The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [18]
“Let’s get out of here, Lis,” Grundy said. “There’s nothing we can do. Want to sneak a look at the security tapes before they’re commandeered?”
“Kenna told me to get my cuts properly cleaned and dressed,” Lisa replied uneasily. “Given her deep-seated conviction that I’m too firmly stuck in the past to be useful to today’s go-ahead police force, it might have been a bad idea to let her see me sporting a Stone Age dressing and multiple bloodstains on my dead sweatshirt.”
“The Fire and Rescue paramedics are downstairs,” Mike said. “We can share the elevator.”
Lisa was by no means reluctant to be hustled back to the gaping doorway, but she couldn’t resist the temptation to take one last panoramic look at the ruins of Mouseworld.
“Seventy years,” she murmured. “Eight hundred generations. All gone in a momentary holocaust. Hideous.”
“You can say that again,” the detective muttered—but he didn’t mean what she meant. He wasn’t a scientist. He didn’t understand. It wasn’t his fault, of course, but it was a gulf between them nevertheless. There had always been a gulf between them, even when they were at their closest, in the traumatic weeks after Helen had thrown him out. At the time, Lisa had thought it was the specter of Morgan Miller that had held her back from any fuller engagement with Mike’s need or his wayward emotions, but now she realized it had been something more fundamental.
They were both detectives, in their different ways, but they had never had the same goals. Mike was a man who thought in terms of offenses and results, while Lisa thought in terms of puzzles, clues, and solutions, but even that wasn’t the heart of it. Mouseworld had meant something to Lisa, not merely as a symbol of the world’s historical predicament—which it had been set up to be—but as a symbol of humankind’s well-meaning, ill-directed, and ineffectual attempts to come to terms with that predicament. To Mike, it was just a mess of mice, which had stunk to high heaven even before it was torched.
FIVE
Mike Grundy’s subordinates had commandeered Thomas Sweet’s office, partly for the sake of the video surveillance cameras and partly for the sake of the percolator. When Grundy turned up, with Lisa still in tow, a constable in plainclothes immediately poured each a cup of coffee. Lisa hesitated before accepting hers, but the residual smoke and fumes had parched her throat and she knew that the caffeine would help her fight off the inconvenient tiredness. She took the cup. Grundy poured milk into his own cup and then offered the carton to her, but she shook her head.
“There’s nothing much on the tapes,” said the sergeant who’d been patiently running them through. Lisa had never met him before, so she assumed that he was part of Judith Kenna’s infusion of new blood. Grundy introduced him as Jerry Hapgood.
“Three individuals, five-seven, five-nine, and five-eleven,” Hapgood went on. “Two definitely look woman-shaped—can’t really tell about the tallest one, although it took serious muscle power to tow Burdillon to safety without hardly slowing down. Both of the women were armed, one with a real gun and one with a silly dart pistol. The one with the real gun—looks like an antique, probably been mothballed for fifty years—covered Burdillon while the other turned to fire, so they must have had a plan of sorts for dealing fairly gently with anyone who interrupted them. They sailed through all the doors, and they knew the routines of Sweet’s people well enough to be in and out without giving them any opportunity to interrupt.”
The bleeper attached to Grundy’s waistband went off and he plucked the phone from his belt. After identifying himself, he listened for a full two minutes, saving up the