Bizarrely, the little cleaning machines were already busy, removing the bodies of dead rats and wiping up blood and slime and fragments of entrails. The machines could be damaged by minisaur jaws, but a swipe of the tail simply knocked them a few yards away. They started right back.
Gordy Rolfe’s gray eyes were bright behind the eyeglasses. If he heard Celine’s words, they had no effect.
She surveyed the rest of the chamber. Weapons. Anything could be a weapon. She hurried across the room to the workbench. Most of the tools were too light or too short. She wanted something heavy and long enough to be used at a distance.
The biggest object on the bench was a huge pair of cutting shears designed to clip sheet metal or bolts. She hefted the tool and decided it was too cumbersome. The second-best was a four-pound steel hammer with a long handle, flat on its main striking face but with a three-inch punch spike sticking out in the other direction.
Celine lifted it. One hand would be possible, but two hands were better. She walked back across the room, swinging the hammer up and over her head to get the balance.
Was she really going to do this, when she had already told herself that it would be total folly to go too near?
Quickly, or not at all. She moved forward. She was now within the carnosaur’s reach if the animal lunged to the end of the chain. The head swung in her direction. It could not see her, but could it smell her?
Quickly. One shot was all you got.
She took another step forward. Hammer up, above her head. Down with the spike, into the carnosaur’s skull, between and behind the ruined eyes — blood and evil-smelling spittle, spraying her face and hair and clothing — a desperate leap backward, away.
She was barely in time. The carnosaur, from intent or muscular reflex, plunged in her direction. It was halted by the chain.
The head and torso fell backward at the same time as the legs jerked forward. Celine saw taloned, three-toed feet flex just inches away from her belly as the body convulsed and the legs stretched to their full length. For a moment the carnosaur stood balanced on the thick tail, then it slowly collapsed.
As the final death spasm began, the scaled head turned again in Celine’s direction. The hammer spike was still embedded there. She saw that in her terror she had hit hard enough to fracture and split the whole skull.
She saw that Gordy Rolfe was looking at her. He was laughing. “Hell of a whack. I wouldn’t like you to get mad with me. But you’ve got a nerve, killing my minirex.”
Celine wiped carnosaur gore and spittle from her eyes and lips. “That was monstrous and unnatural. I had to put the poor beast out of its misery.”
“It would have died anyway in a few minutes. As for unnatural, you’re completely wrong. What we saw is totally natural. That’s how animals die in the wild. Once they get old or sick, something drags them down and eats them.”
Gordy Rolfe was loving every minute. Celine knew it from the pleasure in his glittering eyes and the flush of color on his pallid cheeks. Suddenly, all she wanted to do was get away from him and back to the surface.
“You leaving?” Rolfe watched her intently as she turned toward the circular exit hatch.
Celine did not trust herself to speak. She nodded and kept moving.
“Well, I guess the fun’s over, anyway.” Rolfe reached for the controller at his waist. “One more bit of cleanup to do, then I’ll see you on your way.”
He pressed a sequence of keys. The room filled with high-pitched squeaks. Celine saw scores of rats, their gray skins sparking and smoking, contort into unnatural shapes and collapse to the floor.
“Can’t have them running loose, can we? There’s no saying where they’d get to after they’d eaten.” Rolfe glanced at Celine. “Don’t worry, I only disposed of the ones running free. The ones in the cages are fine. And the dead ones go to the habitat, so they won’t be wasted.”
He led the way down the spiral staircase. Celine followed, very slowly. She felt weak in the knees. Although she had wiped her face, the reek of carnosaur blood saturated her hair and clothing.
Gordy went with her to the elevators. “Don’t forget our deal,” he said. “I’ll keep my end; a set of rolfes will be on the way to Sky City before the end of the week. By that time I expect to hear what you’re doing about my land.”
“I’ll work on it.” Celine forced the words out and pressed the elevator button. She could not wait for the doors to close and the car to ascend. She craved fresh air and sanity. When the slow-rising elevator at last opened on the highest level, she found Chesley Reiter and the rest of his group waiting. One look at her, and the chief of security grabbed her arm.
“It’s all right, Ches, I’m fine.” She gently freed herself. “None of this is my blood.”
“But . . . Madam President?”
He was inviting an explanation. Celine was not ready to give one. She walked past them, through the school-house and on into the open air. It seemed that she had been underground for many hours, and she expected to find it was night outside the building. Instead she walked out into the twilight gloom of an early evening downpour. The thunderstorm had come and gone, leaving in its place a steady rain.
Celine turned her face upward, welcoming the drops. It would be a long time before she felt clean again.
The armored car stood with the door open and the driver waiting. Celine nodded to him and climbed in without a word. Before the door closed she was reaching for the telcom unit to call Nick Lopez. He answered so quickly that she suspected he had been waiting by his own unit.
“Rolfe agreed,” Celine said at once. “He’ll start shipping more up by the end of the week.”
“I can’t believe it. How did you talk him into it?”
