Pandaemonium Part 1

Pandaemonium.

by CHRISTOPHER BROOKMYRE.

Prologue

The Resurrectionist's Price

'We're going to h.e.l.l for this.'

It is one of the soldiers who speaks, talking almost under his breath to the similarly sculpted muscular redoubt standing beside him. Their arms are bare from the shoulders down, dark green sleeveless slips the only clothing between the skin of their chests and sweat-streaked grey tabards of body armour. Their biceps are taut from the weight of their weapons, or maybe that's just how it looks, because Merrick knows what those things feel like to hold; knows a weight in them that derives from more than simply ma.s.s and gravity. Those muscles are US military: built, trained and maintained. You could sling a feather duster across those forearms and the musculature would look just as p.r.o.nounced, just as swollen and primed.

Merrick recalls a detached fragment he glimpsed surfing the digital channels, showing a poster from the Weimar Republic. It depicted an Aryan G.o.d of an athlete above the slogan: 'A healthy body houses a healthy mind'. To which some seditionary artist had added: 'but often a very small one'.

All of the soldiers in here look like gay p.o.r.n. So much muscle on show, all of it glistening with moisture, fresh beads of sweat pooling for a moment, then suddenly swooping in rivulets in response to a slight movement, a s.h.i.+ft in stance, and not infrequently a nervous shudder. It's the heat: that's why they're dressed that way. It's so hot in this place, so infernally hot, always. No amount of venting seems to make a difference. He's stood right next to the giant fans at the base of the intake regulation shaft, walked beneath the coolant transit vessels in the heat-exchange orbital, several miles of insulated alloys thrusting through a circular tubeway engirthing the primary accelerator chase. You can put your left hand next to the vent outlet, or up close to the transit vessel, remind your fingers what cool air feels like; but if you place your right hand a few inches further back, then they might as well be in any other room in the facility, as they'll feel no change. It's like the principles of conductivity have been suspended, or some inexhaustible energy supply keeps pumping more warm air in to replace every atom that gets cooled.

Merrick's going through tubs of Vaseline trying to reduce the chafing of his thighs and where his arms brush his sides, and that's just wearing trousers and a s.h.i.+rt, sometimes a lab coat. What must it be like for these guys, strapped, clipped, belted and burdened until they look like cyborgs and gladiators?

Not that the soldiers would be complaining. They didn't complain, they didn't argue, they didn't question. But that didn't mean they weren't sweltering, didn't mean they weren't blistered worse than Merrick, and most certainly didn't mean they weren't scared.

'Going to h.e.l.l?' replies the second soldier. 'We ain't going. We're standing down all border patrols and letting h.e.l.l come to us.' to h.e.l.l?' replies the second soldier. 'We ain't going. We're standing down all border patrols and letting h.e.l.l come to us.'

They don't know he can hear them. They're talking in whispers and the sound of the machine - the incessant sound of the machine - would make it hard enough to catch anything below a shout from the other side of the chamber. Merrick, however, is picking them up through his headphones from one of the directional laser-mikes he's deployed, monitoring a range of sound frequencies calibrated far outwith the spectrum of human hearing. He's also running all pick-ups through a counter-frequency interference filter, which cancels most of the frequencies coming from the tooth-rattling, pulsatile hum that is as unresting a constant of this place as the stifling heat. It's only with his headphones on and those filters running that he can escape it, can hear a human voice resonate like it would in a normal room in a normal building back in the lost innocence of the normal world.

Maybe he was mistaken, however, and the soldiers said nothing. Maybe all he heard was the words inside his own head.

We're going to h.e.l.l for this.

I'm going to h.e.l.l for this.

This is is h.e.l.l. h.e.l.l.

Here beneath the world, held fast by adamantine rock, impenetrable. Here impaled with circling fire, yet unconsumed.

He recalls the words of a senior cleric a few years back, in a predictably alarmist harangue of Merrick's fraternity.

'One might say that in our country we are about to have a public Government endors.e.m.e.nt of experiments of Frankenstein proportion - without many people really being aware of what is going on.' Thus he had warned the nation about the unchecked recklessness of those mad scientists, still grasping for that apple despite G.o.d having been quite unequivocal on the subject. Or as every monster-movie aficionado knows, 'there are some things man was never meant to tamper with'.

