The Terminal Experiment - Robert J. Sawyer Page 0,93

she were not around. It would destroy me if she were dead.”

“Why?” said the voice.

“Because I love her, dammit. I love her more than life itself. I love her with every fiber of my being.”

“Really?” said the voice.

Peter paused, catching his breath. He considered. Was it just his anger talking? Was he blurting out things he didn’t mean? Or was it true—really true? “Yes,” he said softly, understanding at last, “yes, I really love her that much. I love her more than words can say.”

“It’s about time you admitted that, Petey-boy, even if you had to be pushed into it. Go get Cathy—doubtless you took her to her sister’s house; that’s what I would have done. Go get her and take her home. Nothing more will happen to her.”

CHAPTER 42

The next day, Peter made sure Cathy got safely on her way to work, but he stayed home. He’d disconnected the electronic door system and had called a locksmith to come and put in old-fashioned key-operated deadbolts. While the locksmith worked, Peter sat in his office and stared out into space, trying to make sense of it all.

He thought about Rod Churchill.

A cold fish. Undemonstrative.

But he had been taking phenelzine—an antidepressant.

Meaning, of course, that he had been diagnosed as having clinical depression. But in the two decades Peter had known Rod Churchill, he’d seen no change in his demeanor. So maybe … maybe he’d been depressed for all that time. Maybe he’d been depressed even longer than that, depressed during Cathy’s childhood, leading him to be the lousy father he had been.

Peter shook his head. Rod Churchill—not a bastard, not an asshole. Just sick—a chemical imbalance.

Surely that mitigated what he’d done, made him less culpable for the way in which he’d treated his daughters.

Hell, thought Peter, we’re all chemical machines. Peter couldn’t function without his morning coffee. There was no doubt that Cathy became more irritable just before her period. And Hans Larsen had let his hormones guide him through his life.

Which was the real Peter? The sluggish, irritable guy who pulled himself out of bed each morning? Or the focused, driven person who arrived at the office, the drug caffeine working its magic? Which was the real Cathy? The cheerful, bright, sexy woman she was most of the time, or the cranky, quarrelsome person she became for a few days each month? And which the real Larsen? The drunken, sex-crazed lout Peter had known, or the fellow who apparently had done his job well and been liked by most of his coworkers? What, he wondered idly, would the guy have been like if someone were to cut off his dick? Probably a completely different person.

What was left of a person if you removed stimulants and depressants, inhibitors and disinhibitors, testosterone and estrogen? And what about children who’d received too little oxygen during birth? What about Down’s syndrome—people altered completely by having an extra twenty-first chromosome? What about those with autism? Or dementia? Manic-depressives? Schizophrenics? Those who suffer from multiple personalities? Those with brain damage? Those with Alzheimer’s? Surely the individuals affected aren’t at fault. Surely none of those things reflect the actual people—the souls in question.

And what about those twin studies the Control sim had mentioned? Nature, not nurture, guided our behavior. When we weren’t dancing to a chemical tune, we were marching to the genetic drummer.

Yet Rod Churchill had been getting help.

If he’d really been killed in the way Detective Philo suggested, the sim would have known that Rod was taking phenelzine, would have looked it up in a database of drugs, would have understood what Rod was being treated for. Could the sim have failed to realize that although the treatment might be new, the condition could have been longstanding? Surely that would have been enough evidence to commute any death sentence the sim had been contemplating?

No—no version of him would have killed Rod Churchill, knowing of this chemical problem. Pity him, yes, but surely not kill him. In fact, this called into question all of Sandra Philo’s case. The sims, after all, had admitted to neither of the murders, and all Philo’s evidence pointing to Peter, and from there to the sims, was circumstantial.

Peter breathed a sigh of relief. He would not have killed Rod Churchill. Rod had simply done something stupid, failing to follow his doctor’s orders. And Hans Larsen? Well, Peter had always contended that dozens of angry spouses might have wanted him dead—including, now that he thought about it, Larsen’s own wife, who, Peter