Second Horseman Out of Eden m-7

by George C. Chesbro

  There was one very large room where I suspected some answers might have been. In the center of the room was a huge display stand, a kind of great wooden box on legs, surrounded by shards of plastic. There were marks on the empty walls where maps or charts might have been hanging. The entire floor was covered with ooze, a mixture of water and sand littered with what appeared to be electrical components and large swatches of rotted vegetation. Judging from the size of the room and the depth of the mire on the floor, I judged that the container that had been on the display stand had held upwards of a thousand gallons of water. I was certain that what had been demolished had been a model of a biosphere.

  Off to my right, half submerged in the ooze and caught on a piece of broken plastic, there was what appeared to be a piece of posterboard. I sloshed over and picked it up. In black letters against a pale blue background was written the word EDEN.

  I found Peter Patton's corpse, the head twisted around and bent back at an impossible angle, in an adjacent room, which looked like it had once been used for the storage of maintenance supplies. After breaking Patton's neck, Tanker Thompson had flung the body onto a pile of empty packing crates; one limp arm was draped over the main thermostat, which accounted for the heat. I winced against the smell, turned, and hurried out of the room. I went to the extreme end of the corridor, turned right, and abruptly stopped. In front of me was the door to another elevator.

  I slowly approached the elevator, stopped in front of it. I reached out with a slightly trembling hand for the call button, then drew back, uncertain of what to do.

  There was no doubt in my mind that the elevator led up to Henry Blaisdel's penthouse, but simply getting in and riding up didn't seem like such a good idea. State-of-the-art security, Garth had said, which meant that my operating the elevator could well set off alarms, and I would find a large unwelcoming committee at the top. Then again, they might not expect intruders to come up by way of Nuvironment, since the Nuvironment offices themselves were so difficult to get to. Whatever. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that taking the elevator was probably as good an alternative as any, and better than most. I was going to try to break in on Henry Blaisdel by walking in his front door.

  I punched the call button. Less than a half minute later the door opened, and I stepped into the spacious, mahogany and velvet-lined interior. I punched the button at the side of the door. The elevator whirred, began moving up silently, but at what I could tell was high speed.

  When the elevator stopped, I crouched down at the back, Seecamp held out in front of me with both hands. The door opened, and I found myself staring out into space that was, if not exactly empty, at least devoid of people. I straightened up and, still holding my pistol at the ready, stepped out onto thick, red carpeting that covered the entire floor, and that reminded me of nothing so much as a sea of blood. Rising from this red sea were a series of Doric columns and rectangular Lucite panels on which were hung various paintings executed in what I thought of as Nazi-propaganda style: handsome men, women, and children-all white-marched arm in arm through the paintings, always heading toward a glowing figure, whom I assumed to be Jesus, waiting for them in the distance. In his right hand the glowing Jesus-figure carried a gleaming, upraised sword, and in the left a stylized swastika, a perversion of the cross. Cowering in the corners of all the paintings were writhing, ugly caricatures of blacks, Jews, and Asiatics. There were dozens of these obscene paintings, turning the floor into a kind of art museum that was a real horror show.

  The piece de resistance, propped up on a red velvet throne inside a ceiling-high vacuum chamber, was at the far end of the floor.

  It was impossible to tell how long Henry Blaisdel had been dead, because there were no dates written on or inside the glass case that was his mausoleum, but somebody had done a pretty good job of stuffing the old boy, because his corpse looked better than some living people I know. He was dressed in a three-piece black suit with black wing-tip shoes, leaning forward slightly on his throne and staring thoughtfully off into the distance. Beside him stood a statue of Jesus with one plaster arm draped protectively over Blaisdel's frail shoulders.

  I loved it. It certainly explained why Henry Blaisdel hadn't been sighted in the past few years, and I could only marvel at the number and complexity of the legal stratagems that must have been required to keep the old man's death a secret, and his fortune under the control of. . whoever was controlling it. Certainly, Henry Blaisdel himself must have made all the arrangements before his death. He'd been a man with a purpose; judging by what the men to whom he'd obviously bequeathed his money and power had been and were up to, it was a very dangerous purpose.

