He looked at the dimly illuminated LCD display of his black Teltek voltmeter, holding it in cupped hands. It wasn’t field-caliber equipment, but it would do.

Nothing. No activity.

He traveled another ten feet. The digits began to climb; he took another step, and they surged.

He was approaching the subterranean pressure sensors. Though the voltmeter indicated that the buried cable itself was still a ways off, he knew that the electromagnetic flux of TriStar’s buried-cable sensors created a detection field that was more than six feet wide.

The rate of increase in the voltmeter’s display suggested that he was nearing the active field. Nine inches beneath the sod, the “leaky” coaxial cable was designed to have gaps in the outer conductor, allowing an electromagnetic flux to escape and be detected by a parallel receiving cable that ran in the same jacket. The result was a volumetric detection field around the coaxial cable, about one foot high and six feet wide. Still, as with other outdoor intrusion-detection systems, microprocessors were tasked with distinguishing one kind of disturbance from another. A twenty-pound animal would not trigger an alarm; an eighty-pound boy would. Intruder speeds, too, could be detected and interpreted. Snow, hail, gusting leaves, temperature changes—all could alter the flux. But the brains of the system would filter out such noise.

Unlike a microwave system, it could not be spoofed. The buried cables were inaccessible, and the TriStar system had redundant tamper protection, so any interruption of its circuits would itself be detected and prompt an alarm response. There was only one way through it.

And that was over it.

Janson retrieved the telescoping rod and, twisting the segments counterclockwise, locked it in its fully extended position. He walked some ways back toward the microwave poles and, keeping the rod extended in his hands, raced toward the buried sensor cables, imagining the invisible six-foot-wide band to be a physical barrier.

He held the pole as he ran, then plunged the end of it in the ground, just above where he believed the cable to be buried. Now: a step and drive. He swung his right knee up and forward, and jumped, swinging upward with his hips as he held on to the pole. If all went well, his momentum would carry him, and he would land a safe distance from the cable. It need not be a soaring, athletic pole vault, but a broad jump; it was merely necessary to keep his body several feet in the air. The volumetric detector would have been alerted only to the thin pole twitching in the ground—nothing even approaching the volume, or flux disturbance patterns, consistent with a human being. Now, as he kept his eyes on the area of grass where he hoped to land, a comfortable distance from the buried sensor cable, he suddenly felt the metal rod buckling under his weight.

Oh dear God, no!

In mid-arch, the rod collapsed and Janson tumbled heavily to the ground, just a few feet from where he’d estimated the coaxial to lie.