Tom Hyman (52 page)

“Mommy! Are you in there?”

No answer.

Genny shined the flashlight over the front and saw the two screw-latches. She twisted the bottom one open. The top one she couldn’t reach. She looked around. No chairs. Nothing to stand on.

She ran all the way back up the steps and through the basement until she found a wooden crate. She lugged it down to the dungeon, propped it in front of the Little Maiden, and attacked the top screw-latch. It required considerable strength to turn it.

She finally worked it free. She jumped down and yanked on the door.

Her little body was soaked in perspiration. The door came open at last.

Her mother stumbled forward half a step and fell on top of her.

Genny rolled her over. There was blood on her clothes.

“Mommy! Are you all right?”

“Can’t walk,” she whispered. “Go get help.”

“I can’t! They don’t understand me. They won’t let me come back.”

“Stay with me, then, darling.”

“But Mommy, we have to get out! The castle’s on fire. Can’t you crawl? I’ll help you.”

Anne tried to crawl, but her knees, swollen from the hours of standing and punctured by the maiden’s spikes, were too stiff to move. She asked Genny again to go find help.

Genny grabbed her under the arms and dragged her across the dungeon floor to the bottom of the stone stairs. A stream of foul black water was now running down the steps. It quickly soaked Anne’s clothes.

Tears started down Anne’s face. Once again she told Genny to go get help. But Genny just shook her head. She put the flashlight in her mother’s hand, got up on the first step behind her, locked her arms around under her, and dragged her up the step.

Step by step, inch by inch, she pulled her mother up. Water, pumped by the firemen onto the castle’s walls and washed through the burning, centuries-old timbers, ran down the steps in a torrent now, its foul stink blending with the acrid stench of the smoke.

Genny slipped on the stone and the water carried them down half a dozen steps before could gain a secure foothold again. Anne tried to help, but she simply couldn’t move her legs.

Genny began to feel dizzy and weak. She sat down behind her mother and rested for a few minutes.

Then she redoubled her effort. And this time, after an eternity of tugging and pulling, sitting and resting, tugging and pulling, she succeeded in reaching the top step.

She dragged her mother off to the side to get her out of the path of the water, and again sat down to recoup her strength.

The tranquilizer seemed to be hitting her harder now that she had expended so much adrenaline.

Despite the long struggle up the steps, they were only as far as the basement floor. Water was gushing down from hundreds of places in the ceiling. A tremendous crash overhead shook everything around them.

Part of the castle had collapsed inward. They couldn’t go upstairs.

Genny remembered the fresh air she had smelled near the area with the fireplace wood. Gathering herself for one last exertion, she took hold of her mother again and dragged her backwards through the maze of cellar passages until she found the place where the wood was stored.

A short distance beyond was the door. It was barred by a big hardwood plank resting in iron brackets. Genny lifted the plank off and yanked the door open. Outside there were more stone steps. A gust of smoky air swirled in.

Straining for a few last dregs of strength, Genny tried to pull her mother through the bulkhead doorway and up the cellar steps.

They were so close to freedom now, so close to safety; but the child had already exerted herself beyond even her incredible powers. She had nothing left.

She sat with her arms wrapped around her mother from behind, and rested her shoulder and head against the side of the bulkhead and closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mommy,” she whimpered.

Near dawn the firemen found them, unconscious at the bottom of the bulkhead steps. The blaze had at last been extinguished.

The castle’s interior had been completely gutted by the fire, but the exterior walls still stood.

A rescue crew moved them quickly by ambulance to a hospital in Regensburg.

Anne held up a hand to shield her face from the sun. She was sitting on the deck of Lexy’s summer house on the Maine coast. It was a warm, clear day in late August, and the waters of the bay were unusually blue and serene. A couple of fishing boats were visible on the horizon, and a big, two masted schooner was tacking out of the harbor against a lazy wind.

Anne was near the end of a long convalescence. Only a few small scars were visible on her knees and her shoulders as evidence of her ordeal at Schloss Vogel. Emotionally, she was still fragile, but each day she felt stronger.

