by Dean Koontz
“Joe, damn it, we don’t have time. We’ve got to move if we’re going to keep our girl alive.”
He stared at her. “Nina?”
She met his eyes. She said, “Nina,” but then a fearful look came into her face, and she turned from him.
“We can head north from here on PCH,” he said, “then inland on Kanan-Dume Road. That’s a county route up to Augora Hills. There we can get the 101 east to the 210.”
“Go for it.”
Faces powdered by moonlight, hair wind-tossed, the four who would leave in the Mercedes stood watching, backdropped by leaping stone dolphins and thrashing trees.
This tableau struck Joe as both exhilarating and ominous—and he could not identify the basis of either perception, other than to admit that the night was charged with an uncanny power that was beyond his understanding. Everything his gaze fell upon seemed to have monumental significance, as if he were in a state of heightened consciousness, and even the moon appeared different from any moon that he had ever seen before.
As Joe put the Ford in gear and began to pull away from the fountain, the young woman came forward to place her hand against the window beside Rose Tucker’s face. On this side of the glass, Rose matched her palm to the other. The young woman was crying, her lovely face glimmering with moon-bright tears, and she moved with the car along the driveway, hurrying as it picked up speed, matching her hand to Rose’s all the way to the gate before at last pulling back.
Joe felt almost as if somewhere earlier in the night he had stood before a mirror of madness and, closing his eyes, had passed through his own reflection into lunacy. Yet he did not want to return through the silvered surface to that old gray world. This was a lunacy that he found increasingly agreeable, perhaps because it offered him the one thing he desired most and could find only on this side of the looking glass—hope.
Slumped in the passenger seat beside him, Rose Tucker said, “Maybe all this is more than I can handle, Joe. I’m so tired—and so scared. I’m nobody special enough to do what needs doing, not nearly special enough to carry a weight like this.”
“You seem pretty special to me,” he said.
“I’m going to screw it up,” she said as she entered a phone number on the keypad of the cellular phone. “I’m scared shitless that I’m not going to be strong enough to open that door and take us all through it.” She pushed the Send button.
“Show me the door, tell me where it goes, and I’ll help you,” he said, wishing she would stop speaking in metaphors and give him the hard facts. “Why is Nina so important to whatever’s happening? Where is she, Rose?”
Someone answered the cellular call, and Rose said, “It’s me. Move Nina. Move her now.”
Nina.
Rose listened for a moment but then said firmly, “No, now, move her right now, in the next five minutes, even sooner if you can. They linked Mahalia to me…yeah, and in spite of all the precautions we’d taken. It’s only a matter of time now—and not very much time—until they make the connection to you.”
Nina.
Joe turned off the Pacific Coast Highway onto the county road to Augora Hills, driving up through a rumpled bed of dark land from which the Santa Ana wind flung sheets of pale dust.
“Take her to Big Bear,” Rose told the person on the phone.
Big Bear. Since Joe had talked to Mercy Ealing in Colorado—could it be less than nine hours ago?—Nina had been back in the world, miraculously returned, but in some corner where he could not find her. Soon, however, she would be in the town of Big Bear on the shores of Big Bear Lake, a resort in the nearby San Bernardino Mountains, a place he knew well. Her return was more real to him now that she was in a place that he could name, the byways of which he had walked, and he was flooded with such sweet anticipation that he wanted to shout to relieve the pressure of it. He kept his silence, however, and he rolled the name between the fingers of his mind, rolled it over and over as if it were a shiny coin: Big Bear.
Rose spoke into the phone: “If I can…I’m going to be there in a couple of hours. I love you. Go. Go now.”
She terminated the call, put the phone on the seat between her legs, closed her eyes, and leaned against the door.
Joe realized that she was not making much use of her left hand. It was curled in her lap. Even in the dim light from the instrument panel, he could see that her hand was shaking uncontrollably.
“What’s wrong with your arm?”
“Give it a rest, Joe. It’s sweet of you to be concerned, but you’re getting to be a nag. I’ll be fine once we get to Nina.”
He was silent for half a mile. Then: “Tell me everything. I deserve to know.”
“You do, yes. It’s not a long story…but where do I begin?”
