“Pull back!” Dr. Sandler ordered. The communications net relayed the command from the microphone worked into the fabric of the collar of his white coat and broadcast it through the portal for a short distance, enough to be heard through the helmet sets of his security contingent.
They were already stumbling over one another in their terror-stricken eagerness to do just that, though. A second man waved his arms and legs wildly as he was drawn into the encroaching black whirlwind. Dr. Sandler made a mental note to mark the survivors as culls. They might, on review, be found still useful enough to serve as blunt instruments. But they would never be allowed to pass on their obviously defective genes. He would see to that.
“It’s fantastic!” Dr. Oates breathed, staring in wonder at the whirling black cloud. She ignored the black-armored figures stumbling into the staging area around them, even when one thoughtlessly jostled her. “Such power.”
The blackness spun straight up to the aperture. “Close portal,” Dr. Sandler commanded. Obediently, the techs in the central control room—the aperture device was so calibrated as to operate at several key locations within the sealed facility—broke the connection. The dark vortex winked out, leaving only a blank white bulkhead.
“But our wounded!” one sec man exclaimed.
Dr. Sandler took note of the number stenciled in gray on the man’s breastplate, then of those on the chests of the pair of operators who flanked him. “Numbers 10 and 51,” he rapped, “take 23 to Subbasement Zed-Two and dispose of him.”
The two grabbed Number 23’s arms. Number 10 yanked the sonic projector from his right gauntlet. He protested as they frog-marched him out the door.
“They were dead anyway,” Dr. Sandler said, turning back to the rest, “as any fool could see. And we don’t want fools among our ranks as brave soldiers of the Totality Concept, do we, men?”
They all braced and saluted, except the injured operator being supported by the two comrades who had dragged him through the portal. He dropped with a clatter to the nonskid flooring.
“No, sir, Dr. Sandler!” they sang out as one. Six of them were all that remained standing of the group of sixteen who had trotted out minutes before.
Considering, Dr. Sandler decided that no further punishment than revocation of breeding privileges was required. Although their disgraceful cowardice in allowing themselves to be routed completely was unpardonable weakness, they could not be blamed for being unable to stand up against the bizarre manifestation of the genetically altered girl’s power.
He doubted anything material could withstand it.
“We are lucky you ordered the aperture sealed when you did, Dr. Sandler,” Dr. Oates said.
“Luck had nothing to do with it, Dr. Oates. Merely cool judgment. Although had you been more observant, you might have noted that the manifestation did reach the portal and was unable to pass through. As I knew it would be.”
She dropped her gaze. “You are correct, Dr. Sandler. I failed to notice that. I was caught up in the moment, I admit.”
“Obviously. Why did you feel compelled to blurt out your surmise as to the girl’s origins in front of those primitive people, Dr. Oates?”
“I felt it to be the best way to appeal to a child of her age,” Dr. Oates said, looking him in the eye. “To offer her a chance to rejoin her real family, as it were, instead of continuing to wander with a gang of violent and obviously unfit strangers.”
“You felt,” Dr. Sandler said, his voice lambent with contempt. He did not add, How like a woman, because it seemed unnecessary; Dr. Oates was intelligent enough, in her way. She would perceive the core evolutionary truth as well as he.
“I did not believe it necessary to explain that we ourselves played no role in her conception or engineering, although it seemed clear to me that some branch of the Overproject must be responsible. She is, after all, herself no more than a specimen. But what a specimen! Dr. Sandler, we must secure her, secure that power for our own glorious dream!”
Deplore her emotionalism as he had to, and did, Dr. Sandler could not fault its direction.
“In that, at least, you are thinking like a scientist, Dr. Oates,” he said. “We must. And we shall.”
She looked at the remaining sec men. The wounded one had drawn himself to a position of sitting at attention among his fellows. He still seemed unable to stand on his own.
If he could not economically be returned to full service in a reasonable span of time, he would be recycled. Just as the weak-minded Operator Number 23 had been. But that was down to Major Applewhite, their director of security, to see to.
“Shall we order out a full platoon of operators, Dr. Sandler?” she asked. “If they act expeditiously, they can in all probability stun the girl before she can deploy her enhanced abilities against them.”
“We shall not, Dr. Oates. Have you forgotten your own initial reluctance to enter the target continuum to survey the effects of the manifestation? We have expended energy and caused spatiotemporal distortions far in excess of safe levels. To do any more at this time would be tantamount to manually triggering alarms within the Overproject—or among our rivals, such as Operation Chronos.”
He turned his face toward the sec men. “You are dismissed. See 17 to the infirmary.”
“Yes, sir, Dr. Sandler!” Two operators helped the crippled man to his feet, and they marched out the door.
“We have assets on the ground, Dr. Oates,” Dr. Sandler said. “It’s time to put them to use. Our prime subject must be made to see that now is an opportunity to offer some slight repayment for the aid we have provided him.”
