Slow Apocalypse Read Free Page B

story and sell it to Universal or Paramount. At that point, he didn’t think she would have believed him.
    So he went to his office with the million-dollar view of Century City and West Hollywood, booted up the computer, and started to write.

CHAPTER TWO

    THE PROMETHEUS STRAIN
    A motion picture treatment by Dave Marshall
    The people who worked there called it Area 52, when they called it anything at all. Officially, it didn’t exist. It was an inside joke, Area 51 being the airbase in the Nevada desert where the aliens from the Roswell UFO crash were allegedly taken. The people who worked there didn’t even know where they were. They were flown in and out on jets with no windows. They worked on projects funded from the unaccountable Black Budget, and the money supply was almost endless. Ask for a new piece of scientific equipment, and it would show up within a week.
    Eddie Parker didn’t care where the place was, never even thought of it as Area 52. He simply thought of it as the Lab.
    Eddie did not work well with others, never had, and he knew that he would never rise very high in the rat-maze bureaucracy and backstabbing atmosphere of most research establishments. Luckily for him, interacting with his fellow humans was not high on his list of priorities. At least that’s what he told himself, until he met Jenny.
    The security people would have preferred keeping the scientists at the Lab all the time. But they had tried long-term sequestration and found that it tended to drive the researchers a little crazy. Since many of them were borderline crazy already, it didn’t take much of a nudge to push them over the edge into uselessness. A certain amount of R&R was needed. Two weeks decompression every three months was deemed about right.
    Eddie did not want R&R very much, as it took him away from his toys. But rules were rules. They asked him where he wanted to goand, picking a name out of the air, he said New York City. He’d never been there.
    They put him up in a suite in a fine hotel and he spent most of the first week at his highly secure laptop, communing with the supercomputers back at the Lab. But eventually he did venture out. He took in a movie, ate a hot dog at Nathan’s, but mostly he just walked.
    She was good. He would think he had lost her, then spot her wearing a different hat, with her coat reversed. She was there as both bodyguard and watchdog, and it seemed silly to him. He wasn’t going to talk about his work and he wasn’t going to run away. So he approached her and told her he knew what she was doing. She admitted it, and they had coffee together. After that, she stayed by his side. Her name was Jenny.
    She was no raving beauty, but she was pretty enough, and smart. He found it easy to talk to her.
    Then one evening as she was putting him to bed for the night, she kissed him, and though he was never sure just how it happened, he found himself in bed with her. It was his first time, and she seemed to know it—later, he realized it was probably in his dossier, which she would have memorized—and she was gentle and supportive of his awkwardness. That night, as sleep eluded him, he knew he was in love.
    The next day he had to return to the Lab. They parted at the airport with kisses and made plans for their next meeting in three months.
    His work suffered for a while, but it was all he really knew, and soon he was back into the project he had left behind. But for the first time he began to entertain notions of a life after the Lab. Perhaps even of quitting the Lab entirely, going to work in the private sector. He tossed ideas around, ideas he planned to share with Jenny when he returned to New York and met her for breakfast at Windows on the World, at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
    They never found enough of her to identify. He stood all day just outside the police lines, inhaling dust and grit, until his new handler gently led him back to the hotel, where he informed them