Jed stopped working, and a moment later felt himself being pulled out of the pipe. The part of his mind that had been occupied with evading the terrible panic rejoined his body, and for a moment he felt another twinge of the paralyzing fear. Then he was free of the tunnel, back in the main shaft. He scrambled down the scaffolding, then stepped out of the shaft into the turbine room. There was a sudden silence as the conveyor belt stopped moving, and then the rest of the men who had been working on the scaffolding above began to appear.
Thermoses were opened and someone handed Jed a cup of steaming coffee. Around him he could hear the voices of the men, swapping jokes and casual insults, but Jed took no part in it. He sat still, staring at nothing, sipping with careful disinterest at his coffee.
When the allotted fifteen minutes was nearly up, the foreman spoke.
“Hey, Gomez. Take Harris, Sparks, and Hankins, and head down to the hospital, okay? Company’s springing for flu shots.”
Jed froze, but managed to say nothing, managed even to keep himself from looking up as Randy’s and Jeff’s fathers got up and, demanding to know if they were getting paid for their time away from the job, followed the other two men toward the stairs that would take them to the top of the dam. “Yes, you’re getting paid,” the foreman called after them. “If the company wants you to do something, the company pays you to do it.”
A rowdy cheer erupted from the four men as they disappeared into the narrow corridor.
Jed wanted to yell after them, to warn them not to take the shots, but he knew he couldn’t.
If he did, he would only give himself away.
* * *
Judith watched in silent dismay as her third-period class filed into the room and quietly took their seats. Randy Sparks, along with two others, was absent, but of the twenty-two students who were there, five had that strange glassy-eyed look that Gina, Randy, and the others had exhibited yesterday. The room was almost unnaturally silent, for in this class, as in her two previous classes of the day, it was the liveliest of the students who seemed to have been affected by whatever was being done to them.
Judith, like Jed, had done her best to betray nothing of what she suspected. During the just completed mid-morning break, she’d even managed to force a small laugh when Elliott Halvorson had joked that he wished that whatever kind of flu was going around this year would stay on. His classes seemed to have calmed down, and for the first time in years the students were actually paying attention to what he was saying.
Judith had felt like screaming at him that what was happening to the students had nothing at all to do with the flu, but she’d suppressed her words and coerced a smile from her lips instead.
It had been that way all morning.
She’d tried to tell herself that she was getting paranoid, just as she had yesterday when she’d thought that blue car was following her. Even on her way to work this morning she’d found herself glancing around, searching in every direction for something that might tell her she was indeed being watched.
There had been nothing.
No cars parked where they shouldn’t have been; certainly no one who appeared to be following her. And yet, why should there have been? If anyone wanted to know where she was, it wouldn’t be hard to locate her in Borrego. All anyone would have to do, really, was keep an eye on the main road leading north and south. Unless you had a four-wheel drive and were just a little bit crazy, there was no other way out of town. And as long as she was in town, anyone could find her in ten minutes.
She’d avoided the teachers’ lounge entirely before classes that morning, certain she wouldn’t be able to fake even an appearance of being relaxed, but by the time the break came, her paranoia had overcome her once more, and she’d decided that not to show up for a quick cup of coffee would look suspicious. Besides, if the rest of the classes were like hers, by then it must have been obvious that something was haywire.
Yet during the break none of the teachers seemed the least bit concerned. Most of them—like Elliott Halvorson—actually appeared to welcome the change. Their disciplinary problems had evaporated, and their classes actually seemed attentive.
But Judith wasn’t certain exactly how attentive they really were. Now, as she looked at the class, an idea came to her.
She turned to the board and began quickly writing out a series of problems. Deliberately, she put some of the harder ones first, then scattered out the simpler ones toward the end.
Finally she turned to face the class. “You have five minutes to copy these,” she said. “Copy them in order, please.”
A few groans drifted up—groans Judith welcomed as at least a small sign that some of her students were still perfectly normal.
Judith watched carefully as they set to work. Most of the class kept glancing up at the blackboard, then turning their attention to the paper in front of them while they wrote in short bursts, only to look up at the blackboard once more a few seconds later.
The affected students—the sleepwalkers, as Judith had begun to think of them—seemed to look at the board less often, and their writing, though Judith couldn’t actually see it, appeared to proceed at a much steadier pace.
At the end of the five minutes Judith reached up and pulled the map down to cover the board. “All right,” she said. “Begin working on the problems. You have thirty minutes.”
She sat down at her desk, apparently grading a stack of homework assignments, but glancing up every few seconds to study one student after another.
The seventeen unaffected students seemed to be working normally. Some of their faces screwed up in expressions that looked almost painful as they concentrated, and several of them tapped their pencils nervously on their desktops as they pondered their solutions. Others turned now and then to gaze out the window for a moment, or stared at the ceiling.
