Robert Adams - The Clan of the Cats

“Now, I have to go in, call a staff conference and break the bad news to Dr. Stekowski and the rest of his jolly crew that, with very strict budgeting, we might have a year of life left here, unless the damned dumb latifrons thing is shoved onto a back burner and we start in cooking up some project with more popular appeal. I’m going to strongly recommend one more time that we take advantage of the pair of snow leopards we’ve been offered, acquire such other Felidae as we can get quickly and cheaply, then get at it at flank speed, while still we have the wherewithal to operate at all. A donnybrook with Dr. Harel is dead certain, and this time around I just may deck the son of a bitch, for I have little to lose, here and now. This place is doomed unless it changes fast, and the Steakley folks are itching to have me back, anyway, Uncle Taylor says.”

Bedford pressed the buttons for “Print,” “Separate” and then “Laminate.” When the machine had disgorged the completed page, he inserted it in his ongoing binder of personal files, then switched off the machine and made ready to leave his sanctum sanctorum for the main building of the complex. Dr. Harel and certain others never ceased to twit him about keeping private records in addition to those filed in the computers, but he liked things he could if necessary read and check back on without the power required for activating said computer or one of its outlets.

“So that the sly, conniving sonofabitch could spy on me, pry into my notes the way he does into everyone else’s around here, that’s the real but unstated reason Harel wants me to give over my voicewriter records. No less than three times I’ve come back from trips to find that earnest attempts had been made to pick or force the locks on this office and the private storage room, down here on this level.

“Why, oh, why won’t Stekowski and Singh and Marberg back me in getting rid of Harel, forcing him to resign, get out? They clearly have little use for the bastard, either. All I can figure is that he has something on them, collectively or individually. There can be no other reason why such accomplished professionals would just supinely let the arrogant ass walk all over them the way he does. Then again, maybe it’s just the fact that he’s pushy, openly aggressive, and none of the rest of them are … well, not so much so, so overtly so, anyway.”

At the top of the steep concrete stairs, Bedford opened a plain steel-sheathed door and entered a short corridor. He reflected that no matter how much Harel might bitch about the primitiveness and isolation of the place, they could have done far worse in obtaining—for what amounted to almost nothing—the lease to the facility and the surrounding land.

It had first been built in the fifties or early sixties to house some super-hush-hush project of the federal government—one large and three small chambers cut out of the living rock of the plateau, with only the stair head, what was now the corridor in which he stood and a broad, stubby masonry tower aboveground, all of these spaces at one time filled with equipment of some nature, the traces of it still remaining.

When the army or air force or whoever had moved out in the seventies or eighties, then the state had moved in and erected a tall tower of steel to straddle the one of masonry and provide a firewatch facility. A succession of earth tremors had finally brought that metal tower down, and by the time Bedford first bad been shown it, the plateau and all had been deserted, though sealed and fenced and with a plethora of no-trespassing signs bearing impressive warnings.

Of course, it was state land and could not be sold; however, a thirty-year lease had come very cheaply and the state had even replaced and strengthened the access road, which had been rendered impassable in the last, strongest of the earth tremors.

What had passed into Bedford’s group’s possession had been only the nucleus of the present facility, however—the underground rooms (the largest of which the state had turned into a garage, with a ramped entrance), alcoves filled with lockers at the foot and head of the stairs, the present hallway (which then had been the entrance foyer) and the two tiny chambers within the short, squat masonry tower; the plateau had been bounded at its edges with an eight-foot Cyclone fence topped with razor wire, there had been a concrete helipad with wiry grass growing up between its joints, and the wreck of the downed fire tower stretched its length of rusting metal just where it had fallen some years before. Off to one side, now all overgrown with many years’ worth of vines and weeds. had been a long, sprawling jumble of never-used bricks which had been trucked in by the federal owners just before they had abandoned the site for good, their presence forming an enduring example of the boondoggle and lack of foresigbt of the long-ago administration of President James Earl Carter, to James Bedford’s way of thinking.

After he had brought in a seismic expert to examine the land and give the professional opinion that it was no more geologically unstable than any other part of the range, the preceding ruinous jolts having been at most a fluke and most unlikely to recur within hundreds of years, after the access road had been rendered once more sound and usable, after he had obtained detailed plans of the newly completed Steakley facility, he had contacted one of the family-owned businesses: a general construction contractor.

By the time Stekowski, Singh, Harel and the others actually saw the plateau—having flown from their temporary location in Colorado to the nearest airport and coptered from there—the crash-scheduled project was nearing completion. The only one of the group who had not seemed pleased was Dr. Harel. The big, burly man had snorted and sneered, jabbing and pounding on objects with his blackthorn walking stick for emphasis until the gangling, slow-to-anger engineer and the tough, feisty construction superintendent had seemed on the point of physical assault. In times since, Bedford had often reflected that it might have been best for all concerned had he allowed—nay, encouraged—the two to beat Dr. Harel into a state of bloody insensibility; such an experience might have taken out of the man a measure of the pigheaded arrogance and the dogged insistence on the constant having of his own way no matter the cost, which would have saved Bedford not a little trouble and the project a good deal of money in the time since.

Based on the preliminary plans that had been formulated during the courses of his series of conferences with the group of scientists, Bedford had had the onetime garage level enlarged and enclosed, then had solicited the advice of experts on the housing of big cats and fitted the space out in accordance with their years of experience and ideas.

But on the very first full conference after they had begun to actually occupy the premises, Dr. Harel had rudely dashed Bedford’s planning in that direction. “Why in the world did you not consult with me before you wasted our money in such a way, Mr . Bedford? I could have told you that there will not be, will never be, any scrap of research done here into reproduction or replication of any stripe of dirty, bloodthirsty predator beast. No, it has been decided by us scientists that we will undertake to replicate the Bison latifrons of the North American Pleistocene.”

Only by painful exercise of will had Bedford bitten down a hot reply that day. To the burly, shaggy, bearish, overbearing man he had said, coolly, “For your information, Dr. Harel, the actual funds pledged this project have not yet come through. Therefore, all of the cost incurred at this site and during my fund-raising travels I have paid out of my own pocket.”

“Now, that is true, selfless generosity, my boy.” Stekowski had spoken feelingly. “Of course, when the funding materializes, you will certainly be repaid every last penny, and—”