Someone — something — is making it.
He continued down the hall, and now he could see into the room ahead, which was flooded with light streaming through the windows. Still, the noise came.
Then it stopped.
Jude stepped ahead boldly now and found himself standing in a room. He looked around. Nothing was moving. The walls were covered in faded blue wallpaper, and a baby grand piano was standing in a corner, some of its keys missing. There was no other furniture in the room.
Part of the ceiling had collapsed from a toppled tree. A heap of plaster and broken laths lay on the floor, directly under a wide hole in the ceiling. Floorboards from the room above leaned down at the edges of the opening, and sunlight came in through a gap in the outside wall. It was most likely from there, Jude thought, that the noise had come. He waited quietly for a minute or so, and was soon proved correct. The noise started up again — a scraping sound and the floorboards above shook lightly, bending under the weight of something.
Jude jumped back. Now, suddenly, the noise seemed very loud.
He went to a closet where he found a broom and brought it to the hole and raised it. He pushed hard against the loose floorboards and jumped back, and just as he did, something came crashing down. It was alive, squirming in midair, a creature with a long tail, scales on its back. It landed on its side awkwardly with a grunt, flipped over and scurried away, huddling in a corner. It looked at Jude with a baleful eye that he had seen before. A malevolent-looking, two-foot-long lizard.
They kept these things as pets wherever they went, he thought, as he turned his back in disgust and left the room.
After Jude left the Big House, closing the front door behind him and walking down the front stairs, he waited for Skyler under the oak tree that had been their message board. After a half hour, he saw him in the distance, walking toward him. As he approached closer, Jude could see that he looked odd, his face drawn and tense, his steps mechanical.
Skyler sat next to him and picked up the rock. He explained that he had looked out from the Big House and saw that it had been moved — that no one other than Julia knew that signal. He had run to the lighthouse and searched for a long time, until finally inside the glass room, over in a corner, he had found a note, held in place by a rock.
It was a note from her, written no doubt on the day she had died. A final message, delivered up in love.
She had discovered the passwords from observing the computer operators. She was providing them to him.
"Two words are needed to gain access to the files," said Skyler, talking like a man in a daze. "First: 'Bacon.' And then: 'Newton.'"
He explained about the ditty they had all recited for years.
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
Bacon said, "Let Newton be!" and all was light.
"Do you think…" — Jude tried to pick his way carefully—"that was why she died? Someone saw her or they found out somehow?"
"I do," replied Skyler.
He held the note in his hand, but he did not show it to Jude. Instead, he folded it up and carefully put it inside his pocket.
They spent two hours searching the rest of the island. They examined every building — the Meal House, the storage house, the women's barracks, the guest house, the airport hangar, even the old pump house for the unused swimming pool. And everywhere it was the same. Damage was substantial. Trees had fallen everywhere, crashing down on rooftops and buckling walls. Inside, the buildings were deserted and mostly empty, but with an odd assortment of things left behind in the water-damaged hallways and corners — socks, shirts, belts, batteries, sheets, pillows.
It was impossible to reconstruct what had happened with any certainty. Clearly, an evacuation of some kind had taken place; the members of the Lab had carted away most of their belongings and clothing and medical records and other essentials. Had it been done in panic — perhaps as the hurricane approached? That seemed unlikely. Too much had been taken away in too short a time. Had they returned after the storm? That seemed unlikely, too — the mud would have been covered with telltale footprints.
So the most likely scenario was a planned, methodical evacuation before the hurricane had even been predicted. But that raised as many questions as it settled. Why had it been done? After two hours of sifting through the debris, Jude and Skyler hadn't a clue. They didn't even know how it had been done — what kind of boats had been used or where they had docked. Never mind the ultimate unknown: Where had the boats gone?
One more mystery, thought Jude.
Why do we always seem to be taking two steps backward for every one step forward?
He stood next to Skyler on a small rise overlooking the Campus and checked his watch. Still two more hours until the meeting with Homer. From here he could see almost all the buildings they had searched. At least they had been methodical. They had looked in every building, in every room. There was nothing left to inspect.
Then Skyler reminded him of one place left to look.
"We should check the Nursery. It's on an adjacent island — not far. I think it's easy to cross if the tide is right — though I've never been there."
It took Jude only a second to realize what he was talking about — the colony of small children raised by the Lab. He had assumed, when he heard Skyler talking about them weeks before, that they were another generation of clones. And, like Skyler, he had totally forgotten about them.
Skyler was already off, following a trail that ran north through the woods, and Jude was right behind him. The forest here was dense, and looking at the path they were on, he could see the prints of countless hooves.
After twenty minutes, they reached the northern shore. Jude was winded — they had been going faster than he realized — and so he leaned against a tree with one hand to breathe deeply. He felt his head clear and his heartbeat calm, and he looked around.
This coast was much wilder. The trees dropped away, so that ahead of them was a sea of waist-high grass, extending like a vast golden-green savannah. Beyond was the sea, coming upon them in breakers that washed upon a rocky shore. Off to the left was the island, no more than about two hundred yards away. But it looked like a treacherous two hundred yards. A rocky sandbar served as an isthmus, and it was almost completely under water. To reach the island, they would have to traverse that narrow bar of land. One large wave could sweep them into a channel, where the current, funneled between the two bodies, looked swift.
"Can you tell," shouted Jude over the surf, "is the tide coming in or going out?"
"I'm not sure. In, I think. Even so, we should be able to make it."
"Yes, but can we make it back?"
Skyler shrugged, and it was a gesture that indicated, with its fatalistic eloquence, how upset he was at thinking about Julia.
"I think so," was all he said.
He went back to the woods and returned a minute later with two large walking sticks. Then he undid his shoes, tied the laces together, draped them around his neck and rolled up his pants. Jude did likewise.
Skyler went first, moving sideways while facing the incoming water, feeling the way with his left leg to get a secure foothold before pulling his right leg up. He used the staff for support behind him whenever a wave came. Despite all this, he went surprisingly quickly.