Anna To The Infinite Power (17 page)

As soon as he finished eating, he called Dr. Barrett’s office, identified himself, then asked if there was any news about Anna.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to check with Dr. Barrett, but he’s out of town today,” the nurse said.

“When will he be back?”

“Not until Monday.”

Monday! That meant they would learn nothing about Anna until then, even if a report came through. Rowan hung up, feeling frustrated. Eleven days now, and the doctor had led them to believe it would be only a week! Surely they were entitled to some word by now.

He remembered that Anna had said that the name of a Dr. Jelliff appeared on her files. Undoubtedly the man would be stationed at San Clemente Island. Even if he could reach the doctor by phone, Rowan was sure he would learn nothing. Besides, it was Anna he wanted to talk to. There just had to be a way.

The general phone number for the U.S. Research and Development Center on the island was available to everyone, even though individual extensions were not. As Rowan thought about it, a wild idea struck him. He debated with himself for a few minutes, then picked up the phone and rang the center. What did he have to lose?

When the operator answered, he affected a deep tone and said, “This is Dr. Jelliff. I’m on the mainland right now, so I don’t have the Hart girl’s number--Anna Hart. Will you look it up and put me through to her room?” He held his breath.

“That would be in The Cottages, wouldn’t it?”

“Umph,” Rowan said in a grunt that could be taken any way that would accommodate the situation.

There were a few seconds of silence, then, “That would be room 117. I’ll ring now.”

Was it really working? In another moment, a quavery voice said, “Hello.”

That surely couldn’t be Anna. “Is this Anna Hart’s room?”

“Yes.”

“May I speak to her?”

“This is Anna Hart.”

Relieved, he said, “Anna, don’t you recognize my voice?”

“Rowan! Is it really you?” Before he could even answer, she blurted, “Oh, Rowan, I’m so scared. I don’t know what they’re going to do to us tomorrow.”

Her urgent tone frightened him. “Us? What do you mean?”

“They’re all here, Rowan--all the Anna -- ”

The line went dead. Cut off! He immediately rang the center back. “This is Dr. Jelliff again,” he told the operator. “I was talking to room 117 when I was cut off.”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken--doctor. There’s no room number like that here.”

He started to object, then realized that the operator must have deliberately cut him off. He hung up, angry, defeated. Now there would be no chance of talking to Anna again. Obviously she had been about to say that all of the other Anna Zimmermans were there, too. Why? Could they all have cell problems? And what were they, as Anna called them, about to do to all of the girls tomorrow? Anna had sounded as if she believed them all doomed.

Could government scientists do something like that? Kill people to destroy the proof of what would certainly have been considered a controversial experiment? Of course not! What would they tell the girls’ families? That they had all died of natural causes? But how could one prove otherwise? Rowan paced nervously around the apartment. Tomorrow. The more he thought about it the sicker he felt. Something was going on--something bad. He felt it--no, knew it from the tone of Anna’s voice. Whatever it was, someone had to stop it. Now. Today. Tomorrow could be too late.

He got on the phone to try to call his parents. His father could not be located. His mother was tied up with a critical experiment that could tolerate no interruptions. Although he left messages for both of them, he realized they might well be busy all day.

The play-offs! God, he’d almost forgotten. He got on the phone again and called the man who was handling the competition, asking if he could possibly postpone this last trial.

“This is a concert, Hart,” the man said. “There are other students involved besides yourself. Not only that, one of the judges is the New York Times’ music critic. He’ll be flying home tomorrow. No, Hart, you’ll have to appear this afternoon or forfeit your chance at the scholarship.”

Rowan hung up, feeling even more despairing. He’d had the notion that if he tried, he could somehow get to San Clemente, even if he had to sneak aboard a hydrofoil. They ran every three hours, he’d found out when he and his parents had seen Anna off.

But there was the concert, the chance of the scholarship. He couldn’t give that up. Couldn’t!

Anna, fully clothed, lay on the bed, staring vacant-eyed at the ceiling. The attendant had just left a late-afternoon snack in her room, but she wasn’t at all hungry. She glanced at the calendar on the wall, a calendar used by all of the former occupants of the room, as well as by Anna, to count the passing days with a line drawn through each. Tonight she would cross off the twenty-seventh of February.

