Chapter 2

"I am not going into a board meeting until the experiment is decided, one way or the other."

Jo Camerata said it quietly, but with an edge of steel. The two men in her office glanced at each other uneasily.

The office was clearly hers. The textured walls blazed with slashing orange and yellow stripes against a deep maroon background, the dramatic colors of the Mediterranean. The carpet was thick and patterned in matching bold tones. If she wished, Jo could change the color scheme at the touch of a dial. This morning the fiery hues of her Neapolitan ancestry suited her mood perfectly.

Two whole walls of the office were taken up by floor-to-ceiling windows. The drapes were pulled back, showing the city of Hilo and, off in the distance, the smoldering dark bulk of Mauna Loa. Through the other window wall the Pacific glittered alluringly under a bright cloudless morning sky.

Although she was president of Vanguard Industries, Jo's office held none of the usual trappings of power. It was a modest-sized room, not imposing or huge, furnished with comfortable chairs and sofas and a small round table in the corner by the windows. No desk to form a barrier between her and her visitors. No banks of computer screens and

telephone terminals. No photographs of herself alongside the great and powerful people of the hour. There was nothing in the room to intimidate her employees, nothing except her own dominant personality and unquenchable drive.

Jo sat in an ultramodern power couch of butter-soft leather the color of light caramel. Designed to resemble an astronaut's acceleration chair, it held a complete communications console and computer terminal in its armrests. Within its innards, the chair contained equipment for massage, heat therapy, and biofeedback sessions. It molded itself to the shape of her body, it could swivel or tilt back to a full reclining position at the touch of a fingertip.

But Jo was sitting up straight, her back ramrod stiff, her dark eyes blazing.

The two men sitting side by side on the low cushioned sofa both looked unhappy, but for completely different reasons. Healy, chief scientist of Vanguard Industries, wore a loose, short-sleeved white shirt over his shorts. Archie Madigan, the corporation's top lawyer, one of Jo's former lovers and still a trusted adviser, was in a more conservative shirt jacket of navy blue and soft pink slacks: the business uniform of the twenty-first-century executive male.

Jo was in uniform, too. For nearly twenty years she had worked and schemed her way to the top of Vanguard Industries. She had brains and energy and a driving, consuming ambition. And she never hesitated to use her femininity to help climb the corporate ladder of power the way some men use their skill at golf or their willingness to lick boots. She was wearing a one-piece zipsuit with tight Velcro cuffs at the ankles and wrists and a mesh midriff. Chocolate brown, it clung lovingly to her tall, lush figure. The zipper that led down the suit's front was opened just enough to suggest how interesting it would be to slide it down the rest of the way.

Healy ran a hand through his thinning sandy hair. "It's been a week now and he--"

"Six days," Jo snapped.

The biophysicist nodded. "Six days. Right. But he shows no signs of awakening."

"We've postponed the board meeting twice now, Jo," said Madigan. He was a handsome rascal with a poet's tongue, eyes that twinkled, and a grin that could look rueful

and inviting at the same time. This morning it was almost entirely rueful.

"I won't go before the board until we know," she insisted.

"Mrs. Nillson," Healy said softly, "you've got to face the possibility that he may never wake up."

Jo frowned at him, as much from being called by her husband's name as from his pessimism.

"He is physically recovered, isn't he?" she demanded.

"Yes. . . ."

"And the EEGs show normal brain activity."

With a shake of his head, Healy replied, "But that doesn't mean anything at all, Mrs. Nillson. We're dealing with a human being here, not just a bunch of graphs. All the tests show that he is alive, his body is functioning normally, his brain is active--but he remains in a coma and we don't know why!"

Jo saw that the scientist was getting himself upset. She made herself smile at him. "Back when I was a student at MIT, we used to say that hell for an engineer is when all the instruments check but nothing works."

Healy raised his hands, as if in supplication. "That's where we are. This is the first time anybody's ever brought a human being back from cryonic suspension--"

Madigan broke in, "The chairman of the board isn't going to sit in cryonic suspension. You can't dip your darling husband in liquid nitrogen and put him on hold."

Fixing him with a grim-faced stare, Jo said, "Archie, I'm getting tired--"

A chime sounded softly from the padded armrest of her couch. Jo cut off Madigan's reply with a quick movement of one hand as she touched a pad on the armrest's keyboard with the-other.

"I told them not to disturb us unless he showed some change."

On the wall across the room, the glareless plastic cover over a Mary Cassatt painting of three women admiring a child turned opaque and then took on the three-dimensional form of Jo's secretary. The young woman was open-mouthed with excitement.

"He's awake!" she said breathlessly. "He just opened his eyes and got up and started walking around his room."

Jo could feel her own heart quicken. "Let me see," she demanded.

Instantly the secretary disappeared, and the three of them saw a view of Keith Stoner standing naked as a newborn by the window of his small room, staring intently out at the view.

"My God, he really is awake," Healy whispered, almost in awe.

"I didn't realize he was so big," said Madigan.

Jo shot him a glance.

"Tall, I mean."

She suppressed the urge to laugh. He's alive and awake and just like he was all those years ago. I've done it! I've brought him back!

She studied Keith Stoner intently, wordlessly, eyes picking out every detail of the face and body that she had known so intimately eighteen years ago.

Eighteen years, Jo thought. Suddenly her hands flew to her face. Eighteen years! He hasn't aged a moment and I'm eighteen years older.