16
Great bristling balls of tumbleweed, robbed of their green by the merciless Western sun, cracked from their roots by the withering dryness of the California summer, torn from their homes in the earth by the shrieking Santa Ana wind, now bounded out of the steep canyons and across the narrow highway, silver-gray in the headlights, a curiously melancholy sight, families of thistled skeletons like starved and harried refugees fleeing worse torment.
Joe said, “Start with those people back there. What kind of cult are they?”
She spelled it for him: Infiniface.
“It’s a made word,” she said, “shorthand for ‘Interface with the Infinite.’ And they’re not a cult, not in any sense you mean it.”
“Then what are they?”
Instead of answering immediately, she shifted in her seat, trying to get more comfortable.
Checking her wristwatch, she said, “Can you drive faster?”
“Not on this road. In fact, better put on your safety belt.”
“Not with my left side feeling like it does.” Having adjusted her position, she said, “Do you know the name Loren Pollack?”
“The software genius. The poor man’s Bill Gates.”
“That’s what the press sometimes calls him, yes. But I don’t think the word poor should be associated with someone who started from scratch and made seven billion dollars by the age of forty-two.”
“Maybe not.”
She closed her eyes and slumped against the door, supporting her weight on her right side. Sweat beaded her brow, but her voice was strong. “Two years ago, Loren Pollack used a billion dollars of his money to form a charitable trust. Named it Infiniface. He believes many of the sciences, through research facilitated by new generations of superfast computers, are approaching discoveries that will bring us face-to-face with the reality of a Creator.”
“Sounds like a cult to me.”
“Oh, plenty of people think Pollack is a flake. But he’s got a singular ability to grasp complex research from a wide variety of sciences—and he has vision. You know, there’s a whole movement of modern physics that sees evidence of a created universe.”
Frowning, Joe said, “What about chaos theory? I thought that was the big thing.”
“Chaos theory doesn’t say the universe is random and chaotic. It’s an extremely broad theory that among many other things notes strangely complex relationships in apparently chaotic systems—like the weather. Look deeply enough in any chaos, and you find hidden regularities.”
“Actually,” he admitted, “I don’t know a damn thing about it—just the way they use the term in the movies.”
“Most movies are stupidity machines—like politicians. So…if Pollack was here, he’d tell you that just eighty years ago, science mocked religion’s assertion that the universe was created ex nihilo, out of nothing. Everyone knew something couldn’t be created from nothing—a violation of all the laws of physics. Now we understand more about molecular structure—and particle physicists create matter ex nihilo all the time.” Inhaling with a hiss through clenched teeth, she leaned forward, popped open the glove box, and rummaged through its contents. “I was hoping for aspirin or Excedrin. I’d chew them dry.”
“We
could stop somewhere—”
“No. Drive. Just drive. Big Bear’s so far…” She closed the glove box but remained sitting forward, as though that position gave her relief. “Anyway, physics and biology are the disciplines that most fascinate Pollack—especially molecular biology.”
“Why molecular biology?”
“Because the more we understand living things on a molecular level, the clearer it becomes that everything is intelligently designed. You, me, mammals, fish, insects, plants, everything.”
“Wait a second. Are you tossing away evolution here?”
“Not entirely. Wherever molecular biology takes us, there might still be a place for Darwin’s theory of evolution—in some form.”
“You’re not one of those strict fundamentalists who believe we were created exactly five thousand years ago in the Garden of Eden.”
“Hardly. But Darwin’s theory was put forth in 1859, before we had any knowledge of atomic structure. He thought the smallest unit of a living creature was the cell—which he saw as just a lump of adaptable albumen.”
“Albumen? You’re losing me.”
“The origin of this basic living matter, he thought, was most likely an accident of chemistry—and the origin of all species was explained through evolution. But we now know cells are enormously complex structures of such clockwork design that it’s impossible to believe they are accidental in nature.”
“We do? I guess I’ve been out of school a long time.”
“Even in the matter of the species…Well, the two axioms of Darwinian theory—the continuity of nature and adaptable design—have never been validated by a single empirical discovery in nearly a hundred and fifty years.”
“Now you have lost me.”
“Let me put it another way.” She still leaned forward, staring out at the dark hills and the steadily rising glow of the sprawling suburbs beyond. “Do you know who Francis Crick is?”
“No.”
