Between the Strokes of Night

Charlene Bloom smiled at him and nodded, but her mind was already moving on to the dreaded meeting. Head down, she set off through the hangarlike building, her footsteps echoing to the high, corrugated-steel roof. Behind her, Wolfgang watched her departure. His look was a combination of rage and sorrow. “That’s right, Charlene,” he grunted under his breath. “You’re the boss, so you go off and take the heat. Fair enough. We both deserve it after what we did to poor old Dolly. But you ought to stop kissing JN’s ass and tell her she’s pushing us too fast. She’d probably put you in charge of paperclips, but serve you right — you should have put your foot down before we lost one.” A hundred yards away along the length of the open floor, Charlene Bloom abruptly turned to stare back at him. He looked startled, raised his hand, and gave an awkward half-wave.

“Reading my thoughts?” He sniffed and turned back to his control console. “Nah. She’s just chicken. She’d rather stay here than tell JN what’s happened in the last half-hour.”

He switched to Jinx’s displays. The big brown bear had to be eased back up to consciousness, a fraction of a degree at a time. They couldn’t afford to lose another one.

He rubbed at his unshaven chin, scratched absentmindedly at his crotch, and pored over the telemetry signals. What was the best way? Nobody had real experience at this, not even JN herself.

“Come on, Jinx. Let’s do this right. We don’t want you in pain when the circulation comes back. Blood sugar first, shall we, then serotonin and potassium balance? That sounds pretty good.”

Wolfgang Gibbs wasn’t really angry at Charlene — he liked her too well. It was worry about Dolly and Jinx that upset him. He had little patience or respect for many of his superiors; but for the Kodiak bears and the other animal charges, he had a good deal of affection and concern.

CHAPTER TWO

Charlene Bloom took almost a quarter of an hour to make her way along the length of the main hangar. More than reluctance to attend the impending meeting slowed her steps. Fifty experiments went on in the building, most of them under her administrative control.

In one dim-lit vault a score of domestic cats prowled, sleepless and deranged. A delicate operation had removed part of the reticular formation, the section of the hindbrain that controls sleep. She scanned the records. They had been continuously awake now for eleven hundred and eighty hours — a month and a half. The monitors were at last showing evidence of neurological malfunction. She could reasonably call it feline madness in her monthly report.

Most of the animals now showed no interest in food or sex. A handful had become feral, attacking anything that came near them. But they were all still alive. That was progress. Their last experiment had failed after less than half the time.

Each section of the building held temperature-controlled enclosures. In the next area she came to the rooms where the hibernating rodents and marsupials were housed. She walked slowly past each walled cage, her attention divided between the animals and thoughts of the coming meeting.

Marmots and ground squirrels here, next to the mutated jerboas. Who was running this one? Aston Naugle, if she had it right. Not as organized as Wolfgang Gibbs, and not as hardworking — but at least he didn’t make the shivers run up and down her spine. She was taller than Wolfgang. And his senior by three grades. But there was something about those tawny eyes… like one of the animals. He wasn’t afraid of the bears, or the big cats — or his superior. A sudden disquieting thought came to her. That look. He would ask her out one evening, she was sure of it. And then?

Suddenly conscious that time was passing, she began to hurry along the next corridor. Her shoes were crippling, but it wouldn’t do to be late. These damned shoes — why could she never get any that fitted right, the way other people did? Mustn’t be late. In the labs since JN had been made Director, unpunctuality was a cardinal sin (“When you delay the start of a meeting, you steal everyone’s time to pay for your own lack of efficiency.…”).

The corridor continued outside the main building, to become a long covered walkway. She took her first look at the mid-morning cloud pattern. It was still trying to rain. What was going on with this crazy weather? Since the climate cycle went haywire, not one of the forecasts was worth a thing. There was a low ground mist curling over the hills near Christchurch, and it was hotter than it was ever supposed to be. According to all the reports, the situation was as bad in the northern hemisphere as it was in New Zealand. And the Americans, Europeans, and Soviets were suffering much worse crop failures.