Book Description
2017: NEAR THE PLANET URANUSAfter a deep-space satellite mysteriously stops transmitting, the Hubble III telescope picks up a startling image. Astronomers don't know what the strange object is--only that it orbits past Earth every two millennia.Meanwhile, archaeologist Leo Cross has discovered peculiar layers of black residue at dig sites around the globe. Stranger still, these thin bands occur like clockwork every 2,006 years, coinciding with some of the world's darkest moments in history.We have six months to prepare for the next arrival. This time we know something is coming. This time we have weapons to defend us.This time we'll be wrong . . . again.A science fiction saga set on near-future Earth, THE TENTH PLANET challenges our basic beliefs about the solar system and ultimately our place in the universe. With cutting-edge astronomy, blockbuster action, and high drama, the mystery is revealed in a trilogy of adventures.



From the Inside Flap
2017: NEAR THE PLANET URANUS

After a deep-space satellite mysteriously stops transmitting, the Hubble III telescope picks up a startling image. Astronomers don't know what the strange object is--only that it orbits past Earth every two millennia.

Meanwhile, archaeologist Leo Cross has discovered peculiar layers of black residue at dig sites around the globe. Stranger still, these thin bands occur like clockwork every 2,006 years, coinciding with some of the world's darkest moments in history.

We have six months to prepare for the next arrival. This time we know something is coming. This time we have weapons to defend us.

This time we'll be wrong . . . again.

A science fiction saga set on near-future Earth, THE TENTH PLANET challenges our basic beliefs about the solar system and ultimately our place in the universe. With cutting-edge astronomy, blockbuster action, and high drama, the mystery is revealed in a trilogy of adventures.


About the Author
Dean Wesley Smith was a founder of the well-respected small press Pulphouse. He has written a number of novels--both his own and as tie-in projects--including Laying the Music to Rest and X-Men: The Jewels of Cyttorak.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is the Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning former editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She turned to writing full-time two years ago. She, too, has written a number of original and tie-in novels, including the Fey series and Star Wars: The New Rebellion.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
August 16, 2017: 16:04 Universal Time
240 Days Until Arrival

International Space Monitoring Buoy Number Six was alone. Since it had left Earth over three years ago, it had been alone, traveling through the depths of space to the seventh planet, Uranus, then settling into a wide elliptical orbit. For the past six months, ISMB 6 had faithfully done its job, taking readings of the surface of the planet, using its cameras and sensors and equipment to explore the outer reaches of the solar system.

ISMB 6 was a hardworking little craft, although from the outside it seemed like little more than a piece of space junk in an area devoid of anything else man-made. A silver craft, the diameter of a small bedroom, its surface was cluttered with a myriad of dishes, antennas, and measuring devices, making it look like a spider. On the side of the craft, in one of the only small, open areas of the main body, were the letters ISMB followed by the number 6. Under the letters were a dozen tiny stencils of flags, indicating the countries that had helped in the joint project.

Out here, everything familiar seemed remote. Even the sun was nothing more than a distant hole of light in the massive field of stars, not even strong enough to cast real shadows, or supply any real warmth.

Not that ISMB 6 cared. It was one of seven buoys designed by American and Japanese engineers, and sent outward by a consortium of twelve countries, all believing that the heavens needed to be monitored as the seas were once monitored. The early scientists saw the ISMB system as a twofold project: the buoys would act as ways to gather information in deep space, and they would also serve as the markers of Earth's boundaries.

Surprisingly, the nations making up the consortium did not want to consider the boundary issue. To them, having boundaries meant defending them, sending weapons into space, perhaps even developing a fleet.

Such things are not necessary, the politicians said, unless there is a perceived threat. And of course, there was no threat and no hint of one ever appearing. The politicians believed we were alone. The scientists weren't sure.

So the consortium took its funding and built the seven buoys, launching them over a three-year period. Three buoys orbited the three largest planets in the solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Two buoys were stationed over the sun's poles, holding positions above and below the plane of the solar system at a distance from the sun about the same as Mars. The seventh was completing the last year of its flight to catch and orbit Pluto.

