“And they are about the same age as VJ when his intelligence fell,” Marsha said.
   “Close!” Victor said. “That’s why I want to do the work-up, to make sure that VJ isn’t brewing any further problem. But I’m sure he’s fine. If it hadn’t been for the Hobbs’ and the Murrays’ babies, I wouldn’t have thought about having VJ examined. Trust me.”
   If Marsha could have laughed, she would have. Victor had just about destroyed her life, and he was asking her to trust him. How he could have experimented on his own baby was beyond her comprehension. But that couldn’t be changed. Now she had to worry about the present. “Do you think the same thing that happened to the others could happen to VJ?” she asked hesitantly.
   “I doubt it. Especially with the seven-year difference in ages. It would seem VJ already survived the critical point back when his IQ dropped. Perhaps what happened to the other children was a function of their being frozen in zygote form,” he said, but then broke off, seeing the expression on his wife’s face. She wasn’t about to take a scientific interest in the tragedy.
   “What about VJ’s fall in intelligence?” Marsha asked. “Could that have been the same problem in some arrested form, since he was nearly the same age when it happened?”
   “It’s possible,” Victor said, “but I don’t know.”
   Marsha let her eyes slowly sweep around the lab, seeing all the futuristic equipment in a different light. Research could provide hope for the future by curing disease, but it had another far more disturbing potential.
   “I want to get out of here!” Marsha said suddenly, getting to her feet. Her abrupt movement sent her chair spinning to the center of the room where it hit the freezer containing the frozen zygotes. Victor retrieved it and returned it to its place at the lab bench. By that time Marsha was already out the door, heading down the corridor. Victor quickly locked up, then hurried after her. The elevator doors had almost closed when he squeezed in beside her. She moved away from him, hurt, disgusted, and angry. But most of all she was worried. She wanted to get home to VJ.
   They left the building in silence. Victor was smart enough not to try to make her talk. The snow had started to stick, and they had to walk carefully to keep from slipping. Marsha was aware Victor was watching her intently as they got into the car. Still she didn’t say anything. It wasn’t until they crossed the Merrimack River that she finally spoke.
   “I thought that experimenting on human embryos was against the law.” She knew Victor’s real crime was a moral one, but for the moment she couldn’t face the complete truth.
   “Policy has never been clear,” Victor said, pleased not to have to deal with the ethical issue. “There was a notice published in the Federal Register forbidding such experimentation, but it only covered institutions getting federal grant money. It didn’t cover private institutions like Chimera.” Victor didn’t elaborate further. He knew his actions were indefensible. They drove in silence again until he said, “The reason I didn’t tell you years ago was because I didn’t want you to treat VJ any differently.”
   Marsha looked across at her husband, watching the play of light flickering on his face from the oncoming cars. “You didn’t tell me because you knew what a terrible thing it was,” Marsha said evenly.
   As they turned on Windsor Street, he said, “Maybe you’re right. I suppose I did feel guilty. Before VJ was born, I thought I’d have a nervous breakdown. Then, after his intelligence fell, I was again a basket case. It’s only been during the last five years that I’ve been able to relax.”
   “Then why did you use the zygotes again?” Marsha asked.
   “By that time the experiment seemed like a big success,” Victor said. “And also because the families in question were uniquely qualified to have an exceptional child. But I shouldn’t have done it. I know that now.”
   “Do you mean that?” Marsha asked.
   “Oh God, yes!”
   As they pulled into their driveway, Marsha felt for the first time since he’d shown her the rats that she might someday be able to forgive him. Then maybe—if VJ was truly all right, if her concern about his development was groundless—maybe they might be able to continue as a family. A lot of ifs. Marsha closed her eyes and prayed. Having lost one child, she asked God to spare the other. She didn’t think she could suffer such a loss again.
   The light in VJ’s room was still on. Every night he was up there reading or studying. For however aloof he seemed, he was essentially a good kid.
   Victor used the automatic button to raise the garage door. As soon as the car came to a stop, Marsha dashed out, anxious to reassure herself VJ was fine. Without waiting for Victor, she used her own key on the door to the back hall. But when she tried to push it open, the door wouldn’t budge. Victor came up behind her and tried it himself.
   “The dead bolt’s been thrown,” Victor said.
   “VJ must have locked it after we left.” She raised a fist and pounded on the door. It sounded loud in the garage but there was no response from VJ. “Do you think he’s all right?” she asked.
   “I’m sure he’s fine,” Victor said. “There is no way he could hear you knocking out here unless he was in the family room. Come on! We’ll go to the front.”
   Victor led the way out through the garage and around to the front of the house. He tried his key. But that door had been deadbolted as well. He tried the bell. There was still no response. He rang again, beginning to feel a little of Marsha’s anxiety. Just when they were about to try another door, they heard VJ’s clear voice asking who was there.
   As soon as the front door was opened, Marsha tried to hug VJ, but he eluded her grasp. “Where have you been?” he demanded.
   Victor looked at his watch. It was a quarter to ten. They’d been gone about an hour and a half.
   “Just been over to the lab,” Marsha said. It wasn’t like VJ to notice one way or the other when they weren’t around. He was so self-sufficient.
   VJ looked at Victor. “You got a phone call. I’m supposed to give you the message that things will be getting unpleasant unless you reconsider and are reasonable.”
   “Who was it?” Victor demanded.
   “The caller didn’t leave a name,” VJ said.
   “Was it male or female?” Victor asked.
   “I couldn’t tell,” VJ said. “Whoever it was didn’t speak into the receiver, or at least that’s what it sounded like.”
   Looking from husband to son, Marsha said, “Victor, what is this all about?”
   “Office politics,” he said. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
   Marsha turned to VJ. “Did the caller frighten you? We noticed the doors were all bolted.”
   “A little,” VJ admitted. “Then I realized they wouldn’t have called with that kind of message if they intended to come over.”
   “I suppose you’re right,” Marsha said. VJ had an impressive way of intellectualizing situations. “Why don’t we all go into the kitchen. I could use some herbal tea.”
   “Not for me, thanks,” VJ said. He turned to head up the stairs.
   “Son!” Victor called.
   VJ hesitated on the first step.
   “I just wanted to let you know that we will be going to Children’s Hospital in Boston tomorrow morning. I want you to have a physical.”
   “I don’t need a physical,” VJ complained. “I hate hospitals.”
   “I understand your feelings,” Victor said. “Nonetheless, you will have a physical, just like I do and your mother does.”
   VJ looked toward Marsha. She wanted to hold him and make sure that he didn’t have a headache or any symptoms whatsoever. But she didn’t move, intimidated by her own son.
   “Nothing is wrong with me,” VJ persisted.
   “The matter is closed,” Victor said. “Discussion over.”
   His cupid’s mouth set, VJ glared at his father, then turned and disappeared upstairs.
   Back in the kitchen, Marsha put on the kettle. She knew it would take days before she could sort out all her feelings about what she’d learned that evening. Sixteen years of marriage and she wondered if she knew her husband at all.

   Wind whipped snow against the window, causing the sash to rattle against the frame. Rolling over, Marsha squinted at the face of the digital radio-alarm clock. It was half past midnight, and she was a long way from sleep. Next to her she could hear Victor’s rhythmic breathing.
   Swinging her feet from under the covers, Marsha searched for her slippers. Getting up, she picked up her robe from the chair in the corner, opened the door, and stepped into the hall.
   A sudden gust of wind hit the house and the old timbers groaned. She thought of going down to her study on the floor below, but instead continued down the long corridor, to VJ’s room. She pushed open the door. VJ had left his window open a crack and the lace curtains were snapping in the snowy breeze. Marsha slipped through the door and silently pushed the window shut.
   Marsha looked down at her sleeping son. With his blond curls and high coloring, he looked perfectly angelic. She had to restrain herself from touching him. His aversion to affection was so strong; sometimes it was difficult to think of him and David as brothers. She wondered if his disinclination to hug or cuddle had anything to do with Victor’s injection of foreign genes. She’d probably never know. But she realized her earlier concern about VJ had some basis in reality.
   Moving the clothes from the chair next to VJ’s bed, Marsha sat down. As an infant, he’d been almost too good to be true. He rarely cried, and he slept almost every night the whole night through. To her astonishment, he began to talk when he was only a few months old.
   Marsha realized that her excitement and pride of VJ’s accomplishments had been the reason she’d never questioned them. And she’d certainly never suspected any artificial enhancement. Now she realized she’d been naive. VJ’s brilliance was more than genius. She remembered when a French scientist and his wife had come to Chimera for a six-month stay when VJ was just three. Their daughter, Michelle, had been brought to the day-care center. She was five, and within a week she could say a number of sentences in English. But what was more astounding was that during the same period of time, VJ had become fluent in French.
   And then there was VJ’s third birthday. To celebrate, Marsha had planned a surprise birthday party, inviting most of the children his age from the day-care center. When he came downstairs Saturday for lunch, he’d found a roomful of mothers and kids shouting “Happy Birthday.” It was not a success. VJ pulled Marsha aside and said, “Why did you ask these kids? I have to put up with them every day. I hate them. They drive me crazy!”
   Marsha was shocked, but at the time she told herself that he was so much brighter than the other children that being forced to socialize was a punishment. VJ much preferred the company of adults, even at age three.
   VJ suddenly turned over, muttering in his sleep, bringing Marsha back to the present and all the problems she wanted to forget. He was such a beautiful boy. It was hard to reconcile his innocent face in slumber with the monstrous truth revealed at the lab. At least now she felt she had some understanding of why he was so cold and unaffectionate. Maybe that was why he shared so many of the personality disorders displayed by Jasper Lewis. Ruefully, she reflected that at least her absences from home in VJ’s early years were not to blame.
   Well, as long as Victor was insisting on a neuro-medical work-up, Marsha decided that she would give VJ a battery of psychological tests. It certainly wouldn’t hurt.