This moral colossus had gone on to suggest that he might even be willing to help redeem the scientific community by stepping down from on high and granting an audience to a delegation of their representatives.

'In agreeing to such a meeting my only condition would be that the scientists were also willing to accept instruction from our Churches and peoples of faith on basic morality.'

Merrick still feels the smouldering embers of his indignation at the way he and his peers were being maligned as so many Mengeles, as Frankensteins unfettered by any consideration of morality, driven remorselessly by the pursuit of discovery at any cost. But now he would concede that perhaps it had angered him so much because, like a stopped clock hitting the right time, amid his automatedly dogmatic declamations the cleric had stumbled on to a nasty little truth.

There was a question you could never answer while it remained purely hypothetical, a measure of your character you could never record until it was truly put to the test. That question was: how far would you be prepared to go, what sacrifices would you be willing to make, and most pertinently, what values would you be prepared to compromise, in order to know that bit more, in order to glimpse that bit further than anyone had before you?

It was a question, a test that would only ever be truly faced by a tiny few; but not, he understood now, a lucky few. Those were the ones who would have to live with the consequences of their choice: to pa.s.s up seeing what was behind the curtain for personal ease of conscience, or to accept that an eternal burden of shame and guilt might be the price they must pay as individuals in order to secure greater knowledge for all - albeit with no guarantees that this knowledge would be a blessing or a curse.

Merrick knew the cleric was right, because so many had taken the latter choice. Where would we be otherwise? The myth of Prometheus, like all myths, had its root in a human truth. Scientists had forever defied the values of their societies in order to get that elusive further glimpse, but let's not sugar-coat it as a question of s.h.i.+fting mores and challenging att.i.tudes. They had sometimes done what they knew to be wrong: horribly and hideously wrong. They had robbed graves, or paid the resur rectionists to do it for them. And when the likes of Burke and Hare got creative, they had asked no questions. The promise of that glimpse compelled them to override their morality. Merrick knew this now, knew how little that cleric truly understood with his debates over whether the end justified the means. It wasn't about justification. It was that the promise of the glimpse could obviate the very need for a justification. The glimpse could become its own supreme, unchallengeable justification.

The researcher sacrificing laboratory animals could justify his practices to himself on the grounds that the resultant understanding protected his species. Natural selection had put us in this superior position, he could tell himself, and his responsibility was to his own kind. But Merrick's compromise in this was something far worse than a reluctant vivisectionist's guilt. Maybe the Mengele comparisons weren't so hysterical after all. And the worst part was knowing he'd make the same decision, accept the same tainted deal, if the choice was offered over again. Galling as it was that the glimpse be so small, so needlessly small, and the shame he was party to so utterly unnecessary, if it was the only way to get a glimpse at all, he knew he'd still do it again.

So he'd have to confess that, in the end, that churchman was right, more right than he could possibly know. Look at the compromises he was party to, how far he had stooped here, what dominion he was genuflecting beneath in order to get that glimpse. How vindicated would the cleric feel if he knew what tainted hosts Merrick was prepared to get into bed with, just for a tiny chance to forward his research.

Here in this dark, opprobrious den of shame: this is its own punishment.

This is h.e.l.l.

He glances up from the console and takes a lingering look at his surroundings. The hardware. The boy-toys. Technology so beyond the state of the art that the private sector doesn't know it even exists, never mind the consumer. Weaponry that may not see a battlefield for ten years, if ever. Soldiers so electronically bedecked they look part-android. The mikes, the cameras, the computers, the arrays of screens, the banks of consoles bearing keyboards, tracking devices, laser-mapped 3D motion-capture grids. Not to mention enough medical monitoring and sensory instrumentation to give a hospital accountant a seizure were he to see it thus a.s.sembled in an NHS theatre. And all of it contained by walls of crisp white panelling like it's Moon Base Alpha. Twenty years ago, throw in Maria Whittaker in an unb.u.t.toned lab coat and this would have been close to his idea of heaven.

The panelling has a distinctive sheen, partially reflective in certain light. It's almost like china. It was developed for heat resistance on the new generation of ICBMs, so it's very tough. It's also easy to clean. That's the thing here. Easy to wipe down. But there are places where you can still see live rock visible through gaps between the panels. The reality of this location, of this circ.u.mstance, can be masked off, but it's still there, inches behind the spotless veneer. Beneath the facade of science is a sin of selfish curiosity. Stains cannot be wiped away so easily from the live rock. The taint endures.

