It's the damn JITT . Alice had just completed her Training for the bio-lab audit. That had been the most extensive JITT she had ever undertaken. At this moment, he'd guess there wasn't anyone in the world with more knowledge of lab automation and associated research. I should talk to her direct, no more polite redirections …. Hell, if she won't back off, I should relieve her ! And those thoughts were much too like their recent fights at home.

So it was Bob who drew back. He sat and watched the correlations, the statistical outliers. He moved his group members away from San Diego issues. They would be the tripwires if UCSD was a diversion.

The bioscience pool just got brighter. Alice had preempted CDC's genomics division. He would hear about that in the after-action meetings. He had a cold intuition. Tonight could be the night. The thing he personally feared as much as anything in the world, the possibility Alice always denied. Is she slipping away ? What would a full-sized JITT collapse be like for someone who had Trained a dozen times more than the worst JITT-head in a VA hospital?

"Did you hear something?"

"Like what, Tommie?"

"You know, like a distant thump."

They stopped and looked back. Winnie made an indignant noise. This was like the old days, when Tommie was always working to increase the suspense of their illicit expeditions.

Tommie hesitated. He was leading from behind so that the fine fiber he was paying out wouldn't get trampled by the others. He listened for a moment more, and then turned to catch up. "Maybe it was nothing… but the fiber went dead for moment, too." He glanced down at his laptop. "It looks okay now." He waved them up the tunnel, into the dark beyond their little pool of light. "Keep going."

The first part of the tunnel had been very familiar, an eerie walk down memory lane. There was a time, now more than fifty years past, when all of them but Carlos had explored the tunnels. Tommie Parker had been a smartass freshman showing off to a couple of grad students who often wondered how they had been inveigled into such harebrained expeditions.

As they walked farther on, things became less familiar. Glassy tubes ran along the walls. Robert saw signs printed on the walls, cryptic physical backup for nodes that wouldn't respond to his computer box. Thunk . Something white and the size of a volleyball whizzed by in one tube. Thunk, thunk . Similar traffic in the opposite direction. Pneumatic tubes had once been a sign of the brave new world. When Robert was a child, he'd seen such things in dying department stores. "Why the pneumo tubes, Tommie?"

"Well, this is where theory meets reality. Proteomics, genomics, regulomics — you name the 'omic,' and it's here. These labs are huge . The local data traffic is a million times what you have on a public trunk, with the latencies of a home network. But they still need to look at real biologicals. Sometimes they gotta move samples — transport trays for short moves, pneumos for longer ones. GenGen even has its own UP/Express launcher, for shipping parcels to other labs around the world."

Now Robert heard sounds from the darkness ahead of them, voices that never quite made recognizable words, clicking that might have been old-time typewriters. This is science ?

Carlos said, "When I try to probe the local net, all I see are the bare walls."

"I told you. Talking to the labnet would make this scam way too complicated."

"The tunnel must know we're here." They walked in a small pool of light. Behind and ahead of them, the tunnel was dark.

"Yup. It knows we're here. But you might say that's only at a subconscious level."

Robert was in the lead. He pointed at the wall just at the front edge of the light. "What about these signs?" The letters were physically painted on the wall:

PBps:Prot<->Geno. 1 OPBps:Multi

That brought Tommie forward. "Maybe it's the General Genomics crossbar!" He held his prayer wheel high, waving the fiber out and away from the others. The Stranger was visible beside Tommie, but down here the monster couldn't quite locate itself. Its feet floated above the floor, and its gaze was wrong by ninety degrees.

Tommie pointed his laptop so its camera could see the lettering. "I have to admit, this fiber link is handy. I can send video out to my consultancy." Invisible to Tommie, the Mysterious Stranger jerked a thumb at itself and grinned. Tommie studied his laptop's display for a moment. "Yes! We have reached the GenGen optical crossbar." He pointed down the side tunnel. "This is where things get tricky."

Within fifty feet, the side tunnel had opened into something wider… something cavernous. In the shadows, something slanted into the heights. "See that tower?" said Tommie. "That's GenGen's private launcher. These guys don't bother with the launchers in East County."

The clickety sound was all around them now. It came from the tops of equipment cabinets; it had a pattern, like poetry scanned purely for stress. At the end of a stanza, things actually moved . Light glittered from deep within matted crystals. Some of the cabinets had a physical label:

Mus MCog.

The Stranger danced among them, a fantasy from Tommie's laptop and the fiber behind them. But the fantasy was watching through the laptop's camera, and talking — at least to Robert. The Stranger pointed in the general direction of the crystals. "The wonders of nano-fluidics. A decade of old-time bioscience done in every shifting of the lights. How do you represent a trillion samples, and a billion trillion analyses? How can art deal with that?" It hesitated as if truly anxious for an answer, and then it was gone again. But it left behind its own labels and explanations.

Robert looked at the ranks of machines, the tower almost lost in the distant dark. The place was a machine cathedral. But how to represent it, when it would take him years to have even shallow understanding? The massed crystal was not spectacularly colored; most of the fluid paths were microscopic and hidden within appliances that might have been oversized refrigerators. The Stranger's labels floated randomly about, ghostly subtitles to some transcendent process. And yet, it almost made him remember what he had lost; words burbled up within his imagination, words striving to capture the awe he felt.

They walked down the narrow aisles, turning only when Tommie told them to turn. Every minute or so, he would stop their progress and grab a few more gadgets from the backpacks.

"We gotta install these just right, guys. Staying invisible here is a lot harder than in the tunnel." Tommie wanted the gadgets set near comm nodes, which turned out to be way back within the fluidics crystals. Robert did most of the "installing." Carlos would boost him up over the top of the cabinet. Robert would wiggle back, so near the glassworks that he could hear tiny, tiny clicks and the fluid hissing so faintly it might have been seepage. In their millions, those sounds added up to the larger atmosphere of the room.

In one case, Robert lingered, and noticed that the gadget itself took care of final installation, sliding away from him, deeper into the glassworks — as if its underside were a miniature transport tray .

"What are you laughing at, Gu?" Blount's voice came from below.

"Nothing!" Robert crawled off the cabinet and dropped to the floor. "I just figured out a little mystery."

They continued on. Most of the cabinets were labeled Dros MCog now. They were making faster progress, mainly because Carlos and Robert had figured out the gymnastics of the operation.

"That's the last of them, guys!" Tommie's gaze shifted from his laptop to the fluidics crystals. "You know, it's really weird that all the node locations were so deep in the lab equipment," he said.