The Doomsday Box (4 page)

They were walking together, all six of them, through the deserted corridors of the old Project Rainbow complex. Their footsteps echoed eerily and the whole place was in gloom, but the power was on and some minimal systems were still operative. Strip lights in the ceiling came on automatically as they walked, then switched off behind them, creating weird islands of illumination with darkness behind and darkness ahead. The effect was positively spooky, which was no help at all to Opal's nerves.

She tuned out the conversation between the colonel and Mr. Carradine and tried to concentrate on steadying herself. Her job, after all, was purely routine. She could actually have done it without leaving Britain, if they'd given her coordinates for the underground chamber, but Mr. Carradine had told her there were political implications to the mission. Those in charge of the revived Project Rainbow were extremely skeptical about remote viewing: it was hard enough to convince them it would work at all, let alone that it could work from thousands of miles away. “Why try to convince them?” Opal had asked. “We're the ones doing them a favor.” Which was when Mr. Carradine explained that if she did a good job here, it could mean extra funding. This operation was so important, it could even outweigh her recent success in finding the terrorist leader Venskab Faivre aka the Skull.

So not much pressure there, then
, Opal thought. But however important the mission was, the fact remained it was a very simple job. All they wanted was for her to pass through less than a hundred yards of concrete—which she could manage almost instantaneously—then report back on what she found in the time-tunnel chamber.
Probably nothing
, Mr. Carradine had said.
Probably just a fault in the alarm system.
But what if there
was
something . . . ?

The trouble was, she kept wondering what the
something
might be. Nobody had told her much about the rift: typical need-to-know mentality. So she was left to imagine the sort of thing that might trigger an alarm. Maybe some kind of animal from the distant past that had wandered into the time rift. Once you established a rift like that, it might lead
anywhere.
There was even the possibility that what had triggered the alarm was a visitor from the future, and heaven alone knew what that might be—a highly evolved human with a massive brain who could control people with a single thought, or maybe some alien creature from outer space that had taken over the planet in a million years' time.

There had definitely been trouble in the past, but nobody would say what. She'd talked about it with her father just before she left. He'd told her confidentially he thought the scientists had been mad to open the rift in the first place and doubly mad to unseal it again now. They clearly didn't know enough to manage it safely.

Colonel Saltzman stopped by a door, sturdily made from new wood. He fished a key from his pocket and unlocked it. “In here,” he murmured, and led them through. The doorway itself was so small he had to stoop a little, but when Opal followed him she found herself in a large concrete tunnel that looked for all the world like a gigantic sewer pipe. The lighting here was strictly temporary—bulbs strung along electric cord—but at least it was consistent so that the whole tunnel was lit. This was obviously the passage the army had been drilling toward the rift chamber. “Take it slow,” the colonel advised. “We haven't gotten around to flattening a floor yet.”

Maybe it was worse if you had big feet like the colonel, because Opal didn't really find it tricky at all; besides, they had only to walk a few hundred yards before the tunnel came to an end, the way blocked by a drilling machine so gigantic that it seemed like something from a science fiction movie. Beside it, a team of men in white coats were unpacking and assembling electronic equipment from a wooden crate. Something about the gear looked vaguely familiar, but Opal still hadn't decided what it was before Mr. Carradine said sharply, “I didn't know your men were familiar with psychotronic machinery, Colonel.”

“Those aren't my men, Mr. Carradine,” the colonel told him easily. “They're yours. Turned up an hour after the crate, flashing their CIA IDs and throwing their weight around. Thought they'd be out of the way down here, and they seemed happy enough.”

“Didn't recognize them,” Carradine said sheepishly. “Excuse me, Colonel.” He walked over to the technicians and started a quiet conversation.

Colonel Saltzman glanced toward Opal. “Suppose you know all about this gear, young lady?”

Opal realized that in fact she did. What was taking shape out of the crate looked like a portable version of the Shadow Project's own projection equipment, the psychotronic helmets that helped agents out of their physical bodies and dispatched them to specific, distant coordinates. She also realized she quite liked the colonel, with his laid-back attitude and his Southern drawl. “I think it may be something to help me do my job.” She smiled.

Fifteen minutes later, she and Michael were seated side by side, wearing skeletal versions of the familiar Shadow Project headgear. The CIA technicians had been banished, and Mr. Carradine was making final adjustments on a laptop computer. “Interesting that they have this equipment at Langley,” Michael said quietly.

“What's Langley?” Opal asked him.

“CIA headquarters in Virginia. Some of the gear we're using here is more advanced than the psychotronics we have back in Britain, but the CIA has always claimed their remote viewing project has been closed down for years.”

“You don't think the CIA would
lie
to us?” Opal asked him, poker-faced.

Carradine glanced up from his laptop. “The coordinates are set. You two ready?”

“Are you ready, Michael?” Opal asked.

“You're the one who's traveling,” Michael told her. “I'll just sit here and wait for you to come back safely.”

“We're ready, Mr. Carradine,” Opal called. She took a deep breath to try to settle herself.

She expected Mr. Carradine to trigger the equipment, but instead he said, frowning, “One thing, Opal, and this is important.” He stared at her for emphasis, then went on, “Your job is to examine the chamber that houses the time tunnel, look around for anything that might have set off the alarm. But under no circumstances are you to enter the rift itself. That is positively, absolutely forbidden. Okay?”

