Walt finished his pie. He wiped his mouth and downed the last of the Diet Coke. This was beginning to get interesting. Three kids, all in their teens, parked on a bench outside a bookstore, waiting. Waiting for what?
Childs, of course. They’re waiting for the good Dr. Childs to come and pick them up and take them back to the Devol Research Institute. That’s what they’re waiting for. Only they don’t know it, do they? That’s what the laying-on of hands and the whispering was all about. It was the Pied Piper piping. And now the children are all in a line, waiting to follow the music wherever it takes them.
He crumpled up his napkin and sat back in the booth. It was only a couple of minutes more before Childs and the woman finally showed up. The good doctor was punctual if nothing else. He pulled up to the curb and without a word, the three kids climbed off the bench and into the back seat of the car. Nothing to it. It was that easy, that quick, that inconspicuous.
Slick was the word that came to Walt’s mind as he watched the car pull out into the street again.
The man was slick.
[107]
The empty elevator car, which had been parked on the top floor where all the lab work was being done, started its slow descent toward the basement. It would take several more days before all the test results would be completed. By then, Childs would be back in California. In fact, he had a ticket on the redeye heading out tonight. Pam would be faxing him the prelims as soon as they were available, and if there were any surprises—which he had no reason to expect—then she would express the samples. That had only been necessary once before, when they had first tried AA103. Nothing even remotely as intrusive had been introduced into the study since.
The lab was fully equipped, though it had not always been. Most of the money had poured into the project in the mid-Eighties, after the incident with the AA103. The abrupt comatose states brought about by the experimental drug had initially been thought disastrous. People in the CIA and the DOD were in a panic, fearing that if the project were exposed the entire government might fall. But then an interesting thing had happened. The subjects, while still comatose, had stopped aging. It was the result Childs had been after all along. Only he had stumbled across it accidentally and didn’t clearly understand why or how the natural process had been interrupted. Hence the money came pouring in. Find the answer and everything else would work itself out.
He was still looking for the answer.
The upstairs lab was primarily a biochemistry lab, though there was also a seldom-used bacteriology component. The blood and urine samples were already in testing. Some of the blood had been inserted into a special glass tube, then placed in a centrifuge and spun at a rate of several thousand revolutions per minute, separating the blood cells from the blood serum, which remained at the top of the tube. The serum went into little plastic cups next, then into an automatic analyzer that measured the color by shining lights through the sample plus a reagent solution. Other blood samples were given a flame photometer test for certain elements such as sodium and potassium. The examination of the liver cell samples under an electron microscope would come later.
As the elevator neared the halfway point of its descent, everything was moving along smoothly, all on schedule. The routine examinations on all three subjects had been completed in a little more than forty-five minutes. In addition, Childs had already debriefed and reprogrammed the subjects, which was and always had been the trickiest element of the entire operation. The past five years, they had developed a system of hypnotic and subliminal commands in conjunction with a virtual reality simulator that actually reconstructed a powerful false memory in the minds of the subjects. They had spent the afternoon, the entire afternoon, at the park. That would be their only memory of their afternoon activity. Everything else would be masked. It was a remarkably effective system.
Before virtual reality had been an option, the use of drugs and hypnosis in combination had served in a similar role. While the doctor had not been able to substitute a false memory, he had been able to erase any memories the subjects might have had of being at the lab. It was a process that left them not quite knowing what had happened. They simply closed their eyes at the park and when they opened them again, two hours had passed. In the place of those two hours sat a blank spot. No explanation.
The elevator arrived at the basement. The counterweight set, the car settled onto the buffer, and the doors opened. Childs escorted the three teenagers into the car. They were the walking dead, fixed gazes, expressionless, going through all the motions and only distantly aware of their surroundings. He pressed the button for the first floor. The elevator doors closed.
Pam was waiting in the lobby for them. She checked her watch as the doors opened and the four passengers stepped out. “Right on schedule.”
“Couldn’t have gone any smoother,” Childs said.
“The lab’s got everything?”
“They’re already doing the work up.”
They went out through the back entrance, where the Buick was waiting. The kids climbed into the back seat. They would be back at the park, innocent and safe for another three months, in less than the usual two hours. Childs closed the door behind the girl.
“I think I’ll go straight from the park to the airport,” he said. “No sense in hanging around here twiddling my thumbs for the next three hours. Maybe they’ll be able to get me on an earlier flight out.”
“I’ll fax you the prelims tomorrow.”
He paused a moment, the driver’s side door open. He looked across the top of the car, a wistful longing in his eyes. “You know, we’ve been doing this for I don’t know how many years now. I sure as hell wish we could get over that last little hurdle.”
“We’re getting closer.”
[108]
“For many years we believed that aging was a process beyond our control. There was only so much punishment the body could take, we believed, before it lost its ability to renew itself. Death, we believed, was inevitable.
“I’m here to tell you tonight that we may very well have been wrong.
“Please, let me explain.
“The most interesting development to come along in recent years has been our increased understanding of the nature of a genetic disease called progeria. More specifically Hutchinson-Gilford Syndrome. This is a degenerative disease which afflicts children. By the age of ten or twelve they begin to demonstrate many of the signs of old age. These signs may include gray hair, baldness, loss of body fat, and atherosclerosis, which refers to the fatty deposits lining the arterial walls. While the cause of progeria is still unknown we have discovered that its victims demonstrate a dramatic reduction in the number of times their cells are able to regenerate themselves.
“We know that progeria is a genetic disease and therefore we can now conclude that the aging process is a genetically-controlled process. If we’re able to learn to identify and manipulate the gene or genes that trigger this process, then there’s no reason to believe we won’t be able to delay and perhaps even permanently suspend the aging process.
“This is not idle speculation, ladies and gentlemen.
“This is, in fact, quite achievable. Perhaps even as early as the end of this century.”
[109]
Beep… beep… beep… beep…