Jack Chalker - A War of Shadows

“Sandy? This is Mark,” came a familiar voice. “I figured you’d still be out. Good girl. Now get over to the labs here as soon as you can.”

She tried to shake the sleep from her. “What’s happening?”

“I—I can’t tell you right now,” he said hesitantly. “Something nasty. Something I stumbled on by accident. Just—well, get over here quick as you can, okay? I’ll be in my cubbyhole.”

She was puzzled, but said, “All right, Mark,” and hung up.

It’s funny how when you oversleep you feel like you’ve never slept at all, she thought for the tenth time since starting out. The trip was a quick one, under an hour if you had the traffic with you, and she pulled into a space assigned to NIH bigwigs and hurried inside. Mark’s tone on the phone worried her.. Something nasty, he’d said. Something I stumbled on by accident.

Of course most business couldn’t be done by phone anyway—security and all that. But his tone—he’d been upset, terribly upset, and fear tinged in his voice.

What would cause fear in the medical Rock of Gibraltar?

There were the usual procedures to go through. Nine guards, twenty-six TV cameras—maybe more, they never told you everything—four airlocks and the whole sterilization mess.

Finally in her medical whites she walked again down that familiar yellow-painted corridor to those double doors and pushed them open.

Nobody was there. The computer was on, the whole lab was activated, there was even a sample on the electron microscope. A pad lay on the floor as if hastily dropped, and she picked it up. It held a lengthy serological series in Mark’s handwriting. He had been trying to find the key, the organisms from which the two Wilderness Organisms had been bred.

She was curious, but not concerned. He went out for more coffee, probably, she told herself. She settled down to wait for him, passing the time until his return by going over his notes. They were in a typical doctor’s scrawl, and highly disorganized, and outside her specialty at that, but she roughly followed what he was doing.

Having isolated from the protein “punctuation mark” the first signal in the DNA message of the Wilderness Organism, he and the computer were trying to duplicate it using computer models.

Dr. Denise Ferman, a petite little black woman who was a crack expert at toxicology, stuck her head in the door.

“Oh, hi, Sandy!” she said. “Where’s Mark?” “In the canteen, most likely,” Sandra replied. Ferman shook her head. “No, I just came from there. He must be up top—I’m pretty sure he’s not in A-complex.”

That worried Sandra. She reached over, pressed an intercom stud and three numbers on its face. “Security,” said a voice in her ear.

“This is Dr. O’Connell,” she said. “Is Dr. Mark Spiegelman in A-complex or did he come out?”

“Let me check,” said the voice. There were a few seconds of dead air, then the voice returned. “Dr. Spiegelman logged into A-complex at 12:15, cleared security and decontam at 12:45, and has not yet emerged.”

“All right, thank you,” she said, hanging up. “He’s got to be here someplace,” she said to Denise Ferman. “Security says he is.”

The toxicologist looked puzzled. “Let’s go see,” she suggested.

There were eight one-person control centers in A-complex, four multi-person labs, and a small automated canteen. They checked them all.

Nobody had seen or heard Spiegelman in hours. “This is impossible,” Ferman insisted. “You can’t disappear out of a place like this. He has to have gone up, no matter what security says.”

She didn’t know why, but she was suddenly feeling nervous and a little scared. “I’m going back up,” she told the scientist. “You let me know if he somehow turns up here.”

Ferman nodded, and Sandra O’Connell began the long procedure back out. Something smelled—and smelled bad. First that strange phone call, then this. At each step in the chain she questioned the human attendants. None had seen Dr. Spiegelman leave, and his initial passes were still there. Once out, she called down to Denise Ferman once more.

“Still nothing,” the toxicologist told her. “He isn’t here.”

She went to security and made a scene. They, too, assured her that it was impossible for him not to be down there, but when they checked with the others they agreed to go down and take a look. A huge black sergeant and four very efficient-looking squad members went down, through the same procedure, checks, and watches that made it impossible for anyone to just vanish.

The security team was very efficient without being intrusive. They searched the obvious places, then the less than obvious, then the impossible places as well.

Over an hour after they went in, the intercom at the security central desk crackled. “We found him,” came the sergeant’s voice.

She could hardly restrain herself. “Oh, thank god! Where was he?”

The sergeant hesitated. “Inside a vacuum chamber in Con 3. Somebody knocked him out, dragged him in there, and pumped all the air out.”

The great airliner rose slowly and majestically like a giant silver bird, looking too impossibly huge and bulky ever to become airborne. But its nose went up, and suddenly, painfully, it started to climb.

Suzy laughed and rubbed her hands. It would pass almost directly over their position in the woods just beyond the end of the runway. With George and Alicia holding the mortar steady, Suzy held the shell just over the mouth of the round, squat mortar until the plane was almost on top of them, then dropped it in the hole and fell back.

There was a whump, a swirl of smoke, and some-thing shot upward, catching the great plane amidships. There was a tremendous explosion, and the huge silver bird started to collapse, almost to fall apart in a ball of flame.

He swore he could hear the screams of the dying passengers, 386 ordinary men, women, and children burning, falling to their deaths. He was only superficially aware of Suzy and the others dancing and cheering as the plane came down. He was up there, screaming with the dying innocents, no longer sure as to why they were dying.

Someone was grabbing him, poking him. “Come on, Joe! Wake up!” a deep, throaty voice urged.

He awoke with a cry stifled in mid-utterance as he realized where he was and that it had been a dream once again.

Doug Courtland looked at him in concern. “You oughta see a shrink or somethin’ about this, man,” he told the other. “My lord! This is the third time this month!”

He sighed and wiped the perspiration from his face. “I’ll be okay, Doug, thanks,” he assured the other. “Just a nightmare. Nothing more.”

Courtland looked uncertain, but finally nodded, shrugged, and walked back to his own bed.

He sat up, holding his head in his hands, trying to stop the shaking, to get a grip on himself.

A nightmare, yes. Just a dream. A bad dream. Only once, almost ten years ago, it’d been real.

There was a Hell, he told himself, and he was in it. He got up, went into the bathroom, closed the door and switched on the light. He steadied himself on the sink and looked into the mirror.

It was a strong face on a strong body; a Caucasian complexion but strong Negroid features and a bush of thick, wiry hair now tinged prematurely with gray. The face was lined, etched in with experiences he could not forget; his brown eyes looked old, empty, hollow.

When would it let him alone, this past that haunted him? What did it want? What sort of penance would sponge away the guilt?

Look what’s happened to you, Sam Cornish, he thought bitterly. Ten years older than your age of thirty-four and growing older at twice the clip every night. A hundred years in Hell already served—how many more to go?