God Project (36 page)

“There is no question about these statistics? No possibility of a mistake?”

“None worth talking about,” Sally said, composed now.

“I suppose not,” Wiseman said almost to himself. “I can remember too much of it all—”

“Then you
did
know,” Sally flared.

Wiseman stared at her with eyes that had suddenly aged. “No,” he said softly. “I should have, but I didn’t You have to understand—all this happened over so many years. What I remember are incidents. The babies—the ones that died. We don’t forget them, you know. We learn to deal with the things that happen to children, we even learn to accept their deaths. But we don’t forget.” His eyes moved away from Sally, moved to the coffee table where, on the top of the stack, the list of children
in Group Twenty-one lay. Once again he scanned the names. “They’re my children. All of them.”

Sally bit her lip. “Julie wasn’t your child. She was my child. Mine and Steve’s.”

“I didn’t mean it that way—”

“What are they doing?” Sally demanded. “What is CHILD doing?”

“Sally, I’ve known you all your life, and you’ve known me. Can you really believe that I would know about some sort of conspiracy and remain silent?”

But Sally was implacable. “Then why does it all come back to you?”

Wiseman shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know. I haven’t the slightest idea.” He picked up the medical records and began going through them. Suddenly, he looked up. “What about the chromosome analyses?”

Malone frowned. “What about them?”

Wiseman handed him the medical records of the children in Group Twenty-one, his expression uncertain. “I order a chromosome analysis on a child only if there’s reason to suspect a problem. And even then, I have to rely on the specialists to identify a defect in a particular chromosome and analyze it.”

“So?”

“So, the records of all those children in Group Twenty-one indicate that a complete chromosome analysis was done, but there were no indications of any abnormalities.”

Malone’s eyes fixed on the older man. “Then who ordered the analyses? And why?”

“I’m sure I don’t know—”

“Don’t you?” Malone challenged, his voice icy. He turned to the others. “It’s the obstetrician who orders tests like these. They’re usually done prenatally, when there’s a suspected problem with the fetus. But with all these children, there were no apparent problems, none whatsoever. Until they were born, and began dying.” He turned back to Wiseman. “So my question, Arthur, is, who ordered these tests, and what were they looking for?” Without waiting for the old doctor to answer,
Malone plunged on. “I think the first part of the answer is clear: You were the obstetrician for all of these children. But what were you looking for? Is there something genetically abnormal about these children that
isn’t
reflected in the chromosome analyses?”

Wiseman seemed to sink deeper into his chair, and the records he was holding fluttered to the floor. “My God,” he breathed. “What you’re suggesting is monstrous.”

“What’s happened is monstrous,” Malone countered, his voice suddenly level. “I’m sure you never expected anyone to find it. Not you, or anyone at CHILD. But Sally found it, Arthur. And if she could find it, others can too. So it’s going to come out We’re going to find out what you did to these children’s genes.”

“No!” Wiseman protested. “I did
nothing
to these children. Whatever’s wrong with them, it had to start with their parents. It had to!” But before he could go on, the front door suddenly flew open and Bandy Corliss burst into the room, followed by his father and Carl Bronski.

“I found it,” Randy crowed. “I found the house!”

Lucy’s eyes went immediately to Jim, who nodded. “We stopped at City Hall,” he said. “The place is owned by Paul Randolph.”

Wiseman frowned. “Paul Randolph is executive director of CHILD.”

“Right,” Bronski said. He looked curiously at Wiseman and Steve Montgomery, guessing immediately who they were. “What are you two doing here?”

Malone explained to them what had happened. “We still don’t know how it was done,” he finished. “For that matter, we don’t even know exactly
what
was done to these children’s genes. But you can bet that somehow they’ve been altered.”

“Can we find out what they did?” Sally asked.

Malone shrugged. “It depends on you. If the information’s in the computer, you’re the only one of us that can fish it out.”

Sally started to speak, but Bronski took over. “Then that’ll be your job, Sally. I want you to go to the hospital with Mark and start working with that computer.”
His eyes shifted over to Wiseman. “And I want you to go with them, is that clear?”

