“What’s going to happen to me?”
“Happen to you? What could happen to you?”
“I—I don’t know,” Randy faltered. Then, for the first time, he became aware that his hands were bandaged. “Is something wrong with my hands?”
Again, Hamlin smiled. “Well, why don’t we just take those bandages off and have a look,” he suggested. He seated himself on a chair next to the bed and began unwrapping the gauze from Randy’s hands.
The skin, clear and healthy-looking, showed no signs of the severe burns that had been apparent when Randy had been brought in that afternoon.
For the first few minutes, as he had examined the unconscious child, Hamlin had been tempted to order full-scale exploratory surgery, to determine the effects the 240 volts of electricity had had on Randy’s body. But then, as he had watched, Randy’s vital signs had begun to improve, and he had decided to wait.
Perhaps, finally, he was on the verge of success.
And so he had spent the last several hours observing Randy and watching the monitors attached to the child. Slowly, but miraculously, Randy’s pulse and respiration had returned to normal.
His brainwaves, monitored by the electroencephalograph, had evened out, until they once again reflected a normal pattern.
And now, even Randy’s skin had healed.
Randy Corliss, who should have been dead, was in perfect physical condition.
“Can I go back to my room?” he heard Randy ask.
“Well, now, I don’t really see why not,” Hamlin agreed. “But you’re a very lucky little boy. Did you know that?”
“If I was lucky, I wouldn’t have had the accident, would I?” Randy asked, his voice filled with a suspicion that Hamlin couldn’t quite understand. Wasn’t the boy even glad he was all right? He decided that he would never understand the mentality of children. “Maybe not,” he agreed. “But you have to admit that you were lucky it happened here, where we have lots of doctors. If you’d been somewhere else, you might have died.”
Randy looked up at him, his eyes dark and serious. He appeared to Hamlin as if he was seeing something far away, something in his memory. “But I’m going to die anyway, aren’t I?”
Hamlin scowled. “What makes you say that?”
Randy twisted at the bed covers, and his eyes roamed the room as if he didn’t want to look at Hamlin. “Some of the boys talk. Some of them say that lots of boys die here. But they say we’re not supposed to talk about it. Is that true?”
Hamlin sat silently, cursing to himself. That was the trouble with little boys. If you told them not to talk about something, invariably that was the one thing they talked about. And the problem, of course, was that what the boys were saying was true. So far, every one of the boys who had been brought here had died. But could he tell that to the little boy in the bed? Absolutely not. Instead, he reached out to pat Randy reassuringly on the hand.
“A few of our boys have died. But that happens in every school, doesn’t it? But I’ll bet you won’t. I’ll bet you’ll be the first of my perfect children. And now’s the time to find out.”
As Randy nervously waited, Hamlin left the room, then returned with a piece of equipment that looked to Randy like nothing more than a box with a dial on it, some cord, and two shiny metal handles.
“What’s that?” he asked suspiciously while Hamlin plugged the box into an oversize socket in the wall.
“It’s a rheostat,” Hamlin explained, carefully keeping the anxiety he was feeling from betraying itself in his voice. “I just want to do one more test, to see if you’re really all right. Then you can go back to your room.”
“What kind of test?”
Hamlin hesitated. “A sensitivity test,” he finally explained. “All you have to do is hold on to these handles, and tell me when you feel something.”
Randy scowled at the box. “What kind of something?”
“Anything. Anything at all. Warmth, or cold, or some kind of sensation. Just anything. All right?”
Randy wondered what would happen to him if he refused. Would they strap him down and clamp his head in a vise, like they’d done to Peter? He didn’t know, and he decided the best thing he could do was to go along with whatever Dr. Hamlin wanted. He took one of the electrodes in each of his hands.
George Hamlin turned on the power and slowly began turning the rheostat up, his eyes flickering from the dial on the transformer to the instruments monitoring Randy, to Randy himself.
For the first few seconds, as he steadily increased the force of the electrical current that was passing through Randy’s body, there was no reaction at all.
Then, as the current reached 200 volts, Randy’s eyes widened slightly. “It tickles,” he said.
Tickles.
The word thundered in Hamlin’s mind. A few hours ago, only a little more voltage than this had knocked the boy unconscious and done severe damage to his heart, his nervous system, and his brain.
And now, all it did was tickle him.
Not only had Randy’s regeneration been quick and complete, but he seemed to have built a resistance against the source of the trauma itself.
Impulsively, George Hamlin twisted the rheostat to full power.
Randy Corliss only giggled.
It had worked. At last, it had worked. Hamlin shut off the power and assured himself once more that all Randy’s vital signs were still normal. Then he disconnected the monitoring equipment and squeezed Randy’s shoulder.
“You can go back to your room,” he said. “It’s all over, and there’s nothing wrong with you. Nothing at all.” Without another word, he left the room.
When Hamlin was gone, Randy lay still for a while, wondering what the doctor had meant Then he got out of bed, gathered up his clothes, and went to the door. He started down the hall that would take him back to the main section of the Academy, but then he paused outside a closed door. He looked up and down the hall, and, seeing no one, tried the door. It was unlocked, and Randy slipped inside.