“He’s a molecular biologist. In 1962, he shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine with Maurice Wilkins and James Watson for discovering the three-dimensional molecular structure of DNA—the double helix. Every advancement in genetics since then—and the countless revolutionary cures for diseases we’re going to see over the next twenty years—spring directly from the work of Francis Crick and his colleagues. Crick is a scientist’s scientist, Joe, to no degree a spiritualist or mystic. But do you know what he suggested a few years ago? That life on earth may well have been designed by an extraterrestrial intelligence.”
“Even highbrows read the National Enquirer, huh?”
“The point is—Crick was unable to square what we now know of molecular biology’s complexity with the theory of natural selection, but he was unwilling to suggest a Creator in any spiritual sense.”
“So…enter the ever-popular god-like aliens.”
“But it totally begs the issue, you see? Even if every form of life on this planet was designed by extraterrestrials…who designed them?”
“It’s the chicken or the egg all over again.”
She laughed softly, but the laughter mutated into a cough that she couldn’t easily suppress. She eased back, leaning against the door once more—and glared at him when he tried to suggest that she needed medical attention.
When she regained her breath, she said, “Loren Pollack believes the purpose of human intellectual striving—the purpose of science—is to increase our understanding of the universe, not just to give us better physical control of our environment or to satisfy curiosity, but to solve the puzzle of existence God has put before us.”
“And by solving it to become like gods ourselves.”
She smiled through her pain. “Now you’re tuned to the Pollack frequency. Pollack thinks we’re living in the time when some key scientific breakthrough will prove there is a Creator. Something that is…an interface with the infinite. This will bring the soul back to science—lifting humanity out of its fear and doubt, healing our divisions and hatreds, finally uniting our species on one quest that’s both of the spirit and of the mind.”
“Like Star Trek.”
“Don’t make me laugh again, Joe. It hurts too much.”
Joe thought of Gem Fittich, the used-car dealer. Both Pollack and Fittich sensed an approaching end to the world as they knew it, but the oncoming tidal wave that Fittich perceived was dark and cold and obliterating, while Pollack foresaw a wave of purest light.
“So Pollack,” she said, “founded Infiniface to facilitate this quest, to track research worldwide with an eye toward projects with…well, with metaphysical aspects that the scientists themselves might not recognize. To ensure that key discoveries were shared among researchers. To encourage specific projects that seemed to be leading to a breakthrough of the sort Pollack predicts.”
“Infiniface isn’t a religion at all.”
“No. Pollack thinks all religions are valid to the extent that they recognize the existence of a created universe and a Creator—but that then they bog down in elaborate interpretations of what God expects of us. What’s wanted of us, in Pollack’s view, is to work together to learn, to understand, to peel the layers of the universe, to find God…and in the process to become His equals.”
By now they were out of the dark hills and into suburbs again. Ahead was the entrance to the freeway that would take them east across the city.
As he drove up the ramp, heading toward Glendale and Pasadena, Joe said, “I don’t believe in anything.”
“I know.”
“No loving god would allow such suffering.”
“Pollack would say that the fallacy of your thinking lies in its narrow human perspective.”
“Maybe Pollack is full of shit.”
Whether Rose began to laugh again or fell directly victim to the cough, Joe couldn’t tell, but she needed even longer than before to regain control of herself.
“You need to see a doctor,” he insisted.
She was adamantly opposed. “Any delay…and Nina’s dead.”
“Don’t make me choose between—”
“There is no choice. That’s my point. If it’s me or Nina…then she comes first. Because she’s the future. She’s the hope.”
Orange-faced on first appearance, the moon had lost its blush and, stage fright behind it, had put on the stark white face of a smugly amused mime.
Sunday night traffic on the moon-mocked freeway was heavy as Angelenos returned from Vegas and other points in the desert, while desert dwellers streamed in the opposite direction, returning from the city and its beaches: ceaselessly restless, these multitudes, always seeking a greater happiness—and often finding it, but only for a weekend or an afternoon.
Joe drove as fast and as recklessly as he dared, weaving from lane to lane, but keeping in mind that they could not risk being stopped by the highway patrol. The car wasn’t registered in either his name or Rose’s. Even if they could prove it had been loaned to them, they would lose valuable time in the process.