“I don’t think I did. I think he has his own reasons for wanting to send rolfes to Sky City, but I can’t begin to guess what they are. Nick, I’ve never had a meeting like that in my whole life. Gordy Rolfe is crazier than you can imagine.”
“I told you he was losing it. What did he do? Start lecturing you on the superiority of small mammals?”
“More than that.” Celine glanced around the armored vehicle. The rest of the security staff had piled in and the driver was waiting for instructions. “Back to the White House,” she said. And, as the car began to roll forward, “Our friend gave me his idea of a practical demonstration.”
“Meaning what? With Gordy, I hardly dare to consider the possibilities.”
Celine hesitated. Should she tell Nick, when the security staff would be hanging on her every word? Well, why not. They, had waited for hours in the rain, probably imagining that she was down there being lavishly entertained by the powerful head of the Argos Group. They might as well learn the truth.
“Did you know he raises dinosaurs down there?”
“He showed them to me. Dwarf varieties, hidden in the jungle around his habitat control room.”
“Not always hidden.” Celine described the minirex and its battle to the death with the cageful of rats. She omitted only her own role in delivering the coup de grace to the carnosaur.
Nick Lopez listened without saying a word. The security staff in the car with Celine were equally silent. The vehicle was racing back toward Washington at its highest speed, and the only sound adding to Celine’s voice was the soft hiss of fullerene tires over sodden roadway. Recalling the final moments with the carnosaur, she again became aware of the smell of blood and saliva permeating her hair and clothes.
“We just have to hope that he’s sane on other matters,” she concluded. “Either the rolfes will appear in a few days for shipping up, or they won’t.”
“How did he sound when you left?”
“Cheerful. Manic. As though we’d been partying together.”
“Then I think this might be a good time for me to call him.”
“You might not get through, Nick. He ignored calls when I was there.”
“I don’t think he’ll ignore me. I have a special tie line. One
other question before we sign off.”
“Ask. But keep it short.” Celine was swept by a dreadful wave of fatigue. She wanted to put her head back on the padded car seat and go to sleep.
“What’s the rest of the story? I’ve never heard of Gordy Rolfe making a deal just for money. What else is he asking?”
“The land around the habitat, four miles in every direction, for as long as he’s alive and half a century more. His own personal paradise.” Celine laid her head back and closed her eyes. She could see the carnosaur, eyeless and half gutted, sinking into its death agony. “But you and I might call it hell.”
22
It was a nightmare from Maddy’s childhood. You woke slowly, in near-total darkness, knowing that you were not alone in the room. The thing — the shadowy form of the he-she-it — stood still and silent at the end of the bed. You lay frozen, too scared to move, too scared to scream.
At last you went back to sleep. In the morning you looked and looked, but you found no trace of the phantom.
It was happening now, and you were not a child. You were Maddy Wheatstone, a grown woman with no time for adolescent fantasies. You were no longer in the family home in Edmonton. You were — where?
Maddy struggled to full consciousness. Her eyes were wide open. This was not a dream. The shadow was still there. It loomed by her bedside, leaning over her, shaped like a man.
And she was — oh God, she was on Sky City, where the murderer of a dozen girls wandered free.
Maddy gasped, drew up her legs, and threw herself over the other side of the bed. She grabbed a boot, the only solid object she could find, and stabbed at the wall panel.
The light flashed on. It showed John Hyslop, mouth open and eyes squinted half shut against the glare, standing by the side of the bed.
“John!” Maddy’s curiosity was as strong as her relief.
“What are you doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night?”
“I’m sorry. I did knock before I came in, but you slept through it. I’ve been standing here wondering if I ought to wake you.”
“For what?” She saw the clock. “It’s three in the morning.”
He was not just looking at her, he was staring. Maddy realized that she was wearing a shorter-than-usual nightgown. Well, that was all right. Let him know what he was missing.
“You did say . . .” he began. “I mean, you did tell me you’d like to see it.”
“See what?” Maddy frowned, trying to shift gears.
“Whatever there is to see. When we get under way.”
“You mean we’re on the move?”
“Very soon. Everything is ready. The boosters fire at four.”
“Then of course I want to see it. I’m sorry, John, I shouldn’t have snapped at you. Thanks for waking me.” She saw his weary eyes. “Have you had any sleep at all?”
“No. I’ll sleep when I’m sure everything is all right.”
“Don’t do another Neirling boost. They’re bad for you.” Maddy heard the mothering tone in her voice, but it was too late to do anything about that. She went across to the small closet and pulled out pants and a sleeveless top. “I have to dress. You can stay if you like, but if it makes you feel uncomfortable, you should step outside.”
Back on Earth she wouldn’t have thought to mention it, but different privacy standards applied on Sky City.
“I’ll stay.” John’s mumble could barely be heard.
“Fine.” Maddy slipped off her nightgown and pulled on her clothes. She noticed that he kept his back turned the whole time. So much for her girlish charms. As she pulled on her boots she asked, “Where should I go for the best view?”
“Actually, for the first day or so there’ll be nothing to see. Sky City will accelerate so slowly, only the observing instruments will tell you that we’re leaving orbit.”
