She had found another link in the chain of evidence. If you wanted a message delivered, you would send many messengers. And the messengers could carry different messages. Surely a complex mechanism that governed the shape of a species would not rely on one little messenger and one fixed message. It would automatically alternate subtle designs, hoping to dodge whatever bullets might be out there, problems it could not directly sense or anticipate.

What she was looking at could explain the vast quantities of HERV and other mobile elements — all designed to guarantee an efficient and successful transition to a new pheno-type, a new variety of human. We just don’t know how it works. It’s so complicated…it could take a lifetime to understand!

What chilled her was that in the present atmosphere, these results would be completely misinterpreted.

She pushed her chair back from the computer. All of the energy she had had in the morning, all the optimism, the glow from her night with Mitch, seemed hollow.

She could hear voices down the hall. The hour had passed quickly. She stood and folded the printout of the candidate sites. She would have to take these to Jackson; that was her first duty. Then she had to talk with Dicken. They had to plan a response.

She pulled her coat from the drying rack and slipped it on. She was about to leave when Jackson stepped in from the hall. Kaye looked at him with some shock; he had never come down to her lab before. He looked tired and deeply concerned. He, too, held a slip of paper.

“I thought I should be the first to let you know,” he said, waving the paper under her nose.

“Let me know what?” Kaye asked.

“How wrong you can possibly be. SHEVA is mutating.”

Kaye finished the day in a three-hour round of meetings with senior staff and assistants, a litany of schedules, deadlines, the day-to-day minutiae of research in a small part of a very large corporation, mind-numbing at the best of times, but now almost intolerable. Jackson’s smug condescension at the delivery of the news from Germany had almost goaded her into a sharp rejoinder, but she had simply smiled, said she was already working on the problem, and left…To stand for five minutes in the women’s rest room, staring at herself in a mirror.

She walked from Americol to the condominium tower, accompanied by the ever-watchful Benson, and wondered if last night had just been a dream. The doorman opened the big glass door, smiled politely at them both, and then gave the agent a brotherly nod. Benson joined her in the elevator car. Kaye had never been at ease with the agent, but had managed in the past to keep up polite conversation. Now she could only grunt to his inquiry about how her day had gone.

When she opened the door at 2011, for a moment she thought Mitch was not there, and let out her breath with a small whistle. He had gotten what he wanted and now she was alone again to face her failures, her most brilliant and devastating failures.

But Mitch came out of the small side office with a most pleasing haste and stood in front of her for a moment, searching her face, estimating the situation, before he held her, a little too gently.

“Squeeze me until I squeak,” she said. “I’m having a really bad day.”

That did not stop her from wanting him. Again the love was both intense and wet and full of a marvelous grace she had never felt before. She held on to these moments and when they could go on no more, when Mitch lay beside her covered with beads of sweat and the sheets beneath her were uncomfortably damp, she felt like crying.

“It’s getting really tough,” she said, her chin quivering.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I think I’m wrong, we’re wrong. I know I’m not but everything is telling me I’m wrong.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Mitch said.

“No!” she cried. “I predicted this, I saw it happening, but not soon enough, and they aced me. Jackson aced me. I haven’t talked with Marge Cross, but…”

It took Mitch several minutes to work the details out of her, and even then, he could only half follow what she was saying.

The short form was that she felt new expressions of SHEVA were stimulating new varieties of LPCs, large protein complexes, in case the first signal on Darwin’s radio had not been effective or had met with problems. Jackson and nearly everyone else believed they were encountering a mutated form of SHEVA, perhaps even more virulent.

“Darwin’s radio,” Mitch repeated, mulling over the term.

“The signaling mechanism. SHEVA.”

“Mmm hmm,” he said. “I think your explanation makes more sense.”

“Why does it make more sense? Please tell me I’m not just being pigheaded and wrong.”

“Put the facts together,” Mitch said. “Run it through the science mill again. We know speciation sometimes occurs in small leaps. Because of the mummies in the Alps, we know SHEVA was active in humans who were producing new kinds of babies. Speciation is rare even on a historical time scale — and SHEVA was unknown in medical science until just recently. There are far too many coincidences if SHEVA and evolution in small leaps aren’t connected.”

She rolled to face him, and ran her fingers along his cheeks, around his eyes, in a way that made him flinch.

“Sorry,” she said. “It is so marvelous that you’re here. You restore me. This afternoon — I have never felt so lost…not since Saul was gone.”

“I don’t think Saul ever knew what he had, with you,” Mitch said.

Kaye let this lie between them for a moment, to see if she quite understood what it meant. “No,” she said finally. “He wasn’t capable of knowing.”

“I know who and what you are,” Mitch said.

“Do you?”

“Not yet,” he confessed, and smiled. “But I’d like to try.”

“Listen to us,” Kaye said. “Tell me what you did today.”

“I went to the YMCA and cleared out my locker. I took a cab back here and lounged around like a gigolo.”

“I mean it,” Kaye said, gripping his hand tighter.

“I made some phone calls. I’m going to take a train to New York tomorrow to meet with Merton and our mysterious stranger from Austria. We’re getting together at a place that Merton describes as a ‘wonderful, thoroughly corrupting old mansion upstate.’Then I’ll take the train to Albany for my interview at SUNY.”

“Why a mansion?”

“I have no idea,” Mitch said.

“You’re coming back?”

“If you want me to.”

“Oh, I want you to. You don’t need to worry about that,” Kaye said. “We’re not going to have much time to think, much less worry.”

“Wartime romance is the sweetest,” Mitch said.

“Tomorrow is going to be much worse,” Kaye said. “Jackson is going to make a stink.”

“Let him,” Mitch said. “In the long run, I don’t think anybody is going to be able to stop this. Slow it down, maybe, but not stop it.”

55

Washington, D.C.

Dicken stood on the Capitol steps. It was a warm evening, but he could not help but feel a little cold, listening to a sound like the sea, broken by waves of echoing voices. He had never felt so isolated, so distant, as he did now, staring out over what must have been fifty thousand human beings, stretching from the Capitol to the Washington Monument and beyond. The fluid mass pushed against the barricades along the bottom of the steps, streamed around the tent pavilions and speakers’ stands, listened intently to a dozen different speeches being delivered, milling slowly like stirred soup in a huge tureen. He caught bits and pieces of breeze-tattered speeches, incomplete but suggestive: bits of raw language charging the mass.

Dicken had spent his life hunting down and trying to understand the diseases that affected these people, acting as if in some way he were invulnerable. Because of skill and a little luck he had never caught anything but a bout of dengue fever, bad enough but not fatal. He had always thought of himself as separate, a little superior perhaps but infinitely sympathetic. The self-delusion of an educated and intellectually isolated fool.