the trauma itself.
Impulsively, George Hamlin twisted the rheostat to full power.
Randy Corliss only giggled.
It had worked. At last, it had worked. Hamlin shut off the power and assured himself once more that all Randy’s vital signs were still normal. Then he disconnected the monitoring equipment and squeezed Randy’s shoulder.
“You can go back to your room,” he said. “It’s all over, and there’s nothing wrong with you. Nothing at all.” Without another word, he left the room.
When Hamlin was gone, Randy lay still for a while, wondering what the doctor had meant Then he got out of bed, gathered up his clothes, and went to the door. He started down the hall that would take him back to the main section of the Academy, but then he paused outside a closed door. He looked up and down the hall, and, seeing no one, tried the door. It was unlocked, and Randy slipped inside.
In the room, lying in bed, his face expressionless and his body perfectly still, was Peter Williams. Slowly, Randy moved close to Peter’s bed.
He could hear Peter breathing, but the sound was shallow and rasping, as if something were stuck in Peter’s throat.
So Peter wasn’t dead. Peter was still alive, even afta: everything that had happened to him.
Was that what Dr. Hamlin had meant by being a perfect child? That no matter what happened to you, you wouldn’t die?
As he left the infirmary and started walking toward his own room in the dormitory, Randy began to wonder if he wanted to be a perfect child.
He decided he didn’t—not if it meant ending up like Peter Williams.
George Hamlin peeled off his horn-rimmed glasses and used two fingers to massage the bridge of his nose. The gesture was more habitual than anything else; his energy level, as always, was high. He was prepared to work through the night.
First, there had been the apparent breakthrough with Randy Corliss.
Then there had been the call from Boston.
Paul Randolph’s call had disturbed him more than he had let on. It was nothing, he was sure, no more than an upset mother clutching at any straw that might lead her to her son. Even so, it had disturbed him that the mother had turned out to be Lucy Corliss. Why today? Why should the security of the project be threatened today, and by the mother of the one subject who offered a promise of success?
But he had put his concerns aside. All it meant, really, was that he would simply have to work faster. He picked up his laboratory analyses once more and began studying them.
The problem, he knew, had always had to do with the restrictive endonuclease-ligase compound—the combination of enzymes that altered the genetic structure of the egg just prior to conception. The process was basically a simple one, once he had developed the tools to accomplish it. It was a matter of cutting out a section of the deoxyribonucleic acid—DNA—then repairing it in an altered form. But it had taken Hamlin years to develop the compounds, all of which had to be tested by trial and error.
They had been years of lonely, unrecognized work that, so far, had led only to a series of total, if unspectacular, failures.
Failures that had not been, and never would be, noticed by the scientific community, but failures, nevertheless.
George Hamlin did not like failures.
He turned back to the first page of the report and began reading it through once more. He flipped through page after page of charts, graphic correlations of causes and effects, chemical analyses of the enzymes they had used, medical histories of every subject since the project had begun.
The key, he was now certain, lay in Randy Corliss. He turned to the page describing the genetic analysis of the boy.
It was the introns that interested him.
The answer, he had always been sure, was locked in the introns that lay like genetic garbage along the double helix of DNA. Ever since he had begun studying them, George Hamlin had disagreed with the prevailing theory that the introns were nothing more than gibberish to be edited out of the genetic codes as the process of converting DNA into RNA, and finally into the messenger RNA that would direct cell development, was carried out.
No, Hamlin had long ago decided that introns were something else, and he had finally come to the conclusion that they were a sort of evolutionary experimentation lab, in which nature put together new combinations of the genetic alphabet, then segregated them off, so they