Krone Ascending

Praise for The Krone Experiment

A thriller, a detective story and a brilliant piece of scientific speculation; this is a uniquely intelligent novel. — Tom Clancy, author of The Hunt for Red October.

A world expert on black-hole astrophysics, Craig Wheeler gives us here an off-hours gripping adventure story. — John Archibald Wheeler, theoretical physicist, author of Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics.

Praise for Krone Ascending

If Douglas Coupland had read this, he might have called it a translit, sci-fi saga.

I liked it better than the first one. — W. Bowen, retired German teacher.

You got that business about the glove and the hole in the hand just right — A. Khokhlov, computational astrophysicist.

A very good read, with this tremendous narrative engine giving it quad-storyline propulsion. — J. Robinson Wheeler, author of the graphic novel The Q-Man.

KRONE ASCENDING

by

J. Craig Wheeler

Copyright © 2012 by J. Craig Wheeler

Find other titles by J. Craig Wheeler at Smashwords.com

Published by J. Craig Wheeler at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person with whom you share it. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

Cover and back page design by J. Robinson Wheeler, http://jrwdigitalmedia.com

Dedication

For everyone who had a kind word about The Krone Experiment

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Hugo Bezdek, Elaine Oran, Alexei Khokhlov, Luther Keeler and Wayne Bowen for reading early versions of the manuscript and making constructive comments. Jim Bixby provided San Diego context. Rob Wheeler applied his careful editorial eye.

Disclaimer

All characters and incidents in this book are purely fictitious and products of the imagination of the author and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as a representation of the views of any department or agency of any government body.

Table of Contents

Year One: Deep Background

Year Two: New Beginnings

Year Three: Problems and Solutions

Year Four: Turmoil

Year 5: Transitions

Year 6: The Strip

Year 7: Home

Year 8: Struggle

Year 9: Reconciliation

Year 10: Ascension

History of Publication of The Krone Experiment

About the Film

About the Author

Other Books by the Author

Back Cover

*****

Year One: Deep Background

March

The figure in the dirty turban pulled back the left sleeve of his burnoose and furtively checked the digital readouts of the incongruously high tech instrument on his wrist. He scanned the local time, the countdown register, his location denoted with military accuracy by the satellite-based global positioning system. For the hundredth time, Al Tobin’s gaze swept the crowd thronging the casbah in Homs, the small seaside Libyan city. Only a close examination would reveal it, but his eyes were artificially darkened with contact lenses, his sunburned face a bit too light to be that of a native. Tobin noted that his locally recruited team was in place. This was always a critical phase in these foreign operations. Either too many outsiders or too much currency spread to locals could draw unwanted attention. He had elected to do this mission on his own, hoping that the locals would do their part, keep their mouths shut or at least be sufficiently confused by what he had asked them to do and what would happen a few minutes from now to tell a coherent story.

Tobin checked the countdown again, mentally marking seconds as tenths of seconds zipped by on the watch face. With a minute to go, he gave the arranged signal, adjusting his turban with his left hand. Five young men in their late teens and early twenties had arranged themselves in a crude circle near one of the stalls selling woolen goods. Two of them began to exchange blows and the other three shoved on the crowd to clear a circle. Tobin again checked his GPS location and that of the three-centimeter circle of uncertainty to be avoided under penalty of death, trusting that there would be no glitch, the occasional lurch that altered the critical spot, or too many gammas. He stepped to the edge of the crowd and pushed on bodies, fine tuning their dispersion to suit his needs.

A hole about twenty feet in diameter opened in the crowd. The two fighters put on a good show, but thrashed too close to the danger zone. Tobin stepped to them and with little apparent effort gave them a shove that sent them, off balance, careening to the edge of the circle of people. Those nearest the tumbling figures moved back, giving them way. Tobin, still mentally counting down, strode to the edge of the crowd, blended with the throng and turned to watch. In the turmoil of raucous commentary, he was the only one to register the dull, rumbling bass roar coming from directly beneath the marketplace.

