Maricopa was far bigger and less dense than a British city of the same population would have been, Jeffcott mused to himself as they followed the road towards the city centre. A British city would have been surrounded by countryside and farmland which the town planners would be very reluctant to build on. The town would have narrow streets and closely spaced buildings. The gardens in the residential areas would be small and surrounded by tall fences and hedges to keep put prying eyes.

In contrast, Maricopa was wide and open. The road they were following, the high street of what would have been considered a middle sized town in the UK, was the same size as the interstate on which the mobile command post was located. On either side were streets and houses that would have been the homes of rich businessmen in Britain, but Jeffcott had no reason to believe that anyone but the common people of the city lived there. It was because the city was surrounded by desert, of course, he told himself. There was no reason for the city not to sprawl across as much land as it wanted. The USA was the land of vast, open spaces. He'd known this ever since first coming to this country several years before, but his work had mainly kept him to the big cities. This was his first visit to what he thought of as 'the real America'.

Or, at least, it had been the real America, before the anomaly had appeared. Now it was the corpse of a city. There was no movement. No sounds of traffic. Nobody walking the pavements (Sidewalks, he corrected himself. They're called sidewalks in this country). There wasn't even any wildlife. The whole city was as quiet as a graveyard.

There were signs that law and order had broken down in the days following the appearance of the anomaly, though. When they reached a commercial district with shops and supermarkets he saw broken windows where looters had raided their wares. There was a white panel van standing at an angle outside an electrical wholesaler with flat tyres and bullet holes in its sides. Its rear doors were open and he saw cardboard boxes containing televisions and hi-fi's discarded on the ground beside it. A large stain on the ground nearby was probably blood, he guessed, where one of the looters had met his end. He wondered whether the others had been taken alive, and whether their leathery corpses were still lying in a local police prison cell.

"Spooky," said Robinson, wrapping her arms around her body as if she were cold. In fact, the heat was stifling. People were drinking their water at a prodigious rate to replace perspiration that evaporated almost immediately in the dry air.

"Yeah," Jeffcott replied. "Almost post-apocalyptic."

"No almost about it," Duffy corrected him. "What is this if not an apocalypse? Sixty thousand people dead. Looks like there were riots, panic." He nodded towards a police van that had been pelted with bricks and debris, turning it into a battered ruin. Further away, two more vehicles had been set on fire and were now nothing more than blackened, twisted metal.

"What must it have been like?" mused Jeffcott to himself. "People getting sick all around you. Your own family getting sick. The hospitals much have been packed, everyone demanding that the handful of doctors attend to their family first. And this is America. Everyone's got guns. I imagine the doctors saw a lot of guns pointed at them during those couple of days. And, of course, the doctors would have been just as sick as everyone else."

"And there'd have been nothing they could have done even if they hadn't been sick," said Summers somberely. "I've treated a few hopeless cases in my time. I can't describe the feeling of helplessness you feel. There's nothing worse in the world." Suddenly an uncomfortable expression came over his face and he put a hand to his side."

"You okay?" asked the other doctor.

"Probably just my imagination," Summers replied. "Thought I felt something moving in there. Can't be cell reversal yet. The other patients didn't start to show symptoms until several hours later."

"And they showed other symptoms first," Gruber replied, coming closer to examine summers' face. "You still look fine. Nice human looking skin." Summers nodded gratefully but didn't look completely reassured.

A couple of minutes later they came to the intersection that led to Kensington Labs. There were more traffic lights on long, horizontal poles, and just like the others they'd seen some of them had collapsed under their own weight. Seeing it, Duffy went to a section of railed fencing thar lined part of the road and sat carefully on it, not putting all his weight on the inch-thick hollow tube. It snapped under his weight with a loud crack and he jumped hurriedly off again. "No way metal should be that weak," he said. "I should be able to stand on that with no trouble."

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"Lots of buildings are supported with steel," said Gruber, staring with concern at the city around him. Fortunately none of the buildings he could see were more than two storeys tall.

"Two pharmacies," said Jeffcott with amusement, looking at two buildings on either side of the street. "Big ones too. And one of them's a drive through." He found the idea amusing and struggled to keep from grinning in case it offended his American friends.

