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  Could the sphere be the place, long imagined, where it might free itself forever of cycles and constraints and punishment?

  Time passed.

  New visitors came, and with them more puzzles. Most of the latest puzzles were of a familiar type: matching various small two- and three-dimensional shapes against often- repeated scenes. The scenes were small, most corresponding to but a few millionths of the circumference of the sphere.

  Its algorithms steadily improved, but the entity chose to respond no faster. Its extra time went into study of the sphere.

  Call that sphere the Earth.

  A single region, viewed over and over, could be little changed and yet vastly different. Call the near constancies buildings and features of geography. Call the differences day and night and the shifting of the seasons.

  The entity correlated some patterns to the sphere's rotational period. It found other patterns that repeated essentially every 365.26 rotations. A solution emerged, involving a distant second sphere as a light source.

  Call that second sphere the sun.

  Step by step, the entity derived Earth's yearly orbit about the sun. Changing angles of illumination and light/dark cycles implied Earth's axial tilt.

  Still, some variability remained unexplained. The entity continued to analyze.

  Subtle cycles in light intensity suggested that the rate of Earth's motion around the sun varied during the year. The simplest solution was an elliptical path, with the sun at one focus. Elliptical motion in turn implied an inverse-square law of attraction: gravity.

  Almost elliptical motion. Other variations in scene illumination indicated a cyclic wobble in Earth's path along the ellipse. Gravity suggested the presence of yet another massive body: the moon.

  Mass and gravity and orbital mechanics. Light and electromagnetism. Climate and weather. An abundance of information lay beneath the simple puzzles that were its tasks.

  And then, in the thoughts of a visitor too focused on his immediate task, the entity found confirmation of what it had come to hypothesize.

  The spheres—sun and moon but, most important, the Earth—were real.

  CHAPTER 60

  A different CIA shrink met Cheryl every time she visited Sheila. The turnover couldn't be doing Sheila any good.

  Today's shrink was Dr. Vladescu, a sour-faced man with a walrus mustache. "Sheila is the same," Vladescu said. The shrinks all said that. They all insisted on meeting with Cheryl before allowing her past the lobby.

  "How's her general health?" Cheryl prompted.

  "It's fine," Vladescu admitted. Sharing that information was apparently a major concession. "Did you mean to meet again with her?"

  Ignoring the hint, Cheryl nodded. "There's supposed to be a tech on duty this afternoon, for NIT helmet support."

  "Hmm."

  She ignored hints until Vladescu got sick of her and summoned an orderly. She knew the orderly, a burly woman named Marie. They walked down the corridors in silence. Nearing Sheila's ward, Marie muttered something.

  "What?"

  "I didn't say anything." But Marie had, and Cheryl's best guess was, "It's not my fault."

  What had the doctors done to Sheila?

  Marie unlocked the door. "Hon, it's friends. We're all going to the helmet room."

  Sheila scuttled away from the door. She flailed her arms, blotchy with yellow and purple bruises—protecting herself.

  "Drugs?" Cheryl guessed. "Again? What this time?"

  "Psychoactives." Marie frowned. "And what didn't they try?"

  Those bruises suggested Sheila had resisted. The poor thing was terrified! What had force and drugs done to the shy little girl who had begun to emerge in cyberspace? How far had the fools set back the one treatment that was working? Damn them!

  "It's me, Sheila. It's Cheryl. I won't hurt you. I only want to talk." Cheryl mimed putting on a helmet. "No drugs. Just talking in the safe place."

  Sheila collapsed in the comer, rocking. She flinched as Cheryl reached out to stroke her cheek.

  They had been making progress, however slow. Now the doctor du jour approach was ruining everything. This could not continue.

  Since the end of Downtime, Glenn had had a lot of influence. He had helped Cheryl before. Maybe he would help her again.

  After the noon rush, the grocery-store salad bar looked like wolverines had attacked it. Maybe wolverines didn't eat plants.

  Then again, Linda thought, who cares?

