Authors: John Saul
“Those?” the sergeant asked. “I thought you said it was a message. Singular.”
“It was,” Bronski replied. “But I sent it to every police department in the country.”
The sergeant stared at him. “Holy shit, Bronski. Do you have any idea what the chiefs going to say when he sees the bill?”
Bronski grinned. “Probably just about what you said. But by then, I have a feeling he won’t really give a damn. Keep an eye on that machine, will you?” He
started out the front door, but the sergeant stopped him.
“Mind telling me what if’s all about?”
Bronski paused, scratching his head thoughtfully. “I’m not sure,” he said at last, “but I’ll tell you one thing. If we get back the replies I think we will, you’re going to be part of a bigger case than you ever even dreamed of.” Then, leaving the mystified sergeant wondering what had gotten into him, Bronski started back to Lucy Corliss’s house. On the way, he bought a lot of coffee in little white plastic containers.
It was going to be a long night, and for some reason coffee in cups never kept him awake. If it was cold, it was even better. He made a mental note to take the lids off all the containers as soon as he got back to Lucy’s.
“I don’t believe you,” Jason whispered in the darkness. He was lying on an air mattress that had been inflated and put on the floor next to Randy’s bed, with Randy’s bedspread wrapped around him as a makeshift blanket. For an hour he had listened while his friend had bragged about his adventures. But the last thing had been too much.
“Well, it’s true,” Randy insisted. “I threw the dog against the fence, and he died, and then I climbed the fence, and it didn’t hurt at all.”
“I bet someone turned it off,” Jason argued. “If they didn’t, you’d be as dead as the dog.”
“Bull!” Randy said as loudly as he dared. If his mother heard them, she’d come in and tell them to go to sleep, and he’d hardly begun telling Jason about all the things that had happened to him. “Besides, one day three of the other guys threw me into the fence. That time I got knocked out, but I still didn’t really get hurt. I guess I sort of got used to it.”
“Maybe there wasn’t much electricity in it,” Jason suggested.
“Boy, are you stupid. They either have it all on, or they have it all off. There isn’t any partway.”
“So you say electricity doesn’t hurt you?” There was a note of challenge in Jason’s voice.
“That’s what I’ve been telling you, isn’t it?”
“Prove it.”
“How?”
“Just prove it.”
Randy turned on the light by his bed and sat up. He looked around the room, his eyes coming to rest on the radio that sat on one of his bookshelves. “All right, I will.” He got out of bed, unplugged the radio, then rummaged in a drawer until he found the Swiss Army knife his father had given him the previous Christmas. Bringing the knife and the radio, he squatted down on the floor next to the air mattress.
“Whatcha gonna do?” Jason asked.
“Watch.” Randy opened the knife, and cut the cord off the radio. Then, holding the knife in one hand and the cut end of the cord in the other, he carefully stripped away six inches of insulation. When the wires were bare, he put down the knife and took one of the exposed wires in each hand.
“Plug it in,” he said.
Jason stared at him, his eyes wide with a mixture of awe and fear. “No,” he whispered. “You’ll get hurt.”
“I won’t either,” Randy replied. “Go on—plug it in.”
Jason picked up the plug and looked around. There, under Randy’s bed table, was a double socket, with only the lamp plugged into it. “Are you going to do it or not?” he heard Randy ask.
Jason tried to make up his mind. Was he being chicken? What if something happened to Randy, as he was sure it would? He remembered Julie, and he remembered his guinea pig. With both of them he’d done something he shouldn’t have, and they were both dead.
“I can’t,” he said finally. “I’ll hurt you.”
“Then I’ll do it myself,” Randy announced. He jerked the cord out of Jason’s hand and jammed the plug into the empty socket. His eyes fixed on Jason, he took one of the bare wires in his left hand.
“Now watch,” he whispered. Slowly, while Jason’s eyes followed his movements, he reached out with his
right hand for the second bare wire. He smiled as he saw Jason holding his breath.
He grabbed the wire and Jason gasped.
“See?” Randy said, grinning broadly. “Look at that.”
“So what?” Jason said, trying to sound as if he wasn’t impressed. “Maybe there isn’t any current.”
“Wanna bet?”
“What do you mean?”
