“I’ll see if he wants to talk about it.”

“To you?”

“To a doctor. He ever say anything to you guys? About being a wild kid?”

The men all shook their heads. “I don’t remember him ever talking about his life on Earth,” Paul said. “Funny, now that I think of it. Everybody has Earth stories.”

“He’s odd that way,” Meryl said. “He talks about his mother, when he was little, and he talks about college, but not much in between.”

“That’s not so unusual,” I said. “Paul never talks about that time in his life. Do you?”

“Boring,” he said. “Dealing drugs, child prostitution, day in and day out.”

“Child prostitution?” Fly-in-Amber said.

“Kidding,” he said. “They were all over eighteen.”

“Paul . . .”

“I’m sorry, Fly-in-Amber. It’s disrespectful of me to kid you.”

“On the contrary,” the Martian said. “I learn from your humor. If you had actually been a bad boy, you wouldn’t joke about it. Your feelings are ambiguous, are they not? You wish you had been more bad?”

“Got me there,” he said. “Elza, you’re both victim and professional observer. What if it had happened to someone else—”

“Paul, that’s not relevant,” I said. “There are only two other women here.”

“It might be relevant,” Elza said, “on various levels.” She touched her nose and grimaced. “I’d just asked him about his father, sort of out of the blue.”

“What about his father?” Meryl said. “He never talks about him.”

Elza studied her for a moment. “I know some things I shouldn’t. Maybe because of my security clearance, I don’t know, I . . . I was given access to confidential psychiatric records.”

“About his father?” Meryl said.

“I’m on thin ice here,” she said.

After a pause, everyone started to talk at once. “Wait, wait.” Paul had the strongest voice. “Elza, you don’t have to violate your political principles . . .”

“Yes, she does,” Dustin said.

His wife smiled at him. “The philosopher speaks.”

“All right. The principle of doctor-patient confidentiality is a luxury we have to forego.”

“Like the luxury of anger?” she said, still smiling.

“We are seven people, or nine,” he plowed on, “who may have the fate of the entire human race, both races, depending on our thoughts and actions. Our freedom to think and act can’t be constrained by tradition. By law or superstition.”

“I think he’s right,” Namir said slowly. “At least in terms of information.”

Elza looked at him, then away. “Maybe so. Maybe so.” She sat up straight and spoke to the middle distance, as if reciting. “This is something Moonboy doesn’t remember, because it was repressed by court order: When he was eleven years old, his father killed him.”

“Tried to?” Dustin said.

“Killed him. Not on purpose. Tried to stop his crying by taping his mouth shut. Then bound his hands and feet with the tape and threw him in a dark closet.”