"He destroyed Atlantis because he had another deterrent to fall back on. Making good on the smaller threat increased the credibility of the larger one." The man without a conscience shrugged. "But once you're dead, deterrence has already failed. There's no point in acting on a threat when it can't possibly achieve your goal."

"He could have, easily. I would have."

"You're vindictive. Desjardins wasn't. He was mainly interested in self-gratification." Lubin smiled faintly. "That was unusually enlightened of him, actually. Most people are hardwired for revenge. Perhaps Spartacus freed him of that too."

"But he could have done it."

"It wouldn't have been a credible threat otherwise."

"So how did you know?"

"Doomsday machines are not easy things to assemble. It would have taken a great deal of time and effort for no actual payoff. Faking it was the logical alternative."

"That's not good enough, Ken. Try again."

"I also subjected him to Ganzfeld interrogation once. It gave me certain insights into—"

She shook her head.

He didn't speak for a while. Finally: "We were both off the leash."

"I thought you gave yourself a new leash. I thought your rules..."

"Still. I know how he felt." Lubin unfolded—carefully, carefully—and climbed slowly to his feet.

"Did you know what he'd do?" She couldn't hide the pleading in her voice.

He seemed to look down at her. "Lenie, I've never known anything my entire life. All I can ever do is go with the odds."

It wasn't what she wanted to hear. She wanted him to describe some telltale glitch in Desjardins's shadow-show, some compelling bit of evidence that said the worst will not happen. She wanted some channel of ostensible input traced back to an empty socket, impossibly disconnected from its fiberop. Anything but a gamble based on empathy between two men without conscience.

She wondered if he was disappointed, even a little bit, that Desjardins had been faking it after all. She wondered if he'd really been expecting it.

"What are you so down about?" Lubin asked, sensing what he couldn't see. "We just saved the world."

She shook her head. "He was going to lose anyway. He knew that better than we did."

"Then we advanced the schedule significantly, at least. Saved millions of lives."

How many millions, she wondered, and then: what difference does it make? Could saving twelve million today make up for killing ten million in the past? Could the blood-soaked Meltdown Madonna somehow transmute into Saint Lenie In the Black, savior of two million net? Was the algebra of guilt really so elementary?

For Lenie Clarke, the question didn't even apply. Because any millions saved today had only been spared from a fate she'd condemned them to in the first place. There was no way, no way at all, that she would ever be able to balance those books.

"At least," she said, "the debt won't get any bigger."

"That's a needlessly pessimistic outlook," Lubin observed.