  To the right of the mausoleum was a circular marble staircase. The small shards of plastic embedded in the caked mud on my sneakers clicked and scraped when I stepped on the stone; I kicked off my sneakers, tied the laces together, and draped them around my neck. Then, trying to make myself even smaller than I was, I moved slowly up the staircase, keeping to the right. There was still no sign of anybody, no sound in the massive triplex but my own hoarse breathing. I reached the top of the staircase, peered around the marble balustrade-again saw nobody in my immediate field of vision. It occurred to me that I was wasting my time, that the penthouse was as empty as the Nuvironment offices fifty-nine stories below, as lifeless as the dead old man downstairs. But I had no other place to go, no other hope. .

  Still holding the Seecamp out in front of me, I straightened up, stepped out onto the carpet at the top of the stairs. There was a corridor, lined on both sides with bedrooms-all individually and expensively decorated, but with no sign that anybody had been using them lately. There was a heavy oak door at the end of the corridor. I went through it, stopped abruptly, and sucked in a deep breath as my heart began to beat faster.

  The biosphere model was on a huge table identical to the one I had seen on the ninth floor. It was at least twenty feet long and ten feet wide, with the clear plastic dome over it virtually touching the twelve-foot-high ceiling. Bolted to the side of the table was a wooden plaque with gold lettering: EDEN. I pulled over a straight-backed chair, climbed up on it in order to get a better look at this model of Henry Blaisdel's idea of Paradise.

  Beneath its massive plastic sky, Eden was shaped like the letter F. The base of the F was to my right, and perhaps a third of the section was modeled to simulate desert, complete with dunes, cactus, and stone mesas. The desert merged with what appeared to be a swamp; water drained into lagoons, which in turn fed a large lake. There was even what might be termed an ocean. The top leg of the F, barely visible through the condensed mist which had collected on the plastic, was a model rain forest, with condensation coils, battery powered in the model, set into the plastic over it. Even as I watched, it began to "rain" in the jungle section under the dome; water dripped from the ceiling, ran down hillsides to collect in streams and lagoons, which in turn emptied into the "lake" and the "ocean."

  The middle leg of the F comprised living quarters for the inhabitants. There was a "Main Street" lined on both sides with small cottages, tilled fields, an orchard, and cutaway models of buildings that appeared to be a laboratory, a library, and an amphitheater. At the end of Main Street was a white church topped by the group's swastika-cross.

  I stared down into the biosphere, trying to understand the point of this thing that was Henry Blaisdel's fantasy and obsession; since part of his religious fantasy had been that all true believers would be "Raptured" up to heaven in the early stages of the coming Tribulation, there wouldn't seem any need for this oversized goldfish bowl on earth.

  It appeared that he and his fellow believers had been hedging their bets, so to speak, preparing something he conceived of as a refuge for those of his group who, for one reason or another-perhaps overcrowding in heaven-might not be Raptured in the Final Days. But then, I thought, it probably made no sense for me to try to make sense of the thinking of a bunch of murderous schizoids, or to understand what the
re was about Eden that Blaisdel had thought made it demon-proof.

  It wasn't demons I was worried about. If Eden had, somehow, already been built to the scale represented by the model, it covered several acres-and it was certainly nowhere in the New York metropolitan region. Tanker Thompson had said as much. To be constructed in secret, and its gargantuan presence kept a secret, it would have to be located somewhere where there were vast, empty spaces-and, even then, it might be camouflaged. With all of Nuvironment's records destroyed and its personnel decimated at their own hands or Tanker Thompson's, I might never find Eden.

  Then again, Eden might exist only in this model; there might never have been a shipment of a hundred tons of rain forest soil, but only the cubic yard or so I estimated to be in the model-and that could have been brought into the country with little difficulty. Perhaps Vicky Brown had been here, getting her hands dirty as she'd played with the soil while the model was being built.

