Into The Out Of

by Alan Dean Foster

  "Concentrate on your driving. Stay on the road or we are lost!" ordered Olkeloki in a commanding tone Oak had never heard him use before. The old man reached into his jacket and produced another small pouch. Instead of gold and gems, this sack was filled with something dry and foul-smelling.

  He extracted a pinch of dried weeds and dust, leaned forward over Merry's shoulder, and slammed his dust-filled palm against the windshield just as the shetani bit down again. A rapid-fire series of coughs reached them through the glass. Both the shetani's hands and feet contracted in a useless attempt to cover that enormous mouth. With nothing left to maintain its grip, it went tumbling off the right side of the station wagon, bumped once against the underbody, and was gone. Looking into the right-side mirror, Oak could see it go bouncing and tumbling down the pavement behind them.

  "Jesus," he muttered. "It must have been one of those I ran over. It must have grabbed hold of an axle or something. I was doing sixty at the time."

  "Some shetani are very quick and very strong."

  He glanced back at the old man. "How did you make it let go?"

  Olkeloki was carefully replacing the tiny sack in a coat pocket. "I made it sneeze. The shetani do not like to sneeze. It can kill them. So it let go. It was not tire rubber we drove over, Joshua Oak. You are becoming aware of them. You are more sensitive than you think."

  Oak's heart was slowing down, his respiration returning to normal. "Yeah, well, on the whole I'd rather be watching the 'Skins play the Cowboys." He could feel the warmth of his own blood inside his right sock. The wound was messy but shallow. If dogs had rabies, what did shetani carry? He decided he didn't want to know.

  "And you say millions of those things are going to appear everywhere unless we can stop them?"

  "Not millions," replied the old man quietly, "billions. Am I correct in assuming we will have no more of this ilmeet nonsense about what is real and what is dream, and that I may now devote my energies to the important task that lies ahead?"

  "You bet your ass, old man." He looked over at Merry. "You okay?"

  "Ugly. They're so ugly. Like parodies of people and animals all mixed up together. I'd much rather see a homey old ghost."

  "There's nothing wrong with their teeth, either. Anytime I start feeling skeptical again, the pain in my leg will take care of it."

  "Will you be able to walk?" Olkeloki was leaning over the front seat.

  "Bleeding's pretty much stopped. I've got some stuff in my pack we can dress the wound with. From now on I'll look twice before I kick anything."

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  11

  Volgodonsk, USSR—20 June

  Petrovnich was out of breath by the time he reached the office. That in itself was of no particular significance. The engineer was badly overweight. But the expression on his face made the chief engineer sit up fast and put aside the automobile spare-parts newspaper he'd been perusing. Petrovnich was keen-eyed, nervous, and entirely too dedicated to his profession to suit the easygoing Alexiyev. On the other hand, if anything went wrong you could count on Petrovnich to ferret out the trouble and fix it. This was valuable, especially when the chief inspector came out from Kiev on one of his infrequent but always disquieting surprise inspection tours.

  So while Alexiyev was not personally fond of Petrovnich, he held the man's talents in high regard. Nor was his subordinate a man to waste time.

  "Comrade Chief Engineer, I regret to report there is a leak."

  "A leak?" This was an alien term, a foreign term, a term which had no place in his office. "In the men's washroom? That's what you mean, Petrovnich. There's another leak in the men's washroom?"

  "Would that it were, Comrade Chief Engineer. The leak is on the face, dead center, about two thirds of the way down. I was walking the river road and just happened to glance in that direction. The sun was just right or I wouldn't have noticed it at all, which I suspect is why it has not been reported yet. It is definitely a leak."

  "In that case," muttered Alexiyev, all thoughts of buying some parts for his Laika quickly forgotten, "we'd better have a look at it, hadn't we?"