In the room, lying in bed, his face expressionless and his body perfectly still, was Peter Williams. Slowly, Randy moved close to Peter’s bed.
He could hear Peter breathing, but the sound was shallow and rasping, as if something were stuck in Peter’s throat.
So Peter wasn’t dead. Peter was still alive, even afta: everything that had happened to him.
Was that what Dr. Hamlin had meant by being a perfect child? That no matter what happened to you, you wouldn’t die?
As he left the infirmary and started walking toward his own room in the dormitory, Randy began to wonder if he wanted to be a perfect child.
He decided he didn’t—not if it meant ending up like Peter Williams.
George Hamlin peeled off his horn-rimmed glasses and used two fingers to massage the bridge of his nose. The gesture was more habitual than anything else; his energy level, as always, was high. He was prepared to work through the night.
First, there had been the apparent breakthrough with Randy Corliss.
Then there had been the call from Boston.
Paul Randolph’s call had disturbed him more than he had let on. It was nothing, he was sure, no more than an upset mother clutching at any straw that might lead her to her son. Even so, it had disturbed him that the mother had turned out to be Lucy Corliss. Why today? Why should the security of the project be threatened today, and by the mother of the one subject who offered a promise of success?
But he had put his concerns aside. All it meant, really, was that he would simply have to work faster. He picked up his laboratory analyses once more and began studying them.
The problem, he knew, had always had to do with the restrictive endonuclease-ligase compound—the combination of enzymes that altered the genetic structure of the egg just prior to conception. The process was basically a simple one, once he had developed the tools to accomplish it. It was a matter of cutting out a section of the deoxyribonucleic acid—DNA—then repairing it in an altere
d form. But it had taken Hamlin years to develop the compounds, all of which had to be tested by trial and error.
They had been years of lonely, unrecognized work that, so far, had led only to a series of total, if unspectacular, failures.
Failures that had not been, and never would be, noticed by the scientific community, but failures, nevertheless.
George Hamlin did not like failures.
He turned back to the first page of the report and began reading it through once more. He flipped through page after page of charts, graphic correlations of causes and effects, chemical analyses of the enzymes they had used, medical histories of every subject since the project had begun.
The key, he was now certain, lay in Randy Corliss. He turned to the page describing the genetic analysis of the boy.
It was the introns that interested him.
The answer, he had always been sure, was locked in the introns that lay like genetic garbage along the double helix of DNA. Ever since he had begun studying them, George Hamlin had disagreed with the prevailing theory that the introns were nothing more than gibberish to be edited out of the genetic codes as the process of converting DNA into RNA, and finally into the messenger RNA that would direct cell development, was carried out.
No, Hamlin had long ago decided that introns were something else, and he had finally come to the conclusion that they were a sort of evolutionary experimentation lab, in which nature put together new combinations of the genetic alphabet, then segregated them off, so they wouldn’t be activated except by genetic chance. Thus, only if the experiment proved successful, and the organism lived, would the activated intron, now an exon, be passed on to succeeding generations.
What Hamlin had decided to do was find a way to activate the introns artificially, determine their functions, and then learn to control them and use them.
And slowly, over the years, he had succeeded.
That was when he had begun experimenting on human beings.
That was when the secrecy had begun, and that was when the failures had begun.
And now, locked somewhere within the small, sturdy body of Randy Corliss, the final answer seemed to be emerging.
It was too soon to tell, but it was only a matter of a few months now.
All that had to happen was for Randy Corliss to survive.
The years of secrecy would be over, and George Hamlin would take his place in the ranks of preeminent genetic engineers.
He wished, as he had many times over the years, that he could carry out his experiments entirely in his lab. But that was impossible.
Extrauterine conception was no problem—combining a sperm with an egg outside the womb had been accomplished years ago.
The problem was that there were so many subjects, so many embryos to be brought to maturity, and not nearly enough women who would agree to bear those “test-tube babies,” particularly knowing full well that those babies would be far more the children of George Hamlin than the children of themselves and their husbands.
And so he had made the decision.
The DNA in the ovum would be altered in utero rather than in vitro.
If the experiments failed, the parents would never know exactly what had happened.
If they succeeded, the parents would raise, albeit unknowingly, a group of wonderfully healthy, if not quite human, children.
And success seemed imminent. If Randy Corliss lived.
The four of them sat stiffly in Lucy Corliss’s small living room: Lucy and Jim on the love seat, Sally Montgomery and Carl Bronski on the wing chairs.
It had not been easy for Sally to get there. After hearing what had happened that afternoon, both from Sally and her mother, Steve had suggested that Sally was overwrought. Sally, though she thought the word was ridiculous, had let it pass. Then, rather than argue with him, she had quietly agreed that a good night’s rest would be the best thing for her. A few minutes later, Lucy had called and asked if she would be willing to explain the computer data to Sergeant Bronski. She had agreed, and that was when the fight had started. And now, along with Steve, she had her mother to contend with. Phyllis had sat impassively at first, trying to ignore the argument. At last she had, in her infuriatingly rational voice, sided with Steve.
