The bond was growing stronger between him and Julie. His feelings for her were building, becoming deeper each day. In a short while, he would have to leave her. He hadn't considered that it would be a problem. Now just the thought made his chest go tight and his stomach roll with nausea. He didn't understand it. He only knew that the notion of leaving Julie brought him pain.

He had promised not to hurt her.

Now he wondered if his leaving would cause Julie that same pain.

Julie dashed through the front door of Donovan Real Estate, grabbing her messages from Shirl but continuing past her office. A quick knock at the door and she rushed into Patrick's office, smiling at the sight of his dark head bent over his desk studying what appeared to be Ron Jacobs's most recent real estate contract.

He glanced up, his intense blue eyes climbing steadily to her face, and her stomach did a sweet little curl.

"Hi," she said a bit breathlessly. She wished she could blame it on her harried afternoon, but she knew it was simply the sight of him. He had always been a handsome man. Now, the underlying strength, the purpose that burned in his eyes, made him nearly irresistible.

He smiled, a flash of white against smooth, suntanned skin. "You're certainly in a hurry. Something exciting going on?"

"Not exactly. I'm a little pressed for time, is all."

"So what's new about that?" he teased.

She smiled. "I need to take those books I borrowed back to UCLA. While I'm there, I want to look through the latest newspapers and magazines for articles on UFOs. I've done some work on the Internet and I plan to do more, but I feel like I get more out of an actual magazine. I thought I might convince you to go with me."

Patrick frowned. "I thought you were through with all that. After last night-"

"Last night I said I didn't believe I'd been taken aboard a s.p.a.ceship. For Laura's sake, I'm still trying to keep an open mind." For her own sake as well, she silently added.

Patrick leaned back in his chair. "If you're researching UFOs, there's still the problem we discussed, the one involving the speed of light and the thousands of years it would take to reach other galaxies. I don't suppose you've figured a way around that?"

Julie grinned. "Believe it or not, I might have. During my Internet research, I ran across a woman-an astrophysicist named Meryl Stover. She teaches in the physics department at USC. Dr. Stover believes there are several ways we might be able to reach-perhaps even break-the speed-of-light barrier. I read some of the articles she wrote and then I called her. I told her I was doing some research on s.p.a.ce travel, and she was kind enough to give me an appointment to see her tomorrow afternoon."

Patrick smiled but he certainly didn't look happy. "I can't go with you today, but I wouldn't miss tomorrow for the world." His expression changed, his eyes moving downward, traveling over her body in a way that made the heat rise into her cheeks. "And there is tonight, of course."

"T-tonight?"

A corner of his mouth curved up. "I thought we'd eat in. I'll cook, and we can go to bed early. We can go to your place if you like. Then you won't have to get up and drive home."

Julie thought of the invitation addressed to Patrick she had noticed lying on Shirl's desk. "What about the party?"

"What party?"

"Jack Winston's big celebrity party at The Grill? I thought for sure you'd be going." The old Patrick wouldn't have missed it.

"I'm not going...not unless you'd like to go."

Relief trickled through her. Julie shook her head. Jack Winston and his bunch of movie-star groupies were the last people she wanted to see. "No, I...I don't really care much for that sort of thing."

He smiled. "Then it's settled. Your place tonight for dinner and a moonlight walk on the beach. Tomorrow we see Dr. Stover."

The night was even better than Patrick had promised. He had cooked some sort of Oriental noodle soup and served chocolate ice cream for dessert. Patrick's food tastes continued toward the strange, but the meal was good nonetheless. Afterward they walked the deserted beach and wound up making love on a blanket in the sand. Except for Patrick's late night strolls through the house, which awakened her twice, she had slept like the dead and woke up later than usual.

After a hectic morning at the office and a meatball sandwich to go from Prego's, just down the street, Julie joined Patrick for the drive to the University of Southern California. A search of Dr. Stover's office and cla.s.sroom proved unsuccessful. They finally located the professor in her laboratory, several buildings away.

