Authors: John Saul
“Never mind, Mother.” Sally’s voice was cold, but Phyllis ignored it.
“No arguments! That’s what mothers are for.” But as she guided Sally and Jason out into the parking lot, she glanced back at Arthur Wiseman.
He looked as worried as she felt.
Sergeant Carl Bronski stared at the pile of computer printouts, and shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Corliss, but I’m afraid I’m just not following you.”
Once again Lucy tried to explain what the columns of numbers meant, and once again Bronski listened attentively. When she was done, though, he shook his head sadly.
“But even you admit it doesn’t really mean anything.”
“It means that CHILD is up to something,” Lucy replied. “I don’t know what, and I don’t know why, but something’s going on.”
Bronski nodded tiredly. It had been going on for two hours, and though he understood full well how Lucy Corliss was feeling, he didn’t see what he could do about it. “But if you won’t even tell me where these came from, and if you can’t really explain what they mean, what do you expect me to do?”
“I expect you to find out what CHILD was doing with my son,” Lucy said. “I expect you to do what you’re supposed to do, and investigate this.”
“But, Mrs. Corliss, there isn’t anything to investigate.
A few pages of numbers that don’t really mean anything. It’s just not something I can use to justify an investigation of an outfit the size of CHILD.”
There was a long silence. Lucy sank back in her chair. “All right,” she said, her voice suddenly calm. “How about this? How about if I talk to the person I got this information from, and they agree to talk to you, to explain what all this means? Will you at least listen to h—them?”
Her, Bronski thought. Will I listen to
her
. But who is she? Another hysterical mother? But if that’s all she is, where’d she get this stuff? Finally, he said, “Okay. You talk to her, and if she wants to talk to me, ITI listen.”
Seeming satisfied, Lucy Corliss gathered her things together and left the Eastbury police department. But long after she was gone, Carl Bronski sat at his desk, thinking.
He remembered Randy Corliss very well, and though he had never admitted it to anybody, he had had his private doubts that the boy would run away.
Yes, he decided, if Lucy Corliss’s friend wanted to talk to him, he would listen.
R
ANDY CROSSLISS LAY IN BED
in a small room at the rear of the main floor of the Academy. His breathing was steady, and all the instruments wired to his small body displayed normal readings. His hands, covered with bandages, rested at his sides. A white-clad figure hovered over him, observing him closely, comparing the readings on the instruments to the evidence displayed by Randy’s physical being.
Randy’s eyes fluttered slightly, then opened.
He looked up and frowned uncertainly. Above him, the ceiling was unfamiliar. It was the wrong color, and the cracks in the plaster weren’t in the right places.
He tried to remember what had happened. He’d been playing a game with his friends, and they’d done something to him, something that had frightened him.
He’d been running, and then they’d caught him, and—and what?
The fence. They’d thrown him against the fence, and he’d felt a burning sensation, and—and—
But there wasn’t any more. After that, it was all a blank.
Suddenly, a face loomed above him, and he recognized Dr. Hamlin, who seemed to be smiling at him.
“How are we doing?” he heard Hamlin ask.
“What happened?” Randy countered. He hated it when people acted like however you felt was how they felt too.
“You had a little accident,” Dr. Hamlin explained. “Someone left the electricity on in the fence, and you stumbled into it. But you’re going to be fine. Just fine.” He reached out to touch Randy, but Randy suddenly had a vision of Dr. Hamlin holding a scalpel, and cutting into Peter Williams’s brain. He shrank away from the doctor’s hands.
“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 altered 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.