Brothers to Dragons (28 page)

Still Job waited. The roads and many buildings of Techville were not lit at night. By six-thirty the area below Job's window was completely dark. At last he moved his bed across, stood on it, and eased himself feet-first into the widest space between the window bars. The rough-edged metal scraped agonizingly on the sores of his hips and chest, but he kept inching forward. Within a minute he was holding a bar in each hand and turning so that his feet dangled down against the outside wall. His head was all that remained inside, but it stuck at the ears and temples and would not budge. His feet scraped for a hold on the wall of the building, and found nothing. The bars gripped him on each side of his hairless skull, tearing the skin from his ears. He wriggled and shivered and gave a last despairing push.

And then he was through. He lost his grip on the bars and dropped with a rush of air to sprawl full-length on soft, gluey earth.

As soon as he could breathe he rolled and scrambled away around the side of the building. Surely someone must have heard his feet, scrabbling away on the outer wall . . . But he saw and heard nothing. He waited thirty seconds, then crept away, around the building and towards the dining hall.

The street in front was disturbingly well lit. He hadn't noticed those lamps when he had been there in daylight. But lit or not, it was to the front of the dining hall that he had to go.

He watched while three small trucks drove up to the door, dropped off passengers, and left. At last the little van that he had seen earlier in the day came rolling up to the entrance. Hanna Kronberg and half a dozen others climbed out and went inside.

Job hurried forward. He had no time to worry about being seen. The engine was still running, and it was odds-on that the driver would be out again almost at once. At the side of the van Job hesitated. If just the driver reappeared, it made sense for Job to climb inside and hide at the back. But suppose that the driver was on his way to collect another group of diners? Then they would enter the van, and be sure to find Job.

He went around the truck and climbed onto the open iron frame at the rear. It was a primitive and home-made luggage rack, built of welded lengths of reinforcing bar. Even with the van stationary it was uncomfortable. Job crouched stiffly on hands and knees on the bare metal, and wished himself invisible. Despite the shadow of the van's body he felt conspicuous, but he dared not move.

The driver appeared at last. By the time the van was moving down the road Job's hands and knees were aching so badly that he wanted to scream.

The journey was mercifully short. When the van came to the fenced area and was waved on through the gate, Job was not sure whether he should be pleased or terrified. Certainly this place, inside yet another fence, should be the last location that anyone would search for him once they found that he was missing; they would first assume that he was making a run for Tandy Headquarters to report to his bosses. But if this seemed safe for the moment, instead of two barriers between him and Outside there were now three: one around this enclosed area, one around Techville, and the final and most lethal one around Xanadu itself.

He did not wait for the van to stop. While it was still cruising slowly between buildings he waited for an unlit patch and rolled off the luggage rack. The road was made of concrete. It knocked the breath out of him and delivered punishing blows to his left shoulder and hip. It was another minute or two before he recovered enough to crawl off into the darkness. He was scarcely to the side of the road before the van came roaring back with another load of passengers.

Months ago, Job's inspection of space photographs had shown him three buildings inside the fence. The middle one was three times the size of the others, but it seemed to be devoted to dormitories and recreation. The building next to it, farther to the east, had the most work activity—and it was where Hanna Kronberg had been spotted. Job headed that way, walked up to the building door as though he belonged there, and strode inside. If the staff went to dinner in shifts, rather than all at the same time . . . well, then he would be caught at once and not much worse off.

He found himself in a long, bare corridor with offices set off on each side. Most of the doors were closed, but as he walked he heard the sound of voices from behind one of them. Apparently at least a few of the staff were skipping dinner. At any moment one of them might have a reason to come out into the corridor.

