Damn, his gut hurt. Was it his guilt talking or the illness? Or were they now hopelessly intertwined? You made this bed, he thought, so now you lie in it. So what if the enemy troops hadn’t been his idea? When the notion had first come up, three months ago, he had argued against including live subjects, to the point at which Colonel Oscar Henderson, the bean counter in charge of funding this project, pushed the issue to the level of a deal breaker. There were several ways to interpret Henderson’s stubbornness: as a sign that he had lost faith in Peter’s vision, doubted his abilities, even his loyalty; or merely as a desire to piss on Peter’s project so it would have his scent. Power has to be arbitrary, as Peter had come to realize-otherwise it’s just sound policy. A lifetime of struggling to maintain his vision while being accused of biting the hand that fed him had driven home that truth. His wife, Beatrice, on the other hand, leaned toward the theory of the loyalty test to explain Henderson’s insistence on live subjects. They had spent a week debating the issue, Peter arguing that it tainted all of them and was unnecessary. Beatrice, of course, called him a pompano-their pet word for a pompous ass-and as usual, she was right. After all, he could turn around and walk back down the hill, couldn’t he? Call Henderson’s bluff? And was he going to? No. As a matter of fact, the result of his wife’s chastisement was to make him more determined than ever to see this project through to the end. All the concerns he had voiced to Beatrice-just so much ritual self-doubtwere merely an attempt to quiet the churning in his gut by flattering his conscience. With the result being, of course, that his symptoms were flaring up more painfully than ever. The pills he was taking put his inner ear on gimbals, and now, plodding skyward through the sand, he had to pee again, despite the fact he’d done so five minutes before leaving the bunker. “Dr. Jance? Maybe we could slow down a little bit?” Peter glanced back down the hill. His support team were slogging behind him as best as they could, and one of them, Alex Davies, had apparently decided to take on the job of their spokesman. Peter smiled. Only Alex, in all the world, had the familiarity to suggest he slow down. Peter had known him since he was a kid, and Alex was banking on that. He was a decent kid, despite his pestering. Peter suspected that he might even have a conscience, which was unusual among scientists in this generation. It made Peter like him for it and-come to think of it-for his lack of qualms about speaking up. Despite their constant, collective pissing and moaning, no one else on his team had voiced a serious complaint about any part of this enormously difficult and demanding project on which they labored like indentured servants. Of course, Peter reflected now, he had looked for just such a gung ho, unquestioning quality during the screening process. Wild-card geniuses scrounged from universities all over the United States, this team constituted the best and the brightest scientists working in weapons development today. Wet behind the ears, yes, and in Alex’s case somewhat unpredictable, but who else was willing to put in outrageous hours for peanuts just for the opportunity to work with Peter Jance? Cap Chu, his accelerator specialist, he had shanghaied from MIT. Cap was a secondgeneration Chinese-American from Oakland, whose unchanging uniform was a Raiders T-shirt and cutoff Levi’s, and whose unconscious tendency to mimic his boss’s speech patterns often made Peter want to laugh aloud. But in tens years or less, Cap Chu was a shoo-in to write the book on particle weaponry for the next century-and as Beatrice put it, the kid was a steal. Hank Flannagan, pausing to light a Marlboro, was another diamond in the rough. Flannagan understood the weapons applications of fusion the way angry boys understand a rock’s applications to a picture window. His form of relaxation was stretching out on his dirt bike at sixty miles an hour while he sailed through the pucker bush, or jumping ravines so wide fellow riders braked and covered their eyes in horror. Peter, no stranger to physical risk, encouraged him in this hobby. Flannagan returned from these forays not only unscathed, but bristling with solutions to some of the most challenging mathematical problems the team confronted. The woman among them, just now hooking her arm through Alex Davies’s, was Rosemarie Wiener. The fact that Peter was funding a project to achieve an unprecedented kill factor didn’t bother her one bit. She was herself a protean thinker in the tactical applications of microwave and ultrasound beams and an avid fan of sophisticated military mayhem. The correlation between raw force and long term survival was not lost on her. She had been raised on a kibbutz and took shit from no oneexcept maybe Alex Davies, with whom, at this moment, she