The Experiment

by John Darnton

Jude reached up and shook his hand. He was impressed by the power in the old man's grip. Kuta stepped back and examined him from head to toe, shaking his head slightly.

  "If I didn't see it, I wouldn't have believed it," he said. "Well, I expect there're a lotta things that need explainin'," he added, turning and already walking back toward the shore. "But I think we oughta leave that to some other time and some other place. Right now we gotta get you boys outa here."

  Kuta told the owner of the boat, a younger Gullah called Jonah, to head straight out to sea until they could no longer see the shore, before turning south for a spell and then moving back toward land. They were relieved to see that no boats were following them.

  After forty-five minutes, they put in to a small village on the coast, peopled by Gullah fisherman. Kuta, Skyler was pleased to note, occupied a position of respect. He sent a young man off to bring back the Volvo, and the man obeyed him instantly.

  They settled around a table set in the middle of an empty lot. Delicious smells of gumbo and frying fish wafted over from a house next door, where a feast was being prepared for them. They opened up beers, and as quiet settled on the neighborhood and fireflies lighted up the deepening blue of twilight, they told their stories.

  First, Skyler recounted how he had left the island and his adventures in New York. Then Jude told about meeting Skyler and how shocked he was to encounter someone who looked so much like him. As he talked, the crowd around the table looked from one to the other, marveling at the resemblance.

  Then, when the food was brought over in steaming potfuls and great heaps were piled on their plates and more beers opened, Kuta took the floor. He told about the night when Skyler had left the island, how he had heard a gang of Elders and Orderlies coming from the Big House and had run out to hide just as they arrived, pausing only to grab his trumpet. They'd ransacked his house and he'd assumed they were looking for Skyler, but he wasn't certain.

  Then Skyler dropped from sight. Kuta learned that Julia had died, and he observed her funeral from a distance, sadly watching as her coffin was lowered into the grave. But he decided not to bring fish to the Big House anymore, and so he was cut off from any more news. Still, the rumors he heard from friends who still worked there suggested the place was in an uproar. They were moving everything out. For days and days they took boxes away by the boatload.

  Everything seemed to come to a head with the hurricane. With the storm threatening to be the worst in decades, a boatload of policemen came to the island with orders to evacuate it. From what Kuta heard, the Elders refused. They insisted upon their right to remain there and barricaded themselves inside the Big House. But some of the Gemini—a small handful—took advantage of the situation and left under police protection and were escorted to the mainland. Skyler assumed that this must have been the small group that had appeared to take him seriously when he tried to warn them that the Lab was dangerous.

  "And do you have any idea what happened to them?" Skyler asked Kuta.

  The old man just shook his head.

  Skyler shuddered at the thought that occurred to him, a thought so frightening that he was loath to say it out loud: perhaps these clones, who like him had opted to go to the mainland, were the "body snatcher" murder victims they had been reading about. It sounded a bit far-fetched at first, but the more he considered it, the more he was struck by the likelihood. Who else would be ghoulish enough to rip out their entire insides? Only someone who would let children like those on the island die of a horrible disease.

  He tried to push the thought from his mind.

  Kuta told of listening to the D.J., Bozman, and hearing his own record played and then the over-the-air announcement, casual and offhand, that an old "friend from the island" was back in town. He had known instantly who it was, he said, grabbing a beer bottle and raising a toast to Skyler and Jude.

  Later, after a few more beers, he pulled out his trumpet and played a few licks. But Skyler and Jude didn't feel like celebrating. They were too upset by what they had seen earlier.

  That night, with a full stomach under his belt, Skyler slept in the basement of a large frame house close to the water's edge. The air was fragrant and warm, just as he remembered it from his youth. Jude was sleeping in a bed on the opposite wall—he could hear the rise and fall of his breathing—and Kuta was somewhere upstairs. For the first time in a long while, Skyler felt secure, almost snug.

