The Captain didn't give them time to react to his statement but nodded to the Sergeant to pass around bulging folders full of photos and reports. "Don't take too long studying this," he said. "Time, as you know, is rather pressing. You can have the rest of the day. Then we'll have to move on. We'd like that nightmare out there stopped before it reaches Phoenix, if possible. Every hour you waste is another hundred and fifty metres of land lost."

"Time taken now might save time later," said Cheryl Robinson, tucking a strand of hair behind an ear with a slender hand. "There might be a vital clue in here that we don't want to overlook."

Jeffcott nodded, feeling an unconscious desire to agree with her in an attempt to win her approval. Robinson was a big name in their field. They'd corresponded frequently on professional matters, each of them trying to bring the other around to their own way of thinking on the ultimate nature of the universe, but this was the first time they'd met in person and he was impressed by her good looks. There were a few grey strands in her chestnut hair, he saw, but virtually no other sign of age. Nothing to suggest that she was in her forties, near enough the same age as him. Then he saw a wedding ring on her finger, though, and his heart sank. There'd been nothing in any of her published papers to suggest that she was married, but then, why would there be? Jeffcott smiled at his foolishness. After two divorces, he thought, I should have had enough of women for one lifetime.

"And the bigger the anomaly is, the harder it might be to destroy it," added the Captain. "Even now it might be too late. So read fast." He and the Sergeant then left before any of the experts could ask any more questions. The sound of running motor engines rose briefly as they opened the door, marched through and closed it behind them.

They all glanced at each other, trying to read in each other's faces how scared they thought they should be, but for the most part all they saw was puzzlement and bewilderment. "They don't really expect us to go in there, do they?" said Lucy Dennings with the tremble of fear in her voice.

"He was talking to me when he said that," Jeffcott told her. "I'm guessing he meant us physicists. Those who'll have a chance at figuring out the machine they built in there and putting it into reverse, or something. The rest of you'll be staying here, I reckon."

He was both amused and disheartened by the looks of relief on the faces of the linguist, the psychologist and the doctors. To their credit, though, they looked shameful and embarrassed as well and opened their folders, paying great attention to their contents to avoid having to look at the three physicists. With nothing else to do, therefore, Jeffcott opened his own folder and began sorting through the thick wads of papers they contained.

The first things to take his attention were the photographs. Men, women and children. All nude, most of them lying on hospital beds because they were very obviously too ill to stand. They all had cancerous growth to a greater or lesser extent, from a slight scattering of rounded nodules on a fifty year old woman to a fourteen year old boy who looked like the elephant man. Just looking at him made Jeffcott feel ill and he placed the photo face down on the wood-patterned plastic before leafing through the others.

Each of the people in the photographs had pages of medical notes on them. He saw the doctors reading them avidly but it meidea.mittle to him. The only thing that caught his eye was a note that the cancerous growths had appeared some hours or days after the patients had entered the anomaly, growing much faster than even the most aggressive normal tumour. The first symptoms, some anonymous doctor had said, had been a slight glassiness to the skin. A smoothness and a slight transparency as if the patient's skin was made of paper that had been soaked in oil. That was of only mild interest to Jeffcott, and so he turned to the bottom of the stack of papers where he found the transcripts of the interviews with the surviving Kensington personnel.

There were no actual scientists among them, it turned out. Just accountants, secretaries, interns doing side projects for their doctorates and engineers who'd had a hand in the actual construction of the machine. Jeffcott thought it likely that he, who'd been following the progress of the Kensington team in their published papers, knew more about what had been going on there than any of them. Rahul Bhatt, the mathematician, evidently thought the same thing because he leaned over towards him to ask a question. "What were they actually doing?" he said. "What was this machine of theirs supposed to do?"

"They thought they'd figured out a way to convert matter to energy," Jeffcott replied. He started with a whisper, but let his voice rise when everyone looked up from their reading to listen. "They thought they'd found a way to untie matter."

"Untie?" said Sarah Bright the linguist.

"You've heard of string theory?" said Vincent Duffy. Heads shook around the table. "Duffy glanced across at Jeffcott for permission to continue the explanation and Jeffcott nodded back. Duffy was much more of a natural communicator than he was, able to express complex scientific ideas in a way that laymen could understand. Jeffcott, in contrast, would probably get bogged down trying to explain every arcane concept and leave the others more confused than they were already.

"Well," said Duffy, "for a long time it was thought that the smallest components of matter, quarks, elections and so forth, were dimensionless points. Then a bunch of guys realised that a lot of theoretical problems could be solved if you thought of them as one dimensional strings instead of points. What particle they correspond to depends on how they're vibrating."

"So untying..." ventured Bright hesitantly. "These strings have knots tied in them?"

"Exactly," Duffy said. "Just recently, a small group of physicicts, including the three of us..." He waved a hand to include Robinson. "...realised that even more problems could be solved if each type of particle corresponded to a type of knot tied in the string, rather than the string vibrating. A string that doesn't have a knot in it is just energy, though. Like heat. So by untying these strings you can turn any kind of matter into pure energy."

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"And that's pretty much all we agree on," said Jeffcott with a rueful smile. "Knot theory is a very young discipline. There are thousands of different ways it could be formulated and there's no way of telling which one best describes reality."

"If any of them do," Robinson added. Jeffcott nodded his reluctant agreement.

"You know, there's an entire branch of mathematics dedicated to knots," said Rahul Bhatt. "It happens to be my speciality, in fact."

Duffy's eyes widened in realisation. "You're that Rahul Bhatt," he said in delight. "I read your paper. Lattice models in high dimensional topology. Brilliant." The mathematician nodded his head modestly.

"That's why you're here then," said Bright.

