There was only the one door to the control room, which Skrote now locked. He had eight rounds in his service automatic and a spare clip besides. He would now wait patiently for Madden and Rolsom to cross the lagoon. Wait for them to get inside Zone 4. Wait for the trap to snap shut.
He returned to the control console and sat down in Hyman's vacant chair. Every nook and cranny in the building had its surveillance camera. The entire complex was riddled with them. Every door was electronically controlled from this room. Skrote giggled. The image of a spider sitting patiently at the center of its web had just popped into his head. From here he would feel the slightest tug on his web, be able to watch his prey's every movement, know precisely when and where to ensnare them.
His hand hovered, decided, and touched numbered square white buttons. The screens flickered and changed vantage points: here a corridor, there a stairway, an emergency exit, inner compound, perimeter gate. There were two security guards looking lost and panic-stricken. One of them ran to the main gate, his shadow splaying in all directions from the battery of arc lights, and gestured to the guard emerging from his glass cubicle. Agitated talk, fierce gesticulation. Arguing, the two guards went into the guardpost. A moment later a blue light winked on in the center of the panel and a buzzer rasped urgently.
Skrote picked up the handset from its recessed cradle and brought it slowly to his ear.
"Hyman . . . Hyman! Are you there?"
Skrote grunted.
"This is Fonkle at the main gate. What in hell is happening in Section M? Every fucking goddamn alarm in the place is sounding off!"
"Life-support failure," growled Skrote.
"Holy Mother--where?"
"Meeks."
There was a fearful stunned silence. "But how? I don't get it. Why didn't the computer fail-safe come on-line?"
"It failed."
"Yes," Skrote lied. "He's on his way." Another light on the panel caught his attention. Talk of the devil. That would be Rolsom screaming blue murder. Skrote said, "When the director arrives take him immediately to Section M. I'll do what I can from here."
"Hyman, I think you'd--"
Skrote canceled him out but didn't replace the handset. He watched the light on the panel winking futilely. After thirty seconds it ceased. They were on their way. Get in that launch and get over here. The web is woven and the spider is waiting.
On one of the screens he saw Fonkle emerge from the guardpost and look anxiously toward the landing jetty. Under the arc lights his tan was the color of bad meat. On the larger screen the Meeks slept on, probably forever. The needle on the oxygen gauge stood dead still at zero. They were breathing pure methane.
Skrote flexed his right hand, circled the numbered buttons, hesitated, then like a cobra striking punched up a view of the maternity ward. It looked peaceful. A shaded light burned in the night nurse's station. The two rows of beds on either side of the ward contained seventeen women, one of them Natassya, but he didn't want to know which one. She was not his anymore. She was an incubatory receptacle for an experiment in genetics. An experiment he had helped create. She would give birth to his monster-child. Their love would bring forth horror. He had worked for five years in order to destroy the only human being who had meant anything to him in his adult life.
The screens blurred into prismatic fragments and Skrote realized that he was weeping. A momentous revelation made him stop and blink the tears away. He had regained his sanity. After five years of madness. So real and painful that it was like someone twisting a knife in his belly . . . and he came to recognize the long gradual decline that had brought him to accept these obscene experiments as if they were the most natural, logical thing in the world.
How could it have happened? He had never wished ill or harm to another living soul and yet he had obeyed, acquiesced, played his part in a scheme so monstrous it froze the blood. Where had he, Cyrus Ingram Skrote, been all those years? Not here--not him. An imposter had been walking around wearing his face, dressed in his clothes, walking in his shoes. It had to be--because the real Cy Skrote, the one from Portland, Maine, would never in a million years have participated in such loathsome depravities.
He must have been literally mad. There was no other explanation. And now that it had become clear, shockingly clear, he felt like screaming.
His throat tightened, but instead of a scream a throaty animal sound came out as he saw the hurrying cluster of figures pass through the main gate and enter the brilliantly lit stage set of the inner compound.