Wiseman, his face haggard, made a gesture with a trembling hand. “Of course,” he mumbled. “Anything …”

“The house,” Bronski went on. “I can get a search warrant for it by telephone. We think it’s empty, but I want to go in. And I’d like to take Randy with me.”

“No!”

“Lucy, there’s no other way,” Jim said.

“There must be, or you wouldn’t have come back here,” Lucy snapped. “You’d have just gone ahead and done whatever you thought you had to do.”

Now Carl Bronski spoke again. “Lucy, that isn’t it at all. We came back here because Jim wouldn’t agree to taking Randy in unless you agreed too.”

“Which I don’t,” Lucy said.

Jim Corliss sat on the sofa and drew Lucy down next to him. “Honey, you’ve got to—” Seeing the stony look in her eyes, he broke off and started over. “Of course, you don’t
have
to let Randy go. But without Randy, there’s not much point in Carl even going in there. As far as we could tell from outside, the place is empty. Carl’s excuse for getting a search warrant is that he needs to verify Randy’s story of what’s inside that house, and that means Randy has to show him.”

Lucy, too exhausted to think it all through, turned to Sally for advice.

“If it was Jason, I’d feel the same way you feel,” Sally told her. “But still, if CHILD was using that house for something—”

Lucy took a deep breath and stood up. “You’re right,” she said. “Of course you’re right. We have to know what was going on out there.” As Carl Bronski picked up the phone, dialed, then began speaking quietly to the judge at the other end, Lucy turned back to Jim. “You’ll be careful?”

“Lucy, you have to believe that I’d never let anything happen to Randy.”

“Something’s already happened to him,” Lucy whispered. She reached out and touched his arm. “But it’s
not just Randy,” she said, her voice suddenly shy. “You be careful, too. I—well, I feel as though I just found you again, and I don’t think I could stand to lose you now. Im going to need help from now on, Jim.”

“And you’re going to have it,” Jim promised.

The small group began to break up. Mark Malone packed the computer printouts into his briefcase, then led an ashen-faced and silent Arthur Wiseman out of the house.

Sally and Steve Montgomery left to take Jason to his grandmother’s, where he would stay while his parents went to the hospital to work with Mark Malone.

Carl Bronski, with Jim and Randy Corliss, prepared to return to Paul Randolph’s estate.

And then, as they were about to depart, Lucy suddenly stood up. “I’m going with you,” she told Jim. “I can’t stay here by myself—I’ll go crazy.”

Jim started to protest, but Lucy touched his arm. “I have to go, Jim,” she said softly. “I have to be with Randy, and with you.”

Their eyes met, and a gentle smile came over Jim’s face. “Wherever I go, you go?” he asked.

Lucy hesitated only a moment, then nodded. “From now on.”

   The Montgomerys drove slowly through the streets of Eastbury, Steve at the wheel, Sally sitting silently next to him, Jason in the back. Jason, too, was uncharacteristically silent, but his parents were too deeply involved in their own thoughts to notice.

It was Steve who finally broke the silence. “I’m sorry, honey.”

Her reverie disturbed, Sally glanced over at him. “Did you say something?”

“I was trying to apologize,” Steve said. “I thought-well, you know what I thought But the whole thing seemed so crazy—” He fell silent, regretting his choice of words.

“It
is
crazy.” The calmness in her voice surprised Sally as much as it did Steve; by rights she should be screaming,
or sobbing, or pounding her fists on something. Anything but this eerie sense of calm that had come over her. But she knew the calmness was only a temporary reaction, a protective device she had wrapped herself in, a screen to ward off for a little while the despair she knew was bound to overtake her when she came to grips with reality.

For reality was contained in the term that had flashed into her mind when Mark Malone had said the words “genetically altered.”

Reality was that Jason was not what she had always thought he was. He was something else, something she was unfamiliar with.

A mutant.

Not an eight-year-old boy, not the innocent and perfect product of the mating between herself and her husband.

A mutant.

Something different, something unfamiliar, something unknown.

