They sat quietly, sipping the rich coffee, each lost in her own thoughts.
'Pat?'
'Um?'
'What's the matter between you and Alex? He's always seemed so charming to me.'
Pat was silent for a moment.
'Would you go out with him?'
'Sure, I guess so.'
'That's the problem. He'd take you up on it. Roommate or not. The truth is, of course, that I still find him fascinating. He knows so much about so many dungs. He's warm and engaging and can focus some sort of personal intensity that makes it easy to fall into the illusion that you're the only interesting person in the world.'
Pat stopped to take a drink of coffee. 'I think he really does like me. But he's got enough "like" to spread it around pretty liberally. He separated from his wife, but, as they say, the chances of him settling down are between slim and zero.'
Janine took a sip of coffee and rolled the glass between her palms.
'Is he good in bed?'
'Hey!' Pat laughed. 'What kind of question is that?' She leaned her head back against the wall staring at the white ceiling. She could feel Runyan's hands on her waist, his lips near her navel. 'Yes, damn it,' she said with resignation, 'he's pretty good.'
'Well, then,' said Janine, with an impish sidelong glance at the sofa, 'I suggest that we prepare yon piece for its proper initiation.'
She drained her glass, set it down, and went to grab an armload of clothes off the sofa.
Pat laughed again as Janine disappeared down the hall.
'Thank you, lord,' she said in a loud stage voice, 'for delivering me at last from nosey, interfering roommates.'
Then she stood and looked around. The last shall be first, she decided. She betted the box of utensils she had most recently deposited and headed for the kitchen, bent on the task of imposing order in her new abode.
The following Friday, Robert Isaacs put the finishing touches on his report to Drefke as the setting sun sent lances of light through the blinds of his office windows then dropped below the wall of trees. He was tired, but exhilarated. The report concerned the epochal meeting which had begun early Monday and wound up after lunch Friday, a complete success. A small coterie of scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain and a larger group of diplomats had come to unprecedented, unanimous agreement. The public confrontation would continue, but driven to a close and desperate cooperation, the two countries would, in complete secrecy, launch a massive joint effort to rid the world of Krone's creations.
If all went according to plan, in three or four years an international armada of ships would form a circle a hundred miles in radius in the expanse of the north Pacific. In the centre of the circle would float an artificial, portable island. On the island would be an immensely powerful and complex piece of machinery designed for a suicide mission. The product of a dedicated, cooperative effort between the superpowers, it would produce intense beams of laser light, finely tuned and aimed by the gravitational pull of the black hole itself. Since there would be no way to control the orbit of the hole, the device would be located where orbit perturbations by irregularities in the earth were minimal. The position of the device would be precisely fixed by accurate orbital calculations to be steadily refined over the years.
In addition to settling on the basic engineering attack, there had been a host of ticklish political problems to resolve. Paramount had been the continuing demand by the Russians that the United States cease work on beam weapons. Isaacs had admired the consummate skill of the team from the State Department. They had pointed out how item after item which the Soviets wanted banned was, after all, related to the massive effort before them. Other projects they discarded spontaneously, activities that had to take second seat to the main effort anyway. Neither country had the resources to devote to full scale development of beam weapons when faced with the resource-devouring assault on the black hole. In the final analysis, the Soviets had enough concessions to feel they had accomplished their goal, and the United States did not feel significantly weakened politically in the process.
Another issue had been the manner in which to treat the results of the test. If the project were successful, an explosion of considerable violence would ensue. Technically, it was not in violation of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, but in certain quarters all doubt must be forestalled, and that in turn called for an explanation of the predicament which demanded the undertaking. The NATO allies and Japan would be notified and sworn to secrecy and certain aid would be solicited from them. All would be allowed observers stationed at the site.
Dissension over the role of the Chinese had nearly split the meeting, but a precarious accord had been reached. When the time came, the Chinese would be informed of the test, but the underlying reason would only be hinted. The Soviet Union had chosen to inform none of the countries in its orbit, and the US had not demurred.
Isaacs gathered up the report with its final corrections and headed for the outer office. His eyes skimmed the brass letters on the doorway — Deputy Director of Scientific Intelligence — and the ones below — Robert B. Isaacs. The report was virtually his last official act in that capacity. There had been no scandal, no public condemnation, just the gentle irrefutable suggestion. He thought of his new position with the Georgetown University Center for International Studies, amused at the irony. After years of suspicion and mistrust of academics, he would join their ranks. He was actually looking forward to it. Time to do some thinking. Some writing. 'Forget it,' Martinelli had said. 'You'll be as busy as ever.'
Kathleen Huddleston was in the outer office. 'Here's the last of it,' he said to her. 'I sure appreciate your staying late.'
She acknowledged his gratitude with a smile and flipped expertly through the pages. 'This will just take a few minutes. It'll be on Drefke's desk when he comes in in the morning.'
'Great,' Isaacs replied.
He locked his office for the night, waved goodbye to Kathleen who was busy in front of the screen of her word processor and headed for the stairs. As he walked, his mind whirled with images of the fateful moment, the target of the gargantuan effort outlined in the report.
At zero hour the lasers would be triggered and the tiny hurtling particle would be immersed in a carefully designed cocoon of photons. In lightning response, the hole would emit a corresponding burst of particles and energy in rapid cascade and shrink a fraction in size. From the distance of the monitoring flotilla, this unprecedented set of events would look similar to another man-made holocaust.
Information of the blast would be fed nearly instantaneously to nerve centres around the world. Within hours it would be known whether the experiment was a success, whether the energy released and the shrinkage of the hole were as expected. Only then would they have some concrete basis for the hope that the mass of the hole could be peeled away, little by little, that the orbit could be shifted until the menace was free of the earth.
As Isaacs descended the stairs, he thought of the arguments he had heard from Runyan, Humphreys, Phillips, and Korolev. He trusted these men and believed them when they argued that this was the only rational approach, but their descriptions of the possible pitfalls were deeply troubling. The response of the hole was predicated on deductions from Krone's data concerning previously unknown effects. Great effort would be put into developing theories to interpret the Krone experiments, but these theories could not be tested except by the ultimate event itself.
If the current expectations were overoptimistic, the experiment could be a dud, the black hole continuing on its rapacious path. They could err in the opposite sense. If too much mass were liberated from the hole, too much energy released, the explosion could be catastrophically powerful, threatening the Pacific basin with deadly tsunamis and perhaps the whole earth with climatic changes.