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“Did you say catch, like in baseball?”

Maria nodded. “That is, if you scientist types aren’t too wimpy to throw a ball.”

Jim smiled in spite of himself. “You just lead the way.”

Maria led him over the next ridge and down into a lush green valley. A weathered log cabin with a rickety old truck parked in front of it sat in the shadows of the tall pine trees.

As they approached the house, Maria called out, “It’s me, Uncle Max. I brought a friend.”

She whispered to Jim, “You have to do that. He doesn’t see so good anymore and he’s liable to shoot first and ask questions later.”

Jim stared at her. “You’re kidding, right?”

Maria didn’t answer.

A gruff voice boomed at them. “Who’s that with you?”

Maria glanced at Jim with a twinkle in her eye. “I found a flatlander down by the pond.”

“What?” the voice barked. A big man with a scraggly gray beard limped out onto the wooden porch. He leaned on a gnarled walking stick. “You know better than to bring his kind up here. You’re just asking for trouble.”

Maria let Sammy go and stepped up on the porch beside her uncle. “He’s new down there. They haven’t had time to work on him yet. Besides, I’m bored and he says he can catch.”

The elderly man’s lip curled. He snarled down at Jim. “What are you doing up here? Snooping?”

Jim shook his head. “I didn’t even know anybody lived up here.”

“Well, they do.” The man’s face softened slightly. He turned to Maria. “Don’t keep him up here too long.” He inclined his head in the direction of Folsum. “No telling what they might do to him if they found out.”

The big man turned and slowly limped back into the cabin, shaking his head. “Too bad.”

Jim frowned. “What’s he talking about? Who’s going to do something to me?”

Maria jumped off the porch and sat on the edge, stroking Sammy under the chin. “It’s probably better if you don’t know. After all, you
are
going to have to live down there.”

“Look,” Jim snapped. “I’m getting sick and tired of all this mysterious mumbo jumbo. If you know something, spit it out. If you don’t, then shut up about it.”

Sammy didn’t like his tone of voice and started chattering loudly.

Maria hesitated. She stroked Sammy again and then put him inside the screen door.

“All right, I’ll tell you. Ten years ago my uncle Max used to work at Folsum Laboratories as a custodian. He loved his job.… Of course, most of the people were different back then.”

Jim kicked at a rock. “Did he get fired?”

“In a way. He was asked to resign.”

“Why?”

“One day when he was cleaning Kincaid’s
office—Kincaid’s the president—he came across some documents on a top-secret experiment. The company was doing high-level radiation experiments on people without their knowledge.”

“Did he go to the cops?”

“He tried. He made copies of the information and called the authorities. But before he could prove anything, his house was ransacked and the papers were stolen. The thieves beat him up and broke one of his legs. The next day Kincaid asked him to resign.”

“Man, those guys don’t fool around.” Jim scratched his head. “What makes you think they might try to do something to me? After all, that was a long time ago and they probably don’t do stuff like that anymore. Besides, my dad’s a scientist. It would be pretty tough to get anything past him.”

Maria stood up and brushed the dirt off her jeans. “Haven’t you noticed that the people down there act a little strange?”

“Yeah.” Jim smiled. “If I had to guess, I’d say the laboratory’s been turning out a bunch of zombies.”

Maria didn’t laugh. “You might think it’s funny, but don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.”

“Okay, you warned me. I’ll keep an eye out for people who glow in the dark and anyone who goes by the name of Dr. Frankenstein.” He looked at his watch. “I thought we were going to play some catch.”

Maria reached under the porch and brought out two gloves and a ball. She tossed him one of the gloves. Before he had time to get it all the way onto his hand, she burned the ball into his stomach.

He doubled over. “Hey! What was that for?”

She glared at him. “Better learn to think fast, Young Frankenstein.”

Jim smiled to himself as he made his way back down the mountainside. Maria was actually a pretty good ballplayer. She was, that is, after she got over being mad at him.

Things were definitely looking up. He’d found a pond and a new friend all in one day. Maria had invited him to come back the next day. She said she would show him a cave in a hill behind her house where prospectors used to mine gold. The tunnels stretched for miles. She said there was one that went almost all the way to Folsum.

When he reached the edge of town, he hesitated. Although he hadn’t admitted it to Maria, something about Folsum really did bother him.

That something, a feeling that perhaps someone was watching, made him decide to find a different route to his house. Staying low behind the tall redwood fences of his neighbors’ backyards, he worked his way along the alley. He let himself through the backyard gate and entered the house by the back door.

His mother and father were having a discussion in the hall. “Just the man I need to talk to.” Dr. Stanton motioned for Jim to come closer. “I hear you were off up in the woods today?”

Jim nodded. He started to tell them about Maria and the pond and everything, but his father cut him off.

