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ex-bimbo in ways he had never before contemplated. Those memories did not please him much; the exhausted Mills had the distinct impression that, he’d spent the night with a dirty joke. His cold rage on learning her deception had left Eve frightened and astonished; she'd thought the whole business would amuse him. She had never repeated her mistake on Mills but still found lobotol her chief procurer for the one-nighters she chose like a young Messalina.
    Deliberately abrading a troubled spot: "Anyhow, I don't keep my slaves endlessly hooked on heavy shit—like
some
folks we know," she arched one brow, squinted the other eye.
    Icily: "If there were any other way to pursue the most awesome breathrough in recorded history,
believe
me,—I'd do it."
    "Without giving anything away to John Q. or our glorious government, you mean."
    Mills, now standing, showed every sign of truncating their old debate. "Eve, if you can keep your great wanton ass out of trouble at the top—and if I can get the San Rafael Desert lab to come through for us—you and I will
be
the glorious government, for all practical purposes. I know you're laying poor strung-out Chabrier every time you visit the lab; considering the stuff he pollutes his system with, I don't think your lobotol could do him any additional harm. Be circumspect; that's all."
    "I don't need lobotol with Chabrier," she said, feeling that her charm had been questioned.
    "Thai hash, then," Mills sighed; "whatever. I must get back upstairs; thanks for the warning on individually tailored messages, I'm sure you're right."
    Her languid purr followed him to the door. "With enough lobotol in a metro water supply you wouldn't need tailored messages, luv."
    "Now you're being absurd, Eve. Only half the population would be tuned to FBN and besides, a steady diet of judgment suppressants would put Mexicans in New Denver inside a month."
    "But I can see you've given it a lot of thought," she said, and her cruel cupid lips mimed a juicy kiss of parting.
    Mills strode to the executive lift, exasperated.
    She hadn't even said whether she'd go to Santa Fe. But Mills knew her cravings; she'd be there, all right. He made a mental note to check the remote monitors at the desert lab by way of his private access code. Eve Simpson was the only soul running loose, besides himself, who knew just how Marengo Chabrier's lab was run—and for what purpose.

Chapter 9
    Cloistered in Utah's San Rafael desert region was Mills's most secure research facility, where need-to-know was as strictly monitored as on any proving ground in the world. There, Mills had carefully assembled a group of the technological elite whose drug requirements made them tractable. From Marengo Chabrier, the French program administrator, to the illegal aliens, all lived out their days behind particle-beam fences within a trackless waste. Their one goal: to find some way to scale up the mass synthesizer which China had developed during the war.
    All but a few Chinese researchers had been liquidated by their own leaders, and only Boren Mills had a working model of the device. He had killed to get it. No larger than an overnight bag, the synthesizer had powered the reaction engine of a tiny Sino submarine, also providing oxygen and simple nutrients for the hibernating crew.
    Now, twenty-seven months into his scale-up program. Mills rejoiced and writhed. Chabrier, physicist-turned-administrator and a druggie of broad scope, boasted that the little Chinese synthesizer could now produce small amounts of organic dyes, pheromones, heavy alcohols, and other complex chemicals using plain air as conversion input mass. But an inherent limitation existed in the size of the gadget's toroidal output chamber. The Chinese had already built the thing with its maximum output, and neither Chabrier nor subtler asiatic minds in the lab could even posit, let alone demonstrate, a rig that could do any better.
    Within a few weeks, the lab would try out the new