Kipp was also aware of a strange continuous murmur. He’d only recently begun to hear it.

He’d first thought it might be tinnitus, with which he knew some people suffered, but it was not that.

He could almost hear words in that strange unremitting flow, which came from somewhere to the west. West by northwest.

After Dorothy died, Kipp would need to investigate, find the source of the sound. He was grateful to have an immediate purpose.

He descended from the deck to the yard to stare for a while at the stars, wondering.

Although he was exceedingly smart—only Dorothy knew how smart—he had no idea what it all meant.

Join the club. All the philosophers of history, much wiser than he, had failed to conceive a theory that satisfied everyone.

Shortly after he returned to Dorothy’s bedroom, she woke.

Seeing Rosa reading a novel, Dorothy spoke in a frail voice. “Rosie, dear, you should read aloud to Kipp.”

Humoring her patient, the nurse said, “Don’t you think Dickens is beyond his grade level?”

“Oh, not at all, not at all. He enjoyed Great Expectations when I read it to him, and he adored A Christmas Carol.”

Kipp stood bedside, gazing up at her, wagging his tail.

Dorothy patted the mattress, an invitation.

Kipp sprang onto the bed. Lying at her side, he rested his chin on her hip.

She put one hand on his burly head and gently stroked his pendant ears, his coat of golden fur.

Even with hateful Death on the doorstep, sweet bliss found an equal home with grief in Kipp’s heart.

4

The two-lane blacktop is a dark snake slithering through the moon-washed paleness of the Utah wastelands. In the nearly empty vastness, small clusters of lights glimmer here and there in the distance, like extraterrestrial pod craft that have descended from the mother ship on some nefarious mission.

Traveling south out of the Provo suburbs into ever-greater isolation, Lee Shacket dares not take Interstate 15. He uses less-busy state highways, undivided federal highways when he must, anxious to put as much distance as possible between himself and the events at the Springville facility.

If he has committed as much evil as any man in history, he has done it with the best intentions. He believes that those intentions matter more than the consequences of his actions. How could humanity have advanced from caves to orbiting space stations if all men and women were risk averse? Some seek knowledge and rise to challenges at whatever cost, and because of them, progress is made.

Anyway, all may be well in the end. The final result of the project is not yet known, only that it’s gone wrong in mid stage. Every scientific endeavor is marked by setbacks. Ultimately, failure can be the father of success if one learns from the errors made.

Initially, however, he is treating this failure as absolute.

He is driving neither his Tesla nor his Mercedes SL 550, because eventually the authorities will be looking for him. He is tooling along in a fully loaded bloodred Dodge Demon that he purchased for $146,000 through an LLC based in the Cayman Islands, to which his name can’t be linked even by the most determined investigator. The vehicle bears a Montana license plate. In the unlikely event that a connection between him and the car might be made by law enforcement, the GPS has been removed from the Dodge to prevent its location from being discovered by satellite.

One of two suitcases in the trunk contains $100,000. Another $300,000 in hundred-dollar bills can be accessed by disengaging two pressure latches on the back of the front passenger seat, revealing a secret compartment. Sewn into the lining of his supple black leather jacket, which is cut like a sport coat, are thirty-six high-quality diamonds worth half a million to any gem wholesaler.

These assets are not intended to support him for the rest of his life. They are to be used to allow him to go to ground for a few months, until the furor over the Springville fiasco subsides, make his way out of the United States, and get safely to Costa Rica by an indirect route involving five countries and three identity changes. In Costa Rica, he owns a retreat under the name Ian Stonebridge, and he possesses a valid Swiss passport in that identity.

He is the CEO of Refine, a multibillion-dollar division of a mega-valued conglomerate. Few CEOs of multibillion-dollar companies have the foresight to imagine a corporate crisis dire enough to require the preparation of a new identity and the hiding away of sufficient capital overseas to sustain a high standard of living for decades to come. Shacket takes pride in the fact that he has been wise and discreet for a man so much younger than most other CEOs.

He is thirty-four, which isn’t all that young for a guy in his position in an economic sector where companies have been founded by technology wizards who became billionaires in their twenties. He answers to Dorian Purcell, the chairman of the board of the parent company, who was a billionaire at twenty-seven and is now thirty-eight, but Shacket himself is worth only a hundred million.

Dorian wanted the research at Springville to proceed at a breakneck pace. Shacket obliged because, were they to succeed in their primary project, stock options would make him a billionaire, too, although probably not a multibillionaire, while Dorian’s fifty-billion-dollar fortune would most likely double.

The injustice of this unequal compensation causes Shacket to grind his teeth in his sleep; he often wakes with aching jaws. A mere billionaire is a nobody among the princes of high tech. In spite of their pretensions to social equality, many of this crowd are among the most class-conscious elite bigots the world has ever known. Lee Shacket despises them almost as much as he wants to be one of them.