There was a quick flare of blue-white light, a flash of heat, and a strong tug. Several people near the perimeter of the ragged circle, already jostled by the crowd, lost their balance and fell toward the center of the clearing. At the same time, a high-pitched whistling shriek arose from the middle of the open space and rapidly vanished, fading directly overhead. Individuals in the crowd exchanged fearful glances or craned their necks upward, as did the young recruits. They looked around, but could not see the man with the odd accent who had crossed their palms with welcome cash and arranged for their strange burlesque.

He was already on the edge of the crowd heading at a determined pace to the west, just slowly enough not to attract undue attention. One down, he thought to himself. Tobin pushed up the right sleeve of his burnoose and checked the radiation counter. The dose was miniscule, as predicted by the eggheads at home. He had to trust them, but it was the threat of the radiation, the quick hideous blue flash, that gave him the cold sweats. Despite the best attempts to predict it, he had lost comrades when the beast manifested one of its sporadic fluctuations.

Burnoose swirling, Tobin rounded several corners connecting narrow streets and stopped across from a two story, ramshackle building a few hundred yards from the market. He waited, not bothering to look at his watch this time. This one was out of his control, and he could not get too close. He could only wait and watch and then see if his aid were needed. In theory, if there were no excess radiation on the way up, there would also be none on the way down. In theory.

He heard the growing high-pitched keening, saw the brilliant descending dot, and then it was gone, replaced by the fading bass rumble. He knew that the flaking cement wall in the front of the building now had a finger-sized hole in it. He kept an eye on the building. No rebar, terrible construction. The family that owned it lived upstairs and ran a shop selling simple hardware, pots and pans, on the ground floor. The wail of an infant could be heard from an open window on the upper floor. The fly-spotted window on the ground floor displayed some of the inventory. No one could be seen through the open door into the dim interior of the shop. Luck, or economic blight, might have caught the shop with no customers.

Tobin waited for several minutes. He felt the stable ground under his feet. No temblors. Unlike other parts of the world where the beasts ravaged, Libya was on a relatively stable piece of continental crust. He had nearly decided that the wall would hold when he heard a creak and then a snap. A ragged vertical crack appeared in the wall, stitching from the roof to the ground midway between the door and window of the shop, following the recently inflicted structural wound. The wall sagged and other cracks ran from the first one to the corners of the window and to the top of the door. The glass in the window shattered and fell out to the street and inward among the pots on display. The section of wall between the first crack and the window crumbled, following the glass to tumble out onto the street and inward, crushing the shop window shelves. The upper story shifted a few inches and a woman screamed, momentarily drowning out the cries of the infant.

There was quiet for a heartbeat and then the front of the shop collapsed. The upper floor slammed down at a grotesque angle, still supported by the rear wall. The roof hammered onto the living quarters. Tobin sprang into action, clambering over the steeply sloping debris. He peered in one of the second story windows. The front wall had pancaked into the floor, a beam crushing the baby to its mother's breast. Both were dead. He scrambled further up to the roofline and flung clay tiles aside to peer within. The shop owner had been toward the back of the upper floor. He now clung, disoriented, to a table leg, dangling down the slope. Tobin reached in and grabbed his shirtfront, hoisting the man out onto the destroyed front of the building. He lowered the dazed man down and laid him in the street, checking for wounds as a crowd began to gather. He heard a quiet whimper from the ground floor of the shop.

Leaving the man, Tobin stepped to the crushed front door and worked his way in among the destruction. From the back of the store the large brown eyes of two young girls peered from around the counter that had supported the weight of the collapsing floors. He grabbed the girls and steered them in front of him through the clouds of dust and sifting rubble toward the light from the street. A woman cried out and reached for the girls as they emerged and Tobin sidled off into the crowd, leaving them in her care.