Sally, she declared, should not get involved with the problems of strangers. Certainly, she went on, Sally had enough to cope with right now, without taking on the problems of Lucy Corliss.
Finally, Sally had had enough. Barely retaining her civility, she told her husband and her mother where she was going and stormed out of the house.
Now, after explaining to Sergeant Bronski and Jim Corliss what she thought the computer printouts meant, she was beginning to wonder if she’d done the right thing.
All in all, she realized, there wasn’t really much of a parallel between Randy Corliss’s disappearance, and Julie’s death.
The only real link, indeed, seemed to be that both children had been under study by CHILD. And then, as a silence fell over them, Sally suddenly remembered a thought that had crossed her mind while she was working with the computer that morning. A notion that had been tugging at her mind since her lunch with Jan Ransom.
“Lucy,” she said, “I know this may sound like a strange question, but—well, did you want Randy? Before he was born, I mean. Did you get pregnant on purpose?”
Before Lucy could answer, Jim Corliss shook his head. “I was the one who didn’t want a baby,” he said. “In fact, it was Randy who put an end to our marriage. I guess Lucy thought he’d bring us closer together, but that’s not the way it happened.” His gaze shifted away from Sally, and he began talking directly to Lucy. “I know you meant well, but I … when you told me you were pregnant, I felt like a prison door was slamming on me. So I bolted.”
“But I wasn’t trying to get pregnant!” Lucy protested. “Randy wasn’t my idea. Just the opposite—I’d had a coil put in because I was pretty sure I knew what would happen if I got pregnant. Unfortunately, I was one of those women who doesn’t hold an IUD, but by the time I found that out, it was too late.”
Sally sat stunned, trying to sort it all out. Was she being hysterical, or was the whole situation becoming more ominous? There were four of them now, four children, all of them unplanned, all of their mothers “protected” by IUDs when the pregnancies occurred, all of them under study by the Children’s Institute for Latent Diseases. Now two of them were dead and one was missing. Only Jason was left.
“It’s horrible,” she said, not realizing she was speaking out loud.
“What?” Carl Bronski asked her. “What’s horrible?”
Abashed, Sally glanced from one face to another. All of them were looking at her curiously, but all the faces were friendly. “I was just thinking,” she began. “Thinking about you, and me, and Jan Ransom, and all the coincidences.” She went through them one by one, half-expecting someone—Bronski probably—to tell her she was overreacting, to explain to her that she was seeing a conspiracy where none existed, to suggest that she get some counseling.
No one did.
When she was finished, there was a long silence that was finally broken by Sally herself.
“Lucy,” she asked, her voice oddly constricted. “Who was your obstetrician?”
Lucy frowned thoughtfully. “Somebody over at the Community Hospital. After Randy was born, I never saw him again. I’m afraid I’m just not much of a one for doctors. But his name was Weisfield, or something like that.”
“Was it Wiseman?” Sally asked, knowing the answer.
Lucy brightened. “That’s it! Arthur Wiseman. I hated him, but at the time he was all I could—” She broke off, seeing the twisted expression on Sally’s face. “What is it? What did I say?”
“Wiseman is my doctor too,” Sally explained. “And Jan Ransom’s.” Her voice suddenly turned bitter. “He and his bedside manner and his fatherly advice. What the hell was he doing to all of us?”
“We don’t know that he was doing anything,
” Carl Bronski said quietly. But privately he decided that it was time for him to devote a great deal more attention to finding out exactly what had happened to Randy Corliss.
The house was dark when Sally returned, except for one light glowing upstairs in the master bedroom. Her mother, apparently, had finally gone home. Sally slipped her key into the lock, let herself into the house, then checked the lower floor to be sure all the windows were closed. As she started upstairs she wondered how she was going to tell Steve that far from withdrawing from Lucy Corliss’s problems, she was now going to become even more deeply involved. She knew what his response would be, and she didn’t want to hear it. Yet, she wouldn’t—couldn’t—begin lying to him about what she was doing.
Somehow she would have to make him understand. She knew now that something was happening at Eastbury Community Hospital. Something had happened to her there, and it had happened to Jan Ransom, and it had happened to Lucy Corliss. How many others had it happened to? How many other babies had died, and how many children were missing? She had to know, and Steve had to understand that.
They owed it, if not to themselves or to Julie, to all the women and children to whom, so far, nothing had yet been done.
She reached the top of the stairs and started toward the bedroom, but then changed her mind. She would look in on Jason first, just to reassure herself that everything was all right.
He lay in bed, sound asleep, his right arm dangling over the side of the bed. When she bent down to kiss him, he stirred, and turned over to look up at her.
“Mom? Is that you?” The words were mumbled sleepily, and Jason’s eyes, half opened, seemed to be searching for her.
“It’s me, honey,” she whispered, kneeling by the bed and slipping her arms around him. “How are you? Is everything all right?”
“I’m fine,” Jason replied. “Me and Dad spent the whole night playing games with Grandma, and I won.” There was a note of accusation in his voice, and Sally half-wished she had been home to enjoy the games. And yet, she knew, if she had stayed home, she would have felt guilty all evening.
She reached down and touched the hand gently.