‘With good reason,’ said Kaplan. ‘It’s impregnable. The high-security environment that protects the place is the very best. The state of the science.’
‘Thank you.’
‘If I sound like I’m stating the obvious, it’s because the obvious seems to need repetition,’ said Kaplan. ‘The place is impregnable. You do know that.’
‘I should know,’ said Dallas. ‘I did design the place.’
Kaplan was silent for a long minute. He rocked up and down on all eight legs and then, slowly, walked out of the niche until he stood only a few inches from Dallas. ‘Did you say what I thought you said?’
‘Yes. I said I designed the bank. And many others like it. Until a few days ago I was chief designer at Terotechnology. I assume you’ve heard of that company.’
‘Oh, indeed I have. And how is it that a god like you has descended from Mount Olympus to come among us mere mortals in the Black Hole?’
Dallas told him the bare bones of his own personal story, to which he added only the vague outline of a plan.
‘My heart bleeds for you,’ said Kaplan. ‘Spiders do have hearts, you know. Interestingly enough, they are as long as their whole abdomens. So if this droid I’m forced to sit on was the real thing, its heart would be three feet long.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Dallas, who could only feel revulsion for the half-human-looking creature in front of him.
‘But not nearly as fascinating as you and your special skills.’
‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘You really think you could pull off something like that?’
‘With your help,’ said Dallas. ‘I’ll need a few things. Many of them I’ll be able to pay for myself. I’m not a poor man. Money’s not the reason I’m doing this.’
‘Revenge?’
‘What else?’
‘So tell me what you’ll need.’
Dallas had given the matter some considerable thought. They were going to need a spaceship, new identities and travel documentation, Clean Bill of Health certificates, life-support suits, a virtual reality suite on which they would test a model of the plan, a space fridge, food and water for at least three weeks, a telecommunications and detection screen, a Motion Parallax generator, electron-beam welding tools, lithium hydroxide CO2 collectors, piezoceramic vibration absorbers, infrared headsets, power spectacles, headtop computers, an electric car, and, of course, transfusion facilities for those of his team who had the virus.
He thought of the various people he would need in his ideal team: a quantum cryptographer, an aeronautical engineer, a navigations and communications engineer, a computer engineer, an electrical engineer, a virtual reality model-maker, and a mechanical engineer. He knew there was no way he would find half of them, and many of their vital skills would have to be acquired by his own team using artificial aids. This all passed through his mind in just the few seconds before he answered Kaplan’s question.
‘I’ll tell you what I need most. I need a recent amputee,’ he said. ‘That’s right,’ he added, noting the puzzled look that appeared on Kaplan’s wasted-looking face. ‘I need a man who has recently lost an arm.’
Part Two
You must be prepared for a surprise,
and a very great surprise.
1
I
This was where civilization had begun. And where it had ended first. Orbiting Earth, the spaceship crossed the Red Sea in just twenty seconds. The blast craters that had once been the seaport of Jiddah and the holy city of Mecca appeared in the flight-deck window soon afterward. Years after the Great Middle Eastern War, the whole area — from the Nile in Egypt to the Tigris in Iraq — was still emitting harmful gamma rays, rendering this once fertile crescent uninhabitable for many decades to come.
They had left the planet only a couple of hours before — after a rendezvous, at around fifty thousand feet, with one of the many fuel tanker planes that existed to sell spaceships the hundred tons of liquid helium necessary to help a spaceship blast its way into space. Their orbit, at an altitude of one hundred and seventy miles and increasing, was fixed in space, but the world turns on its invisible axis by fifteen degrees every hour, so that their flight now took them south over the Indian Ocean. After leaving the coast of the Republic of Saudi Arabia, another fifteen minutes were to pass before they saw land again — this time, Australia. She had heard Dallas and Ronica talking about going to Australia, when they got back from the Moon. But she couldn’t quite understand why. It didn’t look like there was much down there. Red, marbled with flecks of gray, blue, and white, the Great Sandy Desert looked like nothing so much as a section of human tissue. The northern coast, appearing a few moments later, most resembled a map of the human circulatory system, with its arterial rivers, venous roads, and capillary canals.
Or so it seemed to Lenina, whose thoughts had been very much preoccupied with her own blood since earlier that same day, when she had awoken to find a red mark on her stomach. Was this the beginning of the rubelliform rash that signaled the active phase of the P2 virus she carried in her bone marrow? Sometimes it took a while for the rash to break out in any significant way. But this was how it had started when her mother died. And then her father, too. Lenina had been just twelve years old. After that, she’d had to fend for herself.
She prayed it was something else. A skin allergy perhaps. What would the others say if they knew she was in Three Moon phase, with a maximum of one hundred and twenty days of life ahead of her? What kind of liability might she pose for the success of their plans? If it was the rash, she hoped it would stay hidden for as long as it took them to get into and out of the love hotel on the Moon. Having a Three Moon phase at Tranquillity Base would only draw unwelcome attention to their group.
As the ship increased its altitude over the curving blue slope of the Pacific Ocean, Lenina could see a thousand miles in any direction, and floating around in her seat harness, she watched the Sun as it started to set behind them. At the speed they were traveling, the Sun set eighteen times as fast as on Earth, and in just a few minutes, the horizon was marked by a narrowing ribbon of light, as one day ended, and they flew through brief night toward another.
Perhaps all her days were as short now, and Lenina found she could hardly bear the thought of closing her eyes and sleeping, like the others back in the main body of the ship. Without a complete infusion of blood she might last only as long as the red cells in her body. She could almost feel herself weakening by the minute, and the darkness that enveloped the spaceship seemed like a heavy black curtain falling on her life. When Gates had first told her of Dallas and his plan to rob the First National Blood Bank, she thought both men crazy. But now it was quite possibly her only chance of returning to Earth alive.
Seeing the stars more clearly in the surrounding darkness and checking the cockpit chronometer, she prompted the computer to line up the navigation systems. Just in case. The ship, named the Mariner — more like the Ancient Mariner, she thought — was an old Pathfinder, an American-built reusable launch vehicle, or RLV, with a Russian-manufactured helium-burning rocket engine and a cargo bay that could carry more than two tons of payload (four, if the payload bay carried a space fridge that could be attached to the rear section of the RLV). Half a liter of blood in its cryoprecipitate state weighed only four ounces: This meant that they could carry as much as forty thousand storage units, worth over twenty-five billion dollars.