He made no noise cutting the sheets; if the kid inside was still awake, Slater wanted to give as little notice as possible of his approach.
The halves of the sheets fell away. Now Slater could swing the door open wide.
Putting the scissors out of reach, he took a breath before silently inserting his key into the lock.
Show time.
In one movement, he twisted the key and yanked open the door. Then he scooped the fire extinguisher into his hands and jumped backward, aiming the nozzle at the open doorway.
Nothing hurtled out at him. No boogieman. No kid. No puppies. Nothing.
Slater allowed himself to breathe.
Had the sleeping pills worked?
Eyes intent on the doorway, he gripped the fire extinguisher with his right hand and felt with the other hand for his flashlight. He clicked it on and directed the beam ahead of him. He tingled with readiness – at the slightest movement, he’d be dropping the flashlight and working the extinguisher with both hands.
Still nothing.
Slater moved ahead, not committing himself to standing directly in front of the doorway.
Still nothing.
He forced himself to breathe again.
Closer to the garage, he swept the flashlight beam into the darkness.
At first, it seemed like a pile of blankets. Then it became crumpled figures in a heap in the center of the garage.
Another cautious step. He was almost to the frame of the doorway.
Suddenly, something moved in the darkness. He slammed the flashlight to the ground and whipped the fire extinguisher nozzle to readiness.
Slater snorted. It was only one of the puppies, wandering to the light of the doorway.
Slater didn’t need the flashlight now. His eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the garage, lit by the cracks of light at the edges of the plastic on the windows. As he stepped inside, he saw that a corner of the plastic on the window facing away from his house had been peeled back. Not much, as if the kid had been too canny to want it known he’d done it.
Inside the garage, and as yet unattacked, Slater knew his doctored cola had done its work. Aside from the puppies, the crumpled figures ahead of him were the only occupants of the garage.
Now, almost to the figures, Slater gaped. His attacker last night hadn’t been a boogieman, hadn’t been a werewolf or some dark creature from a horror show. It had been two other boys.
Slater shook his head.
Three ordinary boys. At least it explained one thing – the apparent supernatural speed of the kid in the dark. If two other boys had been waiting in the bushes, circling him as he went in, naturally the small noises would seem terrifying when he assumed it was one kid moving at top speed.
Yet it begged another question. What had driven them to run away, naked and foodless? From where had they come? And why wasn’t anyone looking for them?
One at a time, Slater carried each boy from the garage to the front room inside his house. Each snored softly against his shoulder as he walked. Each fell limp against the couch as he gently set the child down.
Each time it wasn’t until he stepped into the sunlight that Slater got a clearer look at his hostages.
The first kid wore Slater’s clothes, taken from him the night they had stripped his 4 x 4 of groceries. The clothing had been ripped to shorten the sleeves and pants legs, tied with short lengths of baler twine to keep them snug.
Slater had to chuckle when he got the second outside. The kid had stolen three checked shirts, all too large, and wore all of them, giving him a bulked-up appearance. His pants were men’s shorts, baggy and reaching below his knees. His shoes consisted of a sneaker on one side, a woman’s shoe without the high heel on the other.
The third kid, of course, was a fashion statement in the loot taken from Joyce Burns’s clothesline. He wore two of her blouses and a skirt wrapped around the outside of both as if the skirt were a shawl. His pants consisted of men’s shorts similar to the second kid’s, and he wore floppy rubber boots for shoes.
Slater noted with a large grin that kid number three had found good use for a brassiere taken from Joyce Burns. He’d slung the straps over one shoulder, draping it diagonally across his body so that the massive cups dangled beneath his opposite armpit. Each of those cups was stuffed full with the bounty of their scavenging. A hunk of cheese, screwdriver, knife, hankies, and more packed beneath. Slater decided not only was it an ingenious way to jury-rig a backpack, but it was probably also less stressful on the bra than its original contents.
With kid number three on the couch beside the First two, Slater lost all of his good humor as he discovered something that bothered him very much.
He hadn’t noticed their features that closely – he’d been more aware of the different clothing on their bodies. But side by side by side, he saw now what he’d missed before.
Each was identical to the other. Absolutely identical. Same straw-blond hair. Same upturned noses, Same arch in the eye-brows. Same foreheads. Same lips.
Triplets. Absolutely identical.
Yet no matter how strange it seemed to see three boys who could have been one, it was something he could handle as coincidence or the one-in-whatever odds it took to produce identical triplets.
What disturbed him most were the numbers tattooed on their foreheads.
Chapter 8
Tuesday, May 21
Josef Van Klees, master of anything and. everything within his grasp, began to fret within seconds of losing control of this situation.
Barry Manilow.
Van Klees sat – at 6:00 A.M. mountain time, 8:00 on the eastern seaboard – waiting, with the phone against his ear. Him, waiting. Him, the man certain some day to he recognized and proclaimed with all the due his genius deserved, the man brilliantly capable of juggling all the balls and playing all the roles it took to run the Institute, the man keenly aware that each passing second was a wasted second, the man who held so much power – yet he had no choice but to endure Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs,” made worse by an elevator-music rendition.