The twenty-seventh of February . . . She kept going over the date in her mind. It seemed to her that in some other life the day had some important meaning. Now she couldn’t remember what it was. And did it matter anyhow after what she had overheard yesterday? Never had she felt more alone, more depressed. She was going to die, but not of natural causes. They were going to kill her. And did that matter any more than the twenty-seventh of February? Surely it was better to die than to live on thinking of yourself as a freak, someone who really wasn’t anyone. A shell of a person, that was all she was. No wonder she’d so often experienced that strange feeling of incompleteness.

She was so immersed in her melancholia that she was only dimly aware of the light knock on her door. She ignored it. The attendant had undoubtedly come back for the snack dishes. The woman always rapped before unlocking and entering. When the knocking continued, Anna glanced fretfully at the door. She couldn’t open it from the inside. The attendant should certainly know that.

When the sounds grew more urgent, Anna got off the bed and went over to the door. “Who is it?” she called.

A muffled voice said, “Anna, open up.”

Rowan? No, it couldn’t be. “Who is it?” she said again.

“Rowan. Let me in before someone sees me.”

It was Rowan! She couldn’t believe it. “I can’t open the door, Rowan. It’s locked. Go around back. There’s an alley. I’ll be looking for you.”

When she heard his footsteps hasten away, she ran out into her patio, dragged the metal table over to the back wall, got up on it, and waited. Each Cottage unit had five rooms side by side with passageways between units. Rowan came through one of them and into the alley. When he spotted her, a finger over her lips cautioned him to be quiet. She pointed to one of the trash cans that sat along the backside of the wall. He understood immediately. With as little noise as possible, he moved the can to a spot below Anna. He hopped up on it, then hoisted himself over the wall, and onto the table. Quickly, they both jumped down into the patio. She led him into her room and closed the sliding glass doors.

He stared at her anxiously. “Why are you locked in?”

She shrugged. “It’s the way they do things here. They don’t want you prying into secrets.” She noticed that his jacket looked wet. “How did you ever get here? How did you get so wet?”

“I stowed away on a hydrofoil--a supply ship. I was outside with the cargo, so I took some of the spray until I smartened up and got under a tarpaulin.”

“But how did you get past the guards on the island?”

“While the crew was unloading, I left with a bunch of passengers. I tried to lose myself among them until I discovered they were lining up to show identification. Then I didn’t know what to do. I hung around the dock for a while, trying to look as if I belonged there. When the crew finished unloading, they started carrying boxes on their shoulders and heading up past the guards toward a warehouse. All they seemed to do was point back toward the ship and the guards motioned them on. I waited until the last man was far enough ahead so that he wouldn’t notice me. Then I took a box, did the same thing, and it worked.”

“But how did you find me?”

“Simple. When I called you, I found out you were in something called The Cottages, and the operator mentioned your room number. These are the only buildings that look like cottages, and they’re all numbered outside. I acted as if I had every right to be here, and no one stopped me.”

Anna couldn’t get over it. Rowan had taken an awful chance to come to her. She was so happy to see him, yet terrified to think of what would happen if he was discovered. She tried to keep the sound of panic from her voice as she said, “Oh, Rowan, you shouldn’t have come here. You’ll be caught.”

“No, I won’t,” he said stubbornly, but she could see the look of fear in his eyes. “Besides, it was the only way to find out what was going on.” He placed the small flight bag he was carrying on her dresser. “Now tell me what’s happening. And what did you mean about tomorrow?”

Anna told him about meeting the two girls who, she was certain, were Anna Zimmerman clones. “I’m not sure, but I think they’re all here, Rowan. The second girl I met said there was another girl about our age just two rooms down from her. For some reason, they had to test all of us at the same time, but they’re trying to keep us apart.”

“What’s supposed to happen tomorrow?”

Her voice trembled as she said, “They’re going to do away with us.”

He shrank back in horror. “Oh, my God, Anna--what makes you think a thing like that?”

