Double Helix 03_ Red Sector - Diane Carey [31]
“It was my fault,” Zevon insisted. He pressed a hand to his left thigh and seemed to hurt himself with his own touch. “I should’ve stood up to my superiors when I first saw what the result might be. The graviton impulses were too erratic. I knew that. I knew it before we started. I should never have condoned the switch-on. As senior scientist, I had the right to postpone.” “Why didn’t you, then?” “I was… timid. Yes, I was the senior authority, but only because of my bloodline. There were other scientists who were more qualified quantum specialists. They warned me… but I was afraid to fail.”
So familiar. Why did everybody have to go through this? Just doing their jobs, and all this had to happen. Sitting here in the near-darkness, three levels below the street, cradled in wreckage and out of the line of sight of any judgmental forces, Eric Stiles released himself from the bondage of prying eyes and pointless opinions. How foolish did he have to be to keep holding this weapon on Zevon? If only he could put it down.
With a cleansing sigh, he muttered, “Listen, I… I feel …. ” In his left hand, the metal rod wobbled between them, stubbornly holding its position. “Do me a favor, will you? Come over and… hold this for me.”
Across the wreckage, Zevon blinked, stood up stiffly, and moved toward him.
Stiles parted his lips and started to say something else, but in sudden punctuation of Zevon’s dire prophesy, a loud crumbling noise erupted over their heads. Buffed in a gray cloud burping from above, Zevon disappeared as several large chunks of building material and a gout of rabble shattered through the hole in the floors above them, chittering like a rockslide, and came sheeting down into their chamber. The rain of rock and pebbles hissed furiously and crashed in a million pieces onto the desk of their little area. Stiles threw his working arm over his face and bent to one side, but he couldn’t move far enough to avoid being painted with dust and grit. The metal rod he had claimed as a weapon flew out of his hand and clanked somewhere in the dimness. Cold, stinging debris sheeted his body. The Pojjan guards had taken away his padded vest, gloves, and knee pads, leaving only his daywear uniform to fend off the sharp bits. He felt himself being cut in a hundred tiny places.
As soon as the sound faded, he shoved himself up on his left elbow and twisted around. “Zevon? Where are you?”
In response, he only heard the sound of Zevon coughing somewhere in the cloud of dust. Alive, at least. Stiles pushed up on his elbow. “Are you okay?” Out of the puff of stone dust, shimmering paint fragments and insulation, Zevon finally and slowly came to his feet. Rock bits sheeted off his back and shoulders as he stood and limped over the jagged wreckage to Stiles’ side, where he braced himself on the thing Stiles was sitting upon. “You okay?” Stiles asked again. Zevon wiped dust from his face. “What is ‘okay’?”
“You don’t know? Something tells me you speak English, right?” “Classroom English.”
“Oh. I guess it got started with two alphabetical letters, O and K. It means… agreement. All right. Well. No idea why it would mean that.” “I see… yes, then, I am both O and K.” “But you’re limping.” “A piece of this rod went through my thigh. I pulled it out.” “What? You got speared by a piece of that stuff?.” “Yes, when we first fell-“
“Come here! You could be bleeding to death! Let me see your leg.”
Bending to show Stiles a crudely bandaged part of his thigh above the knee, Zevon winced and tolerated Stiles’s tucking the strips of blanket which now bound each of them. “A few moments ago you were willing to spear me with a piece of this material.”
“Well, never underestimate the capacity of Eric Stiles to make a dunderhead of himself.