The Hammer of Eden by Ken Follett Page A

said.
    “Maybe I—”
    He allowed a flash of anger to show. “No!”
    “Okay, okay,” she said hastily. She bit her lip.
    Dusty said excitedly: “Hey, this is where Daddy lives!”
    “That’s right, honey,” Melanie said. She pointed to a low-rise stucco apartment building, and Priest parked outside it.
    Melanie turned to Dusty, but Priest forestalled her. “He stays in the car.”
    “I’m not sure how safe—”
    “He’s got the dog.”
    “He might get scared.”
    Priest twisted around to speak to Dusty. “Hey, Lieutenant, I need you and Ensign Spirit to stand guard over our spacecraft while First Officer Mom and I go inside the spaceport.”
    “Am I going to see Daddy?”
    “Of course. But I’d like a few minutes with him first. Think you can handle the guard duty assignment?”
    “You bet!”
    “In the space navy, you have to say ‘Aye, sir!’ not ‘You bet.’ ”
    “Aye, sir!”
    “Very good. Carry on.” Priest got out of the car.
    Melanie got out, but she still looked troubled. “For Christ’s sake, don’t let Michael know we left his kid in the car,” she said.
    Priest did not reply.
You might be afraid of offending Michael, baby, but I don’t give a flying fuck
.
    Melanie took her purse off the seat and slung it over her shoulder. They walked up the path to the building door. Melanie pressed the entry phone buzzer and held it down.
    Her husband was a night owl, she had told Priest. He liked to work in the evening and sleep late. That was why they had chosen to get here before seven o’clock in the morning. Priest hoped Michael would be too bleary-eyed to wonder whether their visit had a hidden purpose. If he got suspicious, stealing his disk might be impossible.
    Melanie said he was a workaholic, Priest recalled as they waited for Michael to answer. He spent his days driving all over California, checking the instruments that measured small geological movements in the San Andreas and other faults, and the nights inputting the data into his computer.
    But what had finally driven her to leave him was an incident with Dusty. She and the child had been vegetarian for two years, and they would eat only organic food and health store products. Melanie believed the strict diet reduced Dusty’s allergy attacks, although Michael was skeptical. Then one day she had discovered that Michael had bought Dusty a hamburger. To her, that was like poisoning the child. She still shook with fury when she told the story. She had left that night, taking Dusty with her.
    Priest thought she might be right about the allergy attacks. The commune had been vegetarian ever since the early seventies, when vegetarianism was eccentric. At the time Priest had doubted the value of the diet but had been in favor of a discipline that set them apart from the world outside. Their grapes were grown without chemicals simply because they had been unable to afford sprays, so they had made a virtue of necessity and called their wine organic, which turned out to be a strong selling point. But he could not help noticing that after a quarter century of this life the communards were a remarkably healthy bunch. It was rare for them to have a medical emergency they could not cope with themselves. So he was now convinced. But, unlike Melanie, he was not obsessive about diet. He still liked fish, and now and again he would unintentionally eat meat in a soup or a sandwich and would shrug it off. But if Melanie discoveredthat her mushroom omelet had been cooked in bacon fat, she would throw up.
    A grouchy voice came through the intercom. “Who is it?”
    “Melanie.”
    There was a buzz, and the building door opened. Priest followed Melanie inside and up the stairs. An apartment was open on the second floor. Michael Quercus stood in the doorway.
    Priest was surprised by his appearance. He had been expecting a weedy professorial type, probably bald, wearing brown clothes. Quercus was around thirty-five. Tall and athletic, he had a head of