The first soldier was a Captain, if Jeffcott recognised his rank insignia right, while the other was a Sergeant with a neatly trimmed pencil moustache. He closed the door, and then the Captain went to the head of the table where the experts all looked up at him expectantly.

"Thank you all for coming at such short notice," he said. He was still standing behind his chair. It made Jeffcott feel a little self conscious about being sat down, but the other experts remained seated so he did as well.

"As if we had any choice," said Lucy Dennings acidly. "I was practically kidnapped. I had to leave my daughter with my sister. She had to leave work early to come get her."

"If you've been paying attention to the news recently then you understand the urgency of the situation," the Captain replied impassively. "The anomaly represents a threat to our way of life unlike anything we've ever faced before and so I apologise for the haste with which you were brought here. The circumstances dictated the necessity."

Dennings just stared back at him, but Jeffcott thought the accusing glare in her eyes eased just a little, as if she recognised the truth of his words. The Captain met her gaze for a couple of moments longer before turning back to the table at large.

"I think it would be best if we all introduced ourselves to each other first," he said. "My name is Captain Philip Mase of the US Defence Intelligence Agency and this is Sergeant Boyd-Rochfort. Somewhere out there is a General who's in charge of this whole operation but my job is to look after you. Make sure you have what you need while you figure out what's going on out there."

He paused for a moment to let them digest his words before turning to an Indian-looking man in the chair closest to him. "So how about you tell the others who you are and then the others will do the same one by one."

The Indian-looking man nodded and stood while he introduced himself. His name was Rahul Bhatt, it turned out, and he was a mathematician. Jeffcott nodded to himself as he remembered where he'd heard the name before. His speciality was in knot theory, the mathematics of which were similar to the ones he himself used in his own work. That made sense, considering the likely reason he was here.

The next two people made him frown with puzzlement as they introduced themselves, though. Lucy Dennings was a psychologist, it turned out.. The world's foremost authority on cognitive analysis and the study of non-human sapience. What the hell was she doing there? If that was strange, though, the women sitting next to her was even more so. Sarah Bright. A linguist. He felt his eyebrows rising all by themselves. Was it possible that the powers that be thought that aliens were somehow responsible and wanted to have a go at talking to them? The very idea almost made him laugh aloud. The one thing that all the news reports agreed on was that the anomaly covered a circular area centered precisely on Kensington Labs, the big research institute in the middle of Maricopa. Clearly there'd been a lab accident of some kind. An experiment had gone wrong. It wasn't necessary to blame aliens, just human stupidity and carelessness.

The last two though, Mark Summers and Dennis Gruber, made him a lot happier as they were both doctors, even though Gruber's research on embryonic development was a little surprising. Why would they need someone with that kind of expertise? What the hell was going on here?

"So what do we know about, about that. Out there," said Duffy when the last of the eight scientists had finished talking. He waved a vague hand towards the anomaly, thankfully out-of sight behind the portacabin wall that lacked windows.

The Captain nodded and took a step back away from the table as if he was about to start pacing back and forth. "I'm sure you've all been following the news reports given by our friends in the media out there, so you'll be aware that the anomaly is growing and showing no sign of slowing down. Any living thing it swallows becomes sick and dies. If we, or rather you, can't find a way to stop it, it will reach Phoenix in less than a day and engulf it completely in less than a week. A city of nearly two million people. And we have to assume that it won't stop there. We have to make our plans based on the worst case scenario, which is that it will continue to grow until it engulfs pretty much the whole continent and, in less then ten years, the entire planet."

The faces around the table turned pale as his words sank in. "But why do you want a psychologist?" Dennings asked, a little mollified but genuinely curious. "You want me to psycho-analyse the anomaly?"

"People have been affected by it," said the Captain. "We want you to analyse them, but we'll get to that in good time. I thought we'd start by giving you a summary of everything we've learned about it so far."

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"By your army scientists," said Mark Summers scornfully. "We should have been brought in right from the start. We've lost a week while a bunch of overhyped television repair men fumbled around with something fifty IQ points and several doctorates beyond them."

"We'll you're here now," said the Captain with a warning gleam in his eye. "And I would like to remind you that the President has declared martial law in the entire state of Arizona. You all know what that means."

