The Complete Adversary Cycle: The Keep, the Tomb, the Touch, Reborn, Reprisal, Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack)

by F. Paul Wilson

  Something had to go wrong.

  Neither of us were pessimists by nature, but we had the feeling that it was all going too smoothly. We kept waiting for a catastrophe. And it was the waiting that was killing me. Derr, at least, had his preceptorship in the obstetrical section at Flower Fifth Avenue to keep him busy. But while he was brushing up on the latest delivery techniques, I was home alone, baby-sitting Jazzy.

  Finally, around dinnertime on January 5, she went into labor. Her membranes ruptured spontaneously. With a gush of warm fluid we were on our way.

  There was little drama about the delivery itself. The contractions became longer and closer together, just as they should. Jasmine Cordeau had a generous pelvic structure; the child was in a normal cephalic presentation; as labor progressed at a steady pace toward delivery, we anticipated no problems. The only question hanging over us was: What will she deliver?

  Finally, amid cries and moans, Derr delivered a head, and then an entire male infant. (Male! We were part of the way there!) He cut the cord, got him crying with a whack on the rump, then handed him to me for cleaning up. As I gently wiped the blood and membranes from his shivering, squalling body, my heart was thudding so hard and fast I feared it would break through my ribs. I examined him closely. His skin was red and mottled, as with all newborns, but he was Caucasian, as Caucasian as Derr or myself.

  Myself.

  I was holding myself! You were that infant, Jim, but you are me. I wasn't a new father holding a combination of himself and his wife. This child was all me! It was me!

  I wrapped him up in the flannel blanket we had for him. He was a hairy little thing, hairy like me. Even had little tufts of hair on his palms. I wondered if I'd had hairy palms at birth. I thought of asking my mother, and then realized she was his mother too!

  I held him (you, Jim) against me and I felt an enormous surge of emotion. Until that moment you had been just another experiment; a momentous one, I'll grant, but just an experiment, the culmination of the long process we had begun with frogs and run through rats and pigs. You were an experimental subject, a thing, an it. First an embryo, then a fetus, but never a person.

  All that changed as I cradled your red, squalling little body in my arms. I looked into your face and the enormity of what we had done hit me full force. Suddenly you were a person, a human being with a whole life ahead of you. In a flash I saw what you could expect in the years to come as the world's first human clone. A childhood under the microscope and in the spotlight; a tortured adolescence as a freak, the butt of jokes, the object of bigotry, scorn, ridicule, and possibly the object of hatred by some of the world's more fanatical religious groups.

  And after a youth filled with that sort of trauma, what sort of man would you turn out to be? What sort of tortured soul would you possess? I saw you hating me. I saw you wishing you had never been born. I saw you killing yourself.

  I knew right then that I could not allow any of that to happen.

  After Derr had delivered the placenta, I asked Jazzy if she wanted to hold you, but she wanted no part of you. She seemed afraid of you. After he gave Jazzy something for pain, I handed you to Derr. As he held your squirming little body he looked at me. There was wonder, joy, and triumph in his eyes. But there was a cloud there too. I remember our conversation as if it were yesterday.

  "We've done it," he said.

  "I know. But now that we have him, what do we do with him?"

  He shook his head and said, "I don't know. I don't think the world is ready for him."

  "Neither do I," I said.

  We fed you a sugar-and-water solution, bundled you up in your bassinet, and talked long into the night. For the first time since we had begun Project Genesis, I think we had some perspective on what we had been striving for, and what we had achieved. We had been pulp-magazine mad scientists up to now. Your cries were a dose of sanity. But we still weren't agreed on where we should go from there. I wanted to tell Laughlin that we had failed utterly and urge him to scrap the whole project. Derr thought that was too precipitous. He thought I was exaggerating the public response to a human clone.

  Our argument grew heated, and Derr stormed up to the second floor to check on Jazzy. Lucky he did. Because of our argument, tragedy was narrowly avoided.

  He was only gone a moment when I heard him calling Jazzy's name. I went to the bottom of the stairs and asked what was wrong. Derr told me that she wasn't in her room. He was going to check the bathroom. I went upstairs to check on you, and that's where I found her. She was leaning over your bassinet. My first thought was that Jazzy's maternal instincts had finally fought their way to the surface. Then I noticed that she had a pillow in her hands and was pressing it down over your face.

  With a shout I leapt forward and yanked her away. To my immense relief you immediately began to howl. I knew then that you were unharmed, but I had to fight to keep Jazzy off you. She was like a wild animal, eyes wide, foaming at the mouth, screaming in her Cajun-accented voice.

  "Kill it! Kill it! It is a vile and hateful thing! Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!"

  Derr came in and helped me pull her away, then sedated her. As we locked her bedroom door I saw the look in Derr's eyes and knew that Jazzy's outburst was causing him to reconsider his position.

  Her behavior was all the more shocking because, as far as we knew, Jazzy had no idea of what we had implanted in her uterus. I had been sure she thought us a couple of strange ducks, perhaps even a pair of pansies, who had impregnated her by artificial insemination (although I doubt very much those words were in her vocabulary). There was no explaining her bizarre, violent reaction to you, but the incident had united Derr with me in my opposition to letting the War Department know what we had accomplished.

