She stepped inside. It was like an electronic hobbyist’s den; there were circuit boards and soldering irons and oscilloscopes and meters of all kinds, scattered over the benches and the floor. On the bench where Henry had been working there was a gigantic parts rack, row on row of little plastic drawers containing banana plugs, wires, leads, clips, resistors, capacitors, transistors. The glowing screen of a laptop sat at the centre of the bench. And beside the bench there was a bizarre cairn of gear, a stepped pyramid of what looked like a car tyre inner tube topped by plastic plates and Styrofoam sheets and lengths of hose, all topped by a clutter of electronic gear.

There was a complex smell here, she thought: over-strong coffee, the ozone-rich stink of electronic equipment and burned solder. And Henry, of course, the warm scent she had so quickly gotten used to.

She said, “Have you seen Mike?”

“What?”

“Mike.”

“No. I—”

“Do you think he’s in the lab?”

“He hasn’t been around. What’s wrong?”

“He didn’t come home. Ted is worried.” She told him about the train crash. “I’m worried too.”

He stood up. “We’ll find him. I think I know where he is.”

She glanced around. “What the hell are you doing in here, Henry?”

“I’m building an STM. A scanning tunnelling microscope.” He looked at her. “It’s a device that uses quantum effects to… Well. The point is you can study individual atoms. You can move them, even.”

“Why? What for?”

“So I can study the Moon rock. Why else?”

“There must be STMs in the lab.”

“Dream on, baby. But I need one, so I have to fall back on good old Yankee can-do… This pile of tyres and Styrofoam is the shock absorber.” He grinned. “Low tech but effective. I scrounged a piezo to fix the needle to. I use a loudspeaker coil to move the needle in towards the sample.” He looked at her, to see if she was understanding. “A coil from a telephone headset. I can move my needle to an accuracy of less than an angstrom. That’s less than an atomic diameter. I can feel my way across the atoms on the surface of a sample, like working along a river bottom. I—”

“Henry,” she said, “why are you in the car park?”

“Because the liquefaction is coming.”

“The what?”

“The quicksand. Jane, it’s coming this way. Running through the old igneous structures in the bedrock. The only uncertainty is when it gets here. The lab block over there is a warren. I don’t want to get caught in that.”

“But the university people—”

“ — won’t listen. So I’m making my protest, out here. This way, I might persuade more people to take this seriously.” He stood up and held her shoulders. “Never mind. Let’s go find Mike.”