The Cassandra Complex Read Online Free PDF Page B

was nothing dangerous here; the lab assistants only wore masks and gloves because of the regs. All the mice on the outer walls were part of a famous experiment that had been running since before you and I were born.”
    “Doesn’t do to be famous nowadays,” the fireman observed. “Even if you’re only an experiment. Hear about that TV weathergirl got whacked last week? Don’t care what they say about the impending frustrations of containment—world can’t get much crazier than it already is.”
    ’Do you have any idea of what kind of devices were used?” Lisa asked, knowing she ought to ask the questions Mike Grundy would want answered, even if the investigation would be taken out of his hands before noon. “Have you seen anything like them before?”
    “Better ask the experts,” the black-haired man told her cautiously. “Most of the arson I see is kids with cans of gasoline or beer-bottle Molotovs.”
    “You mean that this was a professional job?”
    “No such thing,” he said contemptuously. “Nobody makes a living torching things. Anyway, every common or garden lunatic can decant cordon-bleu bomb-making instructions from the net. Kids only use gas cans because they’re lazy and because gas gets the job done—if they wanted to do it the fancy way, they could easily find out how.”
    “Why was this job done the fancy way?” Lisa persisted. “What was accomplished here that couldn’t have been done with a can of gasoline and a match?”
    “One-hundred-percent mortality,” he said succinctly. “Like I said, all the local materials, apart from flesh, are decently fire-retardant, so the structure held up far better than the inhabitants. As you’d expect. Nothing’s fireproof, of course, but labs in tall buildings have to observe the regulations. Mind you, fancy accelerants aren’t easy to buy or cook up in the kitchen, so it’s unlikely to have been actual kids. Some organization, I’d say. Some intelligence too. If I were you, I’d assume—at least to start with—that what they wanted to do was what they actually did. They certainly made sure they didn’t leave a single living thing alive.”
    Lisa looked up at the blackened wreckage looming eighteen or twenty feet above her on three sides. She remembered the labels that had been proudly pasted atop each vertical maze: LONDON; PARIS; NEW YORK; ROME. There was no trace of them now—they, at least, had not been made of fire-retardant plastic. The mouse cities weren’t Edgar Burdillon’s experiment and never had been—he had always regarded them as something of a space-wasting nuisance, so there was a certain sour irony in the fact that he had gone to their defense and been hurt in consequence. It was difficult to specify exactly whose experiment the cities were now that their original founders were long retired. They were simply the experiment—a hallowed tradition, not merely of the Applied Genetics Department, but the university’s entire bioscience empire. So why, Lisa wondered, should she feel such an acute sense of personal loss as she stared dumbfounded at the ruins? Was it because the stability of the mouse cities had somehow come to symbolize the stability of her own personality—essentially undisturbed save for a couple of “chaotic fluctuations” way back in the zero decade?
    Lisa couldn’t believe that any terrorist organization could possibly have a grudge against the mouse cities. Their size made them the most conspicuous victims of the attack, but their destruction could have been the unfortunate byproduct of a determination to destroy some or all of the other mice kept in the lab complex: the library specimens in the central section. If so, which ones were the bombers most likely to have been after — and why?
    The GM strains in the H Block had been the detritus of hundreds, maybe thousands, of mostly discontinued experiments. Lisa doubted that anyone currently active in the department was acquainted with the nature