Outside a car pulled into the motel parking lot and stopped.
Rachael glanced worriedly at the barricaded door.
In the still desert air, a car door opened, closed.
Ben sat up straighter in his chair, tense.
Footsteps echoed softly through the empty night. They were heading away from Rachael's and Ben's room. In another part of the motel, the door to another room opened and closed.
With visible relief Rachael let her shoulders sag. “Mice are natural-born cowards, of course. They never fight their enemies. They're not equipped to. They survive by running, dodging, hiding. They don't even fight among themselves for supremacy or territory. They're meek, timid. But the mice who came back weren't meek at all. They fought one another, and they attacked mice that had not been resurrected — and they even tried to nip at the researchers handling them, though a mouse has no hope of hurting a man and is ordinarily acutely aware of that. They flew into rages, clawing at the floors of their cages, pawing at the air as if fighting imaginary enemies, sometimes even clawing at themselves. Occasionally these fits lasted less than a minute, but more often went on until the mouse collapsed in exhaustion.”
For a moment, neither spoke.
The silence in the motel room was sepulchral, profound.
At last Ben said, “In spite of this strangeness in the mice, Eric and his researchers must've been electrified. Dear God, they'd hoped to extend the life span — and instead they defeated death altogether! So they were eager to move on to development of similar methods of genetic alteration for human beings.”
“Yes.”
“In spite of the mice's unexplained tendency to frenzies, rages, random violence.”
“Yes.”
“Figuring that problem might never arise in a human subject… or could be dealt with somewhere along the way.”
“Yes.”
Ben said, “So… slowly the work progressed, but too slowly for Eric. Youth-oriented, youth-obsessed, and inordinately afraid of dying, he decided not to wait for a safe and proven process.”
“Yes.”
“That's what you meant in Eric's office tonight, when you asked Baresco if he knew Eric had broken the cardinal rule. To a genetics researcher or other specialist in biological sciences, the cardinal rule would be — what? — that he should never experiment with human beings until all encountered problems and unanswered questions are dealt with at the test-animal level or below.”
“Exactly,” she said. She had folded her hands in her lap to keep them from shaking, but her fingers kept picking at one another. “And Vincent didn't know Eric had broken the cardinal rule, I knew, but it must've come as a nasty shock to them when they heard Eric's body was missing. The moment they heard, they knew he'd done the craziest, most reckless, most unforgivable thing he possibly could've done.”
“And now what?” Ben asked. “They want to help him?”
“No. They want to kill him. Again.”
“Why?”
“Because he won't come back all the way, won't ever be exactly like he was. This stuff wasn't perfected yet.”
“He'll be like the lab animals?”
“Probably. Strangely violent, dangerous.”
Ben thought of the mindless destruction in the Villa Park house, the blood in the trunk of the car.
Rachael said, “Remember — he was a ruthless man all his life and troubled by barely suppressed violent urges even before this. The mice started out meek, but Eric didn't, so what might he be like now? Look what he did to Sarah Kiel.”
Ben remembered not only the beaten girl but the wrecked kitchen in the Palm Springs house, the knives driven into the wall.
“And if Eric murders someone in one of these rages,” Rachael said, “the police are more likely to learn he's alive, and Wildcard will be blown wide open. So his partners want to kill him in some very final manner that'll rule out another resurrection. I wouldn't be surprised if they dismembered the corpse or burned it to ashes and then disposed of the remains in several locations.”
Good God, Ben thought, is this reality or Chiller Theater?
He said, “They want to kill you because you know about Wildcard?”
“Yes, but that's not the only reason they'd like to get their hands on me. They've got two others at least. For one thing, they probably think I know where Eric will go to ground.”
“But you don't?”
“I had some ideas. And Sarah Kiel gave me another one. But I don't know for sure.”
“You said there's a third reason they'd want you?”
She nodded. “I'm first in line to inherit Geneplan, and they don't trust me to continue pumping enough money into Wildcard. By removing me, they stand a much better chance of retaining control of the corporation and of keeping Wildcard secret. If I could've gotten to Eric's safe ahead of them and could've put my hands on his project diary, I would've had solid proof that Wildcard exists, and then they wouldn't have dared touch me. Without proof, I'm vulnerable.”
Ben rose and began to move restlessly around the room, thinking furiously.
Somewhere in the night, not far beyond the motel walls, a cat cried either in anger or in passion. It went on a long time, rising and falling, an eerie ululation.
Finally Ben said, “Rachael, why are you pursuing Eric? Why this desperate rush to reach him before the others? What'll you do if you find him?”
“Kill him,” she said without hesitation, and the bleakness in her green eyes was now complemented by a Rachael-like determination and iron resolve. “Kill him for good. Because if I don't kill him, he's going to hide out until he's in better condition, until he's a bit more in control of himself, and then he's going to come kill me. He died furious with me, consumed by such hatred for me that he dashed blindly out into traffic, and I'm sure that same hatred was seething in him the moment awareness returned to him in the county morgue. In his clouded and twisted mind, I'm very likely his primary obsession, and I don't think he'll rest until I'm dead. Or until he's dead, really dead this time.”
He knew she was right. He was deeply afraid for her.
His preference for the past was as strong in him now as it had ever been, and he longed for simpler times. How mad had the modern world become? Criminals owned the city streets at night. The whole planet could be utterly destroyed in an hour with the pressing of a few buttons. And now… now dead men could be reanimated. Ben wished for a time machine that could carry him back to a better age: say the early 1920s, when a sense of wonder was still alive and when faith in the human potential was unsullied and unsurpassed.
Yet… he remembered the joy that had surged in him when Rachael had first said that death had been beaten, before she had explained that those who came back from beyond were frighteningly changed. He had been thrilled. Hardly the response of a genuine stick-in-the-mud reactionary. He might peer back at the past and long for it with full-blown sentimentalism, but in his heart he was, like others of his age, undeniably attracted to science and its potential for creating a brighter future. Maybe he was not such a misfit in the modern world as he liked to pretend. Maybe this experience was teaching him something about himself that he would have preferred not to learn.
He said, “Could you really pull the trigger on Eric?”
“Yes.”
“I'm not sure you could. I suspect you'd freeze up when you were really confronted with the moral implications of murder.”