Damon Knight - Orbit 15

The passageway was dimly lighted, the floor smooth. It went four hundred feet to another steel door. This one opened into the first cave chamber, a large, high-domed room. It had been left almost as they had found it, with stalactites and stalagmites on all sides, but now there were many cots, and picnic tables and benches, and a row of cooking tables and serving tables. “Our emergency room, for the ‘hot’ rains,” David said, hurrying her through. There was another passage, narrower and rougher than the first. At the end of this passage was the animal experiment room.

One wall had been cut through and the computer installed, looking grotesquely out of place against a wall of pale pink travertine. In the center of the room were tanks and vats and pipes, all stainless steel and glass. On either side of these were the tanks that held the animal embryos. Celia stared without moving for several moments, then turned to look at David with startled eyes. “How many tanks do you have?”

“Enough to clone six hundred animals of varying sizes,” he said. “We took a lot of them out, put them in the other side, and we’re not using all that we have here. We’re afraid our supplies of chemicals will run out, and so far we haven’t come up with alternatives that we can extract from anything at our disposal here.”

Eddie Beauchamp came from the side of the tanks, jotting figures in a ledger. He grinned at David and Celia. “Slumming?” he asked. He checked his figures against a dial and adjusted it a fraction, and continued down the row checking the other dials, stopping now and again to make a minor adjustment.

Celia’s eyes questioned David and he shook his head. Eddie didn’t know what they were doing in the other lab. They walked past the tanks, row after row of them, all sealed, with only the needles of the meters and gauges to indicate that there was anything inside. They returned to the corridor. David led her through another doorway, another shorter passage, then unlocked a door and took her into the second laboratory.

Walt looked up as they entered, nodded, turned again to his desk. Vlasic didn’t even look up. Sarah smiled and hurried past them and sat down before a computer console and began to type. Another woman in the room didn’t seem to be aware that anyone had come in. Hilda. Celia’s aunt. David glanced at Celia, but she was staring wide-eyed at the tanks, and in this room the tanks were glass-fronted. Each was filled with a pale liquid, a yellow so faint that the color seemed almost illusory. Floating in the liquid were sacs, no larger than small fists. Slender transparent tubes connected the sacs to the top of the tanks; each one was attached to a pipe that led back into a large stainless steel apparatus which seemed to be covered with dials.

Celia walked slowly down the aisle between the tanks, stopped midway and didn’t move again for a long time. David took her arm. She was trembling slightly.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded. “I . . . it’s a shock, seeing them. I . . . maybe I didn’t quite believe it.” There was a film of perspiration on her face.

“Better take off the coat now,” David said. “We have to keep it pretty warm in here. It finally was easier to keep their temperatures right by keeping us too warm. The price we pay,” he said, smiling slightly.

“All the lights? The heat? The computer? You can generate that much electricity?”

He nodded. “That’ll be our tour tomorrow, or sometime. Like everything else around here, the generating system has bugs in it. We can store enough power for no longer than six hours, and we just don’t let it go out for more than that.”

She nodded. “Six hours is a lot. If you stop breathing for six minutes, you’re dead.” With her hands clasped behind her she stepped closer to the shiny control system at the end of the room. “This isn’t the computer. What is it?”

“It’s a computer terminal. The computer controls the input of nutrients and oxygen, and the output of toxins.” He nodded toward the wall. “The animal room is on the other side. Those tanks are linked to it, too. Separate set of systems, but the same machinery.”

She nodded again. They went through the nursery for the animals, and then the nursery for the human babies. There was the dissection room, several small offices where the scientists could withdraw to work, the stock rooms. In every room except the one where the human clones were being grown, people were working. “They never saw a bunsen burner or a test tube before, but they have become scientists and technicians practically overnight,” David said. “And thank God for that, or it never would have worked. I don’t know what they think we’re doing now, but they don’t ask questions. They just do their jobs.”

In August, Avery Handley got through to a shortwave contact in Richmond who warned of a band of marauders working up the valley. “They’re bad,” he said. “They took over the Phillpotts’ place, ransacked it, and then burned it to the ground.”

In September they fought off the first attack. In October they learned the band was grouping for a second attack, this time with thirty to forty men. “We can’t keep fighting them off,” Walt said. “They must know we have food here. They’ll come from all directions this time. They know we’re watching for them.”

“We should blow up the dam,” Clarence said. “Wait until they’re in the upper valley and flood them out.”

The meeting was being held in the cafeteria, with everyone present. Celia’s hand tightened in David’s, but she didn’t protest. No one protested.

“They’ll try to take the mill,” Clarence went on. “They’ll probably think there’s wheat there, or something.” A dozen men volunteered to stand guard at the mill. Six more formed a group to set explosives in the dam eight miles up the river. Others would be a scouting party.

David and Celia left the meeting early. He had volunteered for everything and had been turned down. He was not one of the expendable ones. The rains had become “hot” again, and the people were all sleeping in the cave. David and Celia, Walt, Vlasic, the others who worked in the various labs, all slept there on cots. In one of the small offices David held Celia’s hand and they whispered before they fell asleep. Their talk was of their childhood.

Long after Celia fell asleep David stared into the blackness, still holding her hand. She had grown even thinner, and earlier that week when he had tried to get her to leave the lab to rest, Walt had said, “Leave her be.” She stirred fitfully, and he knelt by the side of her cot and held her; he could feel her heart flutter wildly for a moment. Then she was still again and slowly he released her and sat on the stone floor with his eyes closed. Later he heard Walt moving about, the creaking of his cot in the next office. David was getting stiff, and finally he returned to his own bed.

The next day the people worked to get everything up to high ground. Nothing could be spared, and board by board they carried a barn up the hillside and stacked the pieces. Two days later the signal was given and the dam was destroyed. David and Celia stood in one of the upper hospital rooms and watched together as the wall of water roared down the valley. It was like a jet takeoff; a crowd furious with an umpire’s decision; an express train out of control; a roar like nothing he had ever heard, or like everything he had ever heard, recombined to make this noise that shook the building, that vibrated in his bones. A wall of water, fifteen feet high, twenty feet high, raced down the valley, accelerating as it came, smashing, destroying everything in its path.

They walked back through the empty hospital, through the long dimly lighted passage, through the large chamber where the people were trying to find comfortable positions on the cots, on the benches, through the smaller passages and finally into the lab office.