Dead and Alive

CHAPTER 45

Victor never entered the Hands of Mercy directly. Next door to the hospital, which now passed as a ware-house, a five-story office building housed the accounting and personnel-management departments of Biovision, the company that had made him a billionaire.

In the garage under the building, he parked his S600 Mercedes in a space reserved for him. At this hour, his was the only car.

He had been put off his stride by the business with Erika Four on the phone and Christine not knowing who she was. In moments like this, work was the best thing to settle his mind, and perhaps now more than ever, numerous issues required his attention.

Near his parking space was a painted steel door to which only he possessed a key. Beyond the door lay a twelve-foot-square concrete room.

Opposite the outer door, another door could be operated only by a wall-mounted keypad. Victor entered his code, and the electronic lock disengaged with a thonk.

He stepped into a six-foot-wide, eight-foot-high corridor with a concrete floor and block-and-timber walls. The passageway had been excavated secretly by members of the New Race.

Huge responsibilities came with any attempt to pull down an existing civilization and replace it with a new one. The weight on his shoulders might have been intolerable if there had not been perks like secret passageways, hidden rooms, and concealed staircases, which allowed a measure of fun in every day.

He had found such hugger-mugger thrilling ever since he was a boy growing up in a rambling house built by a paranoid grandfather who included in his design more blind doors than visible ones, more unknown rooms than known, more secret passages than public hallways. Victor thought it said something admirable about him that he had not lost touch with his roots, had not forgotten from where he came.

At the end of the corridor, another keypad accepted his code. A final door opened into an ordinary file room in the lowest realms of the Hands of Mercy.

These days, no work was conducted on this level. A regrettable incident had occurred here, the consequence of sloppy work by some of his Alphas, and forty had perished. He passed through a dimly lighted area, where unrepaired destruction loomed in the shadows.

In the elevator, on his way up to the main lab, Victor heard music by Wagner, and his heart stirred at the majesty of it. Then he realized someone must have activated The Creed, the short film that played once every day throughout the facility for the inspiration and motivation of the New Race staff. But only Victor knew the procedure whereby the computer could be directed to feed the film throughout the Hands of Mercy, and he was curious as to how it had been activated.

When he entered his laboratory, he stood before the embedded wall screen, charmed as always by the marching legions, by the city of tomorrow with its immense buildings that dear Adolf had imagined but had failed ever to erect, by the monuments to himself that would, when the city was built, be much more grand than these examples.

With a team of his people, he had created this realistic glimpse of the future through computer animation. Soon would come the moment when the Wagnerian score faded and in his own voice the Creed would be delivered.

He went to his workstation, intending to sit in his chair to enjoy the last of the film. But arriving there, turning to face the screen from across the room, he saw a portion of the floor ripple, about twenty feet away, and he thought with alarm, Chameleon.