The Third Gate

13

Logan’s schedule was free until the following morning, so he spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the Station getting his sea legs: trying to get a feel for the place and its occupants. Since he’d already seen the offices, residency, and dive staging areas, he decided to visit the science labs in the Red wing. Though the labs themselves were small, he was astonished by their diversity: not only archaeology but geology, organic chemistry, paleobotany, paleozoology, and several others. The laboratories were modular: each was a stainless-steel box approximately eighteen feet square. While some were occupied, others were mothballed: apparently, Porter Stone cherry-picked the labs he thought might be useful for a particular expedition and then activated them on an as-needed basis.

Next he visited White, which he learned was command and control. Although there were the obligatory secure areas and locked doors, the site seemed refreshingly informal: there were very few guards, and the ones he met were friendly and candid. He did not speak of the curse or his reason for being on the project; judging from the curious looks he occasionally received, however, it was clear that at least a few had been briefed.

The nerve center of White was a large space, staffed by a lone technician sitting at a terminal in a far corner. His back was to Logan, and he was so surrounded by monitors that he was reminiscent of a pilot in a cramped cockpit.

“Catch any shoplifters?” Logan said, stepping into the room.

The tech whirled around, neighing in surprise. A book that had been sitting on his lap flew to the floor, spinning around and coming to rest in a corner.

“Judas H. Priest!” the man said, one hand plucking at the collar of his lab coat. “You trying to give a guy a heart attack or something?”

“No. I imagine that would ruin Dr. Rush’s day.” He stepped forward and extended his hand with a smile. “Jeremy Logan.”

“Cory Landau.” From the mangy thatch of black hair, and the way he’d lounged in his chair, Logan had guessed even from the doorway that the tech was young. But seeing him face-to-face was a surprise. Landau couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three. He had brilliant blue eyes, the fresh, peach-colored complexion of a cherub, and-a bizarrely incongruous addition-a narrow Zapata-style mustache. A can of grape-flavor Jolt and a thick pack of chewing gum sat on the desktop before him.

“So,” Logan said. “What do you do around here?”

“What do you think?” the youth replied, leaning back in his chair, surprise giving way to an affected breeziness. “I run the joint.” He took a sip of Jolt. “What did you mean by that crack about catching shoplifters?”

Logan nodded at the array of screens that surrounded Landau. “You’ve got enough LCDs here for the security pit at the Bellagio.”

“Security pit, my aunt Fanny. It all begins and ends right here.” Suddenly Landau’s brow creased with suspicion. “Who are you, anyhow?”

“Don’t worry. I’m one of the good guys.” And Logan flashed his ID.

“In that case, check this out.” Landau waved at the forest of glass panels and the half-dozen keyboards arrayed beneath them. “Here’s where all the data gets entered, all the numbers get crunched by autonomous programs.”

“I thought that was taken care of at the Maw.”

Landau waved a dismissive hand. “You kidding? They’re just the piano builders. I’m the artist who plays the instrument. Watch.”

With a quick flurry of keystrokes, Landau brought up an image on one of the monitors. “See, we receive sensor, sonar, and visual information from the ongoing diving missions. It all comes into a program, here, that maps out the underwater terrain. It’s a beast of a program, too. And this is the result.”

Logan followed the outstretched hand toward the image on the screen. It was indeed remarkable: a fantastically complex wireframe CAD image of an undulating, almost lunar, landscape, thickly honeycombed with tunnels and boreholes.

“That’s what it looks like, forty feet below us,” Landau explained. “With each new dive, our representation of the swamp bed-and the caverns below it-expands.” He demonstrated how the image could be manipulated, zoomed and panned, rotated on the X, Y, and Z axes. “You mentioned the Maw. You seen it yet?”

Logan nodded.

“While you were there, did you get a chance to check out the Grid?”

“You mean, that thing that looks like a bingo card on steroids?”

