“Greetings to all of you outlanders, ladies and gentlemen and children.” He stooped forward to peer at Dean. “Sadly we have few children here in the institute these days. The records show a far higher birth rate back in the early days of the long winters, after skydark.”
“Probably nothing else for them to do,” Abe said in a stage whisper.
“Sample of outlander humor?” the scientist asked, wiping his hands down the sides of his long lab coat as though they’d suddenly become infected.
“Good sample, too. You want some more?”
Buford shook his head, wincing as though someone had wafted a foul-smelling rag under his nose. “No, thank you. I believe not.”
“Can we see all around?”
He looked at Mildred and pasted a lopsided smile across his face. “Why, of course you can.” He paused. “Eventually. But not today.”
“Why? What the fuck do you have to hide from us?” Trader snapped.
Buford glanced around, checking that there were half a dozen sec men within easy call. “You must not be so violent. It will benefit you nothing. Today we’ll have a look around the outline of our project, give you an idea of what we do. Then, perhaps tomorrow, Professor Crichton wishes to talk with you. Specially with you,” he said, turning to face Krysty.
“Me?”
“It’s obvious already that you are not the common, run-of-the-mill outsiders who have stumbled into our lands in the past. We believe you have not told us the truth about where you come from and who you are. Perhaps you have been utilizing some terminological inexactitudes. We think you might have skills we do not yet understand. But we will. Obviously Miss Wroth’s supernatural skill has attracted our interest, and we would like the opportunity to carry out some tests. No harm will come, either to her or to any of you. I promise you that.”
“That’s fair,” Ryan said. “You lay your cards on the gaming table. Something in what you say. You don’t get to make old bones in Deathlands if you go around blabbing off to everyone about who you are and what you’ve done. Mebbe we don’t come from a little fishing village. But that falls under the heading of being our business, the way we see it.”
“You admit to being liars?”
Ryan considered the question. “Yeah. I’ll put my hands up to that charge, whitecoat.”
Buford pulled out his notebook and quickly wrote several lines in it. Ryan glanced sideways but couldn’t read the crabbed, angular hand.
He put the book away in a pocket and smiled brightly. “Very well. The tour begins here.”
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to check out the atrium, which the short, balding man explained had once been filled with a variety of rare and exotic plants. But they had all died. Sleeping and eating quarters opened immediately off it, with the security section on the second floor. Buford also took them into the other story of their own wing.
The rooms were mainly filled with laboratories of differing sizes, manned by the men and women who’d shared their supper the previous night. But there was nothing to give an obvious clue as to what work they were doing there. One of the things that Ryan noticed immediately was the almost-total absence of anyone under the age of thirty in the whole of the institute.
Doc had been walking briskly alongside the diminutive scientist, his sword stick rapping away on the plastic tiles of the corridors.
“Elegant,” Buford commented.
“Thank you kindly.”
“It looks a true antique.” He peered at it. “That beautiful animal’s head in silver.”
“Toledo steel blade within the ebony case, and it supports me in my frail old age.”
“I sometimes use a stick myself,” Buford said, “as you probably noticed when we were outside. Rough ground is hardship to me with my knee and hip joints.”
Mildred overheard the end of the conversation. “Why can’t you carry out replacement operations? Place like this must’ve once been geared up for prosthetic installations.”
“Prosthetic? You use a word like that! A woman shouldn’t have knowledge from predark times on such medical matters. May Hippocrates himself preserve us, but I think that you are all muties!”