“Not ours,” she told him. “We still subcontract some animal work to the university, but the vast majority of the mice in here weren’t on active service anymore. Those that weren’t in the cities—the ones in the central block, that is—were mostly obsolete models and other GM strains preserved as library specimens. All current work is conducted on the upper floors.”
The fireman nodded sagely, although he probably didn’t have a clue as to what she meant by “obsolete models” and certainly didn’t care. “Good doors, fewer windows up there,” he said approvingly. “Certain amount of damage outside but not much in. Parallel labs on this floor came off worse, even though heat always tries to go straight up. There was a lotof heat, but it didn’t last long. They used a fierce accelerant, but most of the local material was decently retardant. Whole thing was a matter of Bang! Whoosh! Bob’s your uncle.”
Lisa thought about that for a moment or two. “Did the bombers expect it to spread upstairs?” she asked. “Were they hoping to destroy the whole wing?”
“Don’t know what they expected or hoped,” the black-haired man replied punctiliously. “Not my job to speculate.”
“I’m just trying to understand why they put the bomb in here,” Lisa said, struggling to remain patient in spite of her stinging hand and aching head. “Might Mouseworld have been the most convenient point they could reach in order to launch an attack on the high-security facility above it?”
“Maybe,” said the fireman dubiously. “They certainly had easy access here—door was unlocked, not broken open. Then again … has to be off the record, because I’m not the man supposed to swear to it in court, but Ireckon there were four devices, placed low down to blast in all four directions. Never saw anything like thisbefore”—he waved an arm at the blackened walls, presumably referring to the vast arrays of interconnected cages—“but if I had to guess, I’d say the bombs were placed to make sure they got all the animals, and nobody gave a damn about the rest of the wing or anything upstairs. Why would anyone do that, hey?”
The fireman was trying hard not to sound anxious, but there had to be at least as many rumors running around Widcombe Fire & Rescue Station as there were around East Central Police Station. Loyal public servants weren’t allowed to say there was a war on, but they all knew full well that millions of people were dying of hyperflu in Mexico, North Africa, and Southeast Asia, and not because their chickens’ resident viruses had been possessed by some kind of mutational madness. “It’s a mystery to me,” Lisa admitted tactfully. “Who would want to assassinate five hundred thousand redundant mice? If there are any significant experiments running at the moment—and I doubt there’s anything much concerned with infective viruses—those animals are upstairs, locked in steel safes surrounded by moats of bleach. There 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 thisjob 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 theexperiment—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 and history of more than a few dozen of them. There would be a supposedly complete catalogue on the computer, of course, but every data bank had to be kept up to date, and everybody knew that records of that kind never matched reality with any exactitude, because errors accumulated over the years and no one could ever be bothered to sort them out—especially if nobody cared passionately about the accuracy of the data. The animals in the tightly sealed biohazard units on the upper floors would be comprehensively documented, but not these. It was possible that nobody would ever know for sure exactly what had been lost.
The fireman had turned away while Lisa was thinking, and she couldn’t see any need to call him back. Someone was coming up the corridor behind her and she put her head around the door to see who it was, after briefly rubbing her smoke-irritated eyes.
Lisa recognized the campus security guard responsible for the building. He’d been around almost as long as she had. His name was Thomas Sweet, although Lisa realized with a slight shock that she’d never actually had occasion to address him by name. He knew her only as an occasional visitor, but she obviously seemed to him to be a sympathetic figure—a possible ally against all the uniformed men and “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” The deeply mournful look brought forth a faint but heartrending echo in her own being.