6. Tuesday Morning

   They took separate cars to drive to Boston since Victor wanted to return directly to Chimera. VJ chose to ride with Marsha.
   The ride itself was uneventful. Marsha tried to get VJ to talk, but he answered all her questions with a curt yes or no. She gave up until they were a few minutes away from Children’s Hospital.
   “Have you been having any headaches?” she asked, breaking the long silence.
   “No,” VJ said. “I told you I’m fine. Why the sudden concern about my health?”
   “It’s your father’s idea,” Marsha said. She couldn’t think of any reason not to tell the truth. “He calls it preventive medicine.”
   “I think it’s a waste of time,” VJ said.
   “Have you had any change in your memory?” Marsha asked.
   “I’m telling you,” VJ snapped, “I’m entirely normal!”
   “All right, VJ,” Marsha said. “There is no reason to get angry. We’re glad that you’re healthy and we want you to stay that way.” She wondered what the boy would think if he were told he was a chimera, and that he had animal genes fused into his chromosomes.
   “Do you remember back when you were three and suddenly couldn’t read?” Marsha asked.
   “Of course,” VJ said.
   “We’ve never talked much about that period,” Marsha said.
   VJ turned away from Marsha and looked out the window.
   “Were you very upset?” Marsha asked.
   VJ turned to her and said, “Mother, please don’t play psychiatrist with me. Of course it bothered me. It was frustrating not being able to do things that I’d been able to do. But I relearned them and I’m fine.”
   “If you ever want to talk about it, I’m available,” Marsha said. “Just because I’ve never brought it up doesn’t mean I don’t care. You have to understand that it was a stressful time for me too. As a mother I was terrified that you were ill. Once it was clear you were all right, I guess I tried not to think about it.”
   VJ just nodded.
   They all met in the waiting room of Dr. Clifford Ruddock, Chief of the Department of Neurology. Victor had beat them by fifteen minutes. As soon as VJ sat down with a magazine, Victor took Marsha aside. “I spoke with Dr. Ruddock as soon as I arrived. He’s agreed to compare VJ’s current neurological status with what he found at the time VJ’s IQ dropped. But he is a little suspicious about why we brought him in today. Obviously, he knows nothing about the NGF gene, and I do not plan to tell him.”
   “Naturally,” said Marsha.
   Victor shot her a look. “I hope you are planning to be cooperative.”
   “I’m going to be more than cooperative,” Marsha said. “As soon as VJ is finished here, I’m planning to take him to my office and have him go through a battery of psychological tests.”
   “What on earth for?” Victor asked.
   “The fact that you have to ask means that I probably couldn’t explain it to you.”
   Dr. Ruddock, a tall, slender man with salt and pepper hair, called all the Franks into his office for a few minutes before the examination. He asked if the boy remembered him. VJ told the man that he did, particularly his smell.
   Victor and Marsha chuckled nervously.
   “It was your cologne,” VJ said. “You were wearing Hermès after-shave.”
   Somewhat taken aback by this personal reference, Dr. Ruddock introduced everyone to Dr. Chris Stevens, his current fellow in pediatric neurology.
   It was Dr. Stevens who examined VJ. In deference to the fact that both parents were physicians, Dr. Stevens allowed Victor and Marsha to remain in the room. It was as complete a neurological exam as either had ever witnessed. After an hour just about every facet of VJ’s nervous system had been evaluated and found to be entirely normal.
   Then Stevens started the lab work. He drew blood for routine chemistries, and Victor had several tubes iced and put aside for him to take back to Chimera. Afterward, VJ was subjected to both PET and NMR scanning.
   The PET scanning involved injecting harmless radioactive substances which emitted positrons into VJ’s arm while his head was positioned inside a large doughnut-shaped apparatus. The positrons collided with electrons in VJ’s brain, releasing a burst of energy with each collision in the form of two gamma rays. Crystals in the PET scanner recorded the gamma rays, and a computer tracked the course of the radiation, creating an image.
   For the second test, the NMR scanning, VJ was placed inside a six-foot-long cylinder surrounded by huge magnets supercooled with liquid helium. The resultant magnetic field, which was sixty thousand times greater than the earth’s magnetic field, aligned the nuclei of the hydrogen atoms in the water molecules of VJ’s body. When a radio wave of a specific frequency knocked these nuclei out of alignment, they sprang back, emitting a faint radio signal of their own which was picked up in radio sensors in the scanner and transformed by computer into an image.
   When all the tests were done, Dr. Ruddock summoned Victor and Marsha back to his office. VJ was left outside in the waiting room. Victor was plainly nervous, crossing and uncrossing his legs and running his hand through his hair. Throughout the testing neither Dr. Stevens nor the technician made any comment. By the end, Victor was almost paralyzed with tension.
   “Well,” Dr. Ruddock began, fingering some of the print-outs and images from the tests, “not all the results are back, specifically the blood work, but we do have several positive findings here.”
   Marsha’s heart sank.
   “Both the PET and the NMR scans are abnormal,” Dr. Ruddock explained. He held up one of the multicolored PET scan images with his left hand. In his right hand he held a Mont Blanc pen. Carefully pointing to different areas, he said, “There is a markedly elevated but diffuse uptake of glucose in the cerebral hemispheres.” He dropped the paper and picked up another colored image. “In this NMR scan we can see the ventricles quite clearly.”
   With her heart pounding, Marsha leaned forward to get a better look.
   “It’s quite obvious,” Dr. Ruddock continued, “that these ventricles are significantly smaller than normal.”
   “What does this mean?” Marsha asked hesitantly.
   Dr. Ruddock shrugged. “Probably nothing. The child’s neurological exam is entirely normal according to Dr. Stevens. And these findings, although interesting, most likely have no effect on function. The only thing I can think of is that if his brain is using that much glucose, maybe you should feed him candy whenever he’s doing much thinking.” Dr. Ruddock laughed heartily at his own attempt at humor.
   For a moment both Victor and Marsha sat there numbly, trying to make the transition from the bad news they’d expected to the good news they’d received. Victor was the first to recover. “We’ll certainly take your advice,” he said with a chuckle. “Any candy in particular?”
   Dr. Ruddock laughed anew, enjoying that his humor was so well received. “Peter Paul Mounds is the therapy I recommend!”
   Marsha thanked the doctor and ran out the door. Catching VJ unaware, she had him in a bear hug before he could move away. “Everything is fine,” she whispered in his ear. “You’re okay.”
   VJ extracted himself from her grasp. “I knew I was fine before we came. Can we go now?”
   Victor tapped Marsha on the shoulder. “I’ve got some other business here and then I’ll go directly to work. I’ll see you at home, okay?” Victor said.
   “We’ll have a special dinner,” Marsha said, turning back to VJ. “We can leave but you, young man, are not finished. We are going to my office. I have a few more tests for you.”
   “Oh, Mom!” whined VJ.
   Marsha smiled. He sounded just like any other ten-year-old.
   “Humor your mother,” Victor said. “I’ll see you both later.” He gave Marsha a peck on the cheek and tousled VJ’s hair.

   Victor crossed from the professional building to the hospital proper and took the elevator to Pathology. He found Dr. Burghofen’s office. The man’s secretary was nowhere to be seen so Victor looked inside. Burghofen was typing with his two index fingers. Victor knocked on the doorjamb.
   “Come in, come in!” Burghofen said with a wave. He continued to peck at the typewriter for a few moments, then gave up. “I don’t know why I’m doing this except my secretary calls in sick every other day, and I’m constrained from firing her. Administering this department is going to be the death of me.”
   Victor smiled, reminding himself to remember that academia had its own limitations the next time he got fed up with office problems at Chimera.
   “I was wondering if you had finished the autopsies on the two children who died of cerebral edema,” Victor said.
   Dr. Burghofen scanned the surface of his cluttered desk. “Where’s that clipboard?” he asked rhetorically. He spun around in his chair, finding what he was searching for on the shelf directly behind him. “Let’s see,” he said, flipping over the pages. “Here we are: Maurice Hobbs and Mark Murray. Are those the ones?”
   “Yup,” Victor said.
   “They were assigned to Dr. Shryack. He’s probably doing them now.”
   “All right if I go look?” asked Victor.
   “Suit yourself,” he said, checking the clipboard. “It’s amphitheater three.” Then as Victor was about to leave, he asked, “You did say you were a medical doctor, didn’t you?”
   Victor nodded.
   “Enjoy yourself,” Dr. Burghofen said, returning to the typewriter.
   The pathology department, like the rest of the hospital, was new, with state-of-the-art equipment. Everything was steel, glass or Formica.
   The four autopsy rooms looked like operating rooms. Only one was in use and Victor went directly inside. The autopsy table was shining stainless steel, as were the other implements in sight. Two men standing on either side of the table looked up as Victor entered. In front of them was a young child whose body was splayed open like a gutted fish. Behind them on a gurney was the small, covered body of another.
   Victor shuddered. It had been a long time since he’d seen an autopsy and he’d forgotten the impact. Particularly when viewing a child.
   “Can we help you?” the doctor on the right asked. He was masked like a surgeon, but instead of a gown, he wore a rubberized apron.
   “I’m Dr. Frank,” Victor said, struggling to suppress nausea. Besides the visual assault, there was the fetid odor that even the room’s modern air conditioning could not handle. “I’m interested in the Hobbs baby and the Murray baby. Dr. Burghofen sent me down.”
   “You can watch over here if you like,” the pathologist said, motioning Victor over with his scalpel.
   Tentatively, Victor advanced into the room. He tried not to look at the tiny eviscerated body.
   “Are you Dr. Shryack?” asked Victor.
   “That’s me.” The pathologist had a pleasant, youthful voice and bright eyes. “And this is Samuel Harkinson,” he said, introducing his assistant. “These children your patients?”
   “Not really,” Victor said. “But I’m terribly interested in the cause of their deaths.”
   “Join the group,” Dr. Shryack said. “Strange story! Come over here and look at this brain.”
   Victor swallowed. The child’s scalp had been cut and pulled down over the face. Then the skull had been sawed around the circumference of the head, and the crown lifted off. Victor found himself looking at the child’s brain, which had risen out of its confinement, giving the child the appearance of some sort of alien being. Most of the gyri of the cerebral cortices had been flattened where they had pressed against the inside of the skull.
   “This has to be the worst case of cerebral edema I’ve ever seen,” Dr. Shryack said. “It makes getting the brain out a chore and a half. Took me half an hour with the other one.” He pointed toward the shrouded body.
   “Till you figured out how to do it,” Harkinson said with a faint Cockney accent.
   “Right you are, Samuel.”
   With Harkinson holding the head and pushing the swollen brain to the side, Dr. Shryack was able to get his knife between the brain and the base of the skull to cut the upper part of the spinal cord.
   Then, with a dull, ripping sound, the brain pulled free. Harkinson cut the cranial nerves, and Dr. Shryack quickly hoisted the brain and placed it in the pan of the overhead scale. The pointer swung wildly back and forth, then settled on 3.2.
   “It’s a full pound more than normal,” Dr. Shryack said, scooping the brain back up with his gloved hands and carrying it over to a sink that had continuous running water. He rinsed the clotted blood and other debris from the brain, then put it on a wooden chopping block.
   With experienced hands, Dr. Shryack carefully examined the brain for gross pathology. “Other than its size, it looks normal.”
   He selected a carving knife from a group in a drawer, and began slicing off half-inch sections. “No hemorrhage, no tumors, no infection. The NMR scanner was right again.”
   “I was wondering if I could ask a favor,” Victor said. “Would it be at all possible for me to take a sample back to my own lab to have it processed?”
   Dr. Shryack shrugged. “I suppose, but I wouldn’t want it to become common knowledge. It would be a great thing to get into the Boston Globe that we’re giving out brain tissue. I wonder what that would do to our autopsy percentage?”
   “I won’t tell a soul.”
   “You want this case, which I think is the Hobbs kid, or do you want the other one?” Dr. Shryack asked.
   “Both, if you wouldn’t mind.”
   “I suppose giving you two specimens is no different than giving you one,” said Dr. Shryack.
   “Have you done the gross on the internal organs yet?” asked Victor.
   “Not yet,” Shryack said. “That’s next on the agenda. Want to watch?”
   Victor shrugged. “Why not. I’m here.”

   VJ was even less communicative on the ride back to Lawrence than he’d been on the ride into Boston that morning. He was obviously mad about the whole situation, and Marsha wondered if he would be cooperative enough to make psychological testing worthwhile.
   She parked across from her office. They waited for the elevator even though they were going up only one floor because the stairwell door was locked from the inside. “I know you’re angry,” Marsha said. “But I do want you to take some psychological tests, yet it’s not worth your time or Jean’s unless you cooperate. Do I make myself clear?”
   “Perfectly,” VJ said crisply, fixing Marsha with his dazzlingly blue eyes.
   “Well, will you cooperate?” she asked as the elevator doors opened.
   VJ nodded coldly.
   Jean was overjoyed to see them. She’d had a terrible time juggling Marsha’s patients, but she’d managed in her usual efficient way.
   As for VJ, she was really happy to see him, even though he greeted her without much enthusiasm, then excused himself to use the bathroom.
   “He’s a bit out of sorts,” Marsha explained. She went on to tell Jean about the neuro work-up and her desire to have him take their basic battery of psychological tests.
   “It will be hard for me to do it today,” Jean said. “With you out all morning the phone has been ringing off the hook.”
   “Let the service handle the phone,” Marsha advised. “It’s important I get VJ tested.”
   Jean nodded and immediately began getting out the forms and preparing their computer to grade and correlate the results.
   When VJ returned from the bathroom, Jean had him sit right down at the keyboard. Since he was familiar with some of the tests, she asked him which kind he wanted to take first.
   “Let’s start with the intelligence tests,” VJ said agreeably.
   For the next hour and a half, Jean administered the WAIS-R intelligence test, which included six verbal and five performance subtests. From her experience she knew that VJ was doing well, but nowhere near what he’d done seven years previously. She also noted that VJ tended to hesitate before he answered a question or performed a task. It was like he wanted to be doubly sure of his choice.
   “Very good!” Jean said when they’d reached the completion. “Now how about the personality test?”
   “Is that the MMPI?” VJ asked. “Or the MCMI?”
   “I’m impressed,” Jean said. “Sounds like you have been doing a little reading.”
   “It’s easy when one of your parents is a psychiatrist,” VJ said.
   “We use both, but let’s start with the MMPI,” Jean said. “You don’t need me for this. It’s all multiple choice. If you have any problems, just yell.”
   Jean left VJ in the testing room, and went back to the reception desk. She called the service and got the pile of messages that had accumulated. She attended to the ones that she could and when Marsha’s patient left, gave her the messages she had to handle herself.
   “How’s VJ doing?” Marsha asked.
   “Couldn’t be better,” Jean reported.
   “He’s being cooperative?” Marsha asked.
   “Like a lamb,” Jean said. “In fact, he seems to be enjoying himself.”
   Marsha shook her head in amazement. “Must be you. He was in an awful mood with me.”
   Jean took it as a compliment. “He’s had a WAIS-R and he’s in the middle of an MMPI. What other tests do you want? A Rorschach and a Thematic Apperception Test or what?”
   Marsha chewed on her thumbnail for a moment, thinking. “Why don’t we do that TAT and let the Rorschach go for now. We can always do it later.”
   “I’ll be happy to do both,” Jean said.
   “Let’s just do the TAT,” Marsha said as she picked up the next chart. “VJ’s in a good mood but why push it? Besides, it might be interesting to cross check the TAT and the Rorschach if they are taken on different days.” She called the patient whose chart she was holding and disappeared for another session.
   After Jean finished as much paperwork as she could, she returned to the testing room. VJ was absorbed in the personality test.
   “Any problems?” Jean asked.
   “Some of these questions are too much,” VJ said with a laugh. “A couple of them have no appropriate answers.”
   “The idea is to select the best one possible,” Jean said.
   “I know,” VJ said. “That’s what I’m doing.”
   At noon, they broke for lunch and walked to the hospital. They ate in the coffee shop. Marsha and Jean had tuna salad sandwiches while VJ had a hamburger and a shake. Marsha noted with contentment that VJ’s attitude had indeed changed. She began to think she had worried for nothing; the tests he was taking would probably result in a healthy psychological portrait. She was dying to ask Jean about the results so far, but she knew she couldn’t in front of VJ. Within thirty minutes they were all back at their respective tasks.
   An hour later, Jean put the phone back on service and returned to the testing room. Just as she closed the door behind her, VJ spoke up: “There,” he said, clicking the last question. “All done.”
   “Very good,” Jean said, impressed. VJ had gone through the five hundred and fifty questions in half the usual time. “Would you like to rest before the next test?” she asked.
   “Let’s get it over with,” VJ said.
   For ninety minutes, Jean showed the TAT cards to VJ. Each contained a black and white picture of people in circumstances that elicited responses having psychological overtones. VJ was asked to describe what he thought was going on in each picture and how the people felt. The idea was for VJ to project his fantasies, feelings, patterns of relationships, needs, and conflicts.
   With some patients the TAT was no easy test to administer. But with VJ, Jean found herself enjoying the process. The boy had no trouble coming up with interesting explanations and his responses were both logical and normal. By the end of the test Jean felt that VJ was emotionally stable, well adjusted, and mature for his age.
   When Marsha was finished with her last patient, Jean went into the office and gave her the computer print-outs. The MMPI would be sent off to be evaluated by a program with a larger data base, but their PC gave them an initial report.
   Marsha glanced through the papers, as Jean gave her own positive clinical impression. “I think he is a model child. I truly can’t see how you can be concerned about him.”
   “That’s reassuring,” Marsha said, studying the IQ test results. The overall score was 128. That was only a two-point variation from the last time that Marsha had had VJ tested several years previously. So VJ’s IQ had not changed, and it was a good, solid, healthy score, certainly well above average. But there was one discrepancy that bothered Marsha: a fifteen-point difference between the verbal and the performance IQ, with the verbal lower than the performance, which suggested a cognitive problem relating to language disabilities. Given VJ’s facility in French, it didn’t seem to make sense.
   “I noticed that,” Jean said when Marsha queried it, “but since the overall score was so good I didn’t give it much significance. Do you?”
   “I don’t know,” Marsha said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a result like this before. Oh well, let’s go on to the MMPI.”
   Marsha put the personality inventory results in front of her. The first part was called the validity scales. Again something immediately aroused her attention. The F and K scales were mildly elevated and at the upper limit of what would be considered normal. Marsha pointed that out to Jean as well.
   “But they are in the normal range,” Jean insisted.
   “True,” Marsha said, “but you have to remember that all this is relative. Why would VJ’s validity scales be nearly abnormal?”
   “He did the test quickly,” Jean said. “Maybe he got a little careless.”
   “VJ is never careless,” Marsha said. “Well, I can’t explain this, but let’s go on.”
   The second part of the report was the clinical scales, and Marsha noted that none were in the abnormal range. She was particularly happy to see that scale four and scale eight were well within normal limits. Those two scales referred to psychopathic deviation and schizophrenic behavior respectively. Marsha breathed a sigh of relief because these scales had a high degree of correlation with clinical reality, and she’d been afraid they would be elevated, given VJ’s history.
   But then Marsha noted that scale three was “high normal.” That would mean VJ tended toward hysteria, constantly seeking affection and attention. That certainly did not correlate with Marsha’s experience.
   “Was it your impression that VJ was cooperating when he took this test?” Marsha asked Jean.
   “Absolutely,” Jean said.
   “I suppose I should be happy with these results,” Marsha said, as she gathered the papers together, then stood them on end, tapping them against the desk until they were lined up.
   “I think so,” Jean said encouragingly.
   Marsha stapled the papers together, then tossed them into her briefcase. “Yet both the Wechsler and the MMPI are a little abnormal. Well, maybe unexpected is a better word. I’d have preferred they be unqualifyingly normal. By the way, how did VJ respond to the TAT with the man standing over the child with his arm raised?”
   “VJ said he was giving a lecture.”
   “The man or the child?” Marsha asked with a laugh.
   “Definitely the man.”
   “Any hostility involved?” Marsha asked.
   “None.”
   “Why was the man’s arm raised?”
   “Because the man was talking about tennis, and he was showing the boy how to serve,” Jean said.
   “Tennis? VJ has never played tennis.”