On hold, and with no recourse, threats, or punishment to mold the situation to his needs, Van Klees fought rising fury,
He counted the ticks of his wrist watch.
Three minutes and five seconds later – thirty-five seconds into a Beatles remake that made him wince – a voice answered.
“Hello. Thanks for waiting.”
“Jack Tansworth here,” Van Klees said, proud at how he kept his anger from his modulated voice. “I have an order to place.”
“Tansworth. TechnoGen? Am I correct?”
“Excellent memory. Two points if you recall our address.”
The woman on the other end giggled. “I’m afraid I lose, With so much happening and so many different clients...”
“I understand completely,” Van Klees said. “And you have much more to worry about than details like mailing addresses. We’re in Pittsburgh.”
“Of course, of course,” she said in a tone that meant the opposite.
Instead of taking offense, Van Klees was grateful that TechnoGen remained low-profile with the clinic. Although no investigative force in the world could follow the connection from TechnoGen to the Institute, let alone physically locate the Institute, it was much better to prevent any questions in the first place. Which was one of the reasons Van Klees was forced to rely on people like this on the other end of the phone.
“Your time is valuable,” Van Klees said. “I won’t waste it. We’d like two – in cryopreservation. Have them sent overnight to Pittsburgh. A certified check for twenty-five thousand dollars will be waiting for your courier on receipt of delivery.”
“Certainly. I’m just pulling your account up on the screen. Um, how do you spell TechnoGen?"
Van Klees smiled hatred into the receiver as he complied. How he detested sloppiness.
***
Half an hour later, Van Klees finished his calls to fertility clinics up
and down the Atlantic Coast. By tomorrow, he’d have two dozen more human eggs for his experiments – and just in time, for he was almost out of stock. It was time consuming to divide the orders among fifteen clinics, but he would do it no other way. Who knew what eyebrows might be raised if he placed a single order of such magnitude?
Van Klees wasn’t even certain he liked this method. Compared to his alternatives, however, he welcomed it. Sure, he could have the eggs produced here at the Institute, but with too much risk.
Very early, he had decided to subcontract as much of the work as possible, The fewer staff within the Institute, the fewer headaches, and the fewer possibilities of a leak.
Compartmentalization. That was the key. Separate the tasks. Separate the workers. Ensure no information crossed horizontally. Let no one person even begin to guess at the overall purpose of the Institute.
The ultimate in compartmentalization, then, was to purchase as much work and product as possible from outside.
His shipments of eggs, for example. Since 1978, scientists had been uniting human egg and sperm in petri dishes. Child’s play, compared to how reproduction technology had evolved since then. New techniques made it possible to allow for fertilized eggs to be saved in a process called cryopreservation, which essentially froze the embryo for thawing and implanting in a womb when convenient.
Even though a mature women carried upward of 300,000 eggs, released one per month, Van Klees preferred to purchase eggs because – aside from needing extra and specialized staff to handle the harvesting – his own women were too valuable to risk. After all, a woman needed to be shot with extra hormones to overstimulate the ovaries, then anesthetized and sucked clean of her eggs by a needle. It was too chancy, the risk of hemorrhage and infection, the growth of ovarian cysts. Let women out there sell their eggs for two or three grand to the medical centers who in turned charged another ten grand for the handling service; Van Klees found it easier to come up with more money for an available product than to find replacement women for the Institute.
***
Life became a lot more interesting, and the situation a lot more intriguing when the boys awakened, sitting on Slater’s couch. Slater sat opposite, sipping coffee as he contemplated them and his options.
The boys were probably nine, ten years old, although Slater had not been around kids in a while and wouldn’t have placed much of a wager on the correctness of his guess.
Barefoot and without clothing, they couldn’t have traveled far. So what in the entire world, he wondered again and again, would put the three of them out here? What had been their dropoff point? Who had dropped them off? And why?
The kids woke within minutes of each other. Each one briefly tested his own bonds, then relaxed. It almost frightened Slater to see them stare at him, waiting with the patience of hunters.
“Boys, I’m a friend. Honest.” Slater said to their stares.
They only stared more.
“Look, I’ll let you call home.”
Slater didn’t expect a verbal response to his question, but he did offer his portable phone. No shake of the head from any of them, no affirmative nods.
Slater punched in zero and let the phone ring. He held the phone up to the first boy’s head. The boy flinched. Slater pressed the phone into place against the boy’s ear.
The answering operator’s voice was muted but distinct to Slater. “This is Carol. How may I help you?”
At those words, the boy bucked as if juiced by a cattle prod. Slater pulled the phone away. The boy’s eyes were on the phone, wide with surprise.
The kid started babbling to the other two, who in turn focused on the telephone.
“Interesting,” Slater said.
He dialed a local number that gave the correct time. As the phone rang, he held it against the second boy’s ear. Same results at a voice on the telephone, same wide-eyed stare, same babble.
