Earth Cult Page 5

  Cal Renfield sniffed and studied his glass. He seemed to be debating something with himself, his lower lip thrust out, and then he said, ‘You pride yourself on being a hardheaded realist, Frank, a rational man. How would you explain what’s been happening to the kids born around here over the past fourteen months or so? One in three has shown signs of abnormal development: how does your scientific mind cope with that?’

  He looked up and his eyes were flat and hard; perspiration gleamed in the creases on his neck and the collar of his shirt was a dark ring.

  Frank said, ‘Are you serious? Abnormal in what way?’

  ‘They don’t behave like new-born babies,’ Cal Renfield said in a low voice. ‘They don’t respond to external stimuli. They don’t cry and it doesn’t seem to bother them if they’re fed or not. They grow but they don’t develop – is that abnormal enough for you?’ His voice had risen and the room had gone quiet, the farmhands motionless and attentive, listening.

  Frank said, ‘There must be a medical explanation for what’s happened. If it’s confined to this area there could be a virus going round, or maybe the ante-natal care was at fault in some way—’

  ‘Then you talk to the medics yourself,’ Cal Renfield told him. ‘I have and I’ve got nowhere fast. Some of those babies are over a year old now and the doctors still don’t know what’s the matter with them or what they ought to do about it… so much for the wonders of medical science!’

  Frank was puzzled and intrigued and was about to press Cal Renfield for more details when his attention was caught by a girl standing at the entrance to the dining-room.

  Before he had time to register anything more than a fleeting impression she had reached their table and was standing above them with one hand resting aggressively on her hip and the other poking into the wrinkled cotton sleeve of Cal Renfield’s jacket, her sharp pointed nails digging into his arm.

  ‘So you had some proofs to check, did you? Work piled up at the office and you had to clear it before morning? I’ve had dinner waiting for two hours and all along you’re sitting here getting sozzled with any bum who’s willing to listen to you for the price of a drink.’

  Cal Renfield’s eyes were shut tight. His face had adopted an expression of pained and weary martyrdom; then he opened the eye nearest to Frank and squinted at him in hopeless defeat.

  Frank thought it wise not to say anything.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ said Cal Renfield, raising his square podgy hands. ‘I told a white lie. I’m a bad little boy. Spank me and send me to bed without any supper.’

  He looked at Frank and nodded his head towards the girl. ‘My daughter, Helen,’ he said in the tone of a man apologizing for a tiresome maiden aunt who’s decided to break up a poker school. ‘She feels responsible for me.’

  The girl, red-haired, slim, with nothing about her to suggest that she was Renfield’s daughter except for the same cool grey eyes, seemed to take in Frank for the first time. Her lips tightened and she said:

  ‘Are you the guy from Chicago? The one that’s been visiting the Project?’

  Frank admitted that he was, and had been.

  Helen Renfield glared at him. He was taken aback, alarmed even, by the animosity in her eyes. It appeared out of nowhere and the full blast of it was aimed directly and unflinchingly at him across the table.

  She said bitingly, ‘Checking up on your experiments? Seeing how far the sickness has spread, is that it?’

  ‘What sickness do you mean?’ Frank asked her quietly.

  ‘No doubt you’ve got some fancy scientific name for it. And something just as neat to explain it all away.’

  ‘Helen,’ Cal Renfield said placatingly, getting up and holding her arm. ‘Frank is a journalist, a writer, he’s got nothing to do with the Project. He’s on an assignment for his magazine, all right?’ He raised his sparse eyebrows in Frank’s direction and shook his head as if in apology.

  ‘Does she mean the babies?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Helen Renfield said. ‘I see you know all about them.’ Her nostrils were pinched and white, the flesh below her cheekbones pulled taut. Her face was quite pale now and made to appear even more so in contrast with her hair.

  ‘Frank didn’t know a thing about them till I told him,’ Cal Renfield said, becoming annoyed himself. ‘Don’t jump to conclusions without proof.’

