• CORE

The Maori guards wouldn’t let Alex go to Hanga Roa town to meet the stratojet, so he waited outside the resonator building. The afternoon was windy and he paced nervously.

At one point, before the incoming flight was delayed yet again, Teresa came by to help him pass the time. “Why is Spivey using a courier?” she asked. “Doesn’t he trust his secure channels anymore?”

“Would you? Those channels go through the same sky everyone else uses. They were secure only because the military paid top dollar and kept a low profile. These days, though?” He shrugged, his point obvious without further elaboration. If this messenger carried the news he expected, it would be worth any wait.

Teresa gave his shoulder an affectionate shove. “Well, I’ll bet you’re glad who the courier is.”

Teresa’s friendship was a fine thing. She understood him. Knew how to tease him out of his frequent dour moods. Alex grinned. “And what about you, Rip? Didn’t I see you eyeing that big fellow Auntie sent to cook for us.”

“Oh, him.” She blushed briefly. “Only for a minute or two. Come on, Alex. I told you how picky I am.”

Indeed, he kept learning new levels to her complexity. Last night, for instance, they had spent hours talking as he handed her tools and she wriggled behind Atlantis’s panels. If things went as expected, they’d be off to Reykjavik tomorrow or the next day, to testify before the special tribunal everyone was talking about. Alex thought it only fair to give her a hand tidying up the old shuttle before that.

Back in the caves of New Zealand, it had been concentration on something external—survival—that first eased the tensions between them. Even now, Teresa found it easier to talk while straining to tighten a bolt or giving some old instrument its first taste of power in forty years. So for the first time, last night, Alex heard the full story of her prior acquaintance with June Morgan, his part-time lover. It made him feel awkward—and yet Teresa said she liked June now. She seemed glad the other woman was coming back, for Alex’s sake.

And happier still because of what everyone assumed June would be carrying with her—Colonel Spivey’s surrender.

It had been hinted in George Hutton’s latest communiqué and confirmed in action. Since Alex’s demonstration yesterday—blasting a mountain of ice all the way to the moon—there had been a sudden drop in aggressive activity by other gazer systems worldwide. The Nihonese still pulsed at low “research” levels, and there were brief glimmers from other locations. But the big new NATO-ANZAC-ASEAN resonators were silent, mothballed, and the original four now obeyed Alex’s steady program unperturbed—pushing Beta gradually out of the boundary zone, where those intricate, superconducting threads flickered so mysteriously.

The number of pulses could be reduced now, and each beam targeted more carefully. Few additional civilian losses were expected, and diplomatic tension had been falling off for hours. Even the hysteria on the Net had abated a bit, as word went out about the new tribunal.

Maybe people are going to be sensible after all, Alex thought as he paced in front of the lab. After staying with him for a while, Teresa left again to resume her chores aboard Atlantis. Alex could have worked, too. But for once he was content just to look across grassy slopes toward the little, crashing baylet of Vaihu and a rank of Easter Island’s famed, forbidding monoliths. Beyond the restored statues, cirrus clouds streaked high over the South Pacific, like banners shredded by stratospheric winds.

This place had affected him, all right. Here earlier men and women had also struggled bitterly against the consequences of their own mistakes. But Alex’s education on Rapa Nui went beyond mere historical comparisons. Because of the nature of the battle he had waged here, he now knew far better than before how those winds and clouds out there were influenced by sunlight and the sea, and by other forces generated deep below. Each was part of a natural web only hinted at by what you saw with your eyes.

Jen was right, he thought. Everything is interwoven.

One didn’t have to be mystical about the interconnectedness. It just was. Science only made the fact more vivid and clear, the more you learned.

A touch of sound wafted from the direction of Rano Kao’s stern cliffs—first the whine of a hydrogen auto engine and then the complaint of rubber tires turning on gravel. He turned to see a car approach the Hine-marama cordon, where big, brown men paced with drawn weapons. After questioning both driver and passenger, they waved the vehicle through. Its fuel cells whistled louder as it climbed the hill and finally pulled up near the front door.

June Morgan bounded out, the wind whipping her hair and bright blue skirt. He met her halfway as she ran to throw her arms around him. “Kiss me quick, you troublemaker, you.” He obliged with some pleasure, though Alex sensed a tremor of tension as he held her. Well, that was understandable of course.

“You put on some show, hombre!” she said, pulling away. “Here Glenn and his people spend weeks studying gazer-based launching, and you yank the rug right out from under him! I laughed so hard … after leaving the room of course.”

