The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume One (25 page)

While one of the other instructors tended to the rest of the
[154]
chil
dren, doing her best to calm then down, the remaining tutor—a dark-skinned African man—joined them alongside the spasming toddler. He smoothly and efficiently slid a hypodermic needle into her arm. Roberta had no idea what kind of potion the hypo held, but it clearly did the trick; seconds later she was relieved to feel the taut muscles in the little girl’s legs relax at last. The child’s breathing settled and her eyelids drooped shut as she slipped into a drugged, narcotic state.

The male instructor spoke to Erickson in Hindi, in a clear attempt to exclude Roberta from the discussion. “I was afraid of this,” he said gravely. “The medication isn’t working; the neurological aberration is too severe. She should be transferred to the Developmental Deviations Unit as soon as she recovers.”

Erickson nodded reluctantly, gently letting go of the victim’s tongue. Roberta noted deep bite marks above the woman’s knuckles. “I was hoping that wouldn’t be necessary,” the female teacher stated with obvious sadness, “but you’re right, these fits aren’t getting any better.” She sucked on her wounded fingers before delivering her final verdict on the disposition of the child. “What a waste. She’s so talented otherwise.”

Feigning incomprehension, Roberta didn’t like what she was hearing. The Developmental Deviations Unit?
Sounds to me like Chrysalis’s genetic assembly line isn’t a hundred percent foolproof just yet,
she guessed.
But what exactly do they do with the rejects? And do I want to find out?

A gentle hand took hold of her upper arm and tried to tug her up and away from the comatose child. “C’mon, Ronnie,” Takagi urged her. “We should probably get out of here. Let’s give Dr. Erickson and her colleagues some space to handle this little emergency.”

Roberta had almost forgotten Takagi was present at all. “But what was that all about?” she demanded urgently, slowly rising to her feet to interrogate her tour guide. “What happened to that little girl?”

“I’m not sure,” he stammered nervously. “I’m a biochemist, not a pediatrician.” He kept tugging on her arm, trying to escort her to the exit. “There’s nothing to worry about, though. Maggie and the others know what they’re doing, trust me.”

That’s getting harder and harder,
she thought grimly, but now was
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probably not the time to stage a major confrontation, not before she found out what had happened to Gary Seven. “Okay,” she assented grudgingly. “Let me get my cat.”

Alone of all the superchildren, only Noon had not fled screaming away from their convulsing classmate. Even now, he stood calmly by, stroking Isis’s furry head as he silently contemplated his unconscious playmate. His stern, unreadable expression offered no clue as to what was going through his genetically enhanced mind.
Is he just braver and more stoic than the other children,
Roberta pondered, as she quietly retrieved Isis from Noon’s arms,
or simply more inhuman and unfeeling?

She wished she knew.

“WHO ARE YOU?”
Sarina Kaur asked the mysterious mr. seven. “Who sent you?”

Scientific curiosity mingled with more pragmatic security concerns as she observed the caged American spy. Part of her almost hoped that he could keep on resisting the serum, just to see what the ultimate limits of his endurance were, but she was also growing impatient to extract some much-needed answers from the man in the cage.

Who was this Gary Seven, and how had he become aware of Chrysalis’s existence, despite their strenuous efforts to conceal the entire project from the outside world? What had inspired him to investigate their New York
connection in the first place, and for whom? The CIA? The KGB? Interpol? There were too many distressing possibilities, and not enough hard information to point her in the right direction.

This was simply unacceptable.
We’ve come too far, worked too hard,
she thought passionately,
to have the project compromised by unknown adversaries.

Williams hovered nervously behind her as she kept her attention focused on her captive. Seven’s shirt was stained with perspiration and spilled tea, and he leaned weakly against the bars of his cage. A day’s worth of stubble encrusted his face, which was locked in a fixed grimace as he struggled to keep his jaws clenched shut. Seven’s willpower was phenomenal, she conceded, but he
had
to crack soon; no one could resist two full dosages of the serum. It was physiologically impossible.

