“What's that?”
“Your friend, the one who gave you the lead to Houston, did she have anyone living in the Chicago area?”
“Let me check.”
The boarding line stretched around the outer edges of the room. It was going to be a full flight. Walt watched Childs move forward in line, one step at a time, like a good little soldier. That's what you are, isn't it? he thought. A little soldier, following orders.
Teri came back on the line. “I don't know if it's the Chicago area or not, but Jeremy and Michelle are in St. Charles.”
“Great. You better give me their address and a phone number in case I need it.”
[97]
They landed at O'Hare twenty minutes late due to a strong head wind. Childs didn't leave his seat the entire flight, and seemed in no particular hurry to get off once the plane had touched down. He calmly collected his briefcase from the overhead storage compartment and stood in line like everyone else.
It was after one in the morning by the time they were both out of the airport. Childs rented a new Buick and took I-90 westbound past Rolling Meadows, Schaumburg, Barrington and into Elgin, where he exited at Route 25 and drove south into a place called St. Charles. Walt followed along behind, trying to stay awake, in a Ford Taurus.
They ended up on the east side of town off Route 63 on Kirk Road. It was primarily an area of corporate and industrial parks, places like the Coca Cola bottling plant and the DuPage Airport and the Norris Cultural Arts Center. At the very outskirts, set well back from the street and hidden behind a wall of trees and shrubbery, was a building called the Devol Research Institute.
Childs pulled into the lot and parked near the front entrance.
Walt passed by, not wanting to be noticed. He circled the block twice, then came back and stopped near the mouth of the long driveway. A scattering of lights gave shape to the building in the distance. In front, parked under the only light in the lot, Walt spotted the rented Buick. It wasn't likely the good doctor would be going anywhere soon. He was probably going to spend the night here.
“Which means I need a place to stay,” Walt muttered to himself.
[98]
“How have things been?” Childs asked.
“Fine, sir.”
“Any changes?”
“No, sir. None.”
He stood at the back of the elevator, admiring the woman's near-perfect form. Her name was Pam, or more formally, Pamela Sergeant, and she was thirty-seven years old. She had been running this facility for nearly ten years now, overseeing a full-time, skeletal staff of four. Three of those under her watchful eye maintained the monitoring system, the fourth served as the receptionist and public liaison. Four times a year, for a period of two weeks, a team of lab technicians were brought in to work upstairs. It was Pam's job to supervise them, and to make sure the Institute kept an overall low profile, while they continued to collect and preserve project data.
“Everything set for tomorrow?”
“As always.”
The elevator came to a stop at the basement level. The doors slid open and there was a long dark hallway in front of them, the only source of light coming from two seventy-five watt bulbs over the doorway at the far end. “After you, Dr. Childs.”
“No, please.”
She nodded, officiously, and led him down the hall to the far door, where she fumbled with the ring of keys dangling from the belt of her skirt. She had used one of the keys to enter the elevator, another to access the basement, and now she used a third key to unlock the door. She stepped aside.
Childs stepped through.
On the other side, three more doors walled the small square room. Pam glanced questioningly at Childs, who pointed to the door on the right. The face plate on the door said: KARMA SIX. She sorted through her key ring, came up with the right key, and unlocked the door.
“No changes at all, huh?” Childs asked as he stepped through.
“None,” she said.
The room was long and narrow, with a line of beds on each side. Not all the beds were occupied. In fact, most of them were stripped of their sheets and buried beneath a blanket of shadows, clearly indicating that they were empty. But of the seven that were occupied, all seven had been occupied for a good long time now, and they were all occupied by children.
Childs stopped at the foot of the first bed, glanced over the chart, then hung it over the frame again. The girl in the bed was eight years old. Her name was Rebecca Wright and she had been eight years old for nearly ten years now. She had also been comatose.
He went to her bedside and pulled the covers back, exposing her legs. Even with the daily routine of manipulating and messaging the muscles, the legs had lost some of their mass.
“She's stabilized at fifty-five pounds,” he noted.
“Yes, she has.”
“That's remarkable when you think about it.”
“Is it?”
“Oh, yes.” He dropped the bed sheet back in place, and checked the girl's pupils as a matter of routine. There was no reason to believe there would be any change and of course he found none. Still, after what had happened with the Knight boy, he had cautioned the staff at each of the centers to keep a closer eye on any changes in a child's condition. No one wanted to take anything for granted.
“All it would take is a couple of weeks of physical therapy and strengthening and she'd be up and around, almost like new.”
“That is remarkable,” Pam said.
“Yes, indeed. You've done a fine job here, Pam.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He moved down the line of occupied beds, one at a time, going through the same routine of first checking their charts, then their pupils. No change. Not a single hint of change anywhere in the room. It had been this way for years now.
