There had been times, during that long day, when Mitch- ell’s coded memories had risen in him, filling him with a strange dread that seemed to have nothing to do with the operation at hand. It was the intimacy of the thing that still disturbed him, and perhaps the feeling of fear sprang from that. Certain frag- ments seemed to have an emotional power entirely out of proportion to their content. Why should a memory of a plain hallway in some dingy Cambridge graduate dormitory fill him with a sense of guilt and self-loathing? Other images, which logically should have carried a degree of feeling, were strangely lacking in affect: Mitchell playing with his baby daughter on an expanse of pale woolen broadloom in a rented house in Geneva, the child laughing, tugging at his hand. Nothing. The man’s life, from Turner’s vantage, seemed marked out by a certain inevitability; he was brilliant, a brilliance that had been detected early on, highly motivated, gifted at the kind of blandly ruthless in-company manipulation required by some- one who aspired to become a top research scientist. If anyone was destined to rise through laboratory-corporate hierarchies, Turner decided, it would be Mitchell. Turner himself was incapable of meshing with the intensely tribal world of the zaibatsumen, the lifers. He was a perpetual outsider, a rogue factor adrift on the secret seas of intercorpo- rate politics. No company man would have been capable of taking the initiatives Turner was required to take in the course of an extraction. No company man was capable of Turner’s professionally casual ability to realign his loyalties to fit a change in employers. Or, perhaps, of his unyielding commit- ment once a contract had been agreed upon. He had drifted into security work in his late teens, `when the grim doldrums of the postwar economy were giving way to the impetus of new technologies. He had done well in security, considering his general lack of ambition. He had a ropy, muscular poise that impressed his employer’s clients, and he was bright, very bright. He wore clothes well. He had a way with technology. Conroy had found him in Mexico, where Turner’s em- ployer had contracted to provide security for a Sense/Net simstim team who were recording a series of thirty-minute segments in an ongoing jungle adventure series When Conroy arrived, Turner was finishing his arrangements. He’d set up a liaison between Sense/Net and the local government, bribed the town’s top police official, analyzed the hotel’s security system, met the local guides and drivers and had their histo- ries doublechecked. arranged for digital voice protection on the simstim team’s transceivers, established a crisis-management team, and planted seismic sensors around the Sense/Net suite-cluster. He entered the hotel’s bar, a jungle-garden extension of the lobby, and found a seat by himself at one of the glass-topped tables. A pale man with a shock of white, bleached hair crossed the bar with a drink in each hand. The pale skin was drawn tight across angular features and a high forehead; he wore a neatly pressed military shirt over jeans, and leather sandals. “You’re the security for those simstim kids,” the pale man said, putting one of the drinks down on Turner’s table. “Al- fredo told me.” Alfredo was one of the hotel bartenders. Turner looked up at the man, who was evidently sober and seemed to have all the confidence in the world. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” Turner said, making no move to accept the proffered drink. “It doesn’t matter,” Conroy said, seating himself, “we’re in the same ball game.” He seated himself. Turner stared. He had a bodyguard’s presence, something restless and watchful written in the lines of his body, and few strangers would so casually violate his private space. “You know,” the man said, the way someone might com- ment on a team that wasn’t doing particularly well in a given season, “those seismics you’re using really don’t make it. I’ve met people who could walk in there, eat your kids for breakfast, stack the bones in the shower, and stroll out whis- tling. Those seismics would say it never happened.” He took a sip of his drink. “You get A for effort, though. You know how to do a job.” The phrase “stack the bones in the shower” was enough. Turner decided to take the pale man out. “Look, Turner, here’s your leading lady.” The man smiled up at Jane Hamilton, who smiled back, her wide blue eyes clear and perfect, each iris ringed with the minute gold letter- ing of the Zeiss Ikon logo. Turner froze, caught in a split- second lock of indecision. The star was close, too close, and the pale man was rising “Nice meeting you, Turner,” he said. “We’ll get together sooner or later. Take my advice about those seismics; back em up with a perimeter of screamers.” And then he turned and walked away, muscles rolling easily beneath the crisp fabric of his tan shirt. “That’s nice, Turner,” Hamilton said, taking the strang- er’s place. “Yeah?” Turner watched as the man was lost in the con- fusion of the crowded lobby, amid pink-fleshed tourists. “You don’t ever seem to talk to people. You always look like you’re running a make on them, filing a report. It’s nice to see you making friends for a change” Turner looked at her. She was twenty, four years his junior, and earned roughly nine times his annual salary in a given week She was blonde, her hair cropped short for the series role, deeply tanned, and looked as if she was illumi- nated from within by sunlamps. The blue eyes were inhu- manly perfect optical instruments, grown in vats in Japan. She was both actress and camera, her eyes worth several million New Yen, and in the hierarchy of Sense/Net stars, she barely rated. He sat with her. in the bar, until she’d finished two drinks, then walked her back to the suite-cluster. “You wouldn’t feel like coming in for another, would you, Turner?” “No.” he said. This was the second evening she’d made the offer, and he sensed that it would be the last. “I have to check the seismics.” Later that night, he phoned New York for the number of a firm in Mexico City that could supply him with screamers for the perimeter of the suite-cluster. But a week later. Jane and three others, half the series cast, were dead.