The God Project (36 page)

Wiseman seemed to sink deeper into his chair, and the records he was holding fluttered to the floor. “My God,” he breathed. “What you’re suggesting is monstrous.”

“What’s happened is monstrous,” Malone countered, his voice suddenly level. “I’m sure you never expected anyone to find it. Not you, or anyone at CHILD. But Sally found it, Arthur. And if she could find it, others can too. So it’s going to come out We’re going to find out what you did to these children’s genes.”

“No!” Wiseman protested. “I did
nothing
to these children. Whatever’s wrong with them, it had to start with their parents. It had to!” But before he could go on, the front door suddenly flew open and Bandy Corliss burst into the room, followed by his father and Carl Bronski.

“I found it,” Randy crowed. “I found the house!”

Lucy’s eyes went immediately to Jim, who nodded. “We stopped at City Hall,” he said. “The place is owned by Paul Randolph.”

Wiseman frowned. “Paul Randolph is executive director of CHILD.”

“Right,” Bronski said. He looked curiously at Wiseman and Steve Montgomery, guessing immediately who they were. “What are you two doing here?”

Malone explained to them what had happened. “We still don’t know how it was done,” he finished. “For that matter, we don’t even know exactly
what
was done to these children’s genes. But you can bet that somehow they’ve been altered.”

“Can we find out what they did?” Sally asked.

Malone shrugged. “It depends on you. If the information’s in the computer, you’re the only one of us that can fish it out.”

Sally started to speak, but Bronski took over. “Then that’ll be your job, Sally. I want you to go to the hospital with Mark and start working with that computer.”
His eyes shifted over to Wiseman. “And I want you to go with them, is that clear?”

Wiseman, his face haggard, made a gesture with a trembling hand. “Of course,” he mumbled. “Anything …”

“The house,” Bronski went on. “I can get a search warrant for it by telephone. We think it’s empty, but I want to go in. And I’d like to take Randy with me.”

“No!”

“Lucy, there’s no other way,” Jim said.

“There must be, or you wouldn’t have come back here,” Lucy snapped. “You’d have just gone ahead and done whatever you thought you had to do.”

Now Carl Bronski spoke again. “Lucy, that isn’t it at all. We came back here because Jim wouldn’t agree to taking Randy in unless you agreed too.”

“Which I don’t,” Lucy said.

Jim Corliss sat on the sofa and drew Lucy down next to him. “Honey, you’ve got to—” Seeing the stony look in her eyes, he broke off and started over. “Of course, you don’t
have
to let Randy go. But without Randy, there’s not much point in Carl even going in there. As far as we could tell from outside, the place is empty. Carl’s excuse for getting a search warrant is that he needs to verify Randy’s story of what’s inside that house, and that means Randy has to show him.”

Lucy, too exhausted to think it all through, turned to Sally for advice.

“If it was Jason, I’d feel the same way you feel,” Sally told her. “But still, if CHILD was using that house for something—”

Lucy took a deep breath and stood up. “You’re right,” she said. “Of course you’re right. We have to know what was going on out there.” As Carl Bronski picked up the phone, dialed, then began speaking quietly to the judge at the other end, Lucy turned back to Jim. “You’ll be careful?”

“Lucy, you have to believe that I’d never let anything happen to Randy.”

“Something’s already happened to him,” Lucy whispered. She reached out and touched his arm. “But it’s
not just Randy,” she said, her voice suddenly shy. “You be careful, too. I—well, I feel as though I just found you again, and I don’t think I could stand to lose you now. Im going to need help from now on, Jim.”

“And you’re going to have it,” Jim promised.

The small group began to break up. Mark Malone packed the computer printouts into his briefcase, then led an ashen-faced and silent Arthur Wiseman out of the house.

Sally and Steve Montgomery left to take Jason to his grandmother’s, where he would stay while his parents went to the hospital to work with Mark Malone.

Carl Bronski, with Jim and Randy Corliss, prepared to return to Paul Randolph’s estate.

And then, as they were about to depart, Lucy suddenly stood up. “I’m going with you,” she told Jim. “I can’t stay here by myself—I’ll go crazy.”