   As Victor drove onto the grounds of Chimera, he noted that none of the previous night’s snow remained. It was still cloudy but the temperature had risen into the high forties.
   He parked his car in the usual spot, but instead of heading directly into the administration building, he took the brown paper bag from the front seat of the car and went directly to his lab.
   “Got some extra rush work for you,” he said to his head technician, Robert Grimes.
   Robert was a painfully thin, intense man, who wore shirts with necks much too large for him, emphasizing his thinness. His eyes had a bulging look of continual surprise.
   Victor pulled out the iced vials of VJ’s blood and sample bottles containing pieces of the dead children’s brains. “I want chromosome studies done on these.”
   Robert picked up the blood vials, shook them, then examined the brain samples. “You want me to let other things go and do this?”
   “That’s right,” Victor said. “I want it done as soon as possible. Plus I want some standard neural stains on the brain slices.”
   “I’ll have to let the uterine implant work slide,” Robert said.
   “You have my permission.”
   Leaving the lab, Victor went to the next building, which housed the central computer. It was situated in the geometric center of the courtyard, an ideal location since the building had easy access to all other facilities. The main office was on the first floor, and Victor had no trouble locating Louis Kaspwicz. There was some problem with a piece of hardware, and Louis was supervising several technicians who had the massive machine open as if it were undergoing surgery.
   “Have any information for me?” Victor asked.
   Louis nodded, told the technicians to keep searching, and led Victor back to his office where he produced a loose-leaf notebook containing the computer logs. “I’ve figured out why you couldn’t call up those files on your terminal,” Louis said. He began to flip the pages of the computer log.
   “Why?” Victor asked, as Louis kept searching through the book.
   Not finding what he was looking for, he straightened up and glanced around his office. “Ah,” he said, spying a loose sheet of paper and snatching it from the desk top.
   “You couldn’t call up the files on Baby Hobbs or Baby Murray because they’d been deleted on November 18,” he said, waving the paper under Victor’s nose.
   “Deleted?”
   “I’m afraid so,” Louis said. “This is the computer log for November 18, and it clearly shows that the files were deleted.”
   “That’s strange,” Victor said. “I don’t suppose you can determine who deleted them, can you?”
   “Sure,” Louis said. “By matching the password of the user.”
   “Did you do that?”
   “Yes,” Louis said.
   “Well, who was it?” Victor asked irritably. It seemed like Louis was deliberately making this difficult.
   Louis glanced at Victor, then looked away. “You, Dr. Frank.”
   “Me?” Victor said with surprise. That was the last thing he expected to hear. Yet he did remember thinking about deleting the files, maybe even planning on doing it at some time, but he could not remember actually having done it.
   “Sorry,” Louis said, shifting his weight. He was plainly uncomfortable.
   “It’s quite all right,” Victor said, embarrassed himself. “Thank you for looking into it for me.”
   “Any time,” Louis said.
   Victor left the computer center, perplexed at this new information. It was true that he’d become somewhat forgetful of late, but could he have actually deleted the files and forgotten about it? Could it have been an accident? He wondered what he’d been doing November 18. Victor went back to the administration building and slowly climbed the back stairs. As he walked down the second-floor corridor toward the rear entrance of his office, he decided to check back over his calendar. He took off his coat, hung it up, and then went to talk to Colleen.
   “Dr. Frank, you frightened me!” she exclaimed when Victor tapped her on the shoulder. She’d been concentrating on typing with dictation headphones on. “I had no idea you were here.”
   Victor apologized, saying that he’d come in the back way.
   “How was the visit to the hospital?” Colleen asked. Victor had called her early that morning to explain why he wouldn’t be in until afternoon. “I hope to God VJ is okay.”
   “He’s fine,” Victor said with a smile. “The tests were normal. Of course, we are waiting on a group of blood tests. But I feel confident they’ll be fine as well.”
   “Thank God!” Colleen said. “You scared me when you called this morning: a full neuro work-up sounded pretty serious.”
   “I was a little worried myself,” Victor admitted.
   “I suppose you want your phone messages,” Colleen said as she peeked under some papers on her otherwise neat desk. “I’ve got a ton of them for you somewhere here.”
   “Hold the messages a minute,” Victor said. “Would you haul out the calendar for 1988? I’m particularly interested in November 18.”
   “Certainly,” Colleen said. She detached herself from her dictation machine and headed for the files.
   Victor went back into his office. While he waited, he thought about the harassing phone call that VJ had unfortunately received, and he debated what to do about it. Reluctantly, he realized there was little he could do. If he asked any of the people he was having a problem with, they’d obviously deny it.
   Colleen came into his office carrying the calendar already opened to November 18, and stuck it under Victor’s nose. It had been a fairly busy day. But there was nothing that had anything even slightly to do with the missing files. The last entry noted that Victor had taken Marsha into Boston to eat at Another Season and go to the Boston Symphony.

  • • •
   Removing her robe, Marsha slid into the deliciously warm bed. She turned down the controls of the electric blanket from high to three. Victor had edged as far away from the heat as possible. His side of the electric blanket was never used. He’d been in bed for over a half hour and was busy reading from a stack of professional journals.
   Marsha rolled on her side, studying Victor’s profile. The sharp line of his nose, the slightly hollow cheeks, the thin lips were as familiar to Marsha as her own. Yet he seemed like a stranger. She still hadn’t fully accepted what he’d done to VJ, vacillating between disbelief, anger, and fear, with fear being paramount.
   “Do you think those tests mean VJ’s really all right?” she asked.
   “I’m reassured,” Victor said without looking up from his magazine. “And you acted pretty happy in Dr. Ruddock’s office.”
   Marsha rolled over on her back. “That was immediate relief that nothing obvious showed up, like a brain tumor.” She looked back at Victor. “But there still is no explanation for his dramatic drop in intelligence.”
   “But that was six and a half years ago.”
   “I’m still worried that the process will start again.”
   “Suit yourself,” Victor said.
   “Victor!” Marsha said. “Can’t you put whatever it is you’re reading aside for a moment to talk with me?”
   Letting the open journal drop, he said, “I am talking to you.”
   “Thank you,” Marsha said. “Of course I’m glad VJ’s physical exam was normal. But his psychological exams weren’t. They were unexpected, and a little contradictory.” Marsha then went on to explain her findings, finishing with VJ’s relatively high score on the hysteria scale.
   “VJ’s not emotional,” Victor said.
   “That’s the point,” Marsha said.
   “Seems to me the result says more about psychological tests than anything else. They probably aren’t accurate.”
   “On the contrary,” Marsha said. “These tests are considered very reliable. But I don’t know what to make of them. Unfortunately they just add to my uneasiness. I can’t help feeling that something terrible is going to happen.”
   “Listen,” Victor said. “I took some of VJ’s blood back to the lab. I’m going to have chromosome six isolated. If it hasn’t changed, I’ll be perfectly satisfied. And you should be as well.” He reached out as if to pat her thigh but she moved her leg away. Victor let his hand fall back to the bed. “If VJ has some mild psychological problems, well that’s something else and we can get him some therapy, okay?” He wanted to reassure her further, but he didn’t know what else to say. He certainly wasn’t about to mention the missing files.
   Marsha took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll try to relax. You’ll tell me about the DNA study as soon as you look at it?”
   “Absolutely,” Victor said. He smiled at her. She managed to smile back weakly.
   Victor raised his journal and tried to read. But he kept thinking about the missing files. Victor wondered again if he could have deleted them. It was a possibility. Since they weren’t cross-referenced, it was unlikely someone else could have deleted all three.
   “Did you find out what caused the death of those poor babies?” Marsha asked.
   Victor let the journal drop once more. “Not yet. The autopsies aren’t complete. The microscopic hasn’t been done.”
   “Could it have been cancer?” Marsha asked nervously, remembering the day David got sick. That was another date that Marsha would never forget: June 17, 1984. David was ten, VJ five. School had been out for several weeks and Janice was planning to take the children to Castle Beach.
   Marsha was in her study, getting her things ready to take to the office when David appeared in the doorway, his thin arms hanging limply at his sides.
   “Mommy, something is wrong with me,” he said.
   Marsha didn’t look up immediately. She was trying to find a folder she’d brought from the office the day before.
   “What seems to be the trouble?” she asked, closing one drawer and opening another. David had gone to bed the night before complaining of some abdominal discomfort, but Pepto-Bismol had taken care of that.
   “I look funny,” David said.
   “I think you are a handsome boy,” Marsha said, turning to scan the built-in shelves behind her desk.
   “I’m getting yellow,” David said.
   Marsha stopped what she was doing and turned to face her son, who ran to her and buried his face in her bosom. He was an affectionate child.
   “What makes you think you’re turning yellow?” she asked, feeling the first stirrings of fear. “Let me see your face,” she said, gently trying to pull the boy away from her. She was hoping that he was wrong and there would be some silly explanation for his impression.
   David would not let go. “It’s my eyes,” he said, his voice muffled against her. “And my tongue.”
   “Your tongue can get yellow from a lemon candy,” Marsha said. “Come, now. Let me see.”
   The light in her study was poor, so she walked him into the hall where she looked at David’s eyes in the light streaming through the window. Marsha caught her breath. There was no doubt. The boy was severely jaundiced.
   Later that day a CAT scan showed a diffuse tumor of the liver. It was an enormously aggressive cancer that destroyed the child’s liver within days of making the diagnosis.
   “Neither baby seemed to have cancer,” Victor was saying, rousing Marsha from her reverie. “The gross studies showed no signs of malignancy.”
   Marsha tried to shake away the haunting image of David’s yellow eyes looking at her from his gaunt face. Even his skin had rapidly turned yellow. She cleared her throat. “What do you think the chances are that the babies’ deaths were caused by the foreign genes you inserted?”
   Victor didn’t answer immediately. “I’d like to think the problem was unrelated. After all, none of the hundreds of animal experiments resulted in any health problems.”
   “But you can’t be sure?” Marsha asked.
   “I can’t be sure,” Victor agreed.
   “What about the other five zygotes?” Marsha asked.
   “What do you mean?” Victor asked. “They are stored in the freezer.”
   “Are they normal or did you mutate them too?” Marsha asked.
   “All of them have the NGF gene,” Victor said.
   “I want you to destroy them,” Marsha said.
   “Why?” Victor asked.
   “You said you were sorry for what you’d done,” Marsha said angrily. “And now you are asking why you should destroy them?”
   “I’m not going to implant them,” Victor said. “I can promise you that. But I might need them to help figure out what went wrong with the Hobbs and Murray babies. Remember, their zygotes had both been frozen. That was the only difference between them and VJ.”
   Marsha studied Victor’s face. It was a horrible feeling to realize that she didn’t know if she believed him or not. She did not like the idea of those zygotes being potentially viable.
   Before she could argue further, a crash shattered the night. Even before the sound of the broken glass faded, a high-pitched scream reverberated from VJ’s room. Marsha and Victor leaped from the bed and ran headlong down the hall.