Alex smiled. “Did you bring his answer?”

“Now what other reason would I have to come all this way?” She winked and patted her briefcase. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

Alex asked the driver to go fetch Teresa as June took his arm and pulled him toward the entrance. There, however, the way was barred by a massive dark man with crossed arms. “Sorry, doctor,” he told June. “I must inspect your valise.”

Alex sighed. “Joey, your men sniffed her luggage at the airport. She’s not carrying a bomb, for heaven’s sake.”

“All the same, tohunga, I have orders. Especially after last time.”

Alex frowned. The first sabotage attempt still had them perplexed. Spivey vehemently denied involvement, and the saboteur himself seemed to have no links at all to NATO or ANZAC.”

“That’s all right.” June laid the briefcase flat in the arms of one big guard and flipped it open. Inside were several pouched datacubes, two reading plaques, and a few slim sheets of paper in a folder. Auntie Kapur’s men ran humming instruments over the contents while June chattered animatedly. “You should have seen George Hutton’s face when he heard Manella had shown up here! He started out both angry and delighted, and finally settled on plain confusion. And you know how George hates that!”

“Indeed I do, madam.”

June and Alex turned as a figure approached from within. Nearly as tall as the Maori guards, and much heavier, Pedro Manella came into the sunlight holding out his hand. “Hello, Doctor Morgan. You bring good tidings, I assume?”

“Of course,” she replied. “And aren’t you a sight, Pedro! Wherever you’ve been hiding yourself, you’ve certainly eaten well.”

The second guard returned June’s valise. Alex said, “Let’s go to my office and play the message.”

“Why such privacy?” June pulled the other way. “We’ll use my old station. Everyone should hear this.”

The huge perovskite cylinder looked like some giant artillery piece, delicately balanced on its perfect bearings. It towered over what had once been June’s console—back when a dozen or so fatigued workers first set up here on the flank of a rocky, weather-beaten isle, searching desperately for a way to beard a monster in its den. The tech who had been working at that post cheerfully made room.

“Here it is,” June said, pulling a cube from its pouch and tossing it to Alex playfully. She insisted he take the seat. A semicircle of watchers gathered as he slotted the cube. Someone from the kitchen handed out cups of coffee, and when everyone was settled, Alex touched the PLAY toggle.

A man in uniform appeared before them, seated at a desk. His hair had grown out, softening somewhat those harsh, scarred features. Glenn Spivey looked out at them as if in real time. He even seemed to track his audience with his eyes.

“Well, Lustig,” the colonel began. “It seems people keep underestimating you. I’ll never do it again.” He lifted both hands. “You win. No more delays. The president met with our alliance partners. Tonight they hand over control of all resonators to the new tribunal—”

The technicians behind Alex clapped and sighed in relief. After all these wearing months, a heavy weight seemed lifted.

”—gathering in Iceland, headed by Professor Jaime Jordelian. I think you know him.”

Alex nodded. As a physicist, Jordelian was stodgy and overly meticulous. But those could be good traits in such a role.

“The committee hasn’t formally met, but Jordelian urgently asked that you attend the opening session. He wants you in operational charge of all resonators for an initial period of six months or so. They also want you center stage for the first news conference. If you’ve been watching the Net, you know what an all-day session that will be! The hypersonic packet that brought Dr. Morgan has orders to wait at Hanga Roa for your convenience.”

“Lucky bastard,” one of the Kiwis muttered in mock envy. “Iceland in winter. Dress warm, tohunga.” Alex broke into a grin. “Hey, what about me?” June complained. “You take my transport and I’m stuck here!” The others made sounds of mock sympathy.

Spivey’s image paused. He cleared his throat and leaned forward a little.

“I won’t pretend we haven’t been surprised by events these last few weeks, doctor. I thought we could finish our experiments long before word leaked out. But things didn’t go according to plan.

“It wasn’t just your little demonstration, yesterday, which nearly everyone in the Western Hemisphere got to witness by naked eye. Even neglecting that, there were just too many bright people out there with their own instruments and souped-up ferret programs.” He shrugged. “I guess we should have known better.

“What really disturbs me, though, is what I hear people saying about our intentions. Despite all the innuendo, you must believe I’m no screaming jingoist. I mean, honestly, could I have persuaded so many decent men and women—not just Yanks and Canadians, but Kiwis and Indonesians and others—to take part if our sole purpose was to invent some sort of super doomsday weapon? The idea’s absurd.

