Текст книги "Reliquary"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

= 34 =

IT WAS ALMOST complete.

He stepped into the humid darkness of the Temple, running his fingers lightly along the cool orbs that made up the walls, caressing the organic surfaces, the hollows and swells. It was right that it should be built here: so like what had come before in that other place, yet so unlike. He turned and settled into the throne they had crafted for him, feeling the rough leathery surface of the seat and the slight give of the lashed members, hearing the faint creak of sinew and bone, his senses alive as never before. It would soon be complete. As he, now, was complete.

They had toiled long and hard for him, their leader and master. They loved and feared him, as was his due, and now they would worship him. He closed his eyes and inhaled the thick, fragrant air that eddied about him like a fog. In times past he would have been repelled by the reek of the Temple, but that was before he’d acquired the gift of sensory acuteness. The plant had given him that, as it had given him so much else. Now, everything was different. The smell was like a vista to him, ever shifting, painted in every imaginable color, here bright and clean, there dark and mysterious. There were mountains and canyons and deserts of scent, oceans and skies, rivers and meadows, a magnificent panorama of fragrance, indescribable in human language. It rendered the world of sight flat, ugly, sterile by comparison.

He savored his triumph. Where the other had failed, hehad succeeded. Where the other had withered in fear and doubt, hehad grown in strength, and courage. The other had been unable to discover the flaw that was hidden in the formula. Hehad not only found the flaw, but had taken the next step and perfected the glorious plant and the secret payload it contained. The other had underestimated the Children’s desperate thirst for ritual, for ceremony. Hehad not. He alone understood the ultimate meaning.

This was the true manifestation of his life’s work—how galling to think he had never realized it before! It was he, and no other, who had the power, the intellect, and the will to carry it through. He alone could cleanse the world and guide it into its future.

The world! As he murmured the word aloud, he could feel that pathetic world so far above him, pressing down upon the sanctuary of his Temple. He saw everything so clearly now. It was an overpopulated world, teeming with insectlike swarms that had no purpose, no meaning, and no value, their ugly little lives churning like the manic pistons of some senseless machine. They were above him always, dropping their dung, mating, giving birth, dying, tied to the slaving meat-wheel of human existence. How easy—and how inevitable—that it should all be swept aside, all of it, as one kicks open an anthill and grinds the soft white pupae underfoot. Then the New World could come: so fresh, so various, and so full of dreams.

= 35 =

“WHERE ARE THE others?” Margo asked as D’Agosta entered the small Anthropology conference room.

“They’re not coming,” D’Agosta said, hiking up his trouser legs and sitting down. “Scheduling.” Then he caught Margo’s glance, and gave his head a disgusted shake. “Ah, what the hell. If you want to know the truth, they’re not interested. That guy Waxie, who you saw at Brambell’s presentation? He’s in charge of the case now. And he believes he’s already got his man.”

“What do you mean, already got his man?” Margo asked.

“Some nut they found in the park. He’s a murderer, all right, but he’s not the killer we’re looking for. At least, Pendergast doesn’t think so.”

“And Pendergast?”

“He’s on a little business trip.” D’Agosta smiled, as if at some private joke. “So whatcha got?”

“I’ll start at the beginning.” Margo took a deep breath. “It’s ten years ago, okay? There’s an expedition to the Amazon Basin. It’s headed by a Museum scientist named Julian Whittlesey. There are personality conflicts, and the team splits up. For various reasons, nobody makes it back alive. But several boxes of relics are shipped to the Museum. One of them includes a hideous figurine, packed in some fibrous material.”

D’Agosta nodded. So far, it was ancient history.

“What they didn’t know was that the figurine was a representation of a savage, indigenous creature. And that the packing material was a local plant essential to the diet of this creature. Soon after, the creature’s home environment is destroyed in the local government’s search for mineral deposits. So this monster—this Mbwun—follows the only remaining fibers. All the way from the Amazon Basin, to Belem, to New York City. It survives in the Museum basement, eating feral animals and consuming this plant, to which it seems addicted.”

D’Agosta nodded again.

“Well,” said Margo, “I don’t buy it. I used to, but I don’t anymore.”

D’Agosta raised an eyebrow. “What about it don’t you buy, exactly?”

“Think about it, Lieutenant. How could a wild animal—even an extremely intelligent one—make its way from the Amazon Basin to New York City in search of a few cases full of fibers? That’s a hell of a long way from its habitat.”