“You try it.”
The two boys faced each other, Randy confidently holding the bare ends of the radio cord, his expression clearly telling Jason what he thought of him. Then, as if to confirm it, Randy spoke. “Are you chicken?”
“No.”
“Then try it.”
Jason’s voice suddenly grew belligerent. “Okay, I will. Lemme have the cord.”
Silently Randy handed the cord over to Jason. Jason took it gingerly with his right hand, staring fearfully at the gleaming strands of wire. Tentatively, he touched them with his left forefinger.
Nothing.
Encouraged, he closed his left hand around the naked end of one side of the cord, then moved his right hand toward the other bare wire.
As he touched it, a spark jumped, and there was a soft crackling sound.
Reflexively, Jason’s hand came away from the wire.
“Chicken,” Randy sneered.
Jason barely heard him. He was staring curiously at the cord. It had hurt, but not nearly as much as he had been expecting.
“Try it again,” Randy urged.
Once more, Randy touched the bare wire, and this time he was able to overcome his reflexes and feel the electricity surge through him.
It didn’t hurt. Not really. At first there was a sort of burning sensation, but that subsided to be replaced by something else.
Something not really unpleasant.
Suddenly confident, he closed his right hand tightly over the live wire.
There was still no pain. As the current flowed through him, there was only a faint tickling sensation. He looked at Randy, and slowly a smile came over his face.
“Hey,” he said softly. “That’s kind of neat, isn’t it?” Then he saw the look of disappointment on Randy’s face, and suddenly realized that Randy had been hoping it wouldn’t work for him, that he’d get a shock. “Are you mad?” he asked.
Randy stared at him for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said at last. Then he licked his lips. “Why do you suppose it doesn’t hurt us?”
“Lots of things don’t hurt me,” Jason suddenly blurted. “That’s why I had to go to the hospital tonight”.
Randy cocked his head. “What kind of things?”
Jason’s eyes fell on the knife, and he suddenly remembered the day of his sister’s funeral, when he’d been playing outside. “I’ll show you,” he whispered. He picked up the knife and stared at the blade for a second. Then, closing his eyes tightly, he slashed the blade across his hand.
This time it was Randy who gasped.
Jason opened his eyes and stared at his hand. Blood was welling up from a deep cut on his palm.
“It’s going to get all over the floor,” Randy said.
“No, it won’t,” Jason told him. “See? It’s not bleeding anymore. Got a Kleenex or something?”
Randy rummaged in a drawer and found a rumpled handkerchief. While he watched, Jason sopped up the blood on his hand. The wound had, indeed, stopped bleeding.
“It’s pretty bad,” Randy whispered.
“Just wait.”
As the two boys watched, the gash in Jason’s hand began to heal. Three minutes later, even the skin had mended, and there was not even so much as a trace of a scar to mark where the wound had been.
Now it was Randy who stared at Jason with wonder. “Did it hurt?”
Jason shrugged with studied indifference, pleased that he’d outdone his friend. “Just for a second.”
“I’m gonna try it,” Randy said, picking up the knife. Without giving himself time to change his mind or even think about it, Randy plunged the knife deep into the palm of his hand. He flinched slightly, then stared at the knife. Blood welled up around it.
“Tuli it out,” Jason whispered.
Jerking hard, Randy wrenched the blade loose, then began mopping at the wound with the already-bloody handkerchief. When the bleeding stopped, the two boys watched.
As with Jason, Randy’s wound disappeared within a few minutes.
“Wow,” Randy breathed. Then he grinned at Jason. “Know what?” he asked.
“What?”
“We can do anything we want to now, Jason. We can do anything we want to, because nothing can hurt us.”
A
S THE FIRST LIGHT OF DAWN
glowed dimly through the east windows of his office, Paul Randolph massaged his temples in a vain effort to ease the tensions that had built up through the long night. The two other men in his office were gazing at him, and he had the feeling he was being judged. Overcoming his exhaustion with an effort of sheer will, he attempted to regain control of the meeting.
“Very well, then. The situation as I see it is this: We have the records of the project—the physical records—locked in the vault, ready to go to Washington this afternoon. The computer banks have been emptied of all data pertaining to the project, and the house has been vacated. What about the staff?”
