The Krone Experiment (45 page)

“What are they doing?”

“I left them in the study.”

“They cannot talk to him. Perhaps they will
leave.”

“I do not think so.” She had lied to the
Russians. She knew the lab books were on the shelf, but resolved to
tell them as little as possible unless forced. She had seen that
Danielson carried one of the books and knew they would spot the
others. “I think that they will want to take Paul away.” That was a
stall, but also the probable truth.

“Show me a back way out,” the man demanded.
“I will head my compatriot off, and find out our orders. You must
learn the intentions of the American agents. Keep them in the front
of the house, and meet us back in this room in ten minutes. If you
are not here—.”

He reached under his jacket again, his
meaning crystal clear.

Isaacs was rapidly evaluating the situation.
Krone was useless for their immediate needs. The machine itself
would speak to experts, but not to them. The lab books were a
treasure, but was there something else they should know about? They
could grab the books and head home, but if they quickly perused
them they might find other valuable clues as to what had gone on in
this remote place. He grabbed several books at random.

“Let’s spend a little time looking through
these,” he said. “See if there is any hint that we should try to
dig up something other than these books themselves.”

He went over to the second high-backed chair
and swiveled it to face the room. He kept one book to read and put
the others on the floor. Danielson sat at the desk and began to
look at another, the last she had taken down from the shelf. Runyan
rummaged through the stack to find some of the earliest tomes. He
looked around, realized all the chairs were taken, and moved to the
wall near the door where he plopped himself on the carpet and
leaned back against the bookshelf.

Some time passed in a silence broken only by
the crackling of the fire and an occasional rustle of a turned
page. Danielson suddenly became aware of a small motion in the
doorway. The woman, Maria Latvin, stood there looking at the chair
in which Krone sat. Her hands were clasped softly in front of her,
perhaps that was the motion that had caught Danielson’s attention.
Danielson was sure the woman had been there for some time, quietly
watching.

The same motion must have caught Runyan’s
attention, too. Danielson watched him as he sat a little more than
an arm’s length from the doorway.

Danielson could see his eyes as he scanned
the lovely, composed face, down the curves of her body to her feet
in open, tastefully designed sandals. She turned to go and Runyan
bent over and craned his neck to follow with unabashed interest her
passage down the hallway. When he could see her no longer, he
straightened up and looked over to catch Danielson’s eyes upon him.
Danielson looked quickly down at the book before her with blurred
eyes. She felt ice in her stomach and warm fire on her face.

Maria Latvin opened the door to the bedroom.
At first she thought only one was there, but then the tall one
stepped out from behind the door.

“What do they do now?”

“They look at books in the study and talk
among themselves.” A mix of truth and half-truth.

“We are taking Krone. And you. To care for
him.”

God! To go back. She felt the wave of despair
again.

“And what of them?” She gestured toward the
front of the house.

“If you cooperate, they need come to no harm.
Where is Krone now?”

“He is still in the study. With them.”

“You must bring him here. We will escape out
the back to our car that is hidden down the road.”

“And if they resist?”

“You must find a way. If they discover our
presence here they will die.”

“If we get away, they, and soon many others,
will follow,” the woman argued.

The tall man thought for a long moment.

“You must make it look as if it is your idea.
If they look only for a woman on the run, our job will be
easier.”

Now Maria Latvin thought deeply. She could go
to the agents in the study and reveal the Russians, but at the risk
of death or worse for her mother and brother. She could make off
with Paul herself and to hell with them all, but the Russians, at
least, would exact the same penalty. She wanted no harm to come to
those in the other room, least of all Paul. She dreaded the idea of
going back, but she would be with Paul, and surely the Americans
would do everything to have him released. Staying close to him was
her best chance of survival.

She needed some way to distract them. She
thought of the lab books. Paul had been working with them when he
had drifted from her. The Americans were keenly interested in them.
She supposed the Russians would be too, if they only knew how near
they were. She hated them!