“I really don’t want to write a book about it,” she said.

“You’ll make a fortune,” Lexy insisted.

“I can’t write, for one thing. For another, I don’t want the world to know. For Genny’s sake. She’s got to grow up with this.”

Lexy refilled their wineglasses. “We’ll get you a collaborator.

That’s the way books get written these days. And you can just leave out whatever you don’t want the world to know. If you don’t write it, someone else will. And then you’ll have no control over the material.”

“Who else could tell the story?”

“Hank Ajemian, for one.”

“Hank doesn’t ever want to think about it again.”

Lexy grinned. “That leaves me,” she said, jabbing a thumb at her chest.

Anne laughed. “I suppose you’ll want a part in the movie version, too.”

“And why not? You don’t dare tell me I don’t deserve it. After delivering that superbaby of yours on the dark earth beside a burning building in the Caribbean on New Year’s Eve? After helping you steal the Jupiter file from Dalton’s office safe?”

“And I’ll be forever grateful.”

“By the way . . . are there any copies of Jupiter left anywhere?”

“I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. No one has the access code except me.”

“What about that guy at IBM?”

“Axel Guttmann. Yes, that’s true. He has it.”

Lexy tapped a fingertip against her wineglass and looked knowingly at Anne. “Did you keep a copy of Jupiter? Tell me the truth.”

Anne didn’t reply.

“I thought so. What’re you going to do with it?”

“I’m going to go back to school first, get a doctorate. Then I’ll think about it. It should be studied. But it’s so dangerous, I don’t know who I could ever trust with it.”

“Don’t trust anyone. And don’t study it. Deep-six the damned thing.

It’s cursed. Think about yourself. Write a book. Become a celebrity.

Have some kicks.”

“I’d rather be a scientist.”

Lexy yawned. “You could be both. But you’re probably right.

Being a celebrity is awfully tacky these days, anyway.”

“What’s Genny doing?”

“Getting something to eat, as usual. That child of yours has the appetite of a starving elephant. I swear she must consume ten thousand calories a day.”

“She has a fast metabolism.”

“Part of her Jupiter profile?”

“Probably. God, Lexy, I worry all the time what’ll become of her. Her playmates already know she’s different.”

Lexy laughed. “I’d worry more about her playmates, if I were you.

Thank God she has your modest, agreeable disposition. Otherwise I’d be afraid of her myself.”

A car turned off the road and came slowly up the driveway on the other side of the house. Lexy leaned out of her beach chair and looked around. “Oh, listen. I’ve asked someone over for dinner. That’s him.

He wants very much to meet you. I hope you don’t mind.”

Anne groaned. “What is this one? A rich, divorced Maine lobster fisherman?”

“I guarantee you’ll be crazy about this guy,” Lexy said. “He’s great company and he’s dying—and I mean absolutely dying—to hear your story.”

Anne heaved a sigh. She slipped her terry-cloth robe on over her bathing suit, then pulled her sun hat down over her face. “I’m not even presentable.”

Lexy snickered. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll fix him a drink and bring him out.”

Ten minutes later Lexy appeared with the male friend in tow.

She was giggling like a prankish schoolgirl. Anne pushed up the brim of her sun hat to get a look. She saw street shoes and then an exceptionally wrinkled wash-and-wear summer suit. The man wearing them had dark hair. He was very tall, with a sensitive face and pleasant eyes. He looked embarrassed.

“Anne, I’d like you to meet Dr. Paul Elder…. You may remember him from a previous lifetime.”

Their eyes met. Both started to say something at the same time, and then stopped. Their faces turned red.

Lexy shook her head in wonderment. “Boy, I can see we’ve got a couple of real party animals here.” She turned back toward the house and bawled out at the top of her voice: “Genny! Come on out here and say hello to your future stepfather!”

Ambassador Mishima beamed. The soft flesh of his face was suffused with a luminous glow, as if lit by some internal power source.

He had a right to be proud, of course. This was his project as much as anyone’s. He had pushed for it, and continued to push for it—at great personal risk to his reputation—when others were long past giving up.