7. Later Tuesday Night

   VJ was curled up in a ball at the head of his bed, cradling his head in both hands. In the center of the room, resting on the rug, was a brick. A length of red ribbon was tied around it, securing a piece of paper, making the package appear like a gift. VJ’s window had been smashed and shards of glass littered the room. Obviously the brick had been thrown from the driveway.
   Victor put out his hand to restrain Marsha from coming into the room and rushing to VJ’s side.
   “Watch the glass!” Victor yelled.
   “VJ, are you all right?” Marsha shouted.
   VJ nodded.
   Reaching around Marsha, Victor grabbed the Oriental runner that extended down the hall. Pulling it into VJ’s room, he let it roll out toward the window. Then he ran across it to look down at the driveway. He saw no one.
   “I’m going out,” Victor said, running past Marsha.
   “Don’t be a hero,” Marsha yelled, but Victor was already halfway down the stairs. “And don’t you move,” she said to VJ. “There’s so much glass, you’re sure to be cut. I’ll be right back.”
   Marsha ran back to the master bedroom and hastily pulled on her slippers and her robe. Returning to VJ’s room, she finally got to the bed. VJ allowed her to hug him. “Hold on,” she said, as she strained to lift him up. He was heavier than she’d anticipated. Staggering to the hallway, she was glad to set him down.
   “A few months from now I won’t be able to do that,” she said with a groan. “You’re getting too big for me.”
   “I’m going to find out who did that,” VJ snarled, finding his voice.
   “Did it frighten you, dear?” Marsha asked, stroking his head.
   VJ parried Marsha’s hand. “I’m going to find out who threw that brick and I’m going to kill him.”
   “You’re safe now,” Marsha said soothingly. “You can calm down. I know you’re upset, but everything is all right. No one got hurt.”
   “I’ll kill him,” VJ persisted. “You’ll see. I’ll kill him.”
   “Okay,” Marsha said. She tried to draw him to her but he resisted. For a moment she looked at him. His blazing eyes held a piercing, unchildlike intensity. “Let’s go down to the study,” she said. “I want to call the police.”
   Victor ran the length of the driveway and stood in the street, looking both ways. Two driveways down, he heard a car being started. Just as he was debating sprinting in that direction, he saw the headlights come on and the car accelerate away. He couldn’t tell the make.
   In frustration, he threw a rock after it, but there was no way he could have hit it. Turning around, he hurried back to the house. He found Marsha and VJ in the study. It was apparent they’d been talking, but as Victor arrived they stopped.
   “Where’s the brick?” Victor asked, out of breath.
   “Still in VJ’s room,” Marsha said. “We’ve been too busy talking about how VJ is planning on killing whoever threw it.”
   “I will!” VJ promised.
   Victor groaned, knowing how Marsha’s mind would take this as further evidence that VJ was disturbed. He went back to his son’s room. The brick was still where it had fallen after crashing through VJ’s window. Bending down, he extracted the paper from beneath the ribbon. “Remember our deal” said the typed message. Victor made an expression of disgust. Who the hell had done this?
   Bringing the brick and the note with him, Victor returned to the study. He showed both to Marsha, who took them in her hands. She was about to say something when the downstairs doorbell sounded.
   “Now what?” Victor questioned.
   “Must be the police,” Marsha said, getting to her feet. “I called them while you were outside running around.” She left the room, heading down the stairs.
   Victor looked at VJ. “Scared you, huh, Tiger?”
   “I think that’s obvious,” VJ said. “It would have scared anyone.”
   “I know,” Victor said. “I’m sorry you’re getting the brunt of all this, what with the phone call last night and the brick tonight. I’m sure you don’t understand, but I’ve some personnel problems at the lab. I’ll try to do something to keep this kind of thing from happening.”
   “It doesn’t matter,” VJ said.
   “I appreciate you being a good sport about it,” Victor said. “Come on, let’s talk to the police.”
   “The police won’t do anything,” VJ said. But he got up and started downstairs.
   Victor followed. He agreed, but he was surprised that at age ten, VJ knew it too.
   The North Andover police were polite and solicitous. A Sergeant Widdicomb and Patrolman O’Connor had responded to the call. Widdicomb was at least sixty-five, with florid skin and a huge beer belly. O’Connor was just the opposite: he was in his twenties and looked like an athlete. Widdicomb did all the talking.
   When Victor and VJ arrived in the foyer, Widdicomb was reading the note while O’Connor fingered the brick. Widdicomb handed the note back to Marsha. “What a dad-blasted awful thing,” he said. “Used to be that this kinda stuff only happened in Boston, not out here.” Widdicomb took out a pad, licked the end of a pencil and started taking notes. He asked the expected questions, like the time it happened, if they saw anyone, whether the lights had been on in the boy’s room. VJ quickly lost interest and disappeared into the kitchen.
   After he ran out of questions, Widdicomb asked if they could take a gander around the yard.
   “Please,” Marsha said, motioning toward the door.
   After the police left, Marsha turned to Victor. “Last night you told me not to worry about the threatening call, that you would look into it.”
   “I know . . .” Victor said guiltily. She waited for Victor to continue. But he didn’t.
   “A threatening phone call is one thing,” Marsha said. “A brick through our child’s window is quite another. I told you I couldn’t handle any more surprises. I think you better give me some idea of these office problems you mentioned.”
   “Fair enough,” Victor said. “But let me get a drink. I think I could use one.”
   VJ had the Johnny Carson show on in the family room and was watching, his head propped up against his arm. His eyes had a glazed look.
   “Are you okay?” Marsha called from the doorway to the kitchen.
   “Fine,” VJ said without turning his head.
   “I think we should let him unwind,” Marsha said, directing her attention to Victor, who was busy making them a hot rum drink.
   Mugs in hand, they sat down at the kitchen table. In capsule form, Victor highlighted the controversy with Ronald, the negotiations with Gephardt’s attorney, Sharon Carver’s threats, and the unfortunate situation with Hurst. “So there you have it,” he concluded. “A normal week at the office.”
   Marsha mulled over the four troublemakers. Aside from Ronald, she guessed any of the other three could be guilty of acting out.
   “What about this note?” she asked. “What deal is it referring to?”
   Victor took a drink, put the mug on the table, then reached across and took the note. He studied it for a moment, then said, “I haven’t the slightest idea. I haven’t made any deals with anyone.” He tossed the paper onto the table.
   “Somebody must have thought you had,” Marsha said.
   “Look, anyone capable of throwing a rock through our window is capable of fantasizing some mythical deal. But I’ll get in touch with each of them and make sure they know that we are not going to sit idly by and allow them to throw bricks through our windows.”
   “What about hiring some security?” Marsha asked.
   “It’s an idea,” Victor said. “But let me make these calls tomorrow. I have a feeling that it will solve this problem.”
   The doorbell sounded again.
   “I’ll get it,” said Victor. He put his mug on the table and left the kitchen.
   Marsha got up and went into the family room. The TV was still on but Johnny Carson had changed to David Letterman. It was that late. VJ was fast asleep. Turning off the TV, Marsha looked at her son. He looked so peaceful. There was no hint of the intense hostility that he’d displayed earlier. Oh God, she thought, what had Victor’s experiment done to her darling baby?
   The front door banged shut, and Victor came in saying, “The police didn’t find anything. They just said they’d try to watch the house best they could over the next week or so.” Then he looked down at VJ. “I see he has recovered.”
   “I wish,” Marsha said wistfully.
   “Oh, come on now,” Victor said. “I don’t want a lecture about his hostility and all that bull.”
   “Maybe he was really upset when his IQ fell,” she said, following her own train of thought. “Can you imagine what kind of self-esteem loss the boy probably suffered when his special abilities evaporated?”
   “The kid was only three and a half,” Victor pleaded.
   “I know you don’t agree with me,” Marsha said, looking back at the sleeping boy. “But I’m terrified. I can’t believe your genetic experiment didn’t affect his future.”

   The following morning the temperature had climbed to nearly sixty degrees by nine o’clock. The sun was out and Victor had both front windows open in the car as well as the sunroof. The air was fragrant with the earthy aroma that presaged spring. Victor pressed the accelerator and let the car loose on the short straightaways.
   He glanced over at VJ, who seemed fully recovered from the previous night. He had his arm out the window and was playing with the wind with his open hand. It was a simple gesture, but so normal. Victor could remember doing it many times when he was VJ’s age.
   Looking at his son, Victor couldn’t rid himself of Marsha’s fears. He seemed fine, but could the implant have affected his development? VJ was a loner. In that regard he certainly didn’t take after anyone else in the family.
   “What’s your friend Richie like?” Victor asked suddenly.
   VJ shot him a look that was midway between vexation and disbelief. “You sound like Mother,” he said.
   Victor laughed. “I suppose I do. But really, what kinda kid is this Richie? How come we haven’t met him?”
   “He’s okay,” VJ said. “I see him every day at school. I don’t know, we have different interests when we’re at home. He watches a lot of TV.”
   “If you two want to go into Boston this week, I’ll have someone from the office drive you.”
   “Thanks, Dad,” VJ said. “I’ll see what Richie says.”
   Victor settled back into his seat. Obviously the kid had friends. He made a mental note to remind Marsha about Richie that evening.
   The moment Victor pulled into his parking space, Philip’s hulking form appeared in front of the car as if by magic. Seeing VJ, a smile broke across his face. He grabbed the front of the car and gave it a shake.
   “Good gravy,” Victor said.
   VJ jumped out of the car and gave the man a punch on the arm. Philip pretended to fall, backing up a few steps, clutching his arm. VJ laughed and the two started off.
   “Wait a second, VJ,” Victor called. “Where are you going?”
   VJ turned and shrugged. “I don’t know. The cafeteria or the library. Why? You want me to do something?”
   “No,” Victor said. “I just want to be sure you stay away from the river. This warm weather is only going to make it rise higher.”
   In the background Victor could hear the roar of the water going over the spillway.
   “Don’t worry,” VJ said. “See you later.”
   Victor watched as they rounded the building, heading in the direction of the cafeteria. They certainly made an improbable pair.
   In the office, Victor got right to work. Colleen gave him an update on all the issues that had to be addressed that day. Victor delegated what he could, the things he had to do himself he put in an orderly stack in the center of his desk. That done, he took out the note that had been wrapped around the brick.
   “Remember our deal,” Victor repeated. “What the hell does that mean?” Suddenly furious, he picked up the phone and called Gephardt’s attorney, William Hurst, and Sharon Carver. He didn’t give any of them a chance to talk. As soon as they were on the phone he shouted that there were no deals and that he’d put the police onto anyone who’d harassed his family.
   Afterward he felt a little silly, but he hoped the guilty party would think twice before trying again. He did not call Ronald because he couldn’t imagine his old friend stooping to violence.
   With that taken care of, Victor picked up the first of Colleen’s notes and started on the day’s administrative duties.