“You mean I won’t even know we’ve started boosting?”
“Oh, you’ll know all right. I hope we don’t know too well.” John smiled at Maddy’s perplexed look, his first smile since the light went on. “The acceleration will be very small, but to push the whole of Sky City we’ll be applying thrust to just a dozen areas, and each one’s only a couple of meters across.”
“Can that be a problem?”
“We’re hoping not. Our calculations say we’ll be all right. But imagine that you had an enormous dish, and you supported it on a dozen tiny pins around the edge and nowhere else. You’d worry that if the dish were heavy enough, the pins would push right through it. We can’t let the local boosters push so hard that they stress the Sky City structure locally beyond what it can stand.”
“What happens if the stresses are too great?”
“Well, we’ll be watching closely. We won’t let it go so far that the plates buckle or the joints fail. But if we have to reduce the thrust, we’ll have other problems. The acceleration would have to be smaller, and then all our other schedules for the new particle defense system would have to change.”
“I see.” Maddy did see — several things. She liked John’s hand on her arm, guiding her along. And he was comfortable again, away from the world of naked ladies and back to his stresses and strains and Poisson’s ratios and buckling coefficients. “Oh, I forgot. What about the new rolfes? Are they on their way from Earth?”
“Not yet. We’re expecting the first ones any day now.”
He did not mention that the arrival of the rolfes would remove Maddy’s reason for remaining on Sky City. She had called Gordy Rolfe two days ago, prepared to offer logic of her own as to why she ought to remain. Gordy had beaten her to it with his first remark: “Hyslop isn’t on the Aten asteroid project anymore.”
“I know.”
“But you stay there. I want you glued to him tighter than ever. Report to me on his every move.”
Gordy had glared at her out of the screen. The scene around him looked like a junkyard, bits and pieces of equipment everywhere. He looked like a junkyard, too, food on his unshaven face and the front of the black jumpsuit, feverish bloodshot eyes and trembling hands.
“But what do I tell Bruno Colombo? I need a reason for staying on Sky City.” She knew that Gordy was in the underground habitat, because she could see the circular wall and the dark green plants beyond it.
“Hell, d’you want me to do your job for you? Tell him anything you like. Sweet-talk Hyslop. Smile at him, show him your tits, open your legs, whatever.”
“I’m not sure that sort of thing works with Hyslop.” It hasn’t so far, and I have been sort of trying. But Gordy can’t be trusted with that sort of detail.
“Fine. It wouldn’t work with me, either. Maybe he’s the one who should be working for Argos instead of you.” Gordy lifted the spindly metal shaft that he was holding in one greasy hand. “All right, here’s what you do. You tell them you have to stay up there until all the new rolfes have arrived, just in case they don’t work right and you have to fix them. That will give you at least ten days.”
“If the rolfes don’t work when they arrive, there’s not much chance I’ll be able to fix them. I’m no great expert when it comes to electronics.”
“Tell me news. It won’t matter. They’ll work exactly as they’re supposed to, and you won’t have to fix a damn thing.”
“How do you know they’ll work?”
He snarled at her. Somehow he had managed to get graphite on his front teeth. They were streaked with black. “The rolfes will work perfectly, because I’m making the fucking things. Personally. Now are you happy? Get back to work. Follow Hyslop, watch what he does. Especially if he starts digging into inventory records and delivery schedules, anything that relates to Argos Group activities. If that happens, you call me at once. Anytime.”
“Anytime?”
“You heard me. You work twenty-four hours a day, the way I do.”
And look the way you do? But he was gone before Maddy could be tempted.
In any case, there was no way to track John Hyslop day and night.
Nights could have been easy, but sexually he was the most timid man she had ever met. He found her attractive, she felt sure he did, based on the few occasions when they had both let down their guards. But he never made a move. She had gone as far as she could without grabbing him and dragging him into the bedroom. Was that what he needed? It was about all that was left.
He still had his hand on her arm, leading her. They were going “up” toward the central axis of Sky City, and the centrifugal force against which they climbed was steadily dropping.
“Where are you taking me? To the engineering information center?”
“No, There’s an observation chamber outside the main body of the city, near the power-generating plant. You’ll have the best view from there.”
Maddy had learned the basic geometry and jargon of Sky City. The structure was in orbit around the Earth and at the same time spun around its central axis. That axis always pointed to a fixed direction in space, out toward the cone end of the space shield and Alpha Centauri. The simulation chamber where she and John Hyslop had discovered Lucille DeNorville’s mutilated body lay on the “front” side of the city, the side facing toward the shield. The power-generation plant sat on the “back” side, with the bulk of the city between them and the shield to provide better protection from the particle storm. “We won’t be able to see the shield, will we?”
“Part of it will be in your field of view, beyond the edges of the Sky City disk. But I doubt you’ll actually be able to see it. It’s too tenuous.” They had reached the axis, and John was floating her along the broad air-filled tunnel extending beyond the bulk of Sky City in the direction of the power-generation plant. “Don’t worry; the shield isn’t where the action is. You’ll see everything worth seeing from right here.”
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