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By Root 1370 0

been sitting on it for up to forty years, trying to figure out a way of making it work on males too. She thinks that because he had failed to do that, he was planning to hand it over to some organization that would carry on the work while maintaining the same kind of secrecy. When she confided all this to her radfem friends, they presumably ran the same background checks on Ahasuerus and the Algenists that Peter Smith ran, and came across all the same tabloid legends. Both institutions are rumored to have exotic secret agendas—but who isn’t nowadays? Ahasuerus is said to have been set up specifically to find a means of conferring emortality upon its illustrious male founder, Adam Zimmerman, and the Algenists are misunderstood by their severest critics to be trying to create a Naziesque master race. You can see how that sort of bad press might raise radfem hackles.”

“I can easily imagine Helen getting excited about that kind of thing,” Mike admitted wryly. “In fact, I don’t have to imagine it. Imagining her as a criminal mastermind dispatching gangs of assassins and bombers is a different matter, though.”

“They think I’m in on it,” Lisa added, shivering in a sudden gust of cold wind. “They think I’ve known all about it since day one, but that I’ve kept quiet. Stella and Helen have convinced themselves that I’ve been prepared to go along with Morgan’s plans in return for a promise that I’d eventually be paid off with the treatment, thus betraying the sacred principles of sisterhood. That’s why they sprayed Traitor’ on my door and tried to shake me up by telling me that Morgan never really intended to cut me in. Can I go now?”

Grundy was still dubious. “I’m no fan of Helen’s nowadays,” he said, “but this is way beyond her. She might conceivably be involved, but she can’t possibly be the one behind it.”

“She’s more than involved, Mike,” Lisa told him, hoping she’d read that part of the puzzle right. “This whole thing’s been too personal That’s partly down to Stella, but only partly.”

“That doesn’t make sense either,” he objected. “We live in crazy times, but—”

“It’s not just the crazy times,” Lisa told him, determined to put her point across quickly so she could move on. “The sense of impending doom that Containment and the undeclared war have cultivated undoubtedly helped to shove them over the edge, but they’re taking it very personally. Stella Filisetti doesn’t know Morgan the way I do, and I doubt if she can relate to his way of life the way I could. She feels let down because he didn’t change into Mister Right the moment he started screwing her. She’s magnified that sense of betrayal into something much greater. And Helen doesn’t know me the way you do. She didn’t understand what happened after she threw you out, any more than she ever understood that we really were friends. She was all set up to believe the very worst of me. They’ve inflated their personal frustrations into a much grander paranoia—a conviction that something immensely valuable is being withheld from them by people they know. They think they’re being left to die while less worthy acquaintances are plotting to survive the impending catastrophe and come through it with a secure position in the pockets of the rulers of the new world. Hell, even Peter Grimmett Smith of the MOD is a sucker for tales of the Secret Masters and the Ice Age Elite. The only difference is that he’s either too shrewd or too contemptuous to believe that someone like me could ever be a part of that kind of conspiracy. Stella isn’t. Nor, alas, is Helen.”

“If you say so,” Grundy conceded reluctantly. “But even if you’re right, it ought to be me who goes after Helen, not you.”

“It has to be me, Mike,” Lisa told him. “It’s because I know Morgan better than anyone else does that I know this farce is founded on a colossal mistake. I’m the only one who can convince the radfems of that fact. Morgan obviously couldn’t.”

“Maybe no one can,” he suggested.

“Maybe not—but I don’t have time to argue, Mike. I have to go now.”

Chan had already moved to Mike’s side. He was waiting, with a