[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 check 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.