He turned to survey the scene, his heart heavy at the loss of life. There would be some surreptitious aid to the shop owner and his surviving daughters. Perhaps some help to re-establish his business nearby. This building would have to be razed. Just as well. The likelihood that someone would closely examine the main crack to determine what had caused it would be small. Even if they did, the true explanation would undoubtedly escape them.

Tobin returned to the marketplace where the crowds went about their business as if the fight and its peculiar aftermath had not occurred. He looked keenly around and satisfied himself that his ad hoc team had heeded orders and made themselves scarce after their charade. He moved through the crowd to where the center of the circle they had earlier cleared had been. Knowing what to look for, it took him only a minute to spy the small hole in the hard-packed earth of the street. He ground his heel over the hole and checked to see that any evidence of it was obliterated to all but the sharpest eye.

Tobin left the marketplace and walked the half hour to the hovel he had called home for the last twenty-four hours. He checked the radiation monitor again, and grunted. Nothing this time, but a little heavy overall. That would get him an extra six months’ vacation, working his desk until he could return to the field. He ate a little from his provisions and then slept, putting the afternoon heat behind him.

When he arose, Tobin pulled the miniaturized radio beacon from under a pile of scrap and put it in a soiled bag that he slung over his shoulder. Then he headed northwest along the road that ran along the beach. The sun had nearly set on his left. On his right, the Gulf of Sidra was settling into twilight. By midnight he was in position. Only a few minutes later he heard the faint purr of the electric outboard. He waded into the shallow waves to greet it.

May

The artificial dawn came once again with the shocking brilliance that he had learned to embrace, but not to accept. Viktor Korolev stood on the deck of the ship and watched, awed that such power even existed in nature, never mind brought to partial harness by man. The fireball blew the horizon apart and then slowly faded to be replaced by the immense, looming, burgeoning mushroom, one that Alice never saw in her looking glass.

Korolev removed his dark glasses and proceeded along the dimly lit deck to the gangway leading into the bowels of the ship. He turned and grabbed the rails to carefully work his way down the steep stairs. As he descended, odors of old oil, dusty electrical connections, and the rancid overtones of people at work in close quarters replaced the bracing smell of brine. Korolev tried to suck in his gut, but his paunch still rubbed on the steps at belt level. He shook his head in self-deprecation and noted that he was favoring his right knee. It seemed to act up in this humid environment. At sixty-three, his days as a football goalie were far behind him. At the base of the steps he headed down the corridor, his mind already on the overwhelming problems they faced. They were slowly saving Earth, but so many things could go wrong, physically, politically, in unimagined ways.

The Krone legacy. Korolev recalled vividly the winter day, sitting in his Academy office in Moscow, when the realization hit him that, incredible as it seemed, they were dealing with a black hole plummeting through the planet, slowly consuming its innards and wreaking havoc at the surface. Even then he had the suspicion that it was not natural, but a creation of man. In Korolev’s mind the past history and the present problems were all part of a continuum, the dilemma, the solutions of the future wrapped in the tangle of the origins. For the thousandth time he connected the incredible act of creation with their frenzied attempts to understand, control, eliminate. Krone had managed to compress and feed a seed of matter until it collapsed in on itself and became something else, a dollop of quantum space-time foam linking the here and now with the ultimate conundrum - the origin of everything. Now they were attempting to undo Krone’s work, but without full knowledge of how it was done. Even Krone probably did not fully understand what had transpired, but what crucial keys were locked in his head? Little hints that could provide a critical insight, a new approach, or a technical twist? Krone remained alive but catatonic, the victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The mystery was theirs to solve.

Korolev arrived in the monitoring station and looked over the shoulders of the men and women doing the work. The data rolled in. The shot was good. They had learned a lot, but the price was huge, and they could not proceed this way much longer. A billion dollars had just evaporated in the South Pacific, a cleverly designed device that irradiated the black hole with powerful lasers. The lasers triggered the release of the black hole’s natural radiation, causing it to lose some mass as pure energy, creating the immense explosion he had just witnessed. Even more critically, the reaction impulse kicked the hole a little higher above the ocean before it plummeted back into the depths to re-emerge on the other side of the earth a little over forty minutes later, a little higher and a little closer to their salvation.

