"strings" which are just as mysterious. Black holes and strings are just names for real physical laws that sometimes behave in unusual ways."

"Are they like real strings?" asked Debbie

"Yes, they do look a bit like real strings, but they are very different, because they are very very long, and they seem to behave like "black holes" only more stretched out. Now, I know this may be too hard for you to understand, but this is what happened to me a few years ago."

The Professor sat down in his armchair, and began his story.

"I and another colleague used to work for the Astrophysics Laboratories in America. We were doing a study of "strings" when we came across a strange object in Space that was like a very short string. It was quite close to Earth, so we gathered a lot of useful information about it.

"This "string" was very short as I said, only a millimeter or so, and it was only detectable by the way it warped the space around it as it moved. It was, so to speak, a sort of time-machine, only it had no direction to travel in, and just moved through the fabric of space like a cloud of smoke may drift across a chunk of countryside.

"My colleague and I wanted to keep track of this thing for as long as possible. We knew it could slip at any moment, into the past or the future. If it did that, we would be left behind, and would not be able to detect it any more, so what did we do? We decided to try to make a copy of the "string". Yes, it sounds mad to say it, but we actually tried to produce something powerful enough to suck this whole Earth into a dot as small as a pin-prick!

"And the amazing things was, we did it, only it wasn't very stable.

"I tried to stop the experiment, but my colleague, Dr Smith, was determined, so I decided to work with him in my own area of specialty, and constructed a devise which could control the direction and power of the "string", thereby hoping to lock the whole project away in the Laboratory vault. A wild animal needs to be caged I feel. Our tools were not powerful enough to contain the thing, should it start to move, and it could have become a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands, so containment was the best option.

"But my colleague was interested in making himself rich, so one night, when I was away, he stole the device and disappeared. I am the only one who can disarm and