Meryl "Smoky" Stover was seated at a desk in the corner, hidden behind several stacks of files that almost completely obscured her. Only her crown of sandy brown hair peeked through. She was dressed in white lab clothes, which hung loose over her short, wiry frame.

"Dr. Stover? I hate to bother you. I can see that you're busy, but-"

"That's all right, I'm always busy." She rose from amidst the disarray, a small woman in her fifties, the kind of lined, craggy face smokers often get, probably the reason for her nickname. "You must be Julie Ferris. Come in."

The doctor sized both of them up as they entered the laboratory, smiling with interest at Julie and obvious appreciation at Patrick. She might be middle-aged, but she was definitely female and she wasn't dead yet, her thorough glance said.

"This is Patrick Donovan, Dr. Stover. A friend who is also interested in s.p.a.ce travel."

"It's nice to meet you." Taking in their conservative dress, Patrick in his Versace double-breasted, Julie in navy blue slacks and a white silk blouse, it was obvious the woman had her doubts. If so, she didn't voice them. "Well, I hope I can be of some help."

She drew a cigarette out of a pack on the desk, stuck it between her fingers, but made no effort to light it.

"I'm trying to quit," she explained as she walked across the laboratory, the cigarette gripped between her fingers. "Been three months and I'm still going crazy."

"It can't be easy," Julie sympathized, she and Patrick following along in the doctor's wake. The room was large, filled with interesting clutter, the walls lined with colorful graphs and charts. Models and mechanical devices covered the countertops, machinery unlike anything Julie had ever seen.

"You said you read some of my articles," the doctor said to Julie, cigarette still in hand. "If that's the case, you understand a little of how difficult s.p.a.ce travel is."

"To be truthful, I'm only beginning to understand. I've been reading a great deal about it. I know how far we would have to travel, that our closest stellar landfall is in the Alpha Centauri system, which is still 4.3 light years away."

The doctor's lips curved. "That's twenty-five trillion miles, in case you haven't figured it out."

Patrick's gaze moved away from the chart he had been studying. "s.p.a.ce travelers face enormous obstacles," he said. "Besides the problem of radiation-a flood of it during magnetic solar storms-there's rocky debris from asteroids and comets which could easily destroy the hull of a ship."

Julie eyed him strangely, but Patrick simply shrugged. "I went to college, too, you know. I'm bound to remember at least a little of what I learned."

"You're both correct. s.p.a.ce travel is fraught with hazards-the body's reaction to extended periods of weightlessness, the problem of communicating through vast empty stretches of s.p.a.ce, but the biggest problem is the time it takes just to get there."

"Which, I gather," said Patrick, "is where you come in."

"That's right. My expertise lies in theoretical astrophysics-developing ideas that allow scientists to eventually reach their goals."

Julie studied one of the charts. It diagrammed what was labeled a rotating skyhook, some sort of catch-and-release satellite station that could pluck an orbiting s.p.a.ceship from a low Earth orbit and hurl it at a much greater speed on its journey into s.p.a.ce.

She turned back to the doctor. "The article you wrote said you believe, at least in theory, man can eventually reach the speed of light."

Smoky unconsciously took a pull on her unlit cigarette. "The speed of light-186,283 miles per second. Yes, I believe in time it can be done, just the way speed of sound was reached and eventually surpa.s.sed. Still, even at light speed, it would take more than ten years to reach a system with a planet or planets that could support the existence of life."

"Surely such a system is rare," Julie said.

Dr. Stover laughed, a rather unnerving, slightly raspy chuckle. "That's what most people think. Maybe that's what they want to think. The truth is, planetary systems like the one around our sun may be the rule rather than the exception. There are two hundred billion stars in Earth's galaxy alone. Which means there may be hundreds of thousands, even millions of inhabitable planets in the universe."

Julie fell silent, staggered by the thought.

Patrick looked back toward the charts on the wall. "Then it's simply a matter of getting there," he said mildly. "Which brings us right back where we started."

"Distance is definitely the problem. Which is why we'll have to go even faster than light speed to achieve the sort of interstellar travel man dreams of."