  The Tsimlyansk dam across the Don was one of the largest in the Soviet Union, one of those massive utilitarian projects the Soviet government was so proud of showing off to visiting dignitaries. It was a statement of socialist dedication and a testament to modern engineering. "Here I am," the dam declared, "and like the people who raised me up, I shall not be moved." It was solid as the earth it was composed of, immense and broad, more a fold in the earth than a man-made edifice. The huge lake backed up behind it provided power for the cities of the southern Ukraine as well as flood control and water for irrigation.

  Chief engineers at the Tsimlyansk station had come and gone. Alexiyev was the latest and he was no less impressed by the finality of the dam as it regulated the Don's southward flow. And yet this immovable object, this simple marvel of engineering, which had never given anyone any trouble in the decades since it had been built, had, if Petrovnich was to be believed, sprung a leak.

  Chief Engineer Alexiyev hung slack in the safety harness, having been winched down from the top of the dam. The winch and the men operating it were invisible far above, the tamed river still dizzyingly distant beneath his backside. His feet kicked at the dirt wall in front of him. Petrovnich hung in a similar harness on his left, looking queasy but determined. Petrovnich didn't like heights.

  Alexiyev had been staring for several minutes now. He continued to stare in disbelief as a steady stream of water gushed forth from the face of the dam exactly where the assistant chief engineer had insisted it would. Less water emerged from the unseen crack than from a garden hose on a hot summer day. That in itself posed no danger. It was the implication of what might lie behind the stream of water that was threatening.

  It might be nothing more than a narrow fissure, the result of millions of tons of rock and earth settling unevenly over the years. In that case the leak should soon heal itself. The structural integrity of the thirty-million-odd cubic yards of fill might not be involved. Better not be involved. No, what mattered was not this thin spurt of cold water. What mattered was what the dam looked like on the opposite side of the leak. He would have to send down divers and he didn't want to, because requesting divers meant filling out time-consuming, complex forms as well as reporting to Kiev. It might mean a visit from the disliked chief inspector.

  Not that he had any choice in the matter. There was the leak, plain as a tear on a movie star's cheek. He could not flip a coin to determine the safety of the thousands of people who lived downriver from the dam.

  The divers arrived that afternoon. They went down into the cool water near the base of the dam, trailing power lines for their high-intensity underwater lights and many safety lines. They were not enthusiastic. Rumor had it that the lake was home to bottom-feeding fish big as tractors.

  The divers saw none of the imagined giants but the face of the chief diver, a powerfully built sandy-haired young man named Sascha, indicated that he had seen something else. Alexiyev steeled himself for the worst.

  As it turned out it wasn't quite that bad, but in some ways it was worse.

  "Well?" He addressed the diver as he was doffing his tanks with the aid of an assistant. The man's face was flushed from the time spent in cold water.

  "There's a hole down there all right, Chief Engineer."

  Alexiyev swallowed. "How big?"

  The diver held both palms out facing each other about half a meter apart. A great surge of relief flowed through the chief engineer.

  "That's all? You're sure?"

  "Yes." Sascha began unzipping his wet suit. "They were all about the same size."

  Some of Alexiyev's relief was replaced by something less exhilarating. "All? There is more than one hole?"

  Sascha nodded slowly. "Comrade Chief Engineer, there are dozens of them." Alexiyev suddenly felt unsteady. "Evenly spaced from each other and covering a section of the interior dam f
ace about thirty meters wide by ten high. If I did not know better I would say the dam was infested with giant rock-eating termites. That's just what it looks like—a house that's being chewed up by termites.

  "Furthermore, as near as we could tell with our lights, the holes all go straight in. They are smooth and even on sides, top and bottom. I don't see how they could have been caused by erosion. I would bet my reputation as a professional diver, Comrade Chief Engineer, that those holes have been excavated, bored, whatever you want to call it. Someone has been down there boring holes in your dam. They have been doing so in precisely the right place to cause a catastrophic structural failure." Alexiyev could see that the young man was not frightened. He was angry.

  The chief engineer was thinking too hard to be angry. He was not normally a fast thinker but this afternoon his brain was functioning at near the speed of light.

