Timeline. Part 51

And all the time, the terrain grew steeper. Now the trees ahead were thinning, she could see light between the trunks, and she heard the rush of water. She was sliding down a path that ran parallel to a small stream. The trees thinned more, and she saw that the forest ended abruptly about twenty yards ahead. The rushing sound of water grew louder.

And then she realized why the forest ended.

It was the edge of a cliff.

And beyond was a waterfall. Directly ahead.

Terrified, Kate rolled over on her stomach, dug her fingers like claws into the mud, but to no avail. She still continued to slide. She couldn't stop. She rolled onto her back, still sliding down a chute of mud, helpless to do anything but watch the end coming, and then she shot out of the forest and was flying in the air, hardly daring to look down.

Almost immediately, she smashed down into foliage, clutched at it, and held. She swung up and down. She was in the branches of a large tree, hanging out over the cliff. The waterfall was directly below her. It wasn't as large as she had thought. Maybe ten, fifteen feet high. There was a pool at the base. She couldn't tell how deep it was.

She tried to climb back along the branches of the tree, but her hands were slippery from the mud. She kept slipping, twisting on the branch. Eventually, she was hanging beneath, clutching it with hands and legs like a sloth as she tried to work her way backward. She went another five feet, then realized she would never make it.

She fell.

She struck another branch, four feet lower. She hung there a moment, gripping the branch with slippery, muddy hands. Then she fell again, struck a lower branch.

Now she was just a few feet above the waterfall as it curved, roaring, over the lip of the cliff. The branches of the tree were wet from mist. She looked at the churning pool of water at the base. She couldn't see the bottom; she couldn't be sure how deep it was.

Hanging precariously from the branch, she thought: Where the h.e.l.l is Chris? But in the next moment, she lost her grip and fell the rest of the way.

The water was an icy shock, bubbling, opaque, roiling furiously around her. She tumbled, disoriented, kicked to the surface, banged against rocks on the bottom. Finally, she came up beneath the waterfall, which pounded on her head with incredible force. She couldn't breathe. She ducked down again, swam ahead, and came out a few yards downstream. The water in the pool was calmer, though still chillingly cold.

She climbed out and sat on a rock. She saw that the churning water had washed all the mud from her clothes, from her body. She felt somehow new-and very glad to be alive.

Catching her breath, she looked around.

She was in a narrow little vale, the afternoon light misty from the waterfall. The valley was lush and wet, the gra.s.s was wet, the trees and rocks covered in moss. Directly ahead, a stone path led to a small chapel.

The chapel was wet, too, its surfaces covered with a kind of slimy mold, which streaked the walls and dripped from the edge of the roof. The mold was bright green.

The green chapel.

She also saw broken suits of armor heaped untidily beside the chapel door, old breastplates rusting in the pale sun and dented helmets lying on their sides; also swords and axes casually thrown all around.

Kate looked for Chris but didn't see him. Evidently, he hadn't fallen all the way, as she had. Probably he was now making his way down by another path. She thought she would wait for him; she had been happy to see him earlier, and missed him now. But she didn't see Chris anywhere. And aside from the waterfall, she heard no sound at all in the little valley, not even birds. It was ominously silent.

And yet she did not feel alone. She had the strong sense of something else here-a presence presence in the valley. in the valley.

And then she heard a growling sound from inside the chapel: a guttural, animal sound.

She stood, and moved cautiously along the stone path toward the weapons. She picked up a sword and gripped the handle in both hands, even though she felt foolish; the sword was heavy, and she knew she had neither the strength nor the skill to use it. She was now close to the chapel door, and she smelled a strong odor of decay from inside. The growling came again.

And suddenly, an armored knight stepped forward, blocking the doorway. He was a huge man, nearly seven feet tall, and his armor was smeared with green mold. He wore a heavy helmet, so she could not see his face. He carried a heavy double-bladed ax, like an executioner's.

The ax swung back and forth as the knight advanced toward her.

Instinctively, she backed away, her eyes on the ax. Her first thought was to run, but the knight had jumped out at her quickly; she suspected he might be able to catch her. Anyway, she didn't want to turn her back on him. But she couldn't attack; he seemed to be twice her size. He never spoke; she heard only grunting and snarling from inside the helmet-animal sounds, demented sounds. He must be insane, she thought.

The knight came quickly closer, forcing her to act. She swung her sword with all her strength; he raised his ax to block and metal clanged against metal; her sword vibrated so strongly, she nearly lost her grip. She swung again, low, trying to cut his legs, but he easily blocked again, and with a quick twist of his ax, the blade flew out of her hands, landing on the gra.s.s beyond.