  ‘I think that’s good advice,’ Frank said, rising to his feet. He looked at Cal Renfield. ‘I don’t think any of us should do that.’

  Helen turned to her father. She was almost a head taller. ‘You let him wriggle out of it, is that right? Did you tell him that this only started after they took over the Telluride Mine?’ She glanced at Frank with narrowed eyes. ‘I suppose you’d call that a coincidence, just like the storms we’ve been having.’

  One of the farmhands had risen and was standing at Frank’s shoulder. He was lean and stringy, veins protruding on his arms, and Frank could smell dried sweat on him.

  The man said, ‘Christ, fella, you’d better get the hell out of this town!’

  Another of the men said, ‘Take it easy, John. Maybe he’s not—’

  ‘I’ve got a kid at the hospital in Radium bin affected by your damn Project and whatever your scientist friends are doing out there. An eight-month-old baby girl lying there like a zombie.’ He clenched his lean red fists and raised them in a gesture of impotent fury. His eyes were hard and dry.

  Frank felt sorry for the man but didn’t see what he could do or how he ought to respond; it wasn’t his fault, nor his responsibility.

  Helen Renfield pulled at her father’s arm, urging him to leave, and at that precise moment a low rumble of thunder echoed faintly in the distance, the onset of a storm rolling towards them from the Mount of the Holy Cross.

  FIVE

  Had Frank Kersh doubted or disbelieved Cal Renfield’s account of the freak weather conditions along the Roaring Fork Valley – which in fact he hadn’t – the storm that night would have swept his doubts aside and made him a firm believer.

  It was spectacular, fearsome to behold, and torrential.

  The blackness outside was total: a combination of low dark cloud, sweeping gusts of rain, and the night itself closing in around them until even the streetlights were obscured in a dense pall of wind and water which buffeted the window of his room so that he thought it was going to shatter under the strain. Now and then a flicker of forked lightning licked across the mountain top, the dark streaming granite face standing out in stark relief, and then the blackness descended once more accompanied by a crash which jarred the light bulbs in their sockets and made the window-frames creak.

  It was the most vicious storm he had ever experienced and it was little comfort to know that it was probably due to the high altitude of the terrain: instead of being above them the storm was actually around them, at ground level. If what Cal Renfield said was true about the frequency of the storms they had suffered over the past eighteen months it pointed to some severe disturbance in the lower stratosphere which the high rugged backbone of the Rockies had exacerbated and brought down upon itself. But of course there had to be a quite rational meteorological/geophysical explanation; the notion that it was somehow connected with – or even caused by – the Deep Hole Project was nonsense, the superstitious belief of ignorant people.

  It was impossible to sleep, the noise and general psychological discomfort too great to allow prolonged relaxation, so Frank lay on the bed reading Moby Dick, a book he always carried with him in the hope of one day actually finishing it. It seemed the more he read the longer it got. He could have done with a drink but he didn’t feel like disturbing his friendly hotel manager, Mr Stringer.

  He had just finished Ishmael’s account of the habits of the Sperm Whale and was about to start Chapter 82, ‘The Honor and Glory of Whaling’, when the bedside lamp dimmed and went out. A glance into the corridor told him that the power had failed and there wasn’t a light showing anywhere. He looked at the luminous dial
of his watch and saw that it was twelve-nineteen, which meant that the storm had been raging for more than an hour.

  There was nothing else to do but lie in the pitch blackness listening to the sound of his own heartbeat and feeling the close tepid air pressing against his face and neck. His one fear was that the road to the east had been washed out and he would be delayed on his return trip: he had planned an early start, getting to Denver by mid-morning and taking Route 80 through Omaha, Des Moines, Davenport, and arriving in Chicago sometime during late-evening. It was a fair drive but there shouldn’t be any problem – provided the road between here and Denver was intact.

