He had arrived in time to have lunch with them, which Marty had prepared with the girls’ help. It consisted of reconstituted eggs, canned sausages, and biscuits from a tin.
As the five of them ate at the large pine table in the kitchen, Karl presented them with their new identities. Marty was surprised by the number of documents. Birth certificates for all four of them. A high school diploma for Paige from a school in Newark, New Jersey, and one for Marty from a school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. An honorable discharge from the United States Army for Marty, issued after three years of service. They had Wyoming driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, and more.
Their new name was Gault. Ann and John Gault. Charlotte’s birth certificate said her name was Rebecca Vanessa Gault, and Emily was now Suzie Lori Gault.
“We got to choose our own first and second names,” Charlotte said with more animation than she’d shown in days. “I’m Rebecca like in the movie, a woman of beauty and mystery, haunting Manderley forever.”
“We didn’t
exactly
get to pick what names we wanted,” Emily said. “We didn’t get first choice, for sure.”
Marty had been deep in wounded sleep back in Bishop, California, when the names had been selected. “What was your first choice?” he asked Emily.
“Bob,” she said.
Marty laughed, and Charlotte giggled explosively.
“I like Bob,” Emily said.
“Well, you have to admit it isn’t really appropriate,” Marty said.
“Suzie Lori is cute enough to puke over,” Charlotte said.
“Well, if I can’t be Bob,” Emily said, “then I want to be Suzie Lori, and everyone has to always use both names, never just Suzie.”
While the girls washed the dishes, Karl brought in a suitcase from the Range Rover, opened it on the table, and discussed the contents with Marty and Paige. There were scores of computer discs containing Network files, which Karl had secretly copied over the years, plus at least a hundred microcassette tapes of conversations that he had recorded, including one at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Dana Point that involved Oslett and a man named Peter Waxhill.
“That one,” Karl said, “will explain the entire clone crisis in a nutshell.” He began returning the items to the suitcase. “These are all copies, the discs and the cassettes. You’ve got two full sets. And I’ve got other duplicates besides.”
Marty didn’t understand. “Why do you want us to have these?”
“You’re a good writer,” Karl said. “I’ve read a couple of your books since Tuesday night. Take all this, write up an explanation of it, an explanation of what happened to you and your family. I’m going to leave you the name of the owner of a major newspaper and a man high in the FBI. I’m confident that neither of them is part of the Network—because both of them were on Alfie’s list of future targets. Send your explanation and one set of discs and tapes to each of them. Mail it blind, of course, no return address, and from another state, not Wyoming.”
“Shouldn’t you do this?” Paige asked.
“I’ll try again if you don’t get the kind of reaction I expect you will. But it’s better coming from you first. Your disappearance, the action in Mission Viejo, the murders of your parents, the bodies I’ve made sure they found in that bell tower near your folks’ cabin—all of that has kept your story hot. The Network has made
sure
it’s kept hot, ’cause they’re desperate for someone to find you for them. Let’s use your notoriety to make it all backfire on them if we can.”
The day was cool but not cold. The sky was a crystalline blue.
Marty and Karl went for a walk along the perimeter of the woods, always keeping the cabin in sight.
“This Alfie,” Marty said.
“What about him?”
“Was he the only one?”
“The first and only operative clone. Others are being grown.”
“We have to stop that.”
“We will.”
“Okay. Suppose we blow the Network apart,” Marty wondered. “Their house of cards collapses. Afterward . . . can we ever go back home, resume our lives?”
Karl shook his head. “I don’t intend to. Don’t dare. Some of them will slip the noose. And these are people who hold a grudge from Sunday to Hell and back. Good haters. You ruin their lives or even just the lives of people in their families, and sooner or later they’ll kill all of you.”
“Then the Gault name isn’t just temporary cover?”
“It’s the best ID you can get. As good as real paper. I got it from sources the Network doesn’t know about. No one will ever see through this ID . . . or track you down by it.”
“My career, income from my books . . .”
“Forget it,” Karl said. “You’re on a new voyage of discovery, outward to worlds unknown.”