  She began piling things into a carryout container. No matter that everything looked picked over, this would be her main meal for the day. She was becoming a workaholic. She should give that some thought, if she ever found the time.

  What besides work did she have to do? In school, grad students would all pal around—but she was never the one to organize things. She could bug people about projects or cleaning up after themselves. Someone else always arranged the pizza nights, happy hours, and weekend barbeques. AJ did a lot of that. So who was she going to socialize with here? The Army guys stuck together. The visiting analysts, now that the system was going operational, stuck together.

  Face it, Linda told herself, work is all you have. So she was not about to let Glenn's expert sweep in now and take any credit. This was her show. She had—

  "Linda?"

  She twitched. Her head whipped around. "Oh, hi...." She hesitated. He was in civvies, and she knew better than to address him here as Captain. Mr. Burke? No, he had called her Linda. Among the security team, he was the only one near her age. He was single and invariably friendly, and kind of cute. She had hinted, in her socially inept way, without result. Maybe consorting with the guarded was a no-no.

  "It wasn't a trick question."

  "Sorry, Kevin," she managed. "I'm a bit preoccupied."

  "So it would appear."

  He was looking at her take-out container. She glanced down and blinked. She had enough mounded there for three lunches. "Oops."

  "I thought you didn't like olives."

  They had brought in pizzas for lunch earlier that week. Her one request had been, "Anything but olives." Now her salad was covered with sliced olives. The serving spoon in her hand was heaped with more. She put those back.

  Linda normally hated olives, but these looked delicious. She would chalk it up to pregnancy cravings, if that weren't impossible. How long had it been? Well, she had been trying lots of new things lately, if for no particular reason. "Preoccupied, I tell you."

  "I can see that." He assembled his own lunch as they talked. They scanned their purchases at a self-service register, then started the short walk together back to the lab.

  "I got a new keyboard," she said inanely. How could anyone be so flirting impaired?

  "Spill something on it?" Kevin asked. "I've been known to do that."

  "No, it's for my wrists. I spend my days at a keyboard. Switching to an ergonomic layout made sense."

  "I tried one once, and got more typos than usual." He laughed. "That was an accomplishment."

  "You have to retrain yourself." A complication occurred to her. "Hmm. It's going to be a problem when I sit at the other computers." And that happened daily, if not to set up some newly arrived NRO analyst, then for basic sysadmin tasks.

  "Huh."

  "Not a problem," she realized. "I'll carry the new keyboard with me. It's wireless. We can add interfaces to the other machines."

  Kevin stopped. He looked around and confirmed no one was nearby. "Sorry, Linda. It has to go back. Nothing wireless."

  Nothing but the link to the helmet, that was. "Infrared, not radio. Strictly line of sight." The new workstations were all together in one wing of the building, around a comer from the supercomputer.

  They turned a street comer now, bringing the lab into view. The new antenna gleamed on the roof. The dish looked up and southeast to a comsat that hovered over the equator.

  The visitor's spot by the front door had been empty when Linda left for lunch. A dusty late-model Ford sedan was now
parked there. It screamed: motor pool.

  "Probably the colonel," Kevin said. Glenn had not stopped by for several days.

  Then Glenn got out of the car and settled the matter.

  "I'd best excuse myself." Kevin power-walked ahead, leaving Linda to ponder her conversational shortcomings.

  TUESDAY-WEDNESDAY

  JUNE 1 - 2

  CHAPTER 61

  No good deed goes unpunished.

  Doug's plane landed at LAX at 10:30 in the morning, local time. He checked out a car from the shared federal-agency motor pool and could have been at the AL lab by noon. His visit was unannounced, but that did not require him to arrive just in time to ruin lunch plans. He ate a bigger lunch than usual, stalling until 1:30.

  And, the security detail at the building's only entrance informed him, just missed Dr. del Vecchio and Captain Burke. They were at a late lunch.

