Somewhat reluctantly, Sand handed it to him. Kemp figured for a moment. "If we assume no frictional effects, it would come right up out of the antipodes of its entry point. But I don't know whether there would be drag— it's sucking in matter and releasing some of it as gamma rays, creating a plasma, or maybe it's . . . Hell, I don't know. Let's assume the core has very little drag effect on it. Maybe it doesn't break the surface ..."

"But the shock wave does," Sand said.

"Right. So we'd have tremendous effects in . . ." Kemp's brow furrowed.

"South Atlantic Ocean," Samshow said. "Thirty south and forty west. About eleven hundred nautical miles east of Brazil, somewhere along the latitude of Pôrto Alegre."

"Very good," Kemp said, his smile fixed now. "Some seismic events there, and then, it swings back to Ramapo eighty or ninety minutes later. And again and again, until its motion is damped by whatever drag it feels and it rests right in the center of the Earth. Do you realize what a black hole could do at the center of the Earth?"

Samshow, suddenly troubled, stood and walked through an open sliding glass door to the veranda. He looked deep into the night jungle behind Mrs. Fusetti's house, quiet except for the noise of the party and the whirring of insects. "How in hell would something like this get to the Earth? Wouldn't our radar spot it, our satellites?"

"I don't know," Kemp said.

"There's definitely some correlation, Walt," Sand said. "Our gravimeters were working perfectly." He joined Samshow on the veranda.

"The party's full of talk about the President's announcement," Kemp said, standing in the open doorway. "What I've been thinking ..."

Sand's eyes widened. "Oh, Jesus," he said. "I hadn't even ..."

"So?" Samshow asked.

"Maybe it's not just a fantasy," Kemp said. "You have a jag we can't trace, a meteor strike you can't explain, and we have compression waves we can't explain. And the President has aliens."

"Now wait," Samshow interrupted. "We haven't got any information about the South Atlantic."

"Could this black hole, or whatever it is, cause substantial damage to the Earth?" Sand asked.

"It would eventually eat it up, swallow it completely," Kemp said.

"Then we'd better tell somebody," Samshow said.

Kemp and Sand looked at him like children chastised for being caught in a dirty game.

"Shouldn't we?" Samshow asked. "Who's going to San Francisco, to the American Geophysical Society convention?"

"I am," Kemp said.

"I'd like to," Samshow said, running on instincts now. Sand regarded him with some confusion. Perhaps he felt like backing down now, having carried things too far and seeing the Old Man take them all seriously. "Can we swing it, David?"

"I . . . want to try some calculations."

"We obviously don't have the expertise," Samshow said. "But somebody there will."

"Right," Kemp said. "I know just the fellow. Jonathan Post will be there."