Her eyes studied him coldly. “Perhaps one thing . . .”
“And what’s that?”
“If you had been willing to be bribed,” Jill Trelawney said, “I should have asked the Troopers to shoot you.”
* * *
There was a lady, Dowland was thinking a few minutes later, who was likely to be something of a problem to any man. However, she wouldn’t be his problem for a considerable number of hours now. She had swallowed the sleep tablet he had given her without any trouble. After the drug wore off, the tablet would keep her quiet till around dawn.
He stood looking about the wind-swept darkened slopes of the ranch area. Clouds were moving past in the sky, but there would be intermittent moonlight. The conditions weren’t too bad for the search he had in mind. There had to be a concealed storeroom about the place somewhere, in which the Trelawneys would keep assorted stuff connected with their secret work which they didn’t want to have cluttering up the lab. Including, very likely, any spare keys to the lab. At a guess, neither of the brothers would have wanted Jill at Lion Mesa during this crucial and dangerous stage of the project. But they probably were used to letting their beautiful and headstrong niece do as she wanted. But they needn’t have mentioned things like the storeroom to her. If he could keep his mind slightly off the fact that within a hundred yards or so of him there were sixty-eight kilograms of YM-400—with an unspecified amount of it at present in its horrendous radioactive state—he should stand a fairly good chance of finding the storeroom.
And in that case, the half-inch atomic key Jill Trelawney had showed him, and which was at the moment weighing down his coat pocket, probably would turn out to be exactly what he needed to get into it.
He located the place just under an hour later. It was a matter partly of observation, partly of remembering a remark Jill had made. The building which housed the giant hogs adjoined a corral three times its size. Corral and building were divided into two sections, the larger one harboring six sows. The single boar was in the other. A spider web of gangways led about above the huge stalls. It was the wall between building and corral which had drawn Dowland’s attention by the fact that a little calculating indicated it was something like a yard thicker than was necessary.
He brought a dozen campfire sticks over from the grid-car and spaced them down the central gangway of the building, then deferred further inspection long enough to locate and trip the automatic feeding mechanisms. The hungry animal thunder which had greeted him at his entry ebbed away as they ate furiously and he studied them. They weren’t the grotesque monstrosities he had expected but massive, sculptured giants with the quick, freewheeling agility of a rhinoceros, sand-colored, with wickedly intelligent eyes. There wasn’t much question they’d make exciting game for anyone who enjoyed a touch of personal danger in the hunt.
The danger was more obviously there in the boar. The brute’s eight hundred or so pounds of weight above that of the average of his prospective harem would not be significant when pitted against an opponent as physically inferior as a human being. His attitude might. The sows filed out into the corral after they had eaten what the feeding machine had thrown into them. The boar remained, watching Dowland on the gangway above him from the corner of one eye. The eye reflected no gratitude for the feeding. It was red-rimmed and angry. The jaw worked with a continuous chewing motion. There was a fringe of foam along the mouth.
Jill Trelawney had mentioned that no one but Miguel could come near the boar.
Dowland could believe it. A small steel ladder led down from the gangway into the brute’s stall. Dowland reached into his pocket and brought out the IPA gun. No sportsman would have considered using it against an animal. But this wasn’t sport. He started down the ladder.
* * *
The boar stood motionless, watching him. Dowland stopped at the foot of the ladder. After a moment, he took a step forward. The boar pivoted and came thundering across the floor of the stall, head low. The gun made its soft, heavy sound, and Dowland leaped aside. The huge body that slammed into the far wall behind him was dead before it struck, nearly headless. He went on to the thick dividing wall between stall and yard.
The lock to the storeroom door was on the inner side of the wall, concealed by the planking but not too difficult to find. Dowland inserted the key, twisted it into position, felt a slight click, and stepped back as the door began to swing out toward him.
The storeroom contained the general kind of paraphernalia he had expected to find, including three antiradiation suits. It took Dowland twenty minutes to convince himself that the one thing it definitely did not contain in any obvious manner was a key to the laboratory. Appropriate detection instruments might have disclosed it somewhere, but he didn’t have them.
The fact was dismaying because it ended his hopes of finding the key. It would take most of the night to make a thorough search of the various ranch buildings, and at best there would be an even chance of discovering the key in the process. Wherever it was, it must be carefully concealed. If Miguel regained consciousness, the information could be forced from him, but it wasn’t too likely that the older Trelawney ever would wake up again.
Dowland picked up two of the three AR suits, folded them over his arm, stood, still hesitant, glancing up and down the long, narrow space of the storeroom, half aware that he was hoping now some magical intuition might point out the location of the key to him at the last second. If he could get into the laboratory, he was reasonably sure he could puzzle out the mechanisms that directed the shift of YM into radioactivity, and shut them down. A machine was a machine, after all. Then, with the YM interference eliminated, grid power should be available again, and . . .
Dowland glanced at his watch again, shook his head. No point in considering it—he couldn’t get into the laboratory. An hour and a half had gone to no purpose. Hunting for the key had looked like a good gamble, the quickest and therefore least dangerous method of solving the whole awesome problem. But it hadn’t worked out; and what was left was to work down the side of Lion Mesa, and start hiking out across the desert. With luck, he’d find the communicator start picking up grid power again around dawn—if the YM didn’t cut loose with further unpredictable and much more disastrous “phenomena” before then. Unsatisfactorily vague as the available information had been, it implied that what had happened around here was still, so far, on a very mild level. The Trelawneys, in spite of their confidence that the Overgovernment was bluffing, that YM was harmless if properly handled, might have had the good sense to work with only the most minute quantities to begin with.
* * *
He left the storeroom door open, turned off the whiter glowing campfire sticks, and took them, with the AR suits, back to the house with him. The living room had become almost completely dark. Uncle and niece were where he had left them. Dowland worked for a minute or two to release the automatic shutters over the single wide window; they came down into position then with a sudden thud which shook the room but failed to arouse the Trelawneys. Dowland relit one of the sticks and dropped it into the fireplace. The room filled with clear light.
He stacked the other stick against the wall, laid the AR suits over the back of a chair. He had considered getting the Trelawneys into them as a safety measure against whatever might happen before the matter was over, but had dropped the idea again. It would be questionable protection. The antiradiation field was maintained automatically while a suit was worn, and it impeded breathing just enough to have occasionally suffocated an unconscious wearer. Jill would discover the suits when she woke up and could use her own judgment about them.
Dowland was coming back from the grid-car with his mountaineering harness and portable communicator when the hogs began to scream again. He stopped, startled. There was an odd and disturbing quality to the racket this time—even more piercing than before—and, unless he was mistaken, the huge animals were in a sudden panic about something. Next, he heard them slamming against the sides of the corral, apparently trying to break out of it. His heart started to pound with instinctive alarms. Should he go down and investigate? Then, before he could decide, he heard through the din of the hogs, swelling gradually to almost match those incredible shrieks in volume, another sound. For a moment, something seemed to shut off Dowland’s listening to the rumble and roar of a rushing, turbulent mass of water—and his ears told him it was passing by beneath him.