  We rented a hotel room for Jazzy and paid her her bonus. Derr visited her daily for the rest of the week, until she was completely recovered from the delivery. As soon as she was out of the house, I hired a nurse to take care of you.

  After long deliberation we decided it would be best for you if we put you up for adoption. So we left you at the St. Francis Home for Boys in Queens. You know the rest of the story. You were adopted almost immediately by Jonah and Emma Stevens and taken to Long Island. We reported utter failure to Colonel Laughlin, turned in a set of phony experimental records, and were informed that Project Genesis was closed for good.

  That should have been that.

  But Jim, I could not let you go. You were on my mind constantly. I had to know how you were, how you were developing. You became such an obsession with me that in 1943I sold the Manhattan town house and moved to Monroe where I bought this old mansion. I lurked around the apartment house where the Stevenses first lived; when Emma took you shopping with her, I'd tag along behind and do some shopping myself, always watching you to see how you were doing, assuring myself that they were treating you right—that they were treating me right.

  And I must confess to some scientific interest. (Don't be offended. Once a scientist, always a scientist.) I had a chance to satisfy my curiosity about the nature-or-nurture question: Which shaped us more, environment or heredity? I had been raised in an intellectual environment; although endowed with the physique for it, I never had much interest in sports. Although genetically identical to me, you were raised in a household where I doubt you ever saw anyone crack a book. As a result, you became a star football player. I thought that answered the question, but you also did extremely well academically in high school, were editor of the school paper, were accepted into college, and now I understand you are majoring in journalism. I recall my own intense interest in writing as a student.

  The result of my years of observing my clone? Confusion. I have more questions now than when I began.

  Does this sound cool and clinical? I hope not. But more than that, I hope you never read these pages. Derr and I have made a pact. We are the only two who know the combination to the safe where these records are hidden. We will never travel together. When one of us dies, the other w
ill put these records into the hands of a law firm we have dealt with for many years. That firm will be instructed to keep the very existence of these records a secret until the day you die. After that, they will be published. You will be beyond hurting then. Who knows? Perhaps cloning will be commonplace by that time. If it is, all the better: Derr and I will smile in our graves, knowing that the scientific world will have to recognize us as the first.

  I know all this is a shock of unimaginable proportions. But I'm sure you can handle it. Just remember: You were never supposed to know. And, having watched you all these years, I know you are wise enough not to make your origin public. On the other hand, I beg you not to destroy these records. Derr and I deserve our recognition someday. We are in no hurry. If you are reading this, it means we are both dead. So we can wait. We have time.

  Please do not hate me, Jim. That would be akin to hating yourself. We are one. We are the same. I am you and you are me. And neither of us can change that.

  Your older twin,

  Roderick C. Hanley, Ph.D.

  Twelve

  1

  It's a hoax!

  Carol sat at the kitchen table, drenched in sweat, gaping at the last page of the letter. She flipped back through the journal's curling pages.

  It has to be a hoax!

  But in the deepest recesses of her heart and mind she knew that Hanley himself had written the letter—she knew his handwriting well enough by now—and that what he said was true. The detailed experimental records, the cache of photos, the yearbooks, the scrapbooks, all the contents of the safe supported his fantastic claims. But more than anything else, it was Hanley's reputation that weighed so heavily on the side of truth—if any man could have accomplished what was described in this letter, it was the Nobel prizewinning Dr. Roderick Hanley.

  Jim was a clone! A clone! Roderick Hanley's clone!

  God, this is a nightmare!

  For Jim, not for her. The shock of it was numbing, frightening, but Carol forced herself to step back from it. And when she did, she saw that it really didn't matter to her, for it didn't change how she felt about Jim.

  So he was a clone. So what?

  He was still the man she had married, the man she loved. So what if he had Hanley's genes? She hadn't married a bunch of chromosomes; she had married a man. Jim was still that man. The letter changed nothing for her.

  But oh, how it had changed things for Jim.

  Poor Jim. So eager and full of hope as he had searched for his roots, only to find that he didn't have any. He had always been insecure about where he had come from—no wonder he had been acting so strange the past twenty-four hours.

  It's not fair!

  Carol was suddenly angry. How had this come to be? Jim never should have learned about this! Hanley had been right in his intent to keep Jim's origin a secret from him. What had gone wrong? The letter said—

  Then she remembered: Hanley and Derr had been killed together in that plane crash.

  What a strange twist of fate. He'd said they never traveled together. Yet they had been together that night. Which left no one alive to put the Project Genesis files into the hands of the lawyer he had mentioned. So they had been left behind for Jim to find.

  Fate could be cruel.

  But Carol's anger was not solely for fate. She was furious with Hanley and Derr. She looked down at the last page of the letter in the journal, still in her hands. One line caught her eye.

  "I beg you not to destroy these records."

  Why not? They should have been destroyed the day Hanley and Derr gave up Jim for adoption. If they had really cared about the child they had created, they never would have risked these records falling into the wrong hands. But no, they had kept all the damning evidence squirreled away.