“You’re not telling me anything we didn’t already know when that beast was destroyed. There was no other interpretation then, and I sure can’t see any other one now. Mbwun was here. I felt the thing breatheon me, for Chrissakes. If it didn’t come from the Amazon, then where?”

“Good question.” said Margo. “What if Mbwun was originally from New York and was simply coming home?”

There was a brief silence. “Coming home?” D’Agosta said, mystified.

“Yes. What if Mbwun was not an animal at all, but a human being? What if he was Whittlesey?”

This time, the silence was much longer. D’Agosta looked at Margo. Great shape or no, she must be near dead from exhaustion, working nonstop on those corpses. And Brambell getting murdered like that, and then her discovering that one of the corpses she’d been picking over belonged to a former coworker. A coworker she already felt guilty about having dropped out of touch with… How could he have been so stupid, so selfish, bringing her in on a job like this, knowing how much the original Museum murders had upset her? “Listen,” he began. “Dr. Green, I think you’d better—”

Margo held up her hand. “I know, I know, it sounds crazy. But it’s not, I swear it’s not. My lab assistant is working on several more tests as we speak, just to verify my findings. So let me finish. Mbwun had an astonishingly high percentage of human DNA. We had one of the claws sequenced, remember? We found intact strings of perfect human DNA, many thousands of base pairs long. That’s no evolutionary aberration. Also, Pendergast found some items of Whittlesey’s in the creature’s lair, remember? And don’t forget that the creature killed everyone it came in contact with except one person: Ian Cuthbert. Why? Cuthbert had once been a close friend of Whittlesey’s. And then, Whittlesey’s body was never found…”

D’Agosta’s jaw set. This was insane. Pushing the chair back, he began to rise.

“Let me finish,” Margo said quietly.

D’Agosta returned her level gaze. Something about the look in her eyes made him sit down again.

“Lieutenant,” she continued, “I know how this sounds. But you mustlisten. We made a terrible mistake. I’m as much to blame as anybody else. We never put the final pieces of the puzzle together. But somebody did. Greg Kawakitadid.”

She placed an 8” x 10” blowup of a microscopic image on the table. “This plant contains a reovirus.”

“We already knew that.”

“But what we overlooked is that these reoviruses have a unique ability: they can inject foreign DNA into the host cell. And they produce a drug. I ran some additional tests on the fibers this evening, after I made this discovery. They carry genetic material—reptilian DNA—which is inserted into the human host when the plant is eaten. And that DNA, in turn, initiates a physicaltransformation. Somehow—I don’t know how or why—Whittlesey must have ingested the plant while on the expedition. He underwent a morphological change. He became Mbwun.Once the change was complete, he needed a steady diet of the drug in the plants. And when the local supply was destroyed, Whittlesey knew that more could be found in the Museum. He knew, because he’d sent them the plants here, as packing fibers in the crates. So he returned to the crates. It was only when he was cut off from the supply of fibers that he began killing human beings. See, the hypothalamus of the human brain contains a hormone similar to the plants—”

“Wait. You’re saying that eating this plant turns you into some kind of monster?” D’Agosta asked incredulously.

Margo nodded. “And now I know what Greg had to do with this. He figured everything out, then dropped out of sight to pursue some plan of his own.” She unrolled a large diagram on the conference table. “Here’s a map of his laboratory, or as much of it as I could reconstruct. This list in the corner inventories all the equipment I could identify. Even at wholesale prices, it all must have cost in excess of eight hundred thousand dollars.”

Despite himself, D’Agosta whistled. “Drug money.”

“That’s exactly right, Lieutenant. The only purpose of such a lab would be some very sophisticated production-level genetic engineering. I emphasize the word production.”

“Late last year, there were rumors about a new drug on the street,” D’Agosta said, “called glaze. Very rare, very expensive, with an amazing rush. Haven’t heard much about it recently, though.”

Margo placed a finger on the diagram. “There are three stages to genetic engineering. The first is to map the DNA of an organism. That’s what these machines along the north wall did. Combined, they made up a massive sequencing operation. This first one controls the polymerase chain reaction, which replicates the DNA so it can be sequenced. This one sequences the DNA. Then this machine, here, was a Cambridge Systems NAD-1. We have one downstairs. It’s a highly specialized supercomputer that uses gallium arsenide CPUs and vector processing to analyze sequencing results. Then here, along the south wall, were the melted remains of a series of aquaria. Kawakita was growing the Mbwun plant in large quantities to supply raw material for this operation. And here was an Ap-Gel viral production facility for incubating and culturing viruses.”

