“Just answer the question, Clay. When did you see it?”
“I don’t know,” Clayton said. “It’s tough keeping track of time. At first it was so small, the size of a penny. And it wasn’t so much that I even saw it at that point. It was that I… I felt it.”
Clayton clearly hadn’t hung the poster to stop anyone from seeing the hole—he’d hung it to stop the hole from seeing him.
That his brother had continued to work mere feet from it, collecting the ambrosia as it widened and grew, sucking ceaselessly at his psyche… Luke understood, not for the first time, that his brother’s mind was built to a different tolerance.
“How does the poster muffle that feeling?”
Clayton shrugged. “I don’t know the principles behind it. I only know it works.”
What if it only works because whatever’s behind the hole wants Clay to think it works? Luke wondered. Could be it’s slackening its pull, letting Clayton believe his flimsy poster is worth a tinker’s damn—and what if Clay’s too far gone to realize he’s being played in such a simplistic fashion?
It was conceivable. The smartest people were too often the stupidest—the most blind to manipulation, believing themselves immune to it.
“How much goo have you collected?”
Clayton’s face puckered with distaste at the word goo.
“A good deal,” he said. “At first we didn’t see any of it. Frankly, I’d begun to despair. We’d built this station already. A man had died to get it operational.”
“Not that you’d care about him,” Luke snapped.
“True,” Clayton said without rancor. “It was his job, as this is mine. But there was the expense to consider, too, in the trillions. And for days, weeks, there wasn’t hide or hair of the substance the Trieste had been built to study. But the sensors began to pick it up—scraps drifting lazily around.”
“Like iron filings to a magnet, huh?”
Clayton shrugged again. “I tried bait boxes filled with colorful shapes and reflecting mirrors, but it exhibited no attraction. It was there, Lucas, the ambrosia was there in tantalizing, taunting abundance, but I couldn’t lay my hands on it.”
“And then?”
“Then it invited itself inside. Problem solved.”
“In Westlake’s journal, he said that you collected a sample in a… a vaccu-trap, he said it was.”
“I lied about that.” Clayton’s shrug indicated this could have been one of many lies he’d told. “I didn’t want him knowing about the hole.”
Westlake didn’t want you knowing about his, either, thought Luke.
LB padded over to sit beside Luke. Her gaze flicked anxiously to the cooler.
“It’s not safe,” Luke said. “The hole. Rift. Whatever. For Christ’s sake, Clay—whatever’s on the other side of these holes killed Westlake. Killed him, or drove him insane and made him kill himself. And I can feel myself slipping, too. My mind coming undone little by little. Do we know what it is, Clay?” Luke stared searchingly at his brother. “Could it be some kind of… Christ, does it lead someplace else? Not into the sea on the other side of the wall, but another place entirely?”
Clayton said, “That may be the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.”
The rage Luke had been struggling to tamp down exploded inside his brain—as if somebody had pushed the plunger on a detonation box wired to a stick of TNT sunk into his most sensitive neuron clusters.
“You colossal fucking idiot! Clay, you’re squirreled away in a lab, thinking that hanging a fucking poster over something as powerful as that”—jabbing his finger toward the hole—“will do a goddamn thing! And you’re calling me stupid? You may be the smartest man on earth, but you’re fucking clueless down here and you’re too mule-headed to admit it. Well, I’m here to tell you, brother of mine, you’re severely outclassed. Severely. You’re an idiot child compared to this thing. You’d need two brains, or three, to even begin to understand this. And even then you’d be too much of an obnoxious, smug, know-it-all prick to admit that you can’t comprehend it.”
Clayton withstood Luke’s tirade as he always did: silently, motionlessly, but with a supercilious smile, as if he were a shrink weathering the blatherings of a raving maniac.
“So you’re under the suspicion that it’s some kind of—what?” Clayton’s hands fluttered in front of his face: Oooh, spooky! “A hole that takes you away to the Land of Nod? Or back in time, perhaps?”
“Jesus, Clay,” Luke said. “There’s a hole in the fucking wall of this station, which happens to be at the bottom of the fucking ocean!”
“Lucas, listen to yourself. Calm down. It’s nothing to be afraid of—cautious, yes, but fear is a wasteful emotion.”
You’re insane, Clayton. You have to be, if any of this strikes you as reasonable.
The bandages had unwound around two fingers of his brother’s hand. The material was sodden with dark blood and something else, something fouler…
Luke’s breath hitched; he nearly screamed.
When Luke was a boy his neighbor Cedric Figgs had developed a goiter on his neck. The massive, throbbing lesion resembled an unpopped zit. Never look at it, his father instructed. Why make him feel bad?
But it had been almost impossible not to stare at Cedric Figgs’ goiter. The eye was drawn naturally, as a child’s eye usually is to such horrors.
Clayton’s hand was far more difficult to avoid staring at. But Luke couldn’t let Clayton know that he’d noticed—because if Clayton saw Luke’s eyes dodging to his hand, he’d know that Luke had perceived what he’d done.
And if Clayton knew, then it might know, too.
7.
THE EXTINCTION KIT. The thought blitzed through Luke’s fevered mind. The one Clayton used to kill that guinea pig. Was it still under the lab bench?
Luke had seen its contents. There was a vial of Telazol, an animal narcotic. Back in veterinary school, a student had gotten hooked on the stuff; the guy had been discovered in the drug lockup, limp as a cooked noodle—he’d nearly choked to death on his tongue.
But how could he prep a hypo without Clay noticing?
The next heartbeat, the lights went out.
Luke was trapped in a bubble of pure animal panic.
They snapped on again—not the regular lights, though. These were small red lights strung down the ceiling.
“Emergency backup,” Clayton said.
“We lost power?”
Clayton turned to face him in the blood-red glow. “For now. It should come back. It’s happened a few times.”
“Is there a power grid?”
“A fuse box, yes.” He favored Luke with a wintry smile. “Maybe we can reset the breaker. Why don’t I go check?”
Without another word, Clayton stepped into the main lab.
This is your chance, Luke. Your only chance, maybe.