The media images of cold-eyed childcare professionals backed up by heavily armed troops going into the centers and bundling bewildered, unresisting kids out of their beds are offensive to anyone with a soul. However strange these children might be they are still just kids. But it had to be done.

Anyway I know that what offends people about those images is not so much the handling of the children itself but the way we were made to confront our own hypocrisy. Everybody has always known, in their hearts, that the true purpose of the centers was containment. Everybody is complicit. Guilty, ashamed, but still afraid, we turned away.

Now the children, separated from their fellows, have disappeared into secure environments, mostly military, all across the country. Out of sight they will be forgotten; separated, they will be contained. That’s the idea anyhow.

It isn’t particularly palatable. But the problem did appear to be approaching a resolution.

Except at Nevada itself.

The wisest thing for me to do would have been to keep out of it; no matter what the resolution to the situation, there was absolutely nothing to gain for me. But staying away just wasn’t an option. My damnable conscience, a true handicap for a -politician, saw to that.

Which is how I came to be at the center when the climax came…

Dan Ystebo was waiting at the security gate when Maura got back to the center.

A week after the quark-nugget incident, the grade-school facade of the place had been stripped away. Most of the staff, including Principal Reeve, were gone. Security was tighter than ever, with what looked to Maura like a substantial military force deployed around the perimeter fence and across the compound. Guys with guns, in heavy body armor.

Dan walked her briskly to the heart of the compound. He looked fat and flustered, but she suspected he was relishing his informality and sloppiness compared to the stiff military types who now ran the place. Many of the rooms had been cleared out and given over to military functions — weapons storage, surveillance, a command post — with here and there a discarded toy or the dangling corner of some child’s painting as deeply incongruous reminders of the life and youth that had, if briefly and under restraint, come to this corner of the Nevada desert.

“I prepared you a written report,” Dan was saying. “I can download it to—”

“Just summarize.”

“The first stage of the clearance operation went to plan. Inasmuch as these goons had a plan at all…”

Most of the children, Dan said, had been cleared out of the center on the first sweep. But a hard core of a dozen or so had barricaded themselves in one of the lab rooms and wouldn’t be moved. And one of the children was — had to be, of course — little Tom Tybee.

After two days it had been obvious the situation was turning into a siege. The commanders were seeking sanction to use greater force, and the whole thing threatened to become a horrible mess.

They came to a room Maura recognized. It was the physics lab. But much had changed.

It was much bigger than she remembered; evidently two or three of the center’s rooms had been knocked together. And it was brighter; the ceiling was coated with big fluorescent strips that dumped hard flat colorless light over everything, creating a

shadowless, pearly glow.

The room was ringed by soldiers and white-coated staff, monitoring, recording. There was a sharp stink of ozone, and a sour compound of sweat and feces and urine.

And, replacing the high-school type science instruments she had seen in here before, there was now a much more substantial array of gear. There were instruments of all kinds, mostly unrecognizable to her, all over the lab. Ducts and cables ran everywhere over the floor, taped together.

The main item was some kind of torus, a fat ring of metal tightly wrapped with wire coils, maybe fifteen feet across; it sat on a series of wooden trestles. Tubes led off to other assemblies of gear, one of them the crude Tinkerbell containment cage that Maura remembered from her last visit. And there was a new cage, a mass of wire and metal rods, growing out of the middle \ of the torus.

Suffusing everything was the bright glow of the object in the original wire cage: the Tinkerbell anomaly, still dipping and darting through the air. Its light was unearthly, easily casting shadows that could not be dispersed even by the powerful fluo-rescents above.

And, through the little jungle of equipment, the children moved.

They stepped carefully, carrying bits of gear to and fro, their childish gait uncertain. Three of them sat on the floor, surrounded by white equipment boxes, eating what looked like hamburgers. In a corner, a couple of kids were sleeping, curled up together. One, a dark little girl, had her thumb in her mouth. All the kids were wearing what looked like nightclothes — loose tunics and trousers, no shoes or socks. The pajamas were grubby, sometimes torn, but neatly stitched with blue circles.

The children looked ill to Maura, but maybe that was an artifact of the hard fluorescent light.

She said to Dan, “I take it we gave them what they wanted, what Anna demanded.”

“It was here in twenty-four hours, up and working twelve hours later.”

“Tell me what it’s for.”

“It’s a factory. As we thought. It makes quark nuggets, droplets of quark matter. The children are growing positively charged nuggets through neutron capture.” He pointed to the original cage, the darting Tinkerbell light. “Small nuggets bud off the big mother in there. We don’t know how that happens, incidentally; we thought that to make quark nuggets you would need to slam heavy ions together at near light speed in a particle accelerator.”

“Evidently not,” Maura said. “How small is small?”

“The size of an atomic nucleus. The nuggets come spraying out of the cage and pass through the magnetic spectrometer — that box over there — where a magnetic field separates them out from other products. We have Cerenkov radiation detectors and time-of-flight detectors to identify the nuggets. Then the nuggets pass through that device—” a long boxy tube “ — which is a linear electrostatic decelerator. At least we think it is. The children modified it. The quark nuggets emerge from the cage at relativistic velocities, and the decelerator—”

“Slows them down.”

“Right. Then the nuggets enter the torus, the big doughnut over there. That contains heavy water, which is water laced with deuterium, heavy hydrogen. The quark nuggets are fed protons to make sure they have a positive charge. That’s important because a negatively charged nugget would—”

“Cause a runaway. I remember.”

“The quark nuggets go on to another magnetic bottle, at the end of the line there, and they are allowed to grow by absorbing neutrons. In the process energy is released, as gamma rays.”

“And that’s how a power plant would be built.”

“Maura, this apparatus is already producing power, but not at useful levels yet.”

A taller girl walked through the room, giraffe thin. She turned, unexpectedly, and looked at Maura.

“Anna,” Maura said to Dan.

“Yeah. And there’s Tommy Tybee.” He was one of the three eating.

“We’re feeding them?”

Dan eyed her. “Of course we are. We haven’t yet reached the point where we are prepared to starve out children. Anyhow it’s siege psychology. The trick-cyclist types here are trying to keep up a line of dialogue with the kids; the food, three or four times a day, is one way. And the kids get what they want: junk food, soda, candy.”

“Not so healthy.”

“Not a green vegetable in sight. But I think the consensus is we’ll fix their health later.” He pointed. “The troopers even brought in a Porta-john. The kids don’t wash much, though. And not a damn one of them will clean her teeth.