“I now see I should have confided in you. My mistake, taking you for a narrowly focused intellectual. Instead, I found myself outfought by a warrior, in the larger sense of the word.” He smiled ruefully. “So much for the accuracy of our dossiers.”

Alex sensed the others’ silent regard. Eyes flicked in his direction. He felt unnerved by all this talk centering on him personally.

“So, you might ask, what was our motive?” Spivey sighed. “What could any honest person’s goal be, these days? What else could ever matter as much as saving the world?

“Surely you’ve seen those economic-ecological projections everyone plays with on the Net? Well, Washington’s had a really excellent trends-analysis program for two decades now, but the results were just too appalling to release. We even managed to discredit the inevitable leaks, to prevent widespread discouragement and nihilism.

“Put simply, calculations show our present stable situation lasting maybe another generation, tops. Then we all go straight to hell. Oblivion. The only way out seemed to demand drastic sacrifice … draconian population control measures combined with major and immediate cuts in standard of living And psych profiles showed the voters utterly rejecting such measures, especially if the outcome would at best only help their great-grandkids.

“Then you came along, Lustig, to show that our projection missed some critical information … like the little item that our world is under attack by aliens!

“More important, you showed how new, completely unexpected levers might be applied to the physical world. New ways of exerting energy. New dangers to frighten us and new possibilities to dazzle. In another age, these powers would have been seized by bold men and used for better or worse, like TwenCen’s flirtation with the atom.

“But we’re growing up … that’s the popular phrase, isn’t it? We know new technologies must be watched carefully. I’m not totally against the science tribunals. Who could be?

“Tell me, though, Lustig, what do you think the new committee will do when they take authority over the new science of gazerdynamics?”

Obviously, the question was rhetorical. Alex already saw the colonel’s point.

“Except for one or two small research sites, they’ll slap on a complete ban, with fierce inspections to make sure nobody else emits even a single graviton! They’ll let you keep vigil on Beta, but outlaw any other gazer use that hasn’t already been tested to death. Oh sure, that’ll prevent chaos. I agree the technology has to be monitored. But can you see why we wanted to delay it for a while?”

Spivey pressed both hands on his desk.

“We hoped to finish developing gazer based launch systems, first! If they were already proven safe and effective, the tribunes couldn’t ban them entirely. We’d save something precious and wonderful … perhaps even a way out of the doomsday trap.”

Alex exhaled a sigh. Teresa should hear this. She despised Spivey. And yet he turned out to be as much a believer as she. Apparently the infection went all the way to the pinnacles of power.

“Our projections say resource depletion is going to kill human civilization deader than triceratops—this poor planet’s gifts have been so badly squandered. But everything changes if you include space! Melt down just one of the millions of small asteroids out there, and you get all the world’s steel needs for an entire decade, plus enough gold, silver, and platinum to finance rebuilding a dozen cities!

“It’s all out there, Lustig, but we’re stuck here at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well. It’s so expensive to haul out the tools needed to begin harnessing those assets.…

“Then came your gazer thing.… Good God, Lustig, have you any idea what you did yesterday? Throwing megatons of ice to the moon?” A vein pulsed in Spivey’s temple. “If you’d landed that berg just ten percent slower, there’d have been water enough to feed and bathe and make productive a colony of hundreds! We could be mining lunar titanium and helium-3 inside a year! We could …”

Spivey paused for breath.

“A few years ago I talked several space powers into backing cavitronics research in orbit, to look for something like what you found by goddam accident! But we were thinking millions of times too small. Please forgive my obvious jealousy …”

Someone behind Alex muttered, “Jesus Christ!” He turned to see Teresa Tikhana standing behind him. Her face was pale, and Alex thought he knew why. So her husband hadn’t worked on weapons research after all. He had just been trying, in his own way, to help save the world.

There would be some poignant satisfaction for her in that, but also bitterness, and the memory that they had not parted in harmony. Alex reached back and took her hand, which trembled, then squeezed his tightly in return.

“… I guess what I’m asking is that you use your influence with the tribunal—and it will be substantial—to keep some effort going into launch systems. At least get them to let you throw more ice!”

Spivey leaned even closer to the camera.

“After all, it’s not enough just to neutralize some paranoid aliens’ damned berserker device. What’s the point, if it all goes into a toxic-dumpit anyway?

“But this thing could be the key to saving everything, the ecology …”

Alex was rapt, mesmerized by the man’s unexpected intensity, and he felt Teresa’s flushed emotion as well. So they both flinched in reflex surprise when somebody behind them let out a blood-chilling scream.

“Give that back!”

