"It will have to," Garth said, taking the fire extinguisher. "Jack, let us out of here."
The captain flicked two switches on the console to his left. I heard a door open behind me, and then a whomp as an emergency escape chute was deployed and inflated. I glanced at Garth's watch as we hurried back to the exit: it was 11:03. As I jumped onto the air bag and slid to the ground behind my brother, I found that my head and vision were clear; the cold night air in my face was invigorating. I no longer felt feverish, and now, at least for the time being, my legs felt strong.
Perhaps, I thought as I hit the ground and, with Garth beside me, came up running toward the massive, glowing structure, my heightened sense of concentration and newfound energy might somehow be connected to the fact that Garth and I could have less than an hour left in our lives.
The assault on Eden had begun. Santa Claus and helper were coming to town.
16
In moments we had reached the base of Eden, which was a wall of concrete five feet high. We crouched in the darkness, just below the eerie green, chemically or solar-cell produced light that seeped out of the translucent plastic dome that covered the vast expanse of the biosphere.
"How are you holding up?" Garth asked.
"Okay. You?"
"Okay. Decision time."
"I know. If this thing was built to the same scale and design as the model I saw, we should be just outside the desert region. The living quarters will be in the first arm, which is a good way up. Where do we go in?"
"What do you say, Mongo?"
I thought about it, said: "It's too risky to try to break right into the living quarters. Hell, we could end up falling in through Tanker Thompson's window and into his lap, which is grief we don't need. Besides, I doubt that the transmitter is anywhere in the living quarters section, or Thompson would have known where it was. If the transmitter is someplace else, then it doesn't make any difference where we break in and start looking, because one place is as good as another. I say we go in here, and check out the terrain as we make our way toward the living quarters."
"Agreed," Garth said, and swung the fire extinguisher full force at the plastic material that rose from the concrete wall.
The steel cylinder struck the plastic and rebounded like a tumbler on a trampoline, almost pulling Garth off his feet.
"Shit," I said. "That's reinforced Plexiglas. It's going to be a bitch to break."
Garth took a deep breath, gripped the handle of the fire extinguisher with both hands, and swung again-with the same results. I grabbed his wrist, looked at his watch: it was 11:11.
"Come on," I said, tugging at my brother's sleeve. "We don't have time for this. We're going to have to look for the front door.''
"No," Garth replied curtly as he took McCloskey's automatic out of his pocket and slipped off the safety catch. "We could waste time looking, make just as much noise going in there as here, and possibly warn them. Let me see if I can't weaken the shield with a bullet or two."
Garth fired two bullets, spaced closely together, into the Plexiglas. I knew that the thickness of the shield would undoubtedly muffle the sound, but I still winced each time the gun went off. Again he smashed the steel cylinder into the plastic, just below the two holes; and again. A slight crack had appeared, but the material still held firm.
His watch read 11:13.
Garth raised his gun again, but I grabbed his arm and shoved Frank Palorino's revolver at him. "Here, use two from mine. We don't have any spare ammunition, and neither one of us can afford to have an empty gun."
Garth nodded, pocketed his automatic, and used the revolver to fire two more shots into the Plexiglas, just below the first two. Then he banged the end of the fire extinguisher into the center of the rectangle formed by the four holes. The material cracked further-and parted. Three more whacks, and there was a hole big enough for a man to crawl through.
"Up, up, and away," Garth said, crouching slightly and cupping his hands together at the level of his knees.
I tucked the revolver, which Garth had given back to me, in the waistband of my jeans, took two steps backward, then ran forward, jumped, and planted my right foot in Garth's cupped hands. He gave me a moderate heave, and I sailed head first through the opening in the Plexiglas, prepared for the shock of landing on what I assumed would be hard-packed sand.
Wrong.
So much for relying on scale models, I thought as I landed in foul-smelling muck that almost immediately closed over my head as it began sucking me down. I fought against the slime, struggling to right myself, and finally felt my feet touch bottom. I stood up, found myself in blackish-brown mire that came up to my shoulders, gagged when I sucked in a breath. It seemed I had landed in the swamp-which was virtually a cesspool.
Something was definitely rotten in Eden; or it was Eden itself that was rotting. Blaisdel, Peter Patton and Company had missed an equation somewhere.
I checked my waistband to make certain the revolver was still there. It was-not that it was going to be much use, except maybe as a club; the firing mechanism would be hopelessly fouled with the lumpy slime.
"Watch out!" I called through cupped hands, shuddering as I felt-or imagined I felt-something large, cold, and slimy slither across my back. "Forget the floor plan! It's a fucking swamp!"
Garth's head and shoulders appeared above me in the opening. He looked down at me, frowned. "You all right?"
"I'm all right, but my gun has to be fouled. Watch out for yours."
Garth nodded, then raised the automatic over his head and jumped into the mire beside me. Taller, and with more leverage, Garth was able to wade more easily through the muck, and I didn't object when he grabbed my arm and dragged me after him across the surface toward higher ground seventy-five yards or so away.
Blaisdel and his people had dreamed of building themselves the ultimate greenhouse, I thought as I gazed into the distance, and my first impression was that they'd wound up with the ultimate shithouse. I wondered how the people living there could stand it. The fetid air hanging over the swamp could not be that much better anywhere else in the biosphere; it was humid and cloying, and felt like wet wool in the lungs. The "sky" above Eden-the same sickly, dim green glow we had seen outside-was, I presumed, supposed to give some psychological satisfaction so that Eden's inhabitants would not be depressed by utter darkness in the absence of the sun, moon, and stars; I would have preferred darkness. It was hot-too hot-and I suspected that the inevitable greenhouse effect induced by the coated Plexiglas was considerably greater than the designers had anticipated, and would eventually become unbearable. Eden was no place to hang out during any Tribulation; Eden itself was a tribulation.
Perhaps a half mile away, the "sky" seemed to lighten and ripple slightly, and I suspected this might be a reflection from Eden's "ocean." Unless the whole biosphere had been redesigned, the living quarters would be in a separate arm or wing constructed on higher ground near the shore of the ocean.
Further in the distance, barely visible, there was what appeared to be a heavy mist hanging like a diaphanous curtain from the ceiling to the ground. That would be the rain forest.
Somewhere in this vast, artificial, rotting world a machine was ticking away, preparing to send a signal that would trigger explosions that would kill tens of millions of people. Eden, indeed. Leaders like Blaisdel, William Kenecky, and Peter Patton, abetted by followers like Tanker Thompson, the Small brothers, Hector Velazian, Billy Dale Rokan, and Craig Valley, had always suffered their patently insane obsessions and superstitions, along with a desperate need to inflict their obsessions and superstitions on everyone else. I had always believed that at the bottom of every political and religious zealot's heart was a death wish. They were, in every sense of the word, enemies of humanity, creators of hell on earth, infecting generation after generation down through the centuries, their lineage of paranoia, hatred, and terrorism going all the way back to the dawn of humankind's tenure on earth. Henry Blaisdel and William Kenecky had presumed to go to the head of the class, and Garth and I had only minutes left to stop them.