Merrick is slapped from his grim reverie by all of the screens giving that simultaneous hiccup he's never got used to, despite the regularity of its rhythm. The images all shudder like some digitally manipulated wave-pulse effect, accompanied by a high-pitched pinging sound. All attempts at s.h.i.+elding have been powerless to prevent it during the surge phases of the machine's cycle. Across the room, he sees Avedon adjusting the focus on a hand-held digital video camera: just in case they miss anything on the dozen other CCTV and infrared cameras. They're all digital; magnetic tape having proven . . . problematic. The white panelling in here is also lead-lined and thus supposedly anti-magnetic, but Steinmeyer himself has confessed that they still don't know what other forces the machine might be generating or even simply interfering with. Merrick just hopes n.o.body in here has plans to father any future kids.

Steinmeyer is hovering restlessly, close to the table, inspecting the surrounding instrumentation with simmering disdain. He looks apt to start knocking things over, to go hauling out tubes and cables and clamps. He's got a headset mike in place so that he can communicate with the rest of the physics and bio teams, but he's been in here forty minutes and so far he hasn't uttered a word.

Lucius Steinmeyer: one of the leading scientific minds of his generation, but not one many people are likely to have heard from in a decade unless they hold sufficient security clearance. A man who thought he had long ago faced The Question when he accepted that only military resources could facilitate his ambitions. A man who remains haunted by a vivid dream he had, in which he was the person in charge of what was taking place here. Merrick could have sworn he had the same dream too, but now they're both wide awake.

Whatever Merrick might be feeling, he knows Steinmeyer's feeling it far worse. Merrick is merely head of the bio team. It's Steinmeyer's lifetime project that's been hijacked and sub-hijacked in a rude awakening to what the phrase 'eminent domain' truly means; whose whose domain, and more pertinently, whose eminence. The physicist has come to realise that after a decade in bed with the devil, everything up until now has merely been foreplay. However, he's not ready to surrender, not yet prepared to accept the renegotiated terms in which the glimpse gets smaller while the price gets higher. Steinmeyer is still fighting to wrest back control, and that, more than any practices doom-mongering clerics might find abhorrent, is what makes him dangerous; domain, and more pertinently, whose eminence. The physicist has come to realise that after a decade in bed with the devil, everything up until now has merely been foreplay. However, he's not ready to surrender, not yet prepared to accept the renegotiated terms in which the glimpse gets smaller while the price gets higher. Steinmeyer is still fighting to wrest back control, and that, more than any practices doom-mongering clerics might find abhorrent, is what makes him dangerous; that that is what genuinely designates him a 'mad scientist'. is what genuinely designates him a 'mad scientist'.

Bowed down over the consoles, Merrick's perspective is flattened so that the table looks like just that, with a number of metal objects sat upon it. It's only when he raises his head again that it resumes its true shape, and the metal objects reveal themselves to be welded and bolted into place. All around it, Merrick's equipment stands in wait, like so many siege engines.

He runs another systems-diagnostic. He knows everything is good to go. Everything has been triple-, maybe quadruple-checked. It's no more than a nervous fidget; no purpose to it beyond finding something to keep his mind occupied, keep his fingers busy. Glancing at what's cradled in those sweat-streaked arms, he hopes the soldiers don't have the same problem. What's making the systems-diagnostic more redundant is that he won't even be permitted to use half of this stuff, and of what remains, much of it might be unable to tell him anything anyway. On a trolley next to the table, for instance, there is a Swan-Ganz catheter for measuring pulmonary arterial pressure and an arterial line for invasive blood pressure monitoring, while next to those is an oesophageal Doppler for monitoring cardiac output. What he doesn't have - for they have thus far allowed him insufficient opportunity to determine - is any guarantee that there will be a heart, lungs, oesophagus or arterial system present to be monitored.

