The cops at the sliding glass doors weren't about to let anyone in. Vera's medical ID was no help. Finally Parsifal flashed some old NASA credentials. 'Bud Parsifal!' one said. 'Hell, yes, come in.' They all wanted to shake his hand. Parsifal was radiant.
'Spacemen,' Vera whispered to Rau.
Inside the lab wing, the activity was equally manic, if less frenzied. Specialists were studying charts, X rays, and film images or mousing at computer models. Portable phones lay trapped on shoulders as people read data from screens or clipboards. Business suits intermixed with shoulder holsters and surgical scrubs of various colors. The hubbub reminded Vera of the aftermath of a natural disaster, an emergency room stretched beyond capacity.
They paused by a group watching a video. On screen, a young woman was bent over a block of blue gel on a steel table. 'That's Dr. Yamamoto,' Vera whispered to Rau and Parsifal. 'Thomas and I met her last time.'
'Here she goes,' a man in the group said. He had a stopwatch in one hand. 'Three, two, one. And... boom.' Yamamoto abruptly stiffened on screen, then sank to her knees. For a moment she sat on her heels, staring, then tumbled to one side and went into violent spasms. The Beowulf scholars continued walking.
Other rooms held other screens and images: the bottom of a skull seemed to blossom open; a cursor arrow navigated up arteries, strayed upon neural arms, a highway of dreams and impulses.
Vera knocked at an open door. A blond woman in a lab smock was hunched over a microscope. 'I'm looking for a Dr. Koenig,' Vera said. The woman looked over, then came rushing to Vera with arms wide.
'Vera, you're back. Yammie told me you visited months ago.'
Vera introduced them. 'Mary Kay was one of my star pupils, when I could get her attention. Always off on triathlons and rock climbs. We could never keep up with her.'
'The old days,' said Mary Kay, probably all of thirty year's old. Judging by the place, medicine had become the exclusive domain of the young and fit.
'You picked a bad time to visit, though,' she said. 'The entire facility's up in arms. Government agencies all over the place. The FBI.' The purple circles under the young doctor's eyes were her testimony. Whatever this emergency was, she'd been hard at it for many hours.
'Actually, we heard something was happening,' Vera said. 'We've come to learn everything possible. If you can spare a few minutes.'
'Of course I can. Let me finish one thing. I was about to run through some of the early stuff.'
'Put me to work,' Vera insisted.
Grateful, Mary Kay handed Vera a folded EEG readout. 'These are the charts for day one of our hadal prep, almost a year ago. I've synched the video to 2:34 P.M., when they first quartered the body. If you don't mind, track the graph while they make the cuts. There should be some activity when the saw goes through. I'll tell you when.'
She tapped a button on her keyboard. The frozen image started playing. 'Okay,' said
Mary Kay. 'Ready? They're about to sever the legs. Now.'
It looked like a butcher's bandsaw on screen. Workers manipulated the long rectangle of blue gel sideways. Two of them lifted away a section after it passed through the saw.
'Nothing,' Vera said. 'No response on the chart. Flat.'
'Here goes the head section. Anything?'
'No response. Not a bump,' said Vera.
'Just what is it we're supposed to be looking for?' Parsifal asked.
'Activity. A pain response. Anything.'
'Mary Kay,' said Vera, 'why are you looking for life signs in a dead hadal?'
The physician looked helplessly at Vera. 'We're considering certain possibilities,' she said, and it was clear the possibilities were unorthodox.
She ushered them down the wing, talking as they went. 'Over the past fifty-two weeks, our computer-anatomy division has been sectioning a hadal specimen for general study. The project leader was Dr. Yamamoto, a noted pathologist. She was working alone in the lab on Sunday morning when this happened.'
They entered a large room that reeked of chemicals and dead tissue. Rau's first impression was that a bomb had exploded. Big machines lay tipped on their sides. Wires had been pulled from ceiling panels. Long strips of industrial carpet lay ripped from the floor. Crime scene people and scientists alike wanted answers from what was left.
'A security guard found Dr. Yamamoto crouching in the far corner. He called for help. That was his last radio dispatch. We located him hanging from the pipes above the ceiling. His esophagus was torn out. By hand. Yammie was lying in the corner. Naked. Bleeding. Unresponsive.'
'What happened?'
'At first we thought someone had broken in to either burgle or sabotage the premises, and that Lindsey had been assaulted. But as you can see, there are no windows, and only the one door. The door wasn't tampered with, which raised concerns that some hadals might have climbed through the vent system with the aim of destroying our database. We were studying hadal anatomy, after all. The project was underwritten with DoD grants. Arms makers have been clamoring for our tissue information to refine their weapons and ammunition.'
'Where's Branch when we need him?' Rau said. 'I've never heard of hadals doing such a thing. An attack like this, it implies such sophistication.'
'Anyway, that's what we thought at first,' Mary Kay continued. 'You can imagine the uproar. The police came. We started to transport Yammie on a gurney. Then she regained consciousness and escaped.'
'Escaped?' said Parsifal. 'She was still frightened of the intruder?'
'It was terrible. She was wrecking machines. She slashed two guards with a scalpel. They finally shot her with a dart gun. Like a wild animal. That's when she lost the child.'
'Child?' Vera asked.
'Yammie was seven months pregnant. The sedative or stress or activity... she miscarried.'
'How dreadful.'
They reached an eight-foot-long autopsy table. Vera had seen the human body insulted in a hundred different ways, shattered by trauma, wasted with disease and famine. But she was unprepared for the slight young woman with Japanese features who lay stretched out, covered with blankets, her head a Medusa-like riot of electrode patches and wires. It looked like a torture in progress. Her hands and feet had been tied down with a makeshift arrangement of towels, rubber tubing, and duct tape. The autopsy table's usual occupants did not require such restraints.
'Finally, one of the detectives sorted out the fingerprints and identified our culprit,'