Running Out of Time

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Then Jessie reached a glassed-in room with a sign, VISITORS LOUNGE, on the door. It held lots of sofas and chairs. Jessie couldn’t see anyone in any of the chairs, but she could hear voices coming from the room. One sounded strangely familiar.

  “—for the greater good of science,” the voice was saying. “There are always sacrifices involved in great scientific work. How many men were killed trying to fly before the Wright brothers succeeded? And how about Marie Curie?—remember, she essentially poisoned herself with radium.”

  “But all those were scientists who endangered themselves,” said a second voice, this one unfamiliar. “Not defenseless children.”

  Cautiously, Jessie stood and peeked around the corner into the visitors lounge. She was glad now that the nurses were close enough to come if she screamed for help—if the voice belonged to the person she thought it belonged to. Of course, it couldn’t be—

  The visitors lounge was empty. But the voices went on. Finally Jessie looked up and saw a large box above her head. A TV She understood now why Katie had been so upset seeing Jessie on TV For there, as clearly as she’d ever seen him, was Mr. Neeley. And Jessie’s knees trembled as much as if it were really him in front of her, ready to catch her again.

  “Mr. Neeley?” Jessie squeaked, convinced he could see her as well. He kept talking, oblivious. Jessie sat down before her legs gave out. But she stayed by the door, because she couldn’t believe she could be safe so close to Mr. Neeley.

  Mr. Neeley disappeared from the screen and another man’s face appeared.

  “We’re talking to Miles Clifton and Frank Lyle, two leaders of the Indiana diphtheria experiments,” the man said. “Both are out on bail in connection with the case. Mr. Clifton has apologized to all involved. He’s cooperating with the criminal investigation and says he wants to make restitution to the grieving families. Mr. Lyle still claims the experiment was scientifically valid and plans to sue the state of Indiana for interfering. Let’s go to the phones…. Green Swamp, Alabama, hello.”

  Now the TV showed Mr. Neeley—was his real name Frank Lyle?—and a chubby, sweating man who Jessie guessed was Mr. Clifton. But the voice Jessie heard was a woman’s, soft and drawling and angry.

  “My question’s for Mr. Lyle,” the woman said. “Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that your so-called ‘greater good of science’ was more important than those poor kids. Just exactly what did you hope to prove?”

  Mr. Neeley—for Jessie couldn’t think of him with any other name—nodded eagerly, as if he’d been waiting for that question.

  “It’s not what we wanted to prove,” he said, leaning forward. “It’s what we wanted to save. Perhaps I should have said ‘greater good of humanity’ instead of ‘science.’ You see, with our modern medicine, more and more people survive diseases that humans used to die from. That’s good—in the short term. But in the long term, the human race is weakened by all the weaker specimens surviving and passing on their weak genes. We wanted to create a strong gene pool that would endure even if the rest of humanity were wiped out—”

  “And how likely is that?” the woman interrupted sarcastically.

  “Much more than most people realize. Already we have supergerms developing that don’t respond to our strongest antibiotics. Another generation or so, and we could be back to relying on our own immune systems…. Can’t you see I wanted to save people, not kill them?” Mr. Neeley’s voice became pleading.

  Jessie couldn’t understand much of what Mr. Neeley had said. What were antibiotics? What was a gene pool? Surely he didn’t mean jeans like Jessie had worn on her trip to Indianapolis. But as confused as Mr. Neeley’s speech made her, something about it reminded her of the fat environmentalist telling her that water was poison. Mr. Neeley, like the environmentalist, was sure that he was right. Jessie’s stomach churned. Mr. Neeley couldn’t be right, could he? Weren’t Abby and Jefferson and all the other Clifton children—including Jessie herself—more important than whatever experiment he wanted to do?

  On the TV screen, Mr. Neeley’s face was replaced by Mr. Clifton’s.

  “That’s what he and the others told me,” Mr. Clifton said. “Can’t you see why I was convinced? I’m not a scientist. I have no scientific training. I only wanted to help humanity by funding their work. They said the human race would be eternally indebted…. I’m so sorry. I never knew how they were running their experiment. I never thought about children dying—”

  “Jessie Keyser!”

