God! To go back. She felt the wave of despair again.
'And what of them?' She gestured towards the front of the house.
'If you cooperate, they need come to no harm. Where is Krone now?'
'He is still in the study. With them.'
'You must bring him here. We will escape out the back to our car which is hidden down the road.'
'And if they resist?'
'You must find a way. If they discover our presence here they will die.'
'If we get away, they, and soon many others, will follow,' the woman argued.
The tall man thought for a long moment.
'You must make it look as if it is your idea. If they look only for a woman on the run, our job will be easier.'
Now Maria Latvin thought deeply. She could go to the agents in the study and reveal the Russians, but at the risk of death or worse for her mother and brother. She could make off with Paul herself and to hell with them all, but the Russians, at least, would exact the same penalty. She wanted no harm to come to those in the other room, least of all Paul. She dreaded the idea of going back, but she would be with Paul, and surely the Americans would do everything to have him released. Staying close to him was her best chance of survival.
She needed some way to distract them. She thought of the lab books. Paul had been working with them when he had drifted from her. The Americans were keenly interested in them. She supposed the Russians would be too, if they only knew how near they were. She hated them!
She spoke to the tall one.
'I will get him out in the car. You can wait to see us leave. We have a hunting lodge higher in the mountains, I'll draw you a map. I will head in the opposite direction and then double back on another road. We can switch to your car there.'
'I don't like it,' said the other man. 'We shouldn't let her or Krone out of our sight.'
The tall man turned to speak to him, keeping his eyes locked on Maria Latvin.
'I don't think there will be any problem.' He smiled an unpleasant smile and patted the leather folder in his breast pocket.
Isaacs closed another book and checked his watch. He had found no reference to other useful material beyond an occasional technical journal. The lab books seemed selfcontained. There was no reason to delay further.
'It's time to get back to the base and radio a report,' he said. 'How are you doing?' he inquired of his companions.
'This is amazing stuff!' Runyan replied enthusiastically.
'The man is really incredible. He has developed a whole series of innovative techniques to accomplish things I would have said were impossible. Apparently, he deliberately set out to make a black hole. He wanted to use it as an energy source, utilize the power emitted as material is swallowed. Vast power from anything, dirt, water, air. He started by investigating how great a density he could create in the lab. Just a question of pure basic science with no practical application in mind. Then he got the idea of creating a black hole. He imploded pellets of iron with his standard beam techniques — iron so that there would be no nuclear reactions. The problem is that it requires vast energies to overcome the internal pressure of the compressed matter. Krone seems to have developed a way to neutralize the electrical charges in the pellet and the beam which compresses it. That reduced the pressure and allows much higher densities. I haven't got to anything about black holes yet, but if I'm any judge his studies will advance our knowledge of the behaviour of nuclear matter by a decade.'
'Could be,' replied Isaacs. 'I was just looking here somewhere in the middle of the story,' he checked a date, 'about a year and a half ago. Apparently, he has had some success at reaching high densities, but trouble maintaining them. He's describing here the development of a magnetic confinement configuration which can support the compressed pellet while he continues to focus the intense neutron beams on it. The discussion is highly technical. I'm barely getting the gist of it.'
Isaacs paused to rub his eyes.
'The real question is whether we are going to learn anything from these that will tell us how to undo the damage. Are you getting any sense of that?'
'He's done the impossible and recorded it in meticulous detail,' Runyan replied. 'Only time will tell, but I can't believe there won't be some new knowledge, some hints. I know this, as long as the original knowledge is locked up there,' he glanced at Krone's still figure, 'these books are invaluable.'
Danielson had not seemed to pay any attention to this interchange. She had swivelled her chair away from the desk and was staring at the fire.
'Pat?' inquired Isaacs.
She turned to look at him with a vacant smile. 'I was thinking about Shelley.'
'The poet, Percy Bysshe?'
'No, his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft.'
'Oh, right, Frankenstein. Well, our scientist has created a monster all right.'
'Four of them.'
'What's that?'
She pointed at the book she had abandoned on the desk.
'He thinks he made four of them. At first the suspension system was ineffective. He cites evidence that he managed to start three seeds, but then they disappeared from the system. There was no sign that they had evaporated, no unexplained release of energy. He suspects they fell into the earth, but are too small to detect. By the fourth time, he made significant improvements to the magnetic suspension and managed to force-feed and grow the one we know about. Eventually, the suspension failed again. This time he detected it seismically and knew for sure what was happening.'
'My god!' gasped Runyan from his seat by the door.
'Didn't he know what he was doing? Why didn't he stop after the first disaster?'
She looked at him Godly.
'The journals are pretty clinical so his state of mind is only implicit, but I get the feeling that he was totally caught up in the scientific and engineering questions and driven by a powerful megalomania. Apparently, he was so consumed by his quest that he didn't question the failures in that way, just what had become of them. When the fourth got away from him, he finally thought seriously about the implications of what he had done — and it destroyed him.' She waved a hand towards the quiet figure in the chair by the fireplace.
'But if he's right about the other three,' said Runyan, 'then even if we find some solution to the big one we're still in danger from the others. Drag on them is going to act more quickly to cause them to settle into the earth where they're unreachable. They may take a much longer time to grow to a dangerous size, but it's still just a matter of time.'
He exchanged a long glance with Isaacs. Isaacs broke it off, gathered up the books he had been reading and stood.
'Well, let's see if we can get these books to someone who will understand them better than we do.'
Danielson stood up from the desk, and Runyan gathered his long legs under him and shoved himself to his feet.
Maria Latvin appeared in the doorway. She gave Runyan a cool look and then addressed herself to Isaacs.
'I must put Paul down for his rest. Then I would like to talk to you, if I may. Would you please wait in the living room?'
'Certainly,' replied Isaacs. 'We have a couple of issues to discuss with you as well.'
They filed out of the room and down the hall as the woman bent to help Krone from the chair.
Isaacs deposited the books he had been holding on the table in the foyer. He walked over next to Runyan who had settled in the chair next to the fireplace. Danielson examined the artefacts on the shelves.
'What next?' Runyan inquired.
'We'll explain to her that we need the books and that we'll have to send someone for Krone. Something tells me she's not going to take that news too well.'
Runyan's face clouded over. 'I don't believe I fathom that lady. Surely she realizes that we represent some threat to upset her isolated but rather posh applecart here, yet she doesn't seem at all perturbed.'