“How many babies?” he asked, looking through the glass walls of the center’s big new maternity suite, built specifically for this occasion.

“Forty,” Yamamoto answered.

“And all healthy?”

“Five died. The rest are healthy.”

“We’ll have to wait for tests, of course,” Mishima said, more or less rhetorically.

“Yes .”

“But this is very promising. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Yamamoto nodded. “Very promising. The genomes all conform to the results—exactly as projected.”

Mishima scratched his cheek thoughtfully. “We should begin varying the sequences of the new genes with the next batch.

Let’s not rest on our laurels. Let’s find out how far these new genes can be pushed. Or perhaps I should say these new old genes.”

Yamamoto nodded.

“There is no new thing under the sun,” Mishima said, with a broad grin.

“Ecclesiastes.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The Christian Bible.”

“Oh.”

“I want the whole team honored.” Mishima said.

“That’d be fitting.”

“It’s been a strain on them. Particularly all these months of secrecy.

And they are heroes—authentic heroes. The country owes them a great debt.”

“But the project must remain secret.”

Mishima sighed. “Unfortunately. I just hope I live long enough to see the Americans’ reaction when we finally spring it on them.”

“Not to mention the rest of the world.”

The ambassador’s expression grew somber. “Of course.

That too.”

Genny picked up a stone from the beach and looked back up at the deck of the cottage where her mother, Paul Elder, and Lexy Tate were sitting. “Watch this one, Paul!” she shouted.

“Okay. I’m watching,” he said.

“That’s the last one, Genny,” Anne warned.

Lexy looked at Elder with a sly grin. “So you’re already ‘Paul’

now.”

Elder shrugged. “I don’t want her to call me ‘Doctor.”

“ Genny whirled around like a shot-putter and hurled the stone far out over the water.

“Very impressive!” Elder cried. “You’ll make the big leagues easy with an arm like that.”

“Don’t give her any ideas,” Anne said. “She’s become a real show-off lately.”

“She’s just trying to impress ‘Paul,’ ” Lexy said.

“Just what I need,” Anne answered. “Competition from my three-year, eight-month-old daughter.”

Genny picked up another rock and threw it out over the water.

She looked back. Paul wasn’t watching anymore. She sighed and wandered down the beach. She was happy that her mother and Paul were together again. She hoped he really would become her new daddy. He was a lot of fun. And she could learn all about being a doctor from him. If she was going to be a doctor.

Right now she wasn’t sure; there were a lot of things she wanted to do.

She found a big white stone half-buried in the sand and pulled it out.

Another one for her collection. She tossed it up in the air and caught it. It felt nice—smooth and heavy.

She looked back down the beach toward Lexy’s cottage. She wanted to go back and ask Paul to come and play with her out on the beach, but Lexy had told her that it was important for her to let Mommy and Paul spend time together alone.

She didn’t see what was so important about it, but she promised Lexy she would.

Genny wandered further down the beach and then turned onto a sandy path that ran back to the town road. There were a lot of bushes here, but she could still catch glimpses of Paul and her mommy on the porch.

Their heads were very close together.

A white car was parked further up the path. People used the path to get to the beach, and it wasn’t nice for someone to block it like this.

She had seen the same car there yesterday, and the day before.

The same two men sat in the front. One of them was looking at Lexy’s house with a pair of binoculars.

She picked up a few more stones, cradled them in her arms, then ducked into the bushes and worked her way through the undergrowth until she was abreast of the car. She put her rocks down in a pile in front of her, collected a few more from the ground nearby, and crouched down to study the men.

One man had a thin, pale face, with big ears and small eyes.

His head was completely bald. The other man had white hair and ebony black skin. Their auras looked scary; they were flickering and jumpy, constantly changing colors.

Genny didn’t know who they were, but she didn’t have to. She understood that they were bad, and that was enough.

She picked up a rock, stood up, gauged the distance, and let it fly.

It struck the binoculars and knocked them out of the man’s hand.