Sleepwalk (42 page)

The track narrowed as it wound eastward, finally disappearing altogether. Peter glanced nervously over at Jed.

Jed kept going. What he was looking for was no more than a quarter of a mile up the canyon’s rim.

Greg Moreland was halfway between The Cottonwoods and the communications center when the quiet of the night was shattered by the high-pitched wailing of the siren. He leaned forward over the wheel and gazed upward at the brilliant white glow of the floodlights surrounding the antenna installation, then slammed his right foot down hard on the gas pedal. The car’s rear wheels skidded on the loose dirt of the road, and the rear end fishtailed violently; a second later the tires caught and the car shot forward. Within less than a minute he braked to a sharp stop in front of the communications building and dashed inside. The front office was deserted, but in the cavern hollowed out of the cliff’s wall he found Paul Kendall and Stan Utley huddled around a computer terminal.

“What the hell is going on?” Greg demanded.

Utley didn’t even look up from the screen he was studying. “Not sure yet,” he said. “Something tripped the alarm topside, but so far everything’s working fine.” He studied the display for a few more seconds, then
glanced up at Paul Kendall. “Could have been a bird,” he said. “If a mouse was poking around up there and an owl went for it, it could break the trip beam.”

Moreland shook his head. Whatever had happened at the antenna had nothing to do with an owl, or any other kind of wild animal. If Judith Sheffield had discovered what was going on, then other people had too. “I want a crew up there,” he ordered. “Right now!”

Utley shot him an irritated glance, but knew better than to argue. He picked up a phone and entered a number on the keypad, drumming his fingers impatiently on his desk until he recognized Otto Kruger’s voice at the other end. Less than a minute later he hung up. “Kruger’s going up there himself with a couple of the men from the dam,” he said. “But if there’s a real problem—”

Abruptly, the sirens stopped wailing. Utley started to smile, but as his eyes moved to the computer screen, the smile faded. “Shit,” he muttered.

Paul Kendall, his fury mounting, shoved Utley aside and studied the display on the screen. It indicated clearly that not only was the signal cable to the antenna cut, but the power cable was broken as well. “I want that fixed,” he said, his voice taking on a dangerous edge. “We’ve got a lot to do tonight, and none of it can wait.”

Utley’s tongue ran nervously across his lower lip. Until Kruger got to the antenna and assessed the damage, there was no way of telling how long it would take before the antenna would be functional again. But he’d worked for Kendall long enough to know better than to suggest the possibility that one of his orders might not be met. “I’ll let you know when I’ve heard from Kruger,” he said.

Kendall nodded curtly, his mind already on other things. He’d made his decision about what was to be done tonight much earlier, and there were preparations to be made. But instead of sitting down at one of the computers with Greg Moreland to begin designing the new program that would be broadcast out over Borrego as soon as the antenna was repaired, he found himself drawn out of the little building into the serene quiet of the canyon.

He glanced upward, but the lights around the antenna were out now, and all he could see were the black shadows of the canyon’s northern wall. On the southern wall the pale light of the moon shone softly on the sandstone, its glorious daylight hues muted now to myriad shades of gray. Directly above, the sky glittered with stars, more stars than Paul Kendall ever remembered having seen before.

He moved away from the building, and a small breeze, redolent with sage, tweaked at him. Then, to the right, there was a flickering movement, nothing more than a shadow within a shadow, as a bat fluttered by.

The stream, running in its bed a few yards away, babbled softly in the darkness, and Kendall could hear the chirruping of frogs as they called out in an endless search for mates.

Kendall liked the canyon—even was beginning to appreciate the desert itself.

He hadn’t wanted to come to Borrego at all. Indeed, his first choice for the experiment that was taking place here had been Alaska. Up there were towns with no roads leading in or out, towns that were all but cut off from the rest of the world during the long northern winter. But in the end he’d realized that the very isolation
of those places could become a liability rather than an asset. While it was true that no one could get to those towns, neither could anyone leave them.

