In total silence, his senses keyed up, he moved through the deep gloom toward the faint glow in the distance. He had traveled perhaps a hundred yards when he began to hear the thrum of machinery. The faint light, he now realized, was coming from beneath a heavy drape of some kind. Cautiously, he eased the drape aside a few inches. Just beyond it, a brushed-steel door, with glass in the upper half, separated him from a gleaming, tiled, brightly lit corridor. Along the corridor on the right-hand side were five doors identical to the one before him. Each was identified by a letter and number painted just above the glass. In addition, there were name plaques in brass just below several of the panes.

Gabe inhaled, held his breath, opened the door, and slipped inside. The steady, mechanical humming was coming from the far end of the corridor. Otherwise, there was neither sound nor movement. He angled himself to be able to see through the glass of the first door, labeled B-10. Below the glass, a bronze plate read: DR. K. RAWDON.

The room, gleaming beneath white fluorescent lights, was clearly a lab of some sort, devoid, at the moment, of people. There were several computer terminals set alongside a complex apparatus that was a tangled arrangement of thick and thin highly polished metal tubes, connected by numerous rivets and bolts and constructed around a series of lenses and eyepieces. The effect was as if he were looking at the inner workings of a nuclear submarine.

But Gabe knew better.

His study of the materials borrowed from Jim Ferendelli's library had disclosed a number of images of equipment nearly identical to the apparatus in Room B-10. The instrument was, he felt certain, a scanning tunneling microscope, capable of mapping the surface of materials atom by atom. It was this instrument, more than any other, that was elemental in the design and construction of nano-scale systems. It had become, in essence, the basis of the entire field of nanotechnology.

CHAPTER 39

Lester, how're you doing?"

Grateful for her hands-off headset, Alison worked the wrapper off a stick of Trident and slipped it into her mouth to join the two sticks already there. From the moment she spotted Treat Griswold heading for his car, she knew this was going to be a three-stick operation. Three at least.

"I'm just passing Dale City," Lester said. "Is he out yet?"

"He's out. Just getting into his car. Lester, listen, are you sure you want to go through with this?"