Crater Lake

Chapter Fifteen

Krysty Wroth pulled a face, spit the first mouthful of food back on the cream plastic plate and dropped the cream plastic spoon alongside it.

"By Gaia!" She shook her head in disgust. "That's the worst food I've ever tasted. Grade alpha mutie dreck. It's..." Words failed her, and she sat in silence, looking at the small pile of light brown goo that rested smugly in the center of the plate.

"It even lookslike shit," J.B. said, pushing his plate away from him.

Jak Lauren, on the other hand, savored the food. "Had worse. Ate a cottonmouth once. Been dead weeks. Melted in mouth. Like jelly. Bits like rice." He paused as everyone waited for the explanation of the bits that seemed like rice. "Maggots," he explained as he grinned and took another spoonful of the soft mix on his plate.

Doc Tanner cautiously dipped the end of his spoon into the substance. Raising it to his lips, his tongue flicking like a sun-warmed lizard's, he said, "I swear that it puts me in mind of...of what? Ah, I believe I have it." He sucked in his lined cheeks like a wine taster. "Yes, the pap they used to serve on airliners. Bland, and yet with an awful, lingering aftertaste. Loaded with vitamins and preservatives."

"I likethe flavor of some addies," Finnegan said, taking another large mouthful. "There's some in this fucking stuff I've never tried."

Doc Tanner laid down his spoon. "Anyone who has two bites of this must be a glutton, my dear Finnegan. When they first began to mix chems in with good food to try to maintain it longer, they found one odd side effect."

"What was that, Doc?" Ryan, who still hadn't tried the food, asked.

"Didn't just keep food longer. It also made human corpses last longer without decomposing. Morticians were the great beneficiaries of it."

"Horrid," Lori said, following Krysty's example and spitting her mouthful back on the plate.

"How 'bout you, Ryan?" J.B. asked.

Ryan sniffed at the food, trying to decide what might be in it. One thing was certain: there was nothing in the mixture that had ever lived, nothing that was either animal or vegetable. But there was a whole lot that was mineral in it. In some places in the Deathlands, the main source of food was chemicals, processed, colored and flavored to make them smell like normal food.

He spooned up a little, transferring it to his mouth and rolling it around his palate. The others were right. It was dreadful — a horrid mingling of dull and sharp flavors overlaid with a bitter aftertaste.

"I guess the folks that run this ville must eat this as well," Ryan said finally. "They seem to do fine on it. Guess we ought to try and finish it up."

Finnegan was the only one who seemed to actually relish the pallid sludge as he wiped his plate, and slurped from the plastic beaker of water.

"Hey! Least the drink's fucking good. Clean and fresh as Sierra meltwater."

"Probably what it is," Ryan commented.

Then the loudspeaker clicked on. "Now that nourishment has taken place, you will be taken to induction. Do not attempt to move within the complex here without orders. Security operatives are waiting outside the door to escort you. Go now."

Finnegan eased himself sideways on the bench and let out a rasping fart, making Jak giggle in a high-pitched voice. "My fucking guts aren't used to such rich food," the blaster said, grinning.

When they got outside the room, they found eighteen black-uniformed sec guards, each one holding a gun at the hip. The helmets were still in place, the visors locked down over their eyes. Ryan began to wonder whether these muties actually had normal eyes, or whether they'd been surgically replaced with comp-vid scanners. He'd once heard of it being done with guard dogs. And if it could be done with hounds, then why not with muties?

"Induction with complex leader is now. All follow. Talk is allowed here."

It was either the same sec man with the scarlet flash on the helmet, or another man, absolutely identical. Ryan studied them, watching their peculiar halting gait. Six walked at the front in three columns of two, with six more at the rear. The other six kept pace with the prisoners, three on each side.

Ryan came up beside Doc Tanner, gesturing for Lori to walk with Krysty. It was strange that they had been in the huge building for well over an hour and still hadn't seen an actual person.

"You sure this isn't a redoubt, like some of the others, Doc?"

"Still functioning? After nearly a hundred years, Ryan? You've visited a mess of these places, have you not? Ever seen any that showed life?"

"Sure. One up in the Rockies had a nest of stickies in it. But I know what you're getting at. So who runs this?"

"Some big-wheel baron. To hold this together for a century means a kind of power I didn't believe could have existed."

"There was an immortal comic hero called Superman, wasn't there?"

"Clark Kent — lived in Gotham City. Or was it Metropolis? I remember him. A fighter for justice." The old man grinned. "You think that Superman still lives and runs this place? We shall soon see, Ryan. For, unless I miss my guess, I believe I can make out a sign on yonder door that reads Induction, does it not?"

