“Interpol send their best. Peter, what happened over there?”

He sighed noisily. “You really want to know?”

“Tell me.”

“I warn you now we will have to discuss black holes. Because that’s what they were trying to build in that lab.”

Even now, more spooky stuff. “Oh, for God’s sake . . .”

The drones, unaware of the odd grammar of our relationship, stirred, baffled, nervous.

Peter began to describe “geometric optics.” “A black hole is a space-time flaw, a hole out of which nothing can escape, not even light. Black holes suck in light through having ultrapowerful gravity fields . . .”

Black holes in nature are formed by massive collapsed stars, or by aggregates of matter at the centers of galaxies like ours—or they may have been formed in the extreme pressures of the Big Bang, the most tremendous crucible of all. It used to be thought that black holes, even microscopic ones, would be so massive and would require such immense densities that to make or manipulate them was forever beyond human reach.

But that wisdom, said George, had turned out to be false. “Light is the fastest thing in the universe—as far as we know—which is why it takes the massive gravity of a black hole to capture it. But if light were to move more slowly, then a more feeble trap might do the job.”

Tense, with the gazes of the drones boring into me, I took the bait. “Fine. How can you slow down light?”

“Anytime light passes through a medium it is slowed from its vacuum speed. Even in water it is slowed by about a quarter—still bloody fast, but that’s enough to give you refraction effects.”

Memories of O-level physics swam into my mind. “Like the way a stick in a stream will seem bent—”

“Yes. But in the lab you can do a lot better. Pass light through a vapor of certain types of atom and you’re down to a few feet per second. And if you use a Bose-Einstein condensate—”

“A what?”

He hesitated. “Supercold matter. All the atoms line up, quantum-mechanically . . . It doesn’t matter. The point is, light can be slowed to below walking pace. I saw the trials in that lab in San Jose. It’s really quite remarkable.”

“And then you can make your black hole.”

“You can blow your slow-moving light around—even make it move backward. Photons, thrown around like paper planes in a Texas twister. To make a black hole you set up a vortex in your medium—a whirlpool. You just pull out the plug. And if the vortex walls are moving faster than your light stream, the light gets sucked into the center and can’t escape, and you have your black hole.”

“That’s what these Californians were doing?”