  "Derr and I deserve our recognition someday…"

  That was the key. Vanity. Ego. Glory-seeking bastards…

  Carol pressed her palms over her eyes. Maybe she was being too hard on them. They were pioneers. They had done something unique. Was it so bad to want the history books to chronicle that?

  She realized suddenly that she couldn't hate them. Without them, there would be no Jim.

  But poor Jim. What was she going to do about Jim? How was she going to get him back on his emotional feet again?

  And suddenly she knew. She'd do what Hanley and Derr should have done in 1942—destroy this junk.

  Jim would be furious, she knew, and justifiably so. After all, these records were a part of his legacy from Hanley. They belonged to him and she had no right to dispose of them.

  But I have a right to protect my husband—even from himself.

  And right now this letter and these journals were tearing him apart. They would destroy Jim if she didn't destroy them first. The longer they were around, the worse it would get. They'd be like a cancer, eating away at him day by day, hour by hour, until there was nothing left of him. Look at how he had been acting since last night! If this went on much longer, he'd be a wreck.

  She looked around her. But how? If only the house had a fireplace. She'd set a match to the papers and watch them go up in smoke. That was the only safe way to go—incinerate the evidence.

  Incinerate. Tomorrow was garbage day, the can out at the curb waiting for the pickup. First thing tomorrow the truck would come by, dump the can, and haul the load out to the county incinerator. That was it. Throw this stuff in the garbage where it belonged!

  She got a brown grocery bag from the kitchen, dumped the journals and the letter inside, then tied it with string. Wrapping her coat around her, she hurried outside to the curb. But as she lifted the lid of the garbage can, Carol hesitated.

  What if the wrapper got torn and one of the sanit men just happened to see the journals and read them? As remote as it was, the possibility chilled her.

  And beyond that, this just didn't feel right. There were Jim's. As much as they were damaging him, he had a right to them.

  What if she simply told him that she had thrown them away? Wouldn't that be just as good?

  But she'd have to have a damn good hiding place to make that plan work. Where… ?

  The crawl space! It was perfect! Nothing down there but pipes, footings, cinder blocks, and dirt. No one had been in there since the plumber they'd hired two years ago to fix a pipe. And Jim would never search there because he wouldn't be searching—he'd believe they'd gone up in smoke at the county incinerator.

  Carol was excited now as she hurried around to the side of the house to the access door. Thank God that Monroe had such a high water table that crawl spaces were the rule rather than cellars. She squatted and reached between a pair of rhododendrons, searching for the handle on the hinged wooden board over the crawl space opening. The opening was small, about a yard wide and only half that in height. She grabbed the handle, lifted the board, quickly dropped the bundle inside, then eased the door back into place.

  There, she thought, straightening and brushing off her hands. No one will read those now except the bugs.

  The beauty part of this plan was that after Jim had blown his top and fumed over the loss of the records, he could get on with the task of accepting his origin and putting it behind him where it belonged. The journals would no longer be staring him in the face every day, gnawing at him, focusing his anxieties and insecurities. And when he had finally stabilized again—and Carol knew he would with her support—and put it all in proper perspective, maybe then, in a couple of years, she would return the journals to him. By that time they would be old news, and he would be better able to deal with them.

  She hurried back to the front door to get out of the cold. Tomorrow was going to be rough after she told him her lie, but once the storm was over, it would be a new beginning.

  Everything was going to be all right now.

  2

  Gerry Becker watched Carol disappear into the house.

  What the hell was that all about?

  First she comes out with a package, very furtively, then she
goes around to the side of the house, kneels in the bushes, then comes out without the package.

  Crazy.

  But something crazy might be just what Gerry was waiting for. Stevens's wife was obviously hiding something. From whom? Her husband? The IRS? Who?

  Gerry waited a few more minutes and saw the lights go out. He smiled. He'd give those two in the house a chance to settle into a nice deep sleep, then he'd go looking. He was good at finding things.

  It wouldn't be long now.

  Thirteen

  Wednesday, March 6

  1

  Jim awoke stiff, sore, and nauseated, feeling like Charlie Watts had been using the back of his head for a bass drum. He hadn't slept a wink Monday night. He'd tried—he'd curled up on the couch under a blanket and hoped he'd doze off so he could wake up later and find that all this had been a bad dream. But sleep hadn't come. And so he'd lain there in the dark, tense and rigid, his mind racing and his stomach twisted into a tight, heavy knot until dawn had crept in and Carol had called. Only exhaustion and a few shots of JD had let him sleep last night. But he didn't feel the least bit rested.

  This was no good. He was going to have to get a grip. He loathed self-pity and could sense that he was turning into some sort of woeful basket case.

  But he had a right to be a basket case, dammit! He'd gone searching for the identity of his parents and discovered that he didn't have any. Worse, his own identity was in question now.

  I'm not really me—I'm a piece of somebody else!

  The knowledge was a weight in his chest, pressing down on his stomach. Why? Why me? Why couldn't he have had a mother and a father like everybody else? Was that asking for so much?