"How do you know?"

"People don't burn themselves, or drown themselves, if they got sense, do they? All them in that town were good, normal folks until that night. Then they just seemed to go crazy."

"What did you do?"

"I thought to myself, Peter, you're dreaming. You had too much to drink. So I went home and got into bed, and figured I'd be better in the morning. Only about ten o'clock, I hear a noise, and it's a car, so I go outside to see who it is. It's some kind of car, you know, one of those vans. Two fellers inside. I go up to them, and damn but they don't fall over dead. Scariest thing you ever saw. But it's funny."

"What's funny?"

"That was the only other car to come through all night. Normally, there's lots of cars."

"There was another car?"

"Yep. Willis, the highway patrol. He came through about fifteen, thirty seconds before it all started. Didn't stop, though; sometimes he doesn't. Depends if he's late on his schedule; he's got a regular patrol, you know, he has to stick to."

Jackson sighed and let his head fall back against the pillow. "Now," he said, "if you don't mind, I'm going to get me some sleep. I'm all talked out."

He closed his eyes. Hall crawled back down the tunnel, out of the unit, and sat in the room looking through the glass at Jackson, and the baby in the crib alongside. He stayed there, just looking, for a long time.

23. Topeka

THE ROOM WAS HUGE, the size of a football field. It was furnished sparsely, just a few tables scattered about. Inside the room, voices echoed as the technicians called to each other, positioning the pieces of wreckage. The post team was reconstructing the wreck in this room, placing the clumps of twisted metal from the Phantom in the same positions as they had been found on the sand.

Only then would the intensive examination begin.

Major Manchek, tired, bleary-eyed, clutching his coffee cup, stood in a corner and watched. To him, there was something surrealistic about the scene: a dozen men in a long, white-washed room in Topeka, rebuilding a crash.

One of the biophysicists came up to him, holding a clear plastic bag. He waved the contents under Manchek's nose.

"Just got it back from the lab," he said.

"What is it?"

"You'll never guess." The man's eyes gleamed in excitement.

All right, Manchek thought irritably, I'll never guess. "What is it?"

"A depolymerized polymer," the biochemist said, smacking his lips with satisfaction. "Just back from the lab."

"What kind of polymer?"

A polymer was a repeating molecule, built up from thousands of the same units, like a stack of dominos. Most plastics, nylon, rayon, plant cellulose, and even glycogen in the human body were polymers.

"A polymer of the plastic used on the air hose of the Phantom jet. The face mask to the pilot. We thought as much."