Wendy returned from the other room. "Did you see Kelly's photo-the one at her fifth birthday? It was sitting with the others in the office." She wanted to group early family shots on a shelf in the nursery.

"No."

"That's odd, it's missing."

"Maybe Jenny took it."

"But she would have said something."

"Unless she had one of her spells." Jenny was known to have moments of confusion-vestiges of childhood schizophrenia that slipped through the medication.

"I'll ask her," Wendy said vaguely. She had hung up a watercolor of children at a yellow beach against a sunlit ocean. "What do you think?"

Chris came over and put his arm around her. "Looks good."

"Hey, why don't we go away someplace tropical-just the two of us, before I'm too big to fit on a plane."

"Like where?"

"Anywhere as long as it's romantic and far from mass spectrometers and rhesus macaques."

"No such place," he grinned.

"That's the problem. You spend more time with your monkeys than you do with me. I'm starting to feel like Jane in the Tarzan movies."

He laughed and gave her a squeeze. The suggestion was wonderful. The tough part was finding the time. He would check the lab schedule to see when he could take off a week. "Sure."

"Good. Maybe Jamaica or Barbados -someplace with beaches, palm trees, and a big double bed."

"You have no shame," he said.

"How would you know?"

He could see the glint in her eyes. He kissed her lips. Instantly his body flooded with warmth as she flicked her tongue in his mouth and ground her hips against him. "I'll never kiss Jimbo again."

She laughed and pulled him to the couch. In a moment he was naked and lying across the cushions, an erection poking in the air.

"You're obscene," she said, slipping out of her pants.

"I hope five minutes from now you still think so."

For a moment Wendy's face clouded over as something rippled through her. "Everything will be all right, won't it?"

There it was again, the old wound that just wouldn't heal. In a flash all defenses had dropped.

"Of course, it will. He'll be fine. We'll all be fine." He held out his hand to hers.

The moment passed, and she smiled again.

Her breasts were beginning to swell, and her belly looked as if she had swallowed a football. She climbed onto the couch and straddled him. "Ever do it with an old heifer?"

"Always a first time for everything."

"You're supposed to say you're not old or heiferey."

"You're not old."

"Moo you," she said, and they made love while Garfield looked on with a sly grin.

Chris had anticipated Betsy Watkins's presentation, but he was not prepared for what he heard.

They met, as scheduled, at ten on Friday morning in the lab conference room. Gathered were Derek Wyman, Stan Chow, company chemist, Vartan Dolat, and Quentin. For the last several months, Betsy had taken over the cell studies.

Betsy was a compact woman with a sharp and pleasant face and wide intelligent eyes. She had dark loose curly hair that only emphasized the hard cool substance of her mind. Armed with notes and board chalk, she reviewed recent breakthroughs in the science then launched into a description of how Elixir worked at the cell level.

"Capping mammal chromosomes is a DNA sequence called 'telomeres,'" she explained. "Like the plastic tips on shoelaces, they function to protect chromosomal molecules from proteins that trigger the cell deterioration associated with aging."

She illustrated her point with diagrams on the board. "Each time a cell divides, telomeres of offspring cells become shorter and shorter. In healthy young cells, there is an enzyme called 'telomerase' containing the genetic code for restoring telomeres, allowing cells to divide by keeping the telomeres long. But as the cell gets old, the telomerase activity decreases and the telomeres get shorter until after a half a dozen replications in mice-fifty in humans-the sequence shortens until the cells die.

"But as we've discovered, cells treated with Elixir don't senesce. Instead, telomeres in treated animals held their length while cells continued to replicate. My guess is that tabulone activates the genes that produces telomerase, thereby maintaining a constant supply to keep the telomeres long and cells young."

"How does that jive with the literature?" Chris asked.

"Well, all aging studies hit the same brick wall: how to switch on telomerase production indefinitely." She held up an ampule of Elixir. "It's the magic bullet. It triggers an endless source of telomerase-the Fountain of Youth, if you will."

Betsy's reasoning was brilliant. But it also raised some fundamental questions. "Are you saying, then, that the cells of our bodies are genetically programmed to die?" Vartan asked.

Betsy hesitated to answer because of the enormity of the implications. "No, because that would mean that death is an evolutionary necessity. And, frankly, I don't believe that aging is the result of evolutionary forces," she answered. "And the reason is that Nature is a red-toothed demon that kills off most animals before they reach reproductive age, and those that make it almost never live long enough for aging to have become part of the natural selection process."

Chris felt a warm flow of satisfaction because it was the same conclusion he had reached years ago. More than that, he felt considerable admiration for Betsy and pride that a scientist with such fierce intelligence and authority was on his team.

Betsy continued, "There are so-called 'big-bang' exceptions like the Pacific salmon which seem genetically programmed to spawn and die within a few days. But on balance, death seems clearly to be the result of cell deterioration at the molecular level and not natural selection."

"Which means that aging could be stalled as long as the cells are protected," Chris added.

"Exactly, and tabulone appears to do just that. As long as the antioxidant binds to the DNA telomere sequence, cell death will not occur."

"What about the rejuvenating effect?" Chris asked.

Betsy nodded in anticipation of the query. "My guess is that it reverses the process. Say we started Jimbo on treatment on his twenty-seventh out of a max of thirty replications. As Elixir turns on the telomerase gene, instead of going twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, death!, the replications went twenty-seven, twenty-six, twenty-five until he reached a steady state. Telomere lengths were restored with each division, and in the meantime he experiences moderate rejuvenation. That's still conjecture, but the important thing is that tabulone is a natural telomerase activator."

Chris was dumbfounded: What Betsy was describing was a breakthrough in cell biology. Under ordinary circumstances such findings would be winged to every major scientific journal. But they were sworn to secrecy.

The next step-Phase 2-was the rapid senescence problem. While the molecular work would be conducted by the others, Chris would concentrate on determining dosages-when exactly senescence began and how to reverse it.

"There's one more thing," Betsy said. Her expression had suddenly darkened. "While our successes don't guarantee prolongevity for humans, we're moving inexorably closer. I need not remind you how stupendous a discovery that is. But it's imperative we consider the higher implications before we blindly push onward."

There was a hushed moment.

"In fact, I suggest we stop right where we are."

"Stop? What are you saying?" It was Quentin from the rear of the room-the first words he had uttered in nearly two hours.

"I know how you feel, but there are some serious moral and social ramifications to what we're doing."

Quentin bolted upright in his chair. "Betsy, let me remind you that this project is guided by FDA protocol and good manufacturing principles as with all our work at Darby."