"Possibly," said the mathematician. "Mathematical knots are different, though. They don't have ends. They're just loops."

"And so are ours," said Duffy

"Really? I'm afraid I haven't been following the physical applications of knot theory. I'm only in it for the pure mathematics."

"But you said they can be untied," said the linguist. "A knot can only be untied if it has loose ends, surely."

"We use the word 'knot' to refer to a rather arcane concept," Robinson explained. "They're not literally knots, any more than a particle with spin literally spins. Mathematical knot theory definitely applies to them, though. All three of us have studied the basic elements of mathematical knot theory." Duffy and Jeffcott nodded their confirmation. "With your greater knowledge of the subject, though, I don't doubt that you'll be of great help to us in getting to the bottom of whatever's happening in there." She indicated the map on the wall indicating the extent of the anomaly.

Rahul Bhatt suddenly looked worried. "Does that mean they'll be expecting me to go in there with you?" He looked back down at the photographs of the cancerous victims.

"Well, they can't force us to do it," said Duffy, looking around at the rest of them, searching their faces for conformation. "Can they?"

"They've declared martial law," pointed out Jeffcott.

"But I'm a Canadian citizen. They can't force me to risk my life. They can't even force an American civilian to risk his life."

"I think, when martial law is in effect, the military can do whatever they damn well like," said Jeffcott with an unhappy frown. "They can draft us into the army and then give us orders just like any other enlisted man."

"But I'm not an American citizen! They can't draft a foreigner into their army. I can just say no. I can just leave. Go back to Canada. So long as I haven't broken a law, they can't stop me."

"There's probably a reason why there are no lawyers among us," said Lucy Dennings, the psychologist. "But even if they don't have the legal right, they do have guns."

"Plus," Robinson added, "running away from the anomaly won't save you. If we can't stop it then eventually it will come to you, no matter where in the world you are."

"It won't get that far," said the Canadian, although he didn't look confident. Jeffcott thought It looked as if he were trying to convince himself more than anyone else. "The anomaly's growth will slow and stop, and I wouldn't be surprised if it dissipates of its own accord soon after. Without maintenance, the institute's generator will run out of fuel and, without power, the machine will shut down. I'm surprised it hasn't happened already."

"Where does Maricopa get its power?" asked Jeffcott. "Does the town have its own generator? If so, what kind of generator?"

"The army will have already asked these questions," said Dennis Gruber. "If it gets power from outside they'll have cut it off. I would imagine that any generator the building has is rather small, designed to keep the power on just long enough for them to save data to hard drives and keep the lights on until the power company can fix the problem. They won't be like a hospital, that has to keep life support equipment running." He looked around at the others questioningly. "Right?"

Jeffcott tried to remember what he knew about Kensington Labs. He'd been there a couple of times to attend lectures given by their tenured members, most particularly by Ernst Jorgensen Bergman, the genius who'd conceived knot theory twenty years before. He'd been given a tour of the place by a pretty assistant and he tried to remember if the subject of a backup generator had ever come up. Then he decided it didn't matter. Gruber was right. The army would already have covered the subject, and they were clearly expecting the anomaly to keep growing, without limit. They must have already cut the power, therefore, and were satisfied that no backup generator was keeping the machine running. And besides, thought Jeffcott, suddenly remembering. The Captain had said that no electrical devices worked inside the anomaly, which presumably included generators. That must mean that the anomaly had become self perpetuating. It wouldn't stop on its own. It would have to be stopped.

He watched as the same realisation came to each of the others. They were all brilliant. All leaders in their fields. They didn't need to have it spelled out to them. Duffy nodded reluctantly to himself. "Okay," he said. "I guess we're going in, then."

He looked scared, and Robinson reached over to put a hand on his arm, making Jeffcott feel a spike of jealousy. He decided to try to impress her by being gallant and chivalrous. "There's no need for all three of us to go in," he said. "If anything happens to the two of us they'll need someone with a grounding in knot theory out here to advise them. I would vote for you to be that person."

Dennings and Bright both looked away, smiling with amusement, and Jeffcott wilted with embarrassment as he realised how transparent he'd been. Dammit, he thought, why am I acting like a teenager? She wasn't that good looking, and she was married!

Robinson rewarded him with a smile of gratitude, though. "I will be going in with you," she said. "All my knowledge won't do any good out here, and a third brain might make the difference trying to figure out what they've done in there."

"And if the three of you are willing to go in, then I must as well," said Rahul Bhatt with a brave smile..

"And a doctor," said Mark Summers. "In case these magnetic shields they've made for us don't work as advertised. Just one," he added before Dennis Gruber could speak out. "You'll need to stay here to keep working on the victims they've already got. You'll have access to scanners and equipment we can't take in with us."

"One of us will," Gruber replied with a smile. "Arm wrestle you for it." Jeffcott wondered if they'd be quite so conspicuously gallant if there weren't women in the room. Dammit, he thought. Do men ever stop being teenagers?

The room lurched under them as the truck carrying the portacabin drove south another half mile, keeping what they hoped was a safe distance from the edge of the anomaly. It reminded Jeffcott of what was out there, just a couple of hundred metres away. He looked out through the nearest window, but mercifully the anomaly was hidden from sight by an army truck parked close alongside.

"Guess we'd better read these, then," he said, looking back down at his folder.

Heads nodded, and silence fell as they all turned out attentions back to the sheets of printer paper and the badly printed text, missing a stripe where one of the nozzles of the printer was blocked. Outside, the air continued to thrum with the sound of engines. People shouted orders to each other and a news agency helicopter was circling endlessly overhead. Jeffcott imagined it was probably carrying a pretty blonde reporter who was saying nothing into a microphone and trying to make it sound informative.