Steinmeyer checks his watch, and to Merrick's relief (but, he'd have to admit, slight disappointment) moves from the vicinity of the table and thus outwith the range of sedition and sabotage. He turns his gaze instead towards the door; not the main door, opposite Merrick's console, upon either side of which stand the two soldiers his mikes picked up, but the other one, the one at the south corner. The circular steel one. The blast-proof one. The mag-locked one, upon either side of which is posted a phalanx of six more soldiers.

All eight of them, as well as all six of the science and medical personnel, stiffen to varying degrees in response to the main door lock-warning alarm as it reverberates off the white walls. A blue glow emanates from the digital read-out topside of the double-width sliding main door, the LED panel's border flas.h.i.+ng red in time to the first five pulses of the alarm. After that there's only the countdown: twenty seconds until the chamber is sealed.

At ten seconds, the two halves of the door slide together, but this happens any time someone comes in or goes out, so n.o.body's fazed by that. It's ten seconds later, when the tumblers drop into place on the other side, that always draws an anxious glance. n.o.body likes to know they're locked into anywhere, but knowing what they're all about to be locked in with with takes it to a whole other level. takes it to a whole other level.

One of the soldiers guarding the entrance slides a card through the swipe-reader inset in the wall to the right of the now deadlocked door, then lifts the telephone handset next to it. He's confirming the lockdown and submitting the auth code for the second stage. Merrick can't stop himself looking towards Steinmeyer. He's got one hand on his chin, his thoughts unreadable. He's still staring at the circular door, and as soon as the second warning alarm sounds, so is everybody else. It's another twenty-second countdown, but this time to opening.

'Okay, places everybody,' Merrick hears a voice say. 'Game time.'

It's the second phrase before he's fully aware that the voice is his own. He's functioning, putting himself into operational mode like any other piece of military-owned equipment he has deployed here, and even as he does he can feel his deeper self disengage, retreat into merely spectating from above like in some out-of-body experience.

He already knows that later he will review the myriad video files, and will see himself in the images, but he won't feel any of this, and there will be no footage saved of the view from inside his head.

The countdown hits five. The phalanx step into an altered formation, forming a V widening away from the door. Their weapons are no longer merely cradled, but levelled at shoulder-height, six little blue LED ammunition readouts describing the V shape, like a constellation, or the floor-level emergency lights on a commercial airliner. And at the apex, one big blue LED reaches zero.

There's a second of silence, or as close to silence as the sound of the machine can permit in this place. One last very pregnant pause. Then there comes the percussive chimes of the mag-locks disengaging, followed by a belly-shuddering thunk as eight impermeable steel cylinders retract into their housing within the giant disc. The final herald's trumpet blast is an indignant hiss from the pressure seals, before the big circular door swings smoothly and slowly open on its hydraulic servo-a.s.sisted hinges.

Merrick knows this door cost more than his house; maybe more than half his street. Given what's kept behind it, he also knows it's money well spent.

But right now it's open, wide to the wall.

At first, all he can make out are shadows and silhouettes, the shapes of several figures moving slowly in concert, like a procession. First to emerge fully into the chamber are two men in identical yellow radiation suits, covering them from head to toe. They move backwards, their gait a cautious, tentative shuffle, resultant of having no option to look at where they're putting their feet, of looking behind, or indeed of looking anywhere but at the subject. Two more follow, flanking the centre, this pair facing inwards, shuffling sideways. Their movement might be crab-like, but Merrick finds himself thinking of a tortoise: not the plodding creature itself but the name given by the Romans to a specific formation of their legionaries. This particular formation is completed at the rear by two forward-facing Romans, and it is in their visors that Merrick catches his first glimpse of what is being escorted at their centre.

The visors are one-way transparent, something to do with the light and radiation filtering, meaning in practice that they can see out but you can't see in. When you speak to them, this has the disorientating and inhibiting effect that you see only the reflection of your own face. And mostly they don't speak back much either. Not to Merrick anyway, nor Steinmeyer, nor anyone outside their own rarefied const.i.tuency. Down here, it's all about who you're answerable to, and the command chain has become rather tangled since they and their boss showed up.

Once all of them have emerged fully into the chamber, the structure of the formation becomes more apparent. It has a frame; maybe you could even call it a skeleton. One member each of the vanguard and rearguard has hold of a metal shaft, terminating either side of a stainless-steel restraining collar. A second, wider such hoop is thus tethered a couple of feet lower down by the Romans on the flanks. The remainder in fore and aft also grip metal shafts, but these will only connect to the subject if the other restraints become insufficient. They are five-feet-long electrified pikes, their business ends crackling like s.p.a.ce Dust on the tongue as blue static dances restlessly around the grey steel.

