Изменить стиль страницы

CHAPTER 41

Astonished and bewildered by what he had discovered, Gabe stood beside the recessed doorway to Lab B-10 willing his pulse to slow and his sense of what was smart to take over.

Get back to the house… Get back and regroup!

He was alone in the brightly lit corridor of an underground laboratory that had at least one tunneling scanning microscope-the pricey, highly technical, sine qua non centerpiece of nanotechnology research. The facility, carved into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, not far from the Shenandoah Valley, was reached from one direction through a little-used hidden entrance in the guest wing of Lily Sexton's opulent country home. There had to be one or more other entrances as well, but how far they were from this one was anybody's guess.

Go back!

Two things were all too clear at this point. The brilliant, elegant, beguiling Ms. Sexton had far more than a passing interest in nanotechnology-one of the sciences she was slated to try to place under government control should she become the country's first Secretary of Science and Technology. In addition, she quite probably had more than the passing acquaintance she claimed to have had with Dr. Jim Ferendelli.

Gabe was equidistant between the door back to Lily Sexton's house and the next doorway on the corridor, which he could see was B-9. His best approach would be to head back and, as soon as possible, check some real estate ledgers and maps involving the area. But the part of him that had always caused trouble was urging him on-at least to the next room.

This is dumb and risky, he warned himself, as he inched along the wall toward B-9.

Risky and dumb.

He felt the adrenaline rush that had long ago stopped being a significant part of his life but had led him to any number of dangerous decisions along the way. The last thing he needed, just seven hours before he was scheduled to meet Ferendelli, was to get caught down here.

He moved ahead several more feet.

The recessed B-9 doorway was identical in every respect to B-10-brushed steel and high-tech, with thick glass filling the top half. He peered into the brightly lit room, which was another deserted lab, featuring another research apparatus he recognized from his studies of nanotechnology-a scanning electron microscope. The SEM was capable of creating remarkably well-defined images of invisibly tiny nanotubes and fullerenes by bombarding them with a stream of electrons.

The brass plaque beneath the glass read simply: ELECTRON MICROSCOPY. No nameplate. Gabe speculated that Dr. K. Rawdon of the tunneling microscope lab was probably the head of this unit as well.

Distracted, Gabe was a step slower than he might have been in reacting to the voices and footsteps echoing down the hallway from someplace ahead and to the right. He held his breath and flattened himself within the recessed doorway of B-9 just as two men in security guard uniforms emerged from a corridor, chatting and laughing. They each wore sidearms.

"Did you understand a word they were saying in there?" one asked.

"No, but that's why they're eggheads and earning the big bucks and we aren't."

"I did love the stuff Dr. Rosenberg was showing, though. Real, living brains without bodies. Could you believe that? I heard he was keeping them in his lab on A Wing, but that's the first time I actually saw them."

"Yeah, I wonder what they're thinking. Maybe something like 'Gosh, it's dark in here.' "

"Yeah, and 'Hey, I can't hear a damn thing, either. Where in the hell is everybody?' "

Both men laughed roundly. If either of them had turned to his left, he would have been looking directly at Gabe, who was just thirty feet away and unable to conceal himself fully in the recessed doorway. Instead, they turned to their right, away from him, and exited Corridor B through a pair of swinging steel doors.

Gabe's desperate need for answers again began doing battle with his common sense.

The silence that followed the guards' departure was not complete. Gabe could still hear the low, machinelike hum and also some voices.

Real living brains without bodies.

Fascinating.

There was no way he could retreat now without trying to get even a little more information. His common sense had been routed. Just a little more information… Just a little more.

Hanging on pegs near the scanning electron microscope were two knee-length lab coats. Gabe tested the knob to the room and the heavy door swung open. Seconds later, he emerged wearing one of the white coats. With his boots back at the beginning of the tunnel, his dark socks protruded from beneath his jeans, looking rather foolish but at the same time making it easier to move silently up the corridor. Still, it seemed as if anyone within earshot would be able to hear his heart slamming against the inside of his chest.

Room B-8, fiefdom of a Dr. P. Wilansky, was another empty lab filled with sophisticated equipment. There was a branching corridor ahead and to the right-the hallway from which the guards had come. The low machine hum was more pronounced, as was a man's voice, loud enough now to make out some words.

"Note… brain… stained… immunofluorescence…"

Gabe inched around the corner and peered down the corridor. At the end were two more doors, identical to the others. The right one was closed and the left one open. Pressed against the wall, every muscle tensed, he moved ahead. If someone came through the doors behind him now, there would be no retreat and, in all likelihood, no meeting with Ferendelli. Still, he had to see.

"… This slide is a photo taken two months after the subjects were dosed with ten micrograms of fullerenes coated with antibodies specifically coded to hypothalamus neuroprotein. Administration in this subject was oral, but the results for intravenous and aerosolized fullerene administration were virtually the same. As you can see, there has been virtually no change in the location and concentration of immunofluorescence, even after thirty days. When these little fellows attach, they stay pretty well attached, although there is a very gradual leeching out."

Gabe thought the line about the "little fellows" and the way Rosenberg delivered it might have engendered at least a chuckle or two, but the assemblage remained stonily silent.

Five more feet.

Gabe was just a few steps from the closed door now. Through the glass he could see seven white-coated scientists-five men and two women-their backs to him, standing shoulder to shoulder at the far end of a carpeted room that was about a twenty-five-foot square-probably a conference room with the chairs removed.

Turn around and leave! Leave while you have the chance!

A slide was being projected on a screen before the small gathering. From what Gabe could see, the image was a cross section of brain, with the jade green glow of an immunofluorescent marker dye scattered over an area that apparently was the hypothalamus. At his very sharpest in neuroanatomy, which would have been a few minutes after finishing the course in med school, he could have easily identified the structures in the brain slice. Now, though, those days were long past and he would have to take Dr. Rosenberg's word.

A grainy slide with fluorescent marker was hardly the real living brains without bodies that the security guards had talked about. Gabe inched closer. At that moment, as if on cue, one of the scientists at the center of the line stepped back, turned to her left, and coughed deeply several times.

Through the opening she had created, Gabe saw three large glass cylinders, four feet high and a foot in diameter. They were filled to near the top with a translucent golden liquid-serum or some other form of nutrient, he guessed-which was being aerated by a bubbler built into the base, the source of the mechanical hum. A large number of monitoring wires snaked over the lips of each cylinder, connecting outside them with elaborate monitoring equipment, at least one of which was an EEG-an electroencephalogram-that was showing continuous brain-wave activity.