“No, of course I didn’t,” Alex remembered telling Manella on that day, and everyone else since then. Now he let go of the lie with relief.

“Yes, Mr. Hutton. I think I made the very Devil itself.”

Stan Goldman’s head jerked up. Until this moment, Alex hadn’t even confided in his old mentor. Sorry, Stan, he thought.

Silence stretched as Hutton stared at him. “You’re saying… the singularity didn’t dissipate like the experts said? That it might still be down there, absorbing matter from the Earth’s core?”

Alex understood the man’s incredulity. Human minds weren’t meant to picture something that was smaller than an atom, and yet weighed megatons. Something narrow enough to fall through the densest rock, yet bound to circle the planet’s center in a spiraling pavane of gravity. Something ineffably but insatiably hungry, and which grew ever hungrier the more it ate…

Just thinking about it put in sudden doubt the very notions of up and down. It challenged faith in the ground below your feet. Alex tried to explain.

“The generals showed me their power plant… offered me a blank check to construct its core. So I took their word they’d be getting permission soon. Any day now, they kept telling me.” Alex shrugged at his former gullibility. An old story, if a bitter one.

“Like everybody else, I was sure the Standard Physical Model was correct — that no black hole lighter than the Earth itself could possibly be stable. Especially one as tiny as we made at Iquitos. It was supposed to evaporate at a controlled rate, after all. Its heat would power three provinces. Most of my colleagues think such facilities will be cleared for use within a decade.

“But the generals wanted to jump the moratorium—”

“Idiots,” Hutton interrupted, shaking his head. “They actually imagined they could keep a thing like that secret? These days?”