"Stand now for the leader," boomed the speaker, which was situated above a pale green light screen.
"Here comes Superman," Doc Tanner whispered.
The speaker coughed and whistled. Lights dimmed, then flickered and flared brighter. Music came from the corners of the large room, hesitantly at first, then swelling to a rather tremulous mezzo-soprano.
"Oh, say, can you see, by the... by the... by the... by the... by the..."
It was switched off.
A door began to slowly open, and Ryan signaled to the others to stand, pushing back his chair, the legs scraping along the floor.
"The leader of the Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement!"
"Holy fuck!" Finnegan breathed, two places along from Ryan.
The leader was barely four feet tall. A pudgy, dumpy little woman, she had pink jowls of fat, like the dewlaps on a bloodhound, dangling on her shoulders. She was wearing a fawn-colored lab coat buttoned up to her throat. Immensely thick spectacles turned her tiny eyes into great goggling orbs of blue and white. Her hair was so thin that her scalp gleamed through the screwed-back mousy locks. She had an enormous bosom, which was out of proportion with the rest of her body, and forced her to lean back as she strutted in on stumpy legs like miniature tree trunks. One arm, the left, hung withered at her side, while the other fiddled with a hearing aid pinned to her lapel. She stopped at the desk at the front of the room and heaved herself slowly onto a box so that she could see the seven strangers who were staring openmouthed at her.
"Assume the seated mode," she said. Though she looked to be about fifty years old, her voice had the soft lisp of an eight-year-old girl.
Ryan sat down, followed by the others. He leaned forward and stared intently through his one good eye at the woman. If she ran a place of this size, then her appearance had to be deceptive.
"My name is Doctor Ethel Tardy," she said. "I function as leader of this complex. You are our first guests for a considerable temporal period. Why did you come here, journey wise?"
"We picked up a message on a trans," Ryan replied. "We're a group of friends, traveling this way. We were visiting Ginnsburg Falls."
"We monitor all communications. You closed the life window of their leader."
Ryan was shaken that they knew about the killing. He nodded. "Yes. It was..."
Dr. Ethel Tardy held up her right hand. "It means nothing, concernwise. Since your arrival in the complex you have all been measured and checked in all ways. All are healthy, though one has an incipient carcinoma, which may result in closure some years future."
Doc Tanner raised a hand. "May I ask a question, Doctor?"
"Indeed, Dr. Tanner, you may."
Ryan could feel ground slipping away beneath his feet. What in the long chill was going on here? How could they know all this? Names, illnesses?
"This has nothing to do with Project Cerberus, does it?"
The answer was some time coming. "Not precisely, Dr. Tanner. Project Cerberus was limited on a need-to-know Grades Delta and up only. We are the descendants of the initiators of Project Eurydice, the project from which there shall never be a looking-back situation."
Doc Tanner sat down again, eyes flicking toward Ryan, who thought that he'd never seen the old man look so worried.
"Interruptionwise, we are in a negative situation. I shall relate all you need to know before aligning you with us."
It was another of the "when, not if" situations, the kind that made Ryan feel uneasy.
For the next hour Dr. Ethel Tardy, in her silly little girl's voice, squeaked and lisped her way through a concise account of the utterly extraordinary history of Project Eurydice, a tale so incredible that the seven friends sat in amazed silence.
Afterward, Ryan tried to recall everything that she'd told them but found he could remember only the bare bones of the story.
During the mid 1990s, when war fever took over the land, a great number of secret missions were set up in what was then the United States. Protest was useless, and even national parks were taken over and used. Though Crater Lake was one of the most beautiful places on the continent, experts pronounced it suitable for deep excavation beneath the cone of Wizard Island near the center of the deep lake. A huge and intricate complex was set up there and staffed by some of the top military scientists. According to the doctor, by the end of the century the only scientists who received any funding were those involved in pure military research.
Bigger weapons.
Better weapons.
Then came 2001, and civilization, as it had been known, disappeared forever. The population wasn't just decimated. It was decimated again and again until only a tiny fraction survived. Among those survivors were the scientists who ran the Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement.
"In the summer of that year, rosterwise," the doctor told them, "there were seventeen hundred personnel here. Security was not a predicated condition."
To the astonishment of Ryan and his friends, the diminutive woman described what followed the nuclear Armageddon that blasted the world. Sealed in concrete and steel, the scientists were spared. Their air was filtered, the food self-produced from limitless supplies of time-safe chemicals. They were totally self-sufficient.
And all they needed to do was proceed with their work. With their research.
"Which we did, ladies and gentlemen. We received no instructions to alter our program schedulewise."
Doc Tanner again raised a hand. "But you are aware that the society that originally funded and ordered your project is long gone? Dust these hundred years?"
"Of course, Doctor. We are not fools here. But we have been reared here. We are born here. Genetically we breed and we die. But always the generations carry on."
"What of fresh blood?" Ryan asked her.
She smiled a gentle, dimpled smile at his question. "What need is there?"
"You breed within the complex and never go out?" Krysty asked.
"Of course. Negative dispersal, socialwise. Nobody ever leaves the complex, except in death."
"How many are there of you scientists now?" Doc Tanner asked, casting a meaningful look across the room at Ryan.
"Sixty-one approved personnel."
"Sixty-one," Jak squeaked. "Then... you said seventeen hundred?"
"Affirmative, young white head. There werethat many. Now we are sixty-one working operatives, sciencewise."
Doc mouthed something at Ryan, but it took the one-eyed man three attempts to understand it. The old man was trying to pass him the word "inbreeding." That had to be it! Ryan had seen enough closed communities to know what happened when the genes never got a chance to get rejuvenated by new, outside blood — there were mutations and still births.
And the ville eventually died away.
From seventeen hundred of what must have been the top scientific brains in the land down to sixty-one of... of people like Dr. Ethel Tardy.
Suddenly, like a thunderbolt, a question came to Ryan's lips. But he quickly suppressed it. The woman knew the name of Doc Tanner. But evidently she didn't know the names of the rest of them. How did she know the Doc?
She went on, in her sweet little girl way, telling them how the original sec guards had died away when some had tried to go outside. Rads had gotten them. And she told them how the scientists had needed menial servants. "Slaves," Krysty whispered.
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.