"She's daddy's nightmare," the SEAL groused. "Daughters are nature's revenge on fathers. She's already got a string of boyfriends. She's going to be impossible when she's a teenager. I'm seriously thinking about putting her in a barrel when she turns twelve and not letting her out until she's eighteen and no longer my problem."

"Be a pretty messy barrel," the physicist pointed out. "Maybe with a mesh bottom? And rinse it out once a week?"

"Whatever."

When they got to the developing encampment around the Orlando anomaly they had some problems getting into the main camp. The guards there had never heard of a Dr. William Weaver, didn't care that they were in a National Guard vehicle and seemed only mildly interested in the fact that Command Master Chief Miller was a SEAL and had been one of the first people through the gate.

After a few calls and calling the Officer of the Guard they were let through but only on condition that they report to the camp headquarters and obtain proper passes.

Weaver had Miller drop him at the physics trailer, which had acquired a sign while he was gone. It was now designated "The Anomaly Physics Research Center" and had another sign that said: "Authorized Persons Only. All Others Keep Out. This Means You!" He figured he'd better get the proper papers later. The guard on the trailer, however, had another opinion.

"I'm sorry, sir, I can't let anyone in who doesn't have the right pass," the guard, an 82nd Airborne private, said.

"Look, son," Weaver said, patiently. "This ismy lab! This ismy project. And unless the secretary of defense or the national security advisor have taken me off the job, that ismy equipment in there."

"That may be the case, sir," the guard said, doggedly. "But unless you have the right pass, you're not going in."

Weaver had just opened his mouth when his cell phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and held a hand up to the guard.

"William Weaver."

"This is the Secretary," the secretary of defense said. "There's supposed to be a FEMA representative down there to coordinate the tracking of the gates. You talked to him, yet?"

"If he's in my lab the answer is: no," Bill said, shaking his head. "I'm having a little trouble getting into it."

"Why? Lost your keys?" the SECDEF chuckled.

"No, the nice young man from the Army who is standing outside the door won't let me in."

There was a long pause as the secretary digested this fact.

"Let me talk to him."

Weaver handed over the phone.

"Private First Class Shawn Parrish, sir," the private said, politely.

"No, I don't recognize your voice, sir."

"Yes, sir."

"No, sir," this somewhat strained but determined. "But I'd be happy to call the sergeant of the guard, sir."

There was a long period while the private's face gradually got whiter.

"Yes, sir."

"Yes, sir."

"Yes, sir." This with a very white face.

"Thank you, sir."

"Dr. Weaver, I need to call the sergeant of the guard," the private said in a very small voice, handingback the phone. He pulled a civilian multiband radio off his LBE and spoke into it.

Weaver spent the next three minutes considering the nature of boson particles, muon detection and particle degradation. He'd been doing that a good bit while not being attacked by aliens or visiting alien planets in the last couple of days, which mostly meant while driving or eating, but every little bit helped.

The sergeant who came running up with two privates trailing him was panting.

"What do you got, Parrish?" the sergeant said, looking askance at Weaver's mussed desert camouflage BDUs, missing such items as nametags or rank insignia and worn over tennis shoes and a civilian T-shirt.

The guard pulled the sergeant aside and carried on a low voiced conversation of which Weaver caught only the exclamation: "Who? Are you sure?"

"Dr. Weaver?" the sergeant said. "Could I see some ID?"

Weaver pulled out his driver's license and Pentagon pass, then waited as the sergeant examined them and the list that the guard handed him.

"Sir, we'll get this straightened out," the sergeant said, handing back the IDs. "For the interim, I'll provisionally add you to the pass list on my authority. Please see that you get the proper paperwork as soon as possible."

"Will do," Weaver said. "Can I go in, now?"

"Yes, sir."

"Thanks."

"Sir, can I ask a question?"

"Yes."

"Was thatreally the secretary of defense?" the sergeant asked, clearly hoping that it was not.