"Diabetes medication," said Summers, looking grateful for something to take his mind off his own medical problems. "Cholesterol medication. High blood pressure medication. Drugs for fat people. Sorry, the clinically overweight. Welcome to America, Mister Jeffcott."

"Someone suggested, back at the command post, that cancer meds might be effective against embryonic cells," said Jeffcott. "I doubt they'd have any here, but would it be worth checking out the hospital?"

"They were trying them, but without much success," the Doctor replied. My time would be better spent trying to stop the anomaly, I think. I'll come with you to the lab."

Jeffcott nodded, and they turned into the side road. Another wide, dusty road, only a little narrower than the one they were leaving. The horses clopped their way along the hot tarmac, the soldiers on horseback in single file beside it, and the experts followed behind, staring around at the spookily empty ghost town as if expecting something to appear and challenge them at any moment.

Nothing appeared, though, and a few minutes later they entered what looked like a newly built part of town. Only about half the houses looked occupied. The gardens, much smaller than they'd seen in other parts of town, were bare and empty and piles of sand still stood by the side of the street, left over from the building work.

On the right hand side, though, stood Kensington Labs; a great, rectangular block of concrete and glass looking as though it had been completed only weeks before. The car park in front of it was almost empty. Only half a dozen cars were parked there, one of them a crimson bentley that Jeffcott recognised.

"That's Bergman's car," he said, pointing it out to the others. "Kensington's chief researcher. I've seen it before, in Switzerland, when we were at the same science conference, a couple of years ago."

"He stayed, then," said Robinson. "When the rest of the city was dying, when everyone else had gone to be with their families, he stayed."

"Maybe he thought he could do something," said Duffy thoughtfully. "Stop the anomaly. If he couldn't do anything, with all his knowledge of how the Furnace works, what chance do we have?"

"We have the generator," said the Sergeant, who'd heard them talking and had brought his horse over to listen. "And I assume he left notes. I have every confidence that you'll be able to figure it out."

"We'll have a better idea when we get a look at it," said Jeffcott. He realised he was feeling excited despite the tragedy that had befallen the city. Like a child being taken to his favourite amusement park. He'd heard and read so much about the machine Bergman had built. The piecewise linear n-sphere magnetic unknotting furnace. Now he was finally going to see it. He realised he'd increased his pace, in a hurry to reach the big glass doors that stood in the centre of the building's roadside face, and made himself slow down. The soldiers would want to go in first, to make sure it was safe, although what there could possibly be inside that was dangerous he couldn't imagine.

They left the wagon and horses in the car park, closing the barrier to keep them from wandering away. Then they approached the building. The doors were automatic, but they refused to open as they approached. They could be opened manually, but only by someone with the key. "Looks like we're going to have to break them," said the Sergeant. He beckoned his two strongest men forward. Parrott and Dustu.

"That'll be toughened glass," said Costanzo. "You'll have to give it quite a whack to break it, unless you've got a glass breaker hammer."

"I'm sure we'll manage," said the Sergeant. "There'll probably be some unused bricks over there." He pointed at the newly built buildings on the other side of the street. "Go find one and we'll..."

He gave the glass door a hard slap with the flat of his hand, then jumped forward in alarm as it shattered into a million tiny cubes that fell in a shower around his feet. "What the blazes..."

The whole front of the building was made of glass. They all crowded forward to take a closer look. "Looks different," said Costanzo, putting his face right up against the nearest window and examining it closely. "Like it's made of millions of tiny crystals all stuck together." He stepped back, as did everyone else when they saw what he was going to do. He gave the glass a sharp rap with the handle of his spear and the window shattered, just as the door had.

More windows shattered as the others tested their strength. "Glass is supposed to be amorphous," said Duffy, picking up one of the tiny fragments to examine it closely. "Something's crystallised it. That would explain what happened to the metal as well. Crystallised metal is way weaker than amorphous metal."

"Is the building safe to enter?" asked Bright, staring in through the broken window doubtfully.

"Most of the building's structural strength will come from reinforced concrete," said Costanzo.

"Reinforced with what?"

"Steel."

They all stared at each other, and then they stared at the building as if expecting it to collapse at any moment. "It's stood this long," said the Sergeant confidently. "And the concrete will have a strength of its own even if the steel inside it is rotten. Come on, we're going in."

He walked confidently in through the shattered door and, after sharing more worried glances with each other, the others followed.