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"No."

Her husband cursed under his breath. Their marriage had been one of convenience for many years now and she was currently an irritant-upsetting the unspoken truce. "Jesus Christ, Fran! You've been sitting in front of that damn computer since I got home. The glow is coming right in my door."

"Then shut your door." She was surprised he'd noticed how long it had been. He worked on Wall Street, crunching his own set of numbers and all he truly cared about was that they turned out in the black, and in at least six digits a month. The numbers had brought them together fifteen years earlier in college, but had subsequently taken them in radically different directions. His had ended on Wall Street. Hers had taken her to Columbia University, where she had helped pioneer the field of statistical projection. She took facts and figures, collated them into numbers a computer could read, and then tried to project out what the possibilities of various future events would be. Right now they read very poorly.

A few years ago a group that had kept what they called a Doomsday Clock had moved the minute hand back from two minutes before midnight to almost fifteen minutes prior to midnight. The breakup of the Soviet Union and the worldwide cutback in military spending had been the impetus. Fran had disagreed with that move, but kept it to herself. Her own calculations would have edged the minute hand a shade closer to the dark hour. The loss of the relative stability of the Soviet Union and the formation of numerous splinter countries all armed with nuclear weapons certainly did not bode well for mankind in her mind or in her calculations. Nor did the world economic condition. The haves were teetering and the have-nots were getting angrier.

She didn't even bother to look at her husband. "Go to bed, George. You need your rest so you can make money tomorrow, or should I say later today."

A year before he would have retorted angrily to the dig, pointing out that his money paid for their exclusive Central Park West apartment. It was a sign of how low things had sunk between them that he simply turned and stalked back into the bedroom, slamming his door behind him. Fran was in her mid-thirties; a tall, slender woman whose dark hair was now streaked with gray-a sign of premature aging she refused to color. As a result of that and the creases around her eyes and mouth, she looked almost ten years older than she really was. It wasn't something to concern her. Such trivial matters bothered her little when weighed against what her numbers told her day in and day out.

She was not overly surprised when the building intercom buzzed. She got out of her chair for the first time in hours and walked on stiff legs to the voice box near the door.

"Yes?"

"Mrs. Volker, this is Ed, downstairs. There are two men here to see you. They say they're from the government. They do have IDs."

"Send them up, Ed. It's all right." She unlocked the apartment door and swung it open. Then she headed for her own bedroom and started packing. It took the men a few minutes to appear.

"Mrs. Volker?"

She nodded as she pulled clothes out of the closet. "Yes."

"Ma'am, we're here to escort you. This is sanctioned under the Hermes Project."

"I know. I've been waiting for you."

The two looked relieved that she was cooperating.

"Are we going to Washington or to the center in West Virginia?" she asked as she sat on the edge of her bed and pulled on a pair of boots. The numbers had gone to D.C., but they usually met in the bunker burrowed under the hills of West Virginia.

The agents' faces were impassive. "Neither, ma'am."

That was the first surprise for Fran. She stood and looked at them. "Can you tell me where we are going, then?"

The two exchanged looks. Finally one replied. "Australia, ma'am."

"Australia? Why are we going there?"

The one who had answered, shrugged. "We don't know. Our job is to get you there. We have military transport waiting at LaGuardia." Fran considered what she knew about Australia-factoring in that it was summer in the southern hemisphere-and placed some T-shirts and shorts in her bag.

She threw a bag over her shoulder while one of the agents grabbed the other. "Can I tell my husband I'm leaving?"

"Yes, ma'am, but not your destination."

"Oh, hell," she said. "I'll just leave him a note on the fridge."

FIRST BRIEFING

Deep Space Communication Complex 14.
Outside of Alice Springs, Australia
21 DECEMBER 1995, 0830 LOCAL
20 DECEMBER 1995, 2300 ZULU

Hawkins checked his watch for the twentieth time in the past hour. He paced back and forth in the tiny cubicle they'd assigned him and then went back to the military issue desk. He snapped open the file folder he'd been given on arrival and studied the documents inside for the hundredth time.

The flight in the backseat of the F-14 Tomcat had left him none the worse for wear. He'd had nothing to do stuffed back where the flight officer normally sat, so he'd slept, the roar of jet engines a comforting and familiar sound. He'd awoken from a troubled sleep several times, usually when they'd slowed down to rendezvous high above the Pacific with a lumbering KC135 tanker for refueling.

He'd arrived here six hours before, been given this folder, and told to wait until the meeting. He'd bristled at the lack of information, but it seemed as if no one else around here knew anything more than he did. Having been in the Army fourteen years, Hawkins was used to "hurry-up-and-wait."

There was a lot of military activity going on-Hawkins's professional judgment estimated at least a battalion-sized Marine Landing Force was staging out of the immediate area of the tracking station. He glanced out a thick window as a CH-47 Chinook helicopter lifted in a cloud of sand and winged to the southwest carrying troops and cargo. It flew over the eight large dishes that were pointing at various attitudes into the early morning sky. Hawkins peered beyond the dishes toward the desert sands. There was something out there that was attracting a whole lot of attention, and Hawkins hoped this upcoming meeting would tell him what it was.

The file folder certainly didn't do that. The papers inside were brief biographies on personnel that a cover letter said would be attending the briefing. Hawkins couldn't figure out what someone would need this strange assortment of people for. Besides himself there were three civilians-two women and a man-along with an Air Force major assigned to the base here and the Marine full colonel who commanded the soldiers outside.

He scanned the picture of the older woman-Dr. Francine Volkers-implanting it in his memory. A professor at Columbia University in New York. Field of expertise: statistical projection, whatever the hell that was. Hawkins shook his head as he flipped the page.

The second woman looked much too young to Hawkins to be on any sort of classified operation even if it just involved thinking. Debra Levy. A physicist, specializing in quantum physics and a whole bunch of other things that Hawkins had no idea what they meant. Hawkins had to smile grimly to himself. So far he was 0 for 2 in understanding exactly what these people did.

He could figure out what the third civilian, Don Batson, did for a living, although why the man was here was as much a mystery to Hawkins as why he himself was here. Batson did consultant work for various mining corporations around the world. His specialty was geology, and in addition to the consulting work he was employed as adjunct faculty at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology with a secondary specialty of operations research.