COSMOS magazine

Monday, June 30

Eyes glistening, lips curved in a happy smile, Jill raised their clasped hands and kissed the backs of his fingers. One hand fell again, wandered.

"What's this?"

"Well, I know it's unusually large, but—"

"No, you idiot. This. The little fringe. I thought you told me you were circumcised?"

"Oh my god. I thought it felt a bit— My prepuce is growing back. Hey, Jill! You know what this means?"

"Another visit to the Mohel for bris? Ouch."

"I'm not Jewish. But look, it works!"

"I can tell that it works. Here, let me just—"

"No, the auxosomes bloody well really do work. They're regenerating our tissues, Jill. I'm growing a new foreskin! The auxosomes are turning back the clock."

"It's the wonder of the age!"

"Not quite that, although as I say I do acknowledge that it's unusually—"

"The auxosome. Kiss me, my fool."

"Mmmm. Yum. Jill, I love you, you know that, don't you."

"Nice to be told, though. Kiss me again. Mmm. I love you too, Paul. Let's never be apart again."

"Come back, you."

They kissed again. After a time she drew away. "Paul, I could do this all night, but really we can't. Mustn't. Would you mind putting the kettle on? I'd better get started on packing up Alex's room."

He released her hand reluctantly, and silently appreciated the curve of her shoulder as she walked away from him.

He had filled the kettle, reaching for the valve to feed gas to the burner, when he heard her frantic scream.

Monday, June 30

Wayne stood in the kid's room, readying himself for his next move, when the woman from the lab flung open the door. He was so startled by her abrupt entry that he lost the advantage of his greater size and weight. In the pressure of the moment, he was a second too slow to raise his gun. She didn't miss a beat.

"You bastard, what are you doing in my house?"

Before Wayne knew what hit him, she was on him, and had smashed him in the cojones with her knee. He fell forward, screaming his pain, barely able to breathe. It was impossible to move. Her fists smacked at his bowed head, stinging, but his bruised balls were all he could think about. Somehow he picked himself up, crabbed for the window, fell through the tattered wire screen head first. He heard Gibson in the room shouting, "What's going on? Are you okay, Jill?"

"It was that Payback asshole from the lab. Dressed as a woman."

"I'm going after him. Is he armed?"

"No, the bastard dropped his gun," he heard her shout back.

Shit! Wayne's eyes blurred with tears. The pain was excruciating. On top of everything, his elbow had smacked something hard when he landed and he'd scraped his shin on the window sill.

He tried to find a less painful posture, dragging himself along the side of the house. He would have traded the title to his land for an aspirin. He tumbled over a tree root, groaned as his weight fell on a particularly tender spot on his left elbow.

Behind him, he heard Gibson yelling. Despite the pain, he forced himself to his feet. The front door banged open; instead of running out to the street he turned back, and clambered with difficulty over the tall fence into the neighbour's yard. New agony. He ran across the yard, pulled himself over the back fence and was running clumsily down the alley, keeping in the shadows.

In a confused haze of pain he made it safely back to his underground hideout and dropped to his pallet, shoeless and utterly exhausted. Within minutes he felt pain crying out from places he hadn't even known existed. He must have strained every muscle in his body diving out that window. To make matters worse, the headache was starting again. Hopeless, he thought. I'm a dead man. He broke into wrenching sobs that made his body hurt worse than ever. This setback would have him laid up for three or four days. Worse, now that they knew he was still hunting them, Jill and Paul would be constantly on their guard. Blood pounded in his skull like liquid lead.

Tuesday, July 1

It was a strange feeling, walking into Allen Hoffman as an outsider. Stranger still when the receptionist, whom she'd known for years, treated her like an unwelcome stranger. Jill wondered what gossip had made the rounds in connection with her being let go.

"I'm here to see Clothile."

"Did you have an appointment?" the young woman asked suspiciously.

"Anne, for goodness sake, I'm returning some files and papers. No. I don't have an appointment, but I'm sure Clothile can spare two minutes to talk to me."

"I'll have to ask Mr. Sutton," Anne said doubtfully. Luckily, at that moment Clothile herself came down the stairs.

"Jill! How good to see you! You look fantastic!" Smiling warmly, she held out her arms for a hug, Jill's supposed involvement with the enemy seemingly forgiven.

"I've brought some papers that look like they belong to Preston. The day I left, Javier picked up a box that wasn't mine." Jill glanced at Anne, who nodded her approval. Good. The last thing Jill wanted was a little chat with Art. "I would've returned it sooner," she said to Clothile, "but Alex has been in the hospital."

"You poor thing!" Clothile's sympathy seemed genuine.

"Thanks, Clo. Look, I'd better not stay. Art seemed so eager to get me out of here, I'm sure he wouldn't be thrilled to have me hanging around." She had to escape before Clothile asked about her life.

"Wait just a sec, Jill. While you're here... a letter came for you yesterday, hand delivered. Don't think it has anything to do with the cases you were working on—it's labelled personal and confidential. I called you right away, but your answering machine wasn't working. Hey, what the heck," Clothile nodded toward the closed door of the conference room, "Preston's here for the day. You can give him his stuff in person."

Instantly Jill's mouth went dry. Could she keep her face impassive, knowing what she now knew? Stop being silly, Jill, she told herself. Relax. Still, she could not make herself move toward the door. "Has he said anything about... the files?"

"Um. No." Clothile shrugged, looked a question. "He asked where you were."

Jill forced herself to walk to the door, open it, say, "Hello, Preston."

"Come in, Jill."

