The God Project

by John Saul

  And so, at last, it was out in the open. As he watched Hamlin, Randolph realized that he had known it for years: At some point this moment would come. And he had even, deep inside of himself, known what the outcome would be. Hamlin was right. The project was far too extensive and far too close to completion to be abandoned now, unless Hamlin himself agreed to it. And barring the possibility of immediate exposure, and the inevitable end of the project that would follow, nothing would make George Hamlin agree to suspend the project.

  So now it was Hamlin who was in control, and as Randolph began trying to adjust himself to his new circumstances, he suddenly remembered the name Hamlin had suggested for the experiments so many years ago.

  The God Project.

  Now, as it neared completion, Randolph realized that Hamlin himself was playing God.

  Chapter 19

  RANDY CORLISS GLARED at the instruction book, his face screwed into an expression that combined concentration with disgust. “It’s wrong,” he said, his eyes moving from the picture to the Lego construction that he and Eric Carter had been working on since lunchtime. The pieces—blue, red, and yellow—were strewn across the floor of Randy’s room. “I don’t see how they expect us to figure out what’s underneath the battle deck.”

  Eric rocked back, balancing himself on the balls of his feet, and stared at the model. “So what if it’s wrong? It doesn’t have to be just like the picture. We can make it any way we want to.”

  “But it should be right,” Randy insisted. He pointed to a bright blue plastic gun mount “That should be farther back, and there’s supposed to be something else in front of it Only I can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be.”

  “Lemme see.” Eric picked up the book, stared at it for a moment, then made a face. “I can’t even figure out what step we’re on.”

  “Fourteen. Right here, after the bridge and the flight deck go on.” While Eric studied the diagram, Randy wandered over to the open window and gazed out at the lawn below. The day had warmed up, and there was a dank humidity to the air that made it hard to breathe. Unconsciously, Randy’s right hand moved to the bars over the window. “Did you ever feel like running away?” he suddenly asked.

  “I did last year,” Eric replied.

  “I mean from here. Do you ever want to run away from here?”

  “Why should I?”

  “I don’t know. Just to see if you could, I guess.”

  “Naa.” Eric went back to the diagram, comparing it carefully to the half-finished model on the floor. “I got it!” he exclaimed. “Look!”

  Randy glanced once more out the window, then returned to the model. Eric was busy pulling the superstructure apart. When he was finished, he began counting the tiles from the bow of the ship to the stern, then grinned at Randy. “See? We didn’t put in enough tiles on the deck. That’s why there’s no room for the lifeboat.”

  And then, as Randy began examining the model, an odd, choking noise came from Eric. Randy looked up, then frowned.

  Something was wrong with Eric. His eyes were opened so wide, they seemed to bulge from his face. His mouth hung slack, and a strange gurgling noise bubbled from his throat.

  “What’s wrong?”

  But Eric made no answer. Instead, as Randy watched, his arms began to flail, and the color drained slowly from his face. In a moment, his flesh had taken on a bluish hue, and he had toppled over onto his side. His legs jerked spasmodically, and then he was still.

  “Eric?” Randy’s voice suddenly grew into a scream of fear. “Eric!”

  Leaving his friend lying on the floor, Randy ran from his room, his terror translating into a scream that echoed through the entire building.

  Louise Bowen was sitting moodily in her tiny office, trying to decide what to do. She knew she shouldn’t have lingered outside Dr. Hamlin’s door, knew she shouldn’t have listened to his conversation with Paul Randolph. In fact, she hadn’t heard the entire conversation, but when Dr. Hamlin had suddenly raised his voice and begun shouting about the children, she couldn’t help but overhear him.

  So now, after three years at the Academy, she knew that all her suspicions were true. To Hamlin, the children simply weren’t human. And in a way, Louise suspected he might be right. These children were different from other children. Yet they still had names, they still had personalities, they still thought, and felt, and reacted just like all the other children she had ever known.

  And deep in her heart, Louise reacted to them as she always had to children. She cared about them, loved them. Every time one of them died, she felt as if she’d lost a baby of her own.

  It was time, she reluctantly decided, for her to leave the Academy.

  The decision made, Louise pulled a pad from her desk and began composing her letter of resignation. She wrote out the first draft quickly, and was about to begin rewriting it when Randy Corliss’s scream rang through the house. Reflexively, she dropped her pen and dashed out of her office into the foyer just as Randy Corliss, his face pale and his eyes wide with fear, charged down the stairs. He looked wildly around; then, seeing Louise, he hurled himself into her arms.

  Louise dropped to her knees, holding the boy close. “What is it, Randy?” she asked. “What’s happened?”

  “It—it’s Eric. He’s—I think he’s dead!” Randy’s words dissolved into a choking sob as his body heaved with emotion. And even while part of Louise’s mind accepted his words and began to make all the decisions concomitant to yet another death at the Academy, a voice sounded deep within her.

  He’s human, it said. This little boy is human.

  Slowly, she disentangled herself from Randy, and, holding him by the hand, began leading him back upstairs.

  “Where is he?”

