“Yeah, and we’re too close to let it slip now,” Mildred added.
Doc moved around in front of her and began to drag one of the chilled corpses back into the room. “Then I suggest we hide these, just in case they should be spotted before our task is accomplished.”
“Good call,” Mildred agreed, taking the other corpse and following the old man into the room.
It was a fortunate act of chance that took them there. As they stashed the chilled Illuminated Ones out of view from the corridor or a casual glance into the room, Mildred caught sight of what was contained within.
“Look at this, Doc,” she murmured, leaving the hidden corpses and walking across the room to a comp display that was linked to graph machines spilling reams of computer paper silently into a collection basket.
“I believe I’ve seen something like this before,” Doc whispered, joining Mildred. “It is, is it not, some kind of medical monitoring device?”
“On the button, Doc,” Mildred muttered, scanning the comp displays and taking out a sheaf of the papers to study them. “Complete vital function, brain and organ scan. But who are they monitoring this closely?”
“Time enough for that in a while,” Doc said quietly. “If this is medical monitoring, then perhaps we have hit the home run?”
“Might just be that, Doc. Whatever this is attached to is through that door,” she said, indicating a closed sec door that linked the two rooms, the cables for the machine running through specially built wall sockets. “I figure there won’t be anything else in there, by the look of this hardware, so we’ll take a look after we’ve scouted the rest of this level. ‘Cause it should all be here.”
Doc agreed, and they temporarily left the comp setup in order to scout the rest of the level. There was only one external sec door onto the corridor—the one through which the two chilled Illuminated Ones had come. But internally, the rooms were linked by a series of sec doors that formed a chain. The first two rooms they entered were nothing more than standard examination rooms with tables and plentiful supplies of medications. Any other time, Mildred would have gladly raided them, but there were more important items on the agenda. It was in the third room that they found that for which they sought.
“Sweet Jesus in heaven, this is a nightmare, all right,” Mildred whistled softly as they entered the room.
Doc surveyed the sterile laboratory conditions. Under protective glass, with built-in arm and glove sockets arrayed along the side, a number of cultures were being developed. The petri dishes in which the disease cultures were being grown seemed innocuous enough, but a closer examination of them would reveal growths that echoed their evil intent on the ugliness of their development. At one end of the long tables on which the cultures were housed there were facilities for making solutions of the culture. It was from these solutions that the disease was being disseminated.
It did not seem, to the untrained eye, the stuff of nightmares. However, Mildred had seen enough of bacterial research and development facilities in her predark life to know what this represented. There were four long benches, one apart from the others. On any one of the other three alone there was enough of the disease being cultured to destroy the population of Earth many times over.
Mildred caught the bemusement in Doc’s eye. “Believe me, my friend, this truly is the stuff of nightmares.”
“I shall take your word as I have little option but to believe.” Doc shrugged. “It seems as little more than a mystery to me, so I hope you have some way of differentiating between the disease and the anti-disease, as it were.”
Mildred immediately, walked across to the bench that lay separate from the other three.
“You know what?” she mused. “These folk are so simpleminded in some ways that I’d lay odds this is where they cultivate the antidote, and I’ll bet you that they have stores of it that are even labeled as such.”
Doc allowed himself the ghost of a smile. “Whitecoat arrogance permeates through the ages. Of course, no one would ever dare to encroach upon their sacred domain.”