Shelley regained control of himself with a visible effort. ‘My only hope is that someone finds these records before it’s too late. I’ll have to hide them somewhere so that it can’t get them and yet where they’ll be found by whoever comes here next. But where?’
There was a noise ofT-screen and Shelley spun round again. The door had apparently opened. They saw him raise the gun then heard him say, still facing away from the camera ‘Oh, it’sjyou, thank God… for a moment I thought it was…’
The screen went blank again.
Paul kept the tape running but there was nothing else on it. Shelley didn’t reappear.
‘Think there’s any chance of repairing one of those boats?’ asked Mark quietly.
‘Take it easy. We saw Shelley last night so he obviously survived. And he certainly looked in better shape then than he did on that tape. Whatever it was, or is, must have been overcome by Shelley and his pals.’
‘You want to make a bet on that?’ said Mark. ‘And what was all that stuff about being dead not a protection. Protection against what, that’s what I want to know.’
Paul gestured at the racks of tape. ‘The answer has to be there somewhere. We keep searching.’
‘Hey!’ Mark was staring at one of the monitors. ‘Look!’ Paul looked and saw the figure of a woman walking down a corridor withjher back to the camera. He glanced immediately at the screen showing the view of the recreation room and saw that all three girls were still playing cards. His pulse quickened. So there was someone else on the rig apart from Shelley.
‘Which level is that picture coming from?’ he asked excitedly. ‘Can you tell?’
Mark shook his head. ‘They all look alike to me.’
The woman, who was walking with a fast, purposeful stride, reached the end of the corridor and disappeared from view. Paul swore and started pressing buttons on the camera controls, hoping to pick her up on another screen. Finally he succeeded, but again she had her back to them and was rapidly moving away from the camera. This time, however, they could make out a sign on a nearby wall. It read ‘Level Two’.
‘She’s on this floor,’ cried Paul, leaping up. ‘I’m going to find her. You try and keep track of her with the cameras in case I lose her.’
Paul hurried out of the room. Mark opened his mouth to call after him but realised he had no idea what he wanted to say. All he knew was that he didn’t care for suddenly being on his own…
He scanned the bank of monitors for the woman. There was no sign of her so he started punching buttons at random, cutting to new cameras. Then he spotted her again. This time she was walking towards the camera. She was wearing a white lab coat and had short blonde hair but he couldn’t make out her face.
Mark frowned as he stared hard at the screen. The woman was getting closer now but her face remained indistinct. Blurred even. Was there something wrong with the camera? A smear on the lens perhaps?
The woman continued to approach the camera. Then she was directly under it…
Mark screamed.
As the woman had walked by the camera she had looked briefly up at it. There had been no way for Mark to avoid the horrible truth…
She had no face.
She had eyes. The round, staring eyes of a fish. Eyes straight out of a nightmare. But that was all. The rest of her face was completely smooth.
Paul caught a glimpse of her ahead of him as she turned a corner. ‘Hey!’ he called and started walking faster. He hurried round the corner and saw that she was now only ten yards or so in front of him. He called out again but she didn’t give any indication of hearing him. She continued on at her same fast pace.
Paul broke into a run and caught up with her just before she reached the next corner. ‘Hey, I want to speak to you,’ he said, grabbing her by the shoulder and pulling her around.
Then he gave a gasp of surprise.
Seven
Mark groaned. Someone was shaking him roughly by the shoulder and he wished they wouldn’t. Reluctantly he opened his eyes. Where was he? Oh yes, on the floor of the video room. But why? What had happened?
He focused his eyes and saw Paul bending over him with a concerned expression. Behind him there was someone else. A woman in a white coat. With short blonde hair…
Then he remembered. He screamed again. Frantically he tried to scramble to his feet. He had to get away from her — the Woman With No Face. The Woman With The Round Eyes..
‘Mark!’
Paul’s yell coincided with a stinging slap on the side of Mark’s face. He stopped screaming and slumped back to the floor. He could see the woman plainly now. She had attractive green eyes, snub nose and wide, sensual mouth. She was very beautiful. He stared at her in amazement.
‘Mark, what’s wrong? W'hat happened?’ cried Paul.
Mark couldn’t speak. He continued to stare dumbly at the woman. She was looking down at him with concern in her eyes.
She spoke. ‘He’s suffering from shock. I’ve seen it before. He needs to be kept warm.’
Mark finally managed to say something. ‘Who’s she.?’
‘This is Dr Carol Soames. She’s who we saw on the TV screen. She’s going to help us. But what happened to you? What’s wrong?’ asked Paul.
Mark shook his head dazedly. ‘I saw… I saw something. It must have been another hallucination. I’m okay now. Help me up.’
As Paul did so he said, ‘What was it this time? More black slime?’
‘No, no… I can’t describe it. Don’t ask me to.’ He glanced at the girl and shuddered.
‘It must have been bad if it made you pass out,’ said Paul worriedly, then he turned to the girl. ‘You said you’d explain everything if we agreed to help you to get away from this place. As spokesman for the group I guarantee no one’s going to object to your coming with us so give — tell us what the hell is happening out here.’
She gave the door a nervous look then sighed and sat down on one of the room’s three swivel chairs. ‘We don’t have much time so I’m going to have to make this brief. The sooner we get going the better. Charlie is under temporary control at the moment but there’s no guarantee for how long…’
‘Who is Charlie?’ demanded Paul.
‘Charlie is a nick name we gave to… but I’ll explain from the beginning. I gather you’ve heard of Lloyd J. Brink-stone?’
Paul frowned. ‘No. But I know this platform is owned by the Brinkstone Company.’
‘Lloyd J. Brinkstone is the Brinkstone Company. He’s enormously wealthy — a dollar billionaire. A few years ago he reached the age where he decided he had to use some of his money to do something for the human race. In fact he decided to save the human race. Being a Texan he doesn’t think small…’ She smiled briefly and Mark saw that his first impression of her had been correct — she was very beautiful — but then he had a mental flashback to the image on the screen and nausea began to build up in his throat. It had been so real…
‘For years Mr Brinkstone had been obsessed by the fear that the human race would be wiped out by a nuclear war,’ she continued, ‘so finally he got a group of microbiologists together — I was one of them — and told us to see if there was any way the human body could be protected against hard radiation by means of genetic engineering. Money was to be no object. We could have whatever we wanted in terms of resources, equipment and so on. The result was this place.. ’ She gestured around her. ‘It cost millions of dollars to convert this disused rig into a secret laboratory complex. It had to be secret because we would be using genetic engineering techniques currently proscribed by most countries. The advantage of using the platform was that we could easily quarantine the labs if anything went wrong.’