Hurriedly recrossing the room, his teeth chattering, he gripped the hatch rim on the nearest cylinder and pulled himself up the rounded side to peer into the pod.
Death returned his gaze…
A skull — thinly bound with ragged, cracked, and leathery skin — lay directly beneath the viewplate. Its eyes were gone. The bony sockets were pooled with darkness, not the slightest hint of corrupted flesh beyond them. The mouth was open in a yawning leer — or perhaps a frozen scream — that revealed fine, white teeth and a shriveled piece of hide that might have once been a tongue. Bright lemon hair billowed around the ghastly sleeper's calcimine cheeks, cradling the death's head in an anachronistically feminine pillow.
If he could have shifted his focus from the macabre countenance to the polished glass of the peephole, he would have seen his own face there, superimposed on the dead woman's face, suddenly drawn and haunted. But he was mesmerized by the specter's cold and empty stare.
For a time he hung there, arms aching with the effort, unable to drop. The black sockets of the dead woman's eyes pinned him in place, skewered his attention and trapped his soul. He could not imagine how she had looked in life; the hideous state in which she now lay was eternal, timeless, and provided no fuel for conjecture. Yet… he felt that he had known her. He reached for a name, felt his mind curl on emptiness. Finally, he let go. The floor felt unsteady beneath his feet.
Before his meager courage could bleed away altogether, he stepped to the adjoining pod and levered himself up to the viewplate. Another skull looked back at him. This one was sheathed in more unholy, weathered meat that the first had been, as if there had been too little air inside its coffin to allow the process of decay to go as far as it should have done. In the depths of the white-rimmed pit where its right eye had been, something yellow gleamed malevolently. No matter. Though this corpse was in better condition than the other, it was still a corpse. And still unrecognizable.
Sliding to the floor again, he leaned against the cool steel pod and wiped perspiration out of his eyes, though the room had grown no warmer.
“They're dead!” he shouted.
He did not know whom he expected to answer.
No one did.
“Damn you!”
If this had been an experimental laboratory — no matter what the subject of the investigations had been; time, later, to wonder about that — the experiments had gone wrong. The other sleepers had been permitted to die in their pods but he had been awakened without memory of even part of the affair. That was a hell of a way to run a scientific inquiry. Criminal negligence was what it was. Simply outrageous! Someone would pay for it. Heads would roll when he found the men responsible.
That peculiar sense of isolation enveloped him again: that certainty that no one was left alive to be held responsible, that he was the only man here, that the scale of the disaster was larger than what this room exposed. He tried to pinpoint the source of his fear but could not.
Pushing away from the pod, unable to withstand the shock of looking at yet another corpse, he went to the door beside the observation windows, opened it, walked into the other room.
Behind him the purple lightstrip in the colder vault dimmed and finally winked out altogether. Simultaneously, the overhead lights in the new chamber rose steadily until he could see that the dust had settled over this machinery too, the death shroud of the inanimate.
Along the wall on his left, sixteen lockers stood like narrow caskets, each with a first name stenciled just above the three short, horizontal slits of the air vents. Intrigued by the names, he forgot about the door. When he remembered it, he was to late to act: the door swung shut at his back and was instantly, electronically locked. Angry with himself, he continued to the lockers and opened them one after the other. Eight of them contained women's clothing in an assortment of sizes. Of the other eight, which contained men's clothing, only one held a suit that had been tailored for his wide shoulders and narrow waist. He dressed in the dark green, one-piece jumpsuit and soft black leather boots, then closed the locker and stared at the name on the door. joel.
Joel…
He said it a few times to himself, then aloud. But he could not make it fit.
He looked at the other names and tried to find a memory in them: Archie, Will, Leonard, Tamur, Alicia, Mary… Although he strained to evoke a face to match each name, all fifteen remained nonentities.
Since none of the lockers contained identification for its owner — other than the simple uniform and the name on the door — he turned away and explored the remainder of the rectangular room. A row of teleprinters stood silent. Teleprint screens along the high ceiling stared down at him like cataracted eyes, unlighted, unmoving, yet somehow watchful. Computer consoles. Print-out troughs. Three empty file cabinets. Two desks: empty, dusty. The contents of the room told him nothing more than what he'd found in the lockers.
When he sat in one of the command chairs, he was surprised to discover that he understood how to read the banks of controls, graphs, charts and monitoring screens set before him. They were all designed either to report on or change conditions in the pods: subject's heartbeat, temperature, metabolism, hormonal secretions… All the controls were now unlighted and might or might not be functional. He didn't see any reason, at the moment, to play around with them.
Despite his grasp of these details, he could not formulate an understanding of the overall purpose of this place. He felt he should be able to build from the specific to the general, but he had no luck. The controls were known, but their part in the larger design remained a mystery. He was like an unskilled laborer assembling the housing of a complex computer system: he took part in the production of the finished item without ever really knowing what purpose the damned thing served.
Yet he knew that in the past he had been at home here, well versed in the intentions of the experimenters. Now, that was as lost to him as his own identity.
Joel?
Joel who? Joel what, when, and where?
Angry, he stood. He wanted to strike out with his blocky fists, but he could find no one to take his rage. The mouse dropped unexpectedly into the maze must also experience this undirected fury. And he would have to solve his problem just as the mouse did — by finding his way to the end of the maze and picking up his reward. If there was a reward. Maybe a booby prize.
He found the outside door of the observation chamber and opened it. The hinges squeaked.
The lights came on in a long corridor when he entered it. Not all the bulbs in the two ceiling strips worked, but he had enough light to see the dreary cement block walls, red-tiled floor, gray soundproof ceiling, and a great deal of dust.
For the first time he realized that the dust held no footprints. No one had passed this way in years. Decades?
“Hello!” he said.
Though it was obviously futile to cry out, he was unable to restrain his compulsive need for companionship.
The corridor was short. Only four rooms opened from it. Each of these was a cubicle devoid of everything but a desk, chair, and unused file cabinet. At one time these must have been the offices of minor executives; now, the dust was nearly half an inch thick, a gray-brown blanket that softened the sharp edges of the furniture, many times thicker than the jacket of dust he had seen elsewhere.
At the end of the hall, two elevator doors were recessed in the wall. Above each was an unlighted floor indicator that was framed by a chrome strip. Filmed with dust, darkened with age, the plastic numerals were only barely readable.
Joel touched the controls of the left-hand lift and waited. When nothing happened he tried the cage on the right. The floor indicator on the right-hand lift lighted instantly, a flickering yellow with red numbers. The lift was at the eighteenth floor, the topmost level. It descended so rapidly that he thought for a moment that it had snapped its cables. A moment later, however, the doors opened with a rasping noise which set his teeth on edge, and the lift awaited his use.