"How are you still alive?" asked Jeffcott as Bergman came forward to join them.

"The others are dead, then?" the newcomer asked sadly.

"Everyone in the city is dead," said Bright. "Your machine killed sixty thousand people."

"I'm sorry." Bergman seemed genuinely upset by the news, Jeffcott thought, but not that upset. He glanced around at the others and saw that they were thinking the same thing.

"The interns brought food and water down to me," Bergman continued. "So I could continue my work down here. I didn't want to leave, even for a moment. I could see that the others were falling sick, though. They could see that I wasn't, so they stayed down here for a few days, thinking they'd recover, but they didn't. As their condition continued to deteriorate they left, to find somewhere quiet and peaceful to die. They didn'twant to die in sight of the thing that had killed them." He turned to glance back at the Furnace.

"It was the magnetic fields that protected you," said Jeffcott. "We discovered that magnetic fields give you some measure of protection. That's why we're wearing these. Iron nitride permanent magnets."

Bergman nodded. "Yes, that makes sense,' he said. "There's an electro-magnetic element to the BLT factor. It's been changed in local space by the Furnace. Magnetic fields must keep it from being changed too much. It seems to cause amorphous substances to become more crystalline. It's inevitable that there'd be some effect on living tissue."

"And it's spreading," said Rahul Bhatt. "A hundred and fifty metres an hour. If it doesn't stop, it'll engulf the whole world. Kill everyone."

"So we have to turn it off," said Bright, stepping angrily towards Bergman. "How do we do that? Do you just flip a switch?"

"It's not that simple," Bergman replied. "The device was originally designed to generate energy. It works, and it's using that energy to power itself. It no longer needs the generator."

"So we just pull some wires," said the linguist, turning towards the Furnace. "There's plenty to choose from."

"No," said Jeffcott, though. "We need it intact so we can reverse what it's done to the BLT field. Make the two universes separate again" He turned to Bergman. "Can that be done? Can the machine tighten up knots as easily as it loosened them?"

"The machine is generating the magnetic field that protects it," said the professor, though. "Turn it off and the magnetic field vanishes. You'd ever be able to turn it on again."

"We brought a generator," said Gruber. "It's shielded with magnetic mesh. It works just fine in the anomaly. It can generate fifty megawatts. Is that enough to start the Furnace up?"

"It's not just power," said Bergman, though. "There are dozens of variables that have to be just right. I had a team of students and engineers to help me last time. There's no way I could do it alone."

"How long would it take to teach us?" asked Duffy.

"A couple of years perhaps, if you're fast learners."

"We've got a couple of months before the anomaly reaches Los Angeles and Las Vegas," said Jeffcott. "And the sooner before that we stop it, the happier the men in charge will be."

Bergman didn't look happy, though. "It took so long to get it running," he said, turning to look at the tangled assembly of tubes and cabling behind him. "One combination after another, with a rigorous post mortem after each failure to figure out what went wrong. It'll probably take just as long to put it in reverse as it did to get it working in the first place."

"So the sooner we start, the sooner we finish," said Jeffcott.

"There's another problem," said Gruber. "The generator is outside, in the car park."

"So?" asked Jeffcott.

"So there's an army of monsters out there, between us and it."

"Monsters?" asked Robinson.

"They emerged from the bodies of the dead," the biologist replied. "Summers and I saw it happen. That means there's about sixty thousand of them out there. The soldiers are holding them back right now."

The other all stared at him, except Bergman. When Jeffcott turned to see how he was reacting to the news the professor was staring down at the floor. Almost guiltily, he thought. He dismissed the idea that began to form in his head. It was ridiculous.

Duffy ran back up the stairs to where the soldiers were still holding the corridor while Bright and Robinson began searching the large room for the service entrance. They found it to the south. A slope leading up to a hatch in the ceiling. It was padlocked, but the steel lock broke into fragments when the linguist hit it hard with the handle of her spear. Then she and Jeffcott reached up and pushed at the heavy wooden door. It opened a fraction, allowing them to see out.

They both gasped with shock. The car park was full of the creatures, their flower-heads turning towards the service hatch as they became aware of the movement. They dropped the door with a slam and hurried back to the others.

"There's about a thousand of them between us and the generator," said Jeffcott, still breathless with the effort.

"Piles of fish eggs with flower-heads?" asked Gruber. Jeffcott nodded. The biologist frowned, though. "That's strange," he said. "If they were random mutations, embryonic stem cells growing chaotically, you would expect them all to be different."

"They were all the same," said Davis as he realised what the other man was getting at.

"Also, they seem to be functioning organisms," Gruber added. "They can move around efficiently. They have well organised sense organs. They're what you would expect from the end of an evolutionary process as an organism adapts to an environment."

"Or if they were designed," said Duffy as he also got it. "Intelligent design."

"So who's the designer?" asked Jeffcott. He turned to Bergman. "You got any idea?"

"I know as much as you do," the professor replied.

"You've been here a week," said Bright accusingly. "What have you been doing all that time?"

