Immune (25 page)

Once completed, the mansion occupied the center of 120 acres of lawns, hedges, and gardens, the entire compound surrounded by a ten-foot-tall wrought-iron fence. After his death, the estate had passed to the State of California, which had converted it to an asylum for the criminally insane.

Unfortunately for Porterville, an extremely violent inmate had escape from the compound on Christmas Eve, 1949. His subsequent atrocities had caused an uproar in the horrified community that had forced the state to close Archibald Mansion and transfer the inmates to more secure facilities elsewhere in the state.

In the years that followed, Archibald Mansion fell into disrepair. Then, in 1986 the property had been purchased by the Henderson Foundation, the old buildings and grounds restored. Renamed Henderson House, the estate now provided round-the-clock care for patients suffering from severe mental and physical handicaps.

As a private foundation, Henderson House received its funding from a combination of private charities and from the fees it charged for the care of its wards. From what Freddy had discovered in three weeks of snooping, many of the patients were the unwanted retarded spawn of the super-rich. For others at the facility, there was no background information at all, but somebody was paying the bills.

The deeper Freddy dug, the more the Henderson House creeped him out. He hadn't been sleeping a lot, but the creepiness wasn’t the cause. For one thing, he’d been following a convoluted money trail. He’d been able to call in a few favors from sources in the banking industry and at the treasury department, but the data they had provided was raw and unfiltered. And, as with all unfiltered data, someone had to do the filtering. While there was plenty here to keep an investigator busy for years, Freddy's interest was limited to recent arrivals at the facility.

He had been lucky to pick up the trail that had led him here. After he had uncovered the empty coffin of Billy Randall and the subsequent murder of Dr. Callow, the Barstow medical examiner, Freddy had tracked down Callow’s secretary. Mary O’Reilly had been at work on the day the bodies of Billy Randall and his family had been picked up from the Barstow morgue. A night at the bingo hall had netted a description of the two men who had come to collect the bodies for transport to the LaGrone funeral home in Wickenburg, Arizona.

Mrs. O’Reilly, a talkative Irish woman in her mid-forties, had remembered that the men had seemed out of place for funeral home employees. But when she had asked for identification, both men had supplied the proper credentials, which were promptly verified by Dr. Callow.

Except for the uncomfortable feeling that she had gotten from the two men, Mary could only remember one other oddity. As one of the men had removed his identification card from his wallet, a second card had fallen onto the desk. Mary had reached out to hand it back to him, but the man had scooped the ID card up fast, as if he didn’t want her to see it. Even though she hadn't been able to see much, she remembered a stylized logo, the letters HH connected in flowing golden script.

Freddy leaned forward as the auto-winder on the Nikon buzzed, directing the camera at the massive gates that blocked the entrance to the old Archibald Mansion grounds. There in flowing golden letters, the twin Hs of Henderson House filled his lens.

Power. The pulse rippled through every fiber of his extended being, from the nerve endings in his skin, along the neural pathways in the alien computers, crawling along the mechanical systems of the ship itself. Raul had never felt such exultation.

Even though it had been what he was hoping for, the resulting energy produced from this one tiny wave packet disrupter surprised him. It was only one cell in a shipboard power production grid that had once enjoyed billions working in tandem, but it was his first major repair. And it would allow him to do so much more without worrying about draining the limited shipboard energy reserves.

The technology behind the disrupter was relatively simple but made human nuclear technology seem laughable in comparison. Raul's ability to periodically tap into the Internet had allowed him to feed on information he hadn't learned in high school, information that the ship's neural network processed effortlessly. And whatever the ship knew, Raul knew. After all, his thinking was augmented by the ship's superior, although damaged, brain.

The human concept of quantum physics was really quite funny, beginning with the dual nature of light. Because scientists couldn't figure out how a photon could act like both a wave and a particle, they just decided it was both, applying two completely inconsistent models to the same thing, a particle governed by waves of probability.

As if waves of probability could physically interfere with each other. Typical scientific nonsense.

The true comedy was in the way earth technology attacked the problem of determining the structure of matter. In order to understand how particles were pieced together, they built giant accelerators to smash particles into one another at high speed so they could watch for what pieces flew out. It was like jamming a stick of dynamite up someone’s ass and setting it off so you could examine his organs. What remained after the explosion was quite different than before.

Matter really had little to do with the notion of particles. The universe was actually made of stuff through which energy waves traveled, a substance with very tiny grains. Those waves traveled through the substance at only one speed—the speed of light.

Certain combinations of waves could combine to form stable vibrational packets, something like musical chords. Only a limited number of frequency combinations formed stable packets, and these produced the elements in the periodic table.

But there were other wave packets that did not form harmonically stable chords. Unstable packets tried to get rid of the clashing frequencies, giving off radiation as they attempted to move to a more harmonious combination.

Most human nuclear reactors were fission reactors, which packed unstable elements tightly together so that the splitting packets combined with others, producing a chain reaction. Fusion reactors crammed together two relatively stable wave packets into one massively discordant jumble. The resultant mess radiated hard in its attempt to cast off the incompatible frequencies.

Both these processes were inefficient in the extreme. The way the disrupter technology worked was different. Since every particle is composed of a specific set of vibrational frequencies, it merely had to know what those frequencies were. Then it could send a complete set of canceling frequencies, an anti-packet, which would result in an instantaneous and total release of all energy. Or it could cancel selected frequencies in the particle, resulting in controlled instability, which bled off energy at a controlled rate.

