Montgomery. That’s the other side of the coin. Although the hormone makes the children appear abnormally healthy, in the end it kills them. It’s as if at some point the hormone has drawn on every bit of energy these children possess, and they die. From what we know, they simply seem to burn out. With the little girls it happens very quickly. So far none of them have survived past the age of one year. With the boys the process is slower. Some of them have lived to be nine. None has lived to see his tenth birthday. And that’s why we kidnaped some of them.”
“Did it occur to you that kidnaping is a federal crime, Mr. Randolph?” Steve asked, his voice crackling with indignation.
“Of course it did,” Randolph snapped. “But in the end, it was the only possible course of action.”
Steve stared at the distinguished-looking man with a mixture of revulsion and curiosity. “In the end?”
“When we began to understand what was happening, we tried to explain the situation to some of the parents. We wanted to put the children under twenty-four-hour-a-day observation. Needless to say, the parents refused. And why wouldn’t they? There was nothing wrong with their children, nothing at all. It was impossible to make them understand what the problem was.”
“So you began stealing the children?” Sally asked.
“Not at first. We simply kept track of them. You know how—you discovered our tracking system. But two years ago it became obvious to us that all the children were going to die. One way or another, the parents were going to lose them. So we took them, hoping that we could eventually discover how the burn-out phenomenon was triggered. So far, we haven’t succeeded. But at least now we seem to know the source of the problem.” He paused. “Wiseman.”
“No,” Sally objected. “It wasn’t Dr. Wiseman. It couldn’t have been. When he found out what was happening, he killed himself.”
“Because he thought he’d been used, or because he knew he’d been caught?” Randolph countered.
“What are you saying?”
“Did you know that Arthur Wiseman was something of an expert in genetics?”
Sally looked puzzled, and Mark Malone frowned. “Even I didn’t know that,” he said.
“I don’t see what—” Sally began, but Randolph interrupted her.
“If these children were somehow made the victims of some form of recombinant DNA, and apparently they were, it happened in Arthur Wiseman’s office. He told Malone about a salve he used, which he claimed he got from PharMax. PharMax has never heard of it. It seems to me that Wiseman must have devised it himself.”
“But why?” Sally flared. “Why would he do it?”
“Science,” Randolph told her. “There are people in the world, Mrs. Montgomery, for whom research and experimentation exist for their own sake. They feel no responsibility for whatever they might create. For them, creation and discovery are fulfillment in themselves. Such people have no thoughts about the final results of what they are doing, no concern about any possible moral issues. Knowledge is to be sought, and used. If you can do something, you must do it. And if Wiseman found a way to alter the human form, the temptation to do so must have been overwhelming. It probably wasn’t until this morning that the consequences of what he’d done became clear to him. And so he buried the evidence. There’s nothing in the computer anymore, Mrs. Montgomery. No records of which children bear the GT-active factor, no records of which women were treated with Wiseman’s compound. Nothing.” He sank into a chair and shook his head. “I’m not sure we can ever rebuild those records.”
Sally lay still, trying to sort it all out. Was he telling her the truth?
He wasn’t. Deep inside, Sally was sure that he was lying to her, or, if not lying, then telling her only a part of the truth. After all, she reflected, he had admitted to having kidnaped Randy Corliss.
Had he also, somehow, killed Randy’s parents and Carl Bronski?
Again, she wasn’t certain. Of one thing, though, she was very sure.
What she had found out, or thought she had found out, had been taken away from her. There was no way she could get it back again. It was all probably still there, buried somewhere in the memory bank of a computer, but so deeply buried and expertly covered that she would never be able to dig it up.
And if she tried, she would very likely be killed.
And I, Sally thought silently to herself, am not going to be