“You’ve been to her parties before?”

“I dated her older daughter once.”

“You never told me that.”

Sand shook his head and grinned. “Do you know Jeremy Kemp? He says he knows you.”

“We shared a cabin years ago, I think — some expedition…no, it was during a seminar at Woods Hole. Kemp. Geophysicist, earthquakes, isn’t he?”

“Right.” Sand pushed him forward. “We all have to talk. This is a real coincidence, his being here, our being here. And I sort of broke our rules. I brought up our sighting.”

“Oh?”

“We’ve already sent our data to La Jolla,” Sand said, by way of an excuse.

Samshow was not completely mollified. Sand opened the door to a back bedroom. Kemp and two other men sat on chairs and on the bed’s Polynesian print coverlet, beers and cocktails in hand. “Walt! Very good to see you again.” Kemp stood, shifted his cocktail, and shook Samshow’s hand firmly. Introductions were made and Samshow stood in a corner while Sand encouraged Kemp to explain his own scientific problem.

“I’m in resources discovery for Asian Thermal, an energy consortium in Taiwan and Korea. We’re keeping track of Chinese oil, for Beijing — it’s official — and we’re trying to chart the whole southwestern Pacific all the way south to the Philippines. Partly we chart through seismic events and analysis of the wave propagation through the deep crust. Now this is at least as proprietary as what you’ve told me…Understood?” He glanced conspiratorially at the door. Sand closed it and latched it.

“My group has listening stations in the Philippines and the Aleutians. We’re also tapped in to the U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Information Center in Colorado and the Large-Aperture Seismic Array in Montana. We have an anomalous seismic event. We think it’s a bad reading or a screwed interpretation. But maybe not. It’s from the vicinity of the Ramapo Deep. We got it on the night of November first, Eastern Pacific Time.”

“The night of our skyfall,” Samshow said.

“Right. We place the time at about eight-twenty p.m. Right?”

“That’s our time, within ten minutes,” Sand acknowledged.

“Okay. Not an earthquake per se. Not a fault slide. More like a nuclear detonation — and yet, not. We get a PcP — reflection off the outer core — in Beijing and reflections from the P260P and P400P in Colorado, then we get P-prime-P-prime waves at the LASA in Montana. Not only that, but we get persistence in the high-frequency P-waves. No Love or Rayleigh surface waves, just body waves. No immediate shear waves. Just compression waves and lots of really unusual microseisms, like something burrowing. Right in the Ramapo Deep. What could that be?”

Sand grinned like a small boy, mischievous. “Something that weighs perhaps a hundred million tons.”

“Right,” Kemp said, mirroring his grin. “So let’s talk crazy. Anything that masses in at ten to the eighth metric tons, strikes the ocean like a mountain. But all you get is a minor squall. So it didn’t transfer much of its energy. Very small profile. Just shot right through, lost a tiny, tiny percentage of its velocity to the water, maybe some heat as well. Something less than a meter wide.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Samshow said.

“Not at all. A plug of superdense matter, probably a black hole. Hitting the ocean nearby, falling to the bottom of the Ramapo Deep, voila! Burrowing.”

“Incredible,” Sand said, shaking his head, still grinning.

“All right. We both have anomalies. My people have a nuclear event profile that isn’t, and you have a jag.” Kemp lifted his drink. “Here’s to shared mysteries.”

Sand had his electronic notebook out and was busy entering figures. “A black hole that size would be a strong source of gamma rays, right?”

“I don’t know,” Kemp said.

Sand shrugged his shoulders. “But it’s so dense and so small it falls directly to the center of the Earth. Actually, it bypasses the center because of Coriolis, and bounds up the other side. There’s very little effective drag. It’s just like passing through thin air.”

Kemp nodded.

“When it reaches the core, it’s traveling about ten kilometers per second. Can you imagine the shock wave coming off that thing? The whole Earth would ring like a bell — your microseisms. The heat released would be incredible. I don’t know how to calculate that…We need somebody conversant in fluid dynamics. Its period — the time it takes to ‘orbit’ in its closed loop around the center of the Earth — would be about eighty, ninety minutes.”

“Wouldn’t whatever sound it makes get lost in background noise?” Samshow asked, feeling years out of date.

“Oh, we’re hearing it, all right,” Kemp said. “Chattering like an imp. Can I borrow your notebook?”

Somewhat reluctantly, Sand handed it to him. Kemp figured for a moment. “If we assume no factional effects, it would come right up out of the antipodes of its entry point. But I don’t know whether there would be drag — it’s sucking in matter and releasing some of it as gamma rays, creating a plasma, or maybe it’s…Hell, I don’t know. Let’s assume the core has very little drag effect on it. Maybe it doesn’t break the surface…”

“But the shock wave does,” Sand said.

“Right. So we’d have tremendous effects in…” Kemp’s brow furrowed.

“South Atlantic Ocean,” Samshow said. “Thirty south and forty west. About eleven hundred nautical miles east. of Brazil, somewhere along the latitude of Porto Alegre.”

“Very good,” Kemp said, his smile fixed now. “Some seismic events there, and then, it swings back to Ramapo eighty or ninety minutes later. And again and again, until its motion is damped by whatever drag it feels and it rests right in the center of the Earth. Do you realize what a black hole could do at the center of the Earth?”

Samshow, suddenly troubled, stood and walked through an open sliding glass door to the veranda. He looked deep into the night jungle behind Mrs. Fusetti’s house, quiet except for the noise of the party and the whirring of insects. “How in hell would something like this get to the Earth? Wouldn’t our radar spot it, our satellites?”

“I don’t know,” Kemp said.

“There’s definitely some correlation, Walt,” Sand said. “Our gravimeters were working perfectly.” He joined Samshow on the veranda.

“The party’s full of talk about the President’s announcement,” Kemp said, standing in the open doorway. “What I’ve been thinking…”

Sand’s eyes widened. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “I hadn’t even…”

“So?” Samshow asked.

“Maybe it’s not just a fantasy,” Kemp said. “You have a jag we can’t trace, a meteor strike you can’t explain, and we have compression waves we can’t explain. And the President has aliens.”

“Now wait,” Samshow interrupted. “We haven’t got any information about the South Atlantic.”

“Could this black hole, or whatever it is, cause substantial damage to the Earth?” Sand asked.

“It would eventually eat it up, swallow it completely,” Kemp said.

“Then we’d better tell somebody,” Samshow said.

Kemp and Sand looked at him like children chastised for being caught in a dirty game.

“Shouldn’t we?” Samshow asked. “Who’s going to San Francisco, to the American Geophysical Society convention?”

“I am,” Kemp said.

“I’d like to,” Samshow said, running on instincts now. Sand regarded him with some confusion. Perhaps he felt like backing down now, having carried things too far and seeing the Old Man take them all seriously. “Can we swing it, David?”

“I…want to try some calculations.”

“We obviously don’t have the expertise,” Samshow said. “But somebody there will.”

“Right,” Kemp said. “I know just the fellow. Jonathan Post will be there.”

The Furnace was now surrounded by three concentric wire fences, the innermost electrified. Troops patrolled the perimeter in Jeeps and helicopters. Beyond the barricades, hundreds of the curious sat idle in their cars, Jeeps, and trucks, binoculars trained on the black mound five miles or more distant. Still more hikers circled the forbidden area, none finding a way to get any closer.