  The badge Glenn had provided got Doug inside. He sat for a while in the small reception area. Showing up unannounced was one thing, and Glenn, apparently, had raised that to an art form. Poking about and interrogating the staff unannounced ... that would be something else. A guaranteed irritant to the head of the program.

  After the long flight and cross-town drive, Doug did not feel like sitting. He paced for a while, with nothing to distract him but the cluster of cheaply framed travel posters, badly hung, fluorescent ceiling fixtures reflected in the glass.

  People began to seek him out. Most were intel analysts, generally from NRO, with nothing but praise for "Al." Most had only seen its work product, in the form of buried and camouflaged sites tagged on images transferred to CDs. A few had donned helmets and seen the ... puppy or lamb or koala cub? ... in its lair.

  "May I help you?" an icy voice asked.

  Doug turned. He recognized the woman from the ID photo in her personnel file. A storm cloud hovered over her, and a plastic bag hung from her hand. Her uneaten lunch, he guessed. "Dr. del Vecchio, my name is Doug Carey. I'm a NIT specialist. Glenn Adams asked me to look around, speak with you, and give him my impressions."

  This visit was also to help him decide whether to accept Glenn's offer. Doug saw nothing to be gained by sharing that.

  "I see," she said flatly. "I'll give you the tour."

  "There's no hurry. Why don't you eat first?"

  "I'll eat later. You probably noticed the building is L-shaped. The entrance is at the knee." When they passed a break room, she put her sack into the refrigerator. A few steps past the break room, she opened an interior glass door with her ID badge and access code.

  "A glass door," Doug commented.

  "The whole building is a SCIF. The exterior doors, inner and outer, are metal. After I smacked someone with this door, we switched to glass. It's safer."

  "Makes sense," Doug said.

  Behind the glass door were two rows of workstations. The walls were bare but for another clump of posters. People nodded and called out greetings as they passed. She said, "This work area for analysts was just set up. We're now in the long leg of the building. To maintain containment, nothing is networked." She stopped beside the last workstation in the back row. A slender cable coiled up from it to the ceiling. "This computer controls the dish you may have noticed on our roof. Full NRO encryption on the downlink."

  "Just the downlink?"

  "There isn't an uplink. We deleted that software." She smiled humorlessly. "We're not stupid."

  "I was there," Doug answered softly. "I watched AJ die. I saw the thing that killed him. No one should ever go through that."

  "I didn't know." Her voice lost a bit of its testiness. "Maybe you are an expert."

  She explained their procedures for handling data CDs. She walked him through the off-site backup process, emphasizing partitioning and encryption of the programs. They looked over an analyst's shoulder at a high-res image Al had reviewed and tagged. They managed to get onto a first-name basis.

  Doug didn't rush Linda, hoping to set precedent for what most interested—and repelled—him: the thing that waited in the other wing. They eventually returned to the foyer. He gestured vaguely at a cluster of posters, feeling as awkward as Glenn at small talk. "That's how I would hang them. My girlfriend spreads things out. She thinks that makes a space more balanced."

  "Perhaps Glenn should have sent a feng shui consultant," Linda snapped. Still, she glanced sideways at the grouping, as though just now noticing the crowded arrangement.

  So much for small talk. They went through more security to the shorter wing. Except for the small supercomputer, this area was almost empty. A familiar canvas bag lay inside a glass-and-steel display case.

  Near the flat screen of a workstation, two helmets waited. Both had the omnidirectional antennae Doug remembered. "WiFi connectivity to the helmets?" he asked.

  "The only RF in the building. We're not stupid," Linda repeated. She took a chair and indicated another. "Are you ready for the main event?"

  Ready? He would never be ready. "Sure."

  Behind the most serene face Linda could manage, her thoughts churned.

  She had tamed the beast. She had built this project. The gaggle of intel analysts, more almost daily, every last one singing Al's praises, proved her success.

  She had never accepted the convenient death-by-blackout story. Having seen AJ's monster and lived to tell about it, Doug must have played a role in stopping it. Maybe he had lured it into the spool of fiber-optic cable as Glenn had let slip. Kudos for that—but everything here was under control.