His eyes were hostile, despite the upward curve of his lips. Heart racing, she set the box on the conference room table. "Art instructed one of the runners to pack up my stuff when I... left. They put this file in my car by mistake. Just glanced at the file headings, looks like these are yours." I'm babbling, she thought. Shut up shut up shut up.

"I see." He opened the box, flipped through the files. "I hadn't even realized these files were missing. That runner should be fired. Who was it?" Before Jill could answer, he said, "You looked through the files?" His gaze cut into her.

Sure that her face had betrayed her, she rejected outright lies. "Just a glance. Why? I thought maybe some of my own personal files might be in the box. Naturally, once I saw that this wasn't the case, I brought the box back."

"Naturally. Why did you wait so long to bring it back?

"Preston, my son has been gravely ill. I've had to stay home with him."

"Have you told anyone else about... the information in the files?"

He knew. Her nervousness had betrayed her. "I'd rather not discuss this with you right now, Preston." If she answered yes, he might accuse her of breaching client confidentiality. If she answered no, he might—what? Call someone to arrange a hit-and-run in the parking lot? She concentrated on breathing steadily.

"Fine. But you should know that if you reveal any information obtained from my personal papers, which of course you had no right to read—" A bitter, brittle edge entered his voice "—your current problems will seem very small indeed."

"I understand."

"For your sake, I hope you do." With one hand, he gestured for her to leave; she slunk from the room.

Tuesday, July 1

Bruce Blick, naked except for a black robe of the finest silk, sat on the marble floor, dangling his feet in warm scented mineral water that bubbled up from the bottom of the sunken hot tub.

When Franz the butler solemnly ushered Tom Gebhardt into the bathing court, Blick greeted him without rising. "Sit down, Gebhardt, and take off your shoes. There is quite possibly nothing more relaxing than soaking the feet in hot mineral water."

It was an order rather than an invitation, and Tom obeyed, though he would have preferred not to. No doubt his trousers would be wrinkled from being rolled up in the damp atmosphere, and probably stained from the water as well.

"I had a chance to look over the P&L earlier this morning," Blick told him. "Providol is doing even better than we'd expected. The advertising and promotion are finally paying off, just as you said they would."

Tom smiled, surprised and glad for credit where credit was due.

"If we can keep the sales figures climbing at the same rate, we'll break even on the advertising sometime within the next six months and cover the R&D within a year or so." Bruce Blick raised his head and stared, somewhat glassy eyed, at the arched window in the wall on the other side of the steaming pool. Following his gaze, Tom saw a sunny hillside carved into vegetable gardens and vineyards and, some distance away, a village of white houses with red tiled roofs clustered around a rustic church. None of it real, thought Tom. By pushing a button or two, Blick could change the scene to a lunar landscape. The sunny hillside was framed by a vine that had been trained up and around the window; the sweet scent of its salmon collared flowers filled the room. The vine, at least, was real.

After an uncomfortably long pause, Blick continued, "Naturally, if another company were to begin marketing a competitive product—"

You mean a better product, Tom thought testily. Our sales would crash, yes. A drug currently with the potential to be one of our best sellers could easily fail to cover the costs of development and marketing.

"It's a pity the Jolly Green Giant, or whatever he calls himself, didn't finish his self-imposed task with MTJ Labs," Blick said.

"Earthsavior. I'm convinced it's the late lamented Rutherford's madman. One of their scientists was attacked—"

Water flicked from Blick's toes, some of it soaking Tom's rolled trouser legs. There was no malice in it, but Blick's agitation was evident. Tom looked sharply at his boss, but Blick was gazing off through the window, into the virtual distance. Back in 1992, before Tom had joined the corporation, Blick had contracted with the military, using psychologically disturbed individuals whose frantic, unpredictable rage might be... bent and shaped to useful ends. The drug and trance work done decades earlier by the CIA and Army also harnessed that rage, but their methods had stalled, crippled by the limitations of the first primitive generation of pharmaceuticals. By the mid Nineties BlickPharm had better drugs available, and even better ones now. But Rutherford had lost control of his subjects, or perhaps he'd never had it in the first place.

"Enough about the bad news," Blick said. "To the best of my knowledge, MTJ isn't anywhere close to human tests with their gene-mod products, so there's no need for panic. We need to stay on top of things, that's all, keep our intelligence lines open. When the time comes, we can make an offer to acquire the rights from them. Meanwhile, we stir the pot now and then and let Nature Forever take its course."

Tom chuckled politely, then resumed his serious, businesslike pose. "I do have something new on MTJ, actually. This young research scientist Gibson that Roberta Treadwell plans to take on seems to be, uh, doing one of our long-time Nature Forever volunteers."

"Oh?" Blick looked at him keenly. "You feel she might be approached for information?"

"Unfortunately, that's no longer likely. Allen Hoffman & Flory terminated the young woman on our representative's recommendation. She's split with NF too. Some sort of falling out between her and Preston Bowie, probably," said Tom. "Bowie was a little vague on the details. I suspect he put moves on her."

"Trust Bowie to screw things up." Bruce frowned. "I never have understood what you see in that sleazy asshole."

"He's... loyal."

Blick shrugged. "Can we place someone to watch this person? She sounds to be in the right place at the right time. Could end up being of some value after all."

"Bowie's stuck in Austin for the time being, doing the scut work she was taking care of before he managed to alienate her. I'll tell him to keep an eye on her." Tom Gebhardt gloomily pictured the press getting even a hint of Rutherford's flawed work. Bruce, he wanted to say, imagine the shitstorm we'll be in if our crazed Mr. Earthsavior Elliot harms this woman in any way. Let alone her young child. But he remained silent, watching Blick's attention drift away behind the rising steam.