   Marsha’s day was a seemingly endless stream of difficult patients until a cancellation just before lunch gave her an hour to review VJ’s tests. Taking them out, she remembered the intensity of his anger over the thrown brick. She looked at clinical scale four that was supposed to reflect such suppressed hostility. VJ had scored well below what she would have expected with such behavior.
   Marsha got up, stretched and stared out her office window. Unfortunately she looked over a parking lot, but beyond that there were some fields and rolling hills. All the trees in view still had that midwinter look of death, their branches like skeletons against the pale blue sky.
   So much for psychological testing, she thought. She wished that she could have talked with Janice Fay. The woman had lived with them until her death in 1985. If anyone would have had insight into VJ’s change in intelligence, it would have been Janice. The only other adult who had been close to VJ during that period was Martha Gillespie at the preschool. VJ had started before his second birthday.
   On impulse, Marsha called to Jean: “I think I’ll be skipping lunch; you go whenever you want. Just don’t forget to put the phone on service.”
   Busy with the typewriter, Jean waved understanding.
   Five minutes later, Marsha was going sixty-five miles an hour on the interstate. She only had to go one exit and was soon back to small country roads.
   The Crocker Preschool was a charming ensemble of yellow cottages with white trim and white shutters on the grounds of a much larger estate house. Marsha wondered how the school made ends meet, but rumor had it that it was more of a hobby for Martha Gillespie. Martha had been widowed at a young age and left a fortune.
   “Of course I remember VJ,” Martha said with feigned indignation. Marsha had found her in the administrative cottage. She was about sixty, with snow white hair and cheery, rosy cheeks. “I remember him vividly right from his first day with us. He was a most extraordinary boy.”
   Marsha recalled the first day also. She’d brought VJ in early, worried about his response since he had not been away from home except when accompanied by Janice or herself. This was to be his first brush with such independence. But the adaptation had proved to be harder for Marsha than for her son, who ran into the middle of a group of children without even one backward glance.
   “In fact,” Martha said, “I remember that by the end of his first day he had all the other children doing exactly what he wanted. And he wasn’t even two!”
   “Then you remember when VJ’s intelligence fell?” Marsha asked.
   Martha paused while she studied Marsha. “Yes, I remember,” she said.
   “What do you remember about him after this occurred?” Marsha asked.
   “How is the boy today?”
   “He’s fine, I hope,” Marsha said.
   “Is there some reason you want to upset yourself by going through this?” Martha asked. “I remember how devastated you were back then.”
   “To be honest,” Marsha said, “I’m terrified the same problem might happen again. I thought that if I learned more about the first episode, I might be able to prevent another.”
   “I don’t know if I can help that much,” Martha said. “There certainly was a big change, and it occurred so quickly. VJ went from being a confident child whose mind seemed infinite in its capability, to a withdrawn child who had few friends. But it wasn’t as if he was autistic. Even though he stayed by himself, he was always uncannily aware of everything going on around him.”
   “Did he continue to relate to children his own age?” Marsha asked.
   “Not very much,” Martha said. “When we made him participate, he was always willing to go along, but left to his own devices, he’d just watch. You know, there was one thing that was curious. Every time we insisted that VJ participate in some kind of game, like musical chairs, he would always let the other children win. That was strange because prior to this, VJ won most of the games no matter what the age of the children involved.”
   “That is curious,” Marsha said.
   Later, when Marsha was driving back to her office, she kept seeing a three-and-a-half-year-old VJ letting other children win. It brought back the episode in the pool Sunday evening. In all her experience with young children, Marsha had never come across such a trait.

   “Perfect!” Victor said as he held one of the microscope slides up to the overhead light. He could see the paper-thin section of brain sealed with a cover slip.
   “That’s the Golgi stain,” Robert said. “You also have Cajal’s and Bielschowsky’s. If you want any others you’ll have to let me know.”
   “Fine,” Victor said. As usual, Robert had accomplished in less than twenty-four hours what would have taken a lesser technician several days.
   “And here are the chromosome preparations,” Robert said, handing Victor a tray. “Everything is labeled.”
   “Fine,” Victor repeated.
   Taking the preparations in his hands, Victor headed across the main room of the lab to the light microscopes. Seating himself before one, he placed the first slide under the instrument. It was labeled Hobbs, right frontal lobe.
   Victor ran the scope down so that the objective was just touching the cover slip. Then, looking through the eyepieces, he corrected the focus.
   “Good God!” he exclaimed as the image became clear. There was no sign of malignancy, but the effect was the same as if a tumor had been present. The children didn’t die of cerebral edema, or an accumulation of fluid. Instead, what Victor saw was evidence of diffuse mitotic activity. The nerve cells of the brain were multiplying just as they did in the first two months of fetal development.
   Victor quickly scanned slides of other areas of the Hobbs brain and then studied the Murray child’s tissue. All of them were the same. The nerve cells were actively reproducing themselves at a furious rate. Since the children’s skulls were fused, the new cells had nowhere to go other than to push the brain down into the spinal canal, with fatal results.
   Horrified yet astounded at the same time, Victor snatched up the tray of slides and left the light microscope. He hurried across the lab and entered the room which housed the scanning electron microscope. The place had the appearance of a command center of a modern electronic weapons system.
   The instrument itself looked very different from a normal microscope. It was about the size of a standard refrigerator. Its business portion was a cylinder approximately a foot in diameter and about three feet tall. A large electrical trunk entered the top of this cylinder and served as the source of electrons. The electrons were then focused by magnets which acted like glass lenses in a light microscope. Next to the scope was a good-sized computer. It was the computer that analyzed multiple-plano images of the electron microscope and constructed the three-dimensional pictures.
   Robert had made extremely thin preparations of the chromatin material from some of the brain cells that were in the initial process of dividing. Victor placed one of these preparations within the scope and searched for chromosome six. What he was looking for was the area of mutation where he’d inserted the foreign genes. It took him over an hour, but at last he found it.
   “Jesus,” Victor gulped. The histones that normally enveloped the DNA were either missing or attenuated in the area of the inserted gene. In addition, the DNA, which was usually tightly coiled, had unraveled, suggesting that active transcription was taking place. In other words, the inserted genes were turned on!
   Victor tried a preparation from the other child with the same results. The inserted genes were turned on, producing NGF. There was no doubt about it.
   Switching to preparations made from VJ’s blood, which must have taken much more patience on Robert’s part since appropriate cells would have been harder to find, Victor introduced one within the electron microscope. Within thirty minutes he located chromosome six. Then, with painstaking effort, he scanned up and down the chromosome several times. The genes were quiescent. The area of the inserted gene was covered with the histone protein in the usual fashion.
   Victor rocked back in the chair. VJ was all right, but the other two children had died as the result of his experiment. How could he ever tell Marsha? She would leave him. In fact, he wasn’t sure he could live with himself.
   Abruptly he stood up and paced the small room. What could have turned the gene back on? The only thing Victor could imagine was the ingestion of cephaloclor, the same antibiotic that he had used during the early embryological development. But how could these children have gotten the drug? It was not a common prescription, and the parents had been specifically warned that both children were deathly allergic to it. Victor was sure neither the Hobbses nor the Murrays would have permitted anyone to administer cephaloclor to their sons.
   With both children dying at once, there was no way it could have been an accident. With a sudden chill of fear, Victor wondered if the area of chromosome six that he’d chosen to insert the manufactured genes was not an area of nonsense DNA as most people thought. Maybe its location in respect to an indigenous promoter caused the gene to turn on by some unknown mechanism. If that were the case, then VJ would indeed be at a risk too. Perhaps his gene had turned on for a short burst of activity back when his intelligence fell.
   Victor tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. Picking up all the samples, he went to the water fountain and took a drink. There were a number of lab assistants working in the main room, but Victor was in no mood to talk. He hurried into his research office and closed the door behind him. He tried calming himself, but just as the pounding of his heart began to ease he remembered the photomicrographs he’d made of VJ’s chromosomes six and a half years ago.
   Jumping to his feet, he dashed to the files and frantically searched until he came up with the photos he’d taken when VJ’s intelligence fell. Studying them, he let out a sigh of relief. VJ’s had not changed at all. His chromosome six looked exactly the same six and a half years ago as it did today. There was not even the slightest uncovering or unraveling of the DNA.