  One thing that bothered him was something that Kuta had said before they'd retired for the night. It wasn't anything much, but it preyed upon the back of his mind, a nagging irritation that wouldn't go away.

  After they had all told their stories, Kuta had looked at him and then Jude and then back at him and remarked: "You know, you two keep saying that you're younger than he is. But I gotta say, when I look at you side by side, you two look just the same. If I didn't know, I'd say you were the same age."

  And the others who were crowded around all agreed: Skyler looked the same as Jude. What had happened to the age difference? Why couldn't they see it?

  Chapter 27

  Tizzie had vaguely heard of the State University of New York branch at Purchase, but had always thought of it as an arts school. And sure enough, when she entered through the unmanned gatehouse on Anderson Hill Road, the first building she saw was the theater.

  But the limousine sent by Uncle Henry, driven by a taciturn chauffeur who had raised the glass partition to seal off the front seat as soon as she stepped inside, passed the theater and continued to a wooded area at the rear of the campus. Set off by itself was a compound of nondescript buildings. From the outside it could have been a business school, except for the tall wooden fence that surrounded it. Sunk in the lawn out front was a sign in embossed metal letters: THE SAMUEL BILLINGTON SCHOOL OF ANIMAL SCIENCES.

  Tizzie was dropped off at a locked gate in the center of the fence. The chauffeur popped the trunk, put her small suitcase on the ground next to her and motioned toward a buzzer attached to an intercom. Then he drove off.

  A disembodied voice asked for her name and told her to wait. After several minutes, a portly man wearing a guard's cap came to the gate, checked her against a photograph that he carried and admitted her. He took her immediately into a small room off the main entry. A bank of monitor screens identified it as the security room.

  "First thing, we gotta get you credentialed," he said, seating her before a Polaroid and snapping her picture. "You're going to be a clearance three."

  "What's that?"

  "Not very high, I'm afraid. In point of fact, it's the lowest. But it gets you into your building and the canteen."

  She looked quickly at the monitors. There seemed to be four cameras—three were trained on the outside grounds, the fourth inside somewhere, pointing at a door that had a keypunch lock.

  He tossed over a laminated card with her picture on it, already strung with a metal necklace.

  "You have to wear it at all times."

  She was led out the back door and across a courtyard and into a three-story white stucco building. There was a peculiar smell of urine inside.

  "That'll be the monkeys," explained the guard. "They're on the second floor, which is a restricted area. You'll be working on the first. Don't worry—you get used to the smell after a while."

  It hadn't escaped her notice that in escorting her, the guard had left his office. Despite the cameras and the ID badges, security was not very tight, she concluded.

  The guard knocked on a door; a sign outside indicated it was the office of Dr. Harold Brody—the head of the animal sciences laboratory. The guard left.

  "Come in" said a soft voice.

  She expected to find Dr. Brody reading scientific papers or going over lab reports, but instead he was seated at his desk, his back to the door and his arms folded behind his head, staring through half-closed venetian blinds at a desolate landscape—a lawn with bald spots leading to the fence. His posture was one of a man sunk in depression.

  His
handshake was weak, and his mind seemed elsewhere. After fifteen minutes of small talk—so small it was practically nonexistent—he took her up to what he called her "work station." There he introduced her to a co-worker—a young man with bright red hair named Alfred. He gave her some perfunctory instructions and left.

  Tizzie took an instant dislike to the carrot-topped Alfred, who was about her age. He was both officious and sycophantic—he had all but prostrated himself before Dr. Brody. To top things off, he was hardly welcoming to her and quickly made it clear he regarded her as his lowly assistant. He kept looking at her badge, until finally she looked at his and figured out why: he had a clearance one, which allowed him access to every floor. She pretended not to notice. Why give him the satisfaction?

  "How about a cup of coffee?" he said.

  "I'd love one."

  "No—I mean, how about getting me one?"

