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Honolulu. Time to get back into the game.
No one intercepted him as he disembarked. The terminal reeked of festering
anxiety. Once aloft he had phoned Arno and asked for an escort, giving enough
detail to convince him that there were factions at war now within the U
Agency.
"Something about China," Kingsley added.
"Don't repeat that word," Arno said hastily.
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352
"It's a fairly well-known nation." Kingsley could not resist the jab. Arno
should never have allowed
Kingsley to go into a situation inadequately forearmed. Put it down to haste
and the press of events, but still&
Sure enough, three men he recognized from the
Center and carrying the right recognition code met him at the gate. Wordlessly
they took him to a private federal airplane, gray and unmarked. In short
order, or so it seemed to his hazy state of mind, they were landing at the new
field just scraped from the valley near the Center.
He was quite knackered and begged off going straightaway to the Center.
Kingsley rang off and called ahead to his private number. "Be there soon,"
he said, not trusting himself to go any further with the driver and two burly
guards, who crisply took him to his flat.
She answered his knock. He embraced her gratefully. She had started their
relationship wearing ratty housecoats, but had quickly learned how he liked to
be greeted by an actual woman, not a housekeeper. Dressed in suitable
nineteenth-century undergarments, red or black if possible.
Sailing on the
Titanic, he thought fuzzily, why go steerage
?
"Thanks, luv," he murmured at her black merry widow, "but afraid it's no use
this time."
"I'll be here when you wake up."
353
"Can't say how long that will be."
"Pretty bad?" A warm kiss.
"What's the saying? 'Politicians, diapers both should be changed regularly,
and for the same reason.' Particularly the ones with guns."
She laughed softly, as if to say it did not matter whether she had heard this
chestnut before. He hugged her. To be in her arms was quite enough, thank you.
They had been drawn to each other as the crisis deepened. In the face of the
abyss, people needed each other. He wondered if he was falling in love with
her. Something in him hoped so.
"Something to drink?" Amy asked. "Lately, I sup solely from the cup of
knowledge." He kissed her again, this time urgently, something escaping from
him, letting out the leaden fog of his desperation.
354
Benjamin could not mourn her anymore.
For three days, he had gone on beach walks and sat staring at the bottom of
various bottles, talked with friends, and read over obsessively her last
writings. Nothing helped. In the afternoon of the third full day, he so
dreaded the coming of shadows that he fled. He finally knew that he had to go
to the Center and face the unknown that loomed there.
A traffic tie-up and even more guards than the last time stopped him outside
the new, high gates a full kilometer from the Center. Someone spotted him
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stuck in the jam and ushered him around, down a side road where he still had
to submit to the triple-
check of ID, retinas, and all. Sunset brimmed over the hills and he could pick
out in profile the snouts of tactical-range missiles, installed only days
before.
Just who were they defending against? No one had explained. There were more U
Agency faces in the corridors every day, but they never spoke, just looked
professionally grim.
2
355
He peered upward, eastward, and there it was: a hard blue-white dot spiking
down at them. The Eater was decelerating at a prodigious rate. Its forward jet
ejected mass apparently accumulated in its accretion disk, which X-ray
telescopes showed had thickened to resemble a fat, rotating donut. Now the
donut was dwindling fast, its stored matter fed by glowing streamers into the
braking jet.
Nobody understood how the system could have stocked up so much mass, enough to
shove around the incredibly dense nugget of the black hole. The magnetic
labyrinth around it must have remarkable retention ability. The hard radiation
coming out of the jet got degraded into visible light, the whole glowing over
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