There was a deathly silence. D’Agosta mopped his brow and felt around in his pocket for the reassuring shape of his cigar. Despite himself, he was starting to believe.

“Kawakita was using this equipment to removegenes from the plant virus.” Margo placed some more pictures on the table. “These are SEM micrographs. They show that he was removing the reptilian genes. Why? Because he was obviously trying to negate the physicaleffects of the drug.”

“What does Frock think of all this?”

As he asked the question, D’Agosta thought he saw a momentary flush move across Margo’s features. “I haven’t had the chance to tell him yet. But I know he’ll be skeptical. He’s still wedded to his fractal evolution theory. This may sound crazy, Lieutenant, but the fact is there are many substances in nature—hormones, for instance—that cause startling transformations like this. It’s not as bizarre or unusual as it sounds. There’s a hormone called BSTH which turns a caterpillar into a butterfly. There’s another called resotropin-x. When a tadpole gets a dose of that, it turns into a frog in a matter of days. That’s what’s happening here, I’m sure of it. Only now, we’re talking about changing a human being.”

She paused. “There’s something else.”

“Isn’t this enough?”

Margo dug into her carryall and pulled out some small scraps of burned paper, sandwiched between pieces of clear plastic. “I found what looked like Kawakita’s lab journal among the ashes. These were the only sheets with any legible writing on them.” She brought out more photographs. “I had the scraps enlarged. This first one is from the middle of the notebook. It’s some kind of a list.”

D’Agosta peered at the photograph. He could make out a few scribbled words along the left edge of the badly burned page: wysoccan, dung-loving blue foot. Then, nearer the bottom: green cloud, gunpowder, lotus heart.

“Mean anything to you?” D’Agosta asked, scribbling the words into his notebook.

“Just the gunpowder,” Margo replied. “Although something tells me I ought to recognize more of it.” She handed him another photograph. “There’s another one that seems to be fragments of code for his extrapolation program. Then there’s a longer one.” D’Agosta scanned the offered fragment.

…can’t live with the knowledge of what I’ve… How could I, while concentrating on… ignore the mental effects that… but the other one grows more eager by the day. I need the time to…

“Sounds like he was getting a conscience, there toward the end,” D’Agosta said, handing back the card. “But what was it, exactly, that he did?”

“I’m getting to that,” Margo replied. “Notice he talks here about the mental effects of glaze as something he hadn’t considered. And did you catch that reference to ‘the other one’? I still haven’t figured that part out.” She reached for another card. “Then there’s this. I think it came from the last page of the journal. As you can see, besides a lot of numbers and calculations, there are only three completely legible words, with a period between them: ‘irreversible. Thyoxin might …’ ”

D’Agosta looked at her questioningly.

“I looked it up. Thyoxin is an experimental herbicide, highly potent, for removing algae from lakes. If Greg was growing this plant, what would he want with thyoxin? Or with vitamin D, which he was also apparently synthesizing? There’s still a lot I haven’t figured out.”

“I’ll mention it to Pendergast, just in case he has any ideas.” D’Agosta stared at the photographs a moment, then pushed them aside. “So tell me, Dr. Green,” he went on, “I’m not quite there yet. Just what exactly was Kawakita trying to do with all this apparatus of his?”

“He was probably trying to tame the drug by subtracting the reptilian genes from the Mbwun plant virus.”

“Tame?”

“I think he was trying to create a drug that didn’t cause the grotesque physical changes. To make the user more alert, stronger, faster, able to see better in the dark. You know, the kind of hypersensory abilities Mbwun had. But without the side effects.”

Margo began rolling up the diagram. “I’d need to test tissue samples from Kawakita’s corpse to be sure. But I think we’ll find traces of the Mbwun drug, substantially altered. And I think that the drug itself will be found to have some kind of narcotic side effect.”

“You mean Kawakita was taking it himself?”

“I’m certain of it. But he must have screwed up in some way. He must not have refined it or purified it properly. And the deformation that we saw in his skeleton was the result.”

D’Agosta wiped his brow again. God, he needed that cigar. “Just a minute,” he said. “Kawakita was a smart guy. He wouldn’t just take a dangerous drug for the hell of it, to see what would happen. No way.”