She spoke to the tall one.

“I will get him out in the car. You can wait
to see us leave. We have a hunting lodge higher in the mountains,
I’ll draw you a map. I will head in the opposite direction and then
double back on another road. We can switch to your car there.”

“I don’t like it,” said the other man. “We
shouldn’t let her or Krone out of our sight.”

The tall man turned to speak to him, keeping
his eyes locked on Maria Latvin.

“I don’t think there will be any problem.” He
smiled an unpleasant smile and patted the leather folder in his
breast pocket.

Isaacs closed another book and checked his
watch. He had found no reference to other useful material beyond an
occasional technical journal. The lab books seemed self-contained.
There was no reason to delay further.

“It’s time to get back to the base and radio
a report,” he said. “How are you doing?” he inquired of his
companions.

“This is amazing stuff!” Runyan replied
enthusiastically. “The man is really incredible. He has developed a
whole series of innovative techniques to accomplish things I would
have said were impossible. Apparently, he deliberately set out to
make a black hole. He wanted to use it as an energy source, utilize
the power emitted as material is swallowed. Vast power from
anything, dirt, water, air. He started by investigating how great a
density he could create in the lab. Just a question of pure basic
science with no practical application in mind. Then he got the idea
of creating a black hole. He imploded pellets of iron with his
standard beam techniques— iron so that there would be no nuclear
reactions. The problem is that it requires vast energies to
overcome the internal pressure of the compressed matter. Krone
seems to have developed a way to neutralize the electrical charges
in the pellet and the beam that compresses it. That reduced the
pressure and allows much higher densities. I haven’t gotten to
anything about black holes yet, but if I’m any judge his studies
will advance our knowledge of the behavior of nuclear matter by a
decade.”

“Could be,” replied Isaacs. “I was just
looking here somewhere in the middle of the story,” he checked a
date, “about a year and a half ago. Apparently, he has had some
success at reaching high densities, but trouble maintaining them.
He’s describing here the development of a magnetic confinement
configuration that can support the compressed pellet while he
continues to focus the intense neutron beams on it. The discussion
is highly technical. I’m barely getting the gist of it.”

Isaacs paused to rub his eyes.

“The real question is whether we are going to
learn anything from these that will tell us how to undo the damage.
Are you getting any sense of that?”

“He’s done the impossible and recorded it in
meticulous detail,” Runyan replied. “Only time will tell, but I
can’t believe there won’t be some new knowledge, some hints. I know
this, as long as the original knowledge is locked up there,” he
glanced at Krone’s still figure, “these books are invaluable.”

Danielson had not seemed to pay any attention
to this interchange. She had swiveled her chair away from the desk
and was staring at the fire.

“Pat?” inquired Isaacs.

She turned to look at him with a vacant
smile. “I was thinking about Shelley.”

“The poet, Percy Bysshe?”

“No, his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft.”

“Oh, right, Frankenstein. Well, our scientist
has created a monster all right.”

“Four of them.”

“What’s that?”

She pointed at the book she had abandoned on
the desk.

“He thinks he made four of them. At first the
suspension system was ineffective. He cites evidence that he
managed to start three seeds, but then they disappeared from the
system. There was no sign that they had evaporated, no unexplained
release of energy. He suspects they fell into the Earth, but are
too small to detect. By the fourth time, he made significant
improvements to the magnetic suspension and managed to force-feed
and grow the one we know about. Eventually, the suspension failed
again. This time he detected it seismically and knew for sure what
was happening.”

“My god!” gasped Runyan from his seat by the
door. “Didn’t he know what he was doing? Why didn’t he stop after
the first disaster?”

She looked at him coolly.

“The journals are pretty clinical so his
state of mind is only implicit, but I get the feeling that he was
totally caught up in the scientific and engineering questions and
driven by a powerful megalomania. Apparently, he was so consumed by
his quest that he didn’t question the failures in that way, just
what had become of them. When the fourth got away from him, he
finally thought seriously about the implications of what he had
done—and it destroyed him.” She waved a hand toward the quiet
figure in the chair by the fireplace.

