jet runway glittered palely next to five compact tourist hotels and a moored cargo zeppelin. Nearer at hand lay the Atlantis monument, bottom-lit so that at night the ancient, crippled space shuttle .actually seemed caught nobly in the act of taking off.

Since their close escape from New Zealand, wincing and limping from their bruises, he and Teresa had perforce taken up different activities. For her part, she spent most of her days with the old model-one shuttle. Presumably she knew a way inside, past the vandalism alarms. Or perhaps she was just scraping off the graffiti and gull droppings that made the broken spacecraft look so pathetic by daylight.

Possibly, she was just sitting in Atlantis’s pilot seat, brooding over the slim likelihood she’d ever see space again — even given a pardon from Spivey’s masters.

Anyway, he was busy enough for both of them. Rapa Nui station was again the fulcrum for up to several dozen gazer beams a day, pulsating through the Earth’s interior in a dizzying variety of modes and leading to countless surface manifestations. Now, at least, Alex had secure consultation links with Stan Goldman in Greenland, and data streamed in from the NATO ground teams, as well, helping him refine his models with each passing day.

(He’d even had a chance to get in touch with his grand-mother, over in Africa. Good old Jen. After berating him several minutes for neglecting her, she had immediately dropped the subject and launched into a long, excited explanation of her new research, which Alex vaguely gathered had something to do with schizophrenia.)

Alex spent a good part of each day watching the singularity on the big display, where Beta could be seen spending more of its time in the “sparse” zones of the lower mantle. Already the monster was on an enforced diet, and soon they’d reach break-even — that milestone when the deadly knot began losing mass-energy as fast as it absorbed it. That would be time for real celebration… a true miracle, given their odds just a few months ago.

But then what?

Behind him, he heard the women laugh out loud, Teresa’s alto blending harmoniously with June’s contralto. It was a sound that cheered him. Finished with his business, Alex found himself suddenly shivering in the chill breeze. He zipped up and walked a little further along the slope, crunching the dry grass underfoot.

Apparently, a surprising number of Colonel Spivey’s superiors believed Alex’s theory, that Beta was a smart bomb sent by alien foes to destroy humanity. If so, then Spivey had a point. The gazer could become the pivot of Earth’s only credible defense. In fact, to hear Spivey put it, the world might someday erect statues to Alex Lustig.

Savior of the planet, forger of our shield.

The image would appeal to any man’s vanity. And Alex wasn’t sure he had the will to resist. What if it’s true? he thought, tasting the honey sweetness of Spivey’s fable.