"Yes," Weaver replied. "Want me to call him back so you can make sure?"

"No, sir!"

"Sergeant, I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off since Saturday when the SECDEF, the national security advisor and the President had me flown down here in an F-15. I've been blown up, had to learn to use a pistol and a shotgun to keep aliens from eating me, learned more than I want to know about gate teleportation and had about four hours' sleep, and three hours recovering from a concussion, since. Could you do me a small favor?"

"Yes, sir," the sergeant said, smiling.

"Get somebody to find me the appropriate paperwork or something? If you need to talk to General Fullbright, do it. As the SEAL I was with said when we busted down the gates to Disney to find this latest gate, I don't have time for Mickey Mouse. Okay?" "Got it, sir."

"Thanks," Weaver said, walking in the trailer.

There were three people crowded in the main room. Two of them he vaguely recognized; the third was a total stranger, a blonde female. Not at all bad looking, little light on top but easy on the eyes. She was running some sort of track calculation on a new computer that had been installed while he was away.

"Dr. Weaver," one of them said, standing up and coming over to shake his hand. "I'm Bill Earp from FEMA, you might remember me . . ."

"From that remarkable safety lecture you gave Sanson," Bill said, shaking his hand. "Good to see you again."

"Good to see you," the FEMA rep replied. "First word we had from Eustis was that you were a goner."

"The report of my demise was exceedingly exaggerated," Weaver replied. "I'm sorry to say that Howse and, apparently, Lieutenant Glasser bought it. Sanson, Chief Miller and I were in Shands hospital.

Where's Garcia?"

"Getting some rest, sir," the other male, a young soldier replied. "I'm Crichton. I was at the site . . ."

"You did the initial survey, sure," Bill said.

"I've got some radiological background," Crichton said. "I'm just trying to help out, keeping an eye on the boson count, mainly."

"FEMA sent me over to coordinate with finding the bosons," the safety specialist said. "I'm a chemist, not a physicist but I know the tune and can dance to it."

"Robin Noue," the young woman said, waving. "I'm a programmer . . . Iwas a programmer at UCF, in the AI Lab."

"Good, okay," Bill said. "What's the count on bosons and have they surveyed any more sites?"

"The count is up to over a hundred," the FEMA rep said. "We've managed to pick out thirty probable sites. Twenty have been surveyed. Five open gates, one into vacuum which displeased the guys that found it immensely; one of them nearly got sucked in. We sent out muon detectors to two of the ones that weren't open, all the detectors we had and we've got a call in for more. They found inactive, I guess you'd call them, bosons at both. Close enough to the course track."

"I've been trying to refine the course programming," Robin said. "I'm getting it fined down somewhat.

What bugs me is that it seems to be following a uniform sphere, congruent to the gravitational field."

"It bugs me, too," Weaver admitted. "And five open gates from twenty bugs me more. Because I think that means the others are 'available' and that means that the Titcher can open them."

"That would be bad," the FEMA rep said.

"Understatement of the century," Bill replied. "Maybe of the millennium. How many base tracks are there?" "Sixteen so far," Crichton said. "Every now and again a boson takes off on its own merry way. But most of them have been sitting in those sixteen base tracks and most of them have been following a 'top four.'"

"Which track is the Titcher track and is it the same as the Mreee track?"

"The Titcher track is designated track three," Crichton said. "And, yes, the Mreee gate is on the same track. Disney and one other open, near Miami out in the Everglades, are on track one. Boca and the Georgia eruption appear to be six and they're the only two bosons that have come out of six."

"Any dead bosons on track three?" Weaver asked.

"Oh, a shit-pot full," Crichton said. "Sorry ma'am."

"It's okay," Robin said.