  When she brought it, she was tempted to throw it in his lap, but she reminded herself that a good spy will do anything, even debase herself, for the cause.

  Tizzie rapidly fell into a routine over the next three days. There were moments when she was not altogether unhappy, though why this should be was somewhat of a mystery—for the most part, she missed Skyler and Jude, worried about her father and wondered how she would ever figure out what was going on.

  She worked hard and long and spent every working hour inside the cramped laboratory. The job itself was routine and tedious, far below her skills. She stained and classified cells on slides for hours on end, then passed them on for analysis to Alfred, who received them as if they were offerings from a peon. Everything about him galled her: the pens lined up so neatly in his pocket, the way he took notes in a book that he locked inside a drawer, the unctuous tone he used in talking with his superiors when they ate together in the canteen. She half expected him to rub his hands together like Uriah Heep, and once actually caught him doing it.

  At dusk, she and the others knocked off and were taken in a bus to an old New England inn, the Homestead, in the nearby town of Greenwich, Connecticut. The lodgings were comfortable, but she rapidly tired of the food, which ran to large portions and heavy sauces. In the evenings, she strolled along the leafy streets past the manicured lawns of the mansions in Belle Haven or read in her room—Agatha Christie and Jane Austen.

  Some of the co-workers, including Alfred, were also staying at the Homestead. When she joined them for dinner or a drink at the bar, they never talked about the job they were doing. When she asked them what they did, she got curt answers. Even with her medical background, they shed little light on the overall project; they said they worked in nephrosclerosis or hyperlipidemia or the accumulation of lipofuscin deposits in kidney and liver. That kind of thing.

  Yet work seemed to be the subject on everyone's mind, and she derived the sense—as much from what was not said as what was said—that there was an urgency about it. They were all engaged in some grand overriding endeavor. Perhaps for that reason, conversations about every other topic seemed forced and unnatural, filled with long pauses. After a while, she stopped trying to socialize. It was less of a strain.

  From what she was able to piece together, she had little doubt that the endeavor was what Uncle Henry had suggested—they were trying to come up with some kind of vaccine to conquer the illness that had consumed her mother and was eating away at her father. She suspected that others, too, were at risk.

  And so, while keeping her eyes and ears open, she vowed to do her own bit, hunching over the high-powered microscope for so many hours at a stretch that her back ached almost all the time.

  The slides appeared as if by magic in a box set in a wall. It had a sliding door on either side, and it mystified her that she never saw the opposite door open or anyone putting the slides in; she eventually discovered, when her door would not open, that the box itself prevented this.

  She examined the cells—or more precisely, the fibroblasts, the basic unit of connective tissue fibers in humans. She dealt with them in assembly-line fashion, classifying them by appearance, photographing them, staining them with dyes, and, above all, testing the resilience and strength of their collagen, the protein that made skin thick and healthy, before passing them on to Alfred.

  By the second day, she had become proficient. She also saw a pattern. The fibroblasts in the cultures divided roughly into two groups—healthy and sickly. She watched the healthy ones producing collagenase to expel the damaged collagen, enthralled by the ineffability of the process. Sometimes the fibroblast was forced to divide to do its work, to produce new collagen. She saw that each time, inside the fibroblast, as the chromosome lined up to split so that it could form two new cells, a little piece at the end of the chromosome got just a little bit shorter. The telomere.

  The unhealthy cells were old cells—so perhaps it was a misnomer to call them sickly; they were just tired. The problem was not that they were inactive; quite the contrary. They seemed to turn out huge amounts of collagenase, but instead of clearing out only the collagen in need of repair, the strange part was that it seemed to attack all the collagen directly. Their telomeres were badly shrunken.

  She dyed the healthy cells red and the sickly ones blue, and passed them on to Alfred, who conducted his own analyses and tests and wrote the results down in the notebook that he kept locked up.