  But that was not the gospel according to Tanker Thompson, who'd said he'd carried the letter in his pocket from somewhere else. I could think of no reason why the man should have lied to me. Also, even if Vicky Brown had been up in this penthouse, she certainly wasn't now. And I was no closer to finding out what had happened to Garth, and where he was being held.

  I was thinking these thoughts, feeling thoroughly frustrated and sorry for myself, when the chair was abruptly pulled from under me. I pitched forward, banging my face against the hard plastic of the dome. An instant later something very hard hit me at the base of the skull. I imagined I passed like a ghost through the barrier of plastic; I was falling, as if pushed from a plane, through the sky, down toward the jungle, swamp, desert, ocean, lagoons, and lakes. I finally landed on a blood-red carpet that swallowed me up in darkness.

  12

  I awoke to some bad news, some good news, and some more bad news. The bad news was that I was up on a wooden platform, hands securely strapped over my head to some kind of skeletal metal frame; since I didn't recognize anything in my surroundings, I assumed I was in another room on the third floor of the triplex.

  The good news was that Garth was there beside me, alive.

  The bad news was that he was also strapped to the frame. Judging from the dried blood on his wrists around the leather thongs that cut into his flesh, he'd spent a good deal of time trying-unsuccessfully, obviously-to free himself. It didn't bode well.

  "Hey, Mongo," Garth said to me when he saw that I was conscious. "You okay?"

  "Is that a rhetorical question?"

  "You've got a hell of a bump on your forehead, and two black eyes. Are you hurting?"

  "I'm betting I've got an even bigger bump on the back of my head, but it's nothing that a couple of aspirin won't fix. You?"

  "I'm all right-but the situation kind of sucks, doesn't it?"

  "Yeah."

  "Shit," my brother said with a thin smile. "You can't rescue anybody. What the hell good are you?"

  "I didn't even know you were here, brother," I said tightly. Now that I saw that Garth was alive, my relief at finding him was being rapidly supplanted by anger-and I didn't care if it showed. "I didn't know where you were, or whether you were dead or alive, and for some reason that bothered me just a tad-especially when I recalled what William Kenecky looked like when he finally turned up. I was on my way up here to confront the old man."

  "Blaisdel's dead, you know. Probably has been for years."

  "Yeah; I saw the mummy downstairs. And by the way, I checked through all the files in your office, and couldn't find even a teeny-weeny clue as to what you were up to, or where you were going. That's a procedure we're definitely going to have to change, even if it's in the next life. Where the hell did they catch you?"

  Garth studied me for a few moments with his limpid brown eyes, then looked away. "Here," he replied evenly. "I figured Blaisdel would certainly know where the girl was, and I wanted to go right at him; I was tired of all the complications and bullshit."

  "You'd already made your decision the last time we talked, hadn't you? Even then, you knew Goddamn well that you were going to try to break in here."

  Now Garth looked at me again, nodded. "Yeah," he said quietly. "I thought I'd figured out a way to bypass the security system, and I figured that if I could get close enough to Blaisdel to put a gun to his head, we'd find out fast enough where Vicky Brown is. Obviously, I missed a circuit somewhere; those two ballplayers, Velazian and Rokan, got me on the way in."

  "Damn you, Garth!" I snapped. "Why the hell didn't you tell me what you planned to do?!"

  "Because I didn't want you to know," he replied matter-of-factly. "I was planning a forced entry, trespassing, and assault on one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. After we found Vicky Brown and made certain she was going to be all right, I didn't care what happened to me; I did care what happened to you. Just by telling you what I was going to do, I'd have made you an accessory to a series of major crimes. You'd have lost your license and your business. Considering that, I couldn't see the sense in involving you in what I considered to be a one-man job."