Korolev went to the underwater acoustic monitors that triangulated on the event. He saw the shock from the explosion as it reverberated off the ocean bottom and then the linear trace after the hole completed its rise a mile and then some above the ocean swells and plunged back into the water, raising a furious cavitation wake. He turned to the seismic monitors and saw the same story played out there; the rolling thunder of the explosion as it bounced off the granite mantle of the earth and again the fainter trace of their nemesis as it tunneled through the solid rock of the crust toward the molten core. Other traces showed the other three black holes in different phases of their orbits. Each one drilled a finger-sized hole in the surface of the earth and anything unfortunate enough to be in the way. Each rose and fell through its gravitational arc, then plummeted down, tunneling its way through the earth to once again repeat the process on the opposite side. For each, the cycle repeated eighteen times a day, day by day, week by week, year by year, deadly quadruplets slowly eating away the planet from the inside out.

For much of his working life, Korolev tried to concentrate on the tasks at hand, but at times, like this one, when the objects of their quest seemed so close, so tactile, he could not help but ponder once again what the future held if they failed. The black holes were growing slowly, but implacably, the most notoriously one-way objects in the Universe. It might take a thousand years to double in mass, another thousand to double again in the race to exponential growth as the bigger they got, the faster they grew. The irony was that they were so subtle now, pinpricks in the mighty planet, four mutant cells at the beginning of life-threatening disease.

The holes passed through the earth in narrow elliptical orbits set by the speed of free fall and the rotation of the surface of the earth at the point where they were born, the high plateau in New Mexico. There Paul Krone had diverted defense and private funds, constructed his secret lab, made and lost his creations. The lab was at 32 degrees 47 minutes north longitude, so one terminus of each hole’s orbit was a belt around the northern hemisphere at that location. The holes plunged through the earth, through the crust, the molten core, then out through the crust on the other side to emerge at 32 degrees 47 minutes south longitude. The holes had the mass of a small mountain, a few hundred million tons, but their event horizons were incredibly tiny, the size of an atomic nucleus. Each hole blasted up through the surface and reached apogee about fifty-seven hundred feet above sea level, the altitude of Krone’s lab. They fell back to sea level forty seconds later within a few hundred meters of where they emerged. One cycle later, they would rise headed in the same direction in space, but given the earth’s rotation, the next impact point would be 1170 miles west of the previous one. Governed by the incommensurate orbital time of the black holes and the spin of the earth on its axis, twenty four hours later a given hole would arise about one hundred ninety miles west of where it had come up before. That meant that despite their ubiquitous presence, the holes never came up in the same place twice. Most of the time they emerged in the ocean with no witness at all. That, Korolev well knew, was how they had managed to continue their magnificent charade for years, pursuing the black holes in secret, attempting to minimize the damage and to obscure the threat. You could miss them if you did not know where and how to look. Their presence was unmistakable if you did.

Korolev also knew, however, that it was only a matter of time before the secret came out. Then all of humanity would wrestle with the understanding that had come to him in a blinding, unwelcome flash that dreary November day. With care, no one would die tomorrow, or the next day, or even the next generation. The threat was unique in the annals if human history, with anemic parallels to global warming and ecodisaster. The threat was in the far future, but unlike various Malthusian disasters, this one was predictable and absolutely unavoidable. Drag would pull the holes beneath the surface, out of reach. That was the more immediate enemy they faced. There the holes would consume the molten core. That would cause Earth to shrink. Terrible earthquakes would grow in severity. There would be horrendous volcanic activity and tidal waves. Eventually, the continental plates would be set in motion to build mountains and crush what remained of civilization. As the holes grew in mass they would merge into one and eventually rival the planet in mass. Earth would begin to oscillate in orbit as it moved around a common center of mass with the single black hole. The hole would digest the last of the core and large chunks of the mantle. At last there would be a small black marble, with a few orbiting rocks and a lonely Moon. There would be no one to care, but eventually that marble would consume the dying Sun.