“That’s it. Well, what I’ve got here is the other half of the equation. The Grid is a two-D representation of what’s been explored so far. And this shows its exact topology.” Landau patted the display with almost fatherly pride. “When we find the-the target, we’ll use this to ensure it is fully mapped and explored.”

Logan murmured his appreciation. “Is this your first assignment for Porter Stone?”

The youth shook his head. “Second.”

Logan waved a hand around. “Is this unusual? All this equipment, tools, expensive setups-just for a single expedition?”

“It’s not for a single expedition. Stone’s got a warehouse somewhere in the south of England. Maybe more than one. That’s where he stores all the stuff.”

“You mean, the vehicles and electronics? Portable labs?”

“So they say. Everything he might possibly need for a particular site.”

Logan nodded. It made sense: like the inactive labs, such an arrangement would allow Stone to get up and running quickly, with as little time wastage as possible, in almost any conceivable climate or terrain.

It was refreshing to chat with someone who hadn’t heard of him before, who didn’t pester him with a hundred questions. Logan gave a smile of thanks. “Nice talking to you.”

“Sure. Mind tossing me that book on your way out?”

Logan walked over to the book that had fallen from the tech’s lap. Picking it up, he saw it was William Hope Hodgson’s exceptionally weird novel The House on the Borderland.

He handed it to Landau. “Sure this is the kind of book you want to be reading out here?”

“What do you mean?” Laudau took the book and cradled it protectively.

“The Sudd’s bizarre enough. Reading stuff like that besides may rot your mind.”

“Huh. Maybe that explains it.” And Landau turned around and resumed his typing.

F rom White, Logan crossed another floating tube into Maroon, which housed-according to a small sign at the far end of the access vent-the historical archives and exotic sciences. Although Logan had no idea what “exotic sciences” were, he began to get an idea as soon as he peeked into some of the additional modular labs that had been installed in this wing. One darkened lab was stocked with ancient books and manuscripts about alchemy and transmutation; the walls of another were plastered with maps of Egypt and Sudan, as well as photographs of pyramids and other structures, each image overspread with a tangle of lines and circles, intersecting at odd geometric angles. Clearly, Stone would explore any avenue of knowledge, no matter how abstruse, to help make his finds. Logan wondered if he should feel insulted that his own office was located here.

As he made his way down the corridor, he stopped before a room whose door was ajar. Although Maroon seemed to hold very few people at present, this particular room was occupied. It was dimly lit. Logan could make out a hospital bed, from which dozens of leads snaked down to various monitoring devices at its foot. It reminded him of the setups in the vacant rooms he’d seen back at the Center for Transmortality Studies.

The bed in this room, however, was not empty. Logan could see that a woman was lying on it: perhaps the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Something about her-some quality he could not quite analyze-made him stop, rooted in his tracks. Her hair was a very unusual color, a rich, dark cinnamon. Her eyes were closed. Probes were set at her temples, and others were fixed to her wrists and ankles. On the wall beside her was a very large mirror, brilliantly polished. The faint lights of the medical devices were reflected in it in myriad points of tiny color.

Logan stood there, mesmerized by this unusual sight: the woman, almost ethereal looking in the faint light of the vast arsenal of instrumentation. She lay absolutely motionless; there was not even any indication of breathing. She almost seemed to have passed from life into death. He had the distinct feeling he’d met her sometime in the past. This feeling was not in itself unusual; with his unusually sharp perception, Logan found deja vu to be a frequent companion. This time, however, the sensation was unusually strong.

There was motion by the monitors at the foot of the bed. Logan glanced toward it and was surprised to see Dr. Rush. He adjusted a dial, peered at a gauge. And then-as if with some sixth sense-he turned toward the doorway and saw Logan.

Logan began to raise his arm in greeting. But he could tell from the look on Rush’s face, from the man’s body language, that this was not the time to linger and that his presence was not welcome. So instead Logan turned away and continued down the hallway, in search of his own office.