“And you’ve got a new name too?”
“Yes.”
“None of my business what it is, huh?”
“Exactly.”
Karl left that same afternoon, an hour before dusk.
As they accompanied him to the Range Rover, he withdrew an envelope from an inside pocket of his tweed jacket and handed it to Paige, explaining that it was the grant deed to the cabin and the land on which it stood.
“I bought and prepared two getaway properties, one at each end of the country, so I’d be prepared for this day when it came. Owned them both under untraceable false names. I’ve transferred this one to Ann and John Gault, since I can only use one of them.”
He seemed embarrassed when Paige hugged him.
“Karl,” Marty said, “what would have happened to us without you? We owe you everything.”
The big man was actually blushing. “You’d have done all right, somehow. You’re survivors. Anything I’ve done for you, it’s only what anyone would have.”
“Not these days,” Marty said.
“Even these days,” Karl said, “there are more good people than not. I really believe that. I have to.”
At the Range Rover, Charlotte and Emily kissed Karl goodbye because they all knew, without having to say it, that they would never see him again.
Emily gave him Peepers. “You need someone,” she said. “You’re all alone. Besides, he’ll never get used to calling me Suzie Lori. He’s your pet now.”
“Thank you, Emily. I’ll take good care of him.”
When Karl got behind the wheel and closed the door, Marty leaned in the open window. “If we wreck the Network, you think they’ll ever put it back together again?”
“It or something like it,” Karl said without hesitation.
Unsettled, Marty said, “I guess we’ll know if they do ... when they cancel all elections.”
“Oh, elections would never be canceled, at least not in any way that was ever apparent,” Karl said as he started the Rover. “They’d go on just as usual, with competing political parties, conventions, debates, bitter campaigns, all the hoopla and shouting. But every one of the candidates would be selected from Network loyalists. If they ever
do
take over, John, only
they
will know.”
Marty was suddenly as cold as he had ever been in the blizzard on Tuesday night.
Karl raised one hand in the split-finger greeting that Marty recognized from
Star Trek.
“Live long and prosper, ” he said, and left them.
Marty stood in the gravel driveway, watching the Rover until it reached the county road, turned left, and dwindled out of sight.
9
That December and throughout the following year, when the headlines screamed of the Network scandal, treason, political conspiracy, assassination, and one world crisis after another, John and Ann Gault didn’t pay as much attention to the newspapers and the television news as they had expected they would. They had new lives to build, which was not a simple undertaking.
Ann cut her blond hair short and dyed it brown. Before meeting any of their neighbors living in the scattered cabins and ranches of that rural area, John grew a beard; not to his surprise, it came in more than half gray, and a lot of gray began to show up on his head, as well.
A simple tint changed Rebecca’s hair from blond to auburn, and Suzie Lori was sufficiently transformed with a new and much shorter style. Both girls were growing fast. Time would swiftly blur the resemblance between them and whoever they once might have been.
Remembering to use new names was easy compared to creating and committing to memory a simple but credible false past. They made a game of it, rather like Look Who’s the Monkey Now.
The nightmares were persistent. Though the enemy they had known was as comfortable in daylight as not, they irrationally viewed each nightfall with an uneasiness that people had felt in ancient and more superstitious times. And sudden noises made everybody jump.
Christmas Eve had been the first time that John dared to hope they would really be able to imagine a new life and find happiness again. It was then that Suzie Lori inquired about the popcorn.
“What popcorn?” John asked.
“Santa’s evil twin put ten pounds in the microwave,” she said, “even though that much corn wouldn’t fit. But even if it would fit, what happened when it started to pop?”
That night, story hour was held for the first time in more than three weeks. Thereafter, it became routine.
In late January, they felt safe enough to register Rebecca and Suzie Lori in the public school system.
By spring, there were new friends and a growing store of Gault-family memories that were not fabricated.
