"He recognized me."

"How do you know?"

"I introduced myself as Roger Glover, but he called me Chris as I walked away. He didn't believe me."

Laura's expression froze. "What did you do?"

"Nothing. I kept walking."

"Then he'll conclude it's a case of mistaken identity."

"Let's hope."

They had considered plastic surgery, but back then his face was too recognizable to risk walking into a surgeon's office. Nor could he leave the country with their photographs at every immigration checkpoint. So he had dyed his hair, grown a beard, and wore tinted contact lenses which combined with the initial rejuvenation created a sufficient cover until Brett reached the age to ask questions. By then they had moved to Eau Claire where nobody knew their faces. Chris kept the beard and hair, but put away the tinted contacts.

What Chris had not counted on was stumbling into somebody from his deep past. And, yet, it was a possibility that had sat in the back of their minds for thirteen years.

He stood at the mirror touching up his beard and sideburns with whitening makeup. Laura was in her nightgown ready for bed, her face glistening with her nightly cold cream. "Besides, you look half your age even with the gray."

"That's what bothers me." In college his hair was sandy, not black, and he didn't have a beard.

"Honey, it's been thirty years. I can barely remember what my roommate looked like from college, let alone some guy downstairs," Laura said. "Christopher Bacon is dead, so is Wendy."

After thirteen years that was the virtual truth.

All they had wanted was to become normal people again-to blend into the scenery, to remake themselves so nobody thought twice. So, early on they had engaged in regular psychodramas, playing out the deaths of their former selves until they were nearly convinced they had always been the Glovers. For hours on end, day after day, they recited their new names, dates of birth, and social security numbers like mantras, writing them out until they were second nature. They always addressed themselves as Roger and Laura, resorting to sneak tests until they had conditioned away all the old reflexes. They even took trips to Wichita and Duluth to visit the neighborhoods and schools of Roger and Laura. It was difficult, but like immigrants desperate to learn English, they eventually strip-mined their old identities until they fell for the artifice.

"I know that. But Wally Olafsson doesn't," Roger said. "I look more like I did in 1970 than 1988."

Silence filled the room as they considered the risks.

"I'm not about to drop our lives and go into hiding again," she said. "I'll stop him first if he tries anything. I swear to God I will."

Roger could feel the heat of her conviction. They had been wrongly convicted by the media of monstrous crimes, and nobody had risen to their defense. Nobody! Short of murder, Laura Glover would not allow Brett's life to be upset. It was what a dozen years of meticulous fabrication and maternal love had produced-a good, happy life for their son and the protective instinct of a mother bear.

Roger folded his makeup kit. "Laura, Wally was an old friend."

"So was Wendy Bacon," she said, and snapped off the light.

The dark silence of the bedroom took Roger Glover back. Back before his wife was Laura Glover, mother of Brett Glover and owner of Laura's Flower Shop on South Street in Eau Claire, and he was Roger Glover, co-owner.

Chris Bacon did not age and die that night in the Adirondack woods. On the contrary, Elixir not only had frozen his cellular clock but created restorative effects that had stabilized at a level where even with the beard he looked no more than thirty-twelve years less than his age when he first injected himself, and twenty-five years less than the number of years he had been alive. And the reason why his body did not waste away and his mind did not gum up was diabetes.

It took him some time to work out the logic, but he concluded that the tabulone steroid had attached itself to a hitherto unknown receptor in his cell makeup-one of the dozens of "orphan" receptors whose purpose science still did not understand. As Betsy Watson had long ago explained, once attached the new shape caused the manufacture of a protein which turned off the telomerase aging effects. It had also turned off other inhibitors that disrupt normal regulation of enzymes so that one would fast-forward die once off tabulone.

But being a diabetic meant that the extra glucose in Chris's system somehow signaled biochemical changes that activated the enzyme even without tabulone. In other words, some combination of tabulone and Chris's diabetes rendered the receptor active for long periods without the need for regular boosts. Apparently the same was true for Iwati, also a diabetic-which explained why he didn't need frequent shots, just an occasional smoke.

That was why Wendy had not found a shriveled, freeze-dried mummy in Chris's clothes when she returned from Lake Placid that night all those years ago. And why after three days of Chris's disorientation and fever, she had managed to nurse him back to health. In time he had worked out a treatment schedule, discovering that he could go as many as three months without a booster. Fortunately, his body signaled when it was time. Just in case, he wore around his neck an emergency ampule that was hidden in a simple tubular gold case with a tiny spring-release button. It looked like a piece of jewelry, but contained a three-year supply of Elixir.

At fifty-six years of age Roger had plateaued at the health level of an athlete half his age. His blood pressure was 110 over 70; his cholesterol hovered at 160; and he had 10 percent body fat. Essentially Roger Glover nee Christopher Bacon was immortal. The only way for him to die was accident, murder, or suicide.

Of course, he had told Laura what he had done-how in a drunken moment fraught with grief and terror he had injected himself. As expected, she reacted with disbelief and anger. There was no turning back. Her first concerns were the unforeseen complications-potential cancers from messing around with his DNA and hormones. Those fears faded when in time he had stabilized. Besides, he felt extraordinary. Gone were arthritic twinges in his back and knees. Gone also were those frightening lapses in recall and memory.

Laura, however, refused to join him. Every instinct had told her Elixir was wrong. Nonetheless, the temptation reared its head higher as the years passed. It was there where she applied makeup to her face each morning. It was there every time she considered the porcelain smoothness of Roger's skin, or felt his hard-body vigor and sexual heat. Or when she considered the impossible anachronism they became by the day. It was there in his entreaties, in sometimes desperate reminders that she was prone to lumps in her breast.

Yet Laura held firm because of Brett. It was bad enough they would someday have to explain Roger. One freak parent was enough.

Because she kept in shape, nobody knew her exact age. They both looked about forty-Roger painting himself older, Laura painting herself younger. The problem was that Laura was fifty-five and Roger was biologically nearly half that. In ten years she could pass for his mother. His encounter tonight only brought that home.

"We're the same people," Roger said. He put his arm around her, hoping she'd sidle up to make love. As always he was primed, but she wasn't interested.

"But we're not the same."

There it was, he thought, the one sure measure of the distance separating them. With so much anguish and grief they had shared over the years, he wondered if he could go it alone when the time came. She would never agree to take Elixir as long as Brett was young, but he hoped that in time she'd change her mind-and before she was elderly. He loved her too much to watch that happen. He also did not want to spend the next century without her. She was the only one who knew who he was.