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Who are you?
she speculated, fascinated by the man’s superhuman resistance, despite the threat it posed to both the project and her peace of mind. Whoever he represented, he clearly had considerable resources at his disposal; a cursory examination of his so-called pen had indicated a degree of technological sophistication that quite possibly exceeded even Chrysalis’s capabilities, while his psychological discipline suggested advanced training and possibly even posthypnotic conditioning.

He really was almost more interesting as a test subject than as a spy or potential saboteur.
If I didn’t know better,
she mused,
I’d swear he was genetically engineered himself.
But that was ridiculous; Seven was over thirty at least, which meant he would have to have been conceived in the forties, which was absurd. Watson and Crick hadn’t even cracked the double helix back then. No one on Earth had been even close to engineering one-celled organisms, let alone enhanced human beings.

No one on Earth
... Intrigued and baffled by Seven’s unaccountable endurance, she began to flirt with more exotic explanations. Could Seven’s unique qualities possibly be extraterrestrial in origin? She had heard whispers about an alien spacecraft that the United States military had supposedly captured back in 1947, at a place called Roswell. Rumor had it the alien technology was still being studied at a top-secret installation somewhere in Nevada. An outlandish proposition to be sure, but her contacts in the U.S. intelligence apparatus had assured her that there was indeed some truth to the rumors.

Could it be?
she wondered, keeping a tight grip on the back of the prisoner’s head, so that he couldn’t possibly look away from her. Had the impossible Mr. Seven been created and dispatched by American scientists at Area 51, or did he come from someplace even farther away, possibly another solar system? The very thought made her heart pound with excitement. What wouldn’t she give to get her hands on some genuinely extraterrestrial DNA? Who knew what revolutionary secrets such a genome might hold?

Tell me who you are,
she thought urgently, staring hungrily at the glazed eyes and gritted teeth of the puzzle that called himself Gary Seven. Her free hand squeezed the handle of a porcelain teacup so
[158]
tightly that she risked snapping it in two. Jaw muscles twitched beneath the drawn skin of her drugged captive, giving him a grotesque facial tic.
Speak to me,
her eyes demanded.
Tell me where you came from. I
have
to know!

Finally, at long last, Seven seemed to succumb to fatigue and the neurotransmitter’s irresistible compulsion. His jaw sagged open and a parched whisper escaped his lips. “My name is Gary Seven,” he began.

“Good lord!” Williams exclaimed. He leaped off his stool and onto his feet. “And about time, too! I thought he was never going to crack.”

“Quiet!” she admonished him brusquely With Seven’s voice little more than a hoarse croak, the last thing she needed was Williams’s babbling in her ears. “Go on,” she entreated Seven. “Tell me more.”

His lips and tongue seemed the only part of him that was still alive. The rest of him hung limply from the handcuffs around his wrists, his arms suspended above his head. “My name’sss Gary Sseven,” he slurred, so faintly that Kaur had to strain to make out what he was saying, “Ssupervissor 194, pressently asssigned to the planet Earthh, late twentieth century. Missshhion: to prevent the human rasse from desstroying itself during the mosst critical juncture in its hissstory ...”

Kaur couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Suddenly, her wildest imaginings were coming true. If neither she nor Seven were deluded, then Chrysalis stood on the verge of implementing evolutionary developments even more significant than she conceived of before. Visions of human-alien hybrids, embodying the finest traits of two completely different sentient species, fired her imagination. “Where do you come from?” she cross-examined Seven. “Where?”

She held her breath as the crucial information dribbled out of Seven with excruciating slowness, one word at a time. “Cloaked planet, light-yearss away, located in Ssystem Zeta-Gamma-Five-Three-Ssev—”

“Wait until you see our new gel-transfer hybridization unit,” Takagi promised, in a clumsy attempt to avoid discussing that ugly and alarming incident in the classroom. He escorted Roberta briskly down a
[159]
long hallway, obviously trying to put as much distance as possible between Roberta and the scene of the disturbance. “After we drop Isis back in your room, we can go check out some of the labs on Level Five. We’re still waiting for some spare parts from America,” he babbled nervously, “but then we’ll really be able to move into high gear.”