And Greg Moreland had assured him that Borrego would be perfect. “No one cares what happens there,” he’d insisted five years ago when he’d brought his first sketchy ideas to Kendall. “No one will even notice what we’re doing.” But now, after all the years of research and planning, after all the experiments that had, in the end, proved the project to be completely feasible; now, when he was on the very verge of success, he was going to have to fold his tents, move on, and start over again.

Well, perhaps not completely over again. The mechanisms were perfected now, he was certain of that. If they’d had another month—maybe even as little as two weeks—they’d have been ready to unveil Greg’s technique to the consortium of corporations that had funded the massive project he’d headed for the last five years.

And abandoning Borrego had its advantages. Before the successes of the past few days, there had been some failures.

Reba Tucker.

No one had meant for Reba to die, not really. But they’d had to have a subject for that first human experiment, and there had been compelling reasons for selecting Reba. The teacher, from the moment Greg had suggested her, had struck Kendall as one of those women who was devoted to her students, even sometimes capable of inspiring them. But she was also the kind who was overprotective of them, just as Frank Arnold had been overprotective of his men. And it wasn’t protection anyone in the country needed. Americans, as far as Paul Kendall was concerned, had had
entirely too much protection. And now, in the last decade of the century, they were paying for it.

The whole nation had become lazy, assuming that its forty years of economic supremacy was a permanent fixture on the planet’s landscape. Too many people, inspired by other people like Reba Tucker, were taking the attitude that their own personal fulfillment was more important than carrying their economic weight. And the country was paying for it.

And then Greg Moreland had come to him with his plan to realign the minds of the nation’s youth.

The most elegant aspect of the scheme—the aspect that had truly seized Kendall’s imagination—was that by its very nature the realignment would allow subjects to be customized perfectly to suit whatever tasks society—or Paul Kendall—required of them.

People with unique talents could be provided with the personalities best suited to utilize those talents. Other people—the masses of individuals who would never stand out from the crowd—would simply have their minds adjusted so that, no matter what their station in life, they would feel a contentment that nature would never have allowed them.

That, of course, was still in the future. But in Borrego the final experimentation would have taken place over the next few weeks, possibly even months. Despite Greg Moreland’s own eagerness to move forward as quickly as possible, Kendall had planned to move slowly, sending out only narrow ranges of frequencies at any given time, then monitoring the people who were affected. Already it was obvious that there were still areas in which the process needed refinement. Right now it appeared there were too many hypothalamus
probes, and some of the subjects had already become almost too lethargic ever to be useful.

On the other hand, those extra probes could prove useful. Indeed, with Frank Arnold, they already had. Frank had gotten out of line, and he’d been punished.

Given time, it all could have been worked out. He and Greg Moreland would have been able to record the changes in each subject, and eventually devise perfect combinations of probes to affect any given subject’s mind in almost any way imaginable.

That was why he’d insisted on keeping such meticulous records of who had received which shot. The probes were tuned to hundreds of frequencies. Until now they’d been very careful in their selection of subjects for realignment.

They’d started with the troublemakers, the kids who made life difficult not only for their teachers, but for everyone else as well. But now there had been a leak in the security of the project, long before they were willing to make it public. Until people could see the benefits of what they were doing, they could hardly expect them to approve. Right now, given the condition of the Alvarez girl, and the Sparks kid, they would surely be accused of “crimes against humanity.”

Kendall had decided that he simply wouldn’t let that happen.

Tonight he was going to eliminate the evidence.

Tonight, as soon as the antenna was repaired, he would send out powerful transmissions of the entire frequency spectrum to which the probes were tuned.

In the space of a few seconds every probe in the Borrego area would fire, burning itself away and leaving no trace whatever of its existence.

A lot of people would die.

Some of them might survive physically, of course, but Kendall knew there would be little left of their minds.