"It does, Doc. It does."

"Sit down, one to each desk, and wait. The complex leader will be here soon. Stand in the presence of the complex leader."

All the guards had waited outside, stopping and standing quite still, like children's toys discarded suddenly in midgame. The room they were in was stepped like a theater. It contained at least a hundred desks, each with a pen and a notepad. Ryan and his six companions took the entire front row.

"Stand now for the leader," boomed the speaker, which was situated above a pale green light screen.

"Here comes Superman," Doc Tanner whispered.

The speaker coughed and whistled. Lights dimmed, then flickered and flared brighter. Music came from the corners of the large room, hesitantly at first, then swelling to a rather tremulous mezzo-soprano.

"Oh, say, can you see, by the... by the... by the... by the... by the..."

It was switched off.

A door began to slowly open, and Ryan signaled to the others to stand, pushing back his chair, the legs scraping along the floor.

"The leader of the Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement!"

"Holy fuck!" Finnegan breathed, two places along from Ryan.

The leader was barely four feet tall. A pudgy, dumpy little woman, she had pink jowls of fat, like the dewlaps on a bloodhound, dangling on her shoulders. She was wearing a fawn-colored lab coat buttoned up to her throat. Immensely thick spectacles turned her tiny eyes into great goggling orbs of blue and white. Her hair was so thin that her scalp gleamed through the screwed-back mousy locks. She had an enormous bosom, which was out of proportion with the rest of her body, and forced her to lean back as she strutted in on stumpy legs like miniature tree trunks. One arm, the left, hung withered at her side, while the other fiddled with a hearing aid pinned to her lapel. She stopped at the desk at the front of the room and heaved herself slowly onto a box so that she could see the seven strangers who were staring openmouthed at her.

"Assume the seated mode," she said. Though she looked to be about fifty years old, her voice had the soft lisp of an eight-year-old girl.

Ryan sat down, followed by the others. He leaned forward and stared intently through his one good eye at the woman. If she ran a place of this size, then her appearance had to be deceptive.

"My name is Doctor Ethel Tardy," she said. "I function as leader of this complex. You are our first guests for a considerable temporal period. Why did you come here, journey wise?"

"We picked up a message on a trans," Ryan replied. "We're a group of friends, traveling this way. We were visiting Ginnsburg Falls."

"We monitor all communications. You closed the life window of their leader."

Ryan was shaken that they knew about the killing. He nodded. "Yes. It was..."

Dr. Ethel Tardy held up her right hand. "It means nothing, concernwise. Since your arrival in the complex you have all been measured and checked in all ways. All are healthy, though one has an incipient carcinoma, which may result in closure some years future."

Doc Tanner raised a hand. "May I ask a question, Doctor?"

"Indeed, Dr. Tanner, you may."

Ryan could feel ground slipping away beneath his feet. What in the long chill was going on here? How could they know all this? Names, illnesses?

"This has nothing to do with Project Cerberus, does it?"

The answer was some time coming. "Not precisely, Dr. Tanner. Project Cerberus was limited on a need-to-know Grades Delta and up only. We are the descendants of the initiators of Project Eurydice, the project from which there shall never be a looking-back situation."

Doc Tanner sat down again, eyes flicking toward Ryan, who thought that he'd never seen the old man look so worried.

"Interruptionwise, we are in a negative situation. I shall relate all you need to know before aligning you with us."

It was another of the "when, not if" situations, the kind that made Ryan feel uneasy.

For the next hour Dr. Ethel Tardy, in her silly little girl's voice, squeaked and lisped her way through a concise account of the utterly extraordinary history of Project Eurydice, a tale so incredible that the seven friends sat in amazed silence.

Afterward, Ryan tried to recall everything that she'd told them but found he could remember only the bare bones of the story.

During the mid 1990s, when war fever took over the land, a great number of secret missions were set up in what was then the United States. Protest was useless, and even national parks were taken over and used. Though Crater Lake was one of the most beautiful places on the continent, experts pronounced it suitable for deep excavation beneath the cone of Wizard Island near the center of the deep lake. A huge and intricate complex was set up there and staffed by some of the top military scientists. According to the doctor, by the end of the century the only scientists who received any funding were those involved in pure military research.

Bigger weapons.

Better weapons.

Then came 2001, and civilization, as it had been known, disappeared forever. The population wasn't just decimated. It was decimated again and again until only a tiny fraction survived. Among those survivors were the scientists who ran the Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement.

"In the summer of that year, rosterwise," the doctor told them, "there were seventeen hundred personnel here. Security was not a predicated condition."

