Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

“That’s a three-thousand-dollar rifle,” Nye replied.

“All the more reason not to wave it in people’s faces.” Carson nodded down the hill, “If you try to use that gun now, it’ll misfire and blow off your little ponytail. By the time you’ve cleaned it, I’ll be gone.”

There was a long silence. The late-afternoon sun refracted through Nye’s eyes, giving them a strange dark gold color. Looking into those eyes, Carson saw that the fiery tints were not completely a trick of the sun; the man’s eyes had a reddish cast, like the inward flames of a secret obsession.

Without another word Carson turned his horse and headed north at a brisk trot. After several minutes he stopped, looking back. Nye remained motionless on his mount, silhouetted against the rise, gazing after him.

“Watch your back, Carson!” came the distant voice. And Carson thought he heard a strange laugh drift toward him across the desert, before being whisked away by the wind.

The portable CD player sat on an outspread Wall Street Journal on a white table in the control room, exploded into twenty or thirty pieces. A figure wearing a dirty T-shirt was bent over it, the picture of concentration. The T-shirt’s legend, VISIT BEAUTIFUL SOVIET GEORGIA, was proudly emblazoned over a picture of a grim, fortresslike government structure, the epitome of Stalinesque architecture.

De Vaca stood to one side of the immaculate control room, wondering if the T-shirt was a joke. “You said you’ve never fixed a CD player before,” she said nervously.

“ Da ,” the figure muttered without looking up.

“Well, then how do you ...?” She let the sentence hang.

The figure muttered again, then popped a chip out of a circuit board, holding it up with a pair of plastic-coated tweezers. “Hmmmph,” he said, and tossed it carelessly on the newspaper. Working the tweezers again, he popped out a second chip.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” said de Vaca.

The figure eyed her over a pair of reading glasses fallen halfway down his nose. “But is not fixed yet,” he protested.

De Vaca shrugged, sorry she had ever brought the CD player to Pavel Vladimirovic. Though she’d been told he was some kind of mechanical genius, she’d seen no evidence of it so far. And the man had even admitted he had never even seen a CD player before, let alone fixed one.

Vladimirovic sighed heavily, dropped the second chip, and sat down heavily, pushing the glasses back up his nose.

“Is broke ” he announced.

“I know,” said de Vaca. “That’s why I brought it to you.”

He nodded and indicated with his palm for her to sit in a chair.

“Can you fix it or not?” de Vaca said, still standing.

He nodded. “ Da , don’t worry! I can fix. Is problem with chip that controls laser diode.”

De Vaca took a seat. “Do you have a replacement?” she asked.

Vladimirovic nodded and rubbed his sweaty neck. Then he stood up, moved to a cabinet, and returned with a small box, green circuit boards peeping from its open top. “I put back together now,” he nodded

De Vaca watched while, in a burst of activity, he cannibalized parts from the box full of circuit boards. In less than five minutes he had assembled the player. He plugged it in, inserted the CD that de Vaca had brought, and waited. The sound of the B-52s came roaring out of the speakers.

“Aiee!” he cried, turning it off. “ Nekulturny . What is that noise! Must still be broke.” He roared with laughter at his own joke.

“Thank you,” de Vaca said, real delight in her voice. “I use this just about every evening. I was afraid I’d have to spend the rest of my time here without music. How’d you do it?”

“Here, many extra pieces from the fail-safe mechanism,” Vladimirovic said. “I use one of those. Is nothing, very simple little machine. Not like this!” he gestured proudly at the rows of control panels, CRT screens and consoles.

“What do they all do?” de Vaca asked.

“Many things!” he cried, lumbering over to a wall of electronics. “Here, is control for laminar airflow. Air intake here, furnace is controlled by all these.” He waved his hand vaguely. “And then all these control cooldown.”

“Cooldown?”

“ Da . You wouldn’t want one-thousand-degree air going back in! Has to be cooled, the air.”

“Why not just suck in fresh air?”

“If suck in fresh air, must vent old air. No good. This is closed system. We are only laboratory in world with such system. Goes back to fail-safe mechanism of military days, shunt hot air to Level-5.”

“You mentioned that fail-safe system before,” de Vaca asked. “I don’t remember hearing about it.”

“For stage-zero alert.”

“There is no stage-zero alert. Stage one is the worst-case-scenario.”

“Back then, was stage-zero alert.” He shrugged. “Maybe terrorists in Level-5, maybe accident with total contamination. Inject one-thousand-degree air into Level-5, make complete sterilization. Not only sterilization. Blow place up real kharasho ! Boom!”

“I see,” said de Vaca, a little uncertainly. “It can’t go off by accident, this state-zero alert, can it?”

Pavel chuckled. “Impossible. When civilians took over, system was deactivated.” He waved his hand at a nearby computer terminal. “Only work if put back on line.”

“Good,” said de Vaca, relieved. “I wouldn’t want to be fried alive because someone tripped over the wrong switch up here.”

“True,” Pavel rumbled. “It’s hot enough outside without making more heat, nyet ? Zharka !” He shook his head, eyes staring absently at the newspaper. Then he stiffened. He picked up the rump end of the Journal and stabbed his finger at it.

“You see this?” he asked.

“No,” said de Vaca. She glanced over at the columns of tiny numbers, thinking that he must have stolen the paper from the Mount Dragon library, which had subscriptions to a dozen or so newspapers and periodicals that were not available on-line. They were the only printed materials allowed on the site.

“GeneDyne stock down half point again! You know what this mean?”

De Vaca shook her head.

“We losing money!”

“Losing money?” de Vaca asked.

“ Da ! You own stock, I own stock, and this stock go down half point! I lose three hundred fifty dollars! What I could have done with that money!”

He buried his head in his hands.

“But isn’t that to be expected?” de Vaca asked.

“ Shto ?”

“Doesn’t the stock go up and down every day?”

“ Da , every day! Last Monday I made six hundred dollars.”

“So what does it matter?”

“Makes even worse! Last Monday, six hundred dollars richer I was. Now it’s all gone! Poof!” He spread his hands in despair.

De Vaca tried to keep from laughing. The man must watch the movement of the stock every day, feeling elated on the days it went up—thinking how he was going to spend the money—and horrified on the days it went down. It was the price of employee ownership: giving stock to people who had never invested before. And yet, she was sure overall he must have made a large profit on his employee plan. She hadn’t checked since arriving at Mount Dragon, but she knew the GeneDyne stock had been soaring in recent months, and that they all were getting richer.

Vladimirovic shook his head again. “And in last few days, worse, much worse. Down many points!”

De Vaca frowned. “I didn’t know that.”

“You not heard talk in canteen! It’s that Boston professor, Levine. Always, he talking bad about GeneDyne, about Brent Scopes. Now he say something worse, I don’t know what, and stock go down.” He muttered under his breath. “KGB would know what to do with such a man.”