And then there would be the inevitable investigation, but in the end, with no evidence to show what had happened, none of the micromachines left in anyone’s brain, there would be nothing left but questions.

Paul Kendall and Greg Moreland wouldn’t be around to answer any of those questions. They would already be somewhere else, in some other small town in the middle of nowhere, preparing to repeat their experiments.

But next time there would be no leaks.

As he started back to the communications center to begin putting together the program that would wreak havoc in the brains of nearly thirty percent of Borrego’s population, Paul Kendall wondered how the town would react to what they would find in the morning.

It was a shame, really, that he wouldn’t be able to stay here and study it. Aside from the sociological implications of the whole thing, he had come to like Borrego.

But not enough that he was unwilling to destroy it.

“We’re here,” Jed said quietly, braking the truck to a stop.

Peter Langston looked around. They were a few yards back from the edge of the canyon. The road had deteriorated into no more than a nearly invisible track winding through the scrub juniper on the top of the mesa, and Peter saw nothing unusual about the area. But Jed was already out of the truck. Peter followed him.

Jed was once more rummaging through the toolbox, finally sliding a rusty carpet knife under his belt and handing Peter a long screwdriver. “That’s not much, but if you have to, at least you can shove it in someone’s eye,” he said.

Langston winced at the boy’s words, telling himself they were nothing but adolescent bravado, but reluctantly took the screwdriver and secured it under his own belt. “Where are we?” he asked as Jed started toward the rim of the canyon.

“There’s a trail,” Jed replied.

A few minutes later the two of them stood on the edge of the precipice. The edge of the cliff dropped straight into the canyon. Peter, after glancing down, took a step backward, his groin tightening as the chasm seemed to draw him toward it, seemed to urge him to throw himself into its gaping maw. He looked away, following as Jed turned northward and trotted quickly along the brink of the cliff, apparently unaffected by the height. Twenty yards away there was a small cleft in the canyon’s wall.

Peter peered doubtfully down into the rift. It notched no more than fifteen feet into the canyon’s wall, and as it went down it seemed to get smaller, until it finally disappeared entirely. “Jesus, kid, that’s not a trail.”

Jed grinned in the moonlight. “Sure it is,” he said. “My grandfather’s been using it for years. He showed it to me when I was about ten.” He didn’t tell Peter that he’d never before attempted to use the trail, even in broad daylight.

He dropped down onto the edge of the cleft, rolled over onto his stomach, then lowered himself down until he was hanging only by his fingers. Closing his eyes and
uttering a silent prayer, he let go, and dropped straight downward.

Peter froze. He couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. The kid must be crazy. Then, from the darkness, he heard Jed’s voice.

“Come on.” The words drifted eerily up from the darkness of the cleft.

Peter approached the edge and reluctantly looked down. Jed was standing on a narrow ledge, his head five feet below Peter’s feet.

Peter realized it was his turn.

He sat down gingerly, then let his legs drop over the edge. His groin tightened again, and for a moment he felt an almost uncontrollable urge to throw himself into the abyss. But the urge passed. Finally he rolled over and inched his way out until only his torso and arms were still on the mesa’s surface.

“Good,” he heard Jed encouraging him. “Now just a little more.”

He inched outward, and then his whole body was hanging over the edge, his fingers clawing at the ground as if trying to dig into the rock itself.

He felt his fingers slip.

A scream rose up in his throat, but he choked it back. The instant during which he fell seemed to expand into an eternity, but then he felt hands grasping him, and suddenly his feet struck the ledge below. As the hands steadied him he pressed against the sandstone, his heart pounding, his breath coming in short gasps. “I knew there was a reason why I never wanted to climb mountains,” he said, his voice trembling.

“It’s not so bad,” Jed said. “Just don’t look down unless you have to.” He was already sidling along the
ledge, and a moment later he crouched down once more. This time, instead of lowering himself to another ledge directly below, he leaped across the gap itself, his feet coming to rest on another outcropping that was four feet farther down and as many across.