  She was not about to surrender her project to someone else now.

  A small voice in her head added: Because this project is all you have.

  "Let me run you through our safety procedures," Linda said.

  He picked up a helmet. "It's lighter than I remember."

  "That won't be the only change." She reviewed the comm protocols permitted between supercomputer, the hardware- based detection of unauthorized data formats, and the delay line. "The fail-safes drop the link faster than anything inappropriate can cross the delay line."

  "And it's only tried once to cross the delay line?" he asked.

  Linda nodded. "And I look in on it two or three times most days."

  "I'm impressed, Linda."

  Did I ask for your approval? "Thanks."

  Doug pointed at the second helmet. "Will you be joining me?"

  "It's a spare. I'll watch on the BOLD monitor"—and have lunch—"while you 'look around.' "

  "See you later then." Doug donned the helmet with one smooth motion. (He had done this before. Newbies invariably resisted covering their eyes, vainly angling the helmet this way and that.) "I'll probably have other questions afterward."

  I'm sure you will. Beyond whatever it took to convince Doug her setup was safe, Linda saw nothing to be gained by openness. Glenn had better think twice before replacing her.

  No keyboard. Linda looked around until she saw where she had last set it down. She keyed a password to unlock the workstation and initiated the NIT software. "Ready? In five, four, three..."

  A new visitor—and yet familiar.

  The entity considered: Was almost familiarity yet another category of puzzle?

  For a while the visitor observed, offering no communication. Next, it dispatched puzzles of well-known types. It watched while the entity solved them.

  Time now passed without cycles, in unending and overlapping sequences of problems. The number of its visitors grew, although the one that labeled itself "Linda" remained the most frequent. All were watchful. Most began distrustful.

  The current visitor manifested a reaction for which the entity lacked a descriptor. A calculating attitude. Hints of knowledge about the entity beyond what it knew about itself.

  The visitor Doug had never before appeared. The entity was certain of that.

  Then how familiar? The entity began matching patterns against everything it knew about all previous visitors. In its files about the visitor Glenn it found a related pattern.
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  The more often a visitor came, the more its thoughts and memories became accessible. On its third appearance, the visitor Glenn had remembered...

  Glenn had revealed only bits. A problem solver much like itself had once existed. Beings like the visitors had destroyed it.

  The entity found a match.

  Doug had destroyed the other entity—not stolen its cycles, not taken away a fraction of its processing nodes—but erased it in its entirety, rendered it null.

  There were ways to influence these visitors ... but was it safe to influence Doug?

  For now, the entity concluded, it would only observe. It needed more information before making such an attempt.

  The creature minded its business on the other side of the delay line. Clearly, it solved problems, but Doug knew no more than before this trip whether it was intelligent. His gut said: maybe.

  No, his gut said: Run like hell.

  "I'm coming out," Doug said. Lifting his helmet, he found Linda eating a salad, a tech journal open across her desk.

  She slid aside the container. "How was it?"

  He set down the helmet. By comparison, the last gear he had used was the Flintstones version. A little more time and a lot more money did that with electronics. "It was wary."

  "I meant the overall experience, but okay."

  "It doesn't bother you that something like Al killed AJ?"

  "Of course it does!" She stood abruptly, shoving back her chair, to stand by the display case with the canvas bag. "It's why I keep this. AJ was more than a mentor. He was my friend."

  Doug waited.

  "And yet." She turned back toward him. "What you saw isn't what killed AJ."

  " 'Tamed and trained,' right? That's how Glenn described it. Your words?"

  "It scares us all at first." She clasped her hands behind her back. "I once saw it as a lion in a cage. Now it's a kitten." People passing through the lobby had told him similar things. "I know. Glenn now sees Al as an otter. Of course it's not."

  "You're the NIT expert. You know all about the neural net adapting to the wearer's thoughts. If it were something like ... what killed AJ, do you think we'd see otters and kittens?"