Upper Montclair, New Jersey, Monday…

With the strains of Mahler's Ruckert-Lieder filling her townhouse study and her second glass of French burgundy, Kalidas Metropolis should have been able to vanquish some of her anxieties. Instead, her paranoia and puzzlement were increasing. She had just made a call to Italy. She hung up the phone, dumbfounded. No one is talking to me.Every scientist in her close circle of fellow researchers was shunning her. The last one she talked to, Antonio Magliozzi in Rome, looked like he was scared of his shadow. Hey, girl, your deodorant can't matter over that many miles! The lines of the last lieder seemed to mock her. "I am out of touch with this world where I have spent so much of my time…."

It seemed that no one wanted to talk about human cloning anymore. True, the United Nations, along with more than seventy other nations, had outlawed it, though researchers still discussed it. Someone has put a tight cap on that discussion, at least among scientists who have a right to more than a layman's opinion about it. She tried one more call. It was three hours earlier in Palo Alto but Professor Wolfgang Richter's department secretary answered the phone.

Kalidas explained who she was. The secretary remembered her from her trip out to Stanford University seven years ago. Wolfgang Richter had been a pompous ass, harassing her all the time during her presentation. But she knew for a fact that he was smart and had lots of DoD contracts.