“What is Project 99?” he asked her. “What the hell are they doing in that subterranean facility outside Manassas?”
“You’ve heard about the Human Genome Project.”
“Yeah. Cover of Newsweek. As I understand it, they’re figuring out what each human gene controls.”
“The greatest scientific undertaking of our age,” Rose said. “Mapping all one hundred thousand human genes and detailing the DNA alphabet of each. And they’re making incredibly fast progress.”
“Find out how to cure muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis—”
“Cancer, everything—given time.”
“You’re part of that?”
“No. Not directly. At Project 99…we have a more exotic assignment. We’re looking for those genes that seem to be associated with unusual talents.”
“What—like Mozart or Rembrandt or Michael Jordan?”
“No. Not creative or athletic talents. Paranormal talents. Telepathy. Telekinesis. Pyrokinesis. It’s
a long strange list.”
His immediate reaction was that of a crime reporter, not of a man who had recently seen the fantastic in action: “But there aren’t such talents. That’s science fiction.”
“There are people who score far higher than chance on a variety of tests designed to disclose psychic abilities. Card prediction. Calling coin tosses. Thought-image transmission.”
“That stuff they used to do at Duke University.”
“That and more. When we find people who perform exceptionally well in these tests, we take blood samples from them. We study their genetic structure. Or children in poltergeist situations.”
“Poltergeists?”
“Poltergeist phenomena—weeding out the hoaxes—aren’t really ghosts. There’s always one or more children in houses where this happens. We think the objects flying around the room and the ectoplasmic apparitions are caused by these children, by their unconscious exercise of powers they don’t even know they have. We take samples from these kids when we can find them. We’re building a library of unusual genetic profiles, looking for common patterns among people who have had all manner of paranormal experiences.”
“And have you found something?”
She was silent, perhaps waiting for another spasm of pain to pass, though her face revealed more mental anguish than physical suffering. At last she said, “Quite a lot, yes.”
If there had been enough light for Joe to see his reflection in the rearview mirror, he knew that he could have watched as his tan faded and his face turned as white as the moon, for he suddenly knew the essence of what Project 99 was all about. “You haven’t just studied this.”
“Not just. No.”
“You’ve applied the research.”
“Yes.”
“How many work on Project 99?”
“Over two hundred of us.”
“Making monsters,” he said numbly.
“People,” she said. “Making people in a lab.”
“They may look like people, but some of them are monsters.”
She was silent for perhaps a mile. Then she said, “Yes.” And after another silence: “Though the true monsters are those of us who made them.”
Fenced and patrolled, identified at the highway as a think tank called the Quartermass Institute, the property encompasses eighteen hundred acres in the Virginia countryside: meadowed hills where deer graze, hushed woods of birch and beeches where a plenitude of small game thrives beyond the rifle reach of hunters, ponds with ducks, and grassy fields with nesting plovers.
Although security appears to be minimal, no animal larger than a rabbit moves across these acres without being monitored by motion detectors, heat sensors, microphones, and cameras, which feed a continuous river of data to a Cray computer for continuous analysis. Unauthorized visitors are subject to immediate arrest, and on those rare occasions when hunters or adventurous teenagers scale the fence, they are halted and taken into custody within five hundred feet of the point of intrusion.
Near the geographical center of these peaceful acres is the orphanage, a cheerless three-story brick structure that resembles a hospital. Forty-eight children currently reside herein, every one below the age of six—though some appear older. They are all residents by virtue of having been born without mothers or fathers in any but the chemical sense. None of them was conceived in love, and none entered the world through a woman’s womb. As fetuses, they were nurtured in mechanical wombs, adrift in amniotic fluid brewed in a laboratory.
As with laboratory rats and monkeys, as with dogs whose skulls are cut open and brains exposed for days during experiments related to the central nervous system, as with all animals that further the cause of knowledge, these orphans have no names. To name them would be to encourage their handlers to develop emotional attachments to them. The handlers—who include everyone from those security men who double as cooks to the scientists who bring these children into the world—must remain morally neutral and emotionally detached in order to do their work properly. Consequently, the children are known by letter and number codes that refer to the specific indices in Project 99’s genetic-profile library from which their special abilities were selected.
Here on the third floor, southwest corner, in a room of her own, sits