She turned and ran. Snarling, the knight raced forward and grabbed a fistful of her short hair. He dragged her, screaming, around to the side of the chapel. Her scalp burned; ahead, she saw a curved block of wood on the ground, showing the marks of many deep cuts. She knew what it was: a beheading block.

She was powerless to oppose him. The knight pushed her down roughly, forcing her neck onto the block. He stood with his foot in the middle of her back, to hold her in position. She flailed her arms helplessly.

She saw a shadow move across the gra.s.s as he raised his ax into the air.

The telephone rang insistently, loudly. David Stern yawned, flicked on the bedside lamp, picked up the receiver. "h.e.l.lo," he said, his voice groggy.

"David, it's John Gordon. You'd better come down to the transit room."

Stern fumbled for his gla.s.ses, looked at his watch. It was 6:20 a.m. He had slept for three hours.

"There's a decision to make," Gordon said. "I'll be up to get you in five minutes."

"Okay," Stern said, and hung up. He got out of bed and opened the blinds at the window; bright sunlight shone in, so bright that it made him squint. He headed for the bathroom to take a shower.

He was in one of three rooms that ITC maintained in their laboratory building for researchers who had to work through the night. It was equipped like a hotel room, even down to the little bottles of shampoo and moisturizing cream by the sink. Stern shaved and dressed, then stepped out into the hallway. He didn't see Gordon anywhere, but he heard voices from the far end of the corridor. He walked down the hall, looking through the gla.s.s doors into the various labs. They were all deserted at this hour.

But at the end of the corridor, he found a lab with its door open. A workman with a yellow tape was measuring the height and width of the doorway. Inside, four technicians were all standing around a large table, looking down at it. On the table was a large scale model built of pale wood, showing the fortress of La Roque and the surrounding area. The men were murmuring to one another, and one was tentatively lifting the edge of the table. It seemed they were trying to figure out how to move it.

"Doniger says he has to have it," the technician said, "as an exhibit after the presentation."

"I don't see how we get it out of the room," another said. "How'd they get it in?"

"They built it in place."

"It'll just make it," said the man at the door, snapping his tape measure shut.

Curious, Stern walked into the room, looked more closely at the model. It showed the castle, recognizable and accurate, in the center of a much larger complex. Beyond the castle was a ring of foliage, and outside that a complex of blocky buildings and a network of roads. Yet none of that existed. In medieval times, the castle had stood alone on a plain.

Stern said, "What model is this?"

"La Roque," a technician said.

"But this model isn't accurate."

"Oh yes," the technician said, "it's entirely accurate. At least according to the latest architectural drawings they've given us."

"What architectural drawings?" Stern said.

At that, the technicians fell silent, worried looks on their faces. Now Stern saw there were other scale models: of Castelgard, and of the Monastery of Sainte-Mere. He saw large drawings on the walls. It was like an architect's office, he thought.

At that moment, Gordon stuck his head in the door. "David? Let's go."

He walked down the corridor with Gordon. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the technicians had turned the model on end and were carrying it through the door.

"What's that all about?" Stern said.

"Site-development study," Gordon said. "We do them for every project site. The idea is to define the immediate environment around the historical monument, so that the site itself is preserved for tourists and scholars. They study view lines, things like that."

"But why is that any of your business?" Stern said.

"It's absolutely our business," Gordon said. "We're going to spend millions before a site is fully restored. And we don't want it junked up with a shopping mall and a bunch of high-rise hotels. So we try to do larger site planning, see if we can get the local government to set guidelines." He looked at Stern. "Frankly, I never thought it was particularly interesting."

"And what about the transit room? What's going on there?"

"I'll show you."

The rubber floor of the transit site had been cleared of debris and cleaned. In the places where acid had eaten through the rubber, the flooring was being replaced by workmen on their hands and knees. Two of the gla.s.s shields were in place, and one was being inspected closely by a man wearing thick goggles and carrying an odd hooded light. But Stern was looking upward as the next big gla.s.s panels were swung in on overhead cranes from the second transit site, still being built.

"It's lucky we had that other transit site under construction," Gordon said to him. "Otherwise, it'd take us a week to get these gla.s.s panels down here. But panels were already here. All we have to do is move them over. Very lucky."

Stern still stared upward. He hadn't realized how large the shielding panels were. Suspended above him, the curved gla.s.s panels were easily ten feet high and fifteen feet wide, and almost two feet deep. They were carried in padded slings toward special mounting brackets in the floor below. "But," Gordon said, "we have no spares. We just have one full set."

"So?"

