If you committted a corporate crime in a forest, and nobody knew it was there, was it even a crime at all? What if you turned right around and gave the cash to charity, like Carnegie did, or Rockefeller? The underprivileged kids of America, noses pressed to their computer screens so they could see their stars . . . Van paced around the telescope, silent, chin up. He stared up at every beam and bolt and crevice of the great machine. She looked so clean. So remote from earthly doings.

  Van’s footsteps echoed from the distant vault. This place was like an opera stage, and here, wired for sound, was the diva. Mondiale had spent billions laying fiber-optic easements across America. Out here, DeFanti found a quiet way to cross the Rocky Mountains, sliding through the wilderness, with a giant firehose of natural gas. Gas pipelines were notorious for exploding. Gas pipelines were very dangerous and dirty, never the kind of thing you could build right out in the open. But that infrastructure had to get built somehow. People needed the energy. Everybody happily used the gas pipes. Nobody faced up to the consequences. So the pipes got built by quiet operators. Guys like Tony. A guy who could do a little sleight-of-hand with those telescope mirrors and the all-natural windmills. Who would ever guess that building a telescope was all about natural gas?

  Was he being too cruel, too suspicious? His work had changed him. All that dirty work on computer security, stuck inside some bombproof vault. Was he a professional paranoid now? Was he a mean bastard, because he’d spent so much time thinking about terrorists and crooks? Maybe he should have more trust for the motives of big business. Like those fine people of Enron, Arthur Andersen, Global Crossing, and his own beloved Mondiale.

  Van rounded the telescope. He spoke to Dottie again. “These walls were built out of hay, right? Don’t you worry about that?”

  “It’s strawbale, honey. Strawbale is very safe. When strawbale is packed down tight and walled off like this, it can’t catch fire. Straw is very light, and it’s Green and organic, and it’s great insulation. A telescope spins to follow the stars, you know. This whole building spins just like a top.”

  He smiled briefly. “Then it’s great.”

  “Everybody asks me that question, about the straw. That’s my number one Frequently Asked Question. The straw is great, honey.”

  Dottie drove their electric buggy back to the Facility. Van found himself tired but clearheaded. That ugly failure at Cheyenne Mountain still rankled him, but the sting was fading. Yes, everybody he knew faced a compromise or two. Real life was never made of spun sugar.

  Was it so bad that he’d blown it, trying to tackle some satellite’s bureaucracy? Was it that bad that his best friend politically faked people out, so that he could sell them the power and energy those very same people had to have?

  Then Dottie took Van into his element. The Facility’s Network Operations Center was three stories high, glass-fronted, and nestled right into a cliff.

  “We never thought we’d have so much telecom equipment in here,” she told him. “Our architect built this place for our public relations people. This was supposed to become their office here, a kind of big tourist attraction, but . . .”

  Van was thrilled. Every Internet2 office he’d ever seen was like a tomb compared to this fantastic place. It didn’t even spoil his enjoyment that all the hardware was 1990s vintage. Cisco Catalysts, Juniper T640s, Force10s, and Chiaro optical switches . . . They were up and running, too, their fans were humming busily. They were dumping the power of hundreds of toasters into the February air. Van walked past a glass library of color-coded backup tapes. He skirted open metal cabinets, draped with thick gushes of fiber-optic cable.

  “Over here”—Dottie beckoned—“there are stairs.”

  “Just a sec,” said Van. He had discovered the local network technician on duty. The guy, an Indian, was wearing a bright polyester T-shirt, sky-blue jeans, and joggers. He had a thin hipster chin beard and was leafing through a magazine called Stardust.

  He glanced up politely as Van approached him.

  “So,” said Van. “How’s that big Code Red attack working out for you guys?”

  “Oh, sir! Do I look worried?” The tech chuckled indulgently. “We’re an OpenBSD shop here!”

  Van’s eyebrows rose. “Good man! Well then, how about those new RPC vulns?”

  “Is just not a problem at all! Using ‘nfsbug’ and patched it all weeks ago.”

  “SNMP traps?”

  “Oh, no, sir, for already we installed version three! We encrypted the protocol data unit, also!”