“Come on, guys,” Slater said. “You’re not cavemen. This is a phone. As in reach out and touch someone.”
Their stares lost disinterest and were now tinged with suspicion.
On sudden impulse, Slater spun away from them and grabbed the remote control to the television. He moved behind them, extended his arm so they could see him point the remote at the television.
He thumbed the power button.
Color and sound sprang to life on the screen.
The kids pushed back in surprise, actually scrabbled with their feet in their efforts to move the couch away from the sudden noise.
When it became apparent that the television offered no harm, they leaned forward to stare open-mouthed at the screen.
“Laxative commercial,” Slater told them. “One of my favorites too.”
He clicked the power off and walked around to face the boys again.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about you guys,” Slater said.
And he did. It came back to him, the questions he’d had when inspecting his truck after they’d trashed it. They’d left a wallet with five hundred in cash. It couldn’t be, could it, that they didn’t even understand the concept of money? Yet they’d left the radar detector, the cellular phone, cassettes. Hungry enough to steal his bread and perishables from the grocery bags, they’d left the canned goods.
No way, Slater told himself, everybody in the world knows about storing food in sealed cans.
He stepped to the wall and flicked on the light switch. Flicked it off again. Did it a few more times to be sure they understood the correlation between the light switch and the light. Nothing in their faces registered interest.
“Call me a fool,” Slater said to their blank stares. “I found it fun.”
He retrieved a hair dryer from the bathroom, plugged it in near the couch, and switched it to high. The roaring startled the boys.
He blew hot air in their faces, and watched fear turn to interest. The middle kid almost smiled, but caught himself in time.
“Go figure,” Slater said. “You know light bulbs, but not television, phones, canned goods, or hair dryers.”
He put his hands on his hips. “It’d be nice, gentlemen, if we spoke the same language. I imagine you have as many questions as I do.”
Half an hour later, Slater had decided his approach. Chances were, the boys wouldn’t comprehend a tape recorder.
Slater fed them first, one by one. He held toast in front of their mouths until they’d grudgingly bitten and swallowed. He poured milk into their mouths straight from the cartoon.
Then he found his micro tape recorder – one he used occasionally to dictate stray thoughts and ideas for a book he might someday write in all his solitude. He set it to record and placed it on his coffee table in front of the couch and left the boys alone.
Half an hour later, he retrieved it.
Slater had been tempted to replay some of their words back to them, just because it was so comical to watch their eyes bulge in surprise at new technology. But he resisted the urge, instead taking the tape recorder to a far corner of the house where he could assure himself that he had indeed captured some of their conversation.
***
Even a blind dog can find a bone.
Crude, Van Klees thought, but apt.
Here he was, checking through the results of his previous day’s work, and all it boiled down to was one simple, crude saying: Even a blind dog can find a bone. Keep nosing around, never give up, dig here, dig there, and eventually, the blind dog gets lucky.
In genetics too.
You never knew for certain how and where a new strand of DNA would patch in on the original. All you could do was try. And try again.
On occasions like this – as he slid one petri dish under the microscope and then another – Van Klees envied the lesser men who experimented with less complicated creatures.
The nematode worm, for example. Under a thousand cells when fully mature. Some scientists made a full-time living off research grants that let them try to map out the gene sequences on nematodes. You cou
ld brew up a batch of ten thousand of them, throw in some DNA strands, and count the mutants that formed.
It wasn’t quite as simple with Homo sapiens. Not at the going rate of $12,500 dollars per egg.
Fortunately, Van Klees had a partial solution to that problem. After he’d fertilized an egg, all it took was careful pruning. He’d let a single-cell embryo go to two cells, then four. No more than four, because once an embryo got to the eight-cell stage, each of the eight cells began to specialize, and cutting them apart simply ended the cell’s life. But at the four-cell stage, any one of the cells pulled loose would simply and patiently divide itself to start the task over again. At that point, he’d get four individual cells from the original embryo. Each one of those four cells replicated through the two-cell stage to the four-cell stage. And once more Van Klees would interrupt development and divide each of those embryos into four separate cells. That gave him a total of sixteen one-cell embryos, all identical to the original embryo. He never allowed assistants to help him with this task, and on a good day he’d manage to interrupt enough of those sixteen embryos to get another dozen or so single-cell originals. Sometimes – when his reflexes were especially fast – he could separate an additional sixteen to thirty-two one-cell embryos. By that time, all the unattended others would be into the eight-cell stage, and he’d have to flush most of them down the sink.
Ideally, then, he would have a couple of eight-cell embryos – essentially the original embryo as it continued its nine-month journey – and maybe thirty one-cell embryos for experimenting. Another generation, so to speak, all identical to each other. He’d run countless generations by now, all of them painstakingly cloned in this manner.
Even a blind dog can find a bone.
Van Klees squinted into the microscope. So far, the results of Monday’s work were disappointing him. The first two dozen injected embryos had already mutated so badly they were merely blobs of dead cell material, barely past a day’s growth.
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