 Breathing more easily, Victor left his office to find Robert. The technician was in the animal room, supervising Sharon Carver’s replacement. Victor took him aside. “I’m afraid I have some more special work for you.”
   “You’re the boss,” Robert answered.
   “There is an area on chromosome six in the brain samples where the DNA is exposed and unraveled. I want the DNA sequenced just as soon as you can.”
   “That is going to take some time,” Robert said.
   “I know it’s tedious,” Victor said. “But I have some radioactive probes you can use.”
   “That’s altogether different.”
   Robert followed Victor back to his office and collected the myriad small bottles. For a few moments after he’d left, Victor stayed in his office, trying to come up with another explanation besides the cephaloclor. Why else would the NGF gene turn on in the two infants? At age two and a half to three, growth was decelerating, and there were no monumental physiological changes such as those that occurred at puberty.
   The other curious fact was that the NGF gene had apparently turned on in the two children at the exact same time. That didn’t make sense. The only way the two children’s lives intersected at all was that both attended the day-care center at Chimera. That was another reason Victor had selected the two couples. He’d wanted an opportunity to view the children during their development. He had also made sure that the Hobbses and the Murrays did not know each other before they became parents. He didn’t want them comparing notes and getting suspicious.
   Reaching across his desk for the phone, Victor called personnel and got the bereaved families’ home addresses. He wrote them down, then went to tell Colleen that he’d be out for several hours.
   Victor decided on the Hobbses first because it was closer. They lived in an attractive brick ranch in a town called Haverhill. Victor pulled up to the front of the house and rang the bell.
   “Dr. Frank,” William Hobbs said with surprise. He opened the door wider, and gestured for Victor to enter. “Sheila!” he called. “We have company!”
   Victor stepped inside. Although the house was pleasantly decorated in a contemporary fashion, an oppressive silence hung over the rooms like a shroud.
   “Come in, come in,” William said, escorting Victor into the living room. “Coffee? Tea?” His voice echoed in the stillness.
   Sheila Hobbs came into the room. She was a dynamic woman with bobbed hair. Victor had met her at several of the obligatory Chimera social occasions.
   Victor agreed to some coffee, and soon all three were sitting in the living room, balancing tiny Wedgwood cups on their knees.
   “I was just thinking about giving you a call,” William said. “It’s such a coincidence that you stopped by.”
   “Oh?” Victor said.
   “Sheila and I have decided to get back to work,” William said, directing his attention at his coffee cup. “At first we thought we’d get away for a while. But now we think we’ll feel better with something to do.”
   “We’ll be pleased to have you back, whenever you choose,” said Victor.
   “We appreciate that,” William said.
   Victor cleared his throat. “There is something I wanted to ask you,” he began. “I believe you’d been warned that your son was allergic to an antibiotic called cephaloclor.”
   “That’s right,” Sheila said. “We’d been told that before we even picked him up.” She lowered her coffee cup and it rattled against the saucer.
   “Is there any chance that your son had been given cephaloclor?” Victor asked.
   The couple looked at each other, then answered in unison: “No.” Then Sheila continued: “Maurice hadn’t been sick or anything. Besides, we’d made sure that his antibiotic allergy was part of his medical record. I’m certain he’d not been given any antibiotic. Why do you ask?”
   Victor stood up. “It was just a thought. I didn’t think he would have, but I’d remembered about the allergy . . .”
   Back in his car, Victor headed toward Boston. He was pretty certain the Murrays would tell him the same thing the Hobbses had, but he had to be sure.
   Since it was the middle of the afternoon, he made excellent time. His major problem was what to do with his car when he got there. Eventually he found a spot on Beacon Hill. A sign said it was a tow zone, but Victor decided to take the chance.
   The Murrays’ house was on West Cedar, in the middle of the block. He rang the bell.
   The door was opened by a man in his late twenties or early thirties, sporting a punk hair style.
   “Are the Murrays in?” Victor asked.
   “They’re both at work,” the man said. “I work for their cleaning service.”
   “I thought they’d taken some time off.”
   The man laughed. “Those workaholics! They took one day after their son died and that was it.”
   Victor returned to his car, irritated with himself for not having called before coming. It would have saved him a trip.
   Back at Chimera, Victor went directly to the accounting department. He found Horace Murray at his desk, bent over computer print-outs. When the man saw Victor he sprang to his feet saying, “Colette and I wanted to thank you again for coming to the hospital.”
   “I only wish I could have done something to help,” Victor said.
   “It was in God’s hands,” Horace said resignedly.
   When Victor asked him about the cephaloclor, the man swore that Mark had not been given an antibiotic, especially not cephaloclor.
   Leaving the accounting department, Victor was struck by still another fear. What if there was a link between the deaths and the fact that the children’s files were missing? That was the most disturbing thought of all because it implied that the genes had been turned on deliberately.
   Heart pounding again, Victor ran back to his lab. One of his newer technicians tried to ask a question, but Victor waved the man away, telling him to talk to Grimes if he had a problem.
   Inside his office Victor bent down in front of a cabinet at the bottom of his bookcase. He unlocked the heavy door and reached in to grasp the NGF data books that he’d written in code. But his hand met empty space. The entire shelf was empty.
   Victor closed the cabinet and carefully locked it even though there was no longer anything to protect.
   “Calm down,” he told himself, trying to stem a rising tide of paranoia. “You’re letting your imagination run away with itself. There has to be an explanation.”
   Getting up, he went out to find Robert. He tracked him down in the electrophoresis unit, working on the task that Victor had earlier assigned him. “Have you seen my NGF data books?” Victor asked.
   “I don’t know where they are,” Robert said. “I haven’t seen them for six months. I thought you’d moved them.”
   Mumbling his thanks, Victor walked away. This was no longer some fantasy. The evidence was mounting. Someone had interfered in his experiment, with lethal results. Deciding to face his worst apprehensions, Victor went over to the liquid nitrogen freezer. He put his hand on the latch and hesitated. Intuition told him what he would find, but he had to force himself to raise the hood. He kept hearing Marsha telling him that he had to destroy the other five zygotes right away.
   Slowly he looked down. At first his view was blocked by the frozen mist as it floated out of the storage container and spilled silently to the floor. Then it cleared, and he saw the plate that contained the embryos. It was empty.
   For a moment Victor supported himself by leaning against the freezer, staring at the empty tray, not wanting to believe what his eyes were clearly telling him. The he let the lid fall shut. The cool nitrogen mist swirled about his legs as if it were alive. He staggered back to his office and fell into the chair. Someone else knew about his NGF work! But who could it be and why had they intentionally brought about the babies’ deaths, or had that been an accident? Was someone so intent on destroying Victor that they didn’t care who else was hurt? Suddenly Hurst’s threats took on a new dimension.
   With a wave of apprehension, Victor realized that he had to find out who was behind all these strange events. He rose from the chair and began to pace, remembering with a start that David had died soon after the battle for taking Chimera public. Could his death have been involved as well? Could Ronald be involved? No, that was ridiculous. David had died of liver cancer, not poisoning or an accident that someone could have caused. Even the idea that the Hobbs and Murray children had been intentionally killed was preposterous. Their deaths had to be an intracellular phenomenon. Maybe there had been a second mutation caused by the freezing which he would see when Robert completed the DNA sequencing.
   Telling himself to calm down and think logically, he headed over to the computer center to see Louis Kaspwicz. The piece of hardware Louis had been working on had been reduced to an empty metal shell. Surrounding it were hundreds of parts and pieces.
   “I hate to bother you again,” Victor said, “but I need to know the time of day when my files were deleted,” Victor said. “I’m trying to figure out how I did it.”
   “If it’s any consolation,” Louis said, “lots of people accidentally delete their files. I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself. As for the time, I think it was around nine or ten o’clock.”
   “Could I look at the log itself?” Victor asked. He thought that if he’d accessed the computer before or after the deletion, it might give him a clue about why he did it.
   “Dr. Frank,” Louis said with one of his distracting twitches, “this is your company. You can look at whatever you want.”
   They went back to Louis’s office and he gave the November 18 log to Victor. Victor scanned through the print-out. He couldn’t find any entry between eight-thirty and ten-thirty.
   “I don’t see it,” Victor admitted.
   Louis came around the desk to look over Victor’s shoulder. “That’s off,” he said, checking the date on the top of the page. “November 18, all right!” He looked back at the entries. “Oh, for God’s sake!” he exclaimed. “No wonder you couldn’t find it. You were looking in the A.M. section.” Louis handed the print-out back, pointing to the entry in question.
   "P.M. ?“ Victor asked, looking at the correct place on the sheet. “That couldn’t be. At 9:45 P.M. I was in Symphony Hall in Boston.”
   “What can I say?” Louis said with a twitch.
   “Are you certain that this is correct?” Victor asked.
   “Absolutely.” Louis pointed to the entries before and after. “See how it’s sequenced? It has to be the right time. Are you sure you were at the symphony?”
   “Yes,” Victor said.
   “You didn’t use the phone?”
   “What are you talking about?” Victor asked.
   “Just that this entry was made off-site. See this access number? That’s for your PC at home.”
   “But I wasn’t at home,” Victor complained.
   Louis’s shoulders jerked spasmodically. “In that case, there’s only one explanation,” he said. “The entry had to have been made by someone who knows your password as well as the unpublished phone number of our computer. Have you ever given your password to anyone?”
   “Never,” Victor said without hesitation.
   “How often do you access the computer from home?” Louis inquired.
   “Almost never,” Victor said. “I used to do it frequently, but that was years ago when the company was just starting.”
   “Good lord!” Louis said, staring at the print-out.
   “What now?” asked Victor.
   “I hate to tell you this, but there have been a lot of entries into the computer on a regular basis with your password. And that can only mean that some hacker has found our telephone number.”
   “Isn’t that difficult?” Victor asked.
   Louis shook his head. “The phone number is the easy part. Just like the kid did in War Games. You can program your computer to make endless calls using permutations. As soon as you stumble on a computer tone, that’s when the fun begins.”
   “And this hacker used the computer frequently?”
   “Sure did,” Louis said. “I’ve noticed the entries, but I always thought it was you. Look!”
   Louis flipped open the log and pointed to a series of entries using Victor’s password. “It’s usually Friday nights.” He flipped the pages and showed other entries. “Must be when the kid is out of school. What a pain in the ass! Here’s another one. Look, the hacker’d logged into Personnel and Purchasing. God, this makes me sick. We’ve been having some problems with files and I wonder if this kid is the source. I think we’d better change your password right away.”
   “But then we stand less chance of catching him. I don’t use my password much anyway. Why don’t we keep watch on Friday evenings and see if we can trace him. You can do that, can’t you?”
   “It’s possible,” Louis agreed, “if the kid stays on line long enough and the telephone people are standing by.”
   “See if you can arrange it,” Victor said.
   “I’ll try. There’s only one thing that’s worse than a meddlesome hacker and that’s a computer virus. But in this case I’ll put my money on the hacker.”
   As Victor left the computer center, he thought he’d better check up on VJ. Given the day’s developments he thought he better warn him to stay away from Hurst and even Ronald Beekman.
   The first place Victor looked was the lab, but Robert had not seen him or Philip all day. Nor had any of the other technicians. This surprised Victor, since VJ spent most of his time trying out the various microscopes and other equipment. Victor decided to try the cafeteria. Since it was late afternoon there were only a few scattered people having coffee. Victor talked with the manager, who was busy closing out the cash registers. He’d seen VJ around lunchtime, but not since then.
   Leaving the cafeteria, Victor stopped in the library, which was in the same building. The circular cement columns that had been added for structural support had been left in plain sight, giving the area a Gothic feeling. The stacks of books and periodicals were shoulder height, affording a view of the entire room. A comfortable reading area to the right looked out over the inner courtyard of the complex.
   When Victor asked the librarian if she’d seen VJ or Philip, she shook her head no. With rising concern, Victor checked out the gym and day-care center. No VJ and no Philip.
   Returning to his lab prepared to call security, Victor found a message from the manager of the cafeteria, saying VJ and Philip had come in for ice cream.
   Victor went to the cafeteria. He found the two sitting at a table near the window.
   “All right, you two,” Victor said with mock anger. “Where the devil have you been?”
   VJ turned to look at his father. He had his spoon in his mouth upside down. Philip, obviously thinking that Victor was angry, stood up, with his large, shovellike hands not knowing what to do with themselves.

   “We’ve been around,” VJ said evasively.
   “Where?” Victor challenged. “I’ve looked high and low for you.”
   “We were down by the river for a while,” VJ admitted.
   “I thought I told you to stay away from the river.”
   “Oh, come on, Dad,” VJ said. “We weren’t doing anything dangerous.”
   “I would never let anything bad happen to VJ,” Philip said in his childlike voice.
   “I don’t imagine you would,” Victor said, suddenly impressed by what a powerfully built man Philip was. He and VJ were an improbable pair, but Victor certainly appreciated Philip’s loyalty to his son. “Sit down,” Victor said more kindly. “Finish your ice cream.”
   Pulling up a chair himself, Victor turned to his son. “I want you to be especially careful around here for a while. After that brick last night, I’m sure you’ve guessed that there are some problems.”
   “I’ll be all right,” VJ said.
   “I’m sure you will,” Victor agreed. “But a little prudence won’t hurt. Don’t say anything to anybody, but keep your eyes open when Beekman or Hurst are around, okay?”
   “Okay,” VJ said.
   “And you,” Victor said to Philip. “You can act as VJ’s unofficial bodyguard. Can you do that?”
   “Oh, yes, Dr. Frank,” Philip said with alacrity.
   “In fact . . .” Victor said, knowing Marsha would appreciate the idea, “why don’t you come and spend a few nights with us like you used to when VJ was little. Then you can be with VJ even in the evenings.”
   “Thank you, Dr. Frank,” Philip said with a smile that exposed most of his large teeth. “I’d like that very much.”
   “Then it’s settled,” Victor said, getting to his feet. “I’ve got to get back to the office; I’ve been running around all day. We’ll probably be leaving in a couple of hours. We can stop by Philip’s to pick up his things on the way home.”
   Both VJ and Philip waved at Victor with their ice cream spoons.

   Marsha was just taking the groceries out of the bag when she heard Victor’s car come up the drive. As Victor waited for the automatic garage door to rise, Marsha noticed a third head in the back seat and groaned. She’d only bought six small lamb chops.
   Two minutes later they came into the kitchen. “I’ve invited Philip to stay with us for a few days,” Victor said. “I thought with all the excitement around here it would be good to have some muscle in the house.”
   “Sounds good,” Marsha said, but then she added, “I hope that’s not in lieu of professional security.”
   Victor laughed. “Not quite.” Turning to VJ and Philip, he said, “Why don’t you two hit the pool?”
   VJ and Philip disappeared upstairs to change.
   Victor moved as if to kiss Marsha, but she was back to digging in the grocery bag. Then she stepped around him to put something in the pantry. He could tell she was still angry and, given the previous evening’s events, he knew she had good reason to be.
   “Sorry about Philip; it was a last-minute idea,” he said. “But I don’t think we’ll have any more bricks or calls, anyway. I phoned the people who might have threatened us and laid it on the line.”
   “Then how come Philip?” asked Marsha, coming back from the pantry.
   “Just an added precaution,” Victor said. Then, to change the subject, he added: “What’s for dinner?”
   “Lamp chops—and we’ll have to stretch them,” Marsha said, looking at Victor out of the corner of her eye. “Why do I have the feeling that you’re still keeping things from me?”
   “Must be your suspicious nature,” Victor said, even though he knew she was in no mood for teasing. “What else besides lamp chops?” he asked, trying to change the subject.
   “Artichokes, rice, and salad.” It was obvious that he was covering something, but she let it go.
   “What can I do?” Victor asked, washing his hands at the kitchen sink. It was generally their habit to share the preparation of the evening meal since they both worked long hours. Marsha told him to rinse the salad greens.
   “I talked with VJ this morning about his friend Richie,” Victor said. “He’s going to ask him to go to Boston to a day’s outing this week so I don’t think it’s fair to say that VJ doesn’t have any friends.”
   “I hope it happens,” Marsha said noncommittally.
   As she put the rice and artichokes on to cook, she continued to watch Victor out of the corner of her eye. She was hoping that he’d volunteer some information about the two unfortunate babies, but he fussed over the salad in silence. Exasperated, Marsha asked: “Any news about the cause of death of the children?”
   Victor turned to face her. “I looked at the inserted gene in VJ as well as in the Hobbs and Murray kids. In the toddlers it appeared overtly abnormal, like it was actively transcribing, but in VJ it looked absolutely quiet. What’s more,” he added, “I got out some photos of the same gene back when VJ’s intelligence dropped. Even then it didn’t look anything like these kids’. So whatever VJ had, it wasn’t the same problem.”
   Marsha gave a sigh of relief. “That’s good news. Why didn’t you tell me right away?”
   “I just got home,” Victor said. “And I’m telling you.”
   “You could have called,” Marsha said, convinced he was still hiding something. “Or brought it up without my asking.”
   “I’m having the dead kids’ genes sequenced,” Victor said, getting out the oil and vinegar. “Then maybe I’ll be able to tell you what turned the gene back on.”
   Marsha went to the cupboard and got out the dishes to set the table. She tried to control the rage that was beginning to reassert itself. How could he remain so casual about all this? When Victor asked if there were anything else he could do for dinner, she told him he’d done enough. He took her literally and sat on one of the kitchen counter stools, watching her set the table.
   “VJ’s letting you win that swimming race wasn’t a fluke,” Marsha said, hoping to goad her husband. “He started doing that when he was three.” Marsha went on to tell him what Martha Gillespie had said about his behavior in nursery school.
   “How can you be so sure he threw the race?” Victor asked.
   “My goodness, that still bothers you,” said Marsha, turning down the burner under the rice. “I was pretty sure he did when I was watching Sunday night. Now that I talked with Martha, I’m positive. It’s as if VJ doesn’t want to draw attention to himself.”
   “Sometimes by throwing a race you attract more attention,” Victor said.
   “Maybe,” Marsha added, but she wasn’t convinced. “The point is I wish to God I knew more about what went on in his mind when his intelligence changed so dramatically. It might give some explanation for his current behavior. Back then we were too concerned with his health to worry about his feelings.”
   “I think he weathered the episode extremely well,” Victor said. He went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of white wine. “I know you don’t agree with me, but I think he’s doing great. He’s a happy kid. I’m proud of him. I think he’s going to make one hell of a researcher one day. He really loves the lab.”
   “Provided his intelligence doesn’t fall again,” Marsha snapped. “But I’m not worried about his ability to work. I’m worried your unspeakable experiment has interfered with his human qualities.” She turned away to hide new tears as emotion welled up within her. When all this was over she didn’t see how she could stay married to Victor. But would VJ ever be willing to leave his precious lab and live with her?
   “You psychiatrists . . .” Victor muttered as he got out the corkscrew.
   Marsha gave the rice a stir and checked the artichokes. She struggled to control herself. She didn’t want more tears. She didn’t speak for a few minutes. When she did, she said, “I wish I’d kept a diary of VJ’s development. It would really be helpful.”
   “I kept one,” Victor said, pulling out the cork with a resounding pop.
   “You did?” Marsha asked. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
   “Because it was for the NGF project.”
   “Can I see it?” Marsha asked, again swallowing her anger at Victor’s arrogance, using her baby as a guinea pig.
   Victor tasted the wine. “It’s in my study. I’ll show it to you later after VJ is in bed.”