  Jessie jumped so high she was surprised her body landed back on the chair. She turned around to find a nurse—the one who always woke her at night to take her temperature—glaring at her.

  “Young lady, you do not have permission to be out of bed,” the nurse said. “We have the entire hospital on alert looking for you. Don’t you know we have better things to do?”

  “Well, you can stop looking now,” Jessie said. “I couldn’t sleep, and then I found this TV—”

  The nurse looked up at the TV screen and gasped. In one quick motion, she strode to the TV and flipped a switch. Mr. Clifton instantly faded into grayness.

  “You are not to watch TV,” the nurse snapped.

  “But this is about Clifton. I want to find out everything that Ma couldn’t tell me—”

  “Oh no,” the nurse said. “We have strict instructions. Believe me, this is for your own good. You’ve been very sick, and you aren’t out of the woods yet. A severe shock could send you into a relapse.”

  “Then why do you go around barking my name and scaring me half to death?” Jessie muttered.

  The nurse ignored her. “Back to bed. Now.”

  And the nurse made Jessie walk all the way back to her room, without the chair. Jessie was so worn-out when she reached her bed she couldn’t even begin to puzzle out what Mr. Neeley and Mr. Clifton had meant on TV All she could do was fall asleep.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Katie and Andrew and Hannah and all the other children got better before Jessie—“because you walked fifteen miles and climbed buildings and held a news conference when you were deathly ill,” one of the doctors told Jessie sternly.

  But none of the children were sent home to Clifton with their parents. Instead, they went to places called foster homes. A woman known as a social worker came around and explained it to each of them.

  “Your parents can’t be trusted with you yet,” she said over and over again. “The state has the responsibility of making sure they’re good parents before you can go home.”

  “Of course Ma and Pa are good parents!” Jessie exclaimed when Hannah and Andrew told her what the social worker said.

  “She says the diphtheria means they weren’t,” Hannah said. “She says Clifton wasn’t a good place to raise us.”

  “That wasn’t Ma and Pa’s fault!” Jessie fumed. “And Ma sent me for help!”

  But nobody listened to her.

  Without the other children, Jessie was lonely in the hospital. The social worker visited once or twice, and a police officer came to interview her. But they were like the doctors and nurses—only asking questions, rarely answering any. The social worker wanted to know if Ma and Pa had ever spanked Jessie and her brothers and sisters. The police officer was interested in getting evidence about what he called “criminal conduct.” Whenever Jessie tried to find out where her parents were or why the diphtheria epidemic had happened, the social worker and the police officer said, “It’s not my place to explain that.”

  Whose place was it? Jessie sneaked down to the visitors lounge on another night, but someone had taken the TV away. She asked the nicest nurse—the one who always smiled even at the end of her shift—if she could see some newspapers with information about Clifton. But the nurse said, “Not just yet. Concentrate on getting better.”

  “I’d get better a lot faster if I knew about Ma and Pa,” Jessie told her.

  The nurse paused while turning Jessie’s pillow.

  “You’re probably right. But it�
�s not my place—”

  “I know, I know,” Jessie said. “I’ve heard that before.”

  The nurse soon left. Jessie lay in her bed and wished she could have another news conference. Only this one would be reversed: This time she would ask questions.

  Suddenly Jessie sat up straight. It wasn’t a bad idea—why not try?

  Jessie slid out of bed and walked unsteadily to the ledge with the flowers people had sent her. She found the bunch of roses with the card that said, “The next time you have a news conference, I won’t doubt you at all. Get well soon. Bob Haverford, Indianapolis Gazette.”

  Jessie called Bob from a pay phone down the hall when the nurses weren’t looking. She didn’t bother with anyone else. When she told him who she was, he greeted her like his best friend.

  “Jessie! Don’t you know every journalist in the world is willing to sell his firstborn to interview you? I thought maybe you’d hold out for big bucks from the National Enquirer.”