  “In—in my room. He’s on the floor, and he’s all blue, and—” Randy broke off, his sobs overcoming him once again. Louise said nothing more until they were in Randy’s room and she had checked Eric Carter’s body for any signs of life. As she had expected, there were none. She pulled the spread from Randy’s bed, covered Eric’s body, then led Randy out of the room.

  Keeping the terrified little boy with her, she moved to the desk at the head of the stairs, picked up the telephone, spoke into it for a moment, then started down to the first floor.

  Randy hesitated at the top of the stairs. “Aren’t we going to do anything?”

  “There’s nothing we can do, darling,” Louise said quietly. Taking Randy by the hand once more, she led him down the stairs and into her office. She closed the door, then took Randy to a sofa, sat down, and drew him into her lap. Randy, despite his size, made no move to resist His arms slipped around her neck, and he rested his head against her breast. For a long time, neither of them said anything, and when Randy finally broke the silence, his voice was shaking.

  “What happened to Eric?”

  Louise wondered how to answer the boy. She knew that she should make up a story. Eric has been sick for a very long time, she would say, and his death wasn’t unexpected; what happened to him certainly wasn’t going to happen to Randy.

  And she knew that she couldn’t.

  She’d done it so many times before, talked to so many frightened little boys who had lost their friends, told so many lies to so many children.

  With Randy she wouldn’t lie.

  “We don’t know what happened to Eric,” she said at last.

  Randy was silent for a moment, digesting what he’d just been told. Then he asked, “Is that what’s going to happen to me? Am I gonna die too?”

  It happens to all of you here, Louise thought. But how could she tell Randy that? She couldn’t. She felt Randy tense in her arms and knew her silence must be terrifying to him, but still she couldn’t bring herself to lie to him. Not to him, not to any of them, not ever again. And yet, did she have the right to frighten Randy so? She tried to think of something she could say that would ease his terror. I don’t think it hurt Eric very much. I think it happened very quickly. I suppose
it must have been sort of like fainting. “Have you ever fainted?”

  “No.”

  “I have. Just once, but I remember it very well. I was fine one minute, and then all of a sudden I started sweating, and things started going black. And then I woke up, and it was all over. It didn’t hurt. It just felt sort of—funny.”

  “But you woke up,” Randy said. “Eric won’t.”

  “No,” Louise whispered. “He won’t.”

  And it does hurt, Randy added to himself. Miss Bowen hadn’t been there and didn’t know. But he’d seen Eric’s eyes and the expression on his face. He’d heard the awful sounds Eric had made and watched him turn blue. He’d seen Eric’s arms waving helplessly in the air and watched him wiggle on the floor.

  Deep in his heart, Randy was sure that dying hurt a lot.

  He didn’t want to die, and he didn’t want to hurt. But he didn’t know what to do about it. All he knew was that he’d just found out what happened to all the boys who disappeared. They died. And they died because they were at the Academy.

  Here. It happened here.

  So, if he could get away …

  But where could he go? He couldn’t go to his father. His father had sent him here, so his father must have—

  The thought was too horrible, and he made himself stop thinking it.

  His mother.

  Somehow, he would have to get away from here and find his mother.

  He snuggled closer to Louise Bowen, but in his mind he was nowhere near her. In his mind, he was with his mother.

  If he was with his mother, he wouldn’t die …

  Sitting at his desk in the Eastbury police station, Carl Bronski loosened his necktie, opened the collar of his shirt, and cursed the anachronistic regulation that forbade the wearing of summer uniforms before June twenty-first. But even as he felt the freedom of releasing his neck from the too-tight collar, he realized that it was neither the heat of the day nor the weight of his uniform that was keeping him from concentrating on the file that lay open and unread on his desk.

  Rather, it was the conversation he’d had last night with the Corlisses and Sally Montgomery. It had been on his mind all morning, and now, in mid-afternoon, it kept picking at him, niggling at him, demanding his attention when he should be thinking about other things. At last he stood up, retrieved the Corliss file from the cabinet, and took it to the chiefs office.

  Orville Cantrell, whose florid face and close-cropped white hair had never quite seemed to fit with the warmth of his personality, waved Bronski into a chair, and brought his telephone conversation to a close. Dropping the receiver back on the hook, he rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Wanna go out and bust Harrison’s peacock again? Old Mrs. Wharton still swears she hears a baby crying in his barn.” When Bronski failed to respond, Cantrell held out his hand for the report his sergeant obviously wanted him to see. He glanced at it, dropped it on his desk, and shrugged. “Runaway. I’ve already seen it.”

  “Except I’m not so sure it’s a runaway.”

  “Aw, come on, Carl, they’re taking off younger every year. And this one’s got a previous.”

  “Still, I don’t believe it.”

  “I’ve got a couple of minutes—explain.”

  As carefully as he could, Bronski tried to explain what Lucy Corliss and Sally Montgomery had discovered, leaving nothing out, including Sally’s suspicions about Dr. Wiseman. But even as he unfolded the tale, he suspected that Cantrell was only half-listening, and when he was finished, the chief confirmed it.

