Dark Rivers of the Heart

striving for it."
        "Good." Roy smiled. "I knew you did."
        "But I don't believe it can be achieved."
        Roy's smile froze. "Oh, but I've seen perfection now and then.
        Not perfection in the whole of anything, perhaps, but in part."
        Mondello smiled indulgently and shook his head. "One man's idea of perfect order is another man's chaos. One man's vision of perfect beauty is another man's notion of deformity."
        Roy did not appreciate such talk. The implication was that any Utopia was also Hell. Eager to convince Mondello of an alternate view, he said, "Perfect beauty exists in nature."
        "There's always a flaw. Nature abhors symmetry, smoothness, straight lines, order-all the things we associate with beauty."
        "I recently saw a woman with perfect hands. Flawless hands, without a blemish, exquisitely shaped."
        "A cosmetic surgeon looks at the human form with a more critical eye than other people do. I'd have seen a lot of flaws, I'm sure."
        The doctor's smugness irritated Roy, and he said, "I wish I'd brought those hands to you-the one, anyway. If I'd brought it, if you'd seen it, you would have agreed."
        Suddenly Roy realized that he had come close to revealing things that would have necessitated the surgeon's immediate execution.
        Concerned that his agitated state of mind would lead him to make another and more egregious error, Roy dawdled no longer. He thanked Mondello for his cooperation, and he got out of the white room.
        In the medical building parking lot, the February sunshine was more white than golden, with a harsh edge, and a border of palm trees cast eastward-leaning shadows. The afternoon was turning cool.
        As he twisted the key in the ignition and started the car, his pager beeped. He checked the small display window, saw a number with the prefix of the regional offices in downtown Los Angeles, and made the call on his cellular phone.
        They had big news for him. Spencer Grant had almost been chased down in Las Vegas; he was now on the run, overland, across the Moiave Desert. A Lea jet was standing by at LAX to take Roy to Nevada. ri Driving up the barely perceptible slope between two rushing rivers, on a steadily narrowing peninsula of sodden sand, searching for an formation of rock on which to batten down and wait out the storm, Spencer was hampered by decreasing visibility. The clouds were so thick, so black, that daylight on the desert was as murky as that a few fathoms under any sea. Rain fell in biblical quantities, overwhelming the windshield wipers, and although the headlights were on, clear glimpses of the ground ahead were brief.
        Great fiery lashes tortured the sky. The blinding pyrotechnics escalated into nearly continuous chain lightning, and brilliant links rattled down the heavens as though an evil angel, imprisoned in the storm, were angrily testing his bonds. Even then, the inconstant light illuminated nothing while swarms of stroboscopic shadows flickered across the landscape, adding to the gloom and confusion.
        Suddenly, ahead and a quarter mile to the west, at ground level, a blue light appeared as if from out of another dimension. At once, it moved off to the south at high seed.
        Spencer squinted through rain and shadow, trying to discern the nature and size of the light source. The details remained obscure.
        The blue traveler turned east, proceeded a few hundred yards, then swung north toward the Explorer. Spherical. Incandescent.
        "What the hell?" Spencer slowed the Explorer to a crawl to watch the eerie luminosity.
        When it Was still a hundred yards from him, the thing swerved west, toward the place where it had first appeared, then dwindled past that point, rose, flared, and vanished.
        Even before the first light winked out, Spencer saw a second from the corner of his eye. He stopped and looked west-northwest.
        The new object-blue, throbbing-moved incredibly fast, on an erratic serpentine course that brought it closer before it angled east.
        Abruptly it spun like pinwheel fireworks and disappeared.
        Both objects had been silent, gliding like apparitions across the stormwashed desert.
        The skin prickled on his arms and along the nape of his neck.
        For the past few days, although he was usually skeptical of all things mystical, he had felt that he was venturing into the