“Wonderful,” I heard myself say.
We took a brief dinner break, wolfing the sandwiches and coffee, and then Vickie took over the input typing again.
“Should’ve brought some beer,” I said to Hank.
“Didn’t even think of it,” he admitted, looking surprised at himself.
Finally the job was done. All the biographical data about every researcher we knew had worked at North Lake was in the computer’s memory bank. Vickie punched the request to correlate the data, and while the computer chewed on the problem, she stood up, put her arms over her head and stretched hard enough to pop tendons along her spine. It was a move that stirred my blood, and I could see that it did the same for Hank. Vickie didn’t seem to notice, though. Or care.
“How long d’yew think it’ll take th’ machine to figure things out?”
Vickie shrugged. “A few minutes, maybe. That’s a lot of data to cross-correlate.”
“You really think this will give us an insight on what’s going on at North Lake?” I asked her.
“It will at least tell us the common denominators among the scientific staff there. If it turns out that they’re all specialists in building hydrogen bombs, for example, do you think the labs’ main interest would be in air pollution studies?”
“Nobody likes a wiseass,” I said.
Vickie grinned and started to rub the back of her neck. Hank was over behind her like a shot, kneading her shoulders.
“Learned massage from an ol’ Indian,” he drawled. Vickie moaned happily and I broiled medium-rare.
The computer screen came to life. A list of words appeared on it. A damned short list. We all huddled around the glowing screen, like kids peeking into a store window. The list read:
MAJOR FIELDS OF COMMON INTEREST
INPUT CODE 042205-B2 19-004
ORGANIC CHEMISTRY
INFECTIOUS DISEASES
BIOCHEMISTRY
VIRAL BIOLOGY
GENETICS
IMMUNOLOGY
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY
INFORMATION THEORY
We stared at the list for a long time. At last Hank exploded, “That don’t tell us diddley-shit!”
“Wait a minute,” Vickie said. She sat at the keyboard again and tapped out a query, explaining as she typed the cryptic shorthand words. “I’m asking what kinds of capabilities these fields of interest could produce.”
The machine considered this problem for only a few seconds, then flashed a new list on the screen. It was a lot longer, and full of technical terms that I’d never seen before. But three items stuck out and hit me just as if they’d been printed in letters of fire:
BIOLOGICAL WARFARE
GENETIC ENGINEERING
CLONING
TWELVE
Before either of the others could say anything, I told Vickie, “Ask the computer for a definition of cloning.”
She looked up at me quizzically, but her fingers tapped out the query. The computer screen immediately showed:
CLONE: The descendants produced vegetatively or by apomixis from a single plant: asexually or by parthenogenesis from a single animal; by division from a single cell. The members of a clone are of the same genetic constitution, except insofar as mutation occurs amongst them.
“That’s it,” I said. “Somebody’s made clone copies of the President.”
“Hey now, slow down a minute fer us ol’ country boys,” Hank said. “What’re yew—”
Vickie explained, “Scientists can take a cell from your body… any cell, like from your skin or a fingernail clipping, and reproduce exact copies of you from it. The babies grown from your cells would turn out to look exactly like you. You could make as many copies of yourself as you want, that way.”
“Exact duplicates,” I said. “As many as you want.”
Hank wasn’t as slow as he liked to pretend. “Y’all mean I could make a roomful of copies of me?”
“Right.”
“Without sex? Just by takin’ a few cells off the end o’ my nose or somethin’?”
I nodded.
“Sheeit… First place, I don’t want more copies o’ me runnin’ around. Second place, I like the old way of makin’ babies a helluva lot better.”
Vickie was grinning at him, but I said, “It’s obvious that somebody wants a lot of copies of the President running around.”
“But nobody’s cloned human beings,” Vickie said. “That whole line of research was shut down years and years ago. The biologists themselves stopped the experiments.”
“Nobody’s reported cloning human beings,” I shot back, jerking a thumb at the computer screen. “But the capability’s there.”
Hank asked slowly, “Y’all think somebody’s taken some cells from th’ President’s body and grown extra people from them? People who look jest like th’ President?”
“That can’t be,” Vickie objected before I could answer. “It would still take forty-some years to grow those cells to the same level of maturity as the President.”
It was all clicking into place in my mind. I asked Vickie, “How much do you want to bet that the biologists outlawed human cloning experiments right around the time the General bought out North Lake Labs?”
She stared at me, speechless.
“James J. Halliday was cloned in infancy,” I said, the words coming fast and eager, “and his father bought the North Lake Labs specifically for that purpