Normally, it might seem odd for a businessman in his fifties to neglect appointments for a rugby game. But the dusky giant toweling himself off in the loo seemed completely unselfconscious, aglow with victory. Alex glanced at his former teacher, who now worked for Hutton here in New Zealand. Stan only shrugged, as if to say billionaires made their own rules.

Hutton emerged wearing a dressing gown and drying his hair with a terry-cloth towel. “Can I offer you anything, Dr. Lustig? How about you, Stan?”

“Nothing, thank you,” Alex said. Less reticent, Stan accepted a Glenfiddich and spring water. Then Hutton settled into a plush swivel chair, stretching his long legs beside the kauri-wood table.

Whatever happens, Alex knew, this is where the trail ends. This is my last hope.

The Maori engineer-businessman regarded him with piercing brown eyes. “I’m told you want to discuss the Iquitos incident, Dr. Lustig. And the miniature black hole you let slip out of your hands there. Frankly, I thought you’d be sick of that embarrassment by now. What did some press hacks call it then? A possible China Syndrome?”

Stan cut in. “A few sensationalists set off a five-minute panic on the World Net, until the scientific community showed everybody that tiny singularities like Alex’s dissipate harmlessly. They’re too small to last long by themselves.”

Hutton raised one dark eyebrow. “Is that so, Dr. Lustig?”

Alex had faced that question so many times since Iquitos. By now he had countless stock answers — from five-second sound bites for the vid cameras to ten-minute lullabies for Senate investigators… all the way to hours of abstruse mathematics to soothe his fellow physicists. He really ought to be used to it by now. Still the question burned, as it had the first time.