  “I don’t want to be interviewed. I want someone to explain things to me.” Jessie told him how nobody would answer questions, and how she’d been yelled at for trying to watch TV Bob listened quietly.

  “I don’t blame you for being frustrated. I may be able to help. But my newspaper wouldn’t be too happy about paying me to deliver the news just to one person. Let’s make a deal—I’ll answer your questions if I get to ask some, too.”

  “Okay,” Jessie said.

  The reporter arrived several hours later.

  “I had to call in every single debt I had from every single hospital and state official I know,” he said as he settled into a chair beside Jessie’s bed. “I’m still not sure someone won’t show up to try and kick me out. But I can be very persuasive…. Now, who gets to ask the first question?”

  “I do,” Jessie said. She paused, suddenly a little frightened.

  Bob was a stranger, even though he had friendly blue eyes with his wiry beard and mustache. “Can I trust you?”

  Bob laughed.

  “I’m in a profession most people don’t trust, and my ex-wives would probably tell you not to trust me as far as you could throw me. But I give you my word, for what it’s worth, I’ll tell you the truth as I know it.”

  “Okay.” For some reason, that satisfied Jessie. “Where are my parents?”

  “I don’t know about your parents specifically, except that they weren’t among those arrested. The officials say most of the Clifton adults are in custody for questioning, in hospitals under observation, or back in Clifton packing up.”

  “Oh. Why can’t I see Ma and Pa?”

  Bob shifted in his chair.

  “You don’t pull any punches, do you?” He tugged on his beard. “I think the state officials feel guilty that they didn’t know about the danger in Clifton, so they’re overcompensating now. They blame your parents—all the Clifton parents—for failing to get the medical care you needed. So they’re not sure your parents can be trusted to take care of you now.”

  “But Ma sent me for help!” Jessie said.

  “The officials don’t necessarily see that as good. They think she should have gone herself, instead of putting you at risk.”

  Jessie scowled. “Didn’t I tell you in the news conference? She couldn’t fit in her modern clothes, and she would have stood out outside Clifton. She thought I could escape without being noticed.”

  “Do you mind if I write that down?” Bob asked. He pulled out a small pad of paper and began scribbling while he talked. “I’m not saying I agree with the state officials. I’m just saying that’s what they believe. They’re beginning to ask all sorts of questions, though, about whether the adults in Clifton were suffering mass delusion—like maybe they were free to go, but because they didn’t think they were free, they’re not responsible for their actions.”

  Jessie rubbed her forehead.

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “No,” Bob said. “But as I tell my daughters, if life made sense, we’d all be bored. Want to see my daughters?”

  He pulled out pictures like the ones Jessie had seen in the billfold from Ma. Jessie realized Bob was trying to calm her down. She smiled and nodded at the pictures of the three pretty blond girls, but asked her next question anyway.

  “Why was there a diphtheria epidemic? Did the tourists want us to die?”

  “Oh no, not at all,” Bob said. “The tourism was just a cover—an excuse to get your families and all the others into Clifton and living like the 1800s. Then, too, it was a way to keep people from asking why they were building such a huge compound down there. The diphtheria was part of the experiment, not the tourist site.”

  “But that’s what I really don’t understand. What was the experiment? I heard Mr. Neeley say something on TV about a gene pool—what’s that?”

  “I’m not so great with science,” Bob said. “But genes are what people inherit. A gene pool is—what characteristics are available to be inherited. Like if there are only blue-eyed people in the gene pool, no one’s going to inherit brown eyes. So the Clifton plotters were trying to create a gene pool where all the people could resist diseases.”

  Bob explained that Mr. Clifton’s scientist friends had planned all along to eventually close Clifton to tourists, introduce various diseases, and see who would survive. They had intended to wait until the first generation grew up.

