Reggie smiled. "When can you leave?"

"I don't know. A couple of days to finish up school stuff. What about the seventeenth?"

"Perfect. We can meet up in Washington and you can sit in on the panel, and then I'll ship you out to San Diego."

"If I decide to do it."

"You will."

"We'll see."

FOUR.

Eight days, three security checks, and one plane ride later, Mike was in Washington, D.C., wearing his best suit. It was still the cheapest one in the room. Reggie had loaned him a silk tie after seeing the two polyester ones he'd brought from home. He adjusted the knot against his throat, glad he'd decided on the full-Windsor over his usual half.

The room was almost twice the size of Mike's cla.s.sroom back in South Berwick. There were no windows. Five people shifted and mumbled and found seats behind a row of tables at the front of the room, avoiding the collection of flags behind them. Ten feet away there was a mirroring row of tables, this one with two dozen chairs lined up behind it in four rows of six. Two other tables ran along the far side, facing the door. The walls were painted in warm colors, but the room felt stark.

It struck Mike that the setup was very similar to a courtroom. Judges up front. Defense and prosecution across from them. Jury off to the side. He was sure it was deliberate.

The five people at the front of the room-three men and two women-settled into their chairs. Mike glanced at each of them. A man in an Air Force uniform with silver eagles on his shoulders and seven rows of color on his chest. A younger man with dark hair and gla.s.ses. An older woman with a flag pin on her collar who the ants recognized as a senator. An Asian man with a white line on his finger where he normally wore a ring. A dark-eyed woman with long hair and an athlete's body. Seven people sat back in the body of the room, scratching notes on identical pads with identical pens.

Reggie guided them to the jury tables. Each one had two pristine legal pads with a Department of Defense watermark stretching across the top of each sheet. A matching logo graced a pen placed precisely across the top of the notepad. A blue file folder lay next to each pad.

"What is this?" asked Mike. He adjusted his coat to display more of the borrowed tie.

"Budget review board," murmured Reggie. He popped open his briefcase and pulled out a slim pad. "Standard stuff. It's still DARPA territory, but a lot of departments have invested in the Albuquerque Door. All these folks have some say in what happens next. Some of them are tied to the agency, a few are from the DOD itself. The Air Force colonel over there? He loves this sort of stuff."

Mike glanced across the half-dozen board members to the broad, square-jawed man with bristle-brush hair. "Really?"

"Oh, yeah. Forget anything you read in the papers about the Marines or the Army. The Air Force loves high tech more than any of them."

"So it's all about high tech, but everyone's using notepads and ballpoint pens?"

"Remember how you had to turn in your phone at the desk?"

Mike nodded.

"They're not big on laptops and tablets in these meetings. It's a security thing."

"Cool. Can I keep the pen?"

"Yes, you can keep the pen," sighed Reggie. "It only cost the taxpayers seventeen dollars. Here, you can have mine, too."

"What about the notepad?"

"Don't be greedy." He nodded to the front of the room. "Okay, pay attention. These are your new best friends."

Two men and a woman came through the door. The leader, an older black man with a trimmed goatee and a circle of gray hair around his scalp, glanced around the room and up at the board members. He walked with a dark cane in his right hand. It had a silver derby-style handle. He wore silver-rimmed gla.s.ses that pulled attention to his eyes. He hadn't changed much since the photo for his book jacket.

"Arthur Cross," said Reggie, following Mike's gaze. "He's probably got the best idea of how this whole thing works, although they'll all tell you it's beyond any one person. That's why you're here."

"I still don't know what 'this' is."

"Patience."

Cross looked across the room at Reggie and nodded politely. The woman with him shot Mike and Reggie a look that was only a few degrees away from a glare. She, Cross, and the other man sat down across from the board.

"The blonde is Jamie Parker," said Reggie. "Head programmer. She's here today because their other physicist has the flu."

Her eyes were hazel, like Mike's, though much narrower than his. Her hair reached past her shoulders, but was bound up in a sensible ponytail. She had on a tight black turtleneck over an equally tight body, somewhat concealed by a gray blazer.

He realized he was staring because she was glaring back at him. Mike rubbed his temple and forced a few ants back behind their wall. "You said it wasn't cryptography."

"It's not."

"Or robots."

"It's the twenty-first century," said Reggie. "I don't think I've got any projects under my umbrella that don't have at least two programmers." He tipped his chin to the woman. "Parker was a black hat at MIT, got in trouble with the feds, but they couldn't prove anything. After she graduated they tried to hire her, and she more or less spit in their faces. Dropped out of sight for two years, and then Arthur found her at a hacker con and recruited her. Major chip on her shoulder."

Mike let his eyes drift to the other man. He had a long, weather-beaten face, and small eyes. His dyed-black hair was slicked back, and his face had a slack look to it that somehow seemed more practiced than genetic. He had lean limbs and perfect posture. It gave the impression of a tall man, even though he was only an inch over Parker. His suit was poorly fitting and almost definitely off-the-rack. It made Mike feel better about his own wardrobe.

Mike nodded at the man. "Olaf Johansson."

"Olaf?"

"Hey, talk to his parents. He's Arthur's partner. Double doctorates in physics and mathematics. Number cruncher. Very little imagination or sense of humor. You two should b.u.t.t heads nicely."