"Is that possible?" Julie asked.

"Theoretically, yes." She pointed toward the wall. "Take a look at those graphs up there. Each line shows various methods of s.p.a.cecraft propulsion."

She ran a thin finger beneath one of the lines. "Metallic Hydrogen and Nuclear Fusion are already in the exploratory stages, but they can't reach faster than thirty percent light speed." She pointed to another line. "Negative Matter could get us up to seventy percent. Combined Matter-Antimatter could go as fast as ninety-nine percent of the speed of light."

"If I remember correctly," Patrick put in, "Einstein believed we could never achieve light speed because we create infinite ma.s.s."

Julie's eyes widened. She couldn't believe Patrick was standing there calmly discussing Einsteinian theory as if he studied it every day. All those years, she had underestimated his intelligence. Or maybe he had simply gone out of his way not to show it.

"Albert Einstein never heard of tachyon particles," Dr. Stover said. "We think-if they actually exist-they can't travel slower than the speed of light. If that's the case, all we have to do is get beyond the light speed barrier and there's no limit to how fast we can go."

It was mind-boggling, no doubt about it. But the one thing Julie was convinced of was that if highly educated scientists like Meryl Stover and her colleagues believed s.p.a.ce travel was possible, and if there really were hundreds of thousands of potentially habitable planets, odds were darned good that some other life form, superior to man, also sought to travel through s.p.a.ce and might have already done it.

"We're looking to quantum mechanics for the answer," the doctor was saying. "It's extremely complicated, but we believe, once we've quantumly jumped the light-speed barrier, some sort of tachyon booster could kick in. It could wind up carrying the ship as fast as three hundred times the speed of light."

Julie looked at Patrick, whose face looked decidedly grim.

"Add to that the existence of black holes or wormholes a s.p.a.cecraft might travel through, and the distance between galaxies could be shortened even more. Or there may be a way to collapse the vast distances in s.p.a.ce, or ways to combine several different modes of travel-"

A knock sounded and the door swung open. "Sorry to bother you, Smoky, but that reporter from the Tribune is here."

The doctor sighed and rolled her eyes, then nodded to the man at the door. "Apparently duty calls," she said to Julie. "We're always trying to raise money to further our studies. Any publicity we can get is helpful." She called back to her a.s.sistant. "Thanks, Tom. Tell him I'll be right there."

"We appreciate your time, Dr. Stover, and I think I'm beginning to get the picture."

"As you can see, there are dozens of possibilities. As I said, so far they're mostly theoretical, but that's the way scientific advances are made."

Julie stared triumphantly at Patrick. "Well, are you satisfied there might really be a way for a s.p.a.ceship to travel to Earth?"

For a moment his features looked dark, then he actually smiled. "After hearing Dr. Stover, I'd be a liar if I said I didn't believe it could be done."

"There are a couple of good books on the subject," the doctor said. "Stephen Hawking wrote one called A Brief History of Time. Wrinkles in Time, by Smoot and Davidson, is another."

"Perhaps I'll read them," Julie said. But as they walked out the door, she was thinking she really didn't need to.

After hearing Dr. Stover, as far as she was concerned s.p.a.ce travel wasn't all that far-fetched. The thought occurred, if a s.p.a.ceship from another world actually did come to Earth, what would the travelers do once they got here?

Perhaps a study of Earth's inhabitants, as Laura continued to insist, wouldn't be so difficult to imagine.

Fifteen.

Val sat in the study of his penthouse apartment reading the Los Angeles Times. Patrick Donovan had enjoyed reading the paper. Val couldn't read the front page without chills running up and down his spine. Murder, rape, gang violence, child abuse-earth's inhabitants were unaccountably savage. Their primitive drives made them reckless, often governed by emotion or instinct, rather than common sense. In Los Angeles alone, not a single day seemed to pa.s.s without total mayhem and dozens of heinous crimes.

Val folded the paper and tossed it onto his desk. There was no crime on Toril. No murder, no mayhem, no hideous disease, no suicide, rarely even an accident. Not even the weather played a part in the life or death cycle as it did here on Earth. There the weather never changed. The clear, acrylic-like dome that housed the cities of the planet were all thermostatically controlled.