  “They planned to gradually remove your parents, so there would be no one like your mother around to know cures were possible,” Bob said. “But the plotters got overeager. They stopped the modern medicine early—didn’t you say at your news conference that the Clifton doctor stopped giving out pills that worked? Then at least one of the plotters introduced a diphtheria strain. After you escaped, they rushed to close Clifton Village entirely to the outside world. But that actually backfired—it just made the media suspicious enough to show up for your news conference. And you stopped their plot.”

  Jessie shivered, still thinking about the diphtheria.

  “So Clifton’s men did want all of us to die. Like Abby and Jefferson.” She couldn’t say their names without a quiver in her voice.

  Bob shook his head.

  “No—just the weaker ones. They wanted the stronger people to live. To create the strong gene pool.”

  The explanation scared Jessie. “So scientists think it’s okay to—to let children die in an experiment?”

  “No,” Bob said. “Not at all. Other scientists are comparing this to the Nazi concentration camp experiments.”

  “The what?” Jessie asked. Would she ever understand anything?

  “I forgot you wouldn’t know about that…. Nazis were very bad people who ruled Germany—the country that you probably know as Prussia—about sixty years ago. They did terribly cruel things to other people in the name of science. And, like now, other scientists were horrified.”

  Jessie thought some more.

  “What about Mr. Neeley—Frank Lyle, I mean? I know at the news conference someone said the real Mr. Neeley was dead, and I guess Clifton’s men knew I escaped and found out who I was trying to call, but—”

  Bob chuckled. “How did Frank Lyle fool you? Is that what you want to know?”

  Jessie nodded.

  “Yes. Ma gave me Mr. Neeley’s number. How did Frank Lyle answer his phone?”

  “Lyle broke into the home of the family who got that number after the real Neeley died. Fortunately for him—or for the family, maybe—the family was away on vacation. So all he had to do was wait for you to call. Then when you did, he simply took you back to an apartment he’d rented and pretended to be Isaac Neeley.”

  “Oh,” Jessie said.

  “As near as I can tell,” Bob said, “Lyle was the ringleader of the whole thing, the one who convinced Miles Clifton to start Clifton Village. And I’d bet serious money he was the one who introduced the diphtheria early.”

  Bob stood up and stretched.

  “That’s an awful lot for you to absorb in one d
ay. Isn’t it my turn to ask questions yet?”

  “Just one more question,” Jessie said. “Can you tell the state that Ma and Pa are good parents? And that Hannah and Andrew and Nathan and Bartholomew and Katie and I want to go home with them?”

  “The state’s not going to listen to me. But if I write a story about how a brave thirteen-year-old girl who risked her life for twenty sick children just wants to see her parents and go home—”

  “I get it,” Jessie said. “What do I have to say?”

  “Whatever you really believe. Now, tell me—why do you want to go home so badly?”

  Jessie told Bob everything she could. He finished up quickly, promised to come back to visit again, and left.

  Two days later, a woman in a pink top and blue jeans knocked at Jessie’s door. Jessie blinked, afraid she was just imagining what she wanted to see. But her imagination would have worn nineteenth-century clothes.

  “Ma!”

  Jessie started to jump up and hug her, then remembered she was still too sick to move so fast. It didn’t matter. Ma was at her bed and already had her arms wrapped around Jessie’s shoulders.

  “Are you taking me home?” Jessie asked.

  “Not yet, I’m afraid,” Ma said. “Pa and I aren’t going to be allowed to do anything but visit you for a while. But, oh, Jessie, it’s so good to see you—”

  Ma hugged her tighter.

  “Ma, I didn’t get help in time. Abby and Jefferson died,” Jessie whispered.

  Ma put her hand on Jessie’s cheek.

  “I know. It’s a terrible shame—they shouldn’t have died. But you mustn’t feel guilty. It’s not your fault. And—you saved a lot of children who would have died if you hadn’t gotten help. Now, how are you? Are you okay?”

  They talked and talked until the social worker came in and said, “Time’s up.”

  Afterward, Jessie was alone again. She stared out the window. She’d had all her questions answered, she’d gotten to see Ma, and she would see Pa the next day. Ma had comforted her about Abby and Jefferson.