The scientists glanced nervously at each other. Martial law meant that if anyone did anything the military didn't like they could just disappear, and not even their nearest and dearest would ever know what had happened to them. Fear settled around the table, therefore, and the Captain nodded with satisfaction as they all settled down and began paying attention.

"The anomaly appeared at three fifteen PM on Tuesday the sixth of August," he said. "Seven days ago. It is believed to have been caused by the scientists of Kensington Labs, which is located right at the center of the affected area, but no attempt to contact them has been successful. Radios and telephones don't work inside the anomaly, and those people who've ventured inside in an attempt to reach the Labs were forced to turn back after being taken ill. It does something to living creatures, it seems. Brief exposure, no more than a couple of minutes, causes a mild illness that lasts for a few hours before the victim makes a full recovery. That's at the very edge of the anomaly, though, where the effects may be weaker. It's possible that, further in, the more extreme symptoms associated with longer exposure appear faster. These symptoms include disfiguring tumorous growths, eventually leading to death."

"People have died?" said Dennings in shock.

"We assume that the entire population of Maricopa is dead," the Captain replied. "The entire town was engulfed before anyone knew how dangerous the anomaly was. We've managed to minimise the number of humans that have died since, though. Every town is evacuated as it approaches them. What we know of the anomaly's effects comes from sending in animals and plants and from those people who wandered in of their own accord before we were able to get the cordon in place. They left hurriedly when they became ill and they are the patients the doctors among you will be examining. Full medical reports on the affected individuals are available for doctors Summers and Gruber to look at."

"Sounds like some kind of radiation," suggested Rahul Bhatt the mathematician. "Send a drone in with a geiger counter. It can take some photos as well as it flies over Maricopa. It might tell us something."

"Drones stop working and crash the moment they enter the anomaly," the Captain replied. "Electricity doesn't flow. No electrical devices work. My science people tell me it's as if the laws of physics are different inside it. Fires don't burn and explosives won't detonate, which means that the only weapons that can be used in there are sharp blades and blunt force instruments. Knives and clubs, in other words."

"Some kind of clockwork device, then," the mathematician suggested. "Something to open and close the shutter of an old style camera with photographic film. We can get some pictures, and if the film comes back fogged we'll know there's radiation. I'm sure we can figure out some way to get it in there, even of it's just dangling under a helium balloon."

"We've tried that as well," the Captain replied. "The trouble is getting the camera back out so we can develop the film. So far we've had no luck. Volunteers have gone a short distance inside with various measuring devices, though, and there doesn't seem to be any radiation."

"What about Kensington personnel who weren't in Maricopa at the time?" asked Duffy. "They must know something."

"We've had them brought here," the Captain replied, "but they haven't been able to tell us much. Just assistants and secretaries for the most part. All the most important scientists were in the labs when the incident happened. They'd been about to make a breakthrough, it seems, and all the top people wanted to be there to witness it. All those people were now presumed dead."

"What were they working on?" asked Sarah Bright, the linguist.

"No bloody idea," the Captain admitted. "They tried to explain it. Something to do with creating free energy or something. The physicists among you might have a better chance of understanding it. There are full transcripts of our interviews with the surviving assistants for you to look at, and you can talk to the people themselves when you're ready."

The anomaly had been almost a mile across right from the start, the Captain then went on to say. It had remained that size for about twelve hours, and then it had started to grow, its perimeter expanding outwards at a rate of one hundred and fifty yards every hour or so. A rate that had remained constant ever since.

He paused while he took a deep breath. "I said just now that no electrical devices work inside the anomaly," he said. "That's not entirely true. They don't do what they're designed to do. Radios don't transmit, cameras don't take pictures, but they do something else. The magnetic fields generated by permanent magnets seem to have a kind of shielding effect, protecting the animals inside it from the effects of the anomaly. We're hoping it has the same protective effect on humans as it does on rats and rabbits."

"You're sending people in there?" said Jeffcott in astonishment.

"We have no choice," the Captain replied. "We're hoping the answers we need will be found at Kensington Labs. Maybe the same equipment that created the anomaly can be used to stop it."

The experts glanced at each other as the meaning of his words sank in. "Which means you need people with the right kind of technical knowledge," said Jeffcott. "You're sending us in there."

"Yes," said the Captain, looking him right in the eye. "We are."