Three of them were surreptitiously trying to see what their classmates had already written.
The five sleepwalkers, however, all sat at their desks, their faces expressionless, their eyes fixed on the papers in front of them.
Their pencils moved steadily, except for two of them, who seemed to have frozen in place.
The minutes ticked by.
After twenty minutes three of the unaffected students had come up and placed their quiz sheets on her desk.
Two of the sleepwalkers had laid their pencils down and were now sitting quietly, their eyes staring straight ahead.
One of them was still working, while the last two were still staring at their papers, their pencils, unmoving, still in their hands.
At the end of the allotted thirty minutes, Judith stood up. “Time’s up,” she said.
Immediately, the fourteen unaffected students began passing their papers forward.
The five others didn’t move.
“Please pass your papers forward,” Judith said quietly.
The five students passed their papers forward.
Judith collected the papers, then glanced at the clock. There were still five minutes before the bell would ring. “All right,” she said. “That’s it for today. And there’ll be no homework tonight. See you all tomorrow.”
As the room began to empty, Judith began scanning the quizzes.
Seventeen of them seemed perfectly normal—most of the students had finished the quiz, or at least come close. All of them had finished the easiest of the problems, and there was a normal spread of right and wrong answers. Some of the harder problems, as Judith had expected, had simply been skipped entirely.
Then she turned to the quizzes turned in by the five strangely subdued students.
Two of them had finished the quiz, and both of them, not surprisingly, since they were her brightest students, had done the work perfectly. Their (solutions were laid out neatly, with nothing either crossed out or erased.
The other three quizzes were strange. The work, as on the first two, was neatly written, with no changes having been made. And what was done had been done correctly.
But one of the students hadn’t even finished the first problem; the second had gotten no more than halfway through the quiz; and the third had apparently given up on the next to the last problem.
The very last problem, which read simply 2 + 2 = x, hadn’t been touched by any of the three students.
Judith’s throat tightened and a knot formed in her stomach as she realized what had happened.
The five students had, like Gina Alvarez night before last, done exactly as they had been told.
They had been told to “begin working on the problems,” and they had. They had worked steadily and methodically, and they had not given up.
But when they had gotten stuck, they simply stopped.
And of course Judith knew why.
She hadn’t told them to go through the quiz and solve the simplest equations first, then go back and work on the harder ones, solving them in the order of difficulty, which would have been the most efficient way to complete the test.
Instead she had simply told them to begin working on the problems, and they had followed her instructions to the letter.
What work they had done was perfect, until they got stuck. But when they got stuck, they were like robots that had walked into a wall.
They did nothing.
They just sat quietly, their gears spinning, and waited.
Chapter 27
Judith’s nerves jangled as she approached the counseling office of Borrego High School. Despite herself, she kept glancing back over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching. But it was ridiculous—she was a teacher, and she had a perfect right to look at the records of any of her students at any time she chose. Still, she’d spent several minutes alone in her classroom after the fourth-period bell had sounded, devising a cover story should anyone ask her what she was doing. A review of her classes was what she’d finally settled on. She was thinking of advancing her lesson plans a bit, and wanted to see just how much preparation her students had had in the event she decided to introduce them to some of the intricacies of trigonometry.
She paused outside the office door, glancing up and down the corridor one more time, but there was no one there. Finally she pushed the door open and stepped inside. Carla Bergstrom, who served as the school’s sole full-time student counselor, was just taking her purse out of the bottom drawer of her desk. “Judith,” she said. “You just barely caught me.”
Judith forced what she hoped was a disarming smile. “Actually, it isn’t you I need at all,” she said. “I just wanted to go over some of my kids’ records.”
Carla shrugged dismissively. “Be my guest,” she said. “Do you know how to use the computer?”
Now Judith uttered a genuine laugh. “Is there anyone in the modern world who doesn’t?” she asked. “But you could save me a little time by bringing up the right program.”
Carla nodded, sat down at her desk and hit a few keys. “There it is,” she said. “Just enter the names of the students you want, and your password, and go to it.” She stood up, picked up her purse, and started toward the door. “If you get stuck, I’ll be hiding out in the staff lounge with everyone else.”
A moment later Judith was sitting at the desk, typing in the names of her students. The work went slowly at first, and after ten minutes she realized she was going at it the wrong way—at this rate, she wouldn’t even finish getting the names in by the time the lunch hour was over.
Clearing the screen, she brought up a directory of the computer’s hard drive, and almost immediately spotted what she was looking for.
A data management program, the same one the school in East Los Angeles had used. Breathing a sigh of relief, she brought up the program’s main menu, then began making her selections, typing in specific words and phrases.
The computer itself would sort through the records, compiling a list of students whose records contained the key words. All she would have to do was look over the list it produced. If she and Jed had been right last night, she knew which names should be on the list. She thought carefully, finally constructing a program designed to dig from the records the names of every student who had a relative working for Borrego Oil and a history of disciplinary problems.
