They had taken some retard muties and given them voice box activators that were controlled from within the complex. They had also made some implants in the cortex to render the creatures totally obedient to the will of the scientists.
“Fucking slaves,” Finnegan hissed.
“How many?” J.B. asked, leaning back in his seat, the brim of his fedora tugged low over his face, making it hard to see his eyes.
“Query sec total? Forty. That balance is now maintained, by culling.”
The story was becoming more and more incredible. The picture of this sealed palace, with its generations of super-brains locked away from the horrors of the world outside for a century, breeding and interbreeding, with slaves to work for them, chilled the blood of Ryan and his compatriots.
Ryan’s immediate guess was that in another twenty years or so the place would wither and die out altogether.
The doctor was remarkably open and frank with the strangers, something else that planted another seed of worry in Ryan’s mind. A place like this would contain enough to keep someone like the Trader in business for life. Any bandit would give his right arm for such a prize. And here was Dr. Tardy telling them all of the secrets and details of how the complex operated. Would she do this if there was any risk of their ever getting out? Locked away, thousands of feet below the surface of Crater Lake, the chances of escape weren’t very good, Ryan knew.
“There. That’s all I can tell you about us,” the doctor finally said. Now that she was finished her talk, the tiny woman seemed more at ease, having dropped some of the parroted jargon that had dotted her speech earlier. “Later we’ll get to know more about you all, factwise, apart from Dr. Tanner, of course.”
She ventured a nervous, trilling laugh that made her cheeks wobble, then climbed down off her box, just as the door started to ease open. Before she could leave, Doc Tanner held up his clawlike hand yet again.
“Yes?” the fat little doctor asked, a smile pasted solidly in place.
“I have another query, Dr. Tardy.”
“Indeed?”
“Throughout your most interesting dissertation, you spoke much of the past, even a little of the present, but nothing of the future. Why is that?”
“The future is a chalice held in all our hands, Doctor.”
“And what does that cup contain?”
“It contains hope.”
“And?”
“Hope of an end to suffering.”
Doc pressed her. “Through peace? Through an end to disease?”
“No. Not that way. That is not the path on which we must tread.”
“What frightful fiend doth tread behind you?” he asked, voice low, almost as if he were speaking to himself.
“I don’t read. We are not interfacing, communicationswise, Dr. Tanner. Let us terminate on that.”
She bustled out, cheeks flushed, eyes averted from her audience. It was screamingly obvious that, quite deliberately, Doc had touched her on the rawest of raw nerves. What the scientists were actually doing in the complex under Wizard Island was something they wished to keep secret.
The seven of them sat there, at their lecture desks, each one with much to think about while they waited for the speaker to crackle into life and give them further orders.
Where they should go.
And what they should do.
Chapter Sixteen
THERE WERE NO CLOCKS in the Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement, not clocks that showed any sort of real time, just circular chrons, divided into three equal parts, red, amber and green, each subdivided into five equal portions lettered from A to E . Ryan and his companions quickly came to realize that the scientists operated a simple three-shift day of eight hours each. But they didn’t use hours and minutes in allocating time. They would talk of eating at Red C or of using one of the deeply buried bathing pools at Amber B .
Ryan Cawdor’s body clock was infallible, and he knew that when they were taken to have their second meal of the day, it was close to noon in the Oregon mountains far, far above them.
It was identical in every way to the first meal, except that it was possibly a more yellowish shade of brown than the first plate of sludge. It was difficult to detect any change in the taste.