  “You find out anything about that burglary down at the A&P?”

  “I thought we were talking about Randy Corliss.”

  “Carl, you were talking about Randy Corliss. I was thinking about the A&P. Charlie Hyer’s giving me a lot of trouble about that—thinks we should have solved it by now.”

  “And Lucy Corliss thinks we should have found her son by now,” Carl Bronski said doggedly. “Now I ask you, Orv, which is more important—a couple of thousand dollars, or a nine-year-old boy?”

  “To Charlie? The couple thousand.”

  Carl groaned. “Come on.”

  Cantrell leaned back and folded his hands behind his head. “Carl, I’m gonna tell you something. When I was your age, which I grant you was quite a ways back, I thought I could spend all my time trying to solve the cases I thought were important But you know what? I found out that every case is important to the people involved. I know it sounds lousy, but to Charlie Hyer, his couple of thousand are just as important as Lucy Corliss’s little boy.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t agree.”

  “Which is why you’re a sergeant and I’m the chief.” Cantrell glanced at the clock. “Now, you’ve got half an hour of duty left, and I want you to spend it on that A&P file. As far as we’re concerned, Randy Corliss is a runaway—”

  “Didn’t you even listen to me?”

  “I heard you, and it sounds to me like you got suckered in by a couple of hysterical women who don’t want to face reality. What have they got? A bunch of crap out of a computer that probably doesn’t even mean anything to the people who put it ini Know what I read? I read that ninety-some percent of everything that goes into computers is never even looked at again. It’s just stowed away and forgotten. Hell, as far as I can tell, nobody even knows what a in the damn computers anymore. So I don’t want you wasting your time trying to figure out what those numbers you were talking about mean.” As Bronski started to protest, Cantrell held up a restraining hand. “Carl, I’m sorry about Randy Corliss running away, and I’m sorry that other woman’s baby died. Hell, I’m sorry about a lot. But when you talk about Arthur Wiseman maybe ‘doing’ something to his patients, I’ve got to think something’s wrong. Are you starting to get the picture?”

  Bronski stood up. “I get it. No more duty time on Randy Corliss, right?”

  “Very right.”

  Bronski started out of the chiefs office. He had the door half-open when Cantrell spoke again, this time in the soft tones his men referred to as his “off-duty” voice.

  “ ’Course, I can’t really be held responsible for what you do on your own time, can I? And you might want to keep in mind that even when you’re not here, the lights are on, the telex works, and nobody really gives a damn about what facilities are used for what case during what hours.”

  Bronski turned back. “Did you say something?”

  The off-duty voice disappeared as fast as it had come. “I didn’t say a damn thing, Sergeant Now get back to work.”

  Bronski pulled Cantrell’s door shut as he left the office and started back toward his own desk. In the far corner, the telex suddenly began chattering, and Bronski changed course to go over and watch as the tape spewed out of the machine.

  There was the usual lot of APBs, mixed with some idle chatter among operators who had become equally idle acquaintances over the years. One item caught Bronski’s eye. It was from Atlanta, Georgia, a request for any information about a boy who was assumed to be a runaway. His name was Adam Rogers, and he was nine years old. The message was being sent to Eastbury because the boy’s father had once lived there, and the mother thought the child might be looking for him. The name of the father and his last known address followed the body of the communiqué.

  Carl Bronski frowned, then reread the message. The thing that struck him as odd was that the last name of the father was not Rogers. It was Kramer, Phillip J. Kramer.

  Bronski was suddenly uneasy. “Anybody on this?” he asked the desk sergeant.

  The sergeant didn’t even look up. “Since it just came in, it doesn’t seem likely, does it?”

  “Then I’ll take it myself.” He tore the strip of paper out of the machine and took it back to his desk. After rereading the message one more time, he picked up the Eastbury phone book and flipped to the K’s.

  No Phillip Kramer was listed.

  Turning to the city directory, he looked up the address. The current occupants were Mr. and Mrs. Roland
P. Strassman.

  Bronski picked up the phone, dialed their number, and a moment later was talking to Mrs. Roland P., whose name turned out to be Mary.

  She and her husband had bought the house from Phillip Kramer eight years ago.

  No, Mr. Kramer had not been married. Yes, she was sure. In all the papers she and Rolly had signed, Mr. Kramer had always been referred to as “a single man,” which had struck her as funny, even though Roily had told her it was the proper way to talk about someone in legal papers. So she was sure Mr. Kramer hadn’t been married.

  Bronski thanked her for the information, then sat at his desk, thinking.

  His mind kept coming back to the telex.

  First the chief had mentioned it, and if Bronski knew Cantrell as well as he thought he did, there was a reason. And then this message, which seemed totally irrelevant, yet made him uneasy.

  Nine-year-old boy. Father’s name different from son’s.

  Unwanted child?

  Possibly born in Eastbury?

  Bronski looked at the clock once more, then at the closed door of Orville Cantrell’s office. Making up his mind, he buttoned his collar and slipped into his coat As he started out of the building, the desk sergeant grinned at him. “Hot case, or cold beer?”