26
Laura's car pulled slowly into a tunnel burrowed into the side of the mountain. The black stone seemed to absorb the white light cast by lamps that ran along the domed ceiling. The road led toward a heavy steel door, which opened to reveal an identical door just beyond.
The car stopped in between the two. A heavy clank preceded a low rumble as the door behind Laura began to close. Her stomach churned.
She was inside the mountain. The Model Eights were in there too.
The moment the first door clanged shut, its clone just ahead cracked open. The car began to inch toward a well-lit intersection, picking up speed as it passed the heavy blast door. It turned down a tunnel to the right. The car — and the Other — knew the way.
The ride was short. The car entered a huge, high-ceilinged cavern located deep inside the mountain. It passed rows of windowless structures that dotted the concrete floor. The black walls bore ugly reminders of the brute force used to gouge the chamber from the earth.
Laura's car stopped in front of a prefabricated metal building indistinguishable from a dozen others she'd passed. The door beside her opened with a hiss.
She got out. There were no echoes to be heard across the great open space. The silence was so complete she could almost feel the oppressive weight of the rock around her. She headed for the door of the nondescript gray building, eyeing the shiny tubes that rose from its roof like a great cathedral's organ. They were bracketed firmly into rough cuts in the wall, and Laura had no idea what purpose they served.
She opened the door and was relieved to find several people inside.
They looked up in surprise to examine the new arrival. Laura introduced herself and asked to see Dr. Krantz.
A woman in a white lab coat headed into the buildings interior. Laura stood by the front door, shifting from one foot to the other and looking around. There was no receptionist, no waiting area, no chairs in which Laura could rest. Just three bespectacled nerds, who glanced awkwardly her way from their paperwork.
'Come with me, Dr. Aldridge,' the woman said from the hallway upon her return.
Laura followed her off through a warren of narrow corridors. At irregularly spaced intervals, closed doors with shiny doorknobs lined the walls. 'You don't have automatic doors down here?' Laura asked. The woman shook her head without turning, which ended Laura's attempt at conversation.
They passed a door that was decidedly different from the others. It was made of heavy metal, rounded, and bolted into its raised frame like a hatch on a ship. A yellow-and-black radiation symbol was prominently displayed just below a small porthole.
Laura followed her mute guide around the corner. The woman opened a door, allowed Laura to pass, and then disappeared. Krantz sat alone at the front of a room that reminded Laura of a surgeon's amphitheater.
Angled glass dominated the far wall, and beyond the windows was a dimly lit chamber several stories in height. Between the door and Krantz were rows of consoles, their instruments darkened and their padded swivel chairs empty.
The physicist was hunched over a notepad, oblivious to Laura's presence. A few strands of hair — each at least ten inches long — swept across his otherwise bare and pasty scalp. Like Laura's escort, Krantz wore a white lab coat, and he propped a single foot in a chair.
'O-o-one second,' he said without looking up. His pencil worked its way down the small pad, which he held high in front of his eyeglasses.
He was lost in the abstract world of his discipline, and he noticed nothing about the real world around him.
Laura took the opportunity to look the place over. The room itself revealed nothing about its purpose. At several places along the control panel beneath the large window there protruded the glove-like apparatuses that operated robotic arms. They were all in the old style, not the new virtual-reality gear. In the semidarkness of the room behind the thick glass, a slaved robotic claw hung suspended in air.
Laura wandered down the broad steps toward the windows. At the bottom of the room below, Laura saw, there was a cluster of black rods suspended in a blue pool. The clear liquid was still and totally translucent. Bright underwater lights were the room's only illumination.
'There!' Krantz said, making his final mark on the pad with a flourish. He looked up, beaming at Laura hospitably. With the difficulty either of age or of cramped muscles, he struggled slowly to his feet with a groan. 'How do you do, Dr. Aldridge,' he said, and Laura shook his hand. 'You caught me in here getting some quiet time.'
One strand of Krantz's greasy hair hung loose, dangling all the way down to his shoulder. His eyes behind the thick lenses were the size of lemons.
'We only met once,' Laura said, 'I'm surprised you remembered me.'
His smile revealed a mouth full of crooked teeth. Krantz held up his little finger, whose last joint looked slightly bent. 'How could I forget? Tackling you ended my flag football career.' He shrugged — staring at the misshapen digit. 'So, what can I do for my esteemed colleague and erstwhile athletic competitor?'
'Actually, I don't know. Mr. Gray suggested I come down here to see what you were up to.'
'Oh. Well, right now I'm working on yields.' Krantz raised his notepad — drumming on it with his pencil's eraser like a conductor demanding the attention of his orchestra. 'Most of the recent research, on the applied side anyway, has been on enhancement or reduction of effects. It's been years since anyone concerned themselves much with the fundamentals of yields.'
'I'm sorry, Professor Krantz, but I have no idea what you're talking about.'
He looked momentarily surprised. 'Oh!' he burst out, then turned to the instrument panel beneath the darkened glass. Krantz flicked a switch. Bright white light flooded the room below. 'This is the latest batch,' he said.
She peered down at the room below the window. A dozen metal containers sat on the [unclear] beside the pool. Laura had seen the containers before… on the dark world she'd visited in virtual reality.
'What are those things?' Laura asked. She looked at Krantz's eyes but saw only the light reflected in the lenses of his glasses.
He had a faint smile on his face. 'They're re-e-ally low-yield nuclear devices.' Laura eyes shot back down to the canisters.
'What?' she shouted. Krantz was startled, looking over at her as if he'd just said something terribly wrong. 'What did you say?' she demanded.
'Oh, my,' he mumbled in a tone of great concern, pulling his notepad back to his chest to hide his scribbling. 'You said Mr. Gray sent you?' he asked.
'Dr. Krantz, are you telling me that you're building nuclear weapons in this lab?'
'Good God, no. They're devices, not weapons.'
'They blow up, don't they?'
'Well, yes, but they're not deliverable. They can't be employed in any tactical or strategic system.'
'Gray has rockets that can go into space,' Laura shot back. 'How much effort do you think it would take to put a few things on a rocket? Or two, or ten, or twenty?'
'But they're so small! Those devices down there are rated at only point two kilotons. It's hardly of military value!'
'But you'll see to that, won't you Dr. Krantz? With your research and Gray's money you'll have multi-megaton weapons just like the big boys.'
Laura rose and headed for the door. 'I can't believe I've been so stupid!'
'Wait! You've got it all wrong! Mr. Gray wants me to lower the yields, not raise them!'
When Laura turned, Krantz held up his notes as if the scribblings were formal proof.
'But…' — her mind reeled—'but why on earth does Gray need those things?'
'Industrial purposes,' Krantz said, clearly resurrecting some long-ago satisfactory explanation. 'Mining — things like that!'
Laura was crushed by the weight of her disillusionment. She knew now what she had to do. Gray had made