  Van gazed at his new friend in deep satisfaction. “I don’t suppose you guys have agent-based packet filtering yet.”

  The tech put his magazine down. “ ‘Agent-based packet filtering’? Isn’t that a theoretical solution to attacks?”

  “Not anymore,” Van told him.

  “Honey,” Dottie objected, walking up.

  “Should I know you?” said the tech. “I know your face, I think, sir.”

  “I’m Derek Vandeveer.” Van stuck out his hand.

  “You are Van!” shouted the tech, vaulting from his Aeron chair. “You are the Van! Oh, sir! This is such an honor.” He ignored Van’s offered hand and lunged straight for Van’s shoes. He reverently brushed Van’s Rockports with his fingertips. “Oh, sir, I’ll never forget your paper on traceroute mapping.”

  “This is Rajiv,” said Dottie as Rajiv stood back up. “Rajiv gets a little enthusiastic.”

  Rajiv placed his palms together, beaming. “Oh, Mrs. Vandeveer, I should have known this is him, your famous husband, here at last! Oh, what a joy to meet you, sir. That work with Grendel you have been doing. There’s so much to discuss!”

  Dottie’s face wrinkled. She was “Dr.” Vandeveer. She hated being called “Mrs.” Vandeveer.

  Van stroked his beard. “So, uh, tell me, would you be that guy, ‘Rajiv23,’ who posts on Alert Consensus List?”

  “Oh yes sir, that is indeed me!” cried Rajiv, thrilled to be recognized. “And what a contribution you are making on that list, sir. I forward all your notes to the Bangalore Linux Group!”

  “So will you be at Joint Techs this year?”

  “Oh, of course I hope so, sir.”

  “Then let’s have a beer, dude. We’ll talk!” At Dottie’s insistence, Van left him.

  Dottie trotted up a set of stairs to the building’s third floor, Van clomping behind her. She turned and frowned down at him. “I hope you don’t mind me boring you to death with my little GRAPE-6 simulators.”

  “Oh, don’t mind that guy, honey.” Van was hugely pleased with himself.

  “Derek, I get maybe forty-eight hours with you, and you would have talked to that man all day.”

  “He doesn’t kiss like you do, baby.” Van gave her a sharp pat on the rump. After a moment, Dottie laughed.

  Upstairs, things were much busier. Dottie greeted half-a-dozen colleagues, but after scolding him for talking to Rajiv, she was much too sheepish to chat with them about her own work. She settled in next to a console. “I guess I shouldn’t show this silly little thing to ‘the Van,’ but I’ve been working on this cluster simulation for four years.”

  “Honey, I always love your demos. Just run it.”

  “These GRAPE-6’s were designed for n-body problems by a Japanese physics department. GRAPE, that means ‘Gravity Pipe.’ ”

  “Boot it up, sweetie, come on.”

  “We’re directly integrating equations of motion into model globular cluster dynamics,” Dottie said smoothly. “We’ve had n-body codes since the sixties, but we broke loose by an order of magnitude up here. These GRAPE cards do a hundred teraflops. I’ve got the rest of the system modeling stellar evolution and mass transfer. Oh, and collision models. If we get a cluster core collapse, then the collision model really gets hairy.”

  Van silently watched a black-and-white LOADING bar crawl across Dottie’s screen.

  “We’re down to five or six simplifying assumptions now,” Dottie said, “and we’re spanning fourteen orders of magnitude, from the diameter of a neutron star to the size of the cluster itself . . . Okay, wait, here we go now.”

  Van stared at Dottie’s screen, stunned. Of course he had seen Dottie’s cluster simulations before. He could remember them from grad school, as crude little X’s and O’s crawling sluggishly around on a plain green screen. The thing he was looking at now was busier than a swarm of bees. There were stars inside Dottie’s box, millions of stars. It looked for all the world like a Hubble photo, but alive. The stars were wildly churning in balletic interactions. Plunging. Knocking into each other. Doing orbital tangos. Looping, kissing, hovering.

  The round cluster of stars was seething. It was boiling away like hornets at war. It took computers to prove that a jeweled globe of stars was unstable. In any telescope, a globular cluster looked as solid as a baseball, but it was a temporary enterprise. Stars tumbled into the core. They suffered unbearable close encounters there. They got slung like shot out of their family. They flew into the awesome darkness and solitude of intergalactic space.