“But if he’s right about the other three,”
said Runyan, “then even if we find some solution to the big one
we’re still in danger from the others. Drag on them is going to act
more quickly to cause them to settle into the Earth where they’re
unreachable. They may take a much longer time to grow to a
dangerous size, but it’s still just a matter of time.”

He exchanged a long glance with Isaacs.
Isaacs broke it off, gathered up the books he had been reading and
stood.

“Well, let’s see if we can get these books to
someone who will understand them better than we do.”

Danielson stood up from the desk, and Runyan
gathered his long legs under him and shoved himself to his
feet.

Maria Latvin appeared in the doorway. She
gave Runyan a cool look and then addressed herself to Isaacs.

“I must put Paul down for his rest. Then I
would like to talk to you, if I may. Would you please wait in the
living room?”

“Certainly,” replied Isaacs. “We have a
couple of issues to discuss with you as well.”

They filed out of the room and down the hall
as the woman bent to help Krone from the chair.

Isaacs deposited the books he had been
holding on the table in the foyer. He walked over next to Runyan
who had settled in the chair next to the fireplace. Danielson
examined the artifacts on the shelves.

“What next?” Runyan inquired.

“We’ll explain to her that we need the books
and that we’ll have to send someone for Krone. Something tells me
she’s not going to take that news too well.”

Runyan’s face clouded over. “I don’t believe
I fathom that lady. Surely she realizes that we represent some
threat to upset her isolated but rather posh applecart here, yet
she doesn’t seem at all perturbed.”

“I’m not sure of her role, either,” Isaacs
answered. “She does seem to be devoted to Krone. If he returned the
consideration, he may have set her up for life, regardless of what
happens.”

Runyan smiled an impish grin. “Or maybe
Krone’s not as incapacitated as he seems. That’s one good-looking
woman there.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Danielson turned,
exasperated. “You can see what shape that man is in. Can you
imagine what an effort it must be to care for him? All by
herself?”

Runyan leaned toward Isaacs and said in a
stage whisper, “Touchy feminist.”

“Mr. Isaacs,” Danielson’s voice was cold with
fury. “I don’t believe you need me here anymore. I’ll wait in the
car.” She paused to pick up the lab books Isaacs had left in the
foyer and then swept out the front door.

Runyan gave a half shrug as Isaacs fixed him
with a stony stare.

“That was completely unnecessary, Alex. I
don’t know what you’ve done to upset her, but I want a lid on
it.”

“Hey, it was a little joke.”

“There’s more to it than that. Something’s
going on between you.”

“Well, to hell with you,” Runyan scowled. “My
personal life is none of your business.”

“It is if it keeps one of my people from
performing at top efficiency, or distracts us at all from what
we’re doing here.”

“Horse shit,” seethed Runyan. “Don’t tell me
I’m not on top of what’s going on.” He stood up and looked down at
the slightly shorter man. “You wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t
for me.”

“I know what you’ve contributed, and I’d like
to keep you on the team, but if you get in my way, you’re out!”

The two men glared at one another, then
Runyan broke off and looked at the carpet, scuffing his toe, then
finally back at Isaacs.

“Look,” he said, “this thing is too big for
us to lose sight of it fighting over some girl.”

“Girl! She’s a damn fine worker. Let me
remind you neither of us would be here if it weren’t for her early
work.”

“She’s a bright lady, I know that. She’s also
attractive, in case you hadn’t noticed. We got a little friendly
out there in Arizona. Didn’t mean anything.”

“I think it did to her.”

They were silent a moment. Then Isaacs
spoke.

“We’ve got to get a move on here. The woman’s
had plenty of time to put Krone to bed or whatever she was going to
do. See if you can find her. I’ll get the two men in the car to
start carrying out the books.”