Unpopular Science

Unpopular Science

For the Glorious House of Sinanju

DestroyerBooks.com

With special thanks and acknowledgement to Tim Somheil for his contribution to this work.

Copyright

First published in the United States in 2004 by Worldwide

First published in Great Britain in ebook by Sphere in 2016

ISBN: 978-0-7515-6085-5

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 Warren Murphy

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Sphere

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DZ

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

Contents

Dedication

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Epilogue

About the Authors

Chapter 1

One day you’re a young man and the next day you’re old. One day your eyes are sharp enough to make out Cloudcroft, better than fifty miles to the northwest, and the next day it’s just another blur on the horizon. One day you’re strong enough to walk to Cloudcroft for a sack of beer, and the next day you’re tuckered out just from shuffling down to the latrine pit.

One day you’ve got your sanity. Next day, well… Bo Janks expected his eyes to go bad and he knew his legs would get tired, but somehow he never expected his mind to give up on him. Not that he relied on it all that much, anyway. Not that he had to think through any new problems. Bo Janks was living the exact same life today as he’d lived thirty years, forty years back. What was there for him to think about? But he did need his old brain to show him what was real and what wasn’t, and for the first time ever it wasn’t pulling its weight in that regard.

It started on April 15, Bo recalled, the day that Mel came out to fill the water tanks and wouldn’t you know it, the rain came that same night. Bo was at home, drinking his one nightly beer and watching the rain from the porch, when his mind betrayed him.

“What is that?” he asked. Bo talked to himself all the time. That didn’t make him crazy, did it?

“I know what that is, don’t I?” Bo remarked a minute later, and by this time he was so intrigued he got up, knees creaking, and walked out into the rain with his thumb over the top of the beer bottle to keep it from getting diluted. He followed the thing, only to become disoriented when he came near enough to recognize what it was. What he recognized couldn’t be real, so he had to be hallucinating. Bo fell over, knocked his head and he spilled his beer.

When he came to his senses again it was morning. Bo Janks found himself looking up at an Air Force man.

“You okay, there, old-timer?”

Bo got to his feet with the help of the Air Force man, who had more than a few uniform decorations. “You gave me a scare when I saw you stretched out like that,” the officer said.

Bo looked around to find he was in the scrub only a hundred paces from his place. His head hurt like hell and he saw the rock he had banged it on. There was a little blood on it.

“I should get you to a doctor.”

‘Tm all right,” Bo said, but he didn’t feel all right He felt as though his life was over. Once your mind goes bad, that was all she wrote.

“Maybe you ought to go easy on the Budweiser,” the officer suggested.

Bo picked up the bottle, showed the officer the dregs. “You’ll find five unopened bottles in the cooler at my place and not another empty bottle around. I ain’t a man who drinks to excess.”

The Air Force man nodded. “Okay. What, were you taking a premature dirt nap, then, old-timer?”

Bo saw no reason to kid himself or this stranger. Bo was a straight shooter, always. “I was seein’ things. Chasing my past in the desert.”

“Chasing your past?”

“Something walked right out of my past and by my place and then into the desert. I saw it plain as day.”

“Somebody you knew once?” the Air Force man asked.

“Not a somebody. A something.”

The Air Force man looked at his black sedan, parked up by Bo’s place, and he looked around the sandy desert, and then his eyes sort of just wandered on back to Bo. “You saw a thing that walked?”

“It warn’t real.”

“What did you mean when you said you know what it was, old-timer?”