'Miss Next!'

It was Stig. He was about ten yards ahead of the car and was squatting down, rifle across his knees. I walked slowly up to him, looking anxiously into the deep woodland on either side of the road. It was quiet. Rather too quiet. The sound of my own footfalls felt deafening.

'What's up?'

He pointed to the ground. There was a human ulna lying on the road. Whoever was in this accident, one of them never left.

'Hear that?' asked Stig.

I listened.

'No.'

'Exactly. No noise at all. We think it advisable to leave.'

We pivoted the car on its roof to give us room to pass and drove on, this time much more slowly, and in silence. There were three other cars on that stretch of road, two on their sides and one pushed into the verge. None of them showed the least sign of the occupants, and the woods to either side seemed somehow even more dark and deep and impenetrable as we drove past. I was glad when we reached the top of the hill, cleared the forest and drove down past a small dam and a lake before a rise in the road brought us within sight of the old Goliath bioengineering labs. I asked Bowden to stop. He pulled up silently and we all got out to observe the old factory through binoculars.

It was in a glorious location, right on the edge of the reservoir. But compared to what we had been led to expect by Millon's hyper-active imagination and a tatty photograph taken in its heyday, it was something of a disappointment. The plant had once been a vast, sprawling complex, built in the art deco style then popular for factories in the thirties, but now it looked as though a hurried and not entirely successful effort had been made to demolish it a long time ago. Although much of the building had been destroyed or had collapsed, the east wing looked as though it had survived relatively unscathed. Even so, it didn't appear that anyone had been there for years, if not decades.

'What was that?' said Millon.

'What was what?'

'A sort of yummy noise.'

'Hopefully just the wind. Let's have a closer look at the plant.'

We motored down the hill and parked in front of the building. The front facade was still imposing though half collapsed, and even retained much of the ceramic tile exterior and decoration. Clearly, Goliath had great things planned for this place. We picked our way among the rubble that lay strewn across the steps and approached the main doors. They had both been pushed off their hinges and one of them had large gouge marks, something that Millon was most interested in. I stepped inside. Broken furniture and fallen masonry lay everywhere in the oval lobby. The once fine suspended glass ceiling had long since collapsed, bringing natural light to an otherwise gloomy interior. The glass squeaked and cracked as we stepped across it.

'Where are the main labs?' I asked, not wanting to be here a minute longer than I had to.

Millon unfolded a blueprint.

'Where do you get all this stuff?' asked Bowden incredulously.

'I swapped it for a Cairngorm yeti's foot,' Millon replied, as though talking about bubble-gum cards. 'It's this way.'

We walked through the building, among more fallen masonry and partially collapsed ceilings, towards the relatively undamaged east wing. The roof was more intact here and our torches flicked into offices and incubating rooms where row upon row of abandoned glass amnio jars were lined up against the wall. In many of them the liquefied remnants of a potential life form had pooled in the bottom. Goliath had left in a hurry.

'What was this place?' I asked, my voice barely louder than a whisper.

'This was,' muttered Millon, consulting his blueprint, 'the main sabre-tooth tiger manufacturing facility. The Neanderthal wing should be through there and the first on the left.'

The door was locked and bolted but it was dry and rotten and it didn't take much to force it open. There were papers scattered everywhere, and a half-hearted attempt had been made to destroy them. We stopped in the doorway and let Stiggins walk in alone. The room was about a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. It was similar to the tiger facility next door but the amnio jars were larger. The glass nutrient pipes were still in evidence and I shivered. To me, the room was undeniably creepy, but to Stig it was his first home. He, along with many thousands of his fellow extinctees, had been grown here. I had sequenced Pickwick at home using nothing more complex than average kitchen utensils and cultivated her in a denucleated goose egg. Birds and reptiles were one thing; umbilical cultivation of mammals quite another. Stig trod carefully among the twisted pipes and broken glass to a far door and found the decanting room where the infant Neanderthals were taken out of their amnio jars and breathed for the first time. Beyond this was the nursery where the young had been brought up. We followed Stig through. He stood at the large window that overlooked the reservoir.

'When we dream, it is of this,' he said quietly. Then, obviously feeling that he was wasting time, he strode back to the incubating room and started rummaging in filing cabinets and desk drawers. I told him we'd meet him outside and rejoined Millon, who was trying to make sense of his floor plan.

After walking in silence through several more rooms with even more ranks of amnio jars, we arrived at a steel-gated secure area. The gate was open and we stepped through, entering what had once been the most secret area of the entire plant.

A dozen or so paces farther on the corridor led into a large hall, and we knew we had found what we had been looking for. Built within the large room was a full-scale copy of the Globe Theatre. The stage and groundling area were strewn with torn-out pages of Shakespeare's plays, heavily annotated in black ink. In an adjacent room we found a dormitory that might have contained two hundred beds. All the bedding was upended in a corner, the bedsteads broken and lying askew.

'How many do you think went through here?' asked Bowden in a whisper.

'Hundreds and hundreds,' replied Millon, holding up a battered copy of The Two Gentlemen of Verona with the name 'Shaxpreke, W., 769' written on the inside front cover. He shook his head sadly.

'What happened to them all?'

'Dead,' said a voice, 'dead as a ducat!'

We turned to find a small man with wild, unkempt hair standing in the doorway. He was dressed in Elizabethan clothes that had seen far better days and his feet were bound with strips of cloth as makeshift shoes. He twitched nervously and one eye was closed — but beyond this the similarity to the Shakespeares Bowden had found was unmistakable. A survivor. I took a step closer. His face was lined and weathered and those teeth he still possessed were stained dark brown and worn. He must have been at least seventy but it didn't matter. The genius that had been Shakespeare had died in 1616 but genetically speaking he was with us right now.