All seven sent a constant stream of data Earthward, powered by batteries designed to last thirty years, even without solar reenergizing. The data was received at stations all over Earth and relayed to a classroom-sized area three floors under a complex outside of Sydney, Australia. The complex housed, at times, upwards of a hundred scientists from around the world, studying on-site the information being sent back from the buoys.

At the complex, ISMB 6 was the only buoy that hadn't been assigned a nickname. The nicknames suggested by the English-speaking scientists were too crude to use, even accidentally, at press conferences, and besides, the jokes did not translate well into the complex's other approved languages. As a result, the scientists who tried to create a shred of personality in their tools imagined ISMB 6 as a serious, unimaginative little worker, who could be relied upon at all times.

ISMB 6 wasn't aware of any of this. ISMB 6 really wasn't aware of anything. It simply went about its job, orbiting Uranus, sending telemetry back to Earth. It's entire mission was routine, as routine as a pioneering mission could be until ISMB 6's third orbit of the day, a day artificially measured in Earth time.

As ISMB 6 rose slightly above and beyond the dark, cold surface of Uranus, a blackness seemed to loom near the little craft, almost as if an invisible cloud of soot was filling space.

Then, with a weak, reflected flash of light from the darkness, all data stopped flowing toward Earth.

All instruments shut down.

ISMB 6, the faithful, hardworking little buoy, was dead.





August 16, 2017: 4:56 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time
240 Days Until Arrival

Orange and yellow bands of light cut through the morning mist as the sun peeked above the Coast Mountain Range. The morning air had a thick dampness that felt more appropriate to winter than to August, yet by noon the chill would be gone and the temperature would hit eighty.

Dr. Edwin Bradshaw ducked out of his tent and pulled his jacket tight around his shoulders, shivering slightly in the cool morning air. A mile to the west the Pacific Ocean rumbled as the surf hit the beach. He couldn't see the water--the tall pine trees that surrounded him prevented that--but he could hear the ocean. Its sound was constant, sometimes a low murmur and sometimes an angry explosive pounding. And sometimes this rumble.

He found that the ocean's constant conversation soothed him. He knew he would miss it, as he always did, when he had to go back to the Valley. He would miss all of this. He was lucky to have ended up here, in Oregon, rather than some podunk university somewhere, a place with no credentials and no budget to send him anywhere. Oregon State University liked his background, despite the controversies, and for the most part, the administration left him alone. He was able to choose his dig sites, and his assistants, and use university funds to continue his research. Fortunately for him, his research centered on the Native American tribes of the Oregon Coast, and he got to spend his summers, and an occasional winter, in what he considered to be the most beautiful place on Earth.

But he was getting older. The morning chill got into his bones these days. In September, he would turn sixty, and lately, he had begun to feel it. Sleeping in a tent, even with a thick sleeping bag and an air mattress (something he wouldn't have considered in the old days), left him stiff and sore. It took a few minutes of movement every morning before his joints stopped creaking.

No one stirred in the dozen other tents around the small clearing. Twenty-four Oregon State University students had signed up for this dig, more than any other summer. He was having trouble just keeping them all busy. The dig site wasn't big enough for all of them to work at once.

He grinned. He always woke before his students. On the second day of the dig, most of them had groaned their way through the work, and he hadn't felt old at all. These days students got no exercise, except for the federally mandated stuff in the public schools. Remotes, handheld computers, and the new personal assistants, which were little more than headless robots, ensured that anyone who wanted to spend his life in a chair could do so without any effort at all.

Bradshaw was an old-fashioned guy, old enough to remember when kids spent their summers outside playing baseball and kick the can until their parents forced them inside. Old enough to remember when color television was an unusual thing. Old enough to remember only three television channels--all free--and changing those channels by twisting a dial. When he was a little, little boy, it had taken him two hands to go from one channel to the other.