  The sight of it set the hair up all over Van’s head. What if you were living around a star like that, thought Van, just living on some nice, sweet little planet. What if your daylight sky was boiling with neighboring suns as big as beachballs. And then, oh, my God, what if you flew too low and too close to one. In just a few dozen human lifetimes, the constellations would warp like putty. The heavens would turn against you and your world, and would blow you away at half the speed of light. You and yours, your innocent civilization, expelled into some unbearable icy exile, never to be retrieved.

  “We call this process ‘evaporation,’ ” Dottie said. “Sooner or later, all the stars have to leave the cluster family. Let me run you this other model, the one with the galactic tidal action.”

  This time the unhappy cluster was taken in hand by forces beyond its ken. What could a little cluster do in the horrendous grip of a superpower galaxy? Clusters were mere golden bubbles. Galaxies were vast flat saucers, cold, spinning, implacable. The uneven force of their gravity bent and tore at the bubbles. There was a mighty tide.

  Van could see it. The attraction of the galaxy was too much for the globular cluster. The stars peeled loose, they struggled toward exile, clinging fitfully to one another. They were ripped out of the cluster in long trains of refugees. Some fell into the galaxy, alien migrants falling down from high off the plane, strangers from an angelic height, doomed to meet some alien fate. The broken cluster, wrecked into mere rags of gas and dust, hung there, half obliterated . . .

  “We’re talking twenty orders of temporal magnitude here,” Dottie told him. “Two neutron stars have a close passage in milliseconds. But the death of a globular cluster . . .”

  “They die?” Van said.

  “Of course they die, honey. All stars die. So do all clusters. But here”—she waved at the screen—“my clusters don’t die quite properly. The universe is only thirteen billion years old, so I don’t have any good observed case studies for a cluster’s late-period dynamical interaction. I’m pushing at the limit of this instrument. I’m going thirty billion years into the future.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean, those numerical errors do accumulate, when I do that.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “I really have to fight with that problem,” Dottie said. “Thirty billion years, it’ll take me quite a while to push that. A long time, maybe. Maybe the rest of my life.”

  Van patted her shoulder. “Baby, honey, you’re doing just great!”

  After a fabulous Szechuan dinner, they took Ted with them for the last night at their Pinecrest love nest. Van was no longer impressed by the place. There was something comical and squalid about this aging zillionaire’s bachelor pad.

  The place was not childproofed. Ted had to live inside his stroller and pen. This was not any kind of home for the three of them, a place like this. Their lives had gone wrong. His wounded pride had stopped hurting now, but he’d made some kind of serious misstep. He could feel it in his bones.

  At two in the morning, Ted’s whimpering woke him. Van got up and stalked across the floorboards. “We’re gonna let your mom sleep this time,” he told the baby. He changed Ted’s diapers and stuffed him into his walker. Ted had a nifty walker that Van had shipped to him in a lonesome moment. It was made of cool cast-plastic, a toddler’s bumper car.

  Ted was clearly thrilled to be up with his dad after midnight inside a brightly lit bathroom. Ted’s mother always made Ted sleep, but here Ted was finally getting to do what Ted most ached to do in the wee hours of the morning. Ted wanted to hurl himself around the room with a clash of plastic wheels, gurgling with glee, little arms slapping like pinwheels, a string of eager drool hanging from his chin.

  Van would be back in Washington by nightfall. He would be forced to tell Jeb that his KH-13 misadventure had gone bust with the Space Force at Cheyenne Mountain. He’d wasted his time, wasted valuable resources . . . To make up for it, he’d have to work twice as hard on the Virginia summit, really dig deep into the rabbit hat . . . Van looked at himself in the mirror, leaning close to take it in without his glasses. He had been a damned fool.

  He tiptoed away as Ted cooed and burbled. He silently fetched his backpack from the foot of Dottie’s bed. He returned to the bathroom with the jet-black SWAT knife.

  He couldn’t fly back to Washington with this throat-cutting pigsticker. Airport security would go nuts over it. But he’d bought it. It was his. It was stupid to not find some kind of use for it.