  He was anxious to get back for a number of reasons. Apart from the fact that Perry Tolchard was expecting him and his desk would most likely be piled high with rewrites, he wanted to talk to somebody at the NIH, which had an office in Chicago. If there was anything at all – anything worth substantiating – in Cal Renfield’s story about the babies born locally and their lack of normal development, then somebody at the National Institute of Health should have the facts and figures and quite probably an expert medical opinion on the cause. Almost certainly, Frank reasoned, it would have something to do with a virus infection or hereditary disease – meningitis or hydrocephalus – that a small percentage of infants were known to suffer from in the first months of life. But an incidence of one in three was unusually high and it wasn’t surprising that the local community was disturbed and liable to lay the blame on whatever seemed strange or inexplicable, especially if it could be given the sinister label, ‘scientific research’.

  He lay in the warm darkness and listened to the storm slowly dying away. The lightning flashes became fainter and less frequent, the low grumbling roll of thunder moving northwards over the town, and the fierce downpour slackened to a steady patter of rain which occasionally rattled against the window as if someone were throwing handfuls of rice against the glass.

  It was this which finally lulled him to sleep, sliding into a shallow uneasy calm in which the sound of the rain became a shower of neutrinos slicing through the mountain and smashing into the detection tanks at the speed of light. And in the manner of dreams everything became confused so that it was the hotel manager, Stringer, who was in charge of the operation, wearing a white coat, stetson and spurs; and Dr Leach and Cal Renfield were interchangeable, a composite figure embodying the characteristics and mannerisms of both. Helen Renfield was there too, but she became transposed into the girl he had met out on the West Coast – this hybrid female diving from the gantry and swimming in a tank of perchloroethylene as if it were a sparkling blue sunlit pool up on Bel Air …

  The morning light was raw, the air clear, and the temperature had dropped by at least four degrees. The storm had swept the sluggish humid layer out of the valley and there was a perceptible chill as the colder mountain air tumbled down from the peaks.

  As he was coming out of the bathroom Frank met Spencer Tutt on the landing; he was carrying a pile of sheets, blankets and towels. The young man nodded a greeting and said in his lazy drawl, ‘We got the power back on, so you’ll be able to eat breakfast. That were a daddy, weren’t it?’

  Frank agreed that it had been quite a storm. He said, ‘You get them pretty often, I believe.’

  ‘That we do. An’ they’re gettin’ to be worse, I can tell you. The one last night was the worst yet.’ He regarded Frank for a moment, his eyes set close together above the prominent sunburned beak of his nose. ‘Looks like them scine-tists over at the Project reaped what they sowed. An’ it seems like nobody’s gonna lift a finger.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The old Telluride working was flooded last night. Three or four men still down there, trapped by the floodwater. They put out a call for volunteers but there ain’t nobody exactly rushin’ to help.’ He shrugged slightly, the wide rake of his bony shoulders stretching the material of his shirt. He turned away.

  ‘Isn’t there a rescue team in the area?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Spencer Tutt over his shoulder. ‘And we’re it.’

  ‘Do you mean nobody’s willing to help them?’ Frank said.

  He found it hard to believe that the townspeople could be so filled with the desire for revenge that it overcame everything else. But it seemed he had seriously underestimated the depth of bitterness and ill-feeling.

  He said, ‘Is the road to the Project still open?’

  ‘Far as I know. Bin no reports that the bridge is down, anyways.’

  Frank stared after the young man’s lean angular back; he was shocked and momentarily at a loss. His first positive thought was to wonder if the engineers on the Deep Hole Project had the facilities to mount a rescue operation … it was logical to assume they would in case just such an emergency as this arose. But had they been trained in underground search and rescue? What was required was a team of men with specialized training and knowledge who knew the local strata and were experienced in locating miners buried under rockfalls or cut off by underground streams. In the absence of such expert help the chances of reaching the trapped scientists were negligible.

  It took almost an hour to get to the Project: the road above the bridge spanning Eagle River had been washed away in places and there had already been some attempts made at clearing the rubble and making the road passable. Tyre tracks indicated that a number of vehicles had passed to and fro and Frank wondered if the scientists had been able to summon outside help.