was flirting hard, the sound of her delighted laughter rising sharply through the shimmering heat. Peter wondered if it was lust or political instinct. With this generation it was hard to tell. Certainly if there was one among these nascent whiz kids headed for real power, it was Alex Davies, so even if Rosemarie was only networking, she had chosen well. Alex was the grand-son of Dr. Frederick Wolfe, a scientist spearheading his own top secret project for the Army, both at other bases and here at White Sands. If Alex himself was something of a catch on his own merits, as a future father-in-law Frederick Wolfe made the kid an all-time trophy. Anyone near Wolfe moved up quickly, and this particular project, code-named Fountain, was legendary on the base, both for the deferment and funding it received and for the cachet it gave to all who Were associated with it. As to what exactly the Fountain Project was, it was a mystery. It was Wrapped in secrecy so extreme that even Peter, who warily counted Wolfe among his oldest friends, could only guess at what it might be all about. To make things even more intriguing, Peter’s own wife Beatrice was employed by Wolfe as a neurobiologist on the Fountain Project. But she, too, was kept on a need-to-know basis-at least judging by what she disclosed to Peter. Her specialty was spinal regeneration, so Peter speculated that maybe it had something to do with trying to cure battle injuries to that stem of stems. But that was only one possibility. Beatrice swore only Wolfe knew the big picture, but Peter found that hard to swallow, considering the ranks of brass coming in and out of Wolfe’s compound. Clearly Wolfe and his Fountain Project were the darlings of someone bigperhaps even the Commander in Chief-and that meant its purpose was not only known in detail by some, but considered important. Hugely important, judging from the amount of funding Wolfe seemed to enjoy. Good luck to him. Peter was never one to begrudge a friend’s good fortune. Besides, the fact was the two had known each other since their twenties, and often shared test ranges and personnel–even, as in this case, family members. Wolfe had given Beatrice a position of power within the Fountain Project, and Peter had agreed to take Alex aboard in return. Peter gave the kid the room he needed to be his own quirky self, while Wolfe had assigned Beatrice to a lab in the Caribbean. On their end, it was an arrangement that permitted the couple to remain close, but not so close they would tear each other’s heads off from propinquity, which was what they tended to do when they worked on the same project. This was a great boon to Peter, for he and Beatrice needed each other desperately, and thrived on distant proximity of just the right kind. Too close to each other and they were miserable; too far apart and they were lost. “Hey, Uncle Peter? Are we there yet?” Saying it with just the right tone of irony and fondness, the kid somehow got away with it. Alex Davies was a wild card, to be sure, but one Peter was glad he’d drawn. Any regrets Peter had personally harbored about having the kid more or less foisted upon him had vanished within a week of the young man’s arrival. For one thing, Alex knew the base’s labyrinthine cluster of Cray supercomputers like the back of his hand. That knowledge allowed Peter to throw dozens of theorems, algorithms and mathematical models at this project each week, rather than once a year through the usual channels. For that alone, Alex was a godsend. So the fact that Alex got a little cheeky from time to time was of little import. In his own quirky way, Alex Davies was vital to the project’s chance for survival and also for its eventual success. Ignoring the twisting pain in his stomach, Peter kept walking at the same killer pace he had set at the bottom of the hill. Despite his illness, he had more energy than most men half his age. Six feet tall, with no suggestion of a stoop, he had spent his youth and much of his middle age accepting every physical challenge he could find. He had bicycled through Nepal when it was known only to National Geographic photographers, trekked halfway across Borneo surveying for an oil company. He had run marathons all over the East Coast just for the hell of it-and until just recently, he played squash with a ferocity that appalled his opponents. Not that he’d worked at any of it very hard. His first love, his obsession, in fact, was physics, the source of all the challenges that truly mattered. It just happened that he was gifted with one of those almost freakishly athletic bodies, capable, it seemed for many years, of anything he asked of it. It had given him a lifetime of pleasures and mobility and, most important, had afforded a superb platform for his brain, bathing it in rich, super-oxygenated blood, allowing its undisputed genius to run at full throttle for six decades. Until the pancreatic cancer.