Power Trip(45)
“What’s it say?”
“Hang on.” She opened the next file. And the next. Her horror grew with every click. She sat, staring, unable to speak. After a few minutes, Cal left her and went back to the pizza.
She could hardly believe it, but there it was, right in front of her. When she came to the end of the last file, she rubbed her hands over her face. They came away wet, but her tears couldn’t wash away the images in her mind’s eye.
Cal stood beside her. “Can I help?” he asked softly.
She lifted her chin. “God, I hope so. Genecorp is experimenting on humans.”
“Are you sure? That’s a serious accusation.” Cal looked at the screen in front of her, but it didn’t make any more sense to him than it had fifteen minutes ago. Biology had little in common with physics.
“It’s all right there in the files. The experiment spans almost twenty years. They’ve bred a human, Cal. A boy. They’re experimenting on him. Peter told me last night his talent is memory control. He’s got an army of amnesiac scientists, of which I was supposed to be one. What if they want to create another army too? A talented army. And why stop there? Once they get the trait they want, they can begin cloning. And with Peter in charge, no one will remember anything.”
Now he understood why she was crying. “So why are they after you?”
Her eyes were wide, dark pools as she considered.
“What do you have that they don’t?” he probed.
He knew she’d reached the same conclusion he had when she inhaled sharply. “I’m neutral. Their army would have no power over me.”
“If they wanted to kill you, I think they could have done it by now,” he said.
“The alternative could be worse. Having my DNA harvested and replicated doesn’t exactly float my boat. Now the guard with the needle makes sense. Oh, God, Peter put his arm around me the other day. He stroked my hair. They’ve probably already got my DNA.” She looked sick.
“Can you fill in the gaps for me? I think I’m missing some big pieces here. What’s the link between your research and theirs?”
“I’ve been studying the effect of dietary aluminum, hypothesizing that aluminum causes mutations in DNA.”
“Why dietary? People don’t eat aluminum.”
She shrugged. “But we drink out of aluminum cans, wrap our food in aluminum foil and cook in aluminum pans. You of all people should know atoms don’t always keep to themselves.”
A fair point. He nodded for her to continue.
She stood up and began to pace around the kitchen. “Jake and I both have a balanced translocation in our chromosomes. We have the same genetic material as everyone else, but some of it is in different places. I believe if I made a karyotype of your chromosomes, or the chromosomes of any talented person, there would be similar translocations.”
“So did your mice have mutated chromosomes?” he asked.
She stopped in the middle of the kitchen and looked at him. “No—I gave them the aluminum for a year. The karyotypes were normal. Then I bred them.” She stared at him expectantly.
She seemed to want him to make a connection, but it wasn’t happening.
Her small smile was sad. “My mother is in an institution with near-toxic aluminum levels. Do you know where your mother is?”
He shook his head. She’d run away and left him with her sister. Come to think of it, Truman didn’t remember his parents, and Sam and the Doc had grown up in an orphanage. “Oh my God, do you think they were experimenting on the general population before they took it underground to Genecorp?”
“I have no idea, but I do wonder what kind of offspring my mice would have had if Peter hadn’t killed them. I cultured fetal cells today. We’ll know in three or four days if they carry the translocations, but I don’t think we should wait that long to expose Genecorp.”
“Hang on, we can’t just hand the police stolen files and tell them Genecorp is run by zombie scientists who’ve created a super kid. They’ll think we’re nuts.”
“Not if we have their super kid.”
“You want to go back into Genecorp?” Cal asked.
Audrey didn’t blame him for looking at her like she was crazy. He didn’t know Genecorp like she did. “I’m almost certain they’ve got him in the basement.” It wasn’t used for storage, offices or labs. No one had a key to get down there, either. Every time she stood in the elevator, she stared at the B on the control panel and wondered, curious, but not sufficiently motivated to make any inquiries. Now she was glad she hadn’t. Lord only knew what might have happened to her then. “I bet Peter has been messing with his head his entire life. We’ve got to help him.”