“George, where was the debate? Were you consulted? Did you vote to have your whereabouts blasted to the universe? What right had these people to act on your behalf?”

“I can’t say it keeps me awake at night.”

“It does me,” he said hoarsely. “We know there is something out there waiting for us. The Kuiper Anomaly—long faded from the news—is still out there, orbiting silently. My seismic signals, the dark matter craft that decelerated and veered inside the Earth: more evidence. Signaling is dangerous. It must be. That is why the sky is so quiet. Whoever is out there has learned to keep quiet—or has been forced to be.”

“Peter, I don’t see what this has to do with the destruction of the black hole lab.”

He sighed again. “George, there are some SETI proponents who say that our feeble attempts to signal so far are futile. Plaques on clunky spacecraft, radio signals—all of this is laughably primitive technology. Jungle drums. It won’t attract the attention of anybody advanced enough to matter.”

“Right. And the kind of technology they will use—”

“Well, we don’t know, but we can speculate. For instance, about technologies based on quantum gravity. Or even the manipulation of space-time itself. If you could do that there is no limit to what you could achieve. Warp drive—faster than light. Antigravity. The control of inertia—”

I began to see where this was going. “The San Jose Black Hole Kit would be a manipulation of space-time.”

“That toy black hole would have stood out like a single campfire shining in the middle of a darkened landscape.”

“You think the San Jose people were trying to signal to aliens?”

“Oh, they didn’t mean to. All they were doing was trying to build a test bed for quantum gravity, just as advertised. I’m sure of that. But they wouldn’t listen to our warnings—the Slan(t)ers. They would have gone on, and on, until they lit that damn campfire . . .”

And then I understood what had been done. I rubbed my eyes. “What did you use, Peter?”

“Semtex-H,” he whispered. “Not difficult to get hold of if you know how. Before the fall of communism the Czechs shipped out a thousand tons of the stuff, mostly through Libya. My police background . . .”

He hadn’t set the thing off, he said, but he had designed the system. It turned out to be simple. He had used electronics parts he bought from RadioShack to build a simple radar-activated sensor. It was based on dashboard detectors supposed to warn drivers of the presence of a police radar gun. If attached to a detonator, such a sensor could be used to set off a bomb, in response to a signal from a radar gun—or even from something smaller, lighter. He had learned these techniques in Northern Ireland.