When evening fell the Sergeant returned to take them to a food tent where they were given baked beans and foil wrapped shepherds pies warmed up in a microwave. Then they were taken to a row of half a dozen camper vans and told they would be spending the night there.

"I thought we might be spending the night in a hotel," said Jeffcott as he and Duffy were shown to the van that had been assigned to them.

"You don't want to go to Phoenix," the Sergeant replied. "Everyone still in the city is frightened. They'll be bothering you with questions, maybe blaming you for the whole situation. Blaming science, I mean, and you're scientists. You'll be safer here with the whole US army to look after you."

Jeffcott hadn't been thinking of Phoenix, though. There were plenty of large towns within a couple of hours drive and surely they had boarding houses. The Sergeant's mention of Phoenix reminded him of the news reports that had been showing on his TV over the past couple of days, though. "How many people are still in the city?" he asked.

"The bulk of the population has already left," the Sergeant replied, "but there are still enough people to cause problems."

Jeffcott could imagine the kind of problems be was referring to. With the majority of buildings empty there would be a lot of looting and the national guard would probably have been called in to help the police deal with it. Just the day before, a news reporter had been standing in the middle of an empty street, trying to speak above the noise of car alarms and police sirens somewhere in the distance. Jeffcott had thought he'd deliberately picked an empty part of the city for dramatic effect but suddenly he wasn't so sure.

"Maybe you're right," he said, looking around at all the soldiers milling around among the parked vehicles. They'd made him feel rather nervous when they'd first arrived a few hours before but now he was immensely glad they were there. The Sergeant nodded and continued walking. They followed him.

Jeffcott and Duffy began the evening watching news reports on the small television the camper had been provided with. The streets of Phoenix looked even emptier than before and Jeffcott thought the city would probably be completely empty by the time the anomaly reached it, except for the bravest looters who would be waiting until the last minute to grab the juiciest treasures. If they weren't careful, though, they'd leave it too late and become ensnared by the thing, or else be grabbed by the police as they tried to leave with their ill-gotten gains.

Eventually the news moved on to other matters and it was comforting to see that life was going on as normal around most of the rest of the world, as if the situation in Arizona was some minor, local difficulty that the authorities would deal with in due course. Jeffcott found it astonishing that he'd thought the same thing just a few hours before. That was before he'd seen the anomaly with his own eyes.

Every hour or so the camper drove further away from the advancing anomaly, driven by a pimple faced private who looked far too young to be in the army. When they tried to talk to him he grinned apologetically and said that he'd been ordered not to talk to them because they'd be too busy working. They took the hint and opened the folders they'd brought with them from the portacabin. They didn't learn anything new, though, and ended up getting an early night, trying to get some sleep on the small, hard cots while trying to ignore the busy noises of the command post that came in through the windows that they had to leave open because of the heat. The poor private had to remain awake behind the wheel, listening to a country music station on the radio, but he was relieved by another painfully young soldier at around midnight.

Jeffcott somehow managed to get some sleep, but woke up with an aching back and a stiff neck. A glance across at Duffy told him that he was suffering similarly. They had a quick breakfast of cereal and semi-skimmed milk from the fridge accompanied by glasses of fruit juice, and then the Sergeant was back, opening the door and coming right in. "Ah, you're up," he said. "Are you ready to talk to the surviving Kensington personnel?"

"Pretty much," said Duffy. "If these transcripts are any clue, though, they won't have much to tell us."

"Well, you never know what minor detail might mean something to you with your knowledge of the subject," said the Sergeant hopefully. "Leave that," he said as Jeffcott took his bowl over to the sink to wash it out. "We'll send someone over to tidy up. You're going to be too busy for such things."

"Our own maid service," said Duffy with a smile. "Can I order a bottle of champagne sent up with the evening meal?"

"I'll see what I can do," said the Sergeant, so matter-of-factly that Jeffcott wondered whether he might actually do it.

