<Okay, Laura, now it's my turn! Where have you been?> the computer asked.
Laura looked at her watch. She had doggedly questioned the computer for hours without interruption, and she felt she'd made good progress.
'Okay, let's see. After talking to you on the treadmill this morning, I went down to the Model Eight facility. Then I met Mr. Hoblenz on the coast, and he took me out into the jungle to see the place where…' She paused, not knowing quite how to put it.
<Where it happened,> the computer supplied, not waiting for her to hit Enter.
'Thank you. Yes, where it happened.'
<You shouldn't go there.>
'Don't worry. Hoblenz had plenty of men, and they were armed to the teeth.'
<I don't mean the jungle. I mean the Model Eight facilities.>
'Well, I had one of Hoblenz's men with me there, too, and he had a machine gun.'
<I rather doubt it was a machine gun. More likely it was a machine pistol — Heckler & Koch model MP-5. That's not enough.>
'Not enough for what?'
<To stop a Model Eight. It fires standard pistol ammunitions—9-mm parabellum. Even with Teflon-coated armor-piercing rounds it wouldn't penetrate the titanium-boron epoxy plating of a Model Eight's chest, which armors their mini-nets. It would take full-sized high-powered rifle rounds like the full-metal-jacket 7.62-mm from the G-3s that Hoblenz's men carry. I've told Mr. Gray that over and over, and Mr. Hoblenz, too.>
'Don't you think you're overreacting a little? The Model Eight facility seemed to be running okay to me.'
<Mr. Gray evacuated it right after you left.>
Laura was stunned.
'Why?'
<He said we're too short-handed. He evacuated the nuclear reactor and Dr. Krantz's labs, too.>
'How can he shut all that down? What about the electricity from the reactor and the whole Model Eight program?'
<Mr. Gray didn't shut anything down. He just reactivated the regular automation systems.>
Laura looked back up at the word 'regular.' 'Wait a minute. Do you mean that everything was automated before?'
<Yes, didn't you know? It doesn't take more than a few hundred people to keep the systems on the island running smoothly. Mr. Gray just manned all the stations again last week after the errors began to mount.>
Laura arched her eyebrows, again confused.
'Then what did the rest of the fifteen hundred employees do?'
<Train, mostly.>
'Do you mean that everyone spent eight hours a day, five days a week training to do a job just in case you malfunctioned?'
<No! We'd run simulations about once a month to keep people current in their old jobs. And of course management personnel like Georgi, Margaret, Dorothy, and the others all had jobs to do. But everyone else trained in courses of their choosing. Mr. Gray built large pools in the Village for a series of space simulations, which were by far the most popular courses.>
'So Gray gave people the option of what course they wanted to take, and everybody chose some kind of astronaut training?' Laura hit Enter with a growing sense of discovery — of finding another piece of the puzzle.
<Not everybody. The most popular courses like Microgravity Construction Techniques were booked solid, so some people got stuck with Art History, The Greek Tragedies, The Role of the Individual in Classic Fiction — courses like that.>
Laura smiled, shaking her head as she typed, 'And people never suspected what Gray was doing?'
<What do you mean?>
'You know what I mean! He's training an army of astronauts! And nobody ever guessed? So many geniuses on this island and they just rush like lemmings toward Gray's final frontier?'
<You understand that I'm not at liberty to comment on such things.>
'You just did,' Laura typed. 'By the way, I would've been a terrible subject for Mr. Gray. I would have taken all the wrong courses. But I'm curious. Why did Mr. Gray even offer the liberal arts curriculum? Why not just add more shop classes to his '[unclear]-tech' school for the outward-bound?'
ACCESS RESTRICTED.
'That was just a joke,' Laura mumbled. She sighed in frustration. Every time she made progress in putting the puzzle together, she was handed yet another unexplained piece.
Laura found Filatov in the control room outside. 'So,' she said as she walked up to him, 'Gray is training a whole army of people to be astronauts and nobody had any idea.' He looked up at her but said nothing. 'You've got three launch pads, space launches a couple of times a week lighting off down there like gigantic Roman candles, and it never occurred to anyone that he was planning on, you know…' She made flapping motions with her hands as though she were flying away.
Filatov looked around to confirm that they were alone. 'I don't know if you've noticed,' Filatov said in a lowered voice, 'but Mr. Gray is fairly good at keeping a secret. He may or may not be the most intelligent man in history, but I'm sure about one thing. He's as hung up on the whole concept of 'intellectual property' as anybody I've ever met. He doesn't like people talking about this stuff, and the only way to pry him open is to get him drunk.'
'He gets drunk?'
Filatov smiled. 'Not easily. He can hang in there with the best of 'em, and on this island that's me! But when he does get smashed, he'll go on and on about this idea of…' He shook his head. 'I don't even know what you'd call it. It was the whole point of his speech at the town meeting, last night — phase two and all that. It represents the… growth of the collective body of all knowledge. A different' — he was struggling with the words—'stage into which that body will evolve.'
'Finally a somewhat consistent answer!' Laura said. 'I had been told this phase two of his was about colonization of space, and about war, but Griffith gave me more or less the same description as you.'
'Well, I could see colonization and war fitting into it,' Filatov said. 'When you colonize some place, you take your knowledge with you. That represents growth. And colonization could certainly lead to war, although I got the impression the conflict Gray was alluding to was more…' He seemed at a loss for words.
'More what?'
'More apocalyptic!' Filatov replied.
When Laura passed Dorothy's office, she saw the girl was slumped over at her desk — oblivious to the glowing screens that surrounded her.
'You okay, Dorothy?' Laura asked.
Dorothy looked up at Laura, the corners of her small mouth drooping into what could have been a pout. She heaved a sigh, burying her hands between her thighs and sitting on them, further folding her shoulders into their slump.
'I don't know why I'm even wasting my time.'
Laura went up to her desk. 'What do you mean?'
'I mean…' Again she heaved a deep huff, this time glancing at the door. 'I can't stop it,' she said in a soft, reedy voice.
'Stop what?'
'The virus.' The way she spoke, the word conveyed a menace of great proportion. And the tone in her voice betrayed something more: intense stress.
'Dorothy, nobody's putting any special pressure on you to solve all the system's problems.'
'It's my job!' she shot back too quickly, and Laura realized she'd struck the girl's worries dead-center.
'But what's happening is beyond any one person's ability to solve.'
'I told him I could do it,' she said, her voice distant and her head sagging.
'You told Mr. Gray you could fix the computer all by yourself?'
'No-o-o. Way back, when he was considering me for this job. He came to a recital… a piano recital.' Her eyes were unfocused, her head tilted to one side. She was in a dreamy state, obviously in great need of rest. 'He
