"How long before she gets here?"

"Two weeks. She's not fast. Twelve knots cruising. If we have somewhere to go, I'll send the ship directly there and meet it at a port along the way."

"Well, now that she's called the Clair, I hope they bring her in safe."

"My ship," Clay said anxiously.

"So," Nate said, "You're what, in your nineties? A hundred?"

"Don't look it, do I?" Amy posed: a coquettish half curtsy with a Betty Boop bump at the end. Indeed, it would have been a spry move for a woman in her nineties.

Nate was really glad he was sitting down, but he missed the sensation he would have had of needing to sit down.

"Your whole attraction was based on my age, wasn't it?" She sat across from him. "You were working out your male menopause on the fantasy of my young body. Somehow you were going to try to recapture your youth. Once again you'd feel like more than a footnote to humanity. You'd be virile and vital and relevant and all alpha male, just because a younger — and decidedly luscious, I might add — woman had chosen you, right?"

"Nuh-uh," Nate said. She was wrong, right?

"Wow, Nate, were you on the debate team at Moose Dirt U? I mean, your talent —»

"Sasketchewan in the Sticks," he corrected.

"So the age thing? It's a problem?"

"You're like a hundred. My grandma isn't even a hundred, and she's dead."

"No, I'm not really that old." She grinned and reached across the table, took his hand. "It's okay, Nate. I'm not Amelia Earhart."

"You're not?" Nate felt his lungs expand, as if a steel band around his chest had broken. He'd been taking tiny yip breaths, but now oxygen was returning to his brain. Funny, he was pretty sure that none of the other women he'd been with had been Amelia Earhart either, but he didn't remember feeling quite so relieved about it before. "Well, I should have known. I mean, you don't look anything like the pictures. No goggles."

"I was just messin' with you. I'm her daughter. Ha!"

"Stop it! This isn't funny, Amy. If you're trying to make a point, you've made it. Yes, you're an attractive young woman, and maybe your youth's a part of why I'm attracted to you, but that's just biology. You can't blame me for that. I didn't make a move on you, I didn't harass you when we were working together. I treated you exactly as I would have treated any research assistant, except maybe you got away with more because I liked you. You can't ridicule me for responding to you sexually down here when you came on to me. The rules had changed."

"I'm not ridiculing you. Amelia Earhart really is my mother."

"Stop it."

"You want to meet her?"

Nate searched her face for signs of a grin or a tremble in her throat that might indicate the rise of an Amy Ha! Nothing there, just that little bit of sweetness that she usually tried to hide.

"So somehow, living down here, you haven't aged. Your mother?"

"We age, but not like on the surface. I was born in 1940. I'm about the same number of years older than you than you were older than me a half hour ago — kinda sorta. You going to dump me?"

"It's so hard to believe."

"Why, after you've seen all this? You've seen what the Goo can do. Why is it so hard to believe that I'm sixty-four?"

"Well, for one, you're so immature."

"Shut up. I'm young at heart."

"But for a second there I was so sure we were doomed." Nate rubbed his temples — trying to stretch them, maybe — to make his head bigger to hold the whole concept of Amy's being sixty-four.

"No, it's okay, we just haven't gotten to that yet. We're still doomed."

"Oh, thank goodness," Nate said. "I was worried."

Later, after they had pushed the world away for a while, made love and napped in each other's arms, Amy made a move to start another round, and Nate awoke to an immediate and uncertain anxiety.

"Are we really doomed?" he asked.

"Oh, goddamn it Nate!" She was straddling him, so she was able to get a good windup before thumping him hard in the chest with her fist. "That's just un-fucking-professional!"

Nate thought about how the praying mantis female will sometimes bite off the male's head during copulation and how the male's body continues to mate until the act is finished.

"Sorry," he said.

She rolled off him and stared up at dim strips of green luminescence on the ceiling. "It's okay. I didn't mean to bite your head off."

"Pardon?"

"Yes, we're probably doomed. We're doomed for the same reason that I look the way I do, that most of the Goos look much younger than we really are. Turn a gene on, you age; turn it off, you don't. I've even seen some people down here who seem to get younger. Flip a switch, pancreatic cancer at age twenty-two; flip another, you can smoke four packs a day and live to be a hundred. If the Goo thinks that the human race is a danger to it, it just has to flip a switch, pick a gene, make a virus, and the human race would blink out. I hadn't really thought about it as a threat before. My whole life I've worked for the Goo. Service, you know? It takes care of us. It's the source."

He didn't know what to say. Did he need to actually take the Colonel's request for help seriously? Did he need to help find a way to kill this amazing creature in order to save his own species? "Amy, I don't know what to do. Two days ago I just wanted to get out of here. Now? The Colonel and you both said I was lucky to be alive. Has the Goo killed people who were close to finding out about it?"

"Honestly, I don't know. I've never seen it or heard of it happening, but I — we — each just do our own part down here. We don't ask a lot of questions. Not because we're told not to or anything — it's just that you can live a long time without asking yourself big questions when your needs are looked after." For the first time Nate could see the experience of years in Amy's face, marked not by wrinkles but by a shadow in her eyes.

"I'm asking," he said.

"Do I think the Goo is ethically capable of killing the human race?"

"I guess."

"I don't even know if the Goo has ethics, Nate. According to the Colonel, it's just a vehicle for genes and we're just vehicles for memes and nature says that a head-on collision is inevitable. What if it's not? This battle has supposedly gone on for millions of years, and now the Colonel wants to force an endgame? What I do know is that you've got to talk him out of trying to kill it."

"But he's your leader."

"Yeah, but he didn't tell any of us about this. I think he's doubting his own judgment. So am I."

"But you said that it could kill everyone on the planet at the flick of a switch."

"Yeah." She rolled over and propped herself up on her elbow. "You hungry? I'm hungry."

"I could eat."