“I know you’re bored, Jim, but you can’t go up in the mountains anymore. Kincaid called me into his office and asked me to tell you.”

“Wait a minute.” Jim’s eyes narrowed. He remembered the moving curtain earlier in the
day. “How did Kincaid know I was taking a hike today?”

His father shook his head. “I really don’t know, son. But I do know that it’s against company policy to let our children traipse around in the woods by themselves. Kincaid said there were undesirables living up there and that we should be extremely careful.”

“But Dad, I—”

Robert Stanton held up his hand. “End of discussion. We’re new here and I’m sure Mr. Kincaid knows the area better than we do.” He reached for his briefcase. “It’s time for us to go down to the lab. Where’s Laura?”

Jim didn’t answer. A hundred thoughts were racing through his mind.
Who is this Kincaid, and why does he want to keep people away from the woods? What is he afraid of?

Mrs. Stanton had gathered up Laura and her doll and was waiting for Jim by the door. “Dad’s already in the car, Jim. Get a move on. He doesn’t want you to make a bad impression on his boss.”

“Right.” Jim mumbled under his breath. “We can’t have the great Mr. Kincaid thinking we’re part of the ‘undesirable’ crowd now, can we?”

“What was that, son?” Mrs. Stanton asked.

Jim held the door for her. “Oh, nothing, Mom. I was just saying how much I was looking forward to meeting Dad’s boss.”

An electric eye scanned the identification card Dr. Stanton held out the car window. The gates opened and a robotlike voice told them to drive ahead. Jim watched the two security guards march back and forth on the catwalk above their heads. The compound was entirely surrounded by an eight-foot fence that was topped with barbed wire, similar to fences on military bases.

Dr. Stanton stopped the station wagon in front of a long white building with a sign across the front that said
FOLSOM NATIONAL LABORATORIES
—
JEFFERSON KINCAID, PRESIDENT
.

Jim’s parents were jabbering away about what a wonderful facility it was and how lucky Dr. Stanton was to be working here, but Jim wasn’t paying any attention. Now more than ever he was convinced that something odd was going on in Folsum and that it was about to involve his family in some way.

He tried to take mental notes on everything as they walked down the hall, attempting to find anything that seemed out of place. His father explained that the area they were in was the lab’s own private medical complex. The business offices were at the other end of the wing, and the experiments took place in various secure, specially built laboratories.

A tall, distinguished-looking man with gray sideburns and bushy black eyebrows was waiting for them at the reception desk. He spoke to Jim’s father. “Nice-looking family, Stanton. Just the kind we like here at Folsum.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The man didn’t wait to be introduced. “I’m Jefferson Kincaid.” He eyed Jim for a moment. “You must be the ballplayer.”

Jim nodded.

“It’s good to have hobbies, as long as they don’t interfere with responsibilities.”

“It’s not a hobby with me, sir. I intend to make it my career.”

The man’s cold blue eyes flashed. “I suppose we’ll see about that, won’t we?”

A woman in a long white coat walked up to them. She looked at her clipboard and asked them to follow her to a small waiting room.

“It was nice meeting your family, Stanton.” Kincaid put his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, smiling slightly. “It might be wise to keep an eye on the ballplayer, though. Looks like he could be a handful.”

Jim felt the man’s eyes on his back as they walked down the hall. He was glad when they turned the corner and went into the waiting room.

It wasn’t his first time inside a laboratory. He’d been in the one where his father used to work several times. On the surface things looked about the same here. People scurried around in lab coats, carrying important-looking papers.

But there was one vast difference.

Silence.

None of the employees spoke to the others. They didn’t nod or acknowledge each other in any way. It was as if each one were a robot in his or her own little world.

Suddenly the quiet was broken.

“Stanton, Robert.”

Jim jumped. A burly man in a white uniform stood in the doorway. Jim’s father laughed. “Relax, son. It’s not the end of the world, it’s only a physical.”

Jim didn’t smile.

The man came back twice more, once for Mrs. Stanton and then again for Laura.

Jim waited more than an hour.

Finally a small, elderly gentleman appeared in the doorway. “Are you Jim Stanton?”

Jim nodded.

“You’re the last one, then. They’ve had a slight emergency and they asked me to finish you up. I’m Dr. Wiley.”

The doctor led him down a long corridor, mumbling to himself all the way. “I can do this. They say I’m too old and that my mind is
failing. But they’re wrong. You can see that, can’t you?” He opened the door to an examining room without waiting for an answer. “Crawl up on the table, young man, and we’ll get this over with.”

The elderly man tapped Jim’s knee and watched his reflexes over the top of his glasses. “You look pretty healthy.”

“I am.”

“Good, then we’ll skip right to the blood test.” The doctor went to a table and fiddled with a long syringe. He dropped something on the floor that resembled a small black dot. He cursed and reached to pick it up. “Oh, I hope it’s not damaged.”