  Van grabbed a thick mess of beard and had at it. The knife went through his bristles like they were cotton candy.

  Six minutes later Van was looking at his bare face while Ted happily sucked on and spat a loose fistful of his beard. The SWAT knife was beyond razor-sharp. It had taken his beard off like a laser. He had thin little paper-cut nicks here and there. No wonder Hickok swore by this knife. Hickok knew his stuff about SWAT weapons. The knife was a jewel.

  Van hadn’t shaved his beard in years. His damp, sleek rubbery face had the pale, surprised look of a shaved head.

  Next morning Dottie stared at him in astonishment. “Oh, honey,” she shrieked, “Oh, look at you! Oh, honey bear, you look so young!”

  This wasn’t the response he’d expected. “Young”? His plan was to lose the goofy hacker beard and look more like a serious Washington professional. “Young”? What about his nose? His nose had grown three sizes overnight.

  Dottie was experimentally kissing parts of his face that had not been kissed in ages. Bare skin reacted in startled pleasure.

  “Oh, honey, you look so handsome this way. You look so clean. Look at Daddy, Teddie!”

  Worn out by his 3:00 A.M. adventures, Ted was fast asleep.

  “You like it?” Van said.

  “It’s different . . . Of course I like it. I married you, didn’t I? Change is good sometimes.”

  “I don’t know what they’ll make of this, back at my work.”

  “Honey . . .” Dottie paused. “If you only knew what your face looks like, when you talk about your work now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Derek, those people are torturing you. It just hurts me so much. I don’t like these people in Washington. I don’t like this administration, I don’t like this stupid War on Terror . . . I can’t even bear to read the newspapers now. They’re not our kind of people.”

  “Now what?” Van said. “What do you mean?”

  “Honey, you don’t have to go back to them. You know? You don’t have to go back to the war, honey. You can stay right here and live with me. Derek, you hate that kind of work. Security work is ugly, dirty work. Sweetheart, maybe I didn’t say this before but . . . things are going really well for me up here. In most campuses, the astronomy people are looking at those awful new budget problems. Nobody’s ever seen it that bad . . . But up here, I have only one problem. I have no Derek Vandeveer.”

  “Huh,” said Van. “Wow.”

  “We won’t have those huge amounts of money anymore, like we did when you were VP. But that only got us in trouble anyway. Derek, you would do great up here. They’ll let you use all the network hardware. You can do all those cool, fun computer-science things you really wanted to do. Like, you can finish your paper on Ramsey theorems. No boss and no schedules, honey. You would be so happy.”

  “Do I look so sad to you now?”

  “Honey, it is written all over your face! I can see your face now. I haven’t seen you without a beard in, what, four years? You cut it for my mother’s funeral.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Van. “That’s right.”

  Dottie wiped at her eyes. “People don’t have to choose to have bad lives that we hate. You’re such a wonderful person, Derek. You’re a good, clean, strong person who means well and has a huge gift . . . There’s nobody in that government who is a decent person like you are . . .” She was sobbing. “I want you to come and live with me, Derek. I’m so sick and tired of living alone.”

  Van sat on the bed. His soul was flapping like a blown sail. “Oh, Dottie.”

  “I have a right to you. I’m your wife. Why should we neglect each other? I want you to come live with me. We could have another baby. They didn’t draft you. You’re not in any uniform. Why don’t you just do it?”

  “I have a title,” Van said. “I get paid. They trust me.”

  “You hate that work. It’s changing you. You should see what you look like when you’re trying to talk about it. Your eyes get so hard and cold. Your face gets sour . . . You look like a big dog guarding the world’s last bone.”

  Van did not take this as an insult. He recognized the truth in what Dottie was telling him. He had the kind of face that cops often had. Cops were people who were never just freely happy to see you. Even if they were nice guys, and many cops were, they always, always had to give you that guardian look first, to size you up to see if you were dangerous, or armed, or insane. He’d seen that guard-dog look on the faces of a hundred people in the Vault, and now, yes, he had it, too. He had it because he deserved it. He had earned that face. He had it because he was one of them.