He had to find a hiding place, but having come this far he wanted more than that. He stared at the closed doors as he passed. Each one had pinned to it a card bearing a person's name. He walked the length of the corridor to the narrow metal staircase at the end, but saw no card saying "Hanna Kronberg." He went up, treading as lightly as possible on the creaking bare metal, and found himself on a second floor that was all one big room. It was a laboratory of some kind, with computer consoles, electron capture detectors, chromatographs, and NMR equipment along one wall, racks of bottles and jars along another, and a dozen cages at the far end. Each cage was empty. Three of them were big enough to hold a large animal—or a human being.

In the corner nearest to Job stood another staircase. It led up to the third and highest floor of the building. Job hurried to it, ascended, and found himself in another corridor with a staircase at the far end leading to the roof. Three doors were along the right-hand side. Two bore unfamiliar names—but the middle one carried the painted number 36 and below it, "Hanna Kronberg."

Job pushed the door open and went in.

The room was empty. It was a plain twelve-by-sixteen oblong, with no pictures or decorations except a clock on one wall and a man's photograph in a frame over the desk. There were signs of recent occupancy. One of the three file cabinets had a drawer open. The computer in the corner was still switched on, displaying a complicated graphic of a biological organism. Jackets had been thrown carelessly on two of the chairs, and a pipe sat next to a pile of papers on the little metal table in the center of the room. It looked as though a meeting in progress had been interrupted for—or was continuing over—dinner.

There was one other exit to the room, a connecting door over by the file cabinets to Job's left. He went through it, and found himself in a file storage area filled with racks of cabinets and a dozen free-standing bookcases. He walked along the bookshelves, reading the titles. Predictably, they meant little to him. They were on molecular biology, physiology, genetics, organic chemistry . . . all subjects about which Job knew nothing. He went back to Hanna Kronberg's office and spent the next half hour examining the open file cabinets and the computer. It was the same story, the same words with a few new ones: hybridomas, recombinant DNA, mapping and splicing, commensalism, artificial symbiotes.

Job realized that real security in this facility was guaranteed not by protective fences and walls, as Wilfred Dell or the Big Three might think, but by the nature of the subject matter. Job could be left in this room all night, undisturbed, and at the end of it he would have only a vague idea what was going on. He had no trouble
reading
the papers in the files, but to him they were just strings of meaningless words. If he were to
understand
Hanna Kronberg's work, he would have to be told about it.

He went back into the storage room and examined it with a new eye. What he needed was a comfortable hideaway, one that would keep him from discovery while allowing him to overhear conversations in the next office.

Unfortunately, there was no such place. If he remained close enough to the door to hear speech, he would be seen by anyone who came in. Unless—Job looked up—unless he dropped any idea of comfort. The two bookcases next to the door were each six feet tall, three feet wide, and a foot deep. They were wood-framed, substantial and solid. If he climbed onto their shadowed top he could stretch out on them, uncomfortable but invisible unless anyone thought to look directly up to the bookcase tops.

He cracked open the door to the other room and looked around for something to stand on. There was nothing. Finally he took hold of the sides of one bookcase and gingerly began to ascend using the shelves themselves as steps. They creaked and bent, but held his weight. He dragged himself over the top and stretched out along the hard wood on his stomach, shoulder square against the wall. When he pushed his head forward it was no more than a foot from the top of the door to Hanna Kronberg's office. He could even slither forward, lean far down, and see the desktop and table at the other side of the room. In that extended position he was so uncomfortable that he could hold it for only a few seconds at a time. Job eased his way back.

In five minutes the hard wood was compressing the sores on his chest and legs. He shifted and squirmed, but found no relief. Before he climbed up he had worried that he might fall asleep and roll off. Now his concerns were quite different: could he endure this, until the return of Hanna Kronberg and her colleagues?

That return felt as though it was taking forever. Job, craning now and again to peer at the clock in the other room, knew that it was only half an hour until footsteps and voices sounded in the corridor outside. He pulled back close to the wall and lay perfectly still.

There was a scraping of chairs and a man's hoarse cough. And then another voice, a woman's. It was speaking, loudly and clearly.

And Job could not understand one word.