Opal had not the slightest intention of going near the time rift. “Perfectly clear, Mr. Carradine,” she said. Actually, the time tunnel was the last thing she was thinking about. She still couldn't shake the feeling there might be something scary lurking in the chamber, maybe even something that had evolved enough to sense her energy body.

“We've no idea what effect a space-time distortion might have on your second body,” Carradine said. “It might even destroy it, so keep well clear.”

“I will,” Opal promised.

“Did he say ‘second body'?” Colonel Saltzman murmured, half to himself.

“We're ready, Mr. Carradine,” Opal said again.

Carradine reached for his laptop.

Fuchsia jerked as if she'd just been stung. “Something's wrong!”

But it was too late. Mr. Carradine had pressed the
ENTER
key.

S
omething was wrong. It was different from the way things happened in the Shadow Project. There you had a brief flash of scenery, then you were at your destination, feeling perfectly normal, perfectly solid, but actually occupying a second body that could walk through walls like a ghost. So she should be in the time-tunnel chamber now, but she wasn't. She was floating in darkness. She could no longer tell which way was up. Any attempt at movement led to more confusion. A wave of nausea swept over her.

Opal forced herself to stay calm. The most likely explanation was that Mr. Carradine had been given the wrong coordinates. It sometimes happened on missions. Usually the error was small, so you arrived only a few yards from your expected destination and it didn't matter . . . if you even noticed at all. But a shortfall in her present mission would leave her inside the concrete plug in total darkness—exactly where she seemed to be now. It made sense; and all she had to do was figure out the direction of the time-tunnel chamber and move toward it. In moments she would emerge from the plug and complete her mission.

Unless, a worried voice whispered in her mind, the wrong coordinates had placed her in the time tunnel itself.

Despite all attempts at discipline, Opal felt a creeping panic. Mr. Carradine had warned her to stay well clear of the tunnel, and she knew exactly why. No one really understood the physics of space-time. For all she knew, the rift could send her consciousness anywhere, to any time or place. Alternatively, it might rip her energy body to shreds, compress it, expand it, or drive her insane like those poor sailors in the Philadelphia Experiment. It could—

With an almost superhuman effort, Opal pushed the panic aside. She still felt afraid—very much afraid—but she forced herself to think clearly. First of all, her second body
hadn't
been ripped to shreds, nor harmed in any way so far as she could tell. And she wasn't any more of a lunatic than usual. She was simply somewhere in darkness, a little confused, and the most likely explanation for that was
definitely
a shortfall in the coordinates, leaving her inside the concrete plug. And since she didn't know which way to go to reach the rift chamber, it would make sense to return to her physical body and try again.

Gross movement follows thought.
It was the first thing operatives were taught when they joined the Shadow Project. If you needed to go somewhere in your second body, you visualized your destination clearly and it drew you to the target like a magnet. If she was inside the concrete plug, her physical body was only yards away at most. It should be the easiest thing in the world to return to it and start again. She took a deep breath and turned her attention to the scene she'd just left: herself in the chair; Michael seated beside her; Mr. Carradine fiddling with his laptop; Danny, Fuchsia, and the colonel looking on. . . .

Nothing happened.

Opal closed her eyes and visualized as vividly as she could, this time concentrating only on her physical body seated on its chair. During Shadow Project training, they referred to your physical body as the
prime objective
. It was your ultimate anchor, the one thing you could rely on when all else failed. But still nothing happened. Maybe the problem had something to do with the closeness of the space-time rift. She wondered if she could contact Michael. They were linked, brain waves to brain waves, through the electronics of the psychotronic helmets, and sometimes, under rare circumstances, the linkage could be made almost telepathic so that he could experience flashes of her thoughts and she of his. She tried desperately to send him a mental message, but if Michael heard her, he didn't manage to reply. She was alone in the darkness.

But that was all right, Opal thought, still fighting back the panic: she could swim out if she kept her head. Swimming was a technique they taught all agents of the Shadow Project as an emergency approach to situations just like this, where it was extraordinarily difficult to judge direction, how fast you were moving, or, indeed, whether you were actually moving at all. For some reason, the actions of swimming gave you back an accurate sensation of movement. You were even able to judge approximately how fast you were traveling. Which only left the question of direction.

Opal tried to work things out logically. Although confused and disoriented, she had not turned around since she found herself in the darkness. Or at least she didn't think she'd turned around. Which meant that any shortfall would still have left her facing the target chamber. So if she swam in that direction, she should emerge from the encasing concrete quite quickly. And even if she had turned without noticing it, there was a two-to-one chance that swimming would still bring her into the light. If she'd turned around, she would swim back toward Michael and the others. If she'd turned upward, she would emerge on the surface. Only if she found herself swimming downward would she be in really serious trouble.

Opal launched herself forward and swam. But as the seconds stretched to minutes, velvet darkness still embraced her.

C
arradine's head jerked round. “What's the matter?”

Danny started forward. Fuchsia was in trouble. Her pale face had taken on a bluish tinge so that it was positively corpselike. Her hands were clenched tightly, and she seemed to be having problems breathing. He took her arm. “Are you all right?”

Fuchsia's eyes rolled back and upward, so she looked like something in a horror movie. There was a catch in her throat as she rasped, “It's bad. Very bad.”

“What's bad?” Danny asked, frightened. Was she choking? Her knees buckled suddenly, and he threw his arms around her to stop her from falling. She was deadweight, surprisingly heavy for such a slight, slim girl. Then Carradine was beside them.