The Experiment

by John Darnton

  Quickly, they looked around.

  No one was in sight. They were midway between two squat, rectangular buildings painted in peeling army gray with black shingled roofs. They looked like barracks or maybe offices.

  "Come. Over here," said Tizzie, leading them around a corner to a doorway. It was up a few wooden steps, painted gray, and set under a small eave. A faded sign on the door read: QUARTERMASTER.

  They stepped inside. There were four desks, venetian blinds on the windows, filing cabinets—some with empty drawers opened—lamps and wooden chairs.

  Tizzie talked breathlessly.

  "I found the control box for the gate—no trouble. But when I opened it, it was empty, just some loose wires. I came in here and found the phone, so I called you."

  "That much we know," said Jude.

  "Sorry about that. But it's okay. No one knows. There's no switchboard. In fact, there's not really much of anything. It's bizarre—the whole place is strange. Half-deserted, things falling apart, a bunch of people walking around looking lost. No one stopped me. No one's even spoken to me. It's unreal. I had this strange thought when I was walking around—this is probably what it felt like to be in some city under siege, one of those walled cities in the Middle Ages. Except no one's doing the sieging."

  "No one but us," replied Jude.

  Skyler slumped into a chair.

  "You don't look good," said Tizzie.

  He shook her off. "Don't worry about me. I'm fine."

  "I hope so."

  She looked at Jude.

  "So what now? What's the plan?"

  "We look for the records."

  She shot him an exasperated look. "Any thoughts on where we look?"

  "These people are scientists, right? Methodical. Organized. The records are very important to them. We saw their last headquarters, and there they kept them in the basement of the Big House. Chances are, they would do the same here. So I say we go to the main building and look there."

  They all agreed it made sense. She insisted on going first. After all, she said, she knew the base somewhat, having parked the car near the front entrance and walked across it. And she was wearing the lab coat, which she felt served as a sort of protective coloring—it and a lot of bluff had been enough to get her inside the place. Jude and Skyler could follow behind and keep out of sight. She would let them know when the coast was clear.

  Jude didn't like it, but before he could think of an objection, she had opened the door and slipped outside. They watched her through the quartermaster's window, striding boldly away on the pavement as if she had every right to be there.

  If anyone can carry it off, she can, he thought admiringly. It's all a question of attitude.

  He was about to open the door, when he felt Skyler's hand on his shoulder.

  "Listen. You go after her. You two get the records. I can't. I've got something to do."

  Jude knew what it was. He had seen Skyler examining the plans, memorizing the layout of the barracks and the hospital. He knew also that he did not have a chance in hell of dissuading him.

  "Okay."

  Then they did something neither expected—they embraced each other, tightly, and drew back and looked at each other squarely in the face, and wished each other luck. Abruptly, Skyler turned and stole out the door and disappeared behind the building across the way. When he was gone, Jude left and hurried in the direction Tizzie had taken.

  He went around a corner and saw her up ahead, now turning casually to make sure he was there. She continued on, and he followed, trying to look inconspicuous. He did not dodge from building to building—that would have looked absurd and caught somebody's attention—but he tried to stay in the shadows and walk slowly and shrink into the landscape. Tizzie was right: there were not many people around, thank God.

  First they tried the general offices, which dominated a cluster of buildings set around an oval driveway. They entered by a side door, and Jude waited in a basement stairwell while Tizzie went from floor to floor. No luck. On the way out, she asked Jude where Skyler was, and when he explained that he had gone off on his own, she frowned and shook her head. Next they tried the supply center, kitchen and the mess hall—four cavernous rooms now unused, marked with falling plaster and white dust on the long tables bearing the delicate footprints of rats.

  Then they came to the assembly hall. Three or four people were congregating on the front steps and inside the vestibule, so they slunk around to the rear. They found a pair of double doors—but they were locked. Jude took a credit card from his wallet, slipped it between the two doors so that it hit the catch, and rocked them slowly until it slid open.

  "One advantage of a wasted youth," he said.

  Instinctively, they went down the stairs to the basement and knew at once that they had found what they were looking for. Through the window of a door, they saw neatly arranged desks and cabinets—the only clean room they had seen so far—and four computers lined up side by side upon a long oak table. The door was unlocked.

  Jude sat down at a computer and switched it on. The screen jumped to life, casting a ghostly glow over his chest and forearms. He punched a few keys, and the screen responded instantly in a one-word demand: PASSWORD. Carefully, his fingers almost shaking, he typed in the word that he had learned on the island, the word that Julia had given her life for: B-A-C-O-N. The screen blinked and flipped, turned blank and flashed again with a second request: 2ND PASSWORD. Jude typed the second name: N-E-W-T-O-N. And in no time, a file menu came up. Jude quickly read the items: medical, match-up, doctors, Group members, Lab research, child placement, experiments, births, deaths, journals, history.

  He tabbed down to MATCH UP and clicked the mouse. A few more blips, a second of hesitation and there it was—two lists. One to the left, headed Prototypes, consisting of names, addresses, professions, families, blood types, capsule medical histories. One to the right, marked Geminis, with names, dates of implantation, dates of birth and medical information. Here the address under each name was the same: Crab Island.

