James P. Hogan - Giants 04 by Entoverse

Author:Entoverse
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2012-02-01T13:42:46+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Four

Gina was sitting on a wall beside Baumer, eating a grinil sandwich and sipping a hot, sharp-tasting beverage that passed for coffee. Then she was lying on her back, staring up at a strange ceiling.

The transition was as abrupt and as disorientating as that. She had no awareness of anything that had happened in between, not even a sensation of time having passed. It was as if a piece had been cut out of a recording tape in her head and the ends spliced cleanly together again.

For what must have been several minutes, she lay regrouping her scattered thoughts and trying vainly to coax an ounce of a recollection from the gap in her impressions. But there was nothing. Her train of memory was like the trace of a recording clock that had lost power and then started again sometime later, after what could, for all the information she had to go on, have been a moment or a year.

She raised her head and saw that she was still dressed as she had been; she was lying on a couch and covered to the waist by a light blanket. The room was warm and clean, furnished simply with chairs, table, closet, and vanity, and embellished with a few strangely styled ornaments, and some pictures on the walls. It felt more like what could have been a spare room in any private house than a hospital. But there was a trace of an odor permeating the place, which suggested, if anything, a kind of incense. She could detect no sign of any injury, and concluded that she hadn’t been in an accident. Therefore her amnesia had been induced deliberately; somebody didn’t want her to know where she was or how she’d gotten there.

Which said she was probably a prisoner.

She tried moving and found there was no restraint. But when she got up and crossed the room to try the door, it was locked. She turned to look at the surroundings again, and noticed the standard Jevlenese companel by the couch, similar to the one she had seen in Baumer’s office. “ZORAC, are you there?” she said aloud on impulse. “Can you hear me?” There was no response. “Channel fiftysix… Activate channel fiftysix…” Nothing. She went back to the couch and sat down to try and make something of the panel’s manual controls, but without result. On reflection it seemed a pretty silly kind of hope, anyway.

Then, all at once, the utter isolation of her predicament came home to her. She felt her resolve slipping, and fear taking over despite herself. Suddenly she wanted to be back in Seattle again, among her own things, knowing that familiar places and scenes lay outside the walls. She picked up the blanket and pulled it around her shoulders, knowing that the room wasn’t especially cool, but unable to feel warm. So much for curiosity and an interesting life. If she got back okay after this, she decided, from now on she’d join the local women’s club and get all the excitement she needed from the soaps.

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