I tested the line around my wrists. Metal mesh of some kind, cool to the touch…and it was tight.

Forward turned a switch. The heads vanished. It was a moment before he spoke.

“You’ve put me in a very bad position.”

And Carlos answered. “I think you put yourself there.”

“That may be. You should not have let me guess what you knew.”

Carlos said, “Sorry, Bey.”

He sounded healthy. Good. “That’s all right,” I said. “But what’s all the excitement about? What has Forward got?”

“I think he’s got the Tunguska meteorite.”

“No. That I do not.” Forward stood and faced us. “I will admit that I came here to search for the Tunguska meteorite. I spent several years trying to trace its trajectory after it left Earth. Perhaps it was a quantum black hole. Perhaps not. The Institute cut off my funds without warning just as I had found a real quantum black hole, the first in history.”

I said, “That doesn’t tell me a lot.”

“Patience, Mr. Shaeffer. You know that a black hole may form from the collapse of a massive star? Good. And you know that it takes a body of at least five solar masses. It may mass as much as a galaxy—or as much as the universe. There is some evidence that the universe is an in-falling black hole. But at less than five solar masses the collapse would stop at the neutron star stage.”

“I follow you.”

“In all the history of the universe there has been one moment at which smaller black holes might have formed. That moment was the explosion of the monoblock, the cosmic egg that once contained all the matter in the universe. In the ferocity of that explosion there must have been loci of unimaginable pressure. Black holes could have formed of mass down to two point two times ten to the minus fifth grams, one point six times ten to the minus twenty-fifth angstroms in radius.”

“Of course you’d never detect anything that small,” said Carlos. He seemed almost cheerful. I wondered why…and then I knew. He’d been right about the way the ships were disappearing. It must compensate him for being tied to a pillar.

“But,” said Forward, “black holes of all sizes could have formed in that explosion, and should have. In more than seven hundred years of searching no quantum black hole has ever been found. Most cosmologists have given up on them, and on the big bang, too.”

Carlos said, “Of course there was the Tunguska meteorite. It could have been a black hole of, oh, asteroidal mass—”

“—and roughly molecular size. But the tide would have pulled down trees as it went past—”

“—and the black hole would have gone right through the Earth and headed back into space a few tons heavier. Eight hundred years ago there was actually a search for the exit point. With that they could have charted a course—”