Jim started to protest, but Lucy touched his arm. “I have to go, Jim,” she said softly. “I have to be with Randy, and with you.”

Their eyes met, and a gentle smile came over Jim’s face. “Wherever I go, you go?” he asked.

Lucy hesitated only a moment, then nodded. “From now on.”

   The Montgomerys drove slowly through the streets of Eastbury, Steve at the wheel, Sally sitting silently next to him, Jason in the back. Jason, too, was uncharacteristically silent, but his parents were too deeply involved in their own thoughts to notice.

It was Steve who finally broke the silence. “I’m sorry, honey.”

Her reverie disturbed, Sally glanced over at him. “Did you say something?”

“I was trying to apologize,” Steve said. “I thought-well, you know what I thought But the whole thing seemed so crazy—” He fell silent, regretting his choice of words.

“It
is
crazy.” The calmness in her voice surprised Sally as much as it did Steve; by rights she should be screaming,
or sobbing, or pounding her fists on something. Anything but this eerie sense of calm that had come over her. But she knew the calmness was only a temporary reaction, a protective device she had wrapped herself in, a screen to ward off for a little while the despair she knew was bound to overtake her when she came to grips with reality.

For reality was contained in the term that had flashed into her mind when Mark Malone had said the words “genetically altered.”

Reality was that Jason was not what she had always thought he was. He was something else, something she was unfamiliar with.

A mutant.

Not an eight-year-old boy, not the innocent and perfect product of the mating between herself and her husband.

A mutant.

Something different, something unfamiliar, something unknown.

What was he?

Suddenly all the words she had heard over the past few years held new and sinister meaning for her.

Recombinant DNA
.

She barely knew what DNA was.

Genetic engineering
.

She knew about that. That was the new science, the science that was going to offer glorious solutions to age-old problems.

But what else was it going to do? Was it going to create a glorious new world, or was it going to create a world full of altered beings,
mutants
, designed for—for what?

She didn’t know. And perhaps she never would. Perhaps whatever had been done to Jason had been done for no specific reason at all. Perhaps he was nothing more than an experiment.

The thought chilled her, and she turned around, gazing at her son, trying to fathom how he might have been changed. She reached back to caress Jason’s cheek, but
he drew back from her touch, his eyes large and worried.

“Why do I have to stay at Grandma’s?” he wanted to know.

“It’s only for a little while, sweetheart,” Sally managed to tell him through the constriction that had formed in her throat “Just a few hours.”

“Why couldn’t I stay with Mrs. Corliss, so I could be there when Randy gets back?”

Randy.

Jason and Randy.

Sally tried to remember how long they had been friends, and how long it had been since Jason had had other friends.

Thoughts flickered through her mind, disconnected thoughts that suddenly fit together.

Mutants.

Was that why Jason and Randy had become friends? Did they know about themselves and each other? Had they recognized each other long ago, sensing that the two of them, different from others, were not different from each other?

Sally sank back into her seat without having answered Jason’s question.

He didn’t look any different He looked as he’d always looked: a miniature version of his father, with the same deep blue eyes and unruly blond hair, the same energy and enthusiasm for everything, the same stubbornness.

But he was not his father’s child, nor was he his mother’s child.

Dear God, what had they done to her child? What had they done to
her?
She reached out and took Steve’s hand in her own.

“Steve?”

He glanced over at her, and squeezed her hand.

“Take care of us, Steve,” she said. “Take care of all of us.”

“I will, darling,” he promised. But even as he made the promise, Steve Montgomery wondered whether he
could keep it. There were so many questions in his mind, and so few answers.

He still wasn’t altogether sure that there was any kind of conspiracy. Wiseman, he was sure, was right. Whatever had gone wrong with the children in Group Twenty-one had started with their parents.

It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was simply a genetic weakness passed on to the next generation.

It was, actually, his fault.

His fault, and Sally’s.

CHILD, in all likelihood, was doing nothing more than watching the children, trying to isolate the defect and find a means to correct it.

So there was really nothing for him to “take care of.” All he had to do was learn to live with the fact that he’d failed his children.