  "You're certain of all that you've told me, Comrade Sascha? You realize what you're saying."

  "As I've said, I stake my reputation on it. My men will confirm this. You can send down other divers if you wish. I should like to go down again myself, with Gregoriov and one other, as soon as our tanks have been refilled. We want to take cameras with us this time."

  "Yes, yes, of course." Alexiyev was hardly hearing what the young man was saying. He was staring out across the vast expanse of the dam, trying to reconcile its apparent solidity with what the divers had seen.

  He was thinking of the hundreds of thousands of people living along the banks of the river downstream, of the farms and factories, all wiped out in minutes by a collapse of the dam. He could not conceive of anyone who might want such a thing to happen. For someone to consider doing it, he would already have had to forfeit his humanity.

  "By all means go down with cameras, Comrade Sascha. Take plenty of pictures of the—holes. I'm going to need them."

  "You'll have them." He turned away, hesitated long enough to look back. "One more thing, Comrade Chief Engineer. I think that since even photographs may be questioned it might be a good idea to call in some people from the army."

  "Yes. They will need to be informed. Everyone will need to be informed."

  San Onofre, California—20 June

  Carrington stared out at the broad gunmetal-gray sheet of water that was the Pacific Ocean. It was eighty-four outside with the hottest part of the day still to come. He forced himself to turn away from the window and the cool water. Still hours before checkout time. He took a lot of kidding from friends for the time he spent in the water so near to the plant's outfall, but he always joked back in kind.

  "When my board starts glowing, maybe I'll cut down—and that'll depend on whether or not the surf's up."

  Around him the great installation hummed silently at full-throated power, feeding energy into the extensive Southern California grid, keeping air conditioners running uninterruptedly in Los Angeles and San Diego. As usual, the control room was overstaffed. Why they needed so many people he didn't know. If the NRC could just let up on the industry a little they could save the taxpayers a lot of money.

  But no. There had to be backups to watch the backups to watch the on-line shift. The result was that he was drawing a top salary for doing next to nothing, wasting a degree in nucleonics when he could have been doing something worthwhile with his time. His eyes drifted back to the window overlooking the empty beach below. Like sitting on his board waiting for a wave with a pipeline in it.

  He waved across the room to Charlie, checked the nearest clock (the room was full of clocks). It wouldn't be long until he could check out, change into a suit, and get in an hour or two in the water before the sun went down and it was time to head home to San Clemente.

  He was thinking about all that as he sat down on the edge of a colleague's desk and the earthquake struck.

  It seemed to go on forever. That is a characteristic of any earth tremor that continues for longer than five seconds. This one rattled the landscape for almost a full minute. Desks were cleared by the shake, which sent pencils and pens, books, and manuals flying. Near the end of the quake the ground seemed to give one monstrous heave, as though a gargantuan hand had shoved the edge of the continent from below, raising it eight inches before allowing it to crash back against the underlying basalt.

  Alarm bells were ringing all over the place, sirens were howling, and people were alternately yelling and cursing at one another. It was just like the nightmare Carrington had managed not to have in the four years he'd been assigned to San Onofre. The nightmare of the red lights.

  They were blinking on now, singly and in groups, on the walls that lined the control room.

  "Jesus Christ!" muttered Fossano, a huge bald butterball of a man who looked like nothing so much as a snowman desperately out of place in semitropical Southern California. He was sweating, and not from the tension of the earthquake. His eyes were scampering over one gauge after another, his hands moving like those of a concert pianist on the controls below. All he wanted out of life at that moment was for the red lights to turn green once more. He pleaded and begged as he worked, running through half the Catholic liturgy. Yellow. He would settle for yellow. Anything but red.

  The son-et-lumiere display refused to cooperate, though he did manage to induce some of the red lights to wink out. But more kept flashing on, faster than he could work. He kept murmuring "Christ" over and over to himself.