"Okay, I'd say that those are a probable threat," Bill said. "Just a hunch. But I'd say it's a good area to point the military and local police towards. Open gates I don't think the Titcher can attack. But closed ones they can and the ones that they're most likely to be able to touch would be the ones on track three; those are the only ones that have been intentionally opened from the other side. Maybe the bosons on that one are really easy to detect or something; that would explain the Mreee as well. Oh, and maybe Boca, I've got no idea what Boca is."

"I do," Crichton said. "But it doesn't help."

"What?" Weaver asked, noticing the pained looks on the faces of Earp and Noue.

"They don't like the answer," Crichton said, seriously. "It's Cthulhu."

"What?" Weaver said, then shook his head. "Come on!"

In the 1920s a series of horror short stories had been written by a writer named Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The stories involved alien beings which had controlled Earth in the depths of time and then died out or been driven out by other aliens, leaving the way open for the development of man. The aliens were also reported to be sealed away in remote places, such as the depths of the ocean, and from time to time tried to "awaken." The best known of the stories was "The Call of Cthulhu" about just such an awakening.

"No, listen to me," the sergeant snapped, shaking his head. "I'm not saying it'sactually Cthulhu but do you know the reason why H.P. Lovecraft started writing those stories?"

"No," Weaver admitted. "But that doesn't mean I'm going to buy your logic. On the other hand, say your piece."

"Lovecraft was a minor student of astrophysical science," Crichton pointed out, earnestly. "He came to the conclusion that if man ever actuallydid meet aliens they were going to be so different that there would be no way that man could interact with them. And if they could cross the stars they would be so powerful and so advanced that they would consider us as no more than ants. Total indifference. The 'evil' aliens in the Lovecraft stories aren't evil; they're indifferent. But their indifference and power, not to mention weirdness, kills us. Just like we kill ants. I'm saying that whatever is in Boca Raton meets the Lovecraftian definition of an alien; a powerful alien being that is indifferent to the secondary effects it is causing. Andthose secondary effects are not a defense but a function of what it is."

"That's it?" Bill asked.

"Yeah," Crichton said, sighing. "Stupid, huh?"

"Only in presentation," Bill replied. "Look, you don't say that 'it's Cthulhu.' You say: 'I think it's a Cthulhoid form entity.' 'Itis Cthulhu' is both wrong-if you went up and asked it its name I sure hope it wouldn't answer 'Cthulhu'-and a good way to get dismissed as a crackpot."

"Yeah," Earp noted. "I had. But that explanation almost makes sense. Why's it driving people crazy, though?"

"Well, the answer to that is sort of out there," Crichton said. "But think for a second about a species that finds quantum mechanics logical. I remember my physics professor joking about that and Lovecraft.

There's a game about those stories calledCall of Cthulhu and any time you run into one of the monsters you have to roll a sanity check."

"Never played it," Weaver said. "But I get what you mean."

"Anyway, he was always joking that we had to roll SAN check when we got into discussions of quantum mechanics. Now, think about a species that actually finds it logical."

"Okay," the physicist said, wincing.

"Did you make your SAN roll?" Crichton said, grinning.

"Barely," Bill laughed. "I think I lost a couple of points, though."

"All right. Now think about such a species that is totally logical, like a Vulcan, maybe even higher form sentient, totally sentient that is, it doesn't haveany subconscious. Just pure thought and logic."

"Okay," Bill replied.

"Now think about it if it's a broadcasting telepathic."

"Oh, hell," Bill whispered. "Now I see what you mean. Not evil, just totally indifferent and bloody dangerous."

"Bingo," Crichton said. "A Cthulhoid entity. Its purpose is probably unknowable at our level."

"It might not even be a real entity," Robin suggested. "It might be something along the lines of a probe.

All the 'broadcast' might be secondary effects from whatever it's using for analysis of its surroundings."

"Robin," Bill said. "Write it up as a theory, post it to the Columbia research net with a suggestion that they try to get some sort of monitors in to see if we can pick up any specific traces of what it's generating.

I refuse to believe that anything is impossible to understand."

"Even quantum mechanics?" Crichton said, smiling.