“Greg…’ Joanna took in a deep breath. This is going to be painful, she knew. “Greg, I’m sending you to a place where they can help you.”

His brows knit. “Sending me? Where?”

“It’s like a hospital. Very private. Very discreet. They’ll be able to help you there.”

“I don’t need anyone’s help! I’m not sick!”

“I’m not asking for your opinion,” Joanna said firmly. “I’m telling you. You’re going there and that’s all there is to it”

“I want to be with you!”

Joanna felt her heart clutch within her. “I know, Greg. I know. I’ll come and visit you. Often.”

“I want to be with you all the time!”

“Later,” Joanna said. “When you’re better.”

He sat there, looking perplexed, for several moments. Then, sullenly, “You want to play with your new baby and forget about me.”

“No!” Joanna blurted. “I could never forget you. You’re my baby boy and I’ll love you forever, no matter what.”

“Then don’t send me away.” Greg fell to his knees in front of his mother and buried his face in her lap. “Please, Mom, don’t send me away.”

A wild thought raced through Joanna’s mind. “What if…’ She hesitated, searching for an answer. “Greg, what if you stayed here at the house, with me?”

“Yes!” he said fervently.

“And I can bring the doctors and their assistants here to stay with us.”

“Yes! Yes!”

“And we’ll be together while they help to make you well again.”

“Anything,” Greg sobbed, “as long as we can be together.”

Joanna stroked her son’s midnight dark hair, thinking, That will be the best way. Keep him here, where I can watch him. Bring the medical help to him.

She realized that Greg had fallen asleep with his head cradled in her lap. He probably hasn’t slept for the past couple of days, either, Joanna thought.

I can’t turn him over to the police. What good would that do? It won’t bring Paul back and it will destroy Greg completely. Not the police. No scandal. No one must know what he did.

She sighed. It’ll be difficult, especially when the new baby comes. Douglas. She already had his name picked out. Greg will be insanely jealous of the baby. But I can protect him. I can do it. I can take care of both my sons. I can. I will.

The subject is a twenty-eight-year-old male in good physical health. He is deeply disturbed and potentially violent, although like many schizophrenics he can cloak his misapprehensions and delusions with extremely logical and plausible-sounding rationalizations. He is in private care at the home of his mother. Deep hypnotherapy is recommended, together with chemosuppressants to regulate his mood swings.

After two years of hypnotherapy the inescapable conclusion is that the primary focus for the subject’s neurosis is the morbid fear of losing his mother. Although the Freudian concept of an Oedipus Complex has long been discredited, the subject sees his mother as a symbol of safety and well-being, hence an object of intense desire. While this desire is primarily connected to his fear of loss of maternal protection, there is also decidedly a sexual component involved.

The subject is now thirty-five years old and freely able to admit that he has harbored murderous rages against the men with whom he was forced to share his mother’s affection: i.e., his father and his step-father, both of whom are now deceased. Even in deep hypnotherapy sessions he evades any mention of his seven-year-old half-brother who, quite obviously, has also taken a share of his mother’s attention and affection.

“I don’t like the looks of this,” said Kris Cardenas.

She was standing on the roof of the two-story nano-technology building, her chief of security beside her, watching the stream of picketers being whipped up into an angry mob.

At the security chiefs earnest suggestion, she had sent most of the working staff home when the mob began to gather outside the main gate. She hadn’t really believed him when he warned her there was going to be trouble; now, hours later, she realized that she hadn’t wanted to believe.

From up on the roof, with the warm wind at her back, she couldn’t hear what the woman with the bullhorn was telling the picketers, but by the way they surged around her and roared incoherently every few minutes Cardenas knew she was working them up into a frenzy.

And more demonstrators were arriving, cars and minivans and even busloads of them.

“This is organized as all hell,” Cardenas muttered.

Her security chief scanned the growing crowd with electronically-boosted binoculars, his mouth set in a grim line.

“Take a look,” he said, looping the strap of the binoculars around Cardenas’ neck. Then he fished a palm-sized phone out of his shirt pocket.

“Got those fire hoses ready?” he asked into the phone.

Cardenas searched through the placards that bobbed drunk-enly in the sea of bodies. Professionally printed, she saw.

Jesus, she thought, this isn’t just one gang of nut cases. They’ve got organized labor, religious zealots — it’s a coalition of pressure groups.

“Look!” the security chief shouted.

Cardenas lowered the binoculars to see where he was pointing. A black pickup truck was speeding across the nearly empty parking lot, straight for the crowd. The people parted like the Red Sea, on cue she thought, and the truck raced straight up to the main gate of the wire security fence and crashed through. One of the uniformed guards was knocked down as the truck roared by without slowing, jounced over the circular plot of flowers in front of the building’s front entrance and smashed into the glass doors of the building’s lobby.

The crowd poured through the open fence, roaring like a white-water river.

“Get the fire hoses on ’em!” the security chief screamed into his phone.

Cardenas’ legs felt rubbery. If that truck had been filled with explosives it would’ve killed us all!

Streams of high-pressure water were spraying the oncoming crowd, knocking people off their feet, pushing them back away from the shattered entrance to the building. But other groups were skirting around the sides of the building, flanking movements. Cardenas knew that the back doors and the loading gates were not protected as well as the front entrance.

She shook herself. It’s a battle now, she realized. A battle to save the labs.

They lost the battle. Police helicopters eventually arrived to evacuate Cardenas and the few remaining security people from the roof. The building was gutted: lab equipment smashed, computers professionally destroyed by magnetized wipers that jangled disk memories into useless hash, offices torn apart.

The news headlines that evening concentrated on the three demonstrators who were injured by the streams from the fire hoses. Masterson Aerospace was going to be sued for police brutality and excessive force? The security guard who died as a result of being hit by the pickup truck was hardly mentioned at all.