Quentin wrote back: I think we should resume our former plan.

Sounds good. A's already got people working on it. We'll keep you posted.

Quentin was amazed. They didn't miss a beat. A. Antoine. Still in power. Still in command. And he had come to the same conclusion about Bacon's condition.

Quentin tapped the keys: He'll need to be tested. Call.

A few minutes later Vince called from a cell phone. "What's this 'tested' stuff?"

"If his system has stabilized, we'll need to know his body chemistry, the dosages, side effects, stuff like that."

"You mean, you want him alive?"

"Yes! Absolutely. Nothing must happen to him or his wife if she's on it too."

They had to understand that this went beyond making the stuff for high-rolling clients. It was a quest for godhead. Christopher Bacon was the most valuable specimen in the universe. Once found, they'd strip him down to his atoms.

President John Markarian remembered the bombing of Eastern 219, but knew nothing about Elixir.

Before departing for a speech in San Diego, aides had dredged up memos from the Reagan White House and spoken to members of that administration intimate with the efforts to locate Christopher Bacon.

As he listened to a summary of the report, his thoughts were not on the efforts to solve the first case of domestic sabotage in recent times, but the implications of the serum.

"Do people really think he had something?" he asked an aide, Tim Reed.

"Apparently Mr. Reagan did." Reed handed the president a report of the meeting between Ross Darby and Reagan.

The language was not very technical, but detailed enough to convince Reagan that Bacon had manipulated the DNA sequences to stop the cellular clock.

When he was finished, the president was shown that morning's Washington Post with the side-by-side wire photos.

"It's the same guy," he said.

"Which would you say looks younger, sir?"

"Except for the white hairs, the guy with the beard."

The aide nodded. "That was taken four months ago, the other in 1985."

"No retouching?"

"None."

"Is Darby still with us?"

"No, sir. Coincidentally, he died in his sleep of cardiac arrest a few days following his visit."

"What are we doing to find Glover?"

"Everything possible."

"And alive and unharmed."

"We'll try."

While the Republic rolled by thirty-seven thousand feet below, the president's mind considered the same implications that had fascinated Ronald Reagan. Given recent medical advances, the populace was growing older. The downside was the ballooning of the age-related diseases. He envisioned a great graying future of Baby Boomers on walkers and in wheelchairs, collecting social security and Medicare checks that totaled in the trillions.

Already, more than half of federal spending-beyond defense and the interest in the national debt-went to pensioners in some form. In ten years when the last of the boomers had retired, more than half of the next generation's taxable income would be used to pay the costs. By 2020, the nation would go bankrupt. It was a crisis too monstrous to resolve for any administration.

However, Markarian speculated, if this Elixir actually prolonged life for a decade or two, it could solve the Social Security crisis and save the nation. If people lived longer, they would work well beyond sixty-five, which would mean a phenomenal reduction in health care as well as a greater tax base.

Of course, the Reagan report mentioned mice living six times their lifespan. Nothing about humans. So his speculations were demographic fantasies.

Yet his mind kept coming back to how much younger Roger Glover looked today than fifteen years earlier. Was it possible the guy had tried it on himself? Sounded like something right out of some sci-fi tale.

But it got him thinking about hereditary averages, averages that suggested John Markarian had about ten years left. Were he to serve a second term, that would leave him three wee years to write an autobiography, work on his golf game, and spend time with his grandchildren.

As he stared out the window into endless blue skies, all he kept thinking about was "biological retrogression" and how he wanted to see this Christopher Bacon/Roger Glover guy up close and personal.

The large white jet touched down a little after one in warm California sunshine. The president and his entourage were picked up on the tarmac.

When he was settled into the limo, Tim Reed slipped beside him to say that CNN and had just announced that an unnamed former employee from Darby Pharmaceuticals was spreading rumors that Christopher Bacon had discovered some kind of "fountain-of-youth" drug.

"Great! Now everybody and his cousin will be gunning for him."

"We can squelch it."

"You can try like hell, but it'll be like getting toothpaste back into the tube. What I want is to bring this Roger Bacon guy in."

"Glover. Roger Glover."

"Whatever. But get him. It's like having Jesus on the loose."

By the time he reached his suite atop El Coronado, the television was blaring nonstop reports of the anti-aging drug.

By early evening, the networks were airing testimonies from unidentified former employees of Darby about animals living far beyond their lifespan, even rejuvenating.

Countering the rumors were biologists who claimed that prolongevity breakthroughs were highly unlikely. Such advances were decades away, unless, of course, Bacon and his group had made some truly miraculous discoveries. Even then, the scientific world would have known about it. Great discoveries don't happen in a bell jar.

One geneticist said he wished he knew what the compound was. "We've known about the telomerase enzyme for years. But if what you're saying is true, then he's found the silver bullet."

Another researcher declared that such a discovery would be the greatest in human history.

One religious leader went so far as to claim that Elixir would make possible a new order of human existence-something akin to the angels.

But others took a darker view. A spokesman of the Witnesses of the Holy Apocalypse, a fortyish-year-old man identified as Reverend Colonel Lamar Fisk, proclaimed that if Elixir could prolong life indefinitely, it would be a sign that Judgment had arrived, closing the long cycle that began with the Fall and to end with the Savior's return. When asked what that meant in human terms, Fisk happily proclaimed that the world would end in conflagration.

"This would not be a war between Arabs and Jews, Serbs and Muslims, black and whites," he said to the camera. "But a war between those who live forever and those who die. This is the handiwork of the Antichrist himself."

Then he lapsed into passages from Revelations: "'Woe unto the inhabitants of the earth for the devil is come to deceive you with false miracles…' Only through Jesus Christ the Lord shall men live forever."

Markarian hit the mute button on the remote. "Didn't take them long to plug in the old equations," he said to Reed. "They yapped the same lines when Galileo discovered sunspots and Morse invented the telegraph."

"Except he's no harmless Luddite. His sermons are heard on a hundred different stations."

"Where did the 'Colonel' come from?"

"Desert Storm."

The scene shifted from Lamar Fisk to public opinion polls. According to the announcer, a survey conducted that afternoon showed 79 percent of those questioned would take the Elixir were it safe; 14 percent said they wouldn't; the remaining 7 percent had no opinion.

In another poll, only 9 percent said there was no government coverup, while a whopping 81 percent said they believed the government was not telling the truth.