“You’re right, Lieutenant. And perhaps that’s where the guilt comes in. See, he wouldn’t have taken the drug himself right away. He would have tested it first.”

“Oh,” D’Agosta said. There was a long silence, and then he added, “Oh, shit.”

= 36 =

BILL TRUMBULL felt great. The market was up sixteen points for the day, nearly a hundred for the week, with no end in sight. At twenty-five, he was already pulling down a hundred large a year. Wouldn’t his classmates at Babson shit when they heard that at the reunion next week. Most of them had gone on to crummy management jobs, lucky to be making fifty.

Trumbull and his friends pushed through the turnstiles and entered the platform of the Fulton Street subway station, chattering and hooting. It was past midnight, and they’d put away a fine dinner at the Seaport, as well as a lot of microbrewed beer, and had talked endlessly about how rich they were all becoming. Now they were in an uproarious mood, chortling about the dork who had just joined the training program and wouldn’t last a month.

Trumbull felt a puff of stale wind and heard the familiar distant rumble as two tiny headlights appeared on the track. He would be home in half an hour. He felt a momentary annoyance at how far uptown he lived—98th Street and Third Avenue—and at how long it took to get home from Wall Street. Maybe it was time to move, get a loft downtown, or a nice two-bedroom in the low Sixties. While a Soho address wasn’t too bad, an East Side address was still better. Balcony on a high floor, king-sized bed, cream carpeting, chrome and glass.

“…So she says, ‘Honey, can Iborrow seventy dollars?’ ” Everyone roared salaciously as the punch line was delivered, and instinctively Trumbull laughed along with them.

The rumble grew into a deafening roar as the express train pulled into the station. One of the group nudged Trumbull playfully toward the edge of the platform, and he leaned back out of the way of the approaching train. It came to a halt with a great shriek of brakes, and they piled into one of the cars.

Trumbull lurched into a seat as they pulled out of the station, looking around in annoyance. The car’s air-conditioning wasn’t working and all the windows were open, letting in the stale, damp smell of the tracks and the deafening noise of the train. It was hot as hell. He loosened his tie further. He was beginning to feel logy, and a mild but persistent pain was gathering at his temples. He glanced at his watch: they had to be back at the office in six hours. He sighed and leaned back. The train rocketed through the tunnel, swaying, making so much noise it was impossible to speak. Trumbull closed his eyes.

At 14th Street, several of the guys got off to catch trains for Penn Station. They grasped his hand, punched his shoulder, and were gone. More got off at Grand Central, leaving only Trumbull and Jim Kolb, a bond trader who worked one floor below. Trumbull didn’t particularly like Kolb. He closed his eyes again, exhaling wearily as the train dove deeper into the earth, following the express track.

Vaguely, Trumbull was aware of the train pulling into the 59th Street station, the doors opening, closing, the express plunging back into the darkness, gathering speed for the thirty-block run to 86th. One more stop,he thought drowsily.

Suddenly, the train lurched, then slowed, screeching to a halt. A long moment passed. Jostled awake, Trumbull sat in gathering irritation, listening to the tickings and creakings of the motionless car.

“Screw it,” said Kolb loudly. “Screw the Lexington Avenue Number Four.” He looked around for a response, getting none from the two other half-asleep riders. Then he elbowed Trumbull, who managed a wan smile as he thought about what a loser Kolb was.

Trumbull glanced down the car. He saw a cute-looking waitress and one black kid, wearing a bulky overcoat and knitted cap despite the hundred-degree interior of the train. Although the youth appeared to be sleeping, Trumbull eyed him warily. Probably coming back from a hard night’s mugging,he thought. He felt in his pocket for his penknife. Nobody was going to take his wallet, even if there was no money left in it.

There was a sudden crackle of static and a raspy voice came over the PA system: Attention passengzweesh therlalignal problem reshorkwix hortly.

“Yeah, right, tell me another one,” Kolb said disgustedly.

“Huh?”

“It’s what they always say. A signal problem. We should be moving shortly. In their dreams.”

Trumbull crossed his arms, closing his eyes again. His headache was getting worse, and the heat felt like a suffocating blanket.

“To think they charge a buck fifty to make us sit in this sweatshop,” Kolb said. “Maybe next time we should hire a limo.”

Trumbull nodded vaguely and checked his watch. Twelve forty-five.

