"Ah. You see, Candotti?" Voelker said, turning to John. "He is determined. A pity but there are circumstances when a man leaves for the good of the Society," Voelker said briskly, returning to Sandoz, "and I shall commend such an honorable decision. Naturally, we will be happy to shelter you until you have fully recovered your strength, Dr. Sandoz."

Here's your hat, John Candotti thought, what's your hurry? Incensed, he was about to tell the Austrian to take a hike when he saw the shaking start. At first, John put it down to illness. Sandoz had almost died. He was still very frail. "Sit down, Father," John said quietly and went to the man's side to guide him back into the chair. He moved behind Sandoz and glared at Voelker. "Father Voelker, I think Father Sandoz could use some rest. Now."

"Oh, dear. I have tired you. Forgive me." Voelker moved without further prompting to the door.

"Voelker's a jerk," John Candotti said dismissively as the secretary's footsteps receded down the hall. "Don't let him rattle you. You can take all the time you need. It's not like we're waiting to rent your room out." He perched on the edge of Emilio's bed, the only other place in the room to sit. "Are you okay? You look a little—" Scared, he thought, but he said, "Sick to your stomach."

"It's…hard. To have so many people around."

"I can imagine," John said automatically but then he took it back. "I'm sorry. That was a stupid thing to say. I can't imagine it, can I?"

There was a brief bleak smile. "I hope not."

Sobered, John dropped all thoughts of lecturing this man on real life.

"Look, Father, I hope you don't mind but I was thinking about what might be a help with your hands," he said after a while, not quite sure why he was embarrassed about mentioning this. Sandoz himself had made no attempt to hide them. Probably, it was thinking about all the things the guy couldn't do for himself. Cut his toenails, shave, go to the can alone. Made you squirm, just considering it all. John rummaged around in his briefcase and pulled out a pair of thin leather gloves, fingers and thumbs removed, cut edges expertly turned and hemmed. "I mean, eventually, a surgeon could probably reconstruct the palms for you but, see, I thought gloves would sort of hold things together, for now. You still won't have a lot of dexterity, I suppose, but you might be able to grip things this way." Sandoz looked at him, wide-eyed. "I mean, you could try them. If they don't work, it's no big deal. Just a pair of gloves, right?"

"Thank you," Sandoz said in an odd voice.

Pleased, and relieved that Sandoz had not been offended by his offer, John helped him fit the impossibly long, scarred fingers into the gloves. Why the hell did they do this to him? John wondered, trying to be careful of the raw new tissue that had only recently reclosed. All the muscles of the palms had been carefully cut from the bones, doubling the length of the fingers, and Sandoz's hands reminded John of childhood Halloween skeletons. "Now that I think of it," John said, "cotton might have been better. It's okay. If this pair works out, I'll make another. I've got an idea for a way to fit a spoon into a little loop here, so it would be easier for you to eat. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best, you know?"

Shut up, John, you're babbling, he told himself. Occupied with putting the gloves on, he was for the moment completely unaware of the tears tracing the lines down Sandoz's worn and expressionless face. When he finished with the second glove, John looked up. Appalled, his smile faded.

Sandoz wept silently, still as an icon, for perhaps five minutes. John stayed with him, sitting on the bed, waiting until the man came back from wherever he'd been in memory.

"Father Candotti," Sandoz said at last, tears drying unacknowledged on his face, "if ever I should desire a confessor, I shall call upon you."

John Candotti, speechless for once, began to realize why he had been brought to Rome.

"Thank you for coming," Sandoz said.

Candotti nodded once and then again, as though confirming something, and left quietly.

4

ARECIBO, PUERTO RICO:

MARCH 2019

When the solution came to him, Jimmy Quinn was shaving, stooped over to see into a mirror hung, inevitably, too low to reflect his head. Most of his best ideas were like that. Sometimes, they occurred to him in the shower, crouched down trying to get his head under the water. He wondered if contorting his neck increased blood flow to his brain somehow. Anne Edwards would know; he'd have to ask her the next time he was over there for dinner.

This particular idea had taken its own sweet time in arriving. Jimmy had promised Peggy Soong that he'd find some way to balance the interests of the employees and the owners of Arecibo, but he'd come up dry. And that surprised him because he was generally able to find ways to please himself and, at the same time, to please his parents, his teachers, his buddies, his girlfriends. It wasn't that hard, if you put yourself in the other person's place. Jimmy liked to get along with people. So far, however, he'd found that the only way to get along with the Japanese management of the Arecibo Radio Telescope was to be quiet and do exactly as he was told.

His position at the dish was about as low as it could be, among the scientific staff. Whenever the telescope wasn't being used for something serious, Jimmy ran the standard SETI routines, monitoring the skies for alien radio transmissions. You could tell how low a priority the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence had become simply by noting that it was Jimmy who got stuck with the job. Most of the time, though, he processed requests to collect radio signals from targeted coordinates. A light astronomer would see something interesting and ask Arecibo to check out the same region of the sky so the two types of observations could be compared. Automated as Arecibo was, some actual real live person still had to receive the request, schedule the use of the dish, see that the work was done, take a look at the results and route the data back to whomever'd asked for it. It was not exactly secretarial; it wasn't Nobel Prize stuff either.

So the question was, why spend money on a first-rate vulture like Sofia Mendes when a perfectly adequate hack could automate his job for less?

After his master's at Cornell, Jimmy got the Arecibo job because he was willing to work cheap, because he'd been shrewd enough to study both Japanese and Spanish, and because he had some strengths in both light and radio astronomy. He loved his work and he was good at it. At the same time, he could see that much of what he did was amenable to automation. He understood that Masao Yanoguchi was under the gun to bring down costs at the dish because the lunar mining program looked like it was going to be a washout after all and the surest way to cut costs was to eliminate human beings from the process.

Yanoguchi had managed the Arecibo operation ever since ISAS, the Japanese Institute for Space and Aeronautical Science, purchased the radio telescope from the U.S. government. Arecibo was a frill, in the larger context of Japan's space industry, but Jimmy knew that there was vast Japanese satisfaction in owning it. Twice, the United States had attempted to force Japan to play by the West's rules with a decisive move to block Japan's access to raw materials and markets. Twice, the U.S. was stunned by the explosive reaction: the conquest of Asia in the first instance, the conquest of space in the second. And this time, there'd been no fatal mistake, like not bombing the shore facilities at Pearl Harbor.

Jimmy had taken a couple of courses in Japanese culture and he tried to apply what he learned but even after working at the Arecibo dish for almost a year, he found it hard to think of the Japanese as wild gamblers. And yet, his professors insisted, their entire history proved they were. Time after time, the Japanese had risked everything on a titanic throw of the dice. The horrific consequences of that single mistake at Pearl Harbor had made them the world's most calculating, meticulous and painstaking gamblers, but gamblers nonetheless. Westerners who understood this, one prof had commented in a wry aside, could occasionally propose a crap game and win.