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pink jowls of fat, like the dewlaps on a bloodhound, dangling on her
shoulders. She was wearing a fawn-colored lab coat buttoned up to her throat.
Immensely thick spectacles turned her tiny eyes into great goggling orbs of
blue and white. Her hair was so thin that her scalp gleamed through the
screwed-back mousy locks.
She had an enormous bosom, which was out of proportion with the rest of her
body, and forced her to lean back as she strutted in on stumpy legs like
miniature tree trunks. One arm, the left, hung withered at her side, while the
other fiddled with a hearing aid pinned to her lapel. She stopped at the desk
at the front of the room and heaved herself slowly onto a box so that she
could see the seven strangers who were staring openmouthed at her.
"Assume the seated mode," she said. Though she looked to be about fifty years
old, her voice had the soft lisp of an eight-year-old girl.
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Ryan sat down, followed by the others. He leaned forward and stared intently
through his one good eye at the woman. If she ran a place of this size, then
her appearance had to be deceptive.
"My name is Doctor Ethel Tardy," she said. "I function as leader of this
complex.
You are our first guests for a considerable temporal period. Why did you come
here, journey wise?"
"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."
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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
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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.
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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.
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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 were that 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
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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
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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
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