Life was controlled as well, planned in an orderly fashion from birth to death. From test-tube conception to the end of a normal five-hundred-year cycle. Any reckless, self-destructive urges had been bred out of Torillian genes ten thousand years ago.

Yet history told of a time when they weren't so civilized, so completely controlled. A time they weren't all that much different from people here on Earth.

And in truth, though the violence chilled him, it also gave rise to certain forms of beauty that no longer existed on Toril. In art and in music, the violence, the pa.s.sion portrayed made the work come to life. Just as it did the residents of Earth themselves. The challenge to survive brought out the best in people, helped them grow and change and achieve a new awareness.

And he had discovered that as much as he was appalled, he was also drawn to the life-or-death struggle people faced each day on Earth. Watching them battle the forces of a tornado or the destructive power of a hurricane was wildly compelling. A man with the courage to face and overcome cancer, or, like Patrick's father, battle to recover from a debilitating stroke, was an inspiration to Val and to others.

In essence, life on Earth was fraught with risks, but it was balanced by incredible rewards.

Val mulled over the notion as he unlocked his middle desk drawer and removed the journal he wrote in each day. He opened it to the latest entry and picked up a pen, tapped it lightly against the blank page.

Here life is struggle, he began, randomly scratching out his thoughts.

The strong survive over the weak. Individuality is key. People live their lives independent of each other. They value their differences, even praise them. To us this att.i.tude seems awesome, unsettling, perhaps even dangerous. A human being, free-willed and driven by his pa.s.sions, might pose a threat that goes far beyond his small place in the world.

He paused a moment, then the pen moved again.

Perhaps it is not man's savagery we fear, but his capacity for independent action.

Val closed the journal, his thoughts moving backward, returning to the charts he had observed on Dr. Stover's wall. Graphs that demonstrated all too clearly several different avenues that would indeed lead to s.p.a.ce travel at speeds far greater than the speed of light. Though the actual accomplishment would surely occur at some point in the future, Torillians had reason to be concerned.

But did that also give them the right to interfere?

Val stood up and began to pace the floor, his mind shifting to Julie, to the Ansor's proposed experiments, to how they might affect her-and any number of others. Though they hadn't set out with that purpose, the testing aboard the ship was no less violent, no less savage than the acts he read about in the paper.

More and more, Val was convinced he had to make them stop.

Laura paced the floor of her tiny apartment. The phone had just quit ringing-again-and the answering machine kicked on. "Laura, it's Brian. I know you're in there. d.a.m.n it, pick up the phone."

She didn't, of course. Instead she just listened to him demanding, then pleading, determined it would do him no good. She cared for Brian Heraldson, more than cared for. Physically, she was wildly attracted to him. But he was wrong about her, and she wasn't going to let his doctor-patient att.i.tude become the driving force of their relationship.

Not that they really had a relationship, she told herself firmly. So Brian had been kind to her. He was a nice man-most of the time. The steady sort women looked for in a man they might want to marry-if she were interested, which she was not. He was also arrogant and domineering, opinionated and determined to sway her to his will.

So what if he was handsome. So what if just noticing the way his bottom lip curved when he smiled stirred funny little flutters in her stomach. Jimmy Osborn was handsome, too. And though he was a little bad-tempered on occasion, he didn't try to run her life.

As luck would have it, Jimmy had called just that morning, right after her fight with Brian. Determined to forget Brian Heraldson and his overbearing ways, she had agreed to a date.

Laura glanced at the clock. Jimmy would be there any minute.

He was only half an hour late-right on time for Jimmy-when she heard his too-loud knock at the door. Hurrying over, she unlocked the double latches, unfastened the chain and pulled it open.

"Hey, babe, what's happenin'?" He was dressed in jeans and a tank top, his thick black hair slicked back, a toothpick stuck between his white teeth. The tattoo of a rose covered a portion of his oversized biceps.

"Hi, Jimmy."