Korolev shook his head and rubbed his eyes to clear his mind of the dismal image. He looked around the room at the people hard at work, tending to their tasks, oblivious of the scenario that spun itself out before him. Or were they? More likely, Korolev thought, each person carried the demon of knowledge in his or her own way. Korolev forced himself to tend to the matters at hand. He looked again at the acoustic and seismic monitors. He noted with satisfaction that both sets of data showed that this shot had the desired magnitude and direction. It was a very long road, but they were headed in the right direction. He lifted the phone and put in his call to Washington.

Alex Runyan sat in his office and squinted out the window. When he worked late (when was the last time he had not?), he could make out the Wright brothers plane hanging in the illuminated window of the Air and Space Museum across the mall. Now in the glare of a summer day, the window just reflected the bustle of traffic. His phone buzzed and he jumped to it.

Hello! Almost a demand.

How is your desk? Is the surface clean, the papers organized?

Damn it, Viktor, you really know how to hurt a guy!

Korolev’s chuckle rolled in over the secure line from the ship. Someone must vanquish the bureaucracy while we peons tend to details.

Don’t give me that. You know I couldn’t get away for this one, and it’s killing me. Well, how’d it go?

Another good one.

Any trouble with the Greenpeace folks?

Just some squabbling. The fact that we move around keeps them off guard. They must have gotten some intelligence as the flotilla gathered, but they didn’t show up until the day before the shot, and they still didn’t know where ground zero was. They were at a safe distance, but you can expect to hear some wailing about dead dolphins. There certainly are some. How about your end?

Precarious. I attended the meeting at the White House. The lid is still on, but I don’t see how it can’t blow. Every seismologist in the world can detect these events. Some people think they’re nukes despite the signatures being very different, smaller energy, very different radioactivity. The only way to dispel that notion is to reveal the truth, and the President is loath to do that. He’s got an election campaign to run. Iraq and Afghanistan are back in their cages, sort of, but the Chinese are bench-pressing above their weight and the economy is shaky. This is not a good time to drop a new bombshell. He’d love to play savior of the world, but he wants to choose the time and place. He won’t go without a plan for a solution. He thinks our current approach is too problematic. We need some ideas, Viktor.

Well, old friend, we have more data. That is the place to start. I’ll see you soon.

Okay. So long, Viktor.

Good-bye, Alex.

Runyan hung up the phone. He walked to the window and stared out across the mall, unseeing. He absent-mindedly scratched the scar along his jaw line that his beard never managed to fully cover. His mind wandered along the pathways of the huge organization he commanded, its tentacles reaching from his home base in the Department of Energy, through Defense, State. He thought of the flotilla in the Pacific, the global array of monitors, the data analysis center at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, the brilliant teams at Livermore and Los Alamos, the fabrication sites for the floating platforms, the lasers. They had made five shots, each a little more effective than the last, but were their efforts enough? At this rate, it might take them a thousand years, ten thousand years. And they had only attacked one. What of the other three?

Runyans’s musings turned to the time nearly a decade ago when he had attended Pat Danielson’s CIA briefing as an academic consultant to the defense department. Sorting through the welter of seismic and oceanic acoustic data, the notion had hit him with horror and fascination that a black hole was boring through Earth. He remembered putting his theory to the test in a remote part of the Arizona desert when he had been gut-punched by the gravity of one of the black holes as it rumbled up out of the earth and whistled into the sky. He remembered when he had first seen Krone’s amazing machine, hidden away on a mesa in New Mexico. He had scampered over the hedgehog shaped device like a kid on a playscape. That device with its immense, inward focused lasers and magnetic support coils was nuts and bolts now, disassembled in a flurry of reverse engineering, the search for clues to control the things. No one proposed to put it together again, this Earth-Killer.