  "Let me tell you something, brother," I said tightly. "You're lucky I'm tied up, because if I wasn't I'd sure as hell go to work on your nose again. Flow do you know I wouldn't have agreed with you? What the hell do you think I'm doing here now? It's true that I came looking for information on you, but why did you assume I wouldn't have done the same for Vicky Brown?"

  "You would have. That's my point. You'd have agreed, and you'd have insisted on coming along. I wanted to keep you out of this particular little venture."

  "If you weren't my brother, and if I didn't love you, I think I'd call you a shithead. Sometimes you really piss me off."

  "How tight are those straps of yours, Mongo?"

  I wriggled a bit, wriggled harder, then started really heaving myself around. The leather straps on my wrists and ankles held tight, and I could easily understand how Garth had cut himself trying to get away. "Tight," I said.

  "Anything in your bag of tricks that might get us off this frame?"

  "Not that I can think of at the moment."

  "Then we've got a real problem, Mongo."

  "No shit?"

  "You don't understand."

  "I understand that I don't like being tied up here. But if they just mean to leave us here to die of thirst and starvation, why didn't they simply off us and be done with it?"

  "Probably because they're getting their jollies out of letting us think about what's going to happen; with these guys, it's anybody's guess what they're thinking."

  "Uh, what's going to happen?"

  "Look behind you."

  I was spread-eagled to the frame in such a way that it was hard for me to turn my head, but by arching my back and craning my neck it was possible for me to catch a glimpse of what was being supported by the skeletal, boxlike apparatus: it looked like a massive steel cannister, perhaps twelve feet high and more than a yard in diameter, bristling with red, yellow, and blue wires. I swallowed hard, found that my mouth was dry.

  "A bomb?" I croaked, looking back at my brother.

  "Not just any old bomb, Mongo," Garth replied softly. "What we've got at our backs is the guts of a B-53-a hydrogen bomb, with a built-in nuclear device to set it off. It has a yield of nine megatons-the equivalent of seven hundred and fifty of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima. If that thing goes off, Manhattan will be vaporized, and all of the other boroughs will be flattened. Millions of people are going to die, Mongo-not only here, but in Detroit, and Israel, and maybe a few other sites. What happens after that will depend, I suppose, on who the various world leaders think is responsible. Blaisdel-when he was alive-Kenecky, and Peter Patton believed that the explosions would trigger a nuclear war with Russia, because the Bible told them so. I don't know where they found that in the Bible, but they may have been on to something. This bomb, and the others like it, will be triggered by a radio signal beamed by satellite at exactly midnight,
New Year's Eve, unless we can find a way to stop it."

  Numb with horror, I moved my lips-but no sound came out. Then I realized that I really had nothing to say. I started desperately jerking my body around on the frame; I stopped and let my body sag when I felt blood begin to ooze from the cuts on my wrists and flow down my forearms. "Jesus Christ," I groaned.

  "That's who they think ordered this all up," Garth said softly.

  "How the hell could they get hold of hydrogen bombs?"

  "It probably wasn't nearly as difficult for somebody like Blaisdel as we'd all like to think it should be. For decades, he had his fingers in just about every military production pie there was. He owned a number of bomb production plants that operated under the aegis of the Department of Energy. In the sixties he was building some components of hydrogen bombs-B-53s-for them. They used to be fitted on the Strategic Air Command's B-52 Stratofortresses, but SAC mothballed them in 1983 and went to smaller bombs and Cruise missiles. Then, a while back, the Pentagon made a rather quiet decision to start taking them out of mothballs-probably because the generals are a little concerned that all the newer gadgets aren't nearly as reliable as they're supposed to be; they wanted some serious, proven firepower on hand. That much is for certain. My guess is that if we had access to classified information we'd find out that Blaisdel's facilities were used to store the bombs; he had access, and he somehow managed-or made it possible for his lieutenants to manage-to spirit away three or more of them. Considering all the talent he had working for him, it's even conceivable that he had his own built."