Chapter 12

A similar procedure with the other stick produced the unsurprising Hardware Token A. I held on to both of these under the theory that they might prove useful and they were really easy to carry in the meantime. I suppose there was some small chance that their removal would presage the door's either locking for good or locking until they were re-inserted. Either way, if my supposition about the inside of that chamber were correct, any locks would be an afterthought: the door was easily eight feet high and six feet wide, which by my math was forty-eight square feet, which was roughly 7,000 square inches, held back by sixteen pounds of air pressure on each of those square inches, which made... well, I didn't have a calculator, but that was a hell of a lot of pounds of pressure.

With that out of the way, I turned to the most recent additions to Task Force Mason (or was it Team Tremont?). Courtney Collins, Second Edition was at best semi-conscious, and at that she was ahead of the other... female. I was trying to suppress my reaction to the half-feline, half-human form that the best evidence told me was once a fully human and very desirable actress. I could imagine, dispassionately, that someone with fantasies involving the fondling of furry animals might be enthralled with this sight, but as with many fantasies, the reality was starkly different than the imagination which gave it birth.

Her body was literally covered in fine fur, fur that even from a short distance away simply appeared to be dark skin — most likely because the mind was not prepared to accept human limbs and torso with fur. Her face was flat, with the white whiskers I had noticed before protruding incongruously from each side of a small but human-looking nose. Her ears tapered to sharp points above and had nothing resembling an earlobe below. Most disturbing of all was a feature I had missed completely during my shoulder-lift rescue moments ago: she had a tail. It was covered with slightly longer hair than the rest of her body and appeared to extend to just below her knees, although it was hard to tell with her lying down. I felt it would be rude in the extreme to examine just how and where the tail was attached to her body, even though she was at present completely unconscious.

Lauren had been kneeling next to Courtney and speaking to her in low tones, trying to get some sort of coherent reaction out of her. I gestured at her and she rose and came over to me. "What's the story?" I asked her in low tones.

"She's drifting in and out. She recognized me, but she's not focusing on anything too well. I can't tell why. She doesn't look like she's injured. It could just be... reaction... to what we went through. Or," she paused for a moment, shuddering a bit, "it could be something that happened to her after I left. Somehow she got captured again?"

"Possible," I allowed.

"Anyway, physically, neither one seems to be hurt. There aren't bruises or cuts or anything that I can see. They just seem like they don't want to face anything."

"Maybe shock?" I shook my head. "We are operating on a whole passel of guesswork and nothing concrete." I thought for a moment, then, looking at her significantly, said, "In fact, we might as well be in Missouri, for all the progress we've made."

She looked at me utterly blankly for a moment, and I felt an icy knot in the pit of my stomach start to form. No, no, not this. Not now.

Time was suspended for an agonizingly long period, at least in my mind; it was no more than a second or two in real time. And then I let out a sigh of relief as Lauren's puzzled face cleared and she said, "Won't do any good to sit around biting our lips and looking upset, will it?"

I closed my eyes for a moment of pure relief. "No," I said with my eyes still closed. "No, we surely can't do that." I opened my eyes to see Lauren looking at me anxiously.

"Sorry," she whispered. "I just forgot for a second."

I pulled her to me and held her tightly for a moment. "You have no idea what I just..."

"Sorry," she said again. "Believe me, I know the feeling, times ten. Familiar faces that don't remember... well, anything."

"I know," I said. "But we're not beaten yet!"

Lauren looked at me, indicating the locked door and the maelstrom behind it, and our two semi-conscious charges. "Are we even on the scoreboard?" she asked.

"On the scoreboard?" I scoffed. "Are you forgetting Hardware Token B?"

"Oh, yeah," she said, smiling a bit in spite of herself. She went on deadpan, "At last, I can stop worrying and relaxing, my hero. I forgot you had Hardware Token B."

"Right!" I held it aloft for a second and then said meditatively, "Now, if only we knew what the hell Hardware Token B does, or even if it does anything at all... then, by God, then we'd a force to be reckoned with!"

"So... what now?"

It was a good question. I really had no idea, but I felt it would be demoralizing to admit that out loud. "Well," I said. "Let's count our assets."

"We have two completely naked and barely conscious women and we're a couple hundred miles from home, locked out of a crazy computer chamber that is deleting chunks of air right out of the... out of the air, and we have a psychopathic rapist who is either dead or escaped into the beyond wanting us dead or turned into mindless sex slaves." Lauren ticked each item off her fingers as she went. "Did I miss anything?"

I looked at her. "Not too promising, is it? Now," I added, "if only we had a wheelbarrow, that would be something."

"Why do we need a wheelbarrow?" she asked. "We can just bring them... wait." She paused, furrowing her brow, and then her face cleared and she grinned impishly at me and recited, "What I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak."

I gaped at her. "The Princess Bride. She knows The Princess Bride," I announced to the world at large. "How do you... ? That movie is older than you are!"

"And Casablanca and Citizen Kane are older than you are. But I bet you know them, right?"

I raised my hands in surrender. "Point taken." I turned back to the business at hand. "OK, let's figure this out. Ithaca is a pretty liberal town, but if we drive around with two naked women in the back seat we might get noticed. And I really don't want to start explaining her condition..." I indicated the feline form of Lisa Antoine "... to the local cops."

She nodded. "True."

"If it were dark, I might say we should risk it, but..." I looked at my watch, marveling again at the little S-shaped hole carved out of the crystal face. "It's not even two in the afternoon. We have about six more hours of daylight."

"It would be great if we could get them some clothes," Lauren put in. "Whatever else happens, I'm sure they won't want to wake up and be standing around here naked."

"I agree. And we could probably do that now — drive into town, buy something, and come back. But I don't want to leave them alone, and I don't want to leave you alone, and I'm even a little worried about staying here. What if Victor comes back?"

Lauren looked shocked. "Do you think he might?"

"I have no freakin' idea. I'd love to believe he was just zapped out of existence but we're just not that lucky. I heard him yell something about Livermore, and I have an idea that he had some pre-programmed locations he could make the machine re-locate him to in case of major trouble."

"Where's Livermore?"

"Again just a theory, but I bet it means the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. They do all sorts of classified government work. I can easily picture Victor the unappreciated physics assistant laboring away at a lab like that until seeing his chance to force himself on unwilling women through the magic of this new discovery. The kind of research he described is the kind of thing that's right up Livermore's alley. There would be no shortage of computer power. One of the things on my to-do list, in fact, was seeing if I could find any record of that senior scientist Victor mentioned. I am willing to bet that if we find him, he'll have some sort of association with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory."

Lauren shook her head in wonder. "You mean you think Victor's in California right now?"

"I wouldn't bet against it. If we ever figure out how to use this thing ourselves, we'll save a fortune on airline fares."

"Then why is this whole setup here?" she wanted to know.

"Lauren, I'm just piling guesswork on top of guesswork now. Maybe there was some research partnership with Cornell? Maybe Victor has a connection with Cornell? Maybe he just knew something about this property and thought he could get away with setting himself up without anyone back in California noticing what he was doing?" I shook my head. "There comes a point when it's useless to speculate. It's a foolish man who builds his house upon the sand."