“No wonder people jump the turnstile,” Kolb was saying.

Trumbull nodded again, wondering how he could make Kolb shut up. He heard a noise outside the car and glanced idly at the window. There was a dim form in the humid darkness, approaching up the adjoining track. Some MTA repairman, no doubt. Maybe he’s just doing late night track repairs,Trumbull thought, watching idly as the figure came closer. Hope swelled, then ebbed. But if there’s something wrong with the train, shit, we could be down here until—

Suddenly it passed by his window, soundlessly, a figure in white. Trumbull sat up like a shot. It was no track worker, but a woman: a woman in a long dress, running and stumbling down the tracks. He watched her retreating back through the open windows. Just as she disappeared into the gloom, he noticed that the woman’s back was splattered with something that glistened black in the reflected light of the stalled train.

“Did you see that?” he asked Kolb.

Kolb glanced up. “See what?”

“A woman running along the tracks.”

Kolb grinned. “One too many, Billy boy?”

Trumbull stood up and thrust his head out the window, squinting down the tracks in the direction the figure had gone. Nothing. As he ducked back into the car, he realized nobody else had noticed anything.

What was going on here? A mugging? He looked back out the window but the woman was gone, the tunnel once again quiet and empty.

“This is getting to be a lot longer than ‘shortly,’ ” Kolb groused, tapping his two-toned Rolex.

Trumbull’s head was pounding now. God knows he’d had enough to drink to be seeing things. Third time this week he’d gotten hammered. Maybe he shouldn’t go out so much. He must have seen a track worker carrying something on his back. Or her back. Some of them were women these days, after all. He glanced through the coupling doors into the next car, but it was equally peaceful, its sole occupant staring vacantly into space. If anything had happened, it would have been announced on the PA.

He sat down, closed his eyes, and concentrated on making the pain in his head go away. Most of the time, he didn’t mind riding the subway. It was a fast trip, and the clattering tracks and flashing lights kept a person distracted. But at times like this—idled without explanation, in the overheated darkness—it was hard not to think about just how deep under the earth the express track ran, or the mile of blackness that lay between him and the next stop…

At first, it sounded like a distant train, screeching into a station. But then, as Trumbull listened, he realized what the sound was: a distant, drawn-out scream, strangely distorted by the echoing tunnel, wafting faintly through the windows.

“What the hell—?” Kolb said, sitting forward. The youth’s eyes popped open, and the late-night waitress suddenly became alert.

There was an electric silence while everyone waited, listening. No other sound came.

“Christ, Bill, you hear that?” Kolb asked.

Trumbull said nothing. There had been a robbery, maybe a murder. Or—perhaps worse—a gang, working its way down the stalled train. It was every subway rider’s worst nightmare.

“They never tell you anything,” Kolb said, glancing nervously at the loudspeaker. “Maybe someone should check it out.”

“Be my guest,” Trumbull said.

“A man’s scream,” Kolb added. “It was a manscreaming, I swear it.”

Trumbull glanced out the window again. This time he could make out another figure moving along the far track, walking with a strange rolling motion, almost a limp, as it approached them.

“There’s somebody coming,” he said.

“Ask him what’s going on.”

Trumbull moved to the window. “Hey! Hey, you!”

In the dimness beyond the train, he saw the figure stop.

“What’s going on?” Trumbull called out. “Did someone get hurt?”

The figure began moving forward again. Trumbull watched as it went to the head of the next car forward, then climbed up onto the coupling and disappeared.

“I hate these TA assholes,” Kolb said. “Bastards make forty grand a year and don’t do shit.”

Trumbull walked to the front, looking through the window into the next car forward. Its lone occupant was still there, now reading a paperback book. Everything was quiet once more.

“What do you see?” Kolb whined.

Trumbull returned to his seat. “Nothing,” he said. “Maybe it was just some transit worker yelling to a buddy.”

“I wish they’d just get moving,”the waitress suddenly said, her voice tight with nerves. The youth in the heavy coat was slumped motionless in his seat, hands shoved in pockets. I’ll bet he’s got his hand on a gun,thought Trumbull, uncertain whether the thought made him anxious or relieved.

The lights blinked out in the forward car.

“Oh, shit,” Kolb said.

A loud thump came from the darkened car, causing the train to shudder as if something heavy had been slammed against it. The thump was followed by a strange sighing sound. Trumbull thought of air being released from a wet balloon.