The comas had swept through nearly half of the participants of the research study in less than a month. It had taken that long to link the protracted unconsciousness to the administration of an experimental drug called AA103. Use of the drug had been halted immediately.
At first, Childs had thought the mishap would prove to be the end of the Karma Project. But he had managed to convince D.C. that they had nothing to lose by monitoring the children another six months. As it turned out, it was a lucky thing they hadn't scrapped the study after all. In those six months, not a single child, not one, had demonstrated a single sign of growth or aging. It was the result they had been chasing all along and suddenly they had it. Somehow, they had managed to halt the aging process. The only glitch, and it was still a glitch to this very day, was that they didn't know exactly how they had done it.
At the last bed, Childs nodded and dropped the bed sheet back over the boy's legs. The children had always been well cared for. Their fingernails and toenails were clipped, their hair groomed, their bodies washed. They were fed a high-protein, vitamin-rich solution that helped them maintain their body mass, and there wasn't a child in the study who wasn't within five or six pounds of what was the natural weight for his age and height.
“Ever wonder what would happen if one of them came out of the sleep?” he asked casually. He stopped just outside the room and waited as Pam locked the door again behind them.
“I'm not sure I understand what you mean, sir.”
“We have a room full of ageless children, Pam. As far as we can tell, they're ageless because the coma has somehow suspended a process which modern science has always believed was unalterable. Have you ever wondered what would happen to that process once the coma ended?”
“No, sir. I can't say that I have.”
“I hadn't, either. Not until recently.”
[99]
“Wake you?”
Teri opened an eye to the clock on the nightstand. She groaned and rolled over on her side, away from the luminous dial. “No, I'm always wide awake at one-thirty in the morning. I like to get up early so I don't miss anything.”
“Sorry,” Walt said. “I just thought I'd better ch
eck in.”
“Where are you?”
“In a dumpy motel on the outskirts of St. Charles.”
“St. Charles?” Both eyes opened and Teri sat up on one elbow. She wiped away what little sleep was left. “I just talked to Michelle tonight. It's the same thing, Walt. Just like the others. They had a baby girl. Her name was Rebecca. She was eight years old when she disappeared.”
“It keeps getting more interesting, doesn't it?”
“We've got him, Walt. Everywhere this guy goes another kid disappears.”
“We're definitely getting there.”
“Jesus, what more do you want?”
“I'm not sure,” he said, his voice quietly subdued. “I guess I'm feeling a little confused about what went on with you and our good doctor back in your college days. Was that all he was to your group of friends? Just the guy who volunteered at the off-campus health clinic?”
“No,” she said, finally coming fully awake. She had forgotten to tell him about her conversation with Peggy the other morning. “No, there was more to it than that. I didn't know this until a couple of days ago, when I was talking to Peggy. There was a drug that was going around then ... I mean, well, there were lots of drugs that were going around, but this one was different. It was called Genesis, and it was something of an hallucinogen, something along the lines of LSD if I remember correctly.”
“You're lucky you still have a brain, you know that?”
Oh, Teri knew it all right. She knew it better than most. Michael Jacobson hadn't been so lucky. They called him Michael the Second because he joined the group a few months after Michael the First. Teri had married Michael the First. After they had married, they had decided to have children, and once they had made the decision to have children they had quietly moved out of the drug scene, giving up everything from Genesis to LSD to pot.
Having children wasn't their only reason for quitting, though. Several weeks before, Michael the Second had taken the kind of trip that very few people ever came back from. He had come back from it, but he had not come back all the way. As far as she knew, he was still swimming in a world of nightmares and twisted images. The last she had heard he was staying at Agnew State Hospital. That had been before it had changed to the Agnew Developmental Center. To this day, as far as she knew, Michael the Second was still a faceless soul, one of the disappeared, living in a strange alienated world that belonged only to him.
“Yeah, I know,” she said sadly. “Anyway, what's important is that Peggy told me Childs was the only supplier for the drug.”
“For Genesis?”
“Yeah.”
Walt fell suddenly quiet on the other end of the line. Teri reached for the lamp behind the clock on the night stand. The room brightened. It felt like an old sweatshirt, soft and familiar, and she realized she had begun to feel comfortable here.
“You know what this probably means, don't you?”
“What?”
“Teri, this guy wasn't trying to help you enjoy a little recreational mind tripping. He was using you. You and your friends, you guys were all guinea pigs. That's how this whole thing got started.”
“My God,” Teri said softly. She took in a breath that felt cold and foreign, and expelled it as quickly as she could. The next breath came a little harder. “And whatever it was he did to us, we passed it on to the children.”
“It looks that way.”
“How could anyone...” The thought fell away naturally, because there was no sensible way to finish it. Some things, some people, simply defied understanding. It wasn't bad enough that this man had kidnapped their children; he had somehow managed to poison them as well.