Before Bergman could answer Summers appeared at the top of the stairs. "How you doing down there?" he asked.

"We're not going to be turning off the Furnace any time soon," Jeffcott replied. "What's going on up there?"

"There's dozens of the creatures in the corridor facing us," the biologist replied. "They're not doing anything, though. Just standing there. Like they're waiting for orders or something."

"Orders from what?" asked Duffy. Summers could only shrug.

"They may not be hostile," said Summers thoughtfully as he joined the others at the bottom of the stairs. "They may be... Bloody hell!"

He'd just noticed the image in the centre of the Furnace and the others took a few moments to tell him what they knew about it. "So we need the generator," Jeffcott concluded, "but..." He waved vaguely towards the service entrance.

"The creatures haven't made any hostile move against us so far," said Robinson thoughtfully. "For all we know, they might let us just go out and get it."

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"Even if they're hostile," Gruber added, how dangerous can they be? They seem to be mostly made of jelly."

"We may have forced them to emerge prematurely," Summers suggested. "When I cut open the corpse, the creature inside may have thought it was being attacked. It sent out an alarm call that made the others emerge prematurely. If we wait, they might develop further. Grow armour, claws, teeth and so forth. If we're going to have to fight them, the time to do it is now."

"So go out there and get the generator," said Bright, gesturing to the service entrance. "Since it was your idea."

Summers looked alarmed by the idea, but then he shrugged and nodded. "I'll need someone to come with me," he said. "I can't pull the wagon by myself."

The others glanced at each other nervously. "We should get the soldiers to do it," said Duffy. "It's their job, after all."

Then Rahul Bhatt stepped forward, though.. "I'll go with you," he said to the biologist. "Let's at least open the doors and see if they react."

"Be careful," said Robinson. A little unnecessarily, thought Jeffcott, trying to suppress a nervous giggle.

Summers nodded to Robinson, though, and he and the mathematician made their way to the service entrance. Jeffcott went with then to help them get one of the doors open, and then they froze with the heavy sheet of steel raised a couple or feet from the car park surface as they watched to see what the creatures would do. They tensed themselves to let the door slam closed again if they did anything sudden, but the creatures just watched them, the disturbingly human-looking eyes in the middle of the petals blinking in the bright Arizona sunlight.

They were indeed all more or less identical, Jeffcott saw, although some of them were larger with two or three flower-heads emerging from the pile-of-fish-eggs body. They shimmered in the sunlight as if they were made of delicately textured glass. A couple of them moved a couple or feet closer, gliding as if on invisible wheels, but then they stopped, still staring at the humans.

Rahul Bhatt lifted the door higher, past vertical, and then it dropped, slammimg down onto the tarmac with a loud bang. The creatures all jumped back in alarm, then stopped, still staring at them. The mathematician stepped warily out onto the surface of the car park and raised his hands to the creatures. "I come in peace," he said. Jeffcott had to clamp his mouth shut to hold in a sudden burst of nervous laughter.

Summers stepped out to stand beside him, and then they walked slowly forward. As they approached, the creatures moved apart to make way for them. It emboldened Jeffcott to step out after them and follow, a few feet behind. Robinson also followed but remained in the doorway.

When Summers and Rahul Bhatt had gone some distance into the crowd of creatures, though, they closed in behind them as if to cut them off. The two humans froze in fear, and Jeffcott thought for a moment that they were about to run back to the basement. After taking a few moments to gather their nerves, though, they went on, the creatures continuing to part to let them through. Then they were at the wagon. They picked up the pulling bars that the horses would normally be hitched to and began pulling it back.

Some of the creatures moved closer to Jeffcott, as if curious. Jeffcott made himself stand firm and, when one of them came close enough, he held out a hand to it as if to a dog. The creature froze for a moment, but then it edged a little closer. Some of the glistening globes of which its body was composed rearranged themselves into a line, like a string of sausages, that reached out towards him like a tentacle. The globe at the end had a long, thin tendril emerging from it and it gently touched the tip of Jeffcott's index finger. Jeffcott made himself hold still and the tendril grew bolder, exploring the length of his finger and the palm of his hand.

"That's right," said Jeffcott softly. "Friend. I want to be your friend."

Robinson grinned and ventured out into the car park. Creatures closed in around her and she reached out to them as if they were curious children. "They're adorable," she said as they explored her hands with their thin, hairlike tendrils. Then she laughed. "That tickles!"

Jeffcott reached his hand out towards the creature facing him. The string-of-sausages jerked back but other than that the creature didn't move. He gently touched the pile-of-fish-eggs and felt movement as a shimmering layer of cilia writhed under his fingertips. The flower-head rose higher on its stalk until it was level with his head, and then Jeffcott and the creature were looking into each other's eyes.

It was impossible to read emotions in the alien face but Jeffcott got the impression of a keen intelligence and a questing curiosity behind the eyes. He reminded himself that this creature was a newborn, less than an hour old. There couldn't possibly be a personality behind those eyes, or could there? Something had guided their growth and development, after all. Could the same thing have uploaded a personality into it?