At the moment, however, Roberta couldn’t even pretend to be interested in Chrysalis’s spiffy new jelly-whatsit. “Hold on a minute,” she protested, digging in her heels right in the middle of the wide corridor. A three-wheeled scooter bearing a couple of jumpsuited technicians zipped past Roberta and her jittery tour guide, on its way to another part of the vast underground complex. “What was that all about,” she demanded, “back at that day-care center for juvenile geniuses? What happened to that little girl?”

At first, Takagi avoided making eye contact with her, studiously contemplating the tops of his sneakers instead, but he soon realized that there was no getting around this conversation. “That wasn’t supposed to be part of the tour,” he explained, somewhat unnecessarily, “but I’m sure it wasn’t really as serious as it looked.”

“That kid had a full grand mal seizure, Walter,” Roberta challenged him, just as she figured any other intelligent person would under these circumstances. “What gives? I thought these supertykes were supposed to be perfect.”

“They are!” he insisted hastily. His chin bobbed forward, propelled by the vehemence of his rebuttal. “It’s just that, well, sometimes the genetic resequencing produces some unexpected side effects. Viktor thinks it has something to do with the accelerated formation of the critical neural pathways, which may affect protein synthesis in ways we don’t entirely understand just yet, but so far—”

Roberta cut off the lecture before Takagi could stray too far from the big picture. “What sort of side effects are we talking about here?” she pressed him. “And how often do you run into this little problem?”

“Er, I’m not sure of the exact ratio,” Takagi waffled, “but I’m sure we’ll isolate the key causal factors eventually. We’re learning more and more with each new batch of kids, so it’s only a matter of time before we can account for every variable.”

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And how many defective children get churned out,
Roberta wondered solemnly,
while you’re working things out by trial and error?
Once again, ghastly pictures of limbless thalidomide babies flashed across her mind.

Takagi mustered a weak smile as he tried his best to put a positive spin on the situation. “If you’re really interested, maybe you can convince Dr. Kaur to let you tackle that project yourself. Who knows, you might be just the person to get to the bottom of this particular challenge.”

Roberta knew that wasn’t going to happen, but she decided to feign scientific curiosity in the hope of getting Takagi to open up even more. “Hmmm, that does sound intriguing,” she said thoughtfully. “But you still haven’t told me exactly what kind of side effects you’re getting. Is it just epileptic seizures?”

“Oh, most of the time, it’s not anything so dramatic,” he assured her fulsomely. “Just some minor personality disorders and/or neurological glitches: autism, hyperactivity, possibly a tendency toward schizophrenia. ... There’s nothing wrong with the basic process, though,” he asserted. “Even with these rare—repeat rare—complications, as frustrating as they can be, every one of our kids is still physically and intellectually superior to ordinary children.”

Oh, great!
Roberta thought privately.
A whole generation of emotionally disturbed super men and women!
She was starting to understand why Chrysalis had Gary Seven so worried.
And just when I’d begun to think that Seven had misjudged Takagi and the others
. ...

“I see,” she said in a noncommittal tone. Deciding to push her luck, she looked Takagi squarely in the eye and declared, with as much conviction as she could amass, “I think I need to see the Developmental Deviations Unit next.”

“What? How do you know—” Her request definitely threw Takagi for a loop. Surprise was written all over his face, and he gulped loudly before coming up with a reply. “That is, I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I understand Hindi,” Roberta informed him bluntly. She realized she was sacrificing a strategic advantage by divulging this fact, but figured it was worth it to get a firsthand look at Chrysalis’s dirty little secret. “I want to see the Developmental Deviations Unit. Now.”