The disrupter cell could do either equally well. It could use any type of matter as fuel, although some elemental wave packets were easier to manipulate than others. Its other function was to collect the energy that had been released from the particle and pass that energy to the ship's systems. There was no need for energy storage. Matter was the stored energy.

Actually, that was not completely correct. The disrupters did require energy to start the entire process once they had been shut down. It was the one thing that had worried Raul about this test. The ship had a store of energy reserves, but these had been heavily depleted by Raul's worm fiber experimentation. And even though a single disrupter cell was tiny, there was a risk that attempting to restart the repaired cell could drain the remainder of those shipboard reserves.

Fortunately, that had not happened. Now he had power. It wouldn't be enough to let him do everything he wanted, but it would increase the amount of time he could operate the systems.

There was something he needed, and this was going to help him get it.

Raul crawled higher along the wall, the set of umbilical cables that dangled from his amputated legs trailing along behind him. Extracting a specially designed tool from a hidden niche, Raul returned to the floor, propping himself against the near wall.

Taking a deep breath, he brought the instrument down to his leg stumps, slicing deeply into the skin around the umbilical. Dr. Stephenson’s crude connections had served their purpose. It was now time to establish a more complete linkage with the ship. Besides, a tail was no fitting appendage for a child of God.

Shift.

Heather struggled to make sense of the sudden change of surroundings although she had no doubt what had happened. A fugue. It wasn’t quite right, but it was the word she had come to call the eerie dream state into which her conscious mind was sometimes summoned.

The place where she now found herself was like nothing she had ever imagined. In the gray light, it was hard to focus her vision, almost as if she drifted in a fog. All around her strange machinery filled the room, odd conduits snaking between them in a jumble of chaotic connections.

She heard something, a skittering noise, but when she tried to turn toward it she found herself unable to move, draped with some sort of invisible force that held her suspended above the floor.

Heather gasped. She hung in the air, face upward, completely naked.

Concentrating her efforts, Heather struggled, her renewed efforts having no more effect than her first. Something was with her here in the room, something that moved along the walls just outside her vision, something that was getting steadily closer.

A deep-seated dread consumed her, rising in intensity with each passing second. Heather increased her concentration, casting away the self-image-imposed limitations that usually blocked her from using all of her neurally enhanced strength. Straining until it seemed that she would tear every muscle in her body, Heather failed to produce the slightest change in position. She couldn't wiggle so much as a finger or a toe.

As a small child, she had once tried to crawl through a drainage pipe and had gotten stuck, her arms pinned to her sides. It had taken the fire department two hours to get her out. The sense of claustrophobic panic Heather had felt in that pipe washed her once again, hyperventilation further constricting her chest.

The other thing in the room was close now, so close she could feel the subtle current in the air from its excited breathing. In that air, Heather could feel a sick desire radiating toward her.

A hand caressed her cheek from behind, slowly making its way along her throat, the fingers quivering as they moved down along her chest. Heather braced herself against a growing revulsion, accompanied by a vague sense of familiarity, as a new purpose formed in her mind. She needed to see the face connected to that hand.

Shift.

Gasping for breath, Heather struggled to reorient herself. She was lying on a couch. As she looked up, she found herself staring directly into the intense blue eyes of Dr. Gertrude Sigmund.

"Schizophrenia!" Gil McFarland sputtered.

"Not our Heather." Anna McFarland shook her head angrily.

"I'm sorry," Dr. Sigmund said. "But your daughter is suffering from an emerging psychosis, probably triggered by the recent traumatic events to which she has been subjected."

For once Gil McFarland was too stunned to respond.

"But you said Schizophrenia," Anna continued. "Heather absolutely does not have a split personality."

Dr. Sigmund put a hand on her arm. "That is a common misconception. Schizophrenia does not imply a split personality. Your daughter is displaying some of the classic symptoms. She is suffering from delusions, hallucinations, and periodic loss of touch with reality. She is both seeing and hearing things that only exist in her head."

"So what does that mean? You said it was caused by her experiences, like post-traumatic stress, right?" Anna asked.

"No. I said that her psychosis was probably triggered by the traumatic events. I'm afraid that this condition is a disease of the mind, a disorder that can be treated but for which there are no cures."

Anna gasped, her hands flying to her mouth.

Gil's jaw clenched. "I can't accept that. I want a second opinion."

Dr. Sigmund nodded. "I understand. But you should know that I have already consulted with two of the top psychiatrists in the country, Dr. Edwards and Dr. Mellon from the Henderson House Hospital in California. After reviewing the case file, they are both in agreement with my diagnosis. Nevertheless, I will fully support your desire to get another opinion from a doctor of your choice."

Anna McFarland's knees buckled, and she would have fallen if not for her husband’s strong hands catching her and guiding her into the chair.

Sliding into a chair beside her, Dr. Sigmund leaned forward. "I know this is a shock, but I think it is very important that you hear it. Your daughter needs treatment before her condition worsens, which it certainly will. I have to warn you that right now is the time to act, before she becomes a threat to herself and to others. Her psychotic episodes are increasing in frequency and intensity."

"What kind of treatment do you think she needs?" Gil McFarland asked. "Counseling? Group therapy?"

Dr. Sigmund paused, a sympathetic look on her face. "I'm afraid that in a case such as Heather's, those methods will not suffice, although they may be helpful to you in learning to deal with her condition. She needs to begin a regimen of antipsychotic medication. Normally I would recommend olanzapine, but for Heather I would like to start with risperidone."