“What was that?” the waitress asked.

“I’m getting the hell out of here,” Kolb said. “Come on, Trumbull. The Fifty-ninth Street station can’t be more than a couple blocks back.”

“I’m staying right here.”

“Then you’re an idiot,” said Kolb. “You think I’m just gonna wait here for some gang to come busting through that door?”

Trumbull shook his aching head. The thing to do was stay put and stay calm. If you got up and called attention to yourself, the only thing you did was make yourself a mark.

There was another sound from the dark car, like rain pelting against metal.

Cautiously, Trumbull leaned forward, looking ahead toward the darkened car. Immediately, he saw that the window was splattered from the inside with something like paint. Thick paint, running down the window in black clots.

“What is it?” Kolb cried.

Some kids were vandalizing the car, splashing paint around. At least, it looked like paint, red paint. Maybe it wastime to get the hell out, and before he had even articulated the thought he was up and running for the rear door of the car.

“Billy!” Kolb was on his feet following.

Behind him, Trumbull heard something slamming against the forward door, the shuffling patter of many feet, and then the sudden screaming of the waitress. Without stopping or looking back, he grabbed the handle and twisted it, throwing the sliding door open. He jumped across the coupling and wrenched open the door to the rearward car, Kolb right behind him, muttering “shit, shit, shit,” in a dull monody.

Trumbull had just enough time to notice that the last car was empty before the lights went out in the entire train. He glanced about wildly. The only illumination came from the faint, infrequent lights of the tunnel, and the distant yellow glow of the 59th Street station.

He stopped and turned to Kolb. “Let’s pry open the rear door.”

At that moment the sound of a gunshot echoed crazily from the car they’d just left. As the shot died away, Trumbull thought he could hear the faint sobbing of the waitress end abruptly.

“They cut his throat!” Kolb screamed, glancing over his shoulder.

“Shut up,” Trumbull hissed. No matter what sound reached his ears, he wasn’t looking back. He ran to the far door and grasped the rubber flanges, trying to pry them apart. “Help me!” he cried.

Kolb grabbed the other flange, the tears streaming down his face.

“ Pull, for Chrissakes!”

There was a sigh of air and the door gave way, flooding the car with a suffocating, earthy odor. Before he could move Trumbull felt himself shoved aside by Kolb, who jammed through the opening and leapt onto the tracks. Trumbull tensed himself for the leap, then froze. Several figures were coming into focus out of the darkness of the tunnel ahead of them, shambling toward Kolb. Trumbull opened his mouth, then closed it again, swaying weakly in disbelief. There was something horribly wrong, something unutterably foreign,about the way the figures moved. He watched as Kolb was surrounded. One of the figures grabbed Kolb’s hair, jerking his head back, while a second pinioned his arms. Kolb struggled soundlessly in jerky pantomime. A third stepped forward from the dim shadows, and, with a strangely delicate movement, flicked his hand across Kolb’s throat. Immediately, a hose of blood jetted in the direction of the train.

Trumbull shrank back in terror, falling to the floor and then scrambling to his knees, momentarily disoriented. He glanced back desperately at the car from which they’d run. In the darkness, he could see two figures crouched over the prone body of the waitress, working busily around her head…

Trumbull felt an indescribable desperation suddenly pierce his gut. He turned and leapt out of the emergency door, stumbling onto the tracks, running past the figures hovering over Kolb, racing for the dim far light of the station. Dinner and beer came up together in a rush, decorating his legs as he ran. He heard sounds of pursuit starting up behind him, crunching and thudding footfalls. A sob escaped his lips.

Then two more figures stepped out ahead of him on the tracks, cloaked and hooded, silhouetted against the distant light of the station. Trumbull stopped short as they began to move, loping toward him with a terrible speed. Behind him, the sounds of pursuit grew closer. A strange lethargy was turning his limbs to stone, and he felt his reason begin to give way. In a few seconds he’d be caught, just like Kolb…

And then, in the brief flash of a signal light, he caught a glimpse of one of the faces.

A single thought, clear and quite unmistakable, came to him through the haze of a night which had suddenly turned to nightmare. He realized what he had to do. Quickly, he scanned the tracks beneath him, located the yellow warning stripes and the bright clean rail, and thrust his foot beneath the shoe guard as the world dissolved in a flash of miraculous brilliance.