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every electronic toy conceivable in that room, too, and I'm guessing one of them monitors what goes on in there. Like with his women."
    "How many of those does he have?"
    "Quite a few, but none that sleep over much, thank Allah."
    David stood and stretched. "I think I may have met one of them. Japanese. Tall, slender, late twenties, with a little dragon tattoo on her ankle? She honed in on me right after you left. Saw me with you. Maybe. . . saw you with Nasheed ?"
    "Like I said, quite a few. Who knows."
    He took a walking tour of Nasheed's framed photographs, tastefully displayed beneath track lighting along two walls. One was an aerial view of the still uncompleted Universe development below The World. " Nasheed thinking of buying a piece of the heavens while he's at it?" he asked. "Maybe one of the rays of the Sun?"
    "He's mentioned it."
    "You haven't really mentioned your own family situation yet, though."
    Etherton coughed. "Yeah? Well, maybe because it’s called divorce. And if you're wondering it has to do my coming over here for longer and longer stints, you're probably right." He paused. "Actually, we've been drifting quite a while. No rudder really, except our work." He sighed. “And, yes, she’s still a lawyer. Divorce lawyer, ironically. But she didn't crucify me, though. Used kid gloves. Even called me a kid. A child , I mean. For doing this. And our son, Ronny? He took her side, too. Can't say I blame him. Guess I had it coming for a long time, what with all the administration overtime I put in on the mountain. Not to mention scope time, when I could."
    David stopped in front of the gold framed close-up image of a sunspot, with hundreds of intricately whorled and contiguous convection cells staring up from the photosphere like dark eyes. "You were good," he said, recalling that even the smallest striations within such plasma cells measured a hundred kilometers across. "Enjoyed your work."
    "And you didn't?"
    David shrugged. "Oh, I did, most aspects of it. While it lasted.”
    "You said you. . . reached bottom, though. How was that even possible? Clinical depression, do you mean?"
    "I don’t know. I couldn’t see anything really wrong with my life." Not in visible wavelengths, anyway. "I could even have kept working, doing something, if not building spectrometers or spin-casting telescope mirrors." He paused. "Do you remember April Ellis?"
    "Sure, she was on an imaging team I consulted at Keck, and had a hand in setting the parameters for the New Horizons survey on Kitt Peak, too. She's at LBT now, I heard. Smart lady."
    "Pretty, too."
    After a moment of silence, David turned to see that Doug's jaw had gone askew, his tongue moving along the backside of his upper teeth. Finally, he said, "She kinda resembles someone, now that I think of it. You don't. . . have romantic inclinations, do you?"
    David returned to the couch, sat, and leaned forward. An odd sudden pressure behind his eyes. He closed them, then rubbed them, taking in and letting out a deep breath. "Not anymore."
    "You'll get over your loss, David, trust me."
    "I don't know what’s wrong with me."
    "Sure you do. Isn’t it obvious? But hey, the past is past. Look on the bright side. You don’t have money worries, like everyone else. Not with that patent you got. No debts, no. . ."
    "No," he agreed, “I guess you’re right.”
    Perhaps sensing the need for a change of subject, Doug finally coaxed from him sentiments about the American dream shifting overseas while its source dissolved into illusion. He said something, in reply, about reaching for dwindling fruit, as though in the Garden of Eden. What he didn’t say was what he couldn’t. Like how much was really left for someone who’d saved both money and time all his adult life, out of fear. Indicating the photographs he'd been examining, Doug changed the subject again by asking, "Did you notice that there's no photos of his family over there? His