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top—and there was no guarantee it would have been—it would still take Montego twenty-odd minutes to get here.
    Louise thought she should get the man out of his wet clothes. She reached for the front of his charcoal gray shirt, but—
    But there were no buttons—and no zipper. It didn’t appear to be a pullover, even though it was collarless, and—
    Ah, there they were! Hidden snaps running along the tops of the broad shoulders. Louise tried to undo them, but they didn’t budge. She glanced down at the man’s pants. They seemed to be dark olive green, although they might have been much lighter if dry. But there was no belt; instead, a series of snaps and folds encircled the waist.
    It suddenly occurred to Louise that the man might be suffering from the bends. The detector chamber was thirty meters deep; who knew how far down he’d gone or how quickly he’d come up? Air pressure this much below Earth’s surface was 130 percent of normal. At that moment, Louise couldn’t figure out how that would affect whether someone got the bends, but it did mean the man would now be receiving a higher concentration of oxygen than he would have up top, and that surely must be to the good.
    There was nothing to do now but wait; the man was breathing, and his pulse had strengthened. Louise finally had a chance to really look at the stranger’s face. It was broad but not flat; rather, the cheekbones trailed back at an angle. And his nose was gargantuan, almost the size of a clenched fist. The man’s lower jaw was covered by a thick, dark blond beard, and straight blond hair was plastered across his forehead. His facial features were vaguely Eastern European, but with Scandinavian rather than olive coloring. The wide-spaced eyes were closed.
    “Where could he possibly have come from?” asked Paul, now sitting cross-legged on the deck next to the man. “No one should have been able to get down here, and—”
    Louise nodded. “And even if he could, how would he get inside the sealed detector chamber?” She paused and brushed hair out of her eyes—realizing for the first time that she’d lost her hair net while swimming in the tank. “You know, the heavy water is ruined. If he survives this stunt, he’ll face one heck of a lawsuit.”
    Louise found herself shaking her head. Who could this man be, anyway? Maybe a Native Canadian zealot—an Indian who felt the mining was interfering with sacred ground. But the man’s hair was blond, rare among Natives. Nor was this a youthful prank gone bad; the guy looked to be about thirty-five.
    It was possible he was a terrorist or an antinuclear protester. But although Atomic Energy of Canada Limited had indeed supplied the heavy water, there was no nuclear work done at this site.
    Whoever he was, Louise reflected, if he did finally die from his injuries, he’d be a prime candidate for the Darwin Awards. This was classic evolution-in-action stuff: a person who did something so incredibly stupid it cost him his own life.

Chapter 2
    Louise Benoit heard the sound of the opening door; someone was coming out onto the deck above the detector chamber. “Yoo-hoo!” she called, getting Dr. Montego’s attention. “Over here!”
    Reuben Montego, a Jamaican-Canadian in his mid-thirties, hurried over to them. He shaved his head completely bald—meaning he was the only person allowed into SNO without a hair net—but, like everyone else, he still had to wear a hardhat. The doctor crouched down, rotated the injured man’s left wrist, and—
    “What the heck is that?” said Reuben, in his accented voice.
    Louise saw it, too: something set, apparently, into the skin of the man’s wrist, a high-contrast, matte-finish rectangular screen about eight centimeters long and two across. It was displaying a string of symbols, the leftmost of which was changing about once per second. Six small beads, each a different color, formed a line beneath the display, and something—maybe a lens—was positioned