  But when he arrived it soon became evident that they hadn’t. Professor Friedmann might have been a first-rate theorist in the field of neutrino astronomy but his grasp of practical matters – particularly when it came to organizing an underground rescue operation – was far too tentative and unsure, lacking the knowledge and ability to deploy men in the most effective manner.

  There were two or three small groups standing around the compound, rather lost and aimless it seemed, and Professor Friedmann was talking with the Senior Engineer, a burly man wearing a bright yellow safety-helmet, the two of them standing at a trestle-table spread with maps and charts. Dr Leach wasn’t to be seen, Frank noted, and he wondered if he was one of the men trapped underground.

  Professor Friedmann had a look in his eyes that could only be described as controlled panic. He nodded brusquely as Frank came up, tapping a ruler on the table in a rapid nervous tattoo, not really listening as the Senior Engineer explained the layout of the ventilation and water-drainage systems in the vicinity of the detection chamber. After a moment he interrupted the man and said, almost fervidly:

  ‘Are they organizing a rescue team? Are they on their way?’

  ‘No on both counts,’ Frank said. ‘And they don’t intend to either.’

  ‘They have plenty of air,’ the Senior Engineer said, continuing his technical resumé of the installation. ‘As far as we can tell the system is still functioning. If they managed to stay on the gantry above the water-level then there’s better than a fifty-fifty chance that they’re okay. The drainage tunnels were only checked a couple of weeks ago and they were in good working order, so by now the level should be falling. I estimate—’ he looked at his watch and calculated silently —that within ten hours, fifteen at the outside, the chamber should be clear.’

  ‘Aren’t you in telephone contact with them?’ Frank asked.

  Professor Friedmann shook his head. He looked grey and ill. The line’s dead,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘We lost contact at midnight.’

  ‘How many men are down there?’

  ‘Four. They went on duty at ten o’clock, just before the storm began. I was about to recall them—’ his voice faltered ‘—but couldn’t get through.’

  Frank moved up to the table and studied an elevation diagram of the detection chamber; it took him a moment to get his bearings, and when he had he said to the engineer, ‘Are these the ventilation shafts?’

  The Senior Engineer looked at Professor Friedmann as if making sure that it was all right to speak, then he nodded.
There are three in the roof, two for inflow, one for extraction. We can’t be a hundred percent certain but we think they’re still operational.’

  ‘How big are they?’

  The Senior Engineer raised one grizzled eyebrow and shook his head. ‘I know what you’re thinking and the answer is no: they’re too small. And if they weren’t too small it wouldn’t do those four guys much good anyway – they’re seamless aluminium, there’s not a handhold anywhere. You can forget that.’

  ‘This is the main tunnel leading from the shaft – is that right?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’ The Senior Engineer’s voice had quickened in response to Frank’s queries, as if at last there was someone prepared to take an interest in the problem and make a constructive suggestion. He was a broad thickset man with the kind of hands and wrists that can twist steel bars. He looked too as if he had been in the wars: there was an old deep scar across his forehead and the tip of his right index finger was missing.

  ‘Have you been down to check the height of the water? Perhaps the tunnel isn’t completely flooded. It’s possible.’

  ‘There’s no need to go down. There are sensors in the main shaft and we know from them that the lower level is flooded to the roof. There’s just no way to get through until the water starts to drain off.’

  Frank said, ‘The lower level? You mean there’s more than one level in that area of the mine?’

  ‘Sure, the place is a regular warren of them.’ The Senior Engineer pulled another chart forward and traced a blunt finger along a series of interconnecting tunnels. ‘The workings extend in every direction, some of them beyond the detection chamber—’

  ‘Which is how far from the main shaft?’

  ‘A helluva long way,’ the Senior Engineer said dourly. ‘Mile and a half, maybe more.’ He looked into Frank’s eyes. ‘You’re thinking of trying to reach the chamber by another route?’