   Marsha was sitting in Victor’s study. She’d insisted on reading the diary alone because she knew Victor’s presence would only upset her more. Her eyes filled with tears as she relived VJ’s birth. Even though much of the record was no more than a standard laboratory account, she was painfully moved by it. She’d forgotten how VJ’s eyes had followed her from birth, long before an average baby’s had even begun to track.
   All the usual milestones had been reached at incredibly early ages, particularly the ability to speak. At seven months, when VJ was supposed to be pronouncing no more than “Mama” and “Dada,” he was already composing sentences. By one year he had a whole vocabulary. By eighteen months, when he was supposed to be able to walk reasonably well, he could ride a small bicycle that Victor had had specially made.
   Reading the history made Marsha remember how exciting it had been. Every day had been marked by a mastery of some different task and the uncovering of a new and unexpected ability. She realized she had been guilty too of reveling in VJ’s unique accomplishments. At the time she had given very little thought to the impact of the child’s precociousness on his personal development. As a psychologist, she should have known better.
   Victor came in with some flimsy excuse about needing a book as she reached a section labeled “mathematics.” Discomforted by her own shortcomings as a caring parent, she let him stay as she continued reading. Math had always been her bête noire. In college she’d had to be tutored to get through the required calculus course. When VJ began to demonstrate an exceptional facility with numbers, she had been astounded. At three VJ actually explained in terms she could understand the basis for calculus. For the first time in her life, Marsha properly comprehended the principles.
   “What amazed me,” Victor was saying, “was his ability to translate mathematical equations into music.”
   Marsha remembered, thinking they had another Beethoven on their hands. “And I never thought to worry if the burden of genius was more than a toddler could handle,” she thought with regret. Sadly, she flipped the next few pages and was surprised to see the diary come to an end.
   “I hope this isn’t all,” she said.
   “I’m afraid so.”
   Marsha read the final pages. The last entry was for May 6, 1982. It described the experience in the day-care center at Chimera that Marsha remembered so vividly. It then dispassionately summarized VJ’s sudden diminution in intelligence. The last sentence read: “VJ appears to have suffered an acute alteration in cerebral function that now appears stable.”
   “You never made any further entries?” asked Marsha.
   “No,” Victor admitted. “I thought the experiment was a failure despite its initial success. There didn’t seem to be any reason to continue the narrative.” Marsha closed the book. She had hoped to find more clues to what she considered the deficiencies in VJ’s personality. “I wish his history pointed to some psychosomatic illness or even a conversion reaction. Then he might be responsive to therapy. I just wish I’d been more sensitive back when all this happened.”
   “I think VJ’s problem was the result of some sort of intracellular phenomenon,” Victor offered. “I don’t think the history would make much difference anyway.”
   “That’s what terrifies me,” said Marsha. “It makes me afraid that VJ is going to die like the Hobbs and Murray children, or of cancer like his brother, or Janice for that matter. I’ve read enough about your work to know that cancer is a big worry for the future of gene therapy. People are worried that inserted genes might cause proto-onco genes to become oncogenes, turning the involved cell into a cancer.”
   She broke off. She could feel her emotions taking over. “How can I go on talking about this as if it were simply a scientific problem? It’s our son—and for all I know you triggered something inside him that will make him die.”
   Marsha covered her face with her hands. Despite her attempts to control herself, tears returned. She let herself cry.
   Victor tried to put his arm around her, but she leaned away. Frustrated, he stood up. He watched her for a moment, with her shoulders silently shaking. There was nothing he could say in defense. Instead, he left the room and started upstairs. The pain of his own grief was overwhelming. And after what he’d discovered today, he had more reason than his wife to fear for VJ’s safety.

8. Thursday Morning

   Wondering how the other people put up with it on a daily basis, Victor suffered the congested traffic of a normal Boston rush hour.
   Once he got on Storrow Drive heading west, traffic improved, only to slow down again near the Fenway. It was after nine when he finally entered the busy Children’s Hospital. He went directly to Pathology.
   “Dr. Shryack, please?” Victor asked. The secretary glanced up at him and, without removing her dictation headset, pointed down the corridor.
   Victor looked at the nameplates as he walked.
   “Excuse me. Dr. Shryack?” Victor called as he stepped through the open door. The extraordinarily young-looking man raised his head from a microscope.
   “I’m Dr. Frank,” Victor said. “Remember when I stopped in while you were autopsying the Hobbs baby?”
   “Of course,” said Dr. Shryack. He stood up and extended his hand. “Nice to meet you under more pleasant circumstances. The name is Stephen.”
   Victor shook his hand.
   “I’m afraid we haven’t any definitive diagnosis yet,” Stephen said, “if that is what you’ve come for. The slides are still being processed.”
   “I’m interested, of course,” Victor said. “But the reason I stopped by was to ask another favor. I was curious if you routinely take fluid samples.”
   “Absolutely,” Stephen answered. “We always do toxicology, at least a screen.”
   “I was hoping to get some of the fluid myself,” Victor said.
   “I’m impressed with your interest,” Stephen said. “Most internists give us a rather wide berth. Come on, let’s see what we have.”
   Stephen led Victor out of his office, down the hall, and into the extensive laboratory where he stopped to speak to a severely dressed middle-aged woman. The conversation lasted for a minute before she pointed toward the opposite end of the room. Stephen then led Victor down the length of the lab and into a side room.
   “I think we’re in luck.” Stephen opened the doors to a large cooler on the far wall and began searching through the hundreds of stoppered Erlenmeyer flasks. He found one and handed it back to Victor. Soon he found three others.
   Victor noticed he had two flasks of blood and two of urine.
   “How much do you need?” Stephen asked.
   “Just a tiny bit,” Victor said.
   Stephen carefully poured a little from each flask into test tubes that he got from a nearby counter top. He capped them, labeled each with a red grease pencil, and handed them to Victor.
   “Anything else?” Stephen asked.
   “Well, I hate to take advantage of your generosity,” Victor said.
   “It’s quite all right,” Stephen said.
   “About five years ago, my son died of a very rare liver cancer,” Victor began.
   “I’m so sorry.”
   “He was treated here. At the time the doctors said there had only been a couple of similar cases in the literature. The thought was that the cancer had arisen from the Kupffer cells so that it really was a cancer of the reticuloendothelial system.”
   Stephen nodded. “I think I read about that case. In fact, I’m sure I did.”
   “Since the tumor was so rare,” Victor said, “do you think that any gross material was saved?”
   “There’s a chance,” Stephen said. “Let’s go back to my office.”
   When Stephen was settled in front of his computer terminal, he asked Victor for David’s full name and birth date. Entering that, he obtained David’s hospital number and located the pathology record. With his finger on the screen, he scanned the information. His finger stopped. “This looks encouraging. Here’s a specimen number. Let’s check it out.”
   This time he took Victor down to the subbasement. “We have a crypt where we put things for long-term storage,” he explained.
   They stepped off the elevator into a dimly lit hall that snaked off in myriad directions. There were pipes and ducts along the ceiling, the floor a bare, stained concrete.
   “We don’t get to come down here that often,” Stephen said as he led the way through the maze. He finally stopped at a heavy metal door. When Victor helped pull it open, Stephen reached in and flipped on a light.
   It was a large, poorly lit room with widely spaced bulbs in simple ceiling fixtures. The air was cold and humid. Numerous rows of metal shelves reached almost to the ceiling.
   Checking a number that he had written on a scrap of paper, Stephen set off down one of the rows. Victor followed, glancing into the shelves. At one point he stopped, transfixed by the image of an entire head of a child contained in a large glass canister and soaking in some kind of preservative brine. The eyes stared out and the mouth was open as if in some perpetual scream. Victor looked at the other glass containers. Each contained some horrifying preserved testament to past suffering. He shuddered, then realized that Stephen had passed from sight.
   Looking nervously around, he heard the resident call. “Over here.”
   Victor strode forward, no longer looking at the specimens. When he reached the corner, he saw the pathologist reaching into one of the shelves, noisily pushing around the glass containers. “Eureka!” he said, straightening up. He had a modest-sized glass jar in his hands that contained a bulbous liver suspended in clear fluid. “You’re in luck,” he said.
   Later, on the way up in the elevator, he asked Victor why he wanted the tissue.
   “Curiosity,” Victor said. “When David died my grief was so overwhelming I didn’t ask any questions. Now after all these years, I want to know more about why he died.”

   Marsha drove VJ and Philip through the Chimera gates. During the drive VJ had chatted about a new Pac-Man video just like any other ten-year-old.
   “Thanks for the lift, Mom,” he said, jumping out.
   “Let Colleen know where you’re playing,” she said. “And I want you to stay away from the river. You saw what it looked like from the bridge.”
   Philip got out from the back seat. “Nothing’s going to happen to VJ,” he said.
   “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go over to your friend Richie’s?” Marsha questioned.
   “I’m happy here,” VJ said. “Don’t worry about me, okay?”
   Marsha watched VJ stride off with Philip rushing to catch up. “What a pair,” she thought, trying to keep last night’s revelation from panicking her.
   She parked the car and headed for the day-care center. As she entered the building she could hear the thwack of a racquetball. The courts were on the floor above, in the fitness center.
   Marsha found Pauline Spaulding kneeling on the floor, supervising a group of children who were finger-painting. She leaped up when she saw Marsha, her figure giving proof to all those years as an aerobics instructor.
   When Marsha asked for a few minutes of her time, Pauline left the kids and went off to find another teacher. After she returned with a younger woman in tow, she led Marsha to another room filled with cribs and folding cots.
   “We’ll have some privacy here,” Pauline said. Her large oval eyes looked nervously at Marsha, who she assumed had come on official business for her husband.
   “I’m not here as the wife of one of the partners,” Marsha said, trying to put Pauline at ease.
   “I see.” Pauline took a deep breath and smiled. “I thought you had some major complaint.”
   “Quite the contrary,” Marsha said. “I wanted to talk to you about my son.”
   “Wonderful boy,” Pauline said. “I suppose you know that he comes in here from time to time and helps out. In fact, he visited us just last weekend.”
   “I didn’t know the center was open on weekends,” Marsha said.
   “Seven days a week,” Pauline said with pride. “A lot of people here at Chimera work every day. I suppose that’s called dedication.”
   Marsha wasn’t sure she’d call it dedication, and she wondered what kind of stress such devotion would have on family life that was already suffering. But she didn’t say any of this. Instead, she asked Pauline if she remembered the day VJ’s IQ dropped.
   “Of course I remember. The fact that it happened here has always made me feel responsible somehow.”
   “Well, that’s plainly absurd,” Marsha said with a warm smile. “What I wanted to ask about was VJ’s behavior afterwards.”
   Pauline looked down at her feet, thinking. After a minute or so, she raised her head. “I suppose the thing I noticed the most was that he’d changed from a leader of activities to an observer. Before, he was always eager to try anything. Later, he acted bored and had to be forced to participate. And he avoided all competition. It was as if he were a different person. We didn’t push him; we were afraid to. Anyway, we saw much less of him after that episode.”
   “What do you mean?” Marsha asked. “Once he finished his medical work-up, he still came here every afternoon after preschool.”
   “No, he didn’t,” Pauline said. “He began to spend most of the time in his father’s lab.”
   “Really? I didn’t think that started until he began school. But what do I know, I’m just the mother!”
   Pauline smiled.
   “What about friends?” Marsha questioned.
   “That was never one of VJ’s strong points,” Pauline said diplomatically. “He always got along better with the staff than the children. After his problem, he tended to stay by himself. Well, I take that back. He did seem to enjoy the company of the retarded employee.”
   “You mean Philip?” Marsha questioned.
   “That’s the fellow,” Pauline said.
   Marsha stood up, thanked Pauline, and together they walked to the entrance.
   “VJ may not be quite as smart as he was,” Pauline said at the door, “but he is a fine boy. We appreciate him here at the center.”
   Marsha hurried back to the car. She hadn’t learned much, but it seemed VJ had always been even more of a loner than she had suspected.