They changed into another set of clothes, wondering whether the maid service would launder and press their previous days clothes while they were away. Outside, Robinson was waiting for them, accompanied by a female soldier who said goodbye and left as the men approached. A short distance away they saw Summers and Gruber, the doctors, being led by another officer to one of the portacabins that had been outfitted as a hospital, but the Sergeant led the three physicists in a different direction, to a portacabin that was being used as 'guest quarters'. Jeffcott wasn't surprised to see serIous looking guards on duty at both the doors.

There were four men and two women inside, as well as three soldiers keeping a wary eye on them as if they were captured prisoners of war. The Kensington people looked scared and subdued, and Jeffcott guessed that the questioning they'd received hadn't been gentle.

One man, thick around the waist and with stubble around his face, stood up to confront the Sergeant. "When are you going to let us go?" he demanded. "We've told you everything we know. If we could help you we would, but we can't."

"I demand a lawyer," one of the women demanded. "I have rights."

"Thank you for your forbearance," the Sergeant replied. "These people are scentists. Experts in the same field as the people you worked for. You've made it quite clear that you can't explain to a layman such as myself what they were doing at Kensington Labs, but any small clue you can give them might be enough for them to fill in the blanks. If they can figure out what your people were doing in there it might help us a great deal."

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"And then you'll let us go?" asked the fat man.

"It's probably better if you remain in protective custody for a while," the Sergeant replied. "The whole world knows about the anomaly now, the threat it represents. The evacuation of Phoenix has already begun. There are a lot of angry, scared people out there."

"But they can't blame us, surely," the fat man protested. "I'm an accountant. I don't know anything about science or knots or anything. I just looked after the accounts."

"And I was a secretary," the woman added. "Pretty much all I did was answer telephones."

"The people on the other end of those telephones," said Jeffcott, taking a step forward. "Were they other scientists? Did you hear anything your employer said to them?"

The woman stared at him with naked fear, as if she feared that some Gestapo style interrogation was about to begin. The Sergeant, meanwhile, was backing away to the door. "I'll leave you to get acquainted," he said. "Take as long as you like, learn whatever you can. We'll bring you something to eat around noon." Then he left, closing the door behind him. The sound of his footsteps descending the steps was drowned out by the sound of a helicopter passing overhead.

Robinson approached the secretary, smiling reassuringly. "You're not in any trouble," she said. "It's just very important that we understand as much as possible about what happened in there. You worked in the building. Maybe you overheard a conversation. Something that didn't mean much to you at the time."

While she worked on the woman and Duffy talked to the fat man Jeffcott approached a younger man who had the look of a university student. He tried to remember the names from the dossiers they'd been given the day before. "Adrian Bailey?' he asked. "You were an intern working for Doctor Bergman, right?"

"On paper," the young man replied. He looked to be barely in his twenties and painfully skinny. There were dark circles under his eyes as if he hadn't slept for several days. "I only met him a couple of times. Most of the time I worked with Geoffrey Fowler. He was the one who mentored me on my thesis. Theoretical modelling of phase transitions in the early universe."

"Sounds interesting," said Jeffcott, while thinking that hundreds of theses must have been written by hundreds of students on an almost identical subject. The Evaluation Committee that would eventually look at it would probably give it only the most cursory of glances before approving it, whereupon it would be forgotten forever. "Did you use data from Bergman's research?"

"Not really," said the intern, his eyes widening with fear as if he expected to be tortured unless he said something useful. "They had lots of ongoing projects. Bergman's knotpicker was just one of them."

"Knotpicker?" Jeffcott asked. He could feel his eyes widening.

"Sorry," said the kid, wilting nervously. "I meant the piecewise linear n-sphere magnetic unknotting furnace. Or just The Furnace. That's what they called it, anyway."

Jeffcott leaned forward in excitement. Now they were getting somewhere. Seeing his interest the young intern perked up, suddenly hopeful. Maybe he wasn't going to be shot or sent to prison after all.