Gordon walked over to one of the gla.s.s panels, already standing in place. "Basically, you can think of these things as big gla.s.s hip flasks," Gordon said. "They're curved containers that fill from a hole at the top. And once we fill them with water, they're very heavy. About five tons each. The curve actually improves the strength. But it's the strength I'm worried about."

"Why?" Stern said.

"Come closer." Gordon ran his fingers over the surface of the gla.s.s. "See these little pits? These little grayish spots? They're small, so you'd never notice them unless you looked carefully. But they're flaws that weren't there before. I think the explosion blew tiny drops of hydrofluoric acid into the other room."

"And now the gla.s.s has been etched."

"Yes. Slightly. But if these pits have weakened the gla.s.s, then the shields may crack when they are filled with water and the gla.s.s is put under pressure. Or worse, the entire gla.s.s shield may shatter."

"And if it does?"

"Then we won't have full shielding around the site," Gordon said, looking directly at Stern. "In which case, we can't safely bring your friends back. They'd risk too many transcription errors."

Stern frowned. "Do you have a way to test the panels? See if they'll hold up?"

"Not really, no. We could stress-test one, if we were willing to risk breaking it, but since we have no spare panels, I won't do that. Instead, I'm doing a microscopic polarization visual inspect." He pointed to the technician in the corner, wearing goggles, going over the gla.s.s. "That test can pick up preexisting stress lines-which always exist in gla.s.s-and give us a rough idea of whether they'll break. And he's got a digital camera that is feeding the data points directly into the computer."

"You going to do a computer simulation?" Stern said.

"It'll be very crude," Gordon said. "Probably not worth doing, it's so crude. But I'll do it anyway."

"So what's the decision?"

"When to fill the panels."

"I don't understand."

"If we fill them now, and they hold up, then everything is probably fine. But you can't be sure. Because one of the tanks may have a weakness that will break only after a period of pressure. So that's an argument to fill all the tanks at the last minute."

"How fast can you fill them?"

"Pretty fast. We have a fire hose down here. But to minimize stress, you probably want to fill them slowly. In which case, it would take almost two hours to fill all nine shields."

"But don't you get field bucks starting two hours before?"

"Yes-if the control room is working right. But the control room equipment has been shut down for ten hours. Acid fumes have gotten up there. It may have affected the electronics. We don't know if it is working properly or not."

"I understand now," Stern said. "And each of the tanks is different."

"Right. Each one is different."

It was, Stern thought, a cla.s.sic real-world scientific problem. Weighing risks, weighing uncertainties. Most people never understood that the majority of scientific problems took this form. Acid rain, global warming, environmental cleanup, cancer risks-these complex questions were always a balancing act, a judgment call. How good was the research data? How trustworthy were the scientists who had done the work? How reliable was the computer simulation? How significant were the future projections? These questions arose again and again. Certainly the media never bothered with the complexities, since they made bad headlines. As a result, people thought science was cut and dried, in a way that it never was. Even the most established concepts-like the idea that germs cause disease-were not as thoroughly proven as people believed.

And in this particular instance, a case directly involving the safety of his friends, Stern was faced with layers of uncertainty. It was uncertain whether the tanks were safe. It was uncertain whether the control room would give adequate warning. It was uncertain whether they should fill the tanks slowly now, or quickly later. They were going to have to make a judgment call. And lives depended on that call.

Gordon was staring at him. Waiting.

"Are any of the tanks unpitted?" Stern said.

"Yes. Four."

"Then let's fill those tanks now," Stern said. "And wait for the polarization a.n.a.lysis and the computer sim before filling the others."

Gordon nodded slowly. "Exactly what I think," he said.

Stern said, "What's your best guess? Are the other tanks okay, or not?"

"My best guess," Gordon said, "is that they are. But we'll know more in a couple of hours."

06:40:22.

"Good Sir Andre, I pray you come this way," Guy de Malegant said with a gracious bow and a wave of his hand.

Marek tried to conceal his astonishment. When he had galloped into La Roque, he fully expected that Guy and his men would kill him at once. Instead, they were treating him deferentially, almost as an honored guest. He was now deep in the castle, in the innermost court, where he saw the great hall, already lit inside.

Malegant led him past the great hall and into a peculiar stone structure to the right. This building had windows fitted not only with wooden shutters but with windowpanes made of translucent pig bladders. There were candles in the windows, but they were outside the pig bladders, instead of inside the room itself.

He knew why even before he stepped into the building, which consisted of a single large room. Against the walls, gray fist-size cloth sacks stood heaped high on raised wooden platforms above the floor. In one corner, iron shot was piled in dark pyramids. The room had a distinctive smell-a sharp, dry odor-and Marek knew exactly where he was.