Everyone turned, and Alex blinked to see June Morgan waging an uneven struggle with … Pedro Manella! The blonde woman hauled at her briefcase, which the Aztlan reporter clutched in one meaty hand, fending her off with the other. When she kicked him, Pedro winced but gave no ground. Meanwhile, Colonel Spivey droned on.

“… creating the very wealth that makes for generosity, and incidentally giving us the stars …”

Alex stood up. “Manella! What are you doing!”

“He’s stealing my valise!” June yelled. “He wants my data so he can scoop tonight’s presidential speech!”

Alex sighed. That sounded like Manella, all right. “Pedro,” he began. “You’ve already got an inside story any reporter would die for—”

Manella interrupted. “Lustig, you better have a—” He stopped with a gulp as June swiveled full circle to elbow him sharply below the sternum, then stamped on his foot and snatched the briefcase during her follow-through. But then, instead of rejoining the others, she spun about and ran away!

“S-stop her!” Pedro gasped. Something in his alarmed voice turned Alex’s heart cold. June held the valise in front of her, sprinting toward the towering resonator. “A bomb?” Teresa blurted, while Alex thought, But they checked for bombs!

At another level he simply couldn’t believe this was happening. June?

She leaped the railing surrounding the massive resonator, ducked under the snatching arm of a Maori security man, and launched herself toward the gleaming cylinder. At the final instant, another guard seized her waist, but June’s expression said it was already too late. People dove for cover as she yanked a hidden lever near the handle.

Alex winced, bracing for a sledgehammer blow.…

But nothing happened!

In the stunned silence, Glenn Spivey’s voice rambled on.

“… so with this message I’m sending a library of all the surface-coupling coefficients we’ve collected. Naturally, you’re ahead of us in most ways, but we’ve learned a few tricks too …”

June’s face flashed from triumph to astonishment to rage. She cursed, pounding the valise until it was dragged from her hands and hustled outside by some brave and very fleet security men. It was Pedro, then, who finally wrestled her away from the resonator and forced her into a chair. Alex switched off the sound of the colonel’s words, which now, suddenly, seemed mockingly irrelevant.

“So this was all a hoax, June? Spivey holds our attention while you sabotage the thumper?” His pulse pounded. To be deceived by the military man’s apparent sincerity was nothing next to the treachery of this woman he thought he knew.

“Oh Alex, you’re such a fool!” June laughed breathlessly and with a note of shrill overcompensation. “You can be sweet and I like you a lot. But how did you ever get to be so gullible?”

“Shut up,” Teresa said evenly, and though her tone was businesslike, June clearly saw dark threat in Teresa’s eyes. She shut up. They all waited silently for the security team to report. It seemed better to let adrenaline stop drumming in their ears before dealing with this unexpected enormity.

Joey came back shortly, bowing his head in apology. “No bomb after all, tohunga. It’s a liquid-suspension catalyst—a simple nanotech corrosion promoter—probably tailored to wreck the thumper’s piezogravitic characteristics. The stuff was supposed to spray when she pulled the lever, but the holes had been squished shut, so nothing came out. A lucky break. Lucky our reporter friend’s so strong.” Joey gestured toward Manella, who blinked in apparent surprise.

“His hand print covers the holes,” Joey explained. “Broke the hinge, too. Don’t nobody challenge that guy to a wrestling match.”

June shrugged when they all looked at her. “I got the idea from those scrubber enzymes Teresa keeps asking for, to clean her old shuttle. Your guards grew used to me bringing chemicals in little packages. Anyway, just a few drops would put you out of business. It takes days to grow a new resonator—all the time my employers needed.”

“You’re not trying to hold back much, are you?” Teresa asked.

“Why should I? If they don’t get my success code soon, they’ll assume I failed and shut you down by other means … a lot more violent than I tried to use! That’s why I volunteered to do this. You’re my friends. I don’t want you hurt.”

The murmuring techs obviously thought her statement bitterly ironic. And yet, at one level Alex believed her. Maybe I have to believe someone I’ve made love to cares about me … even if she turns betrayer for other reasons.

“They agreed to let me say this much if I failed,” June went on intensely. “To convince you to give up. Please, Alex, everybody, take my word for it. You’ve no idea who you’re up against!”

Someone brought a chair for Alex. He knew he must look drawn and unsteady, but going passive would be a mistake right now. He remained standing.

“What’s your success code? How would you tell them you’d succeeded?”

“You were planning to phone Spivey after hearing his pitch, no? I was to slip in a few words, to be overheard by my contact there—”

“What? You mean Spivey’s not your real boss?”