"Guess it's a good thing we brought a linguist after all," he said to himself. Then he raised his voice. "Bright? You there?"

"Yes," she replied from the entrance to the basement. "Be careful."

"I don't think they're dangerous," Jeffcott told her. "You want to come out here and see if you can talk to them?"

His voice startled the creature and it flowed back to rejoin its fellows. Behind them, the crowd was parting as Summers and Rahul Bhatt pulled the wagon towards the doors. They strained with the weight of the vehicle, or rather with the weight of the large generator sitting on it, along with all the other equipment they'd brought. Jeffcott watched as they came closer and closer to the doors and felt joyful hope rising inside him. They were going to make it. They would eliminate the anomaly, save the world, and they'd made peaceful first contact with an alien race. Not bad for a day's work.

When the wagon emerged from the crowd of creatures, Bright hurried over to it and pulled out a laptop. "If the Furnace works in the basement, maybe this will as well," she said happily. "It contains all my language analysis apps and all my data. Everything I need to crack a new language."

"Where would you start with something like that?" asked Jeffcott.

"A measure of the Shannon's entropy of the sounds they make," the linguist replied. "That's a measure of how much information it contains. It'll tell us if they actually saying things to each other or just mooing like cows. Then, if it's an actual message, you break it down into its individual elements and do a statistical analysis. See which elements repeat most often."

"Sounds like you're no mean mathematician yourself," said Rahul Bhatt, looking up from pulling the carriage.

"I have a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT as well as my qualifications in linguistics," Bright replied. "I'm nowhere near your league but I can hold my own when it comes to Fourier and statistical analyses."

Rahul Bhatt smiled. "It'll be a pleasure to work with you," he said. "I can help you create a complexity profile to start with. I did some work with cryptanalysis a few years back. Learning an alien language should be quite similar to decoding a secret message."

Some of the creatures began making their chalk-on-a-blackboard sound, making the humans tense up in sudden alarm. The flower-heads began twitching on the end of their long stalks as more and more of them joined in and the creatures began pressing forward. "Get back inside," said Jeffcott, waving at Bright to go back down into the basement. "Quick! Cheryl, get out of there!"

"What's going on?" demanded Duffy from down below.

"You said they were waiting for instructions," Jeffcott replied. "I think someone just sent them some."

The creatures surrounding Robinson suddenly swarmed onto her. Jeffcott cried out in shock and ran towards her, but the creature he'd been 'talking' to suddenly sprang at him. A clawed tentacle jabbed towards his face and he grabbed it absent mindedly, still staring at where Robinson was struggling to escape from the horde surrounding her. For a moment it looked as if she might succeed but then clawed tentacles swung and Robinson screamed as blood sprayed in the air. As Jeffcott stared in horror, she fell and vanished from view as the creatures pressed in closer.

He screamed in fury and crushed the creature attacking him with his hands, his fingers curled into claws. They sank in through the fish eggs of its body, several of them bursting and releasing foul-smelling gore, and then his fingers found something more substantial. He crushed it with his hands and the creature fell limp. He threw it away from him, still staring at where Robinson had fallen.

Rahul Bhatt ran for the doorway, grabbing Bright's arm and dragging her with him, but Summers was cut off by another swarm of creatures that blocked his way. He ran towards Jeffcott instead, but the physicist, his hands dripping with slime, could only stand there, staring at Robinson's shredded corpse as the creatures moved away from it. He moved to run towards her but Summers grabbed his arm and dragged him towards an empty area of the car park as the creatures swarmed through the doors and down the slope to the basement.

"They killed her!" said Jeffcott in disbelief. "She only wanted to be their friend."

"They'll kill us too unless we get away," said the biologist glancing back and forth between Jeffcott and the doorway.

"What about the others? Down in the basement?"

"They'll retreat up the stairs to where the soldiers are," said Summers. "They'll protect them."

"Against that many creatures?"

"In a narrow corridor, yes. They should be able to. They've got their spears and... Oh no!"

He'd seen a window break on the top floor. A soldier struggled through it feet first until he was sitting on the windowsill. He dropped his spear to the ground, then swung around and dropped, catching the windowsill by the fingertips and dangling beneath it. Then he dropped to the ground and snatched up his spear again.

Another man followed. Jeffcott heard the sounds of a battle coming from inside the building and guessed that the other soldiers were holding the creatures back while some of them tried to escape. The second man, bleeding from cuts to his arm and face, made it to the ground but a third man was caught and dragged back by a mass of string-of-sausages tentacles that twined around him like snakes and slashed viciously at his body. Jeffcott saw a spray of blood flying from his throat and then he fell back into the building.

The two soldiers who'd made it through ran towards where Summers and Jeffcott were standing. "Run!" one of them shouted. It was Seabreeze, they saw. The man with him was Dustu. "Get out of here!"

Jeffcott needed no encouragement. He turned and fled before the creatures could turn their attentions to him, heading for a building across the street where he could hide. The other three men followed him.