Sleepwalk (35 page)

And why do I keep thinking of the driver as
he?
Judith suddenly thought. It could just as easily be a woman.

Making up her mind, Judith braked the car, pulling off the road. A cloud of dust rose behind her as the tires struck the hard adobe shoulder, and then the Honda came to a stop.

The blue car zipped past her, and Judith frowned. She was positive that the man in the car—at least she was now certain it
was
a man—had seen her. But what had she learned by the fact that he hadn’t stopped?

Either he thought she had a problem and didn’t care, or he didn’t want her to get a good look at him.

Feeling foolish, she put the car in gear again and moved back onto the road. Ahead, barely visible, she could just make out the blue car; every few seconds it seemed to disappear into the mirage, only to reappear a moment later.

She drove another thirty minutes and then, ahead, saw a gas station by the side of the road—one of those strange lonely-looking places stuck out in the middle of nowhere.

As she approached it, she saw the blue car pull off the road, and when she passed it a few seconds later, she
could see the person in the car talking to a weathered old man who apparently owned the place. But this time the man in the blue car waved to her as she passed. Suddenly she felt better. At least he’d acknowledged her presence. Surely he wouldn’t have done that if he’d been following her?

An hour later she was on the outskirts of Los Alamos. She hadn’t seen the blue car again, and the simple fact of its absence had made her begin to relax.

As the traffic thickened and she began threading her way toward the Brandt Institute, where Peter worked, she didn’t notice the beige sedan that had picked her up as she’d reached the edges of the town.

Judith pulled to a stop in front of a heavy chain-link gate. Beyond the gate there was a wide lawn, in the center of which stood a large two-story building. It was fairly new, constructed in a Spanish-Moorish style, its white plaster facade plain and unadorned, broken only by small windows covered with heavy wrought-iron gratings. It was capped by a gently sloping red tile roof, and the driveway, which cut straight across the lawn from the gates, ended abruptly at a pair of immense oaken doors, suspended from ornate iron hinges fastened to the wooden planks with large bolts. Except for that huge pair of doors, Judith couldn’t see another entrance to the building. Nor was there much around it. She’d had to drive all the way through Los Alamos to find it; it wasn’t even in the town itself. Around the high fence that surrounded the Brandt Institute, there was little to be seen except the desert itself, and Judith found the broad expanse of lawn to be faintly unsettling.
It was as if whoever had designed the building and its landscaping had wished to separate it from its environment, but had instead succeeded only in making the building appear totally out of place.

The whole estate—for that was what it would have looked like, had it not been for the fence, the gate, and the guardhouse that sat in the center of the drive—was situated a quarter of a mile back from the road, and only a small sign at the main road identified it at all.

A guard stepped out of the shack, and Judith gave her name, asking for Peter Langston. The guard returned to his kiosk and picked up a telephone. A few seconds later he came back to the car and handed Judith a plastic badge. It had Judith’s name embossed across the top. “I don’t believe it,” she murmured, staring at the badge.

The guard grinned. “Computer. Once you’re okayed, I just type in your name and she spits the badge right out.” When Judith remained puzzled, he added: “Yellow just means you’re a visitor. Don’t forget to turn it in before you leave. There’s a magnetic strip on the back that can be detected from anywhere inside the fence. If you take the badge outside the fence, the computer knows it’s missing and alarms go off.”

Judith stared at the badge, then turned it over. It looked for all the world like a credit card, right down to the brown stripe across the back. “Am I supposed to sign it?” she asked, only half in jest.

The guard grinned again. “Only if you’re permanent,” he said. “Then you have to sign for it every day.”

The guard watched as she clipped the badge to her blouse, then he stepped back into the kiosk. The gate rolled back, and Judith put the car into gear and drove onto the grounds of the institute.

The heavy chain-link gate swung closed behind her, and a moment later, as the car approached the wooden doors of the building itself, the huge portals began to swing outward, allowing the car to pass between them, through a short tunnel that ran below the second floor and into an enormous courtyard.

Judith’s eyes opened in shock.

There was a parking lot at the near end of the courtyard, but beyond that a park had been constructed. Tropical foliage burgeoned everywhere, and there was an artificial brook meandering through the gardens, spanned here and there by low wooden bridges.