To the astonishment of Ryan and his friends, the diminutive woman described what followed the nuclear Armageddon that blasted the world. Sealed in concrete and steel, the scientists were spared. Their air was filtered, the food self-produced from limitless supplies of time-safe chemicals. They were totally self-sufficient.

And all they needed to do was proceed with their work. With their research.

"Which we did, ladies and gentlemen. We received no instructions to alter our program schedulewise."

Doc Tanner again raised a hand. "But you are aware that the society that originally funded and ordered your project is long gone? Dust these hundred years?"

"Of course, Doctor. We are not fools here. But we have been reared here. We are born here. Genetically we breed and we die. But always the generations carry on."

"What of fresh blood?" Ryan asked her.

She smiled a gentle, dimpled smile at his question. "What need is there?"

"You breed within the complex and never go out?" Krysty asked.

"Of course. Negative dispersal, socialwise. Nobody ever leaves the complex, except in death."

"How many are there of you scientists now?" Doc Tanner asked, casting a meaningful look across the room at Ryan.

"Sixty-one approved personnel."

"Sixty-one," Jak squeaked. "Then... you said seventeen hundred?"

"Affirmative, young white head. There werethat many. Now we are sixty-one working operatives, sciencewise."

Doc mouthed something at Ryan, but it took the one-eyed man three attempts to understand it. The old man was trying to pass him the word "inbreeding." That had to be it! Ryan had seen enough closed communities to know what happened when the genes never got a chance to get rejuvenated by new, outside blood — there were mutations and still births.

And the ville eventually died away.

From seventeen hundred of what must have been the top scientific brains in the land down to sixty-one of... of people like Dr. Ethel Tardy.

Suddenly, like a thunderbolt, a question came to Ryan's lips. But he quickly suppressed it. The woman knew the name of Doc Tanner. But evidently she didn't know the names of the rest of them. How did she know the Doc?

She went on, in her sweet little girl way, telling them how the original sec guards had died away when some had tried to go outside. Rads had gotten them. And she told them how the scientists had needed menial servants. "Slaves," Krysty whispered.

They had taken some retard muties and given them voice box activators that were controlled from within the complex. They had also made some implants in the cortex to render the creatures totally obedient to the will of the scientists.

"Fucking slaves," Finnegan hissed.

"How many?" J.B. asked, leaning back in his seat, the brim of his fedora tugged low over his face, making it hard to see his eyes.

"Query sec total? Forty. That balance is now maintained, by culling."

The story was becoming more and more incredible. The picture of this sealed palace, with its generations of super-brains locked away from the horrors of the world outside for a century, breeding and interbreeding, with slaves to work for them, chilled the blood of Ryan and his compatriots.

Ryan's immediate guess was that in another twenty years or so the place would wither and die out altogether.

The doctor was remarkably open and frank with the strangers, something else that planted another seed of worry in Ryan's mind. A place like this would contain enough to keep someone like the Trader in business for life. Any bandit would give his right arm for such a prize. And here was Dr. Tardy telling them all of the secrets and details of how the complex operated. Would she do this if there was any risk of their ever getting out? Locked away, thousands of feet below the surface of Crater Lake, the chances of escape weren't very good, Ryan knew.

"There. That's all I can tell you about us," the doctor finally said. Now that she was finished her talk, the tiny woman seemed more at ease, having dropped some of the parroted jargon that had dotted her speech earlier. "Later we'll get to know more about you all, factwise, apart from Dr. Tanner, of course."

She ventured a nervous, trilling laugh that made her cheeks wobble, then climbed down off her box, just as the door started to ease open. Before she could leave, Doc Tanner held up his clawlike hand yet again.

"Yes?" the fat little doctor asked, a smile pasted solidly in place.

"I have another query, Dr. Tardy."

"Indeed?"

"Throughout your most interesting dissertation, you spoke much of the past, even a little of the present, but nothing of the future. Why is that?"

"The future is a chalice held in all our hands, Doctor."

"And what does that cup contain?"

"It contains hope."

"And?"

"Hope of an end to suffering."

Doc pressed her. "Through peace? Through an end to disease?"

"No. Not that way. That is not the path on which we must tread."

"What frightful fiend doth tread behind you?" he asked, voice low, almost as if he were speaking to himself.

"I don't read. We are not interfacing, communicationswise, Dr. Tanner. Let us terminate on that."

She bustled out, cheeks flushed, eyes averted from her audience. It was screamingly obvious that, quite deliberately, Doc had touched her on the rawest of raw nerves. What the scientists were actually doing in the complex under Wizard Island was something they wished to keep secret.

The seven of them sat there, at their lecture desks, each one with much to think about while they waited for the speaker to crackle into life and give them further orders.

Where they should go.

And what they should do.