Doc pressed her. "Through peace? Through an end to disease?"

"No. Not that way. That is not the path on which we must tread."

"What frightful fiend doth tread behind you?" he asked, voice low, almost as if he were speaking to himself.

"I don't read. We are not interfacing, communicationswise, Dr. Tanner. Let us terminate on that."

She bustled out, cheeks flushed, eyes averted from her audience. It was screamingly obvious that, quite deliberately, Doc had touched her on the rawest of raw nerves. What the scientists were actually doing in the complex under Wizard Island was something they wished to keep secret.

The seven of them sat there, at their lecture desks, each one with much to think about while they waited for the speaker to crackle into life and give them further orders.

Where they should go.

And what they should do.

Chapter Sixteen

There were no clocks in the Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement, not clocks that showed any sort of real time, just circular chrons, divided into three equal parts, red, amber and green, each subdivided into five equal portions lettered from Ato E. Ryan and his companions quickly came to realize that the scientists operated a simple three-shift day of eight hours each. But they didn't use hours and minutes in allocating time. They would talk of eating at Red Cor of using one of the deeply buried bathing pools at Amber B.

Ryan Cawdor's body clock was infallible, and he knew that when they were taken to have their second meal of the day, it was close to noon in the Oregon mountains far, far above them.

It was identical in every way to the first meal, except that it was possibly a more yellowish shade of brown than the first plate of sludge. It was difficult to detect any change in the taste.

Having escorted them to the visitors' quarters, the visored sec guards left them to stand patiently and silently in the corridor outside the only door. But the roving vid cameras still blinked and rocked their serpentine necks back and forth.

Apart from certain specific research areas, they had been told they'd have unlimited access to anywhere they wanted to go. The section of the complex that contained the main elevators was also out of bounds to them. After they'd eaten, a voice over the speakers had urged them to go and explore. It added that the computer maps were, unfortunately, malfunctioning.

Within seconds Ryan had combined with Finn, Jak and J.B. to work out if there were any areas in their rooms that the cameras couldn't see.

There were.

Several. Angles behind furniture, or tucked at the rear of open doors. And surprisingly, behind the door marked Hygiene Facility, there was a sizable area where they could converse unseen.

To avoid arousing suspicion, Ryan used yet another of the old tricks taught him by the Trader. With people that you trusted, you passed messages on, one person at a time. That way, there was never a great bunch sitting around, heads together.

He went into the toilets first, and Jak followed. While they stood together, Ryan talked quietly out of the corner of his mouth. Behind them he'd turned on a noisy faucet, drowning out their whispered conversation.

"Don't like it. Might not let us go. Eyes and ears open. Spread out. Report back like this. Soon as we find out what's happening we'll try and make a move. Until then it's step light."

The boy nodded. "Long as bastard sec men don't try push me around. Can't take that, Ryan."

The older man patted him on the arm. Then he zipped up the front of his trousers and went out, motioning for Finnegan to follow him and receive the message from the albino boy. And so on, down the line. Doc went last but one, ready to explain the orders to his beloved Lori, whose own very limited vocabulary meant she always had to be last in the line of message passing.

During the afternoon, around Don amber, they set off to explore the Wizard Island complex. Doc went with Lori, Finnegan with J.B., and Jak and Krysty with Ryan. To leave their quarters they had to stand beneath a vid camera and request permission to have the main door opened. After a delay of several minutes, the request was granted.

They found very quickly that the promise of more or less free access was a myth. They were allowed to wander where they wanted through the main living areas, where they met and talked to more of the scientists. But when they tried to move into areas marked with black circles split with yellow triangles, there were always guards to prevent them, warning them off with the laser weapons, harsh, flat voices croaking threats.

"Any attempt to enter research sections topmost negative prevention deterrent force."

As far as they could judge, it seemed as if most regions of the vast building had been given over to research. During the introductory speech from Dr. Ethel Tardy, she had made it clear that the complex existed as it always had — for scientific work into military possibilities. The scientists worked as their fathers and mothers had worked, and their fathers and mothers, back to their fathers and mothers before the long chill had begun. Each generation had trained the next, handing on the torch.

Several times Tardy had mentioned a mythical government that had given birth to Wizard Island, and was still somewhere out there, waiting, gathering strength, like a wounded beast that would one day be whole again. She had referred to this as "Central," using the word with the same kind of awe that a primitive native would reserve for his most feared deity.

One thing that Ryan immediately found odd was the complete lack of anything from before the terminal war of 2001. In fact, there seemed nothing in the whole complex that was older than a year or so. He asked the first of the coated scientists that they saw that afternoon.

"Nothing old? Define your terms, stranger."

"Nothing more than a few years old."

The man was stooped with only a few tendrils of pale hair pasted across a skull that showed the scars of surgery. Ryan noticed that the man's ears were reversed so that they faced backward.

"A few. What is a few?"

"Five," Ryan said, seeing that this absurd game of chopped logic could go on forever.

"Is there anything here older than five years? Yes, I can answer without hesitation that there is."

"Any books?" Krysty asked.

"Books? Define your terms. What precisely is a book, young woman?"

"Something you read."

"Ah." A wintry smile flitted for a moment across the sallow face. "The tag here that bears my name. Dr. Darren Canting. Can you read that, stranger?"

"Course I can."

"Then the question does not compute. You ask if there is anything you can read. You say you can read my identification pass. Ergo, you can read something that is here."

"Thanks, Doctor," Ryan said. "We'll be on our way." He led the other two along a lateral corridor and up a gentle slope.

"He's fucking crazy." Jak was about to spit his disgust on the spotless floor, then changed his mind. "Like fucking swampy with head blown off. They all like him?"

As the day wore on, it became increasingly obvious that the Wizard Island complex was filled with some of the Crater Lake strangest men and women Ryan and his friends had ever seen.

Dr. Tardy had said there were sixty-one of the descendants of the original scientists left. What she hadn't mentioned was that hardly a single person could qualify for the word normal.

They didn't seem like the muties who haunted the hotter parts of Deathlands, but they showed all manner of physical oddities.

There were dwarfs of both sexes, one of whom pulled himself along in a spidery frame, powered by one of the silent motors that ran the inflatable boats. His head shaking, he smiled at them so radiantly that the room seemed to light up.