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called me a fool once or twice, but they deserved a modicum of respect, even from a man as wealthy as Montoya.
    "I agree, they're way off track," Montoya said. "They'll never see the promised land. I've read your papers. I like them. Tell me more."
    "That's new," Dave said, swiveling the DSV and shining our upper bank of floods on a clump of tube worms. Beyond the worms, the sub's lights shimmered through white clouds like old, chalky paint: a bacteria-rich spring, small in diameter but productive.
    "Let's see." He sidled the sub in a few meters. I pulled down my data glove, feeling the plastic limiter box click into place, guided a sensor-laden mechanical arm, and pushed a probe into the spring outflow.
    "Shove it, shove that old rectal thermometer right into the Earth's fundament" Dave said with another leer. He wasn't funny. "Eighty-six degrees Celsius," he said.
    "Congratulations."
    "I'm just the pilot," he said matter-of-factly. "You're the researcher. You'll get the credit."
    Montoya listened to my presentation for two hours. We broke for a quick dinner--crab cakes and stir-fried vegetables, served with an excellent Oregon pi not gris. We were studying each other, and neither of us was willing to reveal too much. Looking a little glazed, he called a break at 10:00 P.M. Betty Shun appeared to take me on a tour of the house while Montoya fielded some phone calls.
    The glass wall fronted the east wing. The west wing ended in a boat launch built into the native rock of another cove. It easily doubled what had at first seemed merely huge. The floor plan of Montoya Fortress of Solitude had to total a hundred thousand square feet--two and a third acres, topped by wind-winnowed forest, the air conditioner vents camouflaged as tree stumps and the condensers as moss-covered boulders.
    "Don't try to take this tour on your own, Dr. Cousins," Shun warned me on the clay floor of an indoor tennis court. "Without a permission wand, you'll be locked in the first room you enter." She held up a tiny plastic bar. "Security will have to come and save you." She looked at her wristwatch. "Owen doesn't need a wand. The house recognizes him on sight. His steps, his voice--"
    "His DNA?"
    She smiled and tapped her watch. "Owen should be ready now. We are exactly 115 feet from him, as the laser flies." She gave me a look that might have spoken volumes, but I was unable to open, much less read, any of them. "Why were you let go from your last research job?"
    "At Stanford?"
    She nodded.
    "Money ran out in my department. I was junior."
    "Wasn't there some dispute?"
    "A few of the faculty disagreed with my work. But my papers still get published, Ms. Shun. I am still a reputable scientist."
    "Owen is fond of oddball thinking, and even fonder of tweaking academic whiskers. But I hate to see him disappointed, Dr. Cousins."
    "Hal."
    She shook her head politely; keep it business. "Owen needs something to commit to. Something solid."
    Betty Shun left me with Montoya on the west wing's biggest porch, overlooking the boat cove. It was eleven-thirty. We talked pleasantries for a while and listened to the splash of the waves, blankets over our legs, sipping from chilled glasses of draft beer, our heads warmed by radiant heaters. Did I like baseball? Montoya owned a baseball team in Minneapolis. I conversed as much about baseball as I could, having read USA Today in the Hotel W that afternoon.
    Then Montoya drew back to our main topic.
    "You don't say much about reduced caloric intake," he said. "According to most experts, that's the only anti aging technique proven to work."
    "It's just the tip of the iceberg," I said.
    "You haven't sunk your harpoon yet, Hal. I need to know more-much more." He smiled wearily. Make or break.
    1 put my glass on the center table and leaned forward. "The real problem is that we breathe. We respire. We accumulate poisons over time because of the way we burn fuel. We're part of a vast biological conspiracy, billions of years old,