Merrick hears a low, breathy gurgle: not a growl, but ba.s.sy enough to be felt in his own diaphragm, and loud enough to convey that the noise would be fearsome were it to give voice to anger. He strongly suspects that driving a bolt through the skull in order to facilitate intra-cranial Doppler pressure-monitoring might just elicit that response, and that the subject, not having been formally consented, might wish to later register a complaint.

For now, the procession remains calm.

Merrick catches only flashes of movement in the s.h.i.+fting gaps between the yellow suits. He sees skin reflected in the visors. It looks flayed, livid, even steaming, like it's reacting to a drastic change in the ambient temperature or humidity. The first time he caught such a glimpse, he reasoned that it was down to a distortion of the reflection caused by the visor's curvature and by light flaring on the gla.s.s. This time, he's got infrared cameras and humidity sensors waiting in place to filter fear and hysteria from hard data. Unfortunately, he's confident that the hard data will merely provide ample justification for more of the first two. The idea that anything organic could be hotter than the air in here is a truly unsettling one.

The yellow tortoise continues its palpably tense but necessarily unhurried procession, headed towards the table, flanked now by four of the armed phalanx. Two soldiers remain at each door; securing chamber access is their paramount objective, one understood by everyone now locked inside it to override their personal safety. If anything goes wrong here, then here and here alone it stays.

The procession stops a few feet short of the table, which at this stage remains concealed from the subject. At most, all that is likely to be visible between the radiation suits is the odd flash of stainless steel. There is no means of deducing how much the subject knows about what will take place next, no way of antic.i.p.ating reaction and response.

A million white mice go meekly and unsuspectingly towards certain death, then one of them seems spooked and desperate, and you ask yourself: how did it know to be afraid? When it's a white mouse, chances are it detected some smell or sight it didn't like, or perhaps was simply anxious anyway. This, however, is no white mouse. The subject has no inkling what will take place in this chamber, but a specimen such as this goes nowhere meekly; and as for unsuspectingly, well, the steel braces kind of render that one moot.

With some alarm, Merrick notices that around knee height there is something unsecured and in motion, though it looks too thin and too flexible to be an arm. He is not comforted to realise that it is a tail.

From the centre of the formation Merrick hears a guttural, throaty rumbling, like a very large motorbike: idling, but the slightest throttle-twist away from unleas.h.i.+ng far more power. He felt the last emission in his stomach; reckons this one is vibrating his chest until the sound falls away and he realises the palpitation hasn't ceased.

He's not here though, he reminds himself. He's only looking down, and looking down he hears his voice order Avedon to 'present the table'. There is a keening hum of gears as the table begins to rotate on its vertical axis. It tips eighty-five degrees until almost perpendicular to the floor, its shape distinct in grey steel against the white panelling, a horizontal brace bisecting the trunk at around two thirds of its height.

The subject sees it now: a cross, risen, elevated to dominate the room. The subject doesn't like this. There is a ripple through the formation, suggesting that the four Romans gripping the restraining shafts are not so much tethering the subject as merely hanging on like sailors in a storm. The other two respond. The pikes are applied. The storm gets worse for a while, then abates amidst a flurry of fizzes, crackles and winded-sounding groans (though no roars and no screams). The subject goes limp, the four escorts now supporting its weight. The air smells of ozone, and a sweet odour that reminds Merrick pleasantly of childhood for the few seconds it takes to remember that its source was a bacon-curing factory close to his school.

With the subject stunned, the escorts move swiftly to open the loops attaching its wrists to the metal band around its middle, then place them instead into the waiting clamps welded to either side of the table. A metal neckpiece is similarly bolted into place, then the feet are locked in position also.

'Subject secured,' reports one of the yellow suits. With his face concealed, it's impossible to be sure precisely who he is reporting this to, but Merrick knows he could narrow it down at least to being one of the soldiers. It sure as s.h.i.+t isn't him, or Steinmeyer, or anyone else on the scientific staff.

