And, of course, he’d have to keep clear of the lurkers in the dark, the smilers with the knives, the dark little men who would cut him open and eat him raw without the least hesitation….
Man, he hated being one of them.
Leather Man would leave that last back door open for him, or else he’d never get back, not in a million years of Sundays-the door that almost nobody else could get through, certainly no human, certainly not Cal Griffin. The Big Bad Thing would sense a thing like that for sure, and crush anyone flat before he so much as drew a breath.
But a little gray guy, particularly under just the right protection and at the right moment, might just slip on by, be taken for one of the ground crew, one of the staff.
Because as Leather Man and Papa Sky had drilled into him and into him…
Grunters It drove crazy (except for him, for the time being), flares It swallowed whole to fuel the furnace, and dragons-
Well, dragons were another thing entirely.
Time to go home. Or at least what had once been home, and now was-
“Hold it right there, you lying little creep.”
The voice came from behind him, stunningly close. Inigo turned around slowly.
Colleen Brooks stood there, not ten feet off, her crossbow aimed right at him.
He hadn’t heard her coming at all.
Damn, she was good…for a human.
“You wanna talk about it?” Colleen glared at him. “No? Suits me just fine, because most sphincters I run into just want to yak and yak. C’mon, we’re heading back.”
Busted. He took just one step toward her, when abruptly someone dashed up from behind and to the right of him, grabbed him hard and threw him down into the snow.
Which was the only thing that saved him, or his hypersensitive sight at least, because right then there was this explosion of light around him, and Colleen Brooks screamed.
When the light cleared enough for him to look up, Inigo thought for one terrible instant that she had been melted to nothing right there on the spot. Then he saw to his relief that she had just dropped to the ground and was rolling around in pain, holding her eyes and cursing, blinded-temporarily, he hoped.
Then whoever it was behind him grabbed him again.
“Move,” the voice said, and shoved him toward the open shaft. The two of them crawled in quickly, hanging from the handholds.
“The hatch, grab the hatch,” the voice commanded.
Inigo grabbed the heavy iron door by its inner wheel, pulled it down secure.
“Now dog it. Hard.”
Inigo twisted it, then gave it an extra turn no ordinary mortal could undo.
The two of them slid down the walls of the shaft like lizards, like the geckos Inigo had seen on Kauai when his folks had taken him on vacation, in the good time before his dad had gotten the security job at the Project.
It seemed to take forever, the two of them descending in silence, but finally they reached bottom. Breathing hard in the echoing blackness, Inigo faced the one who had saved him.
The man reached out a hand palm-up, and a glowing ball appeared in it, a flawless globe of shimmering blue fog. Inigo squinted painfully against the light.
The figure adjusted his straw cowboy hat with the five aces, set it right.
“Now you’re gonna tell me a thing or two,” Goldie said, neither his eyes nor his mouth smiling, in his own way every bit as terrifying as Leather Man could be.
There was nothing funny about him at all.
SEVENTEEN
Back in the good old twentieth century when Einstein was the latest word in all things physical, the Astronomy Department had set up this telescope-a Meade Starfinder situated in the cupola atop what had once been the Atherton Agricultural College, next to the newer Physical Sciences Building-for long-term use by its faculty and student body.
But Melissa Wade was the only person who came here anymore.
The retractable domed roof of the cupola had been donated by a wealthy alumnus, a tool-and-dye tycoon with a stargazing fetish. Melissa hadn’t expected a clear night, considering the long snowy day. But the sky had opened like a treasure box just after dark. And so, alone between dinner call and lights-out, she had come here and cranked back the roof.
The room was stocked with scope accessories-digital imagers and trackers-but Melissa left these alone. They were an unnecessary draw on the community current, for one thing; moreover, Melissa wasn’t here to do research or even serious observing. She just liked the place. It was conducive to thought. It was her aerie. Crossing the night-lit room, she caught her reflection in the curved glass of the dead monitors, and quickly looked away. Not that she was unattractive; quite the reverse. She got her curves from her mom; her wide, radiant smile from her dad; and that glowing, perpetual-tan skin from the mixture of both, the sweet gift of having one parent white, one black. Whenever she traversed the quad, she was aware of heads turning to watch her; the men, and women, too, as if she was something quite extraordinary.
But she wasn’t, she knew; at least, not that aspect of her. It was merely something she’d been given, not something she’d earned. And so she chose not to dwell on it, not even in reflection.
And anyway, her looks had no effect on Jeff.
Melissa plopped herself down in the plush leather chair and stared up at the expanse of stars through the open dome, gemstones scattered across black velvet. She put her eye to the viewfinder, and the scene leapt to dazzling intensity.
Some astronomy plebe might look at that array and see only constellations and nomenclature; man imposing his arbitrary meaning on nature, and rendering himself blind.
But Melissa’s focus of study had never been astronomy, and what she’d learned by rote in those required classes she’d mostly forgotten. Of all the celestial bodies in the night sky, she could still identify only the moon, Venus and Mars, the Big Dipper, Polaris the North Star and a smattering of others.
But none of that mattered. She didn’t have to name them. She loved them much more simply than that.
With all its optical gear and tracking equipment disengaged, the Meade was little more than an expensive amateur scope. What was different since the Change was the sky. Less pollution to block the view. No competing light from automobiles or cities or towns (except here in Atherton, and then only before curfew). Melissa had grown up in Los Angeles, where the night sky was generally blank as slate. Out here in the boonies-and since the Change-the sky was a river of stars.
She bathed in it.
Stars were suns, very far away. The fuzzy ones were galaxies-whole clusters of stars. And even after the Change they had not varied in their courses. Maybe that was what she found so reassuring in this immensity, the fact that all this scary terrestrial stuff was less than a fleabite against the somber rotations of the sky.
Still, it didn’t change the fact that the natural laws-at least locally, in galactic terms-had become a whole ’nother ball game.
Melissa had been a physics major, specializing in quantum mechanics, but had soon found that her real skill was as a grease monkey. She’d always messed around with motors and engines. Her dad had been a first-rate mechanic-a weekend hobbyist mainly, but a good one-and he’d let her fool around with tools and equipment from before she was riding a bike minus the training wheels.
So when she joined the Atherton lab as a grad student import from UCLA’s Large Plasma Device facility, she’d just naturally fallen into being the pair of hands supervising the building of Jeff Arcott’s own radically original version of the plasma zapper, hand-tooling the steel housings and mounting the big water-cooled bus bars, pumping all the air out of the hundred-yard cylindrical chamber until you had a near-perfect vacuum at barely a billionth of an atmosphere, then introducing argon into the mix. Theo Siegel had taken the lion’s share of fine-tuning the lasers and doing the other minute calibrations. And Jeff Arcott was the designer on high, the lord of creation, the big brain in a globe the mutants carried around.