An image flashed in his mind of a woman, trapped, destroying the evidence they needed, and the look in her eye as her blade swept its deadly arc toward his face. He felt the scar again, this time rubbing it consciously. Tangled webs and all that, he thought. He recalled his shock when he was tapped to run the deliberately obscurely-named Defense Initiative Agency, DINA, the huge new secret organization that was cobbled together to attack the black holes. DINA had taken custody of Krone. Runyan had realized at the time that he needed that same woman to work with Krone; realized that he needed that woman. He turned to the phone again and dialed.

Hello?

Hey, Babe, it’s me.

Alex! What’s happening?

The usual. I’m going to get stuck here tonight for a while. I’ll grab a bite or maybe get something sent in. His voice dropped a notch. But I thought I might come home for a little dessert.

Hmmm, I’ll be ready.

See you then.

Bye.

Runyan hung up and surveyed his desk, which, Korolev’s jibe aside, was anything but clean. He turned to his workstation and stared again at Al Tobin's report from Libya. Two more deaths. They did what they could to minimize the damage, but their enemy was implacable. People got hurt. After a moment he sighed, rubbed his face and opened a new window from which he could log into the computer at the NSA and see the recent data for himself.

Maria Latvin hung up the phone smiling to herself. Alex was always randy, but she enjoyed the physical side of their marriage and the spontaneity Runyan brought to it. In this case he had telegraphed his spontaneity a bit. She went into the kitchen and spoke to the steward.

Phil, Dr. Runyan won’t be home for dinner tonight.

Yes, ma’am, thank you.

Latvin continued into the front hall and climbed the stairs. She proceeded down the long hall and turned into the sunroom, her eye automatically surveying the dramatic sweep of Virginia countryside through the French windows that looked out the rear of the house, across the old estate. Her gaze fell on the tools of her current trade, the stacks of briefing books, the open book for her handwritten notes, the voice activated recorder. She tried to recall just where she had been before she had gone downstairs for a break, in time to take Alex’s call. Then she looked at the focus of all this effort.

Paul Krone sat in the comfortable, specially constructed, high-backed chair, having his blood pressure checked. Latvin looked at the face, still handsome as he neared sixty, the jowls sagging a bit, but his color healthy. The hair was graying, but still luxuriant. The only exceptions were the band that was shaved to allow access by the electrodes and the ugly little scar above his temple where the small bullet went in and lodged. The eyes, once the source of a searing power, were vacant, focused on an inner Universe she could not enter. Sometimes she thought the external signs were all there were to the man, that the inside was hollow, empty. At others, she had a deep fear that he was alive, raging to get out of the trap his body had become. Even after years of seeing him like this, she still had the powerful feeling that in the next instant he would look at her and be once again the exuberant, world-beating man she had first known. This skull contained what was probably the most thoroughly-probed living brain in the world, and all the experts could not tell her any more than her intuition as to whether the real Paul Krone still lived in there somehow.

As they often did when she paused to contemplate Krone like this, random flashes of her past emerged from her subconscious, unbidden, uncontrollable, so routine now that they barely impacted on her conscious thoughts: her flight from her native occupied Lithuania, escape through Czechoslovakia, meeting Krone at an embassy party in Vienna, living an incredible globe-trotting life with him. Some of the best moments were in the spectacular isolation of the mesa in New Mexico. Then there was the night when the gunshot brought it all tumbling down. In a bewildering rush came the arrival of the CIA and Runyan, whom she nearly killed wielding a knife in fury and terror, her kidnapping by Russian agents, fevered negotiations that brought a truce between the US and the crumbling Soviet Union, her assignment as Krone’s guardian as the long de-briefing process of his shattered mind began. Finally, there was her growing involvement with Runyan that led to something like love and then marriage and this current bizarre existence with its tangle of their professional and personal lives.