Except that wasn't the entire truth, now was it? If she were going to be honest with herself, there was a point here where she needed to take responsibility for her own misdeeds. The late Sixties and early Seventies had been her playground, a time of naiveté and taking chances. It was Woodstock and Easy Rider. Don't trust anyone over thirty. And bumper stickers that said: Tomorrow is canceled due to a lack of interest. She had played recklessly and with abandon, as had Michael and most of their friends. And now it was Gabe who was paying the price.
So, yes, she hated what Childs had done—what he was still doing—but there was little saving grace for her own actions.
“What do we do now?” Teri asked.
“Take a look in the bottom drawer of the nightstand and see if there's a phone book in there. I want you to look up the Devol Research Institute. See if they happen to have a local listing.”
The phone book was buried beneath a stack of old Time magazines. Teri dug it out and spent a minute or two thumbing through the yellow pages, wondering in the back of her mind where Walt had stumbled across the name Devol. “What do you want me to look under?”
“You better try the white pages.”
“Devol? Right? D-e-v-o-l?”
“Yeah.”
When she couldn't find it under Devol, she tried Devole, and then finally Devoule. The results were all the same. The closest she came was Devon's Dry Cleaning off Hartnell Avenue. “Sorry, I can't find anything even close. A research institute, you said, right?”
“Just to make sure, after you hang up will you do me a favor and call the operator and see if maybe she has a listing?”
“Sure.” She opened the top drawer of the night stand and rummaged through the books and old magazines until she came up with a pencil and a piece of paper. On the paper, she wrote DEVOL RESEARCH INSTITUTE in bold, block lettering. “So what's this place supposed to be?”
“It's where we ended up after our flight. Childs went straight there, like a spaniel to water. There's not much to see from the street. It looks like just another business building from the outside.”
“Maybe it is.”
“Now there's a story for the papers. Idiot private eye tails suspect halfway across the country while the suspect attends a seminar on the proper filing of Medicare forms. God, it better be more than just a business building.”
Teri grinned, and it struck her how lucky she was to have this man on her side. He had, indeed, just flown halfway across the country for her. How many people did she know who would do that for her? Only one that she could think of.
“Go to bed, Walt.”
“Why? Am I starting to sound crabby?”
“Definitely.”
[100]
Teri did as she had promised.
After she hung up, she called directory assistance and told the operator that she needed a number for the Devol Research Institute in the 9-1-6 area code. The clickety-clackety patter of computer keys sounded in the background.
“Could you please spell that?”
“D-e-v-o-l,” Teri said.
“I'm sorry. I have no listing for the Devol Research Institute.”
“Could it be an unlisted number?”
“As I said, I have no such listing.”
“In other words, you can't tell me.”
“That's correct.”
Teri stewed for awhile after she had hung up. She got out of bed, went into the kitchen, and rummaged through the refrigerator for something to eat. But she wasn't really hungry. She was upset. And when she couldn't find anything that would satisfy the upset, she headed back to bed.
She was on the verge of falling asleep again when something occurred to her that was so obvious she had almost overlooked it. Of course the number was unlisted. If there had been no such number at all, no such place as the Devol Research Institute, the operator would have said so. But since the number was unlisted, the operator was in the position of having to protect that fact.
Of course!
Two calls later, Teri had learned that there were no listings for a Devol Research Institute in either the Houston area or the St. Charles area. Since she knew there was an institute in St. Charles and certainly had reason not to conclude there might be one in Houston as well, it was a short leap to suspect there might also be one here in the local area. And
if that were true, then Gabe had to be somewhere close by.
That little piece of knowledge renewed the sense of excitement inside her and for awhile, unable to sleep, Teri was forced to do some reading before finally turning off the light. She rolled over, her eyes still wide open, and gazed through the thin veil of the bedroom curtains, out into the night sky. A picture of Gabe floated to the fore of her thoughts and she said a little prayer to God that tomorrow would be the day she would be reunited with her son.
Gradually, sleep began to overtake her.
Teri closed her eyes, a moment of pure tranquility settling over her.
Then she heard a noise from the living room that brought her completely awake again.
[101]
��In the sixties, endocrinologists began to understand the true nature of chemical messengers in assisting the release of hormones in the body. It wasn't long after that, that we were able to synthesize these chemical messengers and thus trigger specific hormonal reactions. Somatostatin, which inhibits the pituitary growth hormone, is an example of these messengers. Today, we can already see synthetics playing a role in everything from diabetes control to fertility drugs.
“More recently, as we've come to discover the role that our genes play in the natural process of aging, we have to wonder how much longer it will be before similar synthetics will be used to artificially trigger the functions of these genes. It is not outside the realm of possibility that by the end of this century we will be able to manipulate the on/off switches responsible for the onset of aging.
“We may, in fact, actually be able to cease the human aging process.”
Dr. Timothy Childs
University of California, Berkeley
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