“This it?” Royal said from behind the wheel. “Gowan Avenue—just past the construction, right?” They had slowed down and were passing a stretch of road with barriers and warning beacons, mounds of earth, and stacks of concrete pipe sections waiting to be laid. Silent earth movers and other machinery stood off the road to one side. Ollie consulted the sketch and directions that Andy Finnion had scrawled.
“Should be a gate with a sign somewhere along here,” he confirmed.
They came to it almost at once: neurodyne. That was all it said. Royal pulled over and picked up the car phone. The lots in the office park were practically lost among the trees in the rain just starting to fall. “Let’s just check it one more time.” They had called Neurodyne’s number on the way in. Royal listened for perhaps ten seconds, then shook his head. “There’s nobody answering today. Okay, let’s go.”
They drove in through the gate and stopped outside the main entrance. Royal produced the keys that Andy had given him. Ollie read the directions for when they were inside: “Stairs up to the second floor. Corridor left. Third door on the left.” They got out of the car. And that was when they became aware of the odd droning sound coming from somewhere in the direction of the Interstate, still distant but getting closer.
They exchanged puzzled looks. “What the hell’s that noise?” Royal said.
“Dunno. . . . Chainsaw?”
“Not unless someone’s running with it. . . . Anyhow, that’s gotta be someplace up in the sky.”
They stood outside the doors, scanning, looking more perplexed. Suddenly Ollie pointed. “There!”
They watched in astonishment as a toy airplane, yellow and red, came out from among the treetops. Their puzzlement turned to alarm as the plane descended toward the gateway, clearly heading for the Neurodyne building. Then it was just nose and wings with a tail fin behind, coming straight at them like fighters on strafing runs that Ollie had seen in war movies. He yelped, ducked, and without thinking pulled his gun from the hip holster at the back of his jacket.
But there were no bullets, and the toy plane veered and turned away. Then it swooped and made another pass, uncannily as if the pilot were checking them out—which was stupid, of course; what was in there to do any checking? Then it circled. Somebody, somewhere was presumably figuring out what to do.
Royal was standing tensed, his head jerking first one way then another, scanning the surroundings. “Where are they? Who’s got the button for that thing?”
“I don’t see anybody.”
“Whoever it is has to be around here somewhere.”
“What the hell are they doing?”
“How should I know?”
And then the plane climbed away over the parking area, turned above the gate, and headed back toward the building. Its engine note rose; it lined itself up, came in on a dive over the heads of the two men watching open-mouthed below . . .
And crashed into one of the second-story windows.
Kevin squirmed from beneath the motor and the wreckage of the nose, now crushed back into what had been the cabin, and clambered out over broken spars and shredded fabric. The rest of the plane was tilted almost vertically above him like an upended airliner, its nose inside the shattered window pane, crumpled wings impaled among jagged fingers of glass. He climbed over shards piled like smashed icebergs, and stopped at the edge of the sill to check his bearings. He was in the Test Lab, where he’d intended; there, a short distance away in one of the development couplers, was his real body—where the awareness that he was experiencing at this very instant was actually located. It was still an eerie sensation, even if hardly new. But there was no time for dwelling on things like that now. The two men with the blue car—who could only be henchmen of Payne’s—were only a short corridor, a flight of stairs, and the thickness of the front doors away. But what was Lancelot supposed to do? Moving the spring-loaded On/Off switch would be like trying to turn the gun turret of a tank.