What was he?

Suddenly all the words she had heard over the past few years held new and sinister meaning for her.

Recombinant DNA
.

She barely knew what DNA was.

Genetic engineering
.

She knew about that. That was the new science, the science that was going to offer glorious solutions to age-old problems.

But what else was it going to do? Was it going to create a glorious new world, or was it going to create a world full of altered beings,
mutants
, designed for—for what?

She didn’t know. And perhaps she never would. Perhaps whatever had been done to Jason had been done for no specific reason at all. Perhaps he was nothing more than an experiment.

The thought chilled her, and she turned around, gazing at her son, trying to fathom how he might have been changed. She reached back to caress Jason’s cheek, but
he drew back from her touch, his eyes large and worried.

“Why do I have to stay at Grandma’s?” he wanted to know.

“It’s only for a little while, sweetheart,” Sally managed to tell him through the constriction that had formed in her throat “Just a few hours.”

“Why couldn’t I stay with Mrs. Corliss, so I could be there when Randy gets back?”

Randy.

Jason and Randy.

Sally tried to remember how long they had been friends, and how long it had been since Jason had had other friends.

Thoughts flickered through her mind, disconnected thoughts that suddenly fit together.

Mutants.

Was that why Jason and Randy had become friends? Did they know about themselves and each other? Had they recognized each other long ago, sensing that the two of them, different from others, were not different from each other?

Sally sank back into her seat without having answered Jason’s question.

He didn’t look any different He looked as he’d always looked: a miniature version of his father, with the same deep blue eyes and unruly blond hair, the same energy and enthusiasm for everything, the same stubbornness.

But he was not his father’s child, nor was he his mother’s child.

Dear God, what had they done to her child? What had they done to
her?
She reached out and took Steve’s hand in her own.

“Steve?”

He glanced over at her, and squeezed her hand.

“Take care of us, Steve,” she said. “Take care of all of us.”

“I will, darling,” he promised. But even as he made the promise, Steve Montgomery wondered whether he
could keep it. There were so many questions in his mind, and so few answers.

He still wasn’t altogether sure that there was any kind of conspiracy. Wiseman, he was sure, was right. Whatever had gone wrong with the children in Group Twenty-one had started with their parents.

It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was simply a genetic weakness passed on to the next generation.

It was, actually, his fault.

His fault, and Sally’s.

CHILD, in all likelihood, was doing nothing more than watching the children, trying to isolate the defect and find a means to correct it.

So there was really nothing for him to “take care of.” All he had to do was learn to live with the fact that he’d failed his children.

Or, anyway, he’d failed Julie.

But had he failed Jason? After all, Jason had never been sick a day in his life. Maybe with Jason, he hadn’t failed at all. Maybe Jason, through some strange combination of his genes—and Sally’s—was truly the perfect child they had always thought he was.

Maybe everything was going to be all right after all.

By the time they readied Phyllis Paine’s house, he was feeling much better about everything.

Jason was fine. Jason was his son, and Jason was alive, and Jason was perfect. And in a few hours, working with Dr. Malone and the computer, Sally would find out that nothing was wrong, and they, like the Corlisses, could get back to the reality of being a family.

Steve relaxed, sure the end of the nightmare was near.

   One by one, Arthur Wiseman retrieved the medical histories of the women who had given birth to the children in Group Twenty-one, sure that somewhere in those records his vindication would be found. The pattern emerged very quickly, both to him and to Mark Malone.

It wasn’t just Sally Montgomery, and Lucy Corliss, and Jan Ransom.

It was all of them.

Forty-six women, none of whom had wanted children.

Forty-six women, all of whom he had considered to be poor risks for the pill.

Forty-six women, for whom an intrauterine device had been the indicated method of birth control.

Not an unusual number over the space of more than ten years. Indeed, Arthur Wiseman had inserted far more than forty-six IUDs over those years.

But for these forty-six, there was something else. All of them, at one time or another, had complained of one symptom or another—often a history of allergic reactions—which had suggested that their bodies might reject the intrusion of such an object.