"Tell me about the furnace," said Jeffcott.

"I only saw it a couple of times. I never got to work with it. I was on a different project, for Professor Fowler..."

"Yes, yes," Jeffcott interrupted impatiently. "Tell me what you can about it."

"It was just a big, circular thing in the basement. Fowler said it used the same basic technology as a fusion reactor. Magnets to keep hot plasma confined. Very hot, but the magnets created additional magnetic fields on top of the transient poloidal fields a fusion reactor uses..."

Jeffcott listened intently as the intern went into great technical detail about the device, but his interest waned quickly as it became clear that he wasn't able to add anything to his earlier interviews with the military. He was desperately trying to help by telling absolutely everything he knew, driven by fear of being accused of hindering the investigation, but the fact was that he'd only seen the device a couple of times and knew about it mainly from overheard conversations in the canteen. The young chap had been focused with an almost lasar-like intensity on his own work, afraid that he wouldn't be able to complete his thesis.

Another intern would have been fascinated by the work being done by Bergman, Jeffcott thought. He would have dedicated himself to following every theory, every detail of the machine they were building, but the strange workings of fate meant that the only surviving member of the Kensington team with any kind of scientific knowledge suffered from a crippling inadequacy complex that had kept him from diverting his attention from his own work. On the other hand, though, mused Jeffcott, if he'd been more interested in Bergman's machine he would probably have been there when they turned it on and he would be just as dead as the others.

The disappointment must have showed on his face because the intern shrank back in his chair again, aware that he was failing him. There was such fear in his wide, puppy dog eyes that Jeffcott found himself reassuring him and thanking him for what little he had been able to say. Then he stood and went to where Duffy and Robinson had already gone to share what they'd learned with each other.

They looked up expectantly as Jeffcott joined them but he could only shake his head. "Nothing," he said. "You?"

"They might as well be random strangers they scooped up from the street," said Duffy. "That's an hour of my life I'll never get back."

"The secretary did say one thing that was interesting," said Robinson, twirling a lock of greying hair around her finger thoughtfully. "She said it wasn't the first time they turned it on. They turned it on a couple of days before, for about an hour. Then they turned it off again."

"And nothing happened?" asked Duffy.

"She was upstairs when it happened," Robinson replied. "She overheard a couple of assistants talking about it. All she heard was that the test went very well, though. Better than expected, from the excitement in their voices. One of the assistants said he hoped it worked just as well when they turned it on again on Tuesday. At three PM."

"When the anomaly appeared," said Jeffcott, staring at her. She nodded. "So why didn't the anomaly appear the first time?" Robinson could only shake her head, though, while staring glumly at the floor.

"Well, we've barely started," said Jeffcott, trying to inject a note of optimism. "We've still got the other three to talk to. I think each of us should talk to all six of them. There's no telling what they might reveal if we keep repeating the same questions over and over again, and one of us might think of a question the others didn't."

"What's the point?" said Robinson, though. "They don't know anything. We know more than they do about what they were doing in there."

"You're probably right," said Jeffcott, "but we can't overlook the possibility that there's something important to be learned from them. Who knows what tiny bit of information might make the difference. Something they'll only think to mention when they've been quizzed about the same thing a dozen times over."

Robinson sighed. "Fine," she said. "Why not? It's not as if they're going to be letting us out of here any time soon."

She nodded her head towards the soldier standing beside the door. For a moment Jeffcott didn't know what she meant, but then he noticed that the soldier was watching the three experts just as intently as the six Kensington personnel. She was right, he realised with a nervous shock. The three of them were just as much prisoners as the other occupants of the room.

He glanced across at Duffy and saw him staring back with an 'I told you so' expression on his face. Then he shrugged helplessly, though, and turned to talk to the man their briefing notes had told them was a caretaker. Robinson chose the computer engineer and Jeffcott was left with the other accountant.