Peter Langston, a tall, angular man with hair that was grayer than Judith remembered it, was waiting for her, apparently bemused by her shock at the jungle contained within the building. “I don’t believe this,” Judith said as she got out of the car. “How on earth does it survive in the winter?”

Peter pointed upward. “There’s a roof—see? It retracts when the weather’s right.”

“Incredible,” Judith said.

“Isn’t it just?” Peter replied dryly. He gave her an affectionate hug before holding her away from him, his eyes growing serious. “What’s going on?” he asked. “I was going to call you tonight.”

Judith shook her head. “I couldn’t wait. There’s too much going on, and I’m scared, Peter.”

The last traces of his smile vanished. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go up to my office.” He led her up a flight of stairs to a broad loggia that ran around the entire second floor of the building’s inner wall.

“I suppose there’s no point in asking you what’s going on out here, is there?” Judith asked. “From what happened out in front, I gather it’s all pretty secret.”

Langston shrugged. “Some of it is, I suppose. But a lot of it’s only a secret if you have a financial interest in it, which Willard Brandt certainly does. We’re doing a lot of work with superconductors here, and there’s one group over in the east wing that’s supposed to be working on a new computer that’s going to make the best Cray look like a Model-T Ford.” He turned into an office, then gestured to a comfortable-looking chair before folding himself up into a wooden rocker that looked oddly out of place to Judith. “Back problems,” he said. “Now, what’s this all about? And why the sudden rush?”

Judith explained what had happened in Borrego over the weekend and the odd behavior of some of her students that day. “I’m absolutely certain it has something to do with those shots,” she concluded. “But until you tell me what they are, I can’t prove anything.”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” Peter said, “I just managed to get some time on the electron microscope this afternoon. Let’s go take a look.”

He led Judith back out to the loggia, but this time they used an elevator instead of the stairs, descending to what was apparently the second of three underground levels. When the doors slid open, they emerged into a corridor tiled with glistening white porcelain and shadowlessly illuminated from fluorescent panels in the ceiling. All along the length of the corridor closed doors hid whatever activity was taking place down here from Judith’s view. “Real space-age, huh?” Langston asked.

Judith made no reply, and at last Peter turned into one of the rooms and spoke to a technician who was studying a display on a computer monitor. “Is that my stuff?” he asked.

The technician nodded. “But I can’t quite figure out what it is.”

Judith stared at the image on the monitor. It looked like nothing she’d ever seen before, but at the same time it struck her as being vaguely familiar.

It was roughly rectangular, with two nibs, almost like the tips of ballpoint pens, protruding from one end. The body of the thing seemed to be wrapped in wire, and at what Judith assumed was the base of the object, there was another pair of points, these two mounted to the body in such a way that they appeared to be able to swing toward each other.

The technician, his expression as puzzled as Judith’s own, finally spoke. “I give up,” he said. “I can’t tell you what it is, but I can tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t cellular, and it isn’t organic. And it doesn’t look like any molecule I’ve ever seen either.”

Peter Langston nodded in agreement, his bushy brows knitting as he concentrated on the strange object the screen displayed. “It’s definitely not a molecule,” he said. “It’s way too big. But it’s too small to be anything organic. That thing could fit right into any cell in the human body, with plenty of room to spare.”

Judith glanced at Peter. “Okay,” she said, certain he already knew the answer. “What is it?”

“Off the top of my head,” Peter replied, “I’d say it’s some kind of a micromachine.”

Judith’s eyes left the display and fixed on Peter. “A what?” she asked.

Peter smiled at her. “A micromachine. If I’m right—and I’d give at least a hundred-to-one odds I am—it’s a tiny mechanism, probably etched out of silicon.”

Judith stared at him. “You mean it actually does something?” she asked.

Peter’s finger moved to the screen and he traced along the twin protuberances at the object’s base. “I’d be willing to swear that those two things swing on those pivots,” he said, his finger stopping on what looked like the head of a tiny pin penetrating through the protuberance and fixed to the body of the object. “In fact,” he said, “that looks like some kind of a switch. See?” he went on. “Look how the ends of those are beveled. If you brought them together, the two beveled faces would match perfectly, making a contact point.”