   Victor knew he should go to his office the moment he reached Chimera. Colleen was undoubtedly inundated by emergencies. But instead, carrying his latest samples from Children’s Hospital, he headed for his lab. En route he stopped at the computer center.
   Victor looked for Louis Kaspwicz around the malfunctioning hardware, but the problem had apparently been solved. The machine was back on line with lights blinking and tape reels running. One of the many white-coated technicians said Louis was in his office trying to figure out a glitch that had occurred in one of the accounting programs.
   When Louis saw Victor, he pushed aside the thick program he was working on and took out the log sheets that he was saving to show Victor.
   “I’ve checked over the last six months,” Louis said, organizing the papers for Victor to see, “and underlined the times the hacker has logged on. It seems the kid checks in every Friday night around eight. At least fifty percent of the time he stays on long enough to be traced.”
   “How come you say ‘kid’?” Victor asked, straightening up from glancing at the logs.
   “It’s just an expression,” Louis answered. “Somebody who breaks into a private computer system could be any age.”
   “Like one of our competitors?” Victor said.
   “Exactly, but historically there’s been a lot of teenagers that do it just for the challenge. It’s like some kind of computer game for them.”
   “When can we try to trace him?” Victor asked.
   “As soon as possible,” Louis said. “It terrifies me that this has been going on for so long. I have no idea what kind of mischief this guy has been up to. Anyway, I talked the phone company into sending over some technicians to watch tomorrow night, if it’s all right with you.”
   “Fine,” Victor said.
   That settled, Victor continued on to his lab. He found Robert still absorbed in sequencing the DNA of the inserted genes.
   “I’ve got some more rush work,” Victor said hurriedly. “If you need to, pull one of the other techs off a project to help, but I want you to be personally responsible for this work.”
   “I’ll get Harry if it’s necessary,” Robert said. “What do you have?”
   Victor opened the brown paper bag and removed a small jar. He extended it toward Robert. His hand trembled.
   “It’s a piece of my son’s liver.”
   “VJ’s?” Robert’s gaunt face looked shocked. His eyes seemed even more prominent.
   “No, no, David’s. Remember we did DNA fingerprinting on everyone in my family?”
   Robert nodded.
   “I want that tumor fingerprinted, too,” Victor said. “And I want some standard H and E stains and a chromosome study.”
   “Can I ask why you want all this?”
   “Just do it,” Victor said sharply.
   “All right,” Robert said, nervously looking down at his feet. “I wasn’t questioning your motives. I just thought that if you were looking for something in particular, I could keep an eye out for it.”

  Victor ran his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry for snapping at you like that,” he said. “I’m under a lot of pressure.”
   “No need to apologize,” Robert said. “I’ll start work on it right now.”
   “Wait, there’s more,” Victor said. He removed the four stoppered test tubes. “I’ve got some blood and urine samples I need assayed for a cephalosporin antibiotic called cephaloclor.”
   Robert took the samples, tilted them to see their consistency, then checked the grease-pencil labels. “I’ll put Harry on this. It will be pretty straightforward.”
   “How is the sequencing coming?” Victor asked.
   “Tedious, as usual,” Robert said.
   “Any mutations pop up?”
   “Not a one,” Robert said. “And the way the probes pick up the fragments, I’d guess at this point that the genes have been perfectly stable.”
   “That’s unfortunate,” Victor said.
   “I thought you’d be pleased with that information,” Robert said.
   “Normally I would,” Victor said. He didn’t elaborate. It would have been too hard for him to explain that he was hoping to find concrete evidence that the dead children’s NGF gene differed from VJ’s.
   “So here you are!” a voice called, startling both Victor and Robert. They turned to see Colleen standing at the door, legs apart and arms akimbo. “One of the secretaries told me she saw you creeping around,” she said with a wink.
   “I was just about to come over to the office,” Victor said defensively.
   “Sure, and I’m about to win the lottery,” Colleen laughed.
   “I suppose the office is bedlam?” Victor asked sheepishly.
   “Now he thinks he’s indispensable,” Colleen joked to Robert. “Actually, things aren’t too bad. I’ve handled most of what has come up. But there is something that you should know right away.”
   “What is it?” said Victor, suddenly concerned.
   “Perhaps I could talk to you in private?” Colleen said. She smiled at Robert to indicate she did not mean to be rude.
   “Of course,” Victor said awkwardly. He moved across the lab to one of the benches. Colleen followed.
   “It’s about Gephardt,” Colleen said. “Darryl Webster, who’s in charge of the investigation, has been trying to get you all day. He finally told me what it was all about. Seems that he has uncovered a slew of irregularities. While Gephardt was purchasing supervisor for Chimera a lot of laboratory equipment vanished.”
   “Like what?” Victor questioned.
   “Big-ticket items,” Colleen said. “Fast protein liquid chromatography units, DNA sequencers, mass spectrometers, things like that.”
   “Good God!”
   “Darryl thought you should know,” Colleen added.
   “Did he find bogus orders?”
   “No,” Colleen said. “That’s what makes it so weird. Receiving got the equipment. It just never went to the department that was supposed to have ordered it. And the department in question never said anything because they hadn’t placed the order.”
   “So Gephardt fenced it,” Victor said, amazed. “No wonder his attorney was so hot to cut a deal. He knew what we would find.”
   Angrily, Victor remembered that the note around the brick referred to a deal. In all likelihood, Gephardt had been behind the harassment.
   “I assume we have the bastard’s telephone number,” Victor said with venom.
   “I guess,” Colleen said. “Should be in his employee record.”
   “I want to give Gephardt a call. I’m tired of talking through that lawyer of his.”
   On the way back to the administration building, Colleen had to run to keep up with Victor. She’d never seen him so angry.
   He was still fuming as he dialed Gephardt’s number, motioning for Colleen to stay in the room so she could be a witness to what was said. But the phone rang interminably. “Damn it!” Victor cursed. “The bastard either is out or he’s not answering. What’s his address?”
   Colleen looked it up and found a street number in Lawrence, not far from Chimera.
   “I think I’ll stop and pay the man a visit on the way home,” Victor said. “I have a feeling he’s been to my house. It’s time I return the call.”

   When one of her patients called in sick, Marsha decided to use the hour to visit Pendleton Academy, the private school that VJ had been attending since kindergarten.
   The campus was beautiful even though the trees were still bare and the grass a wintry brown. The stone buildings were covered with ivy, giving the appearance of an old college or university.
   Marsha pulled up to the administration building and got out. She wasn’t as familiar with the school as she might have been. Although she and Victor had made regular Parents’ Day visits, she’d met the headmaster, Perry Remington, on only two occasions. She hoped he would see her.
   When she entered the building she was pleased to find a number of secretaries busy at their desks. At least it wasn’t a vacation week for the staff. Mr. Remington was in his office and was kind enough to see Marsha within a few minutes.
   He was a big man with a full, well-trimmed beard. His bushy brows poked over the top of his horn-rimmed glasses.
   “We are always delighted to see parents,” Mr. Remington said, offering her a chair. He sat down, crossed his legs, and balanced a manila folder on his knee. “What’s on your mind?”
   “I’m curious about my son, VJ,” Marsha said. “I’m a psychiatrist and to be honest with you, I’m a bit worried about him. I know his grades are good, but I wondered how he was doing generally.” Marsha paused. She didn’t want to put words into Mr. Remington’s mouth.
   The headmaster cleared his throat. “When they told me you were outside, I quickly reviewed VJ’s record,” he said. He tapped the folder, then he shifted his position, crossing the other leg. “Actually, if you hadn’t stopped by I’d have probably given you a ring when school reopened. VJ’s teachers are also concerned about him. Despite his excellent grades, your son seems to have an attention problem. His teachers say that he often appears to be daydreaming or off in his own world, though they admit if they call on him he always has the right answer.”
   “Then why are the teachers concerned?” asked Marsha.
   “I guess it’s because of the fights.”
   “Fights!” exclaimed Marsha. “I’ve never heard a word about fights.”
   “There have been four or five episodes this year alone.”
   “Why hasn’t this been brought to my attention?” Marsha asked with some indignation.
   “We didn’t contact you because VJ specifically asked us not to do so.”
   “That’s absurd!” Marsha said, raising her voice. “Why would you take orders from VJ?”
   “Just a moment, Dr. Frank,” Mr. Remington said. “In each incident it was apparent to the staff member present that your son was severely provoked and that he only used his fists as a last resort. Each incident involved a known bully apparently responding childishly to your son’s . . . er, uniqueness. There was nothing equivocal about any of these incidents. VJ was never at fault and never the instigator. Consequently, we respected his wishes not to bother you.”
   “But he could have been hurt,” Marsha said, settling back in her chair.
   “That’s the other surprising thing,” Mr. Remington said. “For a boy who doesn’t go out for athletics, VJ handled himself admirably. One of the other boys came away with a broken nose.”
   “I seem to be learning a lot about my son these days,” Marsha said. “What about friends?”
   “He’s pretty much of a loner,” Mr. Remington said. “In fact, he doesn’t interact well with the other students. Generally, there is no hostility involved. He just does ‘his own thing.’ ”
   That was not what Marsha wanted to hear. She’d hoped her son was more social in school than at home. “Would you describe VJ as a happy child?” she asked.
   “That’s a tough question,” Mr. Remington said. “I don’t feel he is unhappy, but VJ doesn’t display much emotion at any time.”
   Marsha frowned. The flat effect sounded schizoid. The picture was getting worse, not better.
   “One of our math instructors, Raymond Cavendish,” Mr. Remington offered, “took a particular interest in VJ. He made an enormous effort to penetrate what he called VJ’s private world.”
   Marsha leaned forward. “Really? Was he successful?”
   “Unfortunately, no,” Mr. Remington said. “But the reason I mentioned it was because Raymond’s goal was to get VJ involved in extracurricular activities like sports. VJ was not very interested even though he’d shown an innate talent for basketball and soccer. But I agreed with Raymond’s opinion: VJ needs to develop other interests.”
   “What initially interested Mr. Cavendish in my son?”
   “Apparently he was impressed by VJ’s aptitude for math. He put VJ in a gifted class that included kids from several grades. Each was allowed to proceed at his own pace. One day when he was helping some high school kids with their algebra, he noticed VJ daydreaming. He called his name to tell him to get back to work. VJ thought he was calling on him for an answer and, to everyone’s amazement, VJ offered the solution to the high schooler’s problem.”
   “That’s incredible!” Marsha said. “Would it be possible for me to talk with Mr. Cavendish?”
   Mr. Remington shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Mr. Cavendish died a couple of years ago.”
   “Oh, I’m sorry,” Marsha said.
   “It was a great loss to the school,” Mr. Remington agreed.
   There was a pause in the conversation. Marsha was about to excuse herself when Mr. Remington said, “If you want my opinion, I think it would be to VJ’s benefit if he were to spend more time here in school.”
   “You mean summer session?” Marsha asked.
   “No, no, the regular year. Your husband writes frequent notes for VJ to spend time in his research lab. Now, I am all for alternative educational environments, but VJ needs to participate more, particularly in the extracurricular area. I think—”
   “Just a second,” Marsha interrupted. “Are you telling me that VJ misses school to spend time at the lab?”
   “Yes,” Mr. Remington said. “Often.”
   “That’s news to me,” Marsha admitted. “I know VJ spends a lot of time at the lab, but I never knew he was missing school to do it.”
   “If I were to guess,” Mr. Remington said, “I’d say that VJ spends more time at the lab than he does here.”
   “Good grief,” Marsha said.
   “If you feel as I do,” Mr. Remington said, “then perhaps you should talk to your husband.”
   “I will,” Marsha said, getting to her feet. “You can count on it.”

   “I want you to wait in the car,” Victor said to VJ and Philip as he leaned forward and looked at Gephardt’s house through the windshield. It was a nondescript two-story building with a brick façade and fake shutters.
   “Turn the key so we can at least listen to the radio,” VJ said from the passenger seat; Philip was in the back.
   Victor flipped the ignition key. The radio came back on with the raucous rock music VJ had previously selected. It sounded louder with the car engine off.
   “I won’t be long,” he said, getting out of the car. He was having second thoughts about the confrontation now that he was standing on Gephardt’s property. The house was set on a fairly large lot, hidden from its neighbors by thick clusters of birches and maples. A bay window stuck out on the building’s left, probably indicating the living room. There were no lights on even though daylight was fading, but a Ford van stood idle in the driveway so Victor figured somebody might be home.
   Victor leaned back inside the car. “I won’t be long.”
   “You already said that,” VJ said, keeping time to the music on the dashboard with the flat of his palm.
   Victor nodded, embarrassed. He straightened up and started for the house. As he walked, he wondered if he shouldn’t go home and call. But then he remembered the missing laboratory equipment, the embezzlement of some poor dead employee’s paychecks, and the brick through VJ’s window. That raised Victor’s anger and put determination in his step. As he got closer he glanced at the brick façade and wondered if the brick that had crashed into his house was a leftover from the construction of Gephardt’s. Eyeing the bay window, Victor had the urge to throw one of the cobblestones lining the walk through it. Then he stopped.
   Victor blinked as if he thought his eyes were not telling the truth. He was about twenty feet away from the bay window and he could see that many of the panes were already broken, with sharp shards of glass still in place. It was as if his retribution fantasy had become instant reality.
   Glancing back to his car where he could see the silhouettes of VJ and Philip, Victor struggled with an urge to go back and drive away. There was something wrong. He could sense it. He looked back at the broken bay window, then up the front steps at the door. The place was too quiet, too dark. But then Victor wondered what he’d tell VJ: he was too scared? Having come that far, Victor forced himself to continue.
   Going up the front steps, he saw that the door was not completely shut.