  Working was not the only thing she did. She would leave the room for brief periods, telling Alfred that she needed to use the bathroom. On her first excursion, she went up the staircase to the forbidden second floor, prepared to look lost and ingenuous if anyone discovered her. From the top step, she saw the locked door with the keypunch lock and, trained upon it, mounted on the opposite wall, the camera.

  On the second day, she learned the code to unlock the door.

  Through the window, she had seen that the guard was out of doors. She left the lab, went across the courtyard and slipped into the security room. There on the monitor was the view of the locked door. She opened a drawer, found the tape machine that corresponded to the monitor and pressed Rewind. The tape fluttered until the image of a person came on, moving backward jerkily. She put it on Play and watched carefully: the figure approached the door, raised a finger and punched the keyboard four times. She played it back and looked again closely at the keypunch until she got it: 8769.

  She moved the tape ahead, restarted it and left, checking her watch. She had been away six minutes. Not bad; it had felt like fifteen.

  "Where have you been?" demanded Alfred. "The work's piling up."

  "Women's problems," she explained, looking down. That usually took care of male curiosity.

  He shook his head, but said nothing.

  Bending back over the microscope, she reflected that obtaining the code had been the easy part. Using it to get inside the restricted laboratory—and out again in one piece—that would be the trick. She was more than a little scared, and glad that Jude had given her Raymond's phone number just in case.

  ¨

  Jude waited for Raymond near a grove of pine trees inside the entrance to the park. It was dusk, which was good. That way, he would be able to see the headlights of Raymond's car as it approached. And the parking area was divided into lots separated by trees, which was good, too. Raymond wouldn't be able to tell that he hadn't parked his car there.

  He lighted a cigarette and pulled the smoke deeply into his lungs.

  Jude had tried to plan everything ahead of time. He knew he was running a risk in showing himself. There was always the chance that the FBI would snatch him as soon as he was out in the open—there wasn't much he could do to prevent that—but he was operating on the assumption that it wasn't him they were after, but Skyler. He was the one who could identify the conspirators. The FBI wanted to use Skyler; the Orderlies wanted to eliminate him. Either way, Jude had to ensure that he could extract himself from a meeting without leading them to Skyler—in other words, without being followed.

  He could tell on the phone that Raymond
was eager. His old friend had sounded desperate for a meeting; he'd made no effort to conceal his excitement at hearing Jude's voice or pretend that everything was normal.

  "Where are you?" he said, giving each word its own emphasis. "I need to see you."

  "That could be arranged," said Jude, warming up to a role he had seen countless times in the movies—the hunted man calling the coppers on a pay phone. "But it's gotta be on my terms."

  "Name them," replied Raymond, falling into the same familiar patter—the gumshoe leading the dragnet.

  No tricks, no weapons, no backup, Jude insisted.

  No problem, said Raymond—he'd even come without his partner. Jude named the time and place, a spot he had carefully chosen, the Delaware Water Gap, an odd bit of untamed nature only an hour and a half west of New York.

  Of course, he'd already been there when he placed the call.

  He took another drag on the cigarette and tried to quell that little voice inside that told him he was being foolish.

  There was nothing else to do. He and Skyler and Tizzie couldn't take on the Lab alone. They needed allies now. They had done all they could by themselves, and that was a lot: they had tracked down the origins of the cult in Jerome. They had found the island. They had even discovered some co-conspirators. But now they needed help. They didn't have evidence; they didn't know where the group had gone or what it was planning. They had a password that could open up the files, but they didn't know where the goddamned files were.

  The discovery of Eagleton's involvement had changed everything. They were up against some powerful people. Who knew how high up this conspiracy extended? Or what it was capable of? Or what could explain that ghastly sight of suffering and dying children back at the Nursery? And meanwhile, if the victims of the killers in Georgia were who Jude thought they were, the group was still murdering people.

  The evening was warm, almost muggy, but still Jude felt himself shivering. Nerves. He would have to control himself in front of Raymond—the agent did not overlook weakness in others.