But the wormhole was holding.

They were far past the point where all previous experiments had collapsed.

Now the disc image began to shrink as the light, falling from three dimensions onto the wormhole mouth, was compressed by the wormhole’s throat into a narrowing pipe. The scrambled, shrinking puddle of light reached a peak of distortion.

And then the quality of light changed. The multiple image structure became simpler, expanding, seeming to unscramble itself, and David began to pick out elements of a new visual field: a smear of blue that might be sky, a pale white that could be an instrument box.

He said: “Call Hiram.”

Bobby said, “What are we looking at?”

“Just call Father, Bobby.”

Hiram arrived at a run an hour later. “It better be worth it. I broke up an investors’ meeting…”

David, wordlessly, handed him a slab of lead-glass crystal the size and shape of a pack of cards. Hiram turned the slab over, inspecting it.

The upper surface of the slab was ground into a magnifying lens, and when Hiram looked into it, he saw miniaturized electronics: photomultiplier light detectors for receiving signals, a light-emitting diode capable of emitting flashes for testing, a small power supply, miniature electromagnets. And, at the geometric centre of the slab, there was a tiny, perfect sphere, just at the limit of visibility. It looked silvery, reflective, like a pearl; but the quality of light it returned wasn’t quite the hard grey of the countinghouse’s fluorescents.

Hiram turned to David. “What am I looking at?”

David nodded at the big wall SoftScreen. It showed a round blur of light, blue and brown.

A face came looming into the image: a human face, a man somewhere in his forties, perhaps. The image was heavily distorted — it was exactly as if he had pushed his face into a fish-eye lens — but David could make out a knot of curly black hair, leathery sun-beaten skin, white teeth in a broad smile.

“It’s Walter,” Hiram said, wondering. “Our Brisbane station head.” He moved closer to the SoftScreen. “He’s saying something. His lips are moving.” He stood there, mouth moving in sympathy. “I… see… you. I see you. My God.”

Behind Walter, other Aussie technicians could be seen now, heavily distorted shadows, applauding in silence.

David grinned, and submitted to Hiram’s whoops and bear hugs, all the while keeping his eye on the lead-glass slab containing the wormhole mouth, that billion-dollar pearl.

It was 3 A.M. At the heart of the deserted Wormworks, in a bubble of SoftScreen light, Kate and Bobby sat side by side. Bobby was working through a simple question-and-answer setup session on the SoftScreen. They were expecting a long night; behind them there was a heap of hastily gathered gear, coffee flasks and blankets and foam mattresses.

…There was a creak. Kate jumped and grabbed Bobby’s arm.

Bobby kept working at the program. “Take it easy. Just a little thermal contraction. I told you, I made sure all the surveillance systems have a blind spot right here, right now.”

“I’m not doubting it. It’s just that I’m not used to creeping around in the dark like this.”

“I thought you were the tough reporter.”

“Yes. But what I do is generally legal.”

“Generally!”

“Believe it or not.”

“But this -” He waved a hand toward the hulking, mysterious machinery out in the dark. “ — isn’t even surveillance equipment. It’s just an experimental high energy physics rig. There’s nothing like it in the world; how can there be any legislation to cover its use?”

“That’s specious, Bobby. No judge on the planet would buy that argument.”

“Specious or not, I’m telling you to calm down. I’m trying to concentrate. Mission Control here could be a little more user-friendly. David doesn’t even use voice activation. Maybe all physicists are so conservative — or all Catholics.”

She studied him as he worked steadily at the program. He looked as alive as she’d ever seen him, for once fully engaged in the moment. And yet he seemed completely unperturbed by any moral doubt. He really was a complex person — or rather, she thought sadly, incomplete.

His finger hovered over a start button on the SoftScreen. “Ready. Shall I do it?”

“We’re recording?”

He tapped the SoftScreen. “Everything that comes through that wormhole will be trapped right here.”

“…Okay.”

“Three, two, one.” He hit the key.

The ’Screen turned black.

From the greater darkness around her, she heard a deep bass hum as the giant machinery of the Wormworks came on line, huge forces gathering to rip a hole in spacetime. She thought she could smell ozone, feel a prickle of electricity. But maybe that was imagination.

Setting up this operation had been simplicity itself. While Bobby had worked to obtain clandestine access to the Wormworks equipment, Kate had made her way to Billybob’s mansion, a gaudy baroque palace set in woodland on the fringe of the Mount Rainier National Park. She’d taken sufficient photographs to construct a crude external map of the site, and had made Global Positioning System readings at various reference points. That — and the information Billybob had boastfully given away to style magazines about the lavish interior layout — had been sufficient for her to construct a detailed internal map of the building, complete with a grid of GPS references.

Now, if all went well, those references would be sufficient to establish a wormhole link between Billybob’s inner sanctum and this mocked-up listening post.

…The SoftScreen lit up. Kate leaned forward.

The image was heavily distorted, a circular smear of light, orange and brown and yellow, as if she were looking through a silvered tunnel. There was a sense of movement, patches of light coming and going across the image, but she could make out no detail.

“I can’t see a damn thing,” she said querulously.

Bobby tapped at the SoftScreen. “Patience. Now I have to cut in the deconvolution routines.”

“The what?”

“The wormhole mouth isn’t a camera lens, remember. It’s a little sphere on which light falls from all around, in three dimensions. And that global image is pretty much smeared out by its passage through the wormhole itself. But we can use software routines to unscramble all that. It’s kind of interesting. The software is based on programs the astronomers use to factor out atmospheric distortion, twinkling and blurring and refraction, when they study the stars.”

The image abruptly cleared, and Kate gasped.

They saw a massive desk with a globe-lamp hovering above. There were papers and SoftScreens scattered over the desktop. Behind the desk was an empty chair, casually pushed back. On the walls there were performance graphs and bar charts, what looked like accounting statements.

There was luxury here. The wallpaper looked like handmade English stuff, probably the most expensive in the world. And on the floor, casually thrown there, there was a pair of rhino hides, gaping mouths and glassy eyes staring, horns proud even in death.

And there was a simple animated display, a total counting steadily upward. It was labelled CONVERTS: human souls being counted like a fast-food chain’s sushi burger sales.

The image was far from perfect. It was dark, grainy, sometimes unstable, given to freezing or breaking up into clouds of pixels. But still…

“I can’t believe it,” Kate breathed. “It’s working. It’s as if all the walls in the world just turned to glass. Welcome to the goldfish bowl…”

Bobby worked his SoftScreen, making the reconstructed image pan around. “I thought rhinos were extinct.”

“They are now. Billybob was involved in a consortium which bought out the last breeding pair from a private zoo in France. The geneticists had been trying to get hold of the rhinos to store genetic material, maybe eggs and sperm and even zygotes, in the hope of restoring the species in the future. But Billybob got there first. And so he owns the last rhino skins there will ever be. It was good business, if you look at it that way. These skins command unbelievably high prices now.”