"Is he related to Scarlett?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Has anyone told him he looks just like Humphrey Bogart?"

"I tried," said Reggie. "He didn't know who I was talking about."

"How can he not know Bogart?"

"I don't think he's seen Casablanca."

"You lie."

"Shut up and play with your pen. They're ready to get started."

The dark-eyed, athletic woman started things. She had a pleasant voice. "So, Dr. Cross, perhaps you could give us a rundown on your project and where it currently stands?"

Arthur nodded. "Well, as our reports explain, the Albuquerque Door began as the SETH Project. It was an attempt to create a viable method of energetic matter transmission, the long-term goal being to create a practical IMT system."

"Doctor?" The Asian man raised his hand. "Could we get that in layman's terms, please?"

Olaf sighed and his brow furrowed for a moment.

"IMT," said Arthur. "Instant matter transfer. We were trying to make a matter-projection system, one that wouldn't be-"

"Teleportation?" interrupted the Asian again. "You were trying to make some sort of teleporter, like on Star Trek?"

"They call theirs a transporter, actually," said Jamie Parker.

A faint chuckle rolled across the board's tables.

Mike felt his eyes start to roll. He turned to Reggie. "I thought you brought me down here for something serious," he whispered.

"I did," murmured his friend.

"Physical teleportation's impossible."

The board plowed ahead. "And how much success have you had with your...matter-projection system?" asked the Asian man.

"Well," said Arthur, "all things considered, we had a fair degree, sir. There are a number of ways to break something down to the atomic level using existing technology. The challenge, of course, has always been reintegration." He paused to adjust his gla.s.ses. "Even a life form as small as a mouse contains billions of cells, each made up of hundreds of millions of molecules, each of which is also made up of possibly millions of atoms. Taking it apart is relatively easy, putting it back together, well..."

"I believe your earlier budgets accounted for that, yes?" asked the Air Force colonel. His precise voice echoed in the room. "Says here you built yourself a supercomputer."

"To build a computer that could identify and track all those particles in real time would pretty much be impossible," Jamie said. "It'd be beyond anything even theorized by modern engineers. The closest thing in existence is the Tianhe-2 in China, and that's only a bare percentage of the calculating power we'd need for a single jump. We were trying to develop a program that worked off an idea similar to quantum entanglement, what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." We wouldn't need to know where every particle was, so long as we knew where most of them were."

The board members glanced at one another and the files. "And that worked?" asked the athletic woman.

Mike leaned in close to Reggie again. "I don't even follow this stuff and I can tell you half a dozen reasons it wouldn't work."

"I'm sure you can."

"I can name at least a dozen physicists who've played with this and moved on to easier things like antigravity or the Grand Unified Theory."

"I told you to be patient already, yes?"

"Mr. Magnus," asked the athletic woman, "did you have a comment?"

"No, ma'am," he said. "Just clarifying a point for my colleague."

Her gaze slid to Mike, then back to Arthur. "Doctor?"

"We had some success," Arthur said, "and a few failures. The first few objects to HD didn't tell us anything, but by the time we-"

"I'm sorry," interrupted another one of the reviewers, the senator. "HD?"

"Oh, it's...uhh." Arthur examined the table. "Well, it's an unofficial term we coined for when test objects dispersed rather than reintegrated."

"What does it stand for?" This from the man with gla.s.ses.

"Well, it's..." He glanced at Jamie.

"Humpty Dumpty," muttered Olaf Johansson.

"What?"

Mike's mind leaped ahead and found a childhood copy of the nursery rhyme. He looked at all six pages of the picture book at once and crossed it with the topic at hand. He winced.

"Humpty Dumpty," the Bogart look-alike repeated. His faintly accented voice sounded wrong coming from that face. "You know, 'All the king's horses and all the king's men...'"

"Oh," said the Asian interviewer.

The man with the gla.s.ses dipped his chin. "A bit...macabre."

"But pretty much dead on," Olaf said. He almost sneered when he spoke.

"So, really," said the Air Force colonel, "how many successes did you have?"

"In the first three years of the project, we managed to teleport two test blocks and a test animal," said Arthur. "Both of the test blocks crumbled to dust a few moments after reintegration. Microscopic a.n.a.lysis revealed fundamental changes in their structure at the molecular level."

The senator swallowed. "And...the animal?"

Arthur glanced at Jamie. The blonde examined her blank legal pad.

Olaf straightened up in his chair. "We're pretty sure it was dead the moment we reintegrated it."

"Pretty sure?"

"The autopsy was inconclusive," he shrugged. "If it was alive, it couldn't've been for more than a second or two."

"Are you sure?"

"We're sure," muttered Jamie.

Mike picked up his pen and wrote TOLD YOU! on the pad. He angled it to Reggie. Reggie ignored him.

The Asian man tapped his report. "That was an unauthorized animal experiment, was it not?"

"Yes, sir, it was," said Arthur. "And the reports from that hearing, the ethics committee, and the Humane Society should be included in the packets you have. We are...all of us on the Albuquerque Door Project are ashamed of what we let happen. Of what we did then. I can absolutely a.s.sure you it will never happen again."

The Asian man nodded. "Please, go on."

"As I was saying," continued Arthur, "our second wave experiments forced us to agree with prevailing theories. Physical teleportation was simply not going to be possible at our current level of technology. Possibly not ever, as many noted quantum theorists have said."