The Things We Bury - Part 1: In Anticipation of the End of the World [Completed]

Chapter 1: Project LARS (Part 6 of 6)

"You were right about Blass."  Conner Grierson waved Maxwell into the elevator.  The glass and chrome cube hovered at the edge of an abyss.  They were already twenty stories beneath the mountain.  The elevator would descend further, all the way to the BR-Labs.

Maxwell waited until he stepped past Grierson to grit his teeth.  The contraption, with all of its gleaming metal and glass, looked futuristic in a 1960's sci-fi fashion.  It looked new except for the brass handrail dulled with a patina and the thick, black plastic, retro call buttons.  There were only two of them.  An amber light haloed the top one.

Compared to the freight elevator next to them, it was the height of technology.

The massive platform appeared to be suspended in air.  The dozens of floodlights suspended from the cavern's ceiling lit it up, but the darkness of the pit swallowed the light from all around it.  It had been there since the base was built in the fifties.  It was formed out of thick iron girders and concrete slabs and looked like it could have been down there for a hundred years.  

"How did you know he'd come around," Grierson asked, stepping inside and pressing the bottom button.  At the same time as the amber light switched positions, the doors slid shut on their pneumatics.  Then the glass box began to slide down into the depths of the Earth. 

With each passing foot, Maxwell Wiley sensed the mass of rock and stone above him growing heavier.

"I saw it in his eyes while he watched the video."  When he had stared into the tablet, everything from his unwavering focus on the screen to the faint perspiration on his upper lip told Maxwell he was hooked.  Blass might have thought he was refusing the offer, but Maxwell knew the man was only lying to himself.  He no longer had to work to convince him; he didn't need to make R.J like him; he didn't need to sell the job.  His acceptance was inevitable.

The others had been just as easy.  Each had their weakness.  Most of them had more than one.

"If you don't mind me saying so, Blass doesn't look like much of a catch.  None of these people do.  You could have found much better candidates."  Maxwell searched hard for tactful words.  He couldn't very well ask his new boss if he had picked this bunch of losers because of the onset of senility, even if that was what he suspected.

Grierson made a clucking as if to say, oh you kids today.  "These people were cherry-picked precisely because they aren't the best."

"I don't follow."

"If we had recruited the best people in the field, they would have been independent, made demands, been hard to control."  Grierson looked down through the glass.  He seemed to relish the depths they were sinking toward.

"The people I asked you to get are grateful for the opportunity we're giving them.  We won't have to worry about their loyalty.  None of them will go to the press or blow the whistle on us."

"And if one of them does?"

"They're a bunch of screw-ups.  They all have their pressure points.  If they step out of line, it won't be hard to discredit and destroy any of them."

Maxwell had to hand it to the old man, it was a clever strategy – much shrewder than he had expected from the Sector Chief.  But Maxwell couldn't help wonder, what did it say about him that he'd been asked to lead these screw-ups.

Grierson had been so pleased with the announcement.

"Good news," the bastard had said.  He had gone on to explain to Maxwell that he had pulled strings and got him permanently reassigned to Project LARS as its Project Leader.