Now some of his students brought their own televisions with them, tiny things that attached to the wrist and changed channels with a soft verbal command. On the first day of the dig, he had Kelly Flynn, his graduate assistant, help him with what he called the Great Electronics Search. He confiscated most of his students' "necessities"--generally, watches that served as small computers, with television, radio, gaming, and Internet capability. He wanted them to focus on the lives of Native Americans before white settlers found this beautiful place. His theory was that if his students were able to think like the tribe that filled this area, they would do better when they searched through the earth for remnants of that life.

He hated the day of the Great Electronics Search. It made him the most unpopular man in camp for the first week of the dig. But he had done it often enough to know that by the end of the summer, his students would thank him. They would say things like "I really got to enjoy the woods, Doc. I'd never done that before."

And never would again, he would wager.

Most of those students would be angry if they knew that Bradshaw always brought his own electronic equipment to the dig site. They would be even more upset if they knew that he spent part of his evenings on-line, keeping track of current research. His favorite on-line site was a place he lurked, a place where some of the best archaeological minds of this generation argued theory in terms that were as far beyond these students as computers were beyond the tribes that once lived in this very spot. Bradshaw's only contribution to the site--for that matter, to most archaeological publications, print or on-line--was to list the location of his dig and the reason he was excavating the site.

Imagine his surprise when he was awakened this morning by the vibration of his watch against his wrist. He had only set that private computer alarm for messages marked urgent, be they phone, fax, or e-mail.

This one was an e-mail message, sent only a few hours after he had updated the dig information for the archaeological site. It was from Dr. Leo Cross. Cross was not the world's most famous archaeologist. Bradshaw had no respect for the famous people, the brand names, to whom recognition was more important than research. They usually let their grad students handle the hard work, and then took credit for the findings. No. Cross was the best-known archaeological historian among his peers. They all envied his intuitive ability. It was almost as if the earth spoke to him, revealing to him secrets that none of the others could ever hope to hear.

The thing that made Cross so very very good was that he did the things that other archaeologists hoped to do, and probably would never achieve. Cross used the myths of history to find actual archaeological sites. And Cross hadn't just done that once or twice. He'd succeeded dozens of times, which to Bradshaw meant that Cross had more going for him than just luck.

Cross worked at Georgetown University and had, in the last fifteen years, developed its archaeology department from one whose reputation was in decline into one of the best in the world. Sometimes Bradshaw wished he were young again, or young enough to justify going to Georgetown for some postdoc work. He would have loved to spend a semester listening to Dr. Leo Cross.

Bradshaw stretched, wishing the tall pines let some of the sun's warmth through. Later in the day he knew he would be thankful for those trees, but now he wanted just a little of the morning sun to take the chill off.

But maybe the chill he was feeling had nothing to do with the lack of sunlight. Maybe it had more to do with the message he had received from Cross.

Already, Bradshaw could recite it from memory:
Dr. Bradshaw:

Greetings. I see you are working a dig on the Oregon Coast this summer. Would you please inform me if you find a thin layer of black residue covering your site at any level?

Thank you for your consideration.

Leo Cross  
The message had Georgetown's stamp, and Bradshaw used his EncryptionChek program to confirm that the message also used Cross's personal code. This had been sent by the man himself, not some automatic program sending a standard e-mail message every time someone updated a dig site on the archaeological bulletin board.

Cross wanted information, and before Bradshaw replied, he wanted to make sure he had some to give.

He glanced once more at the tents. No one stirred. Thank heavens. He really didn't want to discuss this message with anyone, not even his indispensable graduate assistant.

Bradshaw walked quietly through the tents and down the worn trail toward the site. The dig area was staked and roped off, carefully detailed so that any discovery would be exactly placed in a numbered grid. Even the tiniest scrap of artifact could be traced back to an exact location, both in direction and depth, long after it was removed.