  Boseler, better known as The Old Man, was in the midst of it all, running back and forth from one station to another like a rat looking for an exit from its maze. He moved fast and talked quietly, displaying the control everyone else in the room wanted to demonstrate but didn't possess. He was sweating too, Carrington noted, as he dropped into his own chair. That was scary.

  "Backup One through Six on-line and operating!" he yelled as he scanned his instrumentation.

  "Right, let's square the circle, boys and girls." Boseler spoke as he strode back and forth between stations. He was a chain smoker who wasn't allowed to smoke on the job, so he chewed pencils. Carrington imagined The Old Man's lips must be rife with splinters by now.

  From across the room Sallyanne Rogers called out in that incongruously girlish voice which was no indication of the three advanced degrees she held.

  "Unit Number Two temperature is coming down!"

  "Faster. Got to do it faster." Boseler masticated his pencil and looked anxious. Rogers didn't reply, bent back to her work.

  Slowly, painfully slowly, it got quieter in the control room as the clamor of bells and sirens was replaced by the chorus of professional, well-drilled voices. Boseler conducted them like a quiet demon. The snowman's fingers were slowing as the red lights reluctantly went away and bright green took their places behind the glass.

  A readout screamed at Carrington. "Trouble in Unit Three."

  "How bad?" Boseler demanded to know. "Never mind, I can see the numbers from here. No choice now, let's go. Emergency cooling, full shutdown. C'mon, Steve, flood that sucker!"

  "Not yet, not yet!" Fossano was licking his lips as he worked switches and buttons. "We can save it."

  "Carl, I haven't got time to—"

  "I can route water from Two and One to Three by reversing pressure on all the backups. We don't have to flood the unit."

  "That's one hell of a risk, Carl," said Boseler. "If it doesn't work we could lose the whole plant plus the crew in Three. You know what happens if we lose all three units?"

  "Yes. You'll all reach Japan faster than me. I'm a lousy swimmer. But it ought to work. The parameters fit."

  "Shit," muttered Boseler. He didn't hesitate. His job didn't go to people who hesitated. "Try it, Carl. God help us if you're wrong."

  "God help all of us," Carrington heard someone mutter.

  The snowman's hands were busy once more. Carrington forced himself to monitor his own instruments. There came the water from One and Two, backflushed into Three. It was already too hot by half for proper cooling, but mixed with what they were pumping like cr
azy into the entire system it might be enough. Had to be enough.

  An awful lot of gauges went yellow and stayed there. Then they began to turn green, one by one. As still more cold water was brought into the system all the gauges began to turn, not just in One and Two but in Three as well. Meanwhile the hottest water was being expelled, much of it as steam.

  They watched and agonized for another half hour before Boseler felt secure in ordering a stand-down. Somewhere beyond the plant's outfall pipes there were likely to be some very uncomfortable fish, Carrington knew. He didn't think he'd be going surfing today, or tomorrow either. He wasn't going to set foot in the water beyond the plant until the icy California current which washed the coast had had time to do its necessary scouring.

  A senior technician was standing close to Fossano. Her belly was heaving and she was using his handkerchief. The snowman was the only man Carrington knew who actually carried a handkerchief to work each day. Bless you, Fossano, the younger man thought. "That was absolutely too fucking close," he mumbled.

  "How close was it?" said Charlie, mimicking a well-known television announcer perfectly. Carrington smiled and Sallyanne Rogers giggled nervously.

  Then Boseler was leaning over his shoulder, talking softly. "How're we doing, son?"

  "We got to One and Two fast enough, sir. We were about two minutes away from full meltdown in Unit Three."

  "Three-Mile Island was a damn picnic," said someone from across the room. "Be still my beating heart."

  "Could've been worse. A lot worse." Standing there leaning over his console, the snowman suddenly looked neither fat nor foolish. Instead he rather resembled a savior, which was much nearer the mark, Carrington knew. Savior of what, no one in the room could say. San Onofre certainly. Maybe San Clemente, Oceanside, and Dana Point as well.