June’s eyes flicked away before returning to meet his. “What do you mean?” she asked a little too quickly. “Of course he’s …”

“Wait,” Pedro Manella interrupted. You’re right, Alex. Something’s fishy.” He moved closer to glower over June. “What did you mean when you said, ‘You have no idea who you’re up against’? You weren’t just speaking figuratively, were you? I think you meant it quite literally.”

June attempted nonchalance. “Did I?”

Pedro rubbed his hands. “I spent two months interviewing that kidnapper-­torturer in London. You know, the one who called himself the ‘father confessor of Knightsbridge’? I learned a lot about persuasion techniques, writing that book. Does anyone have any bamboo shoots? Or we’ll make do with what’s in the kitchen.”

June laughed contemptuously. “You wouldn’t dare.” But her uncertainty grew apparent when she met Manella’s eyes.

“What do you mean, Pedro?” Teresa asked. “You think Spivey was telling the truth? That he’s as much a dupe as—as we’ve been?”

Alex appreciated her use of the plural. Of course, he deserved singling out as paramount dupe.

“You’re the astronaut, Captain,” Manella answered. “Did the colonel’s purported passion for new launch systems make sense? Given what you know about him?”

Teresa nodded grudgingly. “Y-e-e-s. Of course, maybe I want to believe. It makes Jason’s last work more noble. It means our leaders aren’t just TwenCen-style, nationalist assholes, but were trying a plan, however misguided—” She shook her head. “Glenn sounded sincere. But I just can’t say.”

“Well, there’s something else a lot less subjective, and that’s the question of why? What motive could Spivey and his bosses have to put this site out of business, if everything comes under international jurisdiction tonight anyway?”

“There’s only one reason possible,” Alex answered. “If taking us out was part of a scheme to stop those controls. Spivey admitted he didn’t want them.”

Teresa shook her head again. “No! He said he wanted them delayed, till gazer space launching was proven. But remember, he accepted the principle of long-term supervision.” Her brow furrowed. “Alex, none of this makes sense!”

He agreed. “What could anyone gain by causing turmoil now? If the president’s speech doesn’t disclose all, the Net will explode.”

“Not just the Net,” Manella added. “There will be chaos, strikes … and a gravity laser arms race. Poor nations and major corporations will blow city blocks out of their rivals’ capitals, or set off earthquakes or—” He shook his head. “Who on Earth could profit from such a situation?”

“Not Glenn Spivey,” Teresa affirmed, now with complete certainty.

“Nor any of the space powers,” Alex put in.

One of the techs asked, “Who does that leave, then?” They regarded June Morgan, who scanned the circle of nervous faces and sighed. “You’re all so smart, so modern. You’ve got your info-plaques and percomps and loyal little ferret programs to go fetch data for you. But what information? Only what’s in the Net, my dears.”

Alex frowned. “What are you talking about?”

She glanced at her watch, nervously. “Look, I was supposed to report in well before this. At any moment, my—masters—will know I’ve failed, and move to settle things more dramatically. Please, Alex. Let me finish my job and call them—”

She was interrupted by a sudden, blaring alarm from one of the consoles. A technician rushed over to read its display. “I’m getting hunt resonance from two—no, three—large thumpers … in the Sahara, Canada, and somewhere in Siberia!”

June stood up, pulling when a guard grabbed her arm. “Too late. They must be getting nervous. Alex please, get everybody out of here!”

Teresa pushed close to the blond woman. “Who do you mean, they? I say we let Pedro do it his way …” She glanced to one side, but Alex was no longer there.

“Give me a projected resonance series for that combination!” he demanded, throwing himself into his work seat, slipping the subvocal device over his head. “Zoom onto the mantle-core boundary under Beta. Show me any likely power threads.”

“Putting it on now, to hunga.”

The recorded message had frozen on its last frame—depicting a hopeful-­looking Glenn Spivey smiling into the camera. That image now vanished, replaced by the familiar cutaway Earth, resplendent in fiery complexity. From three northern points at its surface, pulsing columns of light thrust inward toward a rendezvous far below. The dot where they converged wavered as the beams kept sliding off each other.

“I’ve never seen those sites before,” one Tangoparu scientist said. But another commented, “I … think I might’ve. A couple of quick pulses yesterday, just after we hit the glacier. But the traces looked like those strange surface echoes we’ve been getting, so I assumed …”

To a trained eye, the intruder beams could be seen hunting for alignment in the energized, field-rich lower mantle. The Beta singularity, still orbiting through the enigmatic electricity of those zones, obliged by serving as their mirror, focusing the combined effort. The purple dot shimmered.

