The elevator was descending, slowly and noisily. Nick wondered what would happen if it broke and they became stuck a thousand feet underground. He decided that anyone able to design and build robots as complex and capable as the rolfes would certainly have allowed for elevator maintenance. Gordy was just doing what Nick had so often done, choosing a meeting place where he had the psychological advantage. Probably there were other surprises ahead.

But not, perhaps, at once. The elevator creaked to a stop and the door opened on a long chamber painted in gunmetal gray. Every few feet along the walls, Nick saw a lurid and unvarying design: the scarlet talons of a bird enclosing a green globe.

He stopped by one of the painted symbols. “The original symbol of the Eye of God.”

“Yeah. I didn’t change the paintings down here; they’re all over most of the walls. Don’t you think it makes a nice official emblem for the Argos Group?”

Rolfe’s voice burned with a nervous energy that Nick Lopez encountered only in his meetings with Gordy. Even with the aid of telomod therapy, how long could a man operate at that level of intensity? Rolfe was forty-three years old and he looked over sixty.

Nick made his own reply deliberately casual. “It all seems pretty run-down. I assume we’ll have a shielded environment where we can talk?”

“Right here. We can start anytime. I doubt there’s another human within five miles, and we’ll be under a thousand feet of rock and earth. That’s good against most taps — unless one of us is recording.”

Which, as it happens, I’m not. But we would both deny it if we were. Nick ignored the patronizing tone and the implied question and ducked his head to follow Gordy Rolfe up a tight spiral staircase of gray metal designed for someone a foot shorter than Nick Lopez. At the top Rolfe paused to operate a circular hatch, locked from below. Nick wondered about that. Wouldn’t a private hideaway be more logically locked from the other side? He had seen nothing to stop anyone from wandering into the old schoolroom and taking the elevator down.

Nick followed Gordy through the hatch, straightened, and glanced around him. “I don’t remember talk of anything like this when the Legion of Argos was in the media. Is it new?”

“Depends what you mean by ’new.’ ” Gordy Rolfe closed the hatch. He stood with his hands on his hips and watched Nick’s examination of their surroundings. For a change, he seemed genuinely pleased. “None of this was here in Pearl Lazenby’s time. I’ve been developing it for twenty years.”

The spiral staircase and entry hatch led to the center of an enormous room that was at first glance a conventional combination of living space, engineering laboratory, and office. A compact kitchen, complete with generous storage cabinets, sat behind a waist-high partition on the left. On the other side of the partition was a bedroom and a small closed-off area that Nick assumed must be a bathroom. The office was well equipped with desks, chairs, files, communications equipment, and three-dimensional display volumes. Next to it sat the work area, its long lab bench covered with tools and a mass of electronic test equipment. Half a dozen rolfes in various stages of disassembly stood along the wall.

That wall was the most unusual feature of the room. It formed one continuous circular barrier about twenty meters across, rising vertically to a white ceiling far above their heads. A single bulbous door, set in the wall close to ground level, provided an entrance big enough for a man to walk through. The door, like the wall, was transparent. Beyond lay a jungle of dense vegetation, stretching away for an indeterminate distance.

Nick Lopez craned his head back, seeking the source of light. It came from the ceiling, not as a discrete source but as a continuous glow.

“Matches the solar spectrum,” Gordy Rolfe said, “and it follows the surface diurnal rhythm. It’s late afternoon there, so it’s late afternoon here. If we want light later we’ll have to turn on separate units in my office. I don’t often do that, because I want the habitat to mimic natural conditions.”

“You mean out there, where the plants are?” Nick had walked forward to take a closer look at the wall and door. Beyond the barrier the plants grew dense and to shoulder height. The vegetation had an odd blue tinge to it. Nick rubbed the smooth wall, then rapped on it with his fist.

“Not just plants. Animals too.” Gordy Rolfe came to his side. “Go ahead, hit as hard as you like. You won’t make a dent in it. It’s hardened plastic, half an inch thick and stronger than steel. It runs all the way to the ceiling. The door has mechanical as well as electronic locks, and it can only be opened from this side.”

Nick Lopez backed away from the wall. He was not a nervous man, but this didn’t feel like one of Gordy Rolfe’s mind games. He saw the tops of a group of dark green ferny plants swaying, as though animals were moving below or behind them. “You have something dangerous out there?”

“Let’s say middling dangerous if you went in there bare-handed. Years ago I had things that you wouldn’t want to get within a mile of, but now I have other reasons for keeping the habitat sealed off. It took twenty years to create two thousand acres of controlled environment — three square miles of land and water — where I can run well-designed and controlled experiments. If visitors found their way in and meddled with what I’m doing, they would ruin everything.”

“But there’s nothing dangerous in there now}” Nick found himself reluctant to turn his back on the door.

“I told you, there’s nothing dangerous to an armed man. But I’ve got some fascinating work going on in the habitat. When it gets darker we’ll take a look.” Gordy smiled at Nick’s expression. “No, I don’t mean that we’ll go in. See the rovers? We’ll send one of them.”

Now that they were pointed out, Nick saw two of them. They were squat vehicles about three feet long, with eight thin jointed legs along their sides. At their front end a long, segmented neck rose to a round head circled with ruby sensors. They sat facing the wall of the chamber, not far from the door.

Nick said, “They look like the rolfes that Colombo and his group use in shield work.”

“Yeah.” Rolfe nodded. “Similar technology, though these are a bit smarter. Colombo paid top price, but I keep the best for myself. These rover rolfes are intelligent enough to wander the habitat — it’s tricky in places — without getting stuck. I just tell them where I want them to go, and they figure out the rest. What they see will be displayed there.”

Rolfe pointed to a set of screens in the communications center. “That will be our entertainment later. I think you’ll find it interesting. But first things first.” He gestured to a seat by a worktable in the central chamber. When Nick sat down, Rolfe perched on the table itself so that his head was higher than Lopez’s. He stared down at Nick. “Are you ready for business?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“So let’s do the status review, see where we stand.” Gordy Rolfe waved to the assortment of food and drink beside him on the table. Nick knew from experience that Rolfe himself would touch nothing. The word from Nick’s information network was that drugs and alcohol disagreed with Rolfe’s metabolism. In fact, Nick realized that he had never seen Gordy eat. The same information sources said that he was also celibate.

What were Gordy Rolfe’s pleasures? Nick had his own operating philosophy: If you want to see inside a man, you find out what he does for recreation.

Nick filed that question away for future reference. He had enough hedonistic tastes for both of them. He declined the offer of refreshment with a shake of the head.

Rolfe went on, “Let’s start with John Hyslop. Are you sure you didn’t screw up with him?”