'No,' Gray snapped, then quickly calmed himself. 'No, Laura.'
'But what else could it have been? I mean, did it break the poor man's arms or legs? Did he bleed to death?'
Gray took a deep breath before answering. 'He was decapitated.'
She stared at him in stunned silence. 'Oh, my God, Joseph. How can you say it wasn't a robot?'
'I didn't say it wasn't a robot!' he snarled, and Laura fell silent. Gray swallowed hard. 'Hoblenz found the body with infrared from a helicopter. His men then went all over the area with thermal imagers but didn't find any tracks at all. It takes about twelve hours for a footprint to cool, so we should have seen the guy's tracks. Hoblenz finally set up these bright arc lights like night construction crews use, and we saw them. All over the jungle.'
'But I thought you said… you said you didn't see any other footprints?'
When he answered, he spoke slowly. 'We didn't find any warm footprints.' Laura felt shock at the realization of what he was saying.
'They were Model Eights. A lot of them. They'd been all over the jungle.' He blinked once, then jammed his eyes closed for a moment before opening them wide.
'Joseph, you need to get some sleep.'
He drew a deep breath. 'There's too much to do.' His words were slurred. 'Was there something you wanted?'
Laura looked away — toward the stairs down to the exercise room that lay just behind the circular staircase. 'I've got unlimited access to the facilities, right? That was our deal.' Gray nodded. 'Then I want to take the elevator down to the Model Eights' area. I want to go down into the mountain.'
Laura was surprised and slightly unnerved at how easily Gray consented to her request. All he did was make her wait for Hoblenz to send a security guard.
When the young Frenchman arrived, he carried a squat black machine pistol strapped over his shoulder. They headed down to the lower level of Gray's house, and the soldier stared into a retinal identifier next to the elevator. The high-pitched whine of a motor rose quickly behind the wall of the shaft.
'They said it takes a minute or two,' the man said with a thick French accent. He wore boots and camouflage fatigues and carried a ubiquitous pack like soldiers of any army. Bulging veins and hard muscles ran cord-like up his neck to a skull covered in short, bristly hair and a camouflage baseball cap. His face was tanned dark bronze from a life spent in the sun. The young man caught her studying him, and Laura turned and looked away.
The elevator took quite a while to arrive. Even the ding that announced its approach seemed premature as they waited almost a full minute for the doors to open. When they did, they revealed an elevator unlike any she'd ever seen before. The entire appearance of the car was like that of a space capsule, with shiny red plastic walls and four padded and slightly reclined seats with wide black waist and shoulder restraints.
'What's the deal with this thing?' Laura asked, trying not to let the ever-worsening case of the jitters into her voice.
'It's about fifteen hundred meters down. Runs on magnetic rails.'
The soldier helped Laura get situated first. When he finally fastened his harness, the door slid closed on an audible puff of air.
'Ten seconds to descent,' a woman's voice like that of the treadmill announced.
'Remember to clear your ears,' Laura's escort advised her, further increasing the pace of her already racing pulse.
'Five,' the elevator voice announced, 'four, three, two, one.'
Laura's seat fell away beneath her in the absolute quiet of the capsule. She was jammed hard up against the seat's padded straps, and her stomach felt as though it had leapt into her throat. A faint whining sound rose in volume as the forces of downward acceleration grew.
Laura's ears popped, and popped, and then popped again until the world was totally soundless. She looked over at the soldier, whose mouth was open and whose throat was working to clear his ears.
But as soon as Laura would swallow to clear her own ears, they got hopelessly plugged again by the rapidly rising air pressure of the thicker atmosphere into which they plummeted. Her heart fluttered so much from the carnival ride that she felt short of breath and began to pant. Still, the elevator picked up speed, going faster and faster — straight down the shaft. When she reached to brush the hair from her face, her hand seemed to float upward with the acceleration.
The elevator suddenly began a sickening deceleration. Laura almost retched as her stomach fell from her throat to her knees, reversing 180 degrees the stresses to which her body was being subjected. She moaned — her eyes closed — as she concentrated on trying not to get sick.
Her skin grew prickly and flushed, and she felt a fine perspiration break out on her forehead and neck.
She didn't even realize it when the ordeal came to an end. Her pressure-plugged eardrums admitted almost no sound at all, but when she opened her eyes she saw the soldier undoing his straps.
The elevator doors right in front of her opened without warning. She saw a large room that had been carved out of roughhewn stone walls just as Krantz's nuclear labs had been. But the space was not nearly as expansive, and instead of buildings, it was filled with cafeteria tables.
The soldier helped Laura to her feet. She felt unsteady, groping her way through the doors and bracing herself along the rock wall just outside.
'Well, that was a lot of fun,' she mumbled — the words sounding strange through the cotton in her ears. The man smiled without looking her way, his squinted eyes darting all about the cavern — alert.
He eased her into one of the four chairs obviously meant for the recuperation of the elevators riders. Yet another of Gray's timesavers, Laura thought, just like the ferocious dusters and the Model Threes that race around the island at ninety miles per hour.
The soldier slipped the gun off his shoulder, grasping the pistol grip with his finger curled around the trigger. The gun remained pointed straight down at the floor, but its owner appeared ready to use it in an instant. He stepped slowly out into the room, his eyes searching for a target but finding nothing save the plastic chairs and long tables of an empty cafeteria.
'Al-lo?' he shouted. The gun strap slapped against his thigh as he re-gripped the weapon more firmly. Laura rose to her feet to follow, and her chair scraped noisily along the floor.
The soldier spun toward her, raising the gun but quickly turning back to the empty room. He wasn't just ill at ease; he was coiled and ready for danger. Laura wondered what kind of briefing he'd gotten from Hoblenz or what rumors were going around among the troops.
She wound her way among the tables. There was no sign of any disturbance. The trays were all piled neatly in their racks by the cafeteria line. There was no trash on the tables — no overturned cups, no chairs lying on their backs, no sign of any hasty flight.
Laura took up a position just behind the soldier. Her ears were now clear, but the cavern was deathly silent. There were several passageways out of the cafeteria — each dark, each menacing. All, she noticed, were much taller than the tallest human.
'Whoo!' the soldier shouted into a cupped hand. There was no echo, but the booming sound of his shout in the enclosed space served to remind Laura where she was. Just how deep underground she was, and how thick the black stone walls around her were.
'Down here!' came a distant call. The soldier turned to Laura and flicked his head toward the corridor from which they'd heard a reply.
They passed vending machines. Then came a large white board on which were posted a hodgepodge of messages, notices about [unclear], and new manual updates. Laura stopped in front of one notice. It was bordered by a red box and handwritten in crisp, feminine penmanship, 'Does anyone have a kite? 1.3.04 wants one. Kate M.'
'Don't fall behind,' the soldier snapped, and Laura hurried down the corridor to catch up.
Their footsteps on the flat concrete floor were soundless. The hallway was featureless save the several doors they passed that had been cut into the rough stone walls. Most were normal human-head-height and labeled with words like 'Authorized Personnel Only' or 'Danger! High Voltage.' Some, however, were larger. Like garage doors, they were composed of folding panels. On the push of some unseen button, they would rise into the walls above and reveal…
The sounds of life drifted faintly down the corridor from up ahead. They were the normal voices of people at