Because they had seventy thousand in cash and owned their humble house outright, they were under little pressure to find work. They also had four boxes full of the first editions of the early novels of Martin Stillwater. The cover of
Time
magazine had asked a question that would never be answered
—Where is Martin Stillwater?—
and first editions that had once been worth a couple of hundred dollars each on the collectors’ market had begun selling, by spring, for five times that price; they would probably continue to appreciate faster than blue-chip investments in the years to come. Sold one or two at a time, in far cities, they would keep the family nest egg fat during lean years.
John presented himself to new neighbors and acquaintances as a former insurance salesman from New York City. He claimed to have come into a substantial though not enormous inheritance. He was indulging a lifelong dream of living in a rural setting, struggling to be a poet. “If I don’t start selling some poems in a few years, maybe I’ll write a novel,” he sometimes said, “and if that doesn’t turn out right
—then
I’ll start worrying.”
Ann was content to be seen as a housewife; however, freed from the pressures of the past—troubled clients and freeway commuting—she rediscovered a talent for drawing that she had not tapped since high school. She began doing illustrations for the poems and stories in her husband’s ring-bound notebook of original compositions, which he had been writing for years:
Stories for Rebecca and Suzie Lori.
They had lived in Wyoming five years when
Santa’s Evil Twin
by John Gault with illustrations by Ann Gault became a smash Christmas bestseller. They allowed no jacket photo of author and artist. They politely declined offers of promotional tours and interviews, preferring a quiet life and the chance to do more books for children.
The girls remained healthy, grew tall, and Rebecca began selectively dating boys, all of whom Suzie Lori found wanting in one way or another.
Sometimes John and Ann felt they lived too much in a fantasy, and they made an effort to keep up with current events, watching for signs and portents that they didn’t even like to discuss with each other. But the world was endlessly troubled and tedious. Too few people seemed able to imagine life without the crushing hand of one government or another, one war or another, one form of hatred or another, so the Gaults always lost interest in the news and returned to the world they imagined for themselves.
One day a paperback novel arrived in the mail. The plain brown envelope bore no return address, and no note of any kind was included with the book. It was a science-fiction novel set in the far future, when humankind had conquered the stars but not all of its problems. The title was
The Clone Rebellion.
John and Ann read it. They found it to be admirably well-imagined, and they regretted that they would never have the opportunity to express their admiration to the author.
NEW AFTERWORD BY DEAN KOONTZ
AFTERWORD
The most frequently asked question posed to every writer by readers is
May I commission you to embroider a complete set of bed linens with the imperial crest of Napoleon?
Some writers, lacking any talent for embroidery, must regretfully decline the commission and resort to some other work— mayonnaise tasting, spider ranching, repackaging bulk lard for resale in small gift boxes—as a secondary source of income. Those who are wizards of embroidery sometimes wish that they didn’t have to spend so many hours with their threads and needles, and could devote more time to creating fiction; but then they remind themselves that they should be grateful to have a trade to fall back on in the event that their writing careers ever falter, and in a spirit of remorse, they flail themselves ferociously with brambles or chains or live snakes, whatever their particular social circle deems the appropriate whipping material.
The second most frequently asked question posed to every writer by readers (hereinafter “The Question”) is
Where do you get your ideas?
The noun
ideas
is frequently modified by an adjective like
fascinating
(which brings a smile to the author’s face),
crazy
(which inspires a wince), or
hilarious
(which occasions delight in the author if the book under discussion is one of his comedies, but plunges him into a foul mood if the book is one without a single comic line).
Because a wise writer is grateful to his readers, he politely answers The Question as best he can. A third of the time, the reader will not sincerely care where the writer gets his ideas; he has asked The Question only as a prelude to pitching an idea of his own, which he wants the target novelist to write for him. Frequently, this is not a genuine reader; he has not read a novel since some well-meaning teacher destroyed his love of literature by subjecting him to
Silas Marner
in the eighth grade; he is instead a person who fantasizes about being a writer (hereinafter “The Megalomaniac”). “My idea is yours for nothing, ” The Megalomaniac often says. “All I want is to have my name on the cover.” As often, he will instead say, “All I want for the idea is half the income. ”