George Hamlin flicked an imaginary speck from his left pantleg. “I can personally guarantee the security of the project as far as my people are concerned. They’ve all been with me for years, and each of them has a compelling interest in seeing it through.”
“And the boy?” the third man in the room asked. He was a middle-aged man whose hard-muscled body denied the appearance of aging that his close-cropped gray hair suggested. When he had first entered the room an hour earlier, Hamlin had known who he was even before
Paul Randolph introduced them. The man’s military bearing had given him away.
“Well?” Lieutenant General Scott Carmody prodded.
“Ah. That
is
the problem, isn’t it?” Hamlin replied. A wintry smile molded his lips into an expression that Randolph had long ago come to associate with Hamlin’s less humane ideas. This morning was no exception. “It seems to me that that is the very area in which we need your help. What I believe some of your people sometimes call Vet activities’?”
“Let’s call a spade a spade,” the general dryly translated. “You mean you want us to kill him.”
Paul Randolph rose from his chair. “Now just wait a minute, George. There are some things that I cannot allow this Institute to be a party to.”
When he replied, Hamlin’s voice clearly conveyed the contempt he felt for Randolph. “Are there? It seems to me that this is rather an inappropriate time for you to begin setting moral standards for yourself. Or for any of the rest of us, for that matter.” Randolph tried to interrupt, but Hamlin pressed on. “Besides, I see no moral dilemma in having some of the general’s personnel pacify Randy Corliss.”
“You mean kill him” Randolph corrected.
“As you will. Kill him. Remove him. Whatever. The point is that as far as we know, he’s alive, and if he’s alive, he’s undoubtedly talking. That makes him, and anyone he’s talked to, a threat to all of us.”
“But to kill him?”
“In all likelihood he’s going to die anyway, Paul. All the others have.”
The general frowned. “All of them? I thought you were on the verge of success.”
“I am,” Hamlin told him. “Indeed, at the point that one of the subjects survives to maturity, I
will
have succeeded, and we’re not that far away. In fact, I think Randy Corliss just might be our first success, but unfortunately, circumstances don’t allow us to continue working with him. He’s become a threat.”
“George, he’s only a little boy—” Randolph broke in.
“God
makes little boys, Paul. I made Randy Corliss.” He leaned forward, gazing intently at Randolph. “You’ve never really grasped the nature of the project, have you, Paul?”
“You know that isn’t true, George.”
“Isn’t it? You keep referring to my subjects as little boys. But Randy Corliss and the others are not boys at all. They are a new species, which I created through genetic engineering. Someday they will serve a specific function for our country”—he nodded toward General Carmody—“but we must never make the mistake of regarding them as human beings. Granted, they bear a great resemblance to our species, but genetically they are different. So I am not talking about murder, Paul. I am simply talking about plugging what could become a disastrous security leak.” He tinned his attention fully on the general now. “As far as the world knows, what we are doing is not yet possible. That gives us an advantage. It means that our country will soon be able to match biological form to technological function. We will be able to create the people we need. Except that they won’t be people. They will be living robots, designed with specific purposes in mind. It seems to me that we have no choice but to do whatever is necessary to protect the integrity of the project.”
General Carmody nodded and turned to Randolph. “The Department has a very large investment in this project, Paul. I—
we
expect you to do everything you can to protect that investment. Is that clear?”
“Very.” Paul Randolph sighed. “Do whatever you think is best.” In his heart, Randolph knew that he had just agreed to the murder of a nine-year-old boy.
“I don’t get it,” Mark Malone said. “None of this makes any sense at all.” He stood up, stretched, then poured himself yet one more cup of steaming hot coffee. Taking a careful sip, he glared malevolently as Carl Bronski gulped down half a cup of his remaining supply of cold brew. “Did you know that cold coffee causes cancer?” he taunted.
Carl ignored the bait. “What doesn’t make sense? It seems to me it’s all coming together.”
“It is,” Malone agreed. “And that’s what I don’t get. According to Sally, CHILD chose all these kids for their survey practically on the day they were born. They assigned the numbers, and the numbers show they assigned the children to the groups right away. And with three of the groups, there’s nothing special. But look at Group Twenty-one.”