She sat down on her bed to steady herself as she told him. “I had my last test yesterday. When the nurse finished with me, I had to wait for the attendant to come pick me up and take me back to my room. She was late, so I decided to go back to the doctor who had tested me and ask him when I’d be going home. When I got to his office the door was open. I was about to go in when I heard someone say, ‘The Anna Zimmerman reports are all in now.’ “

When she paused, Rowan said, “Is that all?”

“No. I recognized the voice of the doctor I’d just seen. He said he knew all about the outcome of the tests. Then I heard him ask, ‘What does Jelliff plan to do about it?’ “ Anna’s lips quivered. “The other man said, ‘Get rid of them, of course. What else can he do?’ The doctor asked when, and the man said, ‘Saturday.’ “

Rowan sat down beside her, silent, stunned, to reflect for a long time on her words. Finally, he said, “That doesn’t have to mean what you think.”

“Oh, Rowan, if you’d been here as long as I have, going through all those tests, you’d know what it meant. Every time a doctor examined me, every time one looked at my test results, I could tell what he was thinking, even when he didn’t say anything. I could see it in his eyes, in the way he frowned. The experiment is going terribly wrong and they don’t know what to do about it.”

Again Rowan was silent. Before he’d left home he had tried to prepare for every eventuality. He had left a note for his mother and father, telling them where he was heading. He had even devised several plans. A, B, and C, he’d called them. Now he decided the circumstances called for the ultimate plan, Plan C. He glanced at Anna’s beige sweater and skirt, then opened the flight bag, taking out what Anna recognized as her navy blue slacks and jacket, as well as Rowan’s old watch cap. “I wasn’t sure you’d have any dark clothes with you,” he said, handing them to her. “Hurry and put them on. It will soon be dark and you won’t be so easily seen in these. As soon as you’re ready, we’re getting out of here.” Even if those doctors hadn’t meant what Anna feared, Rowan was taking no chances. It was hard for him to believe his government would kill, execute innocent people, but he knew from his history books that governments, even his own, had sometimes committed heinous crimes. Although it had happened many years ago, he remembered reading about how a branch of the government, as an experiment, had given some unsuspecting man LSD. The man had jumped out of a window and died. Suicide, the government had said at the time. And then there was this experiment with Anna. No, he was not about to trust the government.

Anna knew he meant for both of them to try to sneak off the island, but there were some things he wasn’t considering. “Rowan, even if we made it home, they’d find me there and make me come back.”

“If we can just get out of here, we’ll fight this. I’ll find someplace to hide you--or Dad will.”

“There’s something else you haven’t thought of. You don’t know what’s going on with me. What if I get terribly sick or weird things happen to me? What if my arms and legs rot away or some other awful thing happens?”

“Anna, don’t talk that way!” Sure, he thought, she was changing, but that was natural at her age. If she looked thinner and paler, it was because of worry, stress, because of all she’d been through these past weeks. “Besides, even if you should get sick, at least you’ll be with someone who cares about you.” Someone who cares about you. The words took

Anna aback. For a very long time now she had believed that no one cared about her.

“Hurry up and change,” he said.

Anna hurried into the bathroom and quickly changed. When she returned to the bedroom, she grabbed the snack the attendant had left earlier, a couple of high-nutrition bars. As she thrust the food into Rowan’s flight bag, she noticed the gift-wrapped box at the bottom and drew it out. “What’s this?”

“That was Plan A. If I was caught, I was going to play innocent and pretend I didn’t know I couldn’t pay you a visit and bring you a present. I figured that if everything was all right here, that maybe they would let me visit you.”

“Oh.” Anna returned the gift to the flight bag.

“That doesn’t mean it’s not a real gift,” he said quickly. “In fact, I bought it to give you when you came home. I didn’t even know then I’d be anywhere near this place.”

For a moment Anna’s eyes glistened with unshed tears. It wasn’t her birthday or Christmas or anything special, yet Rowan had bought her a present. She started to take the gift from the bag again, but Rowan stopped her.

“There isn’t time now,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“But what’s in it?”

“Something I hoped you’d like. You’ll see when you open it. Come on.”