“Right.” He went over to his computer and opened the mouse file, began taking notes.

“The virus has slowed, too,” she said, then remembered she’d already said it. They’d noted all this yesterday afternoon, on their daily rounds, but it seemed from moment to moment she could not help wanting to check it all again. “The fruit just won’t rot. These bananas are still yellow and it’s been a month. The produce industry applications alone could make us rich.”

“I know,” Nate said, still typing.

She was not kidding. It had occurred to her that they might one day be able to use this technology to delay the decay of food on a large scale. As in ending starvation. Nobel prize, anyone?

She moved over to the equipment table, freshened her cup of coffee. “You want some?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

She got him a cup and came over and sat down next to him, yawning a bit. “Are you still keeping that journal?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to see it.”

He snorted as if she’d just said she wanted to dissect his liver.

“I have to, Nate. It’s part of the experiment.”

“Does that mean I get to see yours?” he asked dryly, going back to his typing.

“If you’d like.” The mere thought made her hyperventilate.

Priority one: Rewrite her journal. Take out the personal bits.

As if reading her mind, Nate said, “I’ll rewrite it for you. It’ll take a while.”

Jill started to protest, knew it would be not only pointless but also hypocritical. “So how are you feeling?”

He stopped typing, took a drink of coffee. “Good. Calm.” There was a bit of hedging in his voice.

“But not as good as before?”

“Not as maniacally good. I’m sleeping better.”

“Yes,” Jill agreed. “Me, too. Appetite?”

“Functional. I’m still not excited about food, but I’m handling it better than I was. My stomach’s calmer. I’m calmer in general. Too calm, almost.”

She allowed herself to really look at him, since it was her job. He was so gorgeous, the swine, definitely healthy-looking. And with that half-lidded look of complacency he did seem remarkably relaxed and untroubled. Damn it.

“Yes. And, um…” She couldn’t say it, no matter how scientific her motivations.

“It’s… less,” he said tightly, then added, more cruelly, “I’m not surprised. I probably broke something with Linda.”

Jill got up and went over to the mice. They were still there, still not interested in one another. “That’s not it,” she forced herself to say. “The subjects are showing the same thing. That’s very curious. So at seventy-five percent of power on the one pulse, sexual activity and overall stimulation peaks. At ninety percent there appears to be a more mellow kind of well-being. What would be your hypothesis on that one, Nate?”

“Maybe the mice have broken hearts,” he muttered.

7.2. Denton Wyle

For a while, things had not looked too good for everyone’s pal, Denton Wyle. Of the three names he’d gotten off the E-mail to Uberstühl, two of them had resulted in the purchase of Kobinski pages, negotiated by Mr. Fleck. Unfortunately, neither set of pages contained anything more about black holes or the night of the escape. And the third dealer, a gentleman in Charleston, had taken Schwartz’s exclusive, wouldn’t talk to Fleck at all.

It might not be a big deal. But it might. Those pages might be exactly the ones Denton needed, and now they were gone forever. And Fleck, in his capacity as “adviser,” had warned him that Rabbi Schwartz might have been collecting Kobinski for years, might have other pages he’d gotten from private parties or whatnot. Fleck felt it was his “duty” to point that out.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot. If it was meant to bother Denton, it worked. It was bothersome the way pins stuck in one’s corneas would be bothersome. If Denton really thought about it, which he tried not to, it made him weak-kneed with frustration.

But as Kobinski might say, the pendulum finally swung the other way. Fleck had located a new manuscript fragment. Apparently, when World War Two artifacts were sold among the German community—that is, among those who had been on the non-PC side of the war—they were advertised in certain German small-press magazines, things unlikely to be read by any outsider. The advertisements were discreet and inquiries were responded to with the utmost caution. That’s where this nibble had turned up, and Fleck had confirmed that it was, indeed, a Kobinski fragment, one that even Schwartz probably didn’t know about.

Denton was on the plane that same afternoon, Fleck’s words of warning and instruction glowing in his ear: Take cash. Don’t ask questions. And whatever you do, don’t get into politics.

Denton understood perfectly. He was prepared to kiss some Nazi butt if that was what it took: You guys lost the war? Bummer, man. I hate when that happens. But as he drew closer to his destination—a farm in the Schwäbischer area east of Stuttgart—and found himself in a rural landscape where there was about one house per hundred sheep, he felt a leaden reluctance settle in the seat of his pants. His foot eased from the rental car’s pedal until he fell far below the speed limit.

Excuse me, his foot was saying, but are we going to a Nazi’s house? Out on a farm in the middle of absolutely nowhere? Where the nearest neighbor is good ol’ Hans, ten miles down the road? Are you out of your freaking mind?

“It’s okay,” he said aloud. “The guy’s gotta be pushing eighty. Besides, he has no reason to dislike me. I’m the blond white guy with the bag of money.”

He cracked himself up with this and forced his foot down on the pedal. He wanted this bad.

His first Kobinski article—which he’d written to get Jack off his ass and start some PR for the book—had been a background piece only. It had talked about the manuscript but hadn’t actually printed any of it. Still, it had been a big hit with their audience. He’d laid the groundwork for his black hole theory of vanishings by discussing stories from various religious traditions of mystics visiting other planes of existence, usually called heavens and hells. Heck, the entire Tibetan Book of the Dead was a description of the various worlds one passes through after death. And the Swedish mystic Swedenborg? He claimed to have visited Heaven and Hell on many occasions. He was, you might say, “a regular.”

Of course, the leap from mystical visions to believing that a man had used kabbalah magic to physically disappear from Auschwitz was a big one. Then again, the readers of Mysterious World were leapin’ fools.

But the real meat of the article was courtesy of Loretta. She’d found an almost-eyewitness, a survivor named Biederer in Tel Aviv. Denton had interviewed him over the phone. Biederer’s story was amazing—two enemies wrestling, a flash of light… But Beiderer had also said something not too cool. He’d mentioned that “other people” had been talking to him recently about Kobinski.

Denton knew very well who those “other people” were: Schwartz!

Denton hadn’t seen or heard from the man, not directly. Yet he was convinced that Schwartz knew what he was up to, was doing everything in his power to work against him, was dogging his every move.

The more Denton thought about this whole kabbalah magic thing, the more he’d become convinced that there was some seriously heavy-duty power there. What if Schwartz was the head of some secret fraternity of kabbalist magicians? After all, Schwartz was reputed to be one of the greatest living kabbalists, wasn’t he? And the man was so damned secretive. He’d totally lied about his familiarity with Kobinski, tried to put Denton off the scent, tried to block his getting any of Kobinski’s work.