Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [74]
“I really am sorry,” Rajuder Singh assured him. “Alas, it’s not for me to explain matters even if I could. I think that Eveline Hywood might be willing to take your call, though, once we’ve gone down.”
“Down where?”
Damon had so far been under the impression that the room he was in had only three doors, one of them part of a pair. Singh had closed the double doors through which they had entered but two others stood half-open, one offering a glimpse of a bedroom while the other gave access to a narrow corridor leading to a kitchen. Singh now demonstrated the error of Damon’s assumption by going to the wall alongside the kitchen door and pressing a hidden switch of some kind. A section of “wall” slid aside to reveal an empty space—presumably an elevator.
“So the mountain’s hollow as well as fake,” Damon said incredulously. “Down where the magma ought to be there’s some kind of secret laboratory, where my father’s old research team is laboring away on some project too delicate to be divulged to the world.”
“It’s not a laboratory,” Singh told him. “It’s just a hiding place. There isn’t any legion of white-coated workers conducting secret experiments—although I suppose it’s possible that someone thinks there’s more going on here than there is. The original setup was built more than a hundred and fifty years ago—long before we acquired it, of course—as a nuclear bunker. It was a rich man’s fantasy: a hidey-hole where he and a few friends could wait out the coming holocaust. The plague wars were running riot at the time and the fear of escalation was acute. A hundred years after the bunker was built—still some little time before the island came into our hands—someone equally rich and equally paranoid expanded it with the aid of primitive gantzers. I presume that he was more anxious about an asteroid strike or some other natural disaster than about nuclear war, but I don’t know for sure. I suppose it would still be capable of fulfilling any of those functions, were the need to arise.”
“But you aren’t interested in anything as absurdly melodramatic as that, of course,” Damon said sarcastically.
Singh was standing beside the open door, politely indicating that Damon should precede him into the empty space. Damon stayed where he was, waiting for more answers.
“We’re interested in privacy,” Singh told him brusquely. “It’s an increasingly rare commodity in a world of rampant nano-technology. We’re interested in independence—not political independence, just creative independence.”
“And this we, I suppose, comprises Karol Kachellek and Eveline Hywood—if she should ever return to Earth—and other old chums of Conrad Helier. Maybe you even have Conrad Helier himself hidden away down there, dead to the world but still slaving away at all the labor of creation that God somehow left undone? Perhaps that’s what Operator one-oh-one believes, at any rate.”
“Please, Mr. Hart,” the thin man said plaintively.
“I’ll find out what this is all about eventually,” Damon told him, “one way or another.” He was wary enough not to let bravado lead him to give too much away, though. It might be inadvisable to boast about Madoc Tamlin’s capabilities to people who might be just as reluctant to be found out as the mysterious Operator 101 was.
The words displayed on Singh’s screen suddenly disappeared, to be replaced by an urgently flashing message which simply said: READ NOW. The system had presumably been programmed with nets set to trawl the cyberspatial sea for items of a particular kind, and one of them had just made contact.
“You’d better come look at this,” Damon said.
Singh was reluctant to come away from the open elevator, but he did come. When he saw the message, though, his suspicious expression cleared. “Excuse me,” he murmured, as he moved to obey the flashing injunction.
When the thin man’s skeletal fingers