They stepped carefully, carrying bits of gear to and fro, their childish gait uncertain. Three of them sat on the floor, surrounded by white equipment boxes, eating what looked like hamburgers. In a corner, a couple of kids were sleeping, curled up together. One, a dark little girl, had her thumb in her mouth. All the kids were wearing what looked like nightclothes — loose tunics and trousers, no shoes or socks. The pajamas were grubby, sometimes torn, but neatly stitched with blue circles.
The children looked ill to Maura, but maybe that was an artifact of the hard fluorescent light.
She said to Dan, “I take it we gave them what they wanted, what Anna demanded.”
“It was here in twenty-four hours, up and working twelve hours later.”
“Tell me what it’s for.”
“It’s a factory. As we thought. It makes quark nuggets, droplets of quark matter. The children are growing positively charged nuggets through neutron capture.” He pointed to the original cage, the darting Tinkerbell light. “Small nuggets bud off the big mother in there. We don’t know how that happens, incidentally; we thought that to make quark nuggets you would need to slam heavy ions together at near light speed in a particle accelerator.”
“Evidently not,” Maura said. “How small is small?”
“The size of an atomic nucleus. The nuggets come spraying out of the cage and pass through the magnetic spectrometer — that box over there — where a magnetic field separates them out from other products. We have Cerenkov radiation detectors and time-of-flight detectors to identify the nuggets. Then the nuggets pass through that device—” a long boxy tube “ — which is a linear electrostatic decelerator. At least we think it is. The children modified it. The quark nuggets emerge from the cage at relativistic velocities, and the decelerator—”
“Slows them down.”
“Right. Then the nuggets enter the torus, the big doughnut over there. That contains heavy water, which is water laced with deuterium, heavy hydrogen. The quark nuggets are fed protons to make sure they have a positive charge. That’s important because a negatively charged nugget would—”
“Cause a runaway. I remember.”
“The quark nuggets go on to another magnetic bottle, at the end of the line there, and they are allowed to grow by absorbing neutrons. In the process energy is released, as gamma rays.”
“And that’s how a power plant would be built.”
“Maura, this apparatus is already producing power, but not at useful levels yet.”
A taller girl walked through the room, giraffe thin. She turned, unexpectedly, and looked at Maura.
“Anna,” Maura said to Dan.
“Yeah. And there’s Tommy Tybee.” He was one of the three eating.
“We’re feeding them?”
Dan eyed her. “Of course we are. We haven’t yet reached the point where we are prepared to starve out children. Anyhow it’s siege psychology. The trick-cyclist types here are trying to keep up a line of dialogue with the kids; the food, three or four times a day, is one way. And the kids get what they want: junk food, soda, candy.”
“Not so healthy.”
“Not a green vegetable in sight. But I think the consensus is we’ll fix their health later.” He pointed. “The troopers even brought in a Porta-john. The kids don’t wash much, though. And not a damn one of them will clean her teeth.
“Here’s the deal. We don’t get to cross this perimeter.” A blue line, crudely sketched in chalk, ran across the polished floor. It looked to Maura like a complete ring, running all the way around the equipment and the children’s encampment. “We put food and stuff outside the line. Anna, or one of the others, collects it.”
“What happens if we cross the line?”
“We don’t know. The goons haven’t tried yet. They know what happened to that care worker. The bullet from the future.”
“The kids must sleep…”
“In shifts.” He pointed to the little huddle of sleeping forms. “Even now. They always have lookouts. And they move in clusters. It wouldn’t be possible to snatch one without others seeing, being close enough to react.” He scratched his beard thoughtfully. “There are some military-college types analyzing the patterns of the kids’ behavior. Turns out it’s very sophisticated. They work as if they are a single unit, but you don’t hear any of them giving commands or directing the others.”
“Then how? Telepathy?”
Dan shrugged. “They are all supersmart. Maybe they can all figure out the solution to this dynamic tactical problem. Maybe they just know.” He paused. “But it’s eerie to watch, Ms. Della. You can see the collective way they move. Like a pack.”
“Not human.”
“I guess not.”
The atmosphere here was one of tension and suspicion. An image came into her mind of Homo sapi children sitting around a fire, talking fast and fluidly, making fine tools and bows and arrows, surrounded by a circle of baffled and wary Neanderthal adults.
There was a sudden commotion on the other side of the lab: a brief scuffle, voices raised.
Somebody, an adult civilian, had stepped inside the blue chalk perimeter of the children’s domain. A couple of soldiers were reaching for him, weapons at their waist, but the intruder was out of reach.
“Oh, Christ,” Maura said.
It was Bill Tybee.
Little Torn came running out of the group of burger-munching kids, thin legs flashing. He ran straight to his father and clung to his legs, as if that were all that mattered, as if he were just some ordinary kid, and here was his father home from a day’s work.
Bill kneeled down. “You’ve got to come with me now, Tom. It’s over now. We’ll go back home, and wait for Mommy.”
As his father gently coaxed, Tom, clinging, was weeping loudly.
All around the room, Maura saw, weapons were being primed.
The girl Anna came forward now. Bill tensed, but let her approach the boy. Anna laid her own thin hand on Tom’s head. “Tom? You can go with your father if you want. You know that.”
Tom’s eyes were brimming pools of tears. His head tipped up; he looked from Anna to his father and back again. “I don’t want you to go, Dad.”
“But we both have to go.” Maura heard the effort Bill was making to keep his voice level. “Don’t you see? Everything will be fine. Your room is still there, just the way you left it.”
“No. Stay here.”
“I can’t.” Bill’s voice was breaking. “They are sending me away. The soldiers. I have to go now. And you have to come with me.”
“No—”
The girl stepped back. “Let him go, Mr. Tybee.”
Maura knew what was coming. Dread gathering blackly, she pushed forward; she got to the perimeter chalk line before she was stopped by a burly trooper. She called, “Bill. Come out of there.”
Bill grabbed the boy and straightened up, clutching Tom against his chest. “He’s my son. I can’t stand any more of this. Jesus, don’t any of you understand that?”
Maura said, as harshly as she could, “You have to let him go, Bill”
“No!” It was barely a word, more a roar of anger and pain. Holding Tom, Bill pulled away from Anna and tried to step out of the circle.
There was a flash.
Bill fell, screaming, grabbing at his leg.
Tom, released, tumbled; two children caught him and hauled him back to the center of the lab, out of reach.
Bill was on the ground, his lower right leg reduced to a mass of smashed flesh, shards of bone, a few tatters of cloth. A burly trooper in heavy body armor took a step forward, over the chalk line. He grabbed Bill around the waist — Maura heard the whir of hydraulics — and he hauled Bill bodily out of the blue circle, out of the room.