On the box, notes filled perhaps fifty sheets of paper, arranged in no apparent order. Many of the notes were scribbled over or heavily blacked out; sometimes entire pages, except for a few square centimeters of equations or diagrams, were obscured by hard-pressed pencil marks. He leafed through the sheets quietly, puzzling over Patricia's private notation.

A slate lay on one corner, its silver-gray screen blank. A memory block had been plugged into the aperture in the right side of the slate, just above the small keyboard. Olmy glanced around, checking for the position of the guards, and kneeled beside the slate, turning it on. Learning how to use the antique was not difficult; in a few minutes, he had it rapidly scrolling up the contents of the memory block. He recorded the series of files in his implant for later analysis; this took about four minutes.

From what he could see and understand of her work, she was quite advanced for her century.

He was arranging the papers into their previous order when a guard came around the corner of the tent and stared in his direction. Olmy stood slowly, certain the picted camouflage was still effective.

"You hear anything, Norman?" Sergeant Jack Teague asked his colleague.

"No."

"Puff of wind or something? I could have sworn I heard these papers moving."

"Just another boojum, Jack."

Teague approached the box and looked down at the papers. "Jesus," he murmured. "Wonder what this stuff is." He bent and ran his fingers just above the line of symbols. There were cursive letters mixed with bold black lowercase letters; double upright bars reminiscent of the matrix symbols he had studied in flight school, integral signs, exponents containing German gothic letters and Greek letters, squiggles and triangles and lopsided circles with double dots in the middle, letters with single and double dots like umlauts over them. . .

"What a mess," Sergeant Teague said, rising again. His neck hair bristled and he sniffed the air, twisting suddenly.

Of course, nothing was there. What did he expect?

Chapter Twelve

Lanier had slept through most of the two-day OTV ride, head full of weightless dreams indiscriminately mixing the Stone and Earth, past and future.

He looked at his watch and then at the face of the secret service agent sitting beside him in the limousine. There was an eighteen-hour lag between the time he had landed at Vandenberg and the time he would report to Hoffman's office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Outside the smoke-colored car window, desert flashed by. The air pressure was high and the gravitation oppressive. Even through the dark windows, the sun was hot and yellow.

He missed the Stone.

"I have some spare time," he said.

"Yessir." The agent looked straight ahead, face pleasantly bland.

"You fellows are discreet."

"Oh, yessir. We are that," the driver said. The agent seated beside the driver glanced back at Lanier.

"Ms. Hoffman says we're at your disposal, but we're to have you in Pasadena, alive and sober, by eight o'clock tomorrow morning."