'Subject secure,' one of the soldiers in the phalanx acknowledges, then gives a signal to his colleague manning the swipe dock at the main door. Another countdown begins, but now it's not just the door that's on a clock. Whatever he's going to do, Merrick is going to have to commence now, and he's going to have to work fast.

'Restore the table,' he tells Avedon.

The subject writhes in languid disorientation as the table returns to the horizontal: not quite conscious, not quite oblivious either. He'll know when it's fully come round, because that's also when he'll discover how sound those welds are. Right now, though, it merely looks like it's in the last pre-waking throes of unquiet dreams.

Merrick first takes hold of the modified plastic clip that is the sensor end of the pulse-oximeter, and delicately levers it around one of the subject's ear lobes. This particular piece of kit was checked on one of the soldiers an hour back so that hardware error could be ruled out if there is a repeat of the reading Merrick got on a previous subject. The device measures oxygen saturation in red blood cells by pa.s.sing two different wavelengths of red and infrared light (normally through a finger, but that requires a willing patient) from an LED and comparing the different light absorptions demonstrated by oxygenated and deoxygenated haemoglobin. When Merrick first tried measuring this on a test subject, the results were so low as to be inconsistent with human survival. Ruling out knackered kit would open up other explanations. One was denser tissue make-up leading to a greater overall opacity, resulting in little of either wavelength getting through to the sensor. More dramatically, a second interpretation was that there was genuinely very little oxygen in the blood, and that it was therefore nitrogen or even carbon dioxide that was being conveyed instead. Thus instead of a standard human or even mammalian respiratory system, they could be looking at something closer to photosynthesis. Hence the expired gas a.n.a.lysers, though Merrick isn't much looking forward to fitting the mouthpiece.

He reaches to a tray and picks up an electroencephalographic sensor, placing it gently to the subject's temple, then applying a little pressure to make it fast. His little finger brushes the base of the protuberance just above, and he dares to indulge his curiosity by pinching gently with his thumb and forefinger also. It's hard, ungiving, solid. Tougher than bone.

Merrick places another electrode on the opposite temple, then reaches to a second tray and lifts the sensors he will attach to the chest. As he sticks the first of the little pads in place, he stares at the hairless, lightly crenulated plateau beneath his fingers, insulated from his touch by a layer of latex. Merrick finds himself taking off a glove in order to feel the skin directly against his own. It's tougher, like soft leather, a surface that feels as though it would be easily scuffed and sc.r.a.ped, but nonetheless hard to penetrate. He lets his arched palm collapse until it is lightly pressed, feeling for a heartbeat. At this, the subject opens its eyes and sharply turns its head to look into his.

Merrick would not care to describe what he sees in there in that moment, but he knows the results of one test, at least: that test an unlucky few must face. He couldn't say which action const.i.tutes pa.s.sing or failing, wonders whether any man could, but he knows this for sure: he will make do with the ECG, the EEG, the pulsox and at most the expired-gas a.n.a.lysers. He will not be attempting any invasive monitoring procedures without anaesthetising or a.n.a.lgising this thing, neither of which he has any idea how to accomplish anyway.

This inability is, of course, irrelevant, because even if he did know how, he would not be allowed to make an attempt. Monitoring and observation, as has been made unambiguously clear to him and his team, are the absolute extent of his parameters, the demarcation of which will be enforced, if necessary, by the twitchy-looking muscle-bound f.u.c.kers carrying the very big guns.

He checks the monitors. He's getting readings above the baseline from the ECG and the EEG. There is cardiac output and there is intracerebral electrical activity. What that's going to tell him, beyond that the subject has has a heart and a brain, he's not sure. a heart and a brain, he's not sure.

Merrick looks up from the table and finds himself locked in Steinmeyer's gaze. It is only marginally more comfortable than the last pair of eyes he just stared into, but Christ, what does Lucius want him to do? Steinmeyer looks to the main door, then back to the table.

'This is insane,' Steinmeyer says. 'This is completely f.u.c.king insane.'

'Lucius,' Merrick appeals, though he can see it's futile. His face is stone-set in a coolly resolute anger: no sudden, precipitate fury. Steinmeyer shakes his head. Something here has broken, something inside of him. He hauls off his headset and slaps it down on to a nearby tray, upending scalpels, lines and canulae on to the concrete floor.

