“That's good enough for us. Tell us what you need. You've got all the resources of the U.S. government behind you.”

Hibbet laughed and shook his head. “That's a lot better than dealing with the NUMA bean counters. You don't know the trouble I've had trying to buy experimental equipment.” He paused in thought. “Even if I can whip something together, we'll still need a platform to carry it to where it would do the most good.”

“How big would this contraption be?” Austin said.

“Big,” Hibbet said. “Then you'd need the generators to power the antenna. And a way to transport something that weighs tons.”

“That's the bad news,” Austin said.

“What's the good news?” asked Hibbet.

Austin grinned. “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

The phone rang just then and Austin picked it up. Pitt must have pulled some major strings. The Pentagon was sending a car over to pick him up.

THE EARTH seemed to be on fire in a hundred different places. Volcanoes erupted like a virulent disease, spewing forth huge, glowing lava fields whose smoke cast a thick pall over the planet. Wind storms of unimaginable power whipped the massive cloud into twisting vortexes that ranged across continents. Tsunamis slammed into the North American coastline on the east and the west and created a narrow continent squeezed by two angry oceans.

Then the image of the ravaged planet disappeared. The large screen in the Pentagon screening room went blank. Lights that had been dimmed for the presentation went back on, to reveal Austin and the stunned faces of a dozen or so military brass and political people who were sitting around a long conference table.

“The computer simulation you just saw was prepared by Dr. Paul Trout, a computer graphics expert at NUMA,” Austin said. “It presents a reasonably accurate picture of the consequences of a geologic polar shift.”

A four-star general sitting across from Austin said, “I would be the first to admit that was a frightening picture, if it's true. But as you say, it's a computer simulation, and could just as well be based on imagination as fact.”

“I wish it were imagination, General. We didn't have time to prepare a written summary, so you'll have to bear with me while I lay out the main points of what we're dealing with here. The first link in the chain of events that led to this meeting was forged more than sixty years ago with the work of a brilliant electrical engineer named Lazlo Kovacs.”