  Tizzie was standing watch at the door.

  "I'll be damned," he said. "Look at this!"

  She rushed over and bent down over his left shoulder.

  "God."

  That one word said it all. It was uttered with a sense of awe. They knew the master list existed, they had traveled hundreds of miles to find it and endured hardship to attain it, but still, once it was there in black-and-white, they were amazed.

  It was like taking a course in theoretical physics and then watching an atom bomb explode.

  Tizzie resumed her post at the door. Jude scrolled down to his own name and saw a notation: INACTIVE. See individual file. Across the screen he saw the match-up with Skyler. Underneath it said: Escaped from Crab Island. Marked for retirement. See individual file.

  "Jude."

  She was calling to him softly from across the room.

  "Listen. A lot of people are coming. I think they're coming into the building."

  He was too engrossed in the file to pay much attention. She opened the door and left, and a few minutes later, she was back.

  "Jude, listen to me. People are gathering upstairs. Cars are pulling up. They're all coming here—from all over, all of them. The Young Leaders, the prototypes. There's some kind of big meeting about to happen—right upstairs."

  He had pulled up on the screen a name on the left that meant nothing to him. But on the right, under the Gemini, the lengthy medical record ended with a date and three words: ORGAN BLOCK TRANSPLANT. That was one who had run away from the island and was killed, he thought.

  "I hear you," he said. "But we can't leave this. We've got to copy it. Look around for a disk."

  "I'm not saying you should stop," she insisted. "I'm saying we've got to know what they're up to. I'm going to the meeting."

  She opened the door and she was gone.

  A second later, what she said sank in, and Jude knew that it was a mistake, that he should have stoppe
d her. But having finally found what he was looking for, having finally found the fountain of knowledge and imbibed, he was loath to break off.

  He scrolled down until he came to her name: ELIZABETH TIERNEY...

  Skyler peeked around the corner of the building and saw the hospital about twenty yards away. It was off by itself in one corner of the base, which made sense—the patients would have a view of the woods to soothe their convalescence, and in case they bore infectious diseases, they would be isolated from the general population.

  The isolation suited his purposes, too.

  He had already searched the barracks. There were ten of them, low-slung buildings of concrete floors and bunk beds in various states of disarray. It was obvious that they had not been occupied for some time, and as he inspected them, walking as quickly as he could, considering the weakness that was overtaking him, in one door and out the other, he felt an unbridled sense of anxiety. He knew at once the source of the anxiety—the barracks aroused memories of his own past, waking and sleeping years on end in a similar structure, growing up with the Age Group in a solitary world.

  But one of the barracks, closest to the hospital, he could not examine because people were inside. He had heard the voices just as he was about to turn the doorknob, and he stole around the corner just as the door opened. A nurse stepped out, carrying a tray of implements to the hospital. A minute later, out came another, carrying blankets. He found a window and looked inside. Far from being dirty, it was clean and sterile. Hospital beds were made with crisp new sheets. There were stanchions for IVs, bedpans, call buttons on cords and all kinds of medical monitoring machines. It looked like a recovery ward.

  Now, peering around the corner, he realized that the base had come alive. In the distance he could hear cars arriving, doors slamming, voices calling out. People were moving about; they were entering what seemed to be a large assembly hall. Some of them looked over in his direction, toward the hospital. One figure—dressed in a doctor's scrubs, he realized with a spasm of fear—was walking toward him.

  He didn't have much time. And he was feeling none too good.

  Skyler took a deep breath and ran across the gap to the hospital. When he reached the wall of the building, he leaned against it to catch his breath. He stayed like that for some time, recovering. Finally, through sheer will, he pushed forward. He was shaky, but feeling a little better.

  He told himself he had to do this.

  You must.

  He walked around the building, leaning against the wall, until he came to the rear. There he found what he was looking for—a large picture window. Inside were chairs and tables—it appeared to be a sun room—and looking through the room and through an open doorway, he could see the ward.

  And what he saw there jolted him. He felt his senses spring to alert, the blood coursing through his veins.

  Upon the beds, one next to another, he saw his Age Group, his fellow Gemini. He recognized them, each and every one of them. And his heart went out to them. They were strapped down on their beds, lying there looking at the ceiling and at each other, in poses of barely controlled panic.

  Jude was relieved that Tizzie's file substantiated her story. It was all there—the childhood disease, the transplant of the kidney, her family's departure from Arizona, and finally the death of her clone, Julia. This latter event was noted in a rare bit of bureaucratic poetry: GEMINI DEMISE.

  What was reassuring was that Tizzie's file had terminated in the same phrase as his—INACTIVE.

  He hated to admit it, but his relief told him something. Since their meeting at the mine outside Jerome, he had trusted her, but only up to a point. He had been badly burned by her initially, and although he had held his suspicions at bay, he had been unable to banish them altogether. Now, he could. That single word—INACTIVE—spoke volumes.