“But communicating with Dr. Trager—” Dr. Oates began.
“Your concern does you credit, Dr. Oates,” he interrupted. He had regained his equilibrium. After all, he was not only a scientist; he was the senior scientist. In the present context, the patriarch, as it were. “Yet it is not entirely well-founded. As you know, our communications link to Dr. Trager draws such infinitesimal amounts of power and entails such a microscopic interpenetration that it remains intrinsically undetectable unless sensors are focused at its exact locus in space-time.”
He turned away. “Enough talk. Further action is required. And now is the proper time to apply it!”
* * *
KRYSTY’S EYELIDS FLUTTERED, then her brilliant green eyes looked up into Mildred’s as the doctor bent over her, where she lay stretched out across the wag’s bench-style front seats.
“I’m fit to fight, Mildred,” Krysty said, though the weakness of her voice belied her words. “Why are you upside down?”
Mildred reached down to briefly pat her friend’s cheek. “It’s a long story. I’m glad to have you back with us.”
Krysty started to sit up. Mildred helped her.
“Krysty,” Ryan said.
“Ryan,” Krysty breathed. “Sorry for worrying you.”
“I wasn’t worried,” the tall one-eyed man said, “once Doc and Ricky told me you were breathing. You’re a tough one to chill.”
“Why, thank you.” Mildred could hear the smile in her friend’s voice, even though her face was turned directly away. “I’m pretty sure that’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day!”
“Play your cards right, somebody might even top it,” Ryan said. His lips twitched in the ghost of a smile.
“Is she concussed?” J.B. asked. He had moved around the wag to stand at his best friend’s side.
Mildred shook her head. “Nope. No pupil dilation. Something knocked her out, but it wasn’t like getting a whack on the head.”
“Judging from the sounds they emitted, and the effects produced by near misses, I surmise those ovoid devices projected some manner of tightly focused sound beam. Possibly analogous to a laser.”
“They called those things ‘masers,’ I think, Doc,” Mildred said. “Like, ‘microwave amplification of stimulated emission of radiation.’ Or something like that.”
He cocked a brow. “Did they? Indeed. I should further surmise that such weapons might be tunable. At higher levels of output, they could damage metal and inflict potential lethal wounds on flesh and bone. At lower levels, they might be used to disrupt the target’s nervous system, stunning him. Or, well, her.”
“A sonic blaster! I read about them in old predark books that my uncle had,” Ricky said. “Cool.”
J.B. nodded. The others laughed at the boy’s enthusiasm.
“I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on one or two of them,” Ryan said. “But our girl swept them up clean, along with the wounded and the chills. Not that I’m complaining.”
Krysty stood up. She swayed. Ryan caught her in his arms.
“Krysty—” he began.
“Shut up and kiss me,” she said. He did.
Mildred walked around the nose of the wag. It looked as if somebody had taken a twelve-pound sledge to the bumper and grillwork.
Whatever those guns were, she thought, they pack a hell of a punch.
Disengaging, Ryan looked ahead to where Jak and Ricky were examining the road where the mirrorlike thing had appeared.
“Anything?”
Gently Krysty pushed away from Ryan. “Thanks. I can stand on my own now.”
“No,” Jak called.
“Didn’t leave any kind of mark we can see,” Ricky said. “I bet it didn’t touch the ground. But there’s nothing here but scuff marks, some blood and seven spent bullets that seem to have bounced off the gateway. Or whatever it was.”
“It would seem the portal, whatever its nature, was selectively permeable,” Doc said.
“I tried to push my whirlwind through it,” Mariah said. “It wouldn’t go in either.”
She frowned. “I’d probably have to go through myself to get it to...wherever they are.”
“But you’re not going to do that, are you?” Krysty asked.
“Oh, no.” Mariah’s black pigtails swung as she shook her head furiously.
Krysty knelt beside her so that she was looking up into the pale face.
“Thank you,” she told Mariah. “You saved us all.”
“When they shot you, Krysty, I almost lost it. I couldn’t let them do that to you!” She threw her arms around Krysty’s shoulders in a fervent hug and burst into tears.
Mildred felt her jaw set. She looked past the pair to where Ryan and J.B. stood.
Almost lost it, she mouthed. Ryan shrugged.
He said nothing. It wasn’t as if Mildred could think of anything for him to say. But the inevitable speculation of what might make the girl “lose it,” and just what exactly might happen next, hung over them like a cloud far darker and more ominous than the dense black cloud cover that had closed in overhead.
A droplet hit her cheek.
“Best we break this up and head out of here,” Ryan called, as thunder rolled in from the southwest. “It looks as if the cloud’s fixing to open up on us big time. We’ve got a roof to put over our heads, for once. Let’s not waste it.”