Latvin watched as Althea Roberts finished her ministrations, her dark, efficient fingers buttoning up the shirt, stowing the blood pressure wrap, a last look into the eyes, then a friendly, almost intimate swipe at the hair. Latvin enjoyed watching Roberts at work like this, completely professional, deeply caring. At certain angles, Robert’s strong-featured face reminded Latvin of the aging Commander Uhura from the Star Trek movies. Roberts stepped back and turned to look at Latvin.

All systems normal.

Okay, Latvin responded, Let’s see where we were. She watched as Roberts reattached the monitoring systems. The special cap swiveled down from its hinge on the back of the chair and settled onto his skull, making contact. The goggles that could both feed images and monitor eye movement rotated in from the framework on the side of the chair. Roberts returned to her computer to monitor the myriad signals. Latvin hated this rig, especially the goggles. She knew that they were efficient at picking up subtle reactions that might signal some contact, a clue that they were finding a way in the labyrinth of his mind, but she also knew those eyes could someday send her a special signal. How tragic if the goggles caused her to miss it.

Latvin looked at her notes and then at the briefing book, double-checking. She took his hand. Computers or no, she wanted that tactile connection with him, so that he would know it was she. Even the doctors, especially Roberts, agreed with her instinctive reaction that this was an appropriate thing to do. Krone knew Latvin and responded to her in simple, basic ways. The forbidding task was to try to elicit technical information from the storehouse in his mind. It was like playing 20 Questions, but the answers were not yes or no, only faint perturbations in an electroencephalogram, and there were not twenty questions, but twenty thousand, twenty million. Amazingly enough it worked. There were little hints, nudges, glimmers, that had guided their work, and paid off with perceptible increases of efficiency at each terrible release in the South Pacific. Latvin exhaled deeply and started to work.

Paul, she spoke evenly, warmly, giving the hand a slight pressure. We were talking about the night of November 11. Do you remember that? You had noticed a fluctuation in the superconducting trap. You wrote that you also detected a rise in the gamma-ray emissivity. Do you remember that? Can you picture the instrument? Did that worry you? Did you increase the laser frequency?

The questions went on and on, the responses recorded and sent to data bases to be pored over by teams of experts, looking for clues, hints of insight in the slightest reaction, thin tendrils to the past, the act of creation.

The limousine pulled into the long circular driveway a little after 10 pm. Runyan got out, confirmed the 8 am pickup with the driver and walked up the steps and into the house. He riffled through the mail on the hall table and then walked into the kitchen.

Hey, Phil, he said to the Navy steward. Where is everybody?

Evening, sir, replied the young man. I believe Dr. Roberts has gone to bed. Mrs. Runyan is upstairs somewhere. I’m just putting together a little snack for the fellows outside.

Runyan wrinkled his nose. He understood the need for security to guard the national resource they housed, but he had never gotten used to the constant presence of watchful people. That cramped his style. He liked to open up a little when he set aside the weight of the day.

What’s to eat? I just munched a little cold lo mein at work.

I put up a plate, just in case. Phil reached inside the refrigerator and took out a plate and pulled the clear wrap from it. A little roast beef, some potato salad. There’s more if you want.

Great, I love your potato salad. Runyan opened the refrigerator himself and pulled out a Sam Adams. He uncapped it and took a swig and grabbed a fork from the silverware drawer. He scooped a mouthful of potato salad and then headed for the stairs, balancing the plate and beer bottle. He looked in the sunroom, but, as expected, it was empty, the work of the day finished. He looked in the master bedroom and peeked in the bath, but they were also empty. He walked back down the long upper hallway, quietly past Althea Roberts’ door; she was a light sleeper. Two doors further down, he turned to push the door open with his rear and shouldered in. Krone was lying on the bed, his eyes closed, but who knew when he slept or not. Maria was sitting in a chair reading. She looked up, a smile of greeting on her face.

Hi, Runyan whispered. He set the plate and bottle on a side table and stepped in front of Maria and bent to give her a kiss. He relished the feel and smell of her, then slowly knelt in front of her, holding the kiss as she leaned forward following him. He broke away and leaned back, holding her face