He lay frozen on the top of the bookcases. Of all the obstacles that he might have predicted in exploring the mysteries of Techville, this was the least probable. And yet it was one that Job should have been prepared for. Here, as elsewhere in Xanadu, people stuck with their ethnic groups. Hanna Kronberg and her colleagues were no exception. They were talking freely to each other—in their native language that Job had never heard before.

He forgot his discomfort and
listened
, harder than he had ever listened to anything. After a few minutes he began to pick up words, cognates drawn from various other languages. There was a hint now of Italian, then a phrase like Turkish and another that sounded like oddly pronounced Hungarian. The structure was familiar, yet at the same time alien. Within a few minutes Job's ear began to make the adjustment, and his brain reached for a conclusion. What he was hearing was
Rumanian
, a language that he had encountered only in written form, in one dusty book acquired and pondered during his long years as a street
basura
and vendor.

As the three people in the other room—Job could identify two men's voices and one woman's—continued their discussions, other facts became clear. Although they spoke Rumanian, most technical terms were not translated to that language. They were dropped in as English words. Job could hear the same biological vocabulary that he had read in the papers: hybridomas and recombinant DNA techniques and symbiosis. Added to them were new mystery words:
airborne vectors
,
contagion
and
immunity
, and
antigerial effects.

And one other fact became clear from the tones of voice, independent of any language. These three people had not returned for a late-night technical meeting. They had come to continue an argument, and it was a fierce one.

The voices grew louder. Job began to grasp tantalizing scraps of meaning.
You are a slave of Gormish.
That was Hanna Kronberg, addressing the gruffer of her companions, who coughed continuously whenever he was not arguing.
I know what she wants, and what Pyle and Bonvissuto want, too. But we have a
—Hanna Kronberg used a phrase that Job did not recognize. The book that he had studied so long ago had been written for children, with a child's limited vocabulary.

The argument grew more intense. Job risked craning forward enough to steal a glance into the next room. The three had their backs to him, crowded around the computer console. Hanna Kronberg was waving her hand at the screen. "
I can do it—I have proved . . . but it works only by . . . "
Directed something, that was the words she used. From the context and her gesture, it had something to do with
touching.
But touching what, and for what reason?

Job wallowed in words, clutching for the life raft of familiar phrases. "
. . . proof downstairs, as certain as I breathe" . . . "Five years work, no doubt at all. . . " "Stupid, they have no idea what they ask us to do . . ."

On and on it went, for another three hours. There was no agreement. The hoarse man was losing his voice. He began to bang his fist on the table to emphasize his points, and after a final outburst he swept out of the room. Hanna Kronberg and the other man followed, still arguing. The door slammed.

Job lay flat on top of the bookcase. He felt weak and dizzy. He had spent four hours in a concentration so intense that the world around him now seemed vague and distant. The only reality was the turbulent sea of words on which he had been so long adrift. He wanted to relax, but he was too uncomfortable. He flexed taut shoulders and began to ease his way down to the floor. There had been a sound of finality in the way that the door had been banged shut, but even if he were wrong about that he could not stay hidden forever. He went through into Hanna Kronberg's office and looked at the papers strewn on the table, and at the display on the computer screen. She had been pulling materials from file cabinets to support the points she was making, and had not bothered to put any of them back. The same was true of her computer files. Data cubes sat by the console, and one was still in the machine.

Job looked at the clock. Almost eleven; less than seven hours to daylight and his first chance to send a signal aloft to the orbiting monitors. He sat down at the table. Finally he had an idea what the Big Three of the Tandy were planning, and the role that Hanna Kronberg was supposed to play. But ideas were not enough; he needed
proof
, enough to convince Wilfred Dell and the Royal Hundred.

For the next five hours he studied the papers on the table and called files onto the computer screen. Finally his brain would absorb no more information. He walked downstairs to the laboratory and went to a line of glass-fronted cabinets. They were locked, but they had not been built for strength. He forced two of them open with a metal ruler and stood for a long time staring at their contents.