The Doomsday Box Read Online Free Page B

systems were still operative. Strip lights in the ceiling came on automatically as they walked, then switched off behind them, creating weird islands of illumination with darkness behind and darkness ahead. The effect was positively spooky, which was no help at all to Opal’s nerves.
    She tuned out the conversation between the colonel and Mr. Carradine and tried to concentrate on steadying herself. Her job, after all, was purely routine. She could actually have done it without leaving Britain, if they’d given her coordinates for the underground chamber, but Mr. Carradine had told her there were political implications to the mission. Those in charge of the revived Project Rainbow were extremely skeptical about remote viewing: it was hard enough to convince them it would work at all, let alone that it could work from thousands of miles away. “Why try to convince them?” Opal had asked. “We’re the ones doing them a favor.” Which was when Mr. Carradine explained that if she did a good job here, it could mean extra funding. This operation was so important, it could even outweigh her recent success in finding the terrorist leader Venskab Faivre aka the Skull.
    So not much pressure there, then , Opal thought. But however important the mission was, the fact remained it was a very simple job. All they wanted was for her to pass through less than a hundred yards of concrete—which she could manage almost instantaneously—then report back on what she found in the time-tunnel chamber. Probably nothing , Mr. Carradine had said. Probably just a fault in the alarm system. But what if there was something . . . ?
    The trouble was, she kept wondering what the something might be. Nobody had told her much about the rift: typical need-to-know mentality. So she was left to imagine the sort of thing that might trigger an alarm. Maybe some kind of animal from the distant past that had wandered into the time rift. Once you established a rift like that, it might lead anywhere. There was even the possibility that what had triggered the alarm was a visitor from the future, and heaven alone knew what that might be—a highly evolved human with a massive brain who could control people with a single thought, or maybe some alien creature from outer space that had taken over the planet in a million years’ time.
    There had definitely been trouble in the past, but nobody would say what. She’d talked about it with her father just before she left. He’d told her confidentially he thought the scientists had been mad to open the rift in the first place and doubly mad to unseal it again now. They clearly didn’t know enough to manage it safely.
    Colonel Saltzman stopped by a door, sturdily made from new wood. He fished a key from his pocket and unlocked it. “In here,” he murmured, and led them through. The doorway itself was so small he had to stoop a little, but when Opal followed him she found herself in a large concrete tunnel that looked for all the world like a gigantic sewer pipe. The lighting here was strictly temporary—bulbs strung along electric cord—but at least it was consistent so that the whole tunnel was lit. This was obviously the passage the army had been drilling toward the rift chamber. “Take it slow,” the colonel advised. “We haven’t gotten around to flattening a floor yet.”
    Maybe it was worse if you had big feet like the colonel, because Opal didn’t really find it tricky at all; besides, they had only to walk a few hundred yards before the tunnel came to an end, the way blocked by a drilling machine so gigantic that it seemed like something from a science fiction movie. Beside it, a team of men in white coats were unpacking and assembling electronic equipment from a wooden crate. Something about the gear looked vaguely familiar, but Opal still hadn’t decided what it was before Mr. Carradine said sharply, “I