Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

Finger on the switch hook, Scopes turned to Levine.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

Levine nodded.

Scopes released the switch hook. “Spencer, you are to present all tapes of this event to the board next Monday morning. They must carry on according to the tenets of the GeneDyne charter. Now, please begin introducing the VXV gas. Yes. Yes, I know, Spencer. Thank you. Best of luck to you.”

Slowly, Scopes replaced the handset. Then he returned his hands to the keyboard.

“Let’s go,” he said.

There was a humming noise, and the lights dimmed. Suddenly, the huge octagonal office was transformed into the garret room of the ruined house on Monhegan Island. Gazing around, stunned, Levine realized that not just one, but each of the room’s eight walls was a vast display screen.

“Now you know why I chose the turret room,” Scopes said, laying the keyboard aside again.

Levine sat on the sofa, entranced. Outside the garret windows, he could clearly see the widow’s walk. The sun was just coming up over the ocean, the sea itself absorbing the colors of the sky. The seagulls wheeled around the boats in the harbor, crying excitedly as the lobstermen rolled barrels of redfish bait down the pier and onto their boats.

In a chair in the garret, a figure stirred, stood up, stretched. It was short and thin, with gangly limbs and thick glasses. An unrepentant cowlick stood like a black feather from the unruly mass of hair.

“Well, Charles,” it said. “Welcome to Monhegan Island.”

Levine watched as another figure on the far side of the garret—a bald man in an ill-fitting dark suit—nodded in return.

“Thank you,” it said, in a voice hauntingly familiar.

“Shall we wander into town?” the Scopes-figure said.

“Not just now,” the Levine-figure said. “I’d prefer to sit here and watch the boats go out.”

“Very good. Shall we play the Game while we wait?”

“Why not?” said Levine-figure. “We’ve got a lot of time to kill.”

Levine sat in the darkened Octagon, watching his newly created character with a wistful smile.

“A lot of time to kill,” said Scopes from the darkness. “An infinity of time to kill. So much time for them, and so little time for us.”

“I choose time as a keyword,” said the Levine-figure.

The Scopes-figure sat down again in the rickety chair, kicked back, and said:

“There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create ...”

Levine—the real Levine—smelled a strange odor in the air of the Octagon; pungent, almost sweet, like long-dead roses. His eyes began to sting and he closed them, listening to the voice of the Scopes-figure:

“And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me ...”

There was a silence, and the last thing Levine heard as he drew the acrid gas into his lungs was his own voice, reciting an answering quotation: “ ‘Time is a storm in which we are all lost ...’ ”

EPILOGUE

The desert looked strange under the high thin covering of cirrus clouds. It was no longer a sea of light, but a darkening blue plain ending in distant, hard-edged mountain peaks. A chill, and the smell of the desert autumn, hung in the air.

From their vantage point atop Mount Dragon, Carson and de Vaca looked down on the blackened ruins of the GeneDyne Remote Desert Testing Facility. The massive underground bunker of the Fever Tank was now a jagged crater of darkened concrete and twisted rebar erupting out of the desert floor, surrounded by sand scorched a deep orange by fire. The plasmid transfection laboratory was merely as skeleton of I beams warped by the heat. The dormitories and their shattered, dark window-frames stared with dead eyes out over the landscape. Everything of value had been removed weeks before, leaving only the hollow shells of buildings as mute sentinels to what had been. There were no plans to rebuild. According to rumor, the Missile Range was going to use the remains as a bombing target. The only signs of life were the ravens plundering the destroyed canteen, circling and squabbling over something inside.

Beyond the ruins of Mount Dragon, the rubble of another vanished city rose from the landscape: Kin Klizhini, the Black House, felled by time, lack of water, and the elements. On the far side of the cinder cone, the cluster of microwave and radio towers sat silently, waiting disassembly. Far below, the pickup truck the two had driven in on sat where the perimeter had once been, a lonely spot of color in the drab wastes.

Carson stared mesmerized. “Amazing, isn’t it, that a thousand years separates those two ruins,” he said quietly. “We’ve come a long way, I suppose. Yet it all ends up the same. The desert doesn’t care.”

There was a silence.

“Funny they never found Nye,” de Vaca said at last.

Carson shook his head. “The poor son of a bitch. He must have died out there, somewhere, and become dinner for the coyotes and buzzards. He’ll be found someday, just like we found Mondragón. A bleached skeleton and a sack of rocks.” Carson massaged his left forearm, remembering. There was a lot of metal in it now, and it still ached in damp weather. But not here, in the desert.

“Maybe a new legend of gold will grow up around the story, and in five hundred years they’ll be looking for the Nye gold,” de Vaca said, laughing. Then her face turned serious. “I don’t feel sorry for him at all. He was a bastard even before the PurBlood got to him.”

“The one I feel sorry for is Singer,” Carson said. “He was more than a decent guy. And Harper. And Vanderwagon. None of them deserved what happened.”

“You talk like they’re dead.”

“They might as well be.”

De Vaca shrugged. “Who knows? With all the bad press it’s been getting lately, maybe GeneDyne will put its resources toward finding a way to undo what it did to them. Besides, in one sense, they are guilty. Guilty of embracing a great and terrifying vision, with no thought to the consequences.”

Carson shook his head. “If that’s true, I was just as guilty of that as they were.”

“Not quite,” de Vaca said. “I think there was something in the back of your mind that was always skeptical.”

“I’ve asked myself that every day since the PurBlood rollout was terminated. I’m not so sure. I would have taken the blood just like they did.”

De Vaca looked at him.

“It’s true. There was a time I would have followed Scopes to the ends of the earth, if he’d asked. He had that effect on you.”

De Vaca continued to look at him curiously. “Not on me,” she said finally.

Carson said nothing.

“It was very strange, that fire, wasn’t it?” de Vaca asked.

Carson shook his head. “Yes, it was. And Scopes’s confession. If you could call it that. I’m sure we’ll never know what really happened. There was unfinished business between those two, Levine and Scopes.”

De Vaca’s eyebrows lifted. “Well, I guess it’s finished now,” she said.

Carson hesitated. “I wonder if they’ll ever go through with X-FLU,” he said at last. “Now that we solved the problem, I mean.”

“Never,” de Vaca said emphatically. “Nobody would touch it now. It’s too dangerous. Besides, we don’t know all the problems have been solved. And the problem of altering future generations—of changing humanity itself—has just begun. We’re going to see some terrible things in our lifetime, Guy. You know this isn’t the end of it.”