“Okay,” Paul muttered. “Now we play pissin’ blind man’s bluff all the way to the next tempo.”

Then he heard a sudden chatter of beeps in his earphones: the signal from a GPS satellite. I’ll play it by ear,” he said aloud, and began to laugh wildly at his pun.

But he needed to look at the displays on his forearm panel to make sense of the GPS navigational signal. His laughter died as he squinted through the dust filming his visor. If he was reading the instruments correctly, he had drifted more than six miles off his course to the next underground shelter.

SAN JOSE

The manager of the nanotech division was barely out of her thirties, young and intense and obviously nervous. Yet she seemed to be the oldest person that Paul could see anywhere in the plant. Her skirted suit of charcoal gray looked as if she hadn’t worn it since her first job interview. She looked uncomfortable in it, as if she longed to be in a t-shirt and jeans, as almost everyone else was.

Paul felt like an old and stuffy grandfather in his light whipcord slacks and tan sports jacket. Good thing I didn’t wear a tie, he said to himself. These kids’d think I came from Mars.

“Mr. Masterson was here last week, y’know,” the manager was saying, “and he said he was very satisfied with the progress we’ve made in the past six months.”

So that’s it, Paul realized as they looked through the thick window into a clean room where white-smocked technicians were bent over laboratory benches. Paul saw that the techs wore white caps over their heads and even had white booties over their shoes. Or sandals, he thought, glancing at the manager’s bare unpainted toes.

“Look,” he said to her, “I’m not here to swing a hatchet, you know.”

The manager’s expression clearly said she didn’t believe Paul. The ID badge pinned to her jacket said Kris Cardenas. She didn’t look Hispanic, though. To Paul she looked like a California surfer chick: an attractive kid with softly curled sandy hair, a swimmer’s broad shoulders, wide sincere cornflower blue eyes and a deep tan. And enough brains in her head to rise to the top of this very competitive high-tech division.

Making a smile for her, Paul explained, “You’ve probably heard that Greg Masterson and I are enemies, haven’t you?”

She nodded warily.

“Well, even if we are that doesn’t mean I want to kill this division just because he’s backing it. From what I can see, you’re doing a good job here.”

Cardenas seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“What I’d like to know,” Paul went on, “is whether or not you’re at a stage of development where we can try some practical tests of nanotechnology.”

“We were ready to try clinical tests of tumor killers,” Cardenas said, “but the government ruled that anything intended to go inside human patients has to go through the FDA’s approval procedure, and that takes years’

“I know,” Paul said. Washington’s decision had sent the entire nanotechnology industry into a tailspin. It wiped out any hope of profitability for this division for years to come.

“I can show you the animal tests we’ve done,” Cardenas said, starting down the corridor. “We can destroy tumors with better than eighty percent efficiency — and no collateral damage to healthy tissue, y’know.”

Following her, Paul said, “In animals.”

She nodded vigorously. “Pigs, rhesus monkeys, even chimps. There’s no reason why the bugs shouldn’t work just as well in humans. There’s just no sense to the government’s restrictions!”

With a world-weary shrug, Paul said, “I agree, but they’ve made their decision and we’ve got to live with it.” Or die with it, he added silently.

“It’s stupid,” Cardenas insisted.

“I was wondering, though, could you adapt nanotechnology to other applications?”

“Oh, sure,” she said easily, pronouncing the word shirr .

They had reached a set of big double doors. Cardenas pushed one open and they stepped through into a large room filled with animal cages. The walls and floor were tiled in white. The smell of animal fur and excrement was enough to make Paul’s eyes water.

“Careful,” Cardenas warned. “These floor tiles get kind of slick, y’know. The handlers have to wash them down a lot.”

I’ll bet,” said Paul.

As she led Paul past a row of cages filled with hairless lab rats, Cardenas told him, “We’re already adapting what we’ve developed here for other applications.”

One of the monkeys yipped at them and within half a second all of them were howling and shrieking. The din was overpowering, echoing off the tiled walls like shock waves pounding on Paul’s ears.

Looking worried, Cardenas shouted over the noise, “Maybe we’d better go someplace quieter.”

“Amen to that,” Paul yelled back.

Once they were out in the corridor again, with the heavy doors muffling most of the noise, Cardenas said, “Just about every one of those monkeys had cancerous tumors. Y’know, really nasty carcinomas and stuff like that. The nanobugs found them inside their bodies and disassembled them, molecule by molecule.”

“So once you finally get FDA approval this division ought to be worth a good-sized fortune,” Paul said reassuringly.

“For sure.”

“In the meantime, though…’ Paul let the thought dangle in the air between them.

“In the meantime,” she said, leading him farther down the corridor, “we’re trying to spin off the medical work into toxic waste cleanup.”

“You can program the bugs to eat toxic wastes?”

Cardenas nodded vigorously. “It’s pretty simple, really, compared to the tumor work. They can go through a waste dump, find the molecules you want to get rid of, and take them apart. Nothing left but carbon dioxide, water, and pure elements — which you can recycle.”

“Sounds good,” Paul said.

“We’re trying to get the state environmental agency to participate in a demonstration we ve set up.”

“Not the federal EPA?”

Cardenas wrinkled’her nose. “The feds are real assholes. My strategy is to get the state environmental guys on our side and let them convince the feds.”

Paul remembered the first man he had worked for, when he had started at Masterson Aerospace. “Make the customer a party to the crime,” he had advised. “Get them on your side and they’ll do half your work for you.” His respect for Cardenas went up a notch.

She stopped at a locked door with a RESTRICTED ACCESS sign over it. “At least this area will be quieter than the animal pens.”

A few taps at the electronic lock and the door swung open. Paul followed her into a small, stuffy, windowless room crammed with consoles and instrumentation. The only lights came from the display screens on the consoles. The room felt overly warm, uncomfortably so.

As Paul peeled off his jacket, Cardenas leaned over one of the keyboards and typed out a single command. A shutter slid back from the blank wall on Paul’s right and he saw a window that looked into another room.

An ancient Cadillac sat in there, one of those old monsters heavy with chrome and tailfins. Bright red, where there was paint still on it. Almost half the side that Paul could see was dull bare metal. The car was up on blocks, although the rear tire was still on its hub. The front tire was gone. The hood was propped up part-way; the windshield wipers were gone.

“What’s this?” Paul asked. “A pop art exhibit?”

Cardenas grinned at him. “It’s our toxic waste exhibit. What do you think of it?”

Paul turned back to stare at the Cadillac through the thick window. “Nanobugs are taking it apart?”

She nodded happily. “We’ve got four different types of specialized gobblers in there.”

“Gobblers?”

“Nanomachines specifically designed to attack certain molecules, break them apart into their constituent atoms.”

“Gobblers,” Paul repeated.