Electric Forest (14 page)

eyes were rather small, rather dry and flinty. He dropped the self-lighting, self-dousing cigarette on the
ground, and nodded to her.

"Was it a hunch?"

"What?" she asked. She did not know his name.

"Whatever brought you back so quickly. It's bad news."

"Is it?"

"Isn't it always? We've got trouble with Emilion."

"Oh," she said, "oh, Emilion." Suddenly she had to suppress a smile. This was farcical. She wondered if Claudio was anywhere about, hiding behind a tree (the smile seduced her again). Maybe he had installed some device, in the bungalow or here in the open, through which he could watch her. He was
unwholesomely clever with mechanical gadgets.

"Well, we assumed it would go wrong again, did we not?"
"Yes, I suppose we did," she answered dutifully.

"Do you want to come in and confirm it for yourself, Christa? I'd say you should."

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'I don't think," she began. Her mood altered its character abruptly. Running blindfold, she had been bound to
lose her footing.

"I've parked the auto by the road," the man said.
*T have a lot of things to attend to here," she said.

"Come on, Christa. Don't cat about. You're in charge of this thing and you damned well should have stayed
with it. You want to be a star with the C.T. project, O.K. But it works both ways. When the sweet goes
sour, you're not going to land me with holding the can. The others, perhaps. But not Val."

She laughed stupidly. He had gifted her with his name.

Had Claudio prophesied that the man would try to coerce her into going with him? Abruptly, she beheld a
bizarre logic in what Claudio meant to happen, through her and through the events which would gravitate
toward her. Claudio had said,
"It's a facet of my scheme, your incomprehension"

It was not just a matter of amusing herself on Marine Bleu. Why should it be? It was a matter of Magdala
being mistaken for Christophine as frequently as possible. And of Magdala, in her confused ignorance,
presenting a new picture of the hated Christophine-as a mad woman. And how else could it be? She could
not help doing it. Claudio's plan could not fail.

She had even laughed, out of context, as a mad lady should.

Peculiarly, though, the man called Val had not taken her laugh as questionable. His dry flinty little eyes had become drier, flintier, more contracted. He licked his lips and said:

"Yes, it's funny now. Maybe not tomorrow."

His attitude, his mannerisms, displayed trepidation and unease. He had told her Christophine was in charge
of a project at Marine Bleu. The top secret project Claudio had, uninformed, digressed upon.

"Don't threaten me," Magdala said to Val. She said it in a

friendly way, Claudio's way. It worked. Val shrank in one virtually non-physical yet quite picturesque

motion.

"All right, all right. I retract. Shall I kneel?"
If you would like to."

Val chuckled, demonstrating that this had all been a boyish prank, not a trial of strength between them.
"Same Christa. Always the same."

Rather than laugh this time, she shivered. She thought, inchoately, that Claudio's plan could fail after all. If
she could bluff it out. To thwart Claudio. That was important. It always had been, would be. She could hate Christophine, yes. But in her own fashion, because of her own motives. She did not even know what
Claudio's motives were.

"What I'm postulating, tentatively and respectfully," said Val, "is that in my capacity as your sub, I'd advise
you to take a look at Emilion for yourself. That's it."

Magdala ran her eyes along the ranks of the trees to where she could glimpse the auto-cab between. She
could say "no." Although obviously Christophine would not say no.

A buzzing noise came from the direction of the auto.

"Oh God," said Val. He ran off toward the car, and Christophine followed him, without hurry. When she

reached the spot, Val was seated inside the open cab, talking into a pin-head mike attachment on the dash.
"Yes," he said, "yes." He angled himself to face her. "Worse than I judged," said Val. "I have to get back."

"IH come with you."

She had reacted blindly to his imperative agitation, to curiosity, to an underlying fear of Claudio and an

aversion to continued loneliness at the bungalow. To a surge of frustrated power, wrath and temper. To the
aura of Christophine herself.

She got into the cab and the side closed down.

Too late now to escape.

They were on the metal road, in robot-drive, whirling up to the crest of the cliff, under an arch of
steel-ribbed natural

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stone, through the shadowless blaze of the sun-shattered forest. The concrete apron appeared below, a bald
and clinical paragraph between the dark upland and the blue lowland of the sea.

They seemed to fall toward the station.

Val did not talk to her, withered by her proximity.

She was strangely disturbed by the calmness of the ocean on this side of the island, reminded of the savage, rock-smashed breakers the jet had reconnoitered the night before. This side, the sea appeared dead.

A quarter kilometer from the station, they passed an auto-check which flashed them through without having
them reduce speed. A few moments more, and the cab dashed among the tall and featureless buildings.

She had no time to assess the functional cement prairie of the apron, the blocks, the compounds. Everything

l f
ew at her and away.

The auto slowed in the sudden deceleration of robot-drive, throwing up its air barrier within to cushion the

occupants, so the cessation was not felt but only seen -a landscape racing by at two hundred kph, abruptly

flowing
into stasis.

The auto was on a steel pad in a windowless walled precinct. Red panels blazed on the wall, flushed to blue, went out. The pad began to sink.

Overhead, the ground closed.

