The duty officer held the handset in midair, arrested by Chase's appearance. He replaced it in its cradle and jumped up. "1 was just about to call you." He jerked his head toward the light. "Somebody's opened a sealed door on Level Four. I've already sent a couple of men to investigate."
"From inside?"
"Must have been. The alarm sensor wasn't triggered."
"Who'd be crazy enough to do that?"
The answer came to him even before the question was out of his mouth.
Somebody whose grief and desire for revenge would obscure every other impulse. Somebody who had no other reason for living except for his only child--a reason now annulled and made worthless. In a dying world the death of a loved one might prove to be the final blasphemy.
Somebody like Ron Maxwell.
"How long has it been open?"
"Only a few minutes. I got onto it right away. We should have it sealed tight again pretty soon." The armpits of the duty officer's tan shirt were ringed with sweat. He wiped his mouth with a hand that was visibly trembling. "Want me to raise a general alarm?"
"Not yet. Everyone's on his way back to bed. Let's wait for your men to report. We'll give them five minutes."
For Chase and the others in the operations room it was the longest five minutes of their life. After two had ticked away the duty officer had to sit down. After four the tension was like a high-voltage charge, at such an unbearable pitch that one of the technical operators began to whimper through hands pressed to his face.
As the sweeping red hand ascended to the vertical, marking off five, a dozen thoughts were hammering in Chase's brain. The men had been given sufficient time to report and yet failed to do so. How many intruders could have entered the Tomb during those five minutes? Could they have infiltrated up to Level 3? Immediately above Level 3 were the living quarters, the dormitories, and the sick bay. Dan and Ruth and most of the community were down there sleeping.
The duty officer was staring at him, his white face beaded with sweat.
"Hit it!" Chase cried hoarsely and was on his way through the door even as the siren started to wail.
Dan had been wrong. They were not, as he had described them, babies, but homunculi. Tiny stunted dwarflike beings with pulpy alabaster flesh and black pinprick eyes like raisins stuck in dough.
Obeying an instinct similar to the ant's they blindly followed a trail laid by the one in front, and the one in front of that, and the one in front of that, and the one in front of that. First a few, perhaps five or six, had picked up the scent of Dan and Jo as they struggled back across the hot barren landscape. More of the creatures had joined the march, which soon became a straggling procession, dozens, scores, then hundreds plodding onward across the desert scrub and disappearing into the tunnels like a long jointed white slug burrowing underground.
Guns could kill them, though it didn't seem to matter. Instinct and hunger drove them on; death was immaterial. They were seeking food, of any kind, animal or vegetable. They ate voraciously, like a plague of caterpillars stripping a forest bare. Kill one and another climbed over the body to take its place. Kill twenty and fifty more came on with pudgy blank faces and small red gaping mouths. They were mouths on stunted legs, quite mindless, living only to eat and reproduce.
The raw sunlight with its fierce dose of ultraviolet radiation was beneficial to the species, indeed essential. It had warped their genetic structure until each successive generation adapted more comfortably to the new conditions. Even the thinning atmosphere with its low oxygen content had been assimilated and was vital to the development of their metabolic structure.
There was no way they could be stopped--as Chase soon discovered.
They packed Level 4 with their soft squirming bodies and were stumping up the stairway to Level 3, jammed shoulder to naked shoulder, as Chase hopelessly pumped shot after shot into their midst. It was like shooting at the tide. The upper levels above him were in turmoil. People grabbed the few personal effects they could carry and scurried upward, some hastily dressed, others still in night attire. The siren blare
filled the corridors as Chase and the guards tried to halt or at least delay the inexorable progress of the eighteen-inch-high white tide.
Retreating before it, Chase followed the others up to Level 1. In the operations room he came upon the duty officer, holding his post when the rest had fled.
"Where are they?"
"Level Two."
"What in God's name are they after?"
"Food."
"Us?"
"Yes."
"Then we abandon?"
"Unless you can come up with the brain wave of the century in the next two minutes. Are the charges primed?"
"They prime automatically during an alert."
"Is everybody out?"
The duty officer looked at him, gray in the face. "Do you expect me to check?"
"All right. Set the timer and let's go."
The duty officer lifted the circular stainless-steel plate to reveal a red stirrup handle. Quickly he unscrewed two chromium-plated bolts, turned the stirrup through 180 degrees, and pressed it fully down until it locked. A timing device whirred and began to tick away the seconds. There were ninety of them before the Tomb erupted.
After ten the operations room was empty.
28
Sixty feet above the jungle the black gunship banked left and aligned on the Strip, taking its bearings from the crumbling overgrown tower with the ornate lettering just visible through dense foliage and twining mossy creepers: The Dunes.
Powered by chemical fuel and liquid oxygen, the gunship clattered over the swampy hollow formed by the convergence of roads and side streets between Flamingo Road and Sahara Avenue. Circus-Circus went by on the left, smothered in greenery; directly ahead was Las
Vegas Boulevard South in the downtown casino section. The only gambling that took place now had to do with survival. Odds were laid on adaptation versus extinction: the chance of eating something smaller against the risk of being eaten by something bigger.
Encroaching steadily northward, the tropical belt, fed by heat and the abundance of carbon dioxide, had taken possession of a wide swathe of desert. Farther south the swampland was too hot and stagnant even for amphibians. Deep down in the sludge new formations of molecules simmered and thrived, stirred into activity by the bombardment of radiation, creating forms of life that had yet to evolve and emerge into the light. Further south still lay the bubbling toxic ocean, a seething caldron of chemical soup.
Safe behind tinted thermo plastic, breathing cool oxygen, the pilot eased back on the control column and ascended to two hundred feet. The steel-and-concrete blocks, the broken windows, and tilting neon signs merged and were lost in the close-packed growth, as effectively hidden as the remains of a long-lost civilization. Only the reflected gleam of the sun, picking out the shallow muddy strip like the trail of a slug with an unerring sense of direction, gave any hint of man's erstwhile intrusion.
Dan shaded his eyes and watched the speck of the gunship disappear into the hazy distance. His face and neck were caked with yellow cream. He slipped the dark goggles into place and moved slowly, measuring each breath, along the squelchy bank to where the others were stretched out under the giant ferns.
He couldn't help remembering Miami Beach 2008. In thirteen years he hadn't progressed very far--as far as Las Vegas with the dismal prospect of not seeing his thirtieth birthday. At least here the air was just about breathable--2 or 3 percent lower and they would have been floundering about like beached fish.