Judith stared at him. “But how big is it? If it can actually work …” Her voice trailed off as Peter glanced inquiringly at the technician.

“A couple of microns,” he said, “one point eighty-seven, to be exact.”

Peter whistled. “Small, indeed,” he said.

“But what does it do?” Judith asked.

Langston sighed heavily. “I’m going to have to get a lot of images of this thing, then have the computer put it together in three dimensions. At that point I should be able to get a pretty good sense of what it is.”

Judith pulled her eyes away from the strange image on the screen to look worriedly at Peter. “How long will it take?” she asked.

Peter shook his head. “I wish I could tell you. A few hours, probably. But once I know what it is, I’ll need more time to figure out how it works and exactly what it does.”

“But I don’t
have
time,” Judith replied, fear sharpening her voice. “Peter, two people are already dead up in Borrego, and two more might as well be. And now something’s happening to the children—”

Peter held up a restraining hand. “I understand,” he said. “Look, I’ll find someone to help me, and if I have
to, I’ll work all night, and all day tomorrow. Now, the best thing you can do is go find a hotel room and wait for me to call. All right?”

Judith shook her head. “I have to go home. Frank needs me, and Jed—”

Peter eyed her worriedly. “Look. Whatever’s going on, it’s got to be dangerous. And if anyone finds out you stole that syringe, it’s going to be especially dangerous for you.”

Judith took a deep breath and slowly let it out. It did nothing to relieve her fear. But she still knew she had to go back to Borrego today. “I can’t stay,” she said. “I just can’t.”

Peter started to argue with her, but knew by the look in her eye that it would do no good. “All right,” he said, reluctantly giving in. “But be careful, okay?”

Judith nodded tightly. “I will,” she replied. “But promise me, Peter. As soon as you know what that thing is, call me. No matter what time it is.”

Ten minutes later, after Judith had left, Peter Langston set to work. Within an hour, as the truth of what the micromachines were began to dawn on him, a cold knot of fear began to form in his stomach.

The children of Borrego were in a lot more trouble than even Judith suspected.

Jed stared at the dark brick mass of the four-story building that stood at the corner of First and E streets and felt a twinge of doubt. The Borrego Building, still the largest in town, seemed to have taken on an ominous look this afternoon, but Jed knew that its foreboding air was only a figment of his own imagination. The
building itself, with its vaguely Gothic facade, looked as it always had—faintly dingy, like the rest of the town, but with a feeling of solidity to it.

Still, as he pulled the pickup truck into an empty slot in front of the building, he hesitated. But he’d made his decision, and there didn’t seem to be any point in waiting until tomorrow. Once he was working for the company, he might be able to find out the truth about what they had done to his father.

Jed swung out of the cab of the truck and walked through the door next to the bank that occupied the ground floor of the building, hurrying up the stairs to the second floor. At the top of the stairs there was a glass-fronted directory. Jed scanned it quickly, then studied the numbers on the doors on either side of him. Finally he turned left and made his way down the narrow corridor until he came to Room 201, its number emblazoned on the opaque glass panel in flaking gold leaf. Taking a deep breath, he turned the knob and stepped inside.

There were two desks in the room, but only one of them was occupied. Charlie Hodges, a gray-haired man of about fifty-five, whom Jed had known all his life, glanced idly up from his work, then smiled broadly as he rose to his feet and strode toward him, his hand out.

“Jed!” Charlie said. “This is a coincidence.” His smile faded and his eyes grew somber. “I was just working on some of the forms regarding your father. Getting his insurance straightened out, and starting a disability claim.” He shook his head sadly. “This is one of the worst things I’ve ever had to do. Every time I think of Frank …” His voice trailed off, then he seemed to recover himself “How is he? Is there any change?”

Jed shook his head. “I went out to see him this afternoon.
He’s just the same. I—” His voice faltered, but then he managed to steady it. “I don’t know what I’m going to do yet,” he said, leaving it to Hodges to figure out what he meant. Though he’d already thought about it, and was going to talk to Jude about it tonight, he still couldn’t accept the idea of deliberately letting his father die.