The site was under a rock bluff that had sheltered bands of Native Americans from the cold winds in the winter, yet allowed them to remain close to the ocean and the nearby river. This dig was focused on the Tillamook, who were native to the area. Bradshaw had chosen the area because he knew, from some of the aerial photographs and the migration patterns of the tribe, that his students would find something here. But he didn't expect it to be anything important.

Bradshaw already knew a great deal about the Tillamook, and had excavated several other sites relating to them, one that got mired in yet another controversy when his students discovered skeletal remains and the local Native American tribes, most of whom knew nothing about the Tillamook and their dead culture, had demanded that the dig end while they researched Tillamook cultural values to know if Bradshaw was violating an ancient burial site.

He had already known that he wasn't violating anything--the body had no evidence of traditional Tillamook death rituals. Instead, the skull was cracked and a large section in the back was depressed, indicating that either this guy had fallen and hit his head or that he had been murdered. Eventually Bradshaw won this argument and continued the dig, but not without some personal pain. The fight with the local tribes had inspired The Oregonian to investigate Bradshaw's past.

That was the thing that surprised him the most about the message from Cross. No archaeologist with a good reputation had spoken to Bradshaw in twenty years, let alone asked for his help. He supposed he was flattered by Cross's message. And intrigued. But he felt something else, something he didn't want to feel, especially at his age: just a little bit of hope.

Bradshaw passed the dig site and crossed behind it, toward a thin Douglas fir where he had had the students dig their first test hole. The test hole went very deep--this one went deeper than it should have, since the students were being overly cautious. This was called a depth-gauge dig, and it was done so that he could examine the layers and see how deep the dig site had to go to reach the ideal location for their search. Bradshaw's students were going back three to five hundred years, but they had dug the test hole so deep that he figured it went down five thousand years.

He smiled as he remembered double-checking their work. "No need to go any deeper," he had said. "Much of the Northwest Pacific Coast culture was just forming right about the point you're at."

The students had stopped as if they had been burned. Apparently they hadn't realized that you didn't have to dig five hundred feet down to get to five hundred years. "This was why," he had said to his students on their first day of class, "you actually dig instead of read about digging. Archaeology is a hands-on science, just like all the others. Knowing theory only takes you so far."

Now he was glad they had gone down so deep. Because he remembered other test holes from other digs in the area, and they all showed what he thought this one would show: the black layer Dr. Cross had been looking for. Only the layer was thousands of years old.

Bradshaw crouched, hearing his knees crack, and knowing it would take some work to get out of this position. He peered into the hole, and saw exactly what he remembered: a very thin black line several feet down. He knew without checking that the five other depth-gauge holes would also contain this black line. It was about an eighth of an inch thick and in the same level in each hole.

Considering the depth of the line, his guess was that at least four thousand years ago something had created this black layer. He knew from the look of the layer that it was caused by an exogenic process, but he hadn't cared what that process was. It was outside his area of concern. When a student had asked him, he had said that he thought, without testing, that a massive fire had gone through the region. And that was all the thought he had given it, until this morning's message.

Bradshaw stared at the thin, black line cutting across the thick dirt of the wall. Why would someone like Dr. Leo Cross want to know about such a line? Tracking volcanic eruptions? Large regional fires? Neither seemed likely, considering Dr. Cross's reputation.

But clearly something interesting to Cross had laid down that line of black soot four thousand years before.

Bradshaw shrugged and pulled his coat even tighter around his middle against the chill. Then he turned and headed back to his tent. He didn't trust voice commands for this message. He wanted to make sure each word was the one he intended, no misunderstandings, no misspellings. He would write to Leo Cross, and he would use his full-sized keyboard to do it.

This was the closest Bradshaw had been to cutting-edge science since his disgrace twenty years earlier. And he was still ambitious enough not to want to screw this up.