Steinmeyer then strides towards the exit, but finds his way barred. The main door is no longer in lockdown, but there is a soldier between him and the swipe dock for his security card.

'I'm sorry, Professor Steinmeyer,' the soldier states. 'I'm not authorised to let anyone leave this chamber until I have full clearance that the procedure is complete.'

He doesn't look quite so coolly resolute any more. Merrick can see the sinews tense in the back of Steinmeyer's neck, and fears for a moment that he is about to do something rash. Just then, however, he hears the susurrus of the pressure release as the main doors glide apart. The soldier looks around quizzically, then snaps to attention and gives a salute as he sees Colonel Bud Havelock stopped in the entryway, arms folded as he waits for the two halves of the door to slide fully home. The seven other soldiers also salute as he steps into the chamber.

The men in the radiation suits react not at all, their collective attention remaining intent upon the subject on the table.

With the door now open, Steinmeyer attempts to walk towards the pa.s.sage but the soldier manning it steps across his path.

'Colonel Havelock,' Steinmeyer appeals.

'Sir,' the soldier barks, looking past the physicist, 'my orders are to secure the chamber until I have full clearance, sir.'

'Stand easy, Corporal,' orders Havelock. 'You have my clearance to let Professor Steinmeyer pa.s.s.'

'Sir, yes, sir.'

The soldier moves out of Steinmeyer's way with an exaggerated step, his eyes front and away from the professor the second the order is given. This leaves Steinmeyer with only Havelock to get past.

'Where you off to?' the colonel asks. 'Forget something?'

'I have no role here,' Steinmeyer replies. 'You have no role here,' he insists, inviting Havelock's agreement like he's sure he knows how the army man feels about the issue. Turns out he's wrong. have no role here,' he insists, inviting Havelock's agreement like he's sure he knows how the army man feels about the issue. Turns out he's wrong.

'I would strongly dispute that, Professor. We both have a role here because we may be dealing with a threat to national and international security. This is the US Army. This is what we do do. Now this ain't a war, not yet, but if it becomes one, it's men like me, men like Corporal Clark and the other soldiers you see right here, who'll be in the s.h.i.+t, fighting it. So if this helps us learn more about what we're up against, if this in any way helps save my men, if this helps us win win, then G.o.dd.a.m.n right we've got a role here, and G.o.dd.a.m.n right so have you.'

'There will be no war unless you create one. We're the ones holding the door open, remember? The only barbarians at the gate are on our our side of it.' side of it.'

'Ah, bulls.h.i.+t, Lucius,' Havelock replies. There is frustration in his face, indicating that his concern is genuine. 'You've seen as well as I what's on both sides of the gate. What I've seen has given me serious grounds for worry about what would happen should ever the twain meet, and it's my job to worry about that s.h.i.+t. Yes, we're holding open a door: we're holding open one one tiny door so that we can gather us a little intel that just might come in handy if it turns out that meanwhile, on the other side, they're getting ready to tear down the walls.' tiny door so that we can gather us a little intel that just might come in handy if it turns out that meanwhile, on the other side, they're getting ready to tear down the walls.'

'You will learn nothing from this here today,' Steinmeyer states calmly. 'This is superst.i.tion and barbarism.'

'This is cancer cancer, Lucius. This is AIDS. Times ten. Times a thousand. This could be the greatest threat we've ever faced as a species. It's the Black Death and you're saying lay off being cruel to the G.o.dd.a.m.n rats. We cannot afford to be squeamish right now, and we definitely cannot afford men like you closing their minds to any any possibility. possibility. What's been discovered here alters our whole understanding of the nature of the universe What's been discovered here alters our whole understanding of the nature of the universe: those are your own words. There's nothing about this we can take for granted, so that's some pretty f.u.c.king bad timing for you to abandon the scientific principle of observe-and-deduce.'

'You abandoned all all scientific principles when you brought in Tullian.' scientific principles when you brought in Tullian.'

Havelock drops his voice again; looks like he bit back an initial reply, but this one, while quieter, is no less unequivocal in its import.

'That wasn't my call, but it ain't my place to second-guess it, and I don't get to pick sides. I'm on the side of the US Army - that's my job. But I'll say this much for Tullian: it ain't him who's backing away because he's afraid of being proved wrong.'