On its steel platform, the auto descended into a cavern of whitewashed concrete. The hum of many generators swelled through the screens of the auto, which were winding themselves down, and a cold
efficient light radiating from Eterna phosphor lamps. There was the inevitable scent of washed-air,
phosphix, and the alcohol-chemical smell of a laboratory.

A steel door blocked the end of the cavern. At a guess, the route leading back into the cliff.
The auto side lifted.

,8

A cement pillar stood by the steel door, replica of the pillar at the rock jetty. The same ab-human voice
hailed them.

You are at the entrance of Two Unit. Only classified executives will be admitted. Print and voice
check, please.

Val went forward quickly, pressing his hand to the pillar, giving his name. Magdala repeated the action. She
was beginning to experience the pressure of her situation, a tightening of ghostly rivets and joints in the
ozone. But the pillar, predictably, made no demur.

The steel door slid aside.

A corridor of peach plastic, starkly lit by Eternas, opened in front of her, and she grew numb, dumb, eyes
unfocused, hands frozen. She did not want to walk into this sanctum, among things she did not understand, people she had never seen, and let them catch her out. And they must catch her out.

She had to fail. She knew nothing
nothing.

And this was exactly what Claudio would have wanted.

Together, she and Val moved into the corridor, and along it to a blank wall marked ECSORNI DEUX, which, accepting their images, cracked wide before them.

This area was much as she would have anticipated the Tri-V drama laboratory. A computer bank the
length of one long wall and from floor to ceiling, with a walkway running along the upper case.
Computer-linked machinery of process and analysis. Hygienic slabs, a diascope, cabinets of instruments, a
book screen, internal televisor, and slotted panels of tapes. In the midst of the area stood five men and two
women in indigo blue loose-coats. All of them gazed at her, the expressionless gaze rendered to authority
like tax. W. del Jan," one of the men said. "Glad to see you back/* She had only to read him to discover her
anticipated persona. Remote and implacable, that was Christophine. (Yes, she would have to be that way
for Magdala's mistakes to recast her as insane.) Magdala inclined her head to the man who had spoken to
her. Val was moving on, but dawdling

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worriedly in order not to let her drop behind. She joined him, and they passed through a second door.

This room was twice the size of the previous one. There were flexium leads through from the computer

bank, and a smaller daughter-bank connected to a desk console. A woman sat at the desk. The rest of the

room supported five internal televisors, each monitored by personnel in loose-coats seated beneath.

Magdala glanced into these televisors, but Val was continuing toward another wall door, permitting her no
leisure to absorb visual evidence from the screens, despite the fact that the activity in them was minimal. In

one, a man lay, apparently sleeping, on a plastase couch. In another, a woman was propped irregularly in a

chair. Someone was coaxing, or seemed to be coaxing, the woman to lift her arm. A grim aura of an

archaic lunatic asylum overhung these scenes. Nobody in this room had spoken, shoulders cast-iron as they
kept their vigil.

The door gave on to an elevator. It plunged about six meters farther into the sub-surface rock of the cliff. They emerged into a duplicate of the second room above. This room too had computer leads and a
daughter-bank, but of the five screens, only one was live. Before the screen, on their feet, restless and
conveying impotent emotions, a mixed group shook itself about to greet tie arrivals.

"How is he now?" Val barked.

"Bad, M.Vallary." The girl who answered turned to Magdala. "M. del Jan, it started early this morning,

about six o'clock. I have it logged. Since eight we've been using twenty a.c.s of paramyoten every hour to

try to control the behavior pattern, but it hasn't been successful."

Magdala had stopped looking at the girl. She was looking at the screen. In the screen was a rampaging

animal that had formerly been a man. From the stretched black oval of the mouth wafted faint cotton-wool
screamings, muffled by silencers. And as he screamed, the man catapulted himself from one end of his almost featureless chamber to the other.

"Christ/' said Valary, "it
is
worse."

"That isn't all," said the girl. 'Watch-there, you see?"

The man in the screen had paused beside a wa
ll.
Quite systematically, he began to crash his head against
it.

"Who's monitoring the subject capsule?" demanded Valary,

"Doramel."

"How are the life signs?"

"Low. Getting lower."

"Christophine," said Valary, looking only at the man in the screen, "do we increase the paramyoten?"

"M. del Jan," said a young man at the edge of the group, "Emilion's subject is already heavily sedated. The
feed-drip's been clogged with analgens for three days. The subject can't scrape any nourishment from it

any more."

"Dammit," said Valary, "we have to take the risk. Much more of this, and he'll go into shock. My God, our only logged transfer to date. We really thought we could make it with Emilion. Thirty a.c.s of paramyoten,
Christophine?"

Magdala was balancing on a thin line of ice, above a rushing fall of water. She was toppling into the water.
She spoke to Valary, unable to resist herself. "What does he mean, the feed-drip's clogged with analgens?"

"Sorry about that, M. del Jan," said the young man, slightly shrinking. "I don't like it, either. But the transfer's
become consistently violent. And that's been with a steady five a.c.s of paramyoten in the drip. I'm afraid
the motor nerves have gone into spasm. I doubt if we can stop it now, short of actually poisoning him