August 16, 2017: 9:23 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
240 Days Until Arrival

The black racquetball flashed past, just out of Leo Cross's reach. He twisted, his momentum slamming him into the hardwood wall, shoulder first. He rolled along the wall, ending up with his back against the wood, breathing heavily. Sweat dripped from his forehead and down his bare arms. His T-shirt was soaked and his heart was beating like it wanted to get out and run away from the torture of this racquetball court. Forty-six years old and he was more out of shape than he had ever been in his life. How had he let that happen?

"Leo?" Doug Mickelson said, leaning against the other wall, clearly breathing and sweating just as hard. "You all right?"

"Yeah," Leo said. "I just can't believe you beat me. Have you been practicing?"

"As if I have the time." Mickelson wiped his forehead with the back of his arm, and then shook his arm once. Leo was glad he was on the other side of the court. He knew that Mickelson maneuver--he'd seen it on their first day of college twenty-eight years ago in, of all things, a racquetball class they were taking for an easy PE credit. They had been friends ever since.

"They don't have racquetball courts in Southeast Asia?" Leo asked. He had his hands resting on his knees, and he was still breathing hard. Served him right, going after this game as energetically as he had, after not playing for three months.

"I think the Sultan of Brunei has a racquetball court," Mickelson said. "But then, he can afford anything."

"You should know," Leo said. "Check it out. Research. Tell them while you're handling the latest diplomatic crisis that you need a racquetball break."

Mickelson grinned. It was the same boyish grin he'd always had, one that hadn't been on his face much since he'd been appointed secretary of state. "Yeah, right," he said. "And have you fly in at someone else's expense so I have someone to play with." He glanced down at his running shorts and filthy tennis shoes. "Somehow I don't think this is proper attire in Brunei."

"Have you ever been to Brunei?"



Mickelson's grin faded. "I think it's the only place I haven't been. I thought I'd love this job, I really did."

"And you do." Leo had finally caught a breath. He stood, already feeling the workout in his muscles.

"Not like I thought I would, Leo. Not when we were in school. Remember those mock debates? Remember how hyped I would get?"

"I never understood why you liked it then," Leo said. "It seemed dry to me."

"It's not dry." Mickelson picked the ball up and held it in his right hand. "It's fascinating work. It always has been. It's just ... so much is at stake. So much is always at stake."

They had had variations on this conversation before. It was one of the benefits of being old friends. Leo knew that Mickelson talked to him in ways he didn't talk to anyone else. He couldn't.

"You knew that going in. Hell, you've been flirting around this level of government for a long time."

"Flirting around the corners is not the same as being the one in charge." Mickelson glanced at the ball. He seemed about to say something, and then stopped himself.

Leo watched him, waiting. Leo was a bit out of his depth. He didn't entirely understand the differences Mickelson was talking about. The kind of power Mickelson had was something that Leo couldn't get close to, and didn't want to even if he had the opportunity.

Then he shivered. If his research turned out, he might need to make use of such power.

He shook off the thought. "Four months is a long time to go from crisis to crisis."

Mickelson smiled. This time it was the press briefing smile. "I was home for a few days."

"Not long enough to play racquetball."

"Long enough to call you and cancel." He shook his head. "Thank God for the plane. You know, if I didn't have time on that jet to meet my staff and concentrate on the next country, I wouldn't know what time zone I was in, let alone what U.S. interests were in the area."

"You've always known what our interests are. Everywhere," Leo said.

Mickelson nodded. "True enough. But going from a conversation on the International Cloning Treaty violations in China to brokering the latest economic crisis in Greece requires a different set of protocols, different knowledge, different skills. You know, I'm very good with the Chinese."

"I've heard."

"But the Greeks baffle me every time. You'd think I'd do better with them."

"Why?"

"Because of the influence of their culture on ours."

"Their ancient culture," Leo said. The conversation had now moved into his specialty. "A hundred years makes a huge difference in our own culture. Imagine talking to someone who survived the influenza pandemic of 1918 and trying to explain how conditions helped it spread. You can't expect the Greeks to be anything like their ancient ancestors."

