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in the cart again, her voice came from behind him, softly, sadly. "We're finished, aren't we, David? You, I, all of us?"
           He thought, Walt be damned, promises be damned, secrecy be damned. And he told her about the clones developing under the mountain, in the laboratory deep in the cave.

Chapter 5

           Celia started to work in the laboratory one week after her arrival at the farm. "It's the only way I'll ever get to see you at all," she said gently when David protested. "I promised Walt that I would work only four hours a day to start. Okay?"
           David took her through the lab the following morning. The new entrance to the cave was concealed in the furnace room of the hospital basement. The door was steel, set in the limestone rock that underlay the area. As soon as they stepped through the doorway, the air was cold and David put a coat about Celia's shoulders. "We keep them here at all times," he said, taking a second coat from a wall hanger. "Twice government inspectors have come here, and it might look suspicious if we put them on to go down the cellar. They won't be back."
           The passageway was dimly lighted, the floor was smooth. It went four hundred feet to another steel door. This one opened into the first cave chamber, a large, high-domed room. It had been left almost as they had found it, with stalactites and stalagmites on all sides, but now there were many cots, picnic tables and benches, and a row of cooking tables and serving tables. "Our emergency room, for the hot rains," David said, hurrying her through the echoing room. There was another passage, narrower and tougher than the first. At the end of this passage was the animal experiment room.
           One wall had been cut through and the computer installed, looking grotesquely out of place against a wall of pale pink travertine. In the center of the room were tanks and vats and pipes, all stainless steel and glass. On either side of these were the tanks that held the animal embryos. Celia stared without moving for several moments, then turned to look at David with startled eyes. "How many tanks do you have?"
           "Enough to clone six hundred animals of varying sizes," he said. "We took a lot of them out, put them in the lab on the other side, and we're not using all that we have here. We're afraid our supplies of chemicals will run out, and so far we haven't come up with alternatives that we can extract from anything at our disposal here."
           Eddie Beauchamp came from the side of the tanks, jotting figures in a ledger. He grinned at David and Celia. "Slumming?" he asked. He checked his figures against a dial and adjusted it a fraction, and continued down the row checking the other dials, stopping now and again to make a minor adjustment.
           Celia's eyes questioned David, and he shook his head. Eddie didn't know what they were doing in the other lab. They walked past the tanks, row after row of them, all sealed, with only needles that moved now and then and the dials on the sides to indicate that there was anything inside. They returned to the corridor. David led her through another doorway, a short passage, then into the second laboratory, this one secured by a lock that he had a key for.
           Walt looked up as they entered, nodded, and turned again to
    the desk where he was working. Vlasic didn't even look up. Sarah smiled and hurried past them and sat down before a computer console and began to type. Another woman in the room didn't seem to be aware that anyone had come in. Hilda. Celia's aunt. David glanced at Celia, but she was staring wide-eyed at the tanks, and in this room the tanks were glass-fronted. Each was filled with a pale liquid, a yellow so faint that the color seemed almost illusory. Within the tanks, floating in the liquid, were sacs, no larger than small fists. Slender transparent tubes connected the sacs to the top of the tanks; each one was