Or, anyway, he’d failed Julie.

But had he failed Jason? After all, Jason had never been sick a day in his life. Maybe with Jason, he hadn’t failed at all. Maybe Jason, through some strange combination of his genes—and Sally’s—was truly the perfect child they had always thought he was.

Maybe everything was going to be all right after all.

By the time they readied Phyllis Paine’s house, he was feeling much better about everything.

Jason was fine. Jason was his son, and Jason was alive, and Jason was perfect. And in a few hours, working with Dr. Malone and the computer, Sally would find out that nothing was wrong, and they, like the Corlisses, could get back to the reality of being a family.

Steve relaxed, sure the end of the nightmare was near.

   One by one, Arthur Wiseman retrieved the medical histories of the women who had given birth to the children in Group Twenty-one, sure that somewhere in those records his vindication would be found. The pattern emerged very quickly, both to him and to Mark Malone.

It wasn’t just Sally Montgomery, and Lucy Corliss, and Jan Ransom.

It was all of them.

Forty-six women, none of whom had wanted children.

Forty-six women, all of whom he had considered to be poor risks for the pill.

Forty-six women, for whom an intrauterine device had been the indicated method of birth control.

Not an unusual number over the space of more than ten years. Indeed, Arthur Wiseman had inserted far more than forty-six IUDs over those years.

But for these forty-six, there was something else. All of them, at one time or another, had complained of one symptom or another—often a history of allergic reactions—which had suggested that their bodies might reject the intrusion of such an object.

And so he had applied, in the uterus of each of these women, and perhaps a hundred others, bicalcioglythemine.

“But what is it?” Mark Malone asked.

“BCG? It’s a salve that helps reduce the likelihood of the uterus rejecting the IUD.

“I’ve never even heard of it,” Malone said. “Who makes it?”

“PharMax.”

Malone groaned, and Wiseman looked at him curiously. “What’s wrong? I’ve been using it for ten years.”

“Which is just about how long we’ve had this problem, even though we didn’t know about it.”

“I don’t see what the connection could be—”

“TharMax is the source of CHILD’S funds. In fact, PharMax set CHILD up in the first place. And why haven’t I ever heard of this—what do you call it?”

“BCG. And there’s a simple reason why you’ve never heard of it—you’re not an OB-GYN.”

“But I keep up with the literature, and I talk to the reps. And Bob Pender’s never mentioned anything about BCG to me.”

Wiseman’s temper began to slip. “Why the hell would he?” he demanded. “You’d have no use for the stuff. And I can tell you, it’s nothing more than an antiseptic and a relaxant.”

“Maybe,” Malone replied quietly. “But I think we’d better have it analyzed, just to see what’s in it.”

Wiseman glared at the younger man. “Just what are you suggesting?”

“I’m suggesting we find out what you’ve been treating these women with. My God, Arthur, we’ve got forty-six children here, more than half of whom are dead. And if you look at the dates on those charts, every one of them would have been exposed to this BCG stuff exactly at the time of conception. Now, if DNA is going to be tampered with, when is it done?”

“In the embryo—”

“Even before that, Arthur. In the egg. In the nucleus of the egg.”

The anger he had been feeling—the anger of affronted pride—suddenly drained out of Wiseman, to be replaced by fear.

Fear, and a memory.

How many women had he treated with BCG? Not only treated, but followed up on, reapplying the salve month after month. But had it done its job, the job it was intended for? No, it hadn’t. For even in women he had treated with BCG, the devices had still sometimes been rejected, though the salve itself remained. Remained, to do what?

There had been a drug—how many years ago? Nearly thirty. The drug had been called thalidomide, and it had been a tranquilizer.

And doctors all over the world, unaware or uncaring of the fact that it had never been exhaustively tested, had prescribed it for pregnant women. The results had been a nightmare of congenitally deformed infants.

And there had been DES, where the consequence of the drug’s use was not immediately apparent, but rather lay like an invisible time bomb deep within the children—the daughters—waiting to explode into a devastating cancer.

Now BCG. What was it going to do? What had it already done?