"I suppose not." Mickelson sighed. "You caught me on a bad day, Leo. I guess we should have waited until I was back for a week before we had our racquetball date."

"Only to have you cancel again because of another terrorist incident in Milan? No thanks."

"I hope that never happens again." Mickelson started across the court. "I'm supposed to be back for at least a month. Maybe as out of shape as we are, we should schedule twice a week."

Leo smiled. "Whatever you want, Mr. Secretary."

"You're not going anywhere?"

"Research is keeping me home." Leo stood up completely, and walked to the glass door. On the bleachers sat Hank, the head of Mickelson's Secret Service detail. Two more Secret Service officers stood outside the private door leading into the racquetball courts. Since Mickelson had become secretary of state, privacy had become a thing of the past.

At first Leo felt uncomfortable even talking to his friends with the Secret Service around. But Mickelson pretended they weren't there, and Leo felt that if Mickelson was comfortable discussing personal matters around these men, then Leo could be to. Still, every time he came out of the racquetball court to see a burly man in a black suit, with the most sophisticated electronic equipment on his wrist, and a gun in a shoulder holster ruining the line of the man's jacket, he was astonished. Astonished because, in his mind, he and Mickelson were still students at Columbia, their theoretical discussions simply continuations of all-night pizza sessions at the dorm, the ups and downs in their personal lives just more grist for the conversation mill.

To think that, in twenty-eight years, Leo had risen to the top of his profession and Mickelson had risen to the top of his made Leo feel like a grown-up. He wondered if this was how his parents' generation felt when they woke up one day to discover their friends were successful bankers and doctors, and a man their age was president of the United States.

Perhaps that was what got Leo the most. The president was only five years older than he was, and Mickelson--the guy who had once called himself king of the mosh pits, who had gotten his nipples pierced on a dare--was now secretary of state for the United States. A man who wore Saville Row suits because they told leaders of foreign countries that he was conservative and cautious despite his relative youth (forty-six, apparently, was considered babyhood in international politics).

Leo himself had reached the age where anyone under thirty called him "sir"--and rightly so, since he could have fathered most of them. He hadn't fathered anyone, however, and he hadn't married. He had dedicated his entire adult life to his work, and he didn't see that changing. Archaeology combined the best of all the sciences. He had to know chemistry and biology and physics, as well as geology and paleontology. In the last year, he'd learned more about astronomy than he ever thought he would, and he'd been to a lot of classes and meetings in archaeoastronomy, a growing branch of his own field.

Yet the more he learned the more he realized he didn't know. And that worried him. He was beginning to think he was running out of time.

As Leo pushed the glass door open, he said, "Hey, Hank."

Hank nodded, just as Leo expected him to. In the years that Hank had been assigned to Mickelson, Leo hadn't managed to get more than a "Yes, sir," and "No, sir" out of the man. There was no way of telling if he had enjoyed watching two middle-aged men play racquetball for the past forty minutes. There was no way of telling anything about Hank at all.

"Dr. Leo," Hank said, and Leo started. Hank had never addressed him directly before. "Your computer alarm has been buzzing off and on for the last ten minutes."

Mickelson frowned. "You should have interrupted us. It might have been something important."

"No," Leo said. "Being my secretary is not part of his job description."

Leo grabbed his towel off a lower bleacher and wiped off his face and chest. Then he wrapped the towel around his neck and picked up the watch.

Watches weren't really watches anymore, but all the trendy names like Infometer by Swatch failed to catch on. Even though watches could do everything but drive your car (and Leo sometimes wondered why someone hadn't developed a program to do that), they were still called watches. They were thick little creatures though, and the older models, like his, were bulky. He just didn't believe in upgrading every time someone improved the sound speakers. He simply waited until the upgrades were something he could use. And in the last three years, no one had thought to upgrade the business programming.

He didn't buckle the watch onto his sweaty wrist. Instead, he sat on the bleacher and called up his e-mail.

Mickelson stood beside him, toweling off. "It's kind of nice to see someone else get the urgent message these days," he said to Hank.

