They had been living with this business long enough to have time to plow the McGee field both wide and deep. Filed away in the computer were facts on more than two hundred relatives and four hundred friends all the way around the McGee Tomlinson family tree. These friendships stretched all the way back to Vicky’s best friend in the first grade, a girl named Kathy Smith, who was now Mrs. Frank Worthy, of Cabral, California, and who had probably not spared a thought for Vicky Tomlinson in twenty years or more.
The computer was given the “last-seen” data and promptly spit out a list of probabilities. Heading the list was the name of Andy’s deceased grandfather, who had owned a camp on Tashmore Pond in Vermont; ownership had since passed to Andy. The McGees had vacationed there, and it was within reasonable striking distance of the Manders farm by way of the back roads. The computer felt that if Andy and Charlie were to make for any “known place,” it would be this place.
Less than a week after they had moved into Granther’s, Cap knew they were there. A loose cordon of agents was set up around the camp. Arrangements had been made for the purchase of Notions “n” Novelties in Bradford on the probability that whatever shopping they needed to do would be done in Bradford.
Passive surveillance, nothing more. All the photographs had been taken with telephoto lenses under optimum conditions for concealment. Cap had no intention of risking another firestorm.
They could have taken Andy quietly on any of his trips across the lake. They could have shot them both as easily as they had got the picture of Charlie sledding on the cardboard carton. But Cap wanted the girl, and he had now come to believe that if they were going to have any real control over her, they would need her father as well.
After locating them again, the most important objective had been to make sure they kept quiet. Cap didn’t need a computer to tell him that as Andy grew more frightened, the chances that he would seek outside help went up and up. Before the Manders affair, a press leak could have been handled or lived with. Afterward, press interference became a different ballgame altogether. Cap had nightmares just thinking about what would happen if the New York Times got hold of such a thing.
For a brief period, during the confusion that had followed the firestorm, Andy could have got his letters out. But apparently the McGees had been living with their own confusion. Their golden chance to mail the letters or make some phone calls had passed unused… and very well mightn’t have come to anything, anyway. The woods were full of crackpots these days, and newspeople were as cynical as anyone else. Theirs had become a glamour occupation. They were more interested in what Margaux and Bo and Suzanne and Cheryl were doing. It was safer.
Now the two of them were in a box. Cap had had the entire winter to consider options.
Even at his wife’s funeral he had been running through his options. Gradually he had settled upon a plan of action and now he was prepared to tip that plan into motion. Payson, their man in Bradford, said that the ice was getting ready to go out on Tashmore Pond. And McGee had finally mailed his letters. Already he would be getting impatient for a response-and perhaps beginning to suspect his letters had never arrived at their intended sources. They might be getting ready to move, and Cap liked them right where they were.
Beneath the photos was a thick typed report better than three hundred pages-bound in a blue TOP SECRET cover. Eleven doctors and psychologists had put the combination report and prospectus together under the overall direction of Dr. Patrick Hockstetter, a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. He was, in Cap’s opinion, one of the ten or twelve most astute minds at the Shop’s disposal. At the eight hundred thousand dollars it had cost the taxpayer to put the report together, he ought to have been. Thumbing through the report now, Cap wondered what Wanless, that old doomsayer, would have made of it.
His own intuition that they needed Andy alive was confirmed in here. The postulate Hockstetter’s crew had based their own chain of logic on was the idea that all the powers they were interested in were exercised voluntarily, having their first cause in the willingness of the possessor to use them… and the key word was will.
The girl’s powers, of which pyrokinesis was only the cornerstone, had a way of getting out of control, of jumping nimbly over the barriers of her will, but this study, which incorporated all the available information, indicated that it was the girl herself who elected whether or not to set things in motion-as she had done at the Manders farm when she realized that the Shop agents were trying to kill her father.
He rifled through the recap of the original Lot Six experiment. All the graphs and computer readouts boiled down to the same thing: will as the first cause.
Using will as the basis for everything. Hockstetter and his colleagues had gone through an amazing catalogue of drugs before deciding on Thorazine for Andy and a new drug called Orasin for the girl. Seventy pages of gobbledy-gook in the report came down to the fact that the drugs would make them feel high, dreamy, floaty. Neither of them would be able to exercise enough will to choose between chocolate milk and white, let alone enough to start fires or convince people they were blind, or whatever.
They could keep Andy McGee drugged constantly. They had no real use for him; both the report and Cap’s own intuition suggested that he was a dead end, a burned-out case. It was the girl who interested them. Give me six months, Cap thought, and we’ll have enough. Just long enough to map the terrain inside that amazing little head. No House or Senate subcommittee would be able to resist the promise of chemically induced psi powers and the enormous implications it would have on the arms race if that little girl was even half of what Wanless suspected.
And there were other possibilities. They were not in the blue-backed report, because they were too explosive for even a TOP SECRET heading. Hockstetter, who had become progressively more excited as the picture took shape before him and his committee of experts, had mentioned one of these possibilities to Cap only a week ago.
“This Z factor,” Hockstetter said. “Have you considered any of the ramifications if it turns out that the child isn’t a mule but a genuine mutation?” Cap had, although he did not tell Hockstetter that. It raised the interesting question of eugenics… the potentially explosive question of eugenics, with its lingering connotations of Nazism and superraces-all the things Americans had fought World War II to put an end to. But it was one thing to sink a philosophical well and produce a gusher of bullshit about usurping the power of God and quite another to produce laboratory evidence that the offspring of Lot Six parents might be human torches, levitators, tele-or telempaths, or God only knew what else. Ideals were cheap things to hold as long as there were no solid arguments for their overthrow. If there were, what then? Human breeding farms? As crazy as it sounded, Cap could visualize it. It could be the key to everything. World peace, or world domination, and when you got rid of the trick mirrors of rhetoric and bombast, weren’t they really the same thing?
It was a whole can of worms. The possibilities stretched a dozen years into the future. Cap knew the best he himself could realistically hope for was six months, but it might be enough to set policy-to survey the land on which the tracks would be laid and the railroad would run. It would be his legacy to the country and to the world. Measured against this, the lives of a runaway college instructor and his ragamuffin daughter were less than dust in the wind.
The girl could not be tested and observed with any degree of validity if she was constantly drugged, but her father would be their hostage to fortune. And on the few occasions they wanted to run tests on him, the reverse would hold. It was a simple system of levers. And as Archimedes had observed, a lever long enough would move the world.