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believe I heard you mention his name."
    "Lewis," Kates said. "Ben Lewis. Everyone we asked said that he's the best. I guess he'll do. If he leaves the bottle alone, he should be all right."
    That sounded truly encouraging. She sighed again. "Is he an American?"
    Rick shrugged. "I guess. He did have kind of a southern accent."
    To Jillian's way of thinking, that pretty well nailed down the man's country of origin. She managed to keep the comment to herself.
    "He was born in the States," Kates said, "but who knows if he still considers himself an American? I believe the term is 'expatriate.' No one seemed to know how long he's been down here."
    Long enough to have gone completely tropical, Jillian would have bet. Slower, less concerned with detail. But most places in the world lacked the obsession with speed and efficiency that characterized the States, and she herself had learned to slow down when in other countries. She had been on digs in Africa among people who had no word for "time" in their language; the concept of putting themselves on a schedule would have been utterly alien to them. It had been a matter of adapt or go insane; it would be interesting to see which option Mr. Lewis had chosen.
    "He's the type who wants to run the show," Rick said. "If half of what we heard about him is true, I guess he does what he damn well pleases."
    She could tell that Rick had been impressed by this Lewis person. Her brother's taste had been frozen in mid-adolescence, however, so she decided to reserve judgment. Rick was impressed by any swaggering bully, believing machismo to be the essence of manhood. She began to lower her expectations of the guide they had hired.
    At Rick's request, she was ready at six-thirty. She knew him well enough to realize he wished she were some sort of blond bombshell who was willing to use her body to dazzle and influence this man, who had somehow impressed him, but even if she were willing to bleach her hair she just didn't have the basic material to be a bombshell. One of the requirements was voluptuousness, and Jillian fell far short of that. She'd always been glad, too, because it looked like a lot of effort to haul around the large breasts that seemed to turn men into slavering idiots.
    She was what she was: neat, trim, pleasant to look at but not a raving beauty. If anyone had asked her what her best feature was, she'd have said it was her brain.
    As a concession to the heat, however, she wore a halter-top dress; it was, in fact, the only dress she had packed. Except for the skirt and blouse she had worn on the flight down, she'd brought only sturdy trousers, shirts, and boots.
    During the taxi ride through Manaus with Rick and Kates she took the time to look around and admire what she saw. It was a beautiful city and she wished she had time to explore it, but then, she always felt that way. She never had enough time in the cities of today's world; her work was with those of past worlds—dead cities, burial grounds—trying to piece together the past so as to learn how those long-ago people had lived as well as how the human race had come to be in its present position. Archaeology tried to find the roadway humans had traveled to the present, and to learn how they had changed over the millennia. It was a puzzle she never tired of trying to solve.
    The bar she and Rick and Kates stepped into wasn't the ritziest joint she had ever been in, but neither was it the worst. She took it in stride, even the way the men at the bar all turned to survey her with hooded eyes. Had she been alone she wouldn't have entered the place except in an emergency. Still, it was dim and blessedly cool and filled with the low hum of voices. The scents of alcohol, tobacco, and sweat swirled around with the lazy movements of the two ceiling fans.
    She was flanked by Rick and Kates as they moved toward a table set against the wall, where a lone man lazed as if half asleep, an open bottle of whiskey in front of him. His