Hank, characteristically, didn't reply.

Leo stared at the e-mail response from Professor Edwin Bradshaw in Oregon. Part of him had hoped that he wouldn't get another e-mail like this, but the scientist in him, the part that loved discovery, was thrilled.

"Problems?" Mickelson asked.

"A pet project," Leo said. "A worrisome one."

"Something you need to talk about?" Mickelson was a good friend; he always asked that. And once or twice Leo had taken him up on it. But archaeology was not Mickelson's strong suit. He didn't understand how ancient civilizations had a relevance in modern society.

This time, though. This time, he might need to know. But Leo would pick his moment, and this certainly wasn't it.

"Actually, I might need to talk to you," Leo said, "in an official capacity."

"You're not a head of state, Leo," Mickelson said, only partially joking.

"I know," Leo said. "But sometimes you open the doors you can, not the doors you should."

"And I suppose on that cryptic statement, you're going to let this go."

Leo grinned. "Yeah." He flicked the watch to voice-activation. "Phone."

"You don't need to lean in like that," Mickelson said.

"You always tell me that," Leo said as the phone icon appeared on the tiny screen. He leaned in again. "Office."

The watch dialed his office, and he turned the switch on the side back to normal function. The phone rang, and then his secretary Bonnie picked it up. Bonnie was an elderly woman who refused to give him her age. She had raised her own children, and then her grandchildren, and then, two years before, had decided to rejoin the workforce. She'd had a lot of trouble finding a job; secretaries were a dying breed, replaced by automation and computers. Leo hated doing a lot of the work himself, even though it took nanoseconds instead of days, and he had convinced the university to find room in the department's budget for a secretary.

Leo wouldn't have gotten that luxury if he hadn't been the centerpiece of the department.

He had interviewed nearly forty highly qualified women, most of them elderly, and had finally settled on Bonnie, not because she was more qualified--there were others who were just as qualified as she was--but because she made him laugh.

"Dr. Cross's office," she said in her best schoolmarm voice.

"Dr. Cross," he said, and she burst out laughing. He had done that to her on her first day, and inadvertently launched her into a surreal conversation where she was trying to explain that Dr. Cross wasn't available, and he was trying to explain that he was Dr. Cross. Later she had called it an Abbott and Costello moment, and when he hadn't understood the reference, she introduced him to the joys of their "Who's on First" routine.

When she stopped giggling, she said, "I thought you were coming back here after your racquetball game."

"Change of plans," he said. "I need you to book me a flight to Portland, Oregon. I need to leave as soon as possible."

"Want me to bring your overnight bag to the airport?" she asked. Her question wasn't an idle one. She was booking his flight as she spoke to him, and she was efficient enough to use the conversation to gather information. Someone had once pointed out to him that in the time he spoke to her, he could have booked his own flight. But he really hated that sort of work, more than he admitted to anyone, except Bonnie.

"Depends on the flight time," he said. "I might have a chance to stop at the office and pick it up."

"Good," she said, "because you were supposed to have student conferences this afternoon. It would be nice if you were to leave the vid message canceling instead of me."

He sighed. "If I have time."

"You'll have time," she said. Then he heard a slight ping on the watch. "There. You've got a flight leaving from Dulles in three hours. You'll have time to stop."

"Nothing earlier? It'll be late afternoon by the time I reach Oregon."

"I can work miracles," she said primly, "but only on every other Thursday."

He laughed. "Thanks, Bonnie," he said. "See you in a few." Then he hung up.

Mickelson was still watching him. "I thought you said your research was keeping you here."

"It was," Leo said. "But things change at a moment's notice."

"In archaeology?" Mickelson said. "If it's been sitting there for a thousand years, what difference does another day make?"

Leo stared at him for a moment, wondering if this was the time to broach the subject. Then he shook his head slightly.

"You'd be surprised how much difference a day makes, Doug," he said. "You'd be really surprised."

FROM THE PUBLISHER