Quotes from Christa Faust

Okay," Nina said. "What if you two drop the special acid and concentrate on opening the gate again, and I'll stand by with Lulu.

I wouldn't want to be summarily exterminated by aliens who judged the whole human race on the behavior of Charles Manson, for example

But I still think having Nina standing by as ground control couldn't possibly be a bad idea. Not as an executioner—just as armed back-up, in case things get ugly.

Information that might be useful—or at least good to know before we open the way again. Forewarned is forearmed.

He reached for a pencil and a blank sheet of paper from a stack beside Nina's typewriter, and began to fill it with scribbled notes and test keys.

Some time later, although Walter couldn't have guessed how long if he'd been paid to do so, he became aware of a warm, spicy, almost ambrosial smell.

In fact, he couldn't remember the last time he'd had anything to eat.

But Walter was only interested in what Nina was carrying. She was the one with the food.

Nina," Walter said as she handed him one of the warm boxes. "You are my angel.

Just these," Nina replied, holding up a fist full of balsa wood chopsticks. "That's okay," Walter said, tipping the box to his lips like a cup and slurping up the noodles.

I tried all the basic approaches," he said. "Including the one those teachers used to crack the cipher he sent to the papers. No dice. This is much more complicated, and far more secure. See, look here.

The most common double-letter pairing in the English language being the double L, of course, challenged only by the double T.

There are only one or two repeats in the whole book. So that got me thinking polyalphabetic substitution.

It uses twenty-six substitution ciphers," he told her. "One for each letter of the alphabet. But the problem is that it requires a keyword to solve.

We could spend the rest of our lives trying to randomly guess his keyword. And worse, I'm fairly certain he's using multiple keywords, maybe even more than one on every page. I wouldn't say it's crack-proof, but I believe it may be beyond my own personal abilities.

Try Reiden," he said. "My God," Walter said, putting his own food aside and grabbing the pencil.

Less than an hour later, Walter had most of the last page of the notebook deciphered.

The sparks are getting hungrier every day, but controlling appetites is what separates man from beast. I shall wait until

We should get to work immediately on recreating the exact pharmacological launchpad we used that day at Reiden Lake.

The first thing I did was lock myself in the bathroom and unwind my binders. I was moist and sour from adrenaline and fear sweat and I felt like I would die if I didn't rinse off. There was no soap and the rusty, lukewarm water dribbled out of the showerhead like blood from the wrist of a reluctant suicide. Still, it was better than nothing.

Four minutes," Walter said, "seems like four hours.

What I had done to Jesse, well, that was something else. In a way, it's like I was burying my old self in that pit. The person that I'd been before I'd looked into a man's eyes and shot him dead. The person that I was now, the delicate newborn killer that Jesse made me, needed the slow thoughtless shoveling like an insect still wet from metamorphosis needs time to dry its wings and figure out how to work its brand new form.

Chick and Iggy had never come home the night before, but according to Nina this was a fairly regular occurrence, usually attributable to drugs, women, or both.

He would feel horrible if anything happened to her and her baby, all because of him.