"We picked up a message on a trans," Ryan replied. "We're a group of friends, traveling this way. We were visiting Ginnsburg Falls."

"We monitor all communications. You closed the life window of their leader."

Ryan was shaken that they knew about the killing. He nodded. "Yes. It was..."

Dr. Ethel Tardy held up her right hand. "It means nothing, concernwise. Since your arrival in the complex you have all been measured and checked in all ways. All are healthy, though one has an incipient carcinoma, which may result in closure some years future."

Doc Tanner raised a hand. "May I ask a question, Doctor?"

"Indeed, Dr. Tanner, you may."

Ryan could feel ground slipping away beneath his feet. What in the long chill was going on here? How could they know all this? Names, illnesses?

"This has nothing to do with Project Cerberus, does it?"

The answer was some time coming. "Not precisely, Dr. Tanner. Project Cerberus was limited on a need-to-know Grades Delta and up only. We are the descendants of the initiators of Project Eurydice, the project from which there shall never be a looking-back situation."

Doc Tanner sat down again, eyes flicking toward Ryan, who thought that he'd never seen the old man look so worried.

"Interruptionwise, we are in a negative situation. I shall relate all you need to know before aligning you with us."

It was another of the "when, not if" situations, the kind that made Ryan feel uneasy.

For the next hour Dr. Ethel Tardy, in her silly little girl's voice, squeaked and lisped her way through a concise account of the utterly extraordinary history of Project Eurydice, a tale so incredible that the seven friends sat in amazed silence.

Afterward, Ryan tried to recall everything that she'd told them but found he could remember only the bare bones of the story.

During the mid 1990s, when war fever took over the land, a great number of secret missions were set up in what was then the United States. Protest was useless, and even national parks were taken over and used. Though Crater Lake was one of the most beautiful places on the continent, experts pronounced it suitable for deep excavation beneath the cone of Wizard Island near the center of the deep lake. A huge and intricate complex was set up there and staffed by some of the top military scientists. According to the doctor, by the end of the century the only scientists who received any funding were those involved in pure military research.

Bigger weapons.

Better weapons.

Then came 2001, and civilization, as it had been known, disappeared forever. The population wasn't just decimated. It was decimated again and again until only a tiny fraction survived. Among those survivors were the scientists who ran the Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement.

"In the summer of that year, rosterwise," the doctor told them, "there were seventeen hundred personnel here. Security was not a predicated condition."

To the astonishment of Ryan and his friends, the diminutive woman described what followed the nuclear Armageddon that blasted the world. Sealed in concrete and steel, the scientists were spared. Their air was filtered, the food self-produced from limitless supplies of time-safe chemicals. They were totally self-sufficient.

And all they needed to do was proceed with their work. With their research.

"Which we did, ladies and gentlemen. We received no instructions to alter our program schedulewise."

Doc Tanner again raised a hand. "But you are aware that the society that originally funded and ordered your project is long gone? Dust these hundred years?"

"Of course, Doctor. We are not fools here. But we have been reared here. We are born here. Genetically we breed and we die. But always the generations carry on."

"What of fresh blood?" Ryan asked her.

She smiled a gentle, dimpled smile at his question. "What need is there?"

"You breed within the complex and never go out?" Krysty asked.

"Of course. Negative dispersal, socialwise. Nobody ever leaves the complex, except in death."

"How many are there of you scientists now?" Doc Tanner asked, casting a meaningful look across the room at Ryan.

"Sixty-one approved personnel."

"Sixty-one," Jak squeaked. "Then... you said seventeen hundred?"

"Affirmative, young white head. There werethat many. Now we are sixty-one working operatives, sciencewise."

Doc mouthed something at Ryan, but it took the one-eyed man three attempts to understand it. The old man was trying to pass him the word "inbreeding." That had to be it! Ryan had seen enough closed communities to know what happened when the genes never got a chance to get rejuvenated by new, outside blood — there were mutations and still births.

And the ville eventually died away.

From seventeen hundred of what must have been the top scientific brains in the land down to sixty-one of... of people like Dr. Ethel Tardy.

Suddenly, like a thunderbolt, a question came to Ryan's lips. But he quickly suppressed it. The woman knew the name of Doc Tanner. But evidently she didn't know the names of the rest of them. How did she know the Doc?

She went on, in her sweet little girl way, telling them how the original sec guards had died away when some had tried to go outside. Rads had gotten them. And she told them how the scientists had needed menial servants. "Slaves," Krysty whispered.

They had taken some retard muties and given them voice box activators that were controlled from within the complex. They had also made some implants in the cortex to render the creatures totally obedient to the will of the scientists.

"Fucking slaves," Finnegan hissed.

"How many?" J.B. asked, leaning back in his seat, the brim of his fedora tugged low over his face, making it hard to see his eyes.

"Query sec total? Forty. That balance is now maintained, by culling."

The story was becoming more and more incredible. The picture of this sealed palace, with its generations of super-brains locked away from the horrors of the world outside for a century, breeding and interbreeding, with slaves to work for them, chilled the blood of Ryan and his compatriots.

Ryan's immediate guess was that in another twenty years or so the place would wither and die out altogether.

The doctor was remarkably open and frank with the strangers, something else that planted another seed of worry in Ryan's mind. A place like this would contain enough to keep someone like the Trader in business for life. Any bandit would give his right arm for such a prize. And here was Dr. Tardy telling them all of the secrets and details of how the complex operated. Would she do this if there was any risk of their ever getting out? Locked away, thousands of feet below the surface of Crater Lake, the chances of escape weren't very good, Ryan knew.

"There. That's all I can tell you about us," the doctor finally said. Now that she was finished her talk, the tiny woman seemed more at ease, having dropped some of the parroted jargon that had dotted her speech earlier. "Later we'll get to know more about you all, factwise, apart from Dr. Tanner, of course."

She ventured a nervous, trilling laugh that made her cheeks wobble, then climbed down off her box, just as the door started to ease open. Before she could leave, Doc Tanner held up his clawlike hand yet again.

"Yes?" the fat little doctor asked, a smile pasted solidly in place.

"I have another query, Dr. Tardy."

"Indeed?"

"Throughout your most interesting dissertation, you spoke much of the past, even a little of the present, but nothing of the future. Why is that?"

"The future is a chalice held in all our hands, Doctor."

"And what does that cup contain?"

"It contains hope."

"And?"

"Hope of an end to suffering."