“They’re less experienced,” somebody near Alex muttered. “But they know what they’re doing.”

“Extrapolating now.… Gaia!” The first tech cried out. “The amplified beam’s going to come this way!”

Alex was too busy to turn his head, which would throw off the subvocal anyway. Using the delicate input device was a lot like running full tilt along a tightrope. Ironically, it was easier to order up a simulated image of his face than to use his own voice to shout a warning.

“Rip!” the imitation self cried out as he worked. “Get everyone but the controllers out of here. Take them west, you hear? West!”

Someone else might have had some romantic impulse to argue, but not Teresa. She’d evaluate the situation, decide there was little she could do here to help, and obey without hesitation. Sure enough, Alex heard her voice of command driving the others outside leaving his truncated team to work in relative peace.

The peace of a battlefield. Alex sensed the big, cylindrical resonator swing about at his command and begin throbbing its own contribution to a struggle being joined thousands of kilometers below. There followed something like a gravitational fencing match—his own beam countering and parrying the opposing three as they attempted to unite. Bouncing off Beta’s sparkling mirror, they passed through threadlike filigrees of transient superconductivity, which of late had taken on new orders of intricacy, rising from the core boundary in gauzy loops and splendid, shimmering bows.

Some time ago, Alex had likened the loops to “prominences”—those arcs of plasma one saw along the sun’s limb during an eclipse, which drove fierce currents from the star’s surface into space. Similar laws applied near the Earth’s core, though on vastly different scales. The comparison would have been interesting to contemplate if he weren’t busy fighting to save their lives.

Thousands of the mysterious strands vibrated as fingers of tuned gravity plucked them, stimulating the release of pent-up energy. Some rays scattered off Beta, sending augmented flashes spiraling randomly. There was no time to wonder how his opponents had learned to do this so quickly, or even who they were. Alex was too busy fending off their beams, preventing them from combining to create something coherent and cohesive and lethal.

Alex watched more and more shimmering filaments pulsate in time to his rhythms. Other flashes sparkled to the melodies of his unknown foes. Each flicker represented some great expanse of semimolten rock, millions of tons altering state at the whim of entities far above.

“We can’t hold them much longer!” One of the techs cried out.

“Wait! We have to work together,” Alex urged. “What if—”

He stopped talking abruptly as ripples flowed across the display, and the subvocal sent his amplified speech throbbing deep into the Earth’s interior. Alex switched to communicating with slight tremors in his larynx, letting the machine transmit a message to the others.

Take a look at this! He urged, and caused the Easter Island resonator to suddenly draw back from the acherontic struggle.

His opponents’ beams floundered in the abrupt lack of resistance, momentarily discomfited in overcompensation. Then, as if unable to believe the way was now clear, the three columns came together again tentatively.

Everybody else … out! He commanded. I’ll take it from here!

He heard chairs squeak and topple as his assistants took him at his word. Footsteps scrambled for the door. “Don’t wait too long, Alex!” someone shouted. But his attention was already focused as it never had been before. The enemy beams touched Beta, hunted, and at last found their resonance.

At that same moment, though, Alex felt a strange, fey oneness with the monster singularity. No matter how much the enemy must have learned—no doubt by snooping his files—he still knew Beta better than any living man!

If I wait till the very last millisecond …

Of course no human could control the beam with such fineness. Not in real time. So he chose his counterstroke in advance and delegated a program to act on his behalf. There was no chance to double-check the code.

Go! He unleashed his surrogate warrior at the last possible moment. Behind him, the resonator seemed to yowl an angry, almost feline battle cry.

It was already too late to flee. Alex quashed the adrenaline rush—a reaction inherited from ancient days when his ancestors used to seek out danger with their own eyes, meeting it with the power of their own limbs and their own tenacious wills. The last of these, at least, was valid still. He forced himself to wait calmly through the final fractions of a second, as fate came bulling toward him from the bowels of the Earth.

The Snake River Plain stretches, desolate and lined with cinder cones, from the Cascades all the way to Yellowstone, where outcrops of pale rhyolite gave the great park its name. As near Hawaii and several other places, a fierce needle here replaced the mantle’s normal, placid convection. Something slender and hot enough to melt granite had worked its way under the North American Plate, taking several million years to cut the wide valley.

That pace was quick, in geologic terms. But there was no law that said things could not go faster still.