Could he get to it in time?
As he stood, frozen in place, one of the men pulled out his gun and aimed it at the door lock. The sound of the shot reached him as a sharp crump.
At the same time, Logan’s gaze fell on the strange device he’d noticed earlier: the oversized timpani mallet. He peered at it more closely as another shot sounded. It consisted of a spherical metal ball atop a red plastic belt, the belt looking almost like the ribbon cable of a personal computer, fastened at the base to what appeared to be a comb-shaped electrode. The entire thing was encased in a wire cage.
It was familiar. He’d seen something like it before.
A third shot sounded. With the whine of a ricochet, part of the door lock spun back into the room, leaving a small, ragged hole.
Logan did his best to ignore this as he stared at the device. Where had he seen this?
And then he remembered. It had been at a Yale freshman fraternity rush, back before the practice was banned. An electrical engineering club had exhibited just such a device: its metal globe had shot out sparks in all directions, eliciting shrieks and cries and making people’s hair stand on end.
A Van de Graaff generator. That’s what it was called. And that wire enclosure: it was exactly like the Faraday cage Kim Mykolos had speculated about, in the faceplates of the suits hanging in the forgotten room. What was it she’d said? An enclosure, made of a conducting mesh, that ensures the electrical voltage on both sides remains constant.
A fourth shot. This one had the effect of knocking out the rest of the lock, sending it scudding across the floor.
Logan was thinking furiously, cursing the time he’d spent as a junior, snoozing through Dr. Wallace’s physics course. The cage surrounding the Van de Graaff generator — it acted as a protective device. If the generator was turned on, and the cage removed, the generator would produce a rapid buildup of negative electrons….
He rushed up to the lab table. Knocking away the surrounding cage, he saw the device was powered by two small white wires and a toggle switch inserted into the base. The wires led away to a standard electrical plug, which he picked up and slid into an outlet in the side of the lab table. Nothing happened. He pressed the toggle switch. It must have acted as a fail-safe mechanism, because immediately the generator came to life, humming and vibrating. He fell back, ducking down into the doorway and out of harm’s way. As he did so, the door at the far end of the lab flew open with a violent slam.
As the three men stormed into the room, the Van de Graaff generator went crazy; freed of the restraining mesh, it began shooting out bolts of lightning in every direction, glancing off metal chairs and tables and racks of equipment, the blue and yellow tongues licking their way up the walls in uncontrolled, spastic gestures.
The men paused a moment, staring at the awesome display of electricity streaming out in a hundred jagged lines from the metal sphere. Then one of them — the man in the waterproof jacket — stepped gingerly forward. Quick as a striking snake, a jumping, dancing bolt of electricity shot out from the generator and almost encircled him. His body jerked for a moment under the current, and then he fell to the ground, temporarily stunned.
Logan backed away still farther, out of the lab and into the short hallway. It was as he’d hoped: with the generator running, the constant stream of negative electrons it produced would jump to any conducting material…for example, a human body.
“Thank you, Dr. Wallace,” he murmured. One down, two to go…
Suddenly, silently, the lights went out.
For a moment, Logan remained in stasis, uncertain of what had happened. Almost instantly, he realized: the storm had cut power to the mansion.
Feeling frantically around in the complete blackness, patting himself, he found first his flashlight, then his knife. It was just possible that, in the dark, he could make his way to the three, grab a gun, and then…
Red emergency lighting glowed into view. Then — fitfully at first, and with increasing strength — the main lights came back on.
Had the power been restored so soon? But no — the lights were still a little dim and uncertain. Lux’s backup generator must have kicked in.
On the far end of the lab, he heard a groan as someone tried to rise to his feet.
Logan peered around the doorframe at the Van de Graaff generator. It was dead, powerless. Activating it again meant using the toggle switch. To attempt to approach it again, exposing himself to a field of fire, would be madness.
He wheeled around, looking down the short hallway. His eye paused at the oversized ventilation grate.
Maybe, just maybe…
He rushed over to the grate and knelt, flipping out the blade of his knife and running it along the closest edge, trying with all his strength to pry it away from the wall. The edge of the grate moved an inch, then another.
He heard voices around the corner now, growing closer. Logan moved the knife to another edge of the grate, working it loose with the blade….
With a faint snick, the blade snapped off near its base.
Jesus, what else! Pocketing the broken knife and grasping at the partially loosened grating, he yanked at it with a grunt. With a pop, pop, pop of screws tearing out of the wall it came away, and he flung it across the hallway. From around the corner came the sound of running feet.
In the faint light of the hallway, he could see that a forced-air ventilation duct lay on the far side of a square hole the grate had covered. The stainless steel of the duct looked thin but well secured, and its passage was wide enough to accommodate his body. It ran straight ahead for about three feet, then sloped upward, toward the first floor.
On hands and knees he ducked into the improvised crawl space, the steel skin around him wobbling and swaying fearfully. If he could just make it back up to the main floor, he told himself, he’d be able to —
There was a sudden shriek of rending metal; a crack of failing rivets; and then the duct gave way and Logan began to fall into an unknowable blackness.
49
He plummeted downward through inky darkness. And then, quite suddenly, he hit something hard and unyielding. White light exploded in his head, and he lost consciousness.
He came to slowly, laboriously, like a swimmer struggling to reach the surface. It seemed to take forever. One after another, his senses returned. The first thing he became aware of was pain — his back, right knee, and head were throbbing, all at different, nauseating cadences. Next was sight. He could make out a smear of light — no, two smears of light — against the blackness that surrounded him.
Next: sound. He could hear whispers, different voices, speaking from somewhere above him, near the lights.
He blinked, blinked again, tried to sit up. A stab of pain went through his knee, and he bit down on his lip to avoid crying out. His sight was clearing a little, and he could now tell that the smears of light were actually flashlight beams. They were lancing here and there, probing down from the ruins of the ventilation duct.
Logan realized that, however it seemed to him, he must have been unconscious only a few seconds. His pursuers were still in the corridor above, crouching in the mouth of the ventilation duct, searching for him. He’d fallen into some kind of subbasement.
He tried once again to rise, and only now became aware that he was lying in six inches of cold, brackish water. It must be groundwater, he realized, leaching in from the saturated soil around the mansion’s foundation: a result of the torrential downpour. This time he was successful in forcing himself into a sitting position.
He waited, breathing heavily, for the pain to recede and full alertness to return. The flashlight beams were still moving around, but he had apparently fallen into a small cul-de-sac whose walls shielded him from the lights.