At last she pressed the Enter key, then stared at the screen as images flashed by. A few seconds later a report form generated itself on the screen and names began to appear.
The pattern was there.
The names of every one of her affected students, along with many others—some she recognized, and others she did not—appeared on the list.
She narrowed the focus of the search, linking several of the variables together.
A much shorter list appeared, but still, all the names of those strange, emotionless kids who had sat so quietly through her morning classes were still there.
Her mind in turmoil, Judith printed out a copy of the list of names, folded it carefully, and stuck it into her purse. Turning off the computer, she stepped out into the hall. She still had fifteen minutes left of her lunch hour, time at least to grab a snack from one of the machines outside the cafeteria door. But as she started down the hall, the sound of voices caught her attention. She glanced across the corridor to the open door to Laura Sanders’s office. A man was standing in front of the nurse’s desk. Even from the back, Judith recognized him.
Greg Moreland.
As Laura’s voice, sounding furious now, erupted once more, Judith slipped silently across the corridor.
* * *
Laura Sanders knew she was losing her temper, but she wasn’t sure she cared anymore. Though Greg Moreland had been perfectly polite when he’d appeared in her office ten minutes ago, his implication was clear—he was accusing her of incompetence. And if there was one thing that annoyed Laura more than anything else, it was to have the thoroughness with which she did her job questioned.
“I don’t really care what you think, Greg,” she said now, her voice rising as she fixed her eyes on him. “I administered every one of the inoculations myself. I kept the records precisely as Mr. Beckwith instructed me, and I cross-checked my work after every class was inoculated.”
Greg’s expression hardened. He’d been working all morning, ever since Kendall had called him at seven, demanding to know if one of the syringes could possibly have gotten away from them. Since the call, he’d reviewed the records again and again, but been unable to find a mistake.
Every one of the needles was accounted for in the records, either as having been administered to someone or as being in the safe in his office.
Indeed, more than an hour had been wasted in examining the contents of the safe itself, physically matching the syringes against the inventory lists.
Every needle appeared to have been accounted for.
“I’m not accusing you of anything, Laura,” Greg said, deliberately keeping his own anger out of his voice. “I just want you to check these lists one more time. There seems to be a mistake somewhere, and all I want you to do is help me find it.”
Laura’s lips set angrily, but she picked up the lists and began scanning them one more time. Everything, just as she expected—in fact just as it had been the last time she’d looked at it, not two minutes ago—was in order. And then she glanced once more at the second name on the list of Judith Sheffield’s first-period class.
Jed Arnold.
Her eyes focused on the number next to his name.
It was out of sequence; indeed, it wasn’t even close to the numbers of the rest of his class, nor the class preceding.
And then she remembered.
“Well, there is one thing,” she said, looking up. She paused as she saw Judith Sheffield herself, standing outside the office, apparently listening. She was about to nod a greeting to Judith, but when the other woman shook her head and held a finger to her lips, she changed her mind. “It’s Jed Arnold,” she said. “Actually, he missed his shot that morning. He was late that morning.”
Laura saw Judith shaking her head violently. For a split seco
nd she didn’t understand. And then she realized what must have happened. Her mind raced, and then, as she saw the anger in Greg Moreland’s eyes, she decided what to do.
“That’s why his number is out of sequence,” she went on smoothly. “He came in after school and I gave him his shot then.” She let her voice harden slightly. “In fact, if you remember, I was cross-checking the lists when you came to pick everything up.”
Greg stared at Laura, trying to decide if she was telling the truth. But of course there was a way to find out—a call to the dam would tell him if Jed had become as compliant as the rest of them. But wherever the mistake had occurred—if, indeed, there had been one at all—it no longer mattered. If Jed was behaving as the rest of the teenagers were, all the syringes were accounted for.
He thanked Laura for her cooperation and turned to leave the office.
Judith Sheffield had disappeared around the corner toward the cafeteria only seconds before.
Peter Langston stared at the telephone.
Twenty-four hours.
That was all it had taken, but it seemed much longer. He and the technician had been in the second subterranean level of the Brandt Institute almost all night, and both of them had been back early this morning just a little after dawn. It hadn’t taken too long to figure out what the micromachines were. That had been the simplest part.
They were nothing more than minute transformers. When the switch at the bottom was thrown, whatever electrical source was entering them from their base would be stepped up, and the protuberances at the top, made of a high-resistance ceramic, would heat up. Nor had the source of electricity been difficult to decipher.
He’d calculated the amount of electricity the machines would need to operate. Not surprisingly, it had matched the tiny amount of electricity the human body itself generated.
But there had been some anomalies too, and finally, this morning, he had called in Tom Patchell, a neurosurgeon who had often served as a consultant to the institute.