“This redoubt must have been used as a graveyard.”
“The word is ‘morgue,’ John.” A pause. “Or, perhaps ‘mortuary’ would be more accurate. But certainly not a graveyard.”
They both turned and saw Mildred watching them from way down the tunnel, her voice carried by the excellent acoustics.
“The others with you?” Ryan asked, walking toward the woman, his eye constantly on the watch for more danger.
“Haven’t seen them.” She looked past him to J.B.
“Hello, John. Thought I might not ever see you again.”
“Me, too, Mildred.”
Ryan moved aside as they embraced, hugging each other, the woman burying her face in the man’s shoulder. For several long seconds none of them spoke. When Mildred finally broke away she was sniffing, wiping her nose.
“Must be those bastard stinking chemicals. They made my eyes water.”
Ryan glanced at his chron. “Nearly ten o’clock. I came out of the jump just after eight. There was a repeater on the wall in the control room.”
J.B. was industriously polishing his glasses. “Eight-twenty for me.”
Mildred’s jaw dropped. “Eight-forty. Intervals of twenty minutes between each of us. You think”
Ryan was trying to work it out, and he didn’t answer for a moment. “If there’s a twenty minute gap, then there’s three possibilities. Everyone’s ahead of us. Or everyone’s behind us. Or they’re split up.”
“They could have wandered off down any of the other passages,” Mildred observed.
“And run into these cannibal muties. Haven’t heard any noise of a fight.”
“Nor me,” Ryan agreed.
“You didn’t hear anyone behind you?” The Armorer was slipping another round into the shotgun.
Mildred shook her head. “No. Found the code for the elevator on the wall and came on up.”
“Mebbe we should go back, Ryan. See if it’s been used again by Doc or Krysty or someone.”
“I don’t understand why the shooting hasn’t brought some more of the muties. Noise must’ve carried right through this part of the redoubt.” Ryan looked at the four bodies and the sad, scattered remnants of human flesh.
J.B. repeated his question. “How about going to check the elevator, Ryan?”
“Why not?”
Mildred had stooped to examine the corpses, straightening, shuddering. “Bad sight of the week, friends. Sickest specimens I ever saw outside the covers of Japanese horror comics. If that’s what eating human flesh does for you, then I think I might turn vegetarian.”
Ryan looked down the gentle slope that would bring them back to the top of the deep shaft. “All right,” he said. “Close together and on triple-red.”
“I’M WANDERING as lonely as a Perdition! I seem to have mislaid what I wandered lonely as. A flower? A cloud? No, I think that it wasn’t that, either. But I certainly seem most damnably lonely here.”
Doc had stepped out, past the surgical gloves and gowns, hardly noticing them. He walked around the control room, passing the screen that carried Mildred’s message without it registering on his consciousness. He was humming to himself.
The wall clock was now showing just one minute shy of ten o’clock.
“You’re a trained scientist, Theophilus. Exercise that rapier-keen intellect and work out just what the devil, what the Satan, what the Beelzebub, what the Hades, what” He jerked his head to snap himself out of the pattern. “What has happened to the others? Where are they? What went wrong?”
He sat at a desk, close to the sec doors, and looked vaguely around him.
“Redoubt in Florida was about to be drowned. Something went wrong and got separated in the jump.” He ticked off the points on his bony fingers. “All ended up in different places. Damn it, I’m starting to speak in some infernal telegraphese. Now, if everyone went elsewhere, then the probability is that they all tried again. I have ended here, wherever ‘here’ happens to be. Why should they not also have ended up in this redoubt? The answer is that they might.” Doc laughed. “And then again, my dear old duffer, perhaps they might not.”
He stood. “If you wish to make a practical test of the hypothesis, then that is what you shall do. I shall boldly go where somebody else might have gone before.”