Timeline - Crichton Michael - Страница 97

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Guy was working his way around the cross-beam bracing. He was only seconds away from her now. She crouched on the beam, took a breath, tensed her muscles - and kicked hard with her legs, sending her body flying out into open space.

Chris came up through the stone trapdoor. He looked through the fire and saw that everybody in the room was staring up at the ceiling. He knew Kate was up there, but there was nothing he could do for her. He went directly to the side door and tried to open it. When it didn't budge, he slammed his full weight against it, felt it give an inch. He shoved again; the door creaked, then swung wide.

He stepped out into the inner courtyard of La Roque. Soldiers were running everywhere. A fire had broken out in one of the hoardings, the wooden galleries that ran along the top of the walls. Something was burning like a bonfire in the center of the courtyard itself. Amid the chaos, no one paid any attention to him.

He said, "Andre. Are you there?"

A static crackle. Nothing.

And then: "Yes." It was Andre's voice.

"Andre? Where are you?"

"With the Professor."

"Where?" Chris said.

"The arsenal."

"Where is that?"

There were two dozen animals in cages in the laboratory storeroom, mostly cats, but also some guinea pigs and mice. The room smelled of fur and feces. Gordon led him down the aisle, saying, "We keep the split ones isolated from the others. We have to."

Stern saw three cages along the back wall. The bars of these cages were thick. Gordon led him to one, where he saw a small, curled-up bundle of fur. It was a sleeping cat, a Persian, pale gray in color.

"This is Wellsey," Gordon said, nodding.

The cat seemed entirely normal. It breathed slowly, gently, as it slept. He could see half the face above the curve of the fur. The paws were dark. Stern leaned closer, but Gordon put his hand on his chest. "Not too close," he said.

Gordon reached for a stick, ran it along the bars of the cage.

The cat's eye opened. Not slowly and lazily - it opened wide, instantly alert. The cat did not move, did not stretch. Only the eye moved.

Gordon ran the stick along the bars a second time.

With a furious hiss, the cat flung itself against the bars, mouth wide, teeth bared. It banged against the bars, stepped back, and attacked again - and again, relentlessly, without pause, hissing, snarling.

Stern stared in horror.

The animal's face was hideously distorted. One side appeared normal, but the other side was distinctly lower, the eye, the nostril, everything lower, with a line down the center of the face, dividing the halves. That's why they called it "split," he thought.

But worse was the far side of the face, which he didn't see at first, with the cat lunging and banging against the bars, but now he could see that back on the side of the head, behind the distorted ear, there was a third eye, smaller and only partially formed. And beneath that eye was a patch of nose flesh, and then a protruding bit of jaw that stuck out like a tumor from the side of the face. A curve of white teeth poked out from the fur, though there was no mouth.

Transcription errors. He now understood what that meant.

The cat banged again and again; its face was starting to bleed with the repeated impacts. Gordon said, "He'll do that until we leave."

"Then we better leave," Stern said.

They walked back in silence for a while. Then Gordon said, "It's not just what you can see. There are mental changes, too. That was the first noticeable change, in the person who was split."

"This is the person you were telling me about? The one who stayed back?"

"Yes," Gordon said. "Deckard. Rob Deckard. He was one of our marines. Long before we saw physical changes in his body, there were mental changes. But we only understood later that transcription errors were the cause."

"What kind of mental changes?"

"Originally, Rob was a cheerful guy, very good athlete, extremely gifted with languages. He would sit around having a beer with somebody foreign, and by the end of the beer he'd have started to pick up the language. You know, a phrase here, a sentence there. He'd just start speaking. Always with a perfect accent. After a few weeks, he could speak like a native. The marines spotted it first, and had sent him to one of their language schools. But as time went by, and Rob accumulated more damage, he wasn't so cheerful anymore. He turned mean," Gordon said. "Really mean."

"Yes?"

"He beat the hell out of the gate guard here, because the guard took too long checking his ID. And he practically killed a guy in an Albuquerque bar. That was when we started to realize that Deckard had permanent damage to his brain, and it wasn't going to get better, that if anything, it would get worse."

Back in the control room, they found Kramer hunched over the monitor, staring at the screen, which showed the field fluctuations. They were coming more strongly now. And the technicians were saying that at least three were coming back, and maybe four or five. From her expression, it was clear Kramer was torn; she wanted to see them all come back.

"I still think the computer is wrong, and the panels will hold," Gordon said. "We certainly can fill the tanks now and see if they hold."

Kramer nodded. "Yes, we can do that. But even if they fill without breaking, we can't be certain they won't blow out later, in the middle of the transit. And that would be a disaster."

Stern shifted in his seat. He felt suddenly uneasy. Something was nagging at him, tickling the back of his mind. When Kramer said "blow out," he once more saw automobiles in his mind - the same succession of images, all over again. Car races. Huge truck tires. Michelin Man. A big nail in the road, and a tire driving over it.

Blowout.

The water tanks would blow out. The tires would blow out. What was it about blowouts?

"To pull this off," Kramer said, "we somehow need to strengthen the tanks."

"Yes, but we've been over that," Gordon said. "There's just no way to do it."

Stern sighed. "How much time left?"

The technician said, "Fifty-one minutes, and counting."

To Kate's astonishment, she heard applause from the floor below. She had made the jump; she swung back and forth, dangling beneath the beam. And down on the floor, they were applauding, as if this were a circus act.

She quickly kicked her legs up and clambered onto the beam.

On the rafter behind her, Guy Malegant was hurrying back to the centerline beam. He clearly intended to try to block her return from her present rafter.

She ran down the beam, back to the center of the ceiling. She was more agile than Guy, and she arrived at the wide central rafter well before he did. She had a moment to collect herself, to decide what to do What was she going to do?

She was standing in the middle of the open roof, holding on to a thick vertical strut, about twice the diameter of a telephone pole. The strut had supporting braces that angled out diagonally on both sides, starting midway up the shaft and then connecting to the roof. These braces were so low that if Sir Guy intended to get to her, he would have to crouch down as he made his way around the strut.

Kate crouched down now, seeing what it felt like to move around under the brace. It was awkward, and it would be slow. She got to her feet again. As she did so, her hand brushed her dagger. She'd forgotten she had it. She drew it out now, held it in front of her.

Guy saw her, and laughed. His laughter was picked up by the watching crowd on the floor below. Guy shouted something down to them, which made them laugh all the harder.

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