The Cardinal of the Kremlin - Tom Clancy [98]
"Heart rate's coming up," the doctor said almost three hours later. "Time zero, patient conscious." A reel-to-reel tape recorder took down his words.
She didn't know the point at which sleep ended and consciousness began. The line is a fuzzy one for most people, particularly so in the absence of an alarm or the first beam of sunlight. She was given no signals. Svetlana Vaneyeva's first conscious emotion was puzzlement. Where am I? she asked herself after about fifteen minutes. The lingering aftereffects of the barbiturates eased away, but nothing replaced the comfortable relaxation of dreamless sleep. She was floating?
She tried to move, but couldn't? She was totally at rest, every square centimeter of her body was evenly supported so that no muscle was stretched or strained. Never had she known such wonderful relaxation. Where am I?
She could see nothing, but that wasn't right, either. It was not black, but gray like a night cloud reflecting the city lights of Moscow, featureless, but somehow textured.
She could hear nothing, not the rumble of traffic, not the mechanical sounds of running water or slamming doors
She turned her head, but the view remained the same, a gray blankness, like the inside of a cloud, or a ball of cotton, or-
She breathed. The air had no smell, no taste, neither moist nor dry, not even a temperature that she could discern. She' spoke but incredibly she heard nothing. Where am I!
Svetlana began to examine the world more carefully. It took about half an hour of careful experimentation. Svetlana kept control of her emotions, told herself forcefully to be calm, to relax. It had to be a dream. Nothing untoward could really be happening, not to her. Real fear had not yet begun, but already she could feel its approach. She mustered her determination and fought to hold it off. Explore the environment. Her eyes swept left and right. There was only enough light to deny her blackness. Her arms were there, but seemed to be away from her sides, and she could not move them inward, though she tried for what seemed like hours. The same was true of her legs. She tried to ball her right hand into a fist but she couldn't even make her fingers touch one another.
Her breathing was more rapid now. It was all she had. She could feel the air come in and out, could feel the movement of her chest, but nothing else. Closing her eyes gave her the choice of a black nothing over a gray one, but that was all. Where am I?
Movement, she told herself, more movement. She rolled around, searching for resistance, searching for any tactile feeling outside her own body. She was rewarded with nothing at all, just the same slow, fluid resistance-and whichever way she turned, the sensation of floating was the same. It mattered not-she could tell not-whether gravity had her up or down, left side or right. It was all the same. She screamed as loudly as she could, just to hear something real and close, just to be sure that she at least had herself for company. All she heard was the distant, fading echo of a stranger.
The panic started in earnest.
"Time twelve minutes fifteen seconds," the doctor said into the tape recorder. The control booth was five meters above the tank. "Heart rate rising, now one forty, respiration forty-two, acute anxiety reaction onset." He looked over to Vatutin. "Sooner than usual. The more intelligent the subject "
"The greater the need for sensory input, yes," Vatutin said gruffly. He'd read the briefing material on this procedure, but was skeptical. This was brand-new, and required a kind of expert assistance that he'd never needed in his career. -
"Heart rate appears to have peaked at one seventy-seven, no gross irregularities."
"How do you mute her own speech?" Vatutin asked the doctor.
"It's new. We use an electronic device to duplicate her voice and repeat it back exactly out of phase. That neutralizes her