  As Jude scrolled through the records, reading hungrily, he was too excited to be afraid. He heard people assembling in the hall above—the sounds of their shoes thudding and scuffing against the floorboards was magnified by the concrete walls of the basement office. He knew he could be caught at any time. All it would take was one person who decided to come downstairs. He played the scene over in his mind: the sight of him typing away at the keyboard, a shrill cry, those footsteps turning back and thundering down the steps, the crowd grabbing him and hustling him off. Still, he could not stop. What he was turning up was too valuable. It was worth the risk.

  Those two passwords had opened the cave, like an open sesame. They had enabled him to tap into the mother lode of information. Almost everything was recorded in the computer: how the Lab operated, its original membership, the scientific breakthroughs, the births of its children and their clones, the financial records, the outside contacts. There was even a narrative; it told how the early researchers, including his father, had come together. It told how they had stepped over the line of what was permissible at their medical schools, how they'd become obsessed with cloning and gone underground in Arizona, and finally how they'd transformed themselves from a cult of brilliant scientists into a conspiratorial web that used the lure of immortality to reach into the power centers of the country. What the records did not tell—and the omission was conspicuous—was anything about the spider at the vortex of the web, Dr. Rincon.

  It was like a puzzle with a single piece missing—a piece right smack in the center.

  Still, there was more than enough for the FBI to go on and for prosecutors to break up the Lab. Most important was a listing of the outside conspirators who had agreed to join the Group. Jude wanted to whistle as he read through the list of names, twenty-four in all. There was Tibbett. And Eagleton. And the Georgia congressman. And others equally prominent. They represented people at the height of the professions, movers and shakers in politics, finance, the media, commerce, and retailing. Raymond had been right: they'd paid ten million bucks a head for the right to participate. In return, they got a regime of gene therapy—weekly injections of DNA inside enucleated viruses, targeted at the bone marrow, where blood is manufactured. They also got a clone. In a backup file Jude found their names and addresses—foster children who had been placed in homes around the country. The oldest, he noted with disgust, was seven.

  In another file, Jude found the account of what had gone wrong, how the complicated medical process had backfired and actually triggered off premature aging. For those who had received gene therapy—including most in the Lab and the Group—it was most severe, leading to illness and a painful death. But even those who had received only the early experimental injections—like Skyler, he thought—were susceptible.

  The solution was a desperate one. The prototypes of the clones, the children of the original scientists, were to undergo radical surgery. With a sense of dread, Jude saw that the operations—spelled out in bold uppercase letters, ORGAN BLOCK TRANSPLANTS—had been already scheduled. He looked at the times and dates, then at the clock. Was it possible? According to this file, the first block transplant was about to begin.

  Jude left the computer and searched through the cabinets and desk drawers. Behind a stack of stationery and yellow legal pads, he found what he was looking for—a plastic container filled with disks. He chose one, shoved it into the computer and began copying. He watched as, with horrible slowness, the tiny symbols of a file copying itself floated across the screen. He hit the keys, did it again, then hit them again and again. He could not copy everything—that would take too long—just the basic files on the Lab and the Group.

  Seven long, agonizing minutes later, he was through. He ejected the disk and put it in his pocket.

  He had one more thing to do.

  Hurriedly, he called up the Eagleton file. From somewhere behind him, or maybe up above, he thought heard something, footsteps perhaps. Undoubtedly Tizzie coming back to join him.

  He couldn't break off, for this was more important than anything else. He had to locate the backup files. He had to see who else in the FBI was named as a conspirator or
who was working for them. He had to know whom he could trust.

  The sound got closer. It seemed right behind him, and he was preparing to turn around just as he found the one file he was looking for, and started to read it...

  He jumped as the hands landed on his shoulders and his arms, roughly. The hands lifted him out of the chair and twisted one arm behind his back until it hurt. They grabbed his cell phone. Then they trundled him away.

  Tizzie slumped down in a chair near the back of the auditorium. She was not in the very last row—that, she thought, might draw attention to herself—and she hoped she was far enough from the front to be hard to spot from the stage. She wanted to blend in, and wished that someone would sit next to her or talk to her so that she would seem to belong. But no one did. She'd also put on a pair of sunglasses she'd had in the pocket of her coat. She didn't know who would be here, but the last thing she wanted was to be recognized.

  She was beginning to feel that she had behaved recklessly. She had simply mounted the stairs and joined the flow of people entering by the front door. They'd gone straight ahead and she had followed them, entering the hall, which had a vaulted ceiling high above and a wooden balcony at the rear. Faded color banners of some sort hung from the rafters, left over from the former occupants. The room was large enough to make them feel small.

  There were perhaps fifty people altogether. They were prosperous-looking, and they could have been an upper-middle-class group anywhere—say, parents at a get-acquainted evening at a private school. Except that they did not come in pairs. About half were the prototypes, she thought, the beloved offspring. They were roughly her age—or seemed to be, though in truth, they looked older. Some of their parents were there, too, the original scientists in the Lab. These are the true believers, she thought, the ones who'd started it all. They looked old indeed, wispy-haired, withered and frail, with liver-spotted skin, and they were scattered through the crowd like white mushrooms. Here and there were other men and women in nurse's uniforms and scrubs and lab coats like her own, which made her feel a bit less conspicuous.