The elevator doors started to close. Jak reached out and stopped them. “Where to?” he asked. “Out?”
“Before we leave, we’d better check out the armory,” Ryan said. “Mebbe we’ll get lucky this time and find something we can use. We’re getting low on ammo.”
He got in the elevator and gently set Krysty against the rear wall. She was lost in a deep and troubled sleep. As Ryan straightened, Jak poked the illuminated button for the fourth floor.
When the doors opened on the next level, all of the companions stood with their blasters drawn, ready to defend themselves. They were greeted not by kill-crazed mutants, but by pitch-darkness. The light from the elevator penetrated only a few feet into the gloom. Then, one after another, the banks of ceiling lights flickered and started to come on. Some of the fluorescent tubes continued to flicker annoyingly; others remained dark. Enough of them lit up for Ryan and friends to be able to see there was no opposition down the long, windowless corridor.
“Those are some long-life bulbs,” Mildred said appreciatively.
“Probably keyed to movement or sound,” Ryan replied. “Don’t come on until someone triggers them. Saves wear and tear that way.”
He turned to the Armorer and said, “J.B., give Jak your scattergun. He can sit and watch on the elevator and Krysty while we recce.”
The Armorer unsiung his Smith & Wesson M-4000
12-gauge and handed it to Jak. The white-haired teen automatically checked the breech for a live round, then found and tripped the car’s control-panel switch that locked the doors open and held the elevator in place.
Ryan and the others leapfrogged down the hallway, kick-entering every room, making sure no muties were lying in wait, and that their backs-and line of retreat-were protected.
They were closing in on the armory when J.B. stuck his head out of a doorway and shouted down the passage to his friends. “Hey, I found somebody in here,” he said. “It looks like one of your predark whitecoats, Doc. Don’t get your hopes up, though. He’s already well chilled.”
Ryan, Mildred and Doc followed J.B. into the room. It was a scientific laboratory, with its own mainframe computer and a row of automated chemical-analysis machines. The walls were lined with metal shelves, bearing hundreds of stacked, labeled, sealed glass jars. Similar jars rested on the workstation counters and the floor.
Ryan scanned some of the labels. The dates printed at the tops went all the way back to the days immediately after the nuclear holocaust.
The room contained thousands of jars. Some were packed with what looked like wads of human hair and fingernail clippings. Others were filled with cloudy liquid in different shades of yellow and amber. Still others contained brown, segmented coils of excrement suspended in clear fluid.
A broad, white writing surface on one wall displayed a hand-drawn graph in red. Numerous points on the parabola were marked with blue dots, and above the dots were numerical values and Greek letters. Five-foot-high stacks of computer spreadsheets stood beside the writing panel.
“He’s over here,” J.B. said, waving them to a big, wall-mounted freezer unit with smoked-glass doors.
Inside the freezer a man-shape sat facing out, cross-legged, its arms folded over its chest It was wearing a white lab coat. Ryan could just make out the round lenses of its eyeglasses under the hoary growth of frost From the dates on the jars, the whitecoat had lived in the redoubt for decades before pulling his own plug. While he had waited in the freezer to die, he had written something in the frost on the inside of the door with a fingertip. He’d written it backward so anyone looking in at him could read it.
Ryan read the two words aloud: “‘Science rules.'”
Laughter exploded from Doc’s throat. He hooted so hard, it sent him into a fit of coughing. He doubled over, gasping for air, while he continued to laugh.
Ryan clapped the old man on the back. “Easy, Doc,” he said, “or you’re gonna bust something important. We don’t have time for this. Let’s get out of here.”
The armory entrance they sought stood near the dead end of the corridor. It had a heavy, double-wide, tempered steel door and a massive and still-operational computer card lock.