Vitals Read Free Page B

tells me you're looking for new kinds of xenos," Dave said. "Ugly little spuds."
    "Interesting little spuds," I said.
    Nearly every dive in these areas found xenos--xenophyophores, the single-celled tramps of the seafloor, some as big as a clenched fist. Xenos are distantly related to amoebae and resemble scummy bath sponges. They use sand as ballast, glue their waste into supports, and coat their slimy exteriors with debris as they roll around on the ocean floor. Their convoluted, tube-riddled bodies hide many passengers: isopods, bacteria, predatory mollusks. True monsters, but wonderful and harmless. "What's so interesting about xenos?" Dave asked.
    "I have a snapshot taken by some post docs two months ago. They found what they called 'sea daisy fields' north of the new vents, but they didn't have a good fix on the position because one of the transponders had stopped sending. I examined a frozen specimen two months ago at the University of Washington, but it was all busted up, membranes ruptured. A specimen in formalin was nothing but gray pudding."
    Dave had already gotten a briefing on our dive. This was telling him nothing more than what he knew already. "Yuck," he said. "So what's it to Owen?"
    "Right." I smiled.
    Dave lifted his eyebrows. just mind my own business and drive," he said, and rubbed his finger under his nose. "But I do have a master's in ocean biochemistry. Maybe I can render some expert assistance when the tine comes."
    "I hope so," I said. is Owen interested in immortality? That's what I've heard;'
    Dave said.
    "I really don't know." I closed my eyes and pretended to nap. Dave didn't disturb me when he ran his check at five thousand feet. I don't think he liked my attitude any more than I liked his.
    Owen Montoya wanted to be a wallflower at the Reaper's ball.
    That's what had brought us together.
    Set the Wayback machine, Sherman.
    Three weeks before, a slender little blue helicopter, bright as a fresh ,
    bug, had buzzed me over Puget Sound to Anson Island. It was six o'clock on a Northwestern spring evening and the weather was gloriously lovely. I felt more alive than I had in a year, since the divorce from Julia.
    1 am normally a nervous flier, especially in choppers, but the young, square-jawed pilot, his eyes wrapped in metallic blue shades,
    was reassuringly deft, and I was too busy enjoying the view.
    "I was wearing my powder-blue suit;' Philip Marlowe tells us in The Big Sleep, "with dark blue shirt, tie, and display handkerchief,
    black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them.
    I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it... I was calling on four million dollars?"
    I wore a black-cotton sports jacket and pants, wrinkled white cotton dress shirt with black tie, high black socks, shiny black brogues that much was the same and I was calling on forty billion dollars.
    Owen Montoya could have bought and sold the Sternwoods a hundred times over, even accounting for inflation.
    I had worn that same outfit when visiting other angels, financial
    "backers visionary enough or cracked enough--sometimes I had a hard time telling which--to spend small fortunes on a microbiological Ponce de Leon. I hadn't done too badly; my fancy footwork had kept me funded for the past five years.
    I was no fraud. If the angels were smart, they sensed that I almost had the goods. If they were stupid--like Mr. Song--they bought futures in snake-bladder extract.
    I was very close. Just a little cash and a lot of very hard work, and I could jump the wall around Eden and find the ultimate treasure: vim and vigor for a thousand or ten thousand years, maybe longer, barring accidents or geological upheaval.
    It was an amazing thought, and it never failed to give me chills.
    The chopper performed a smooth bank to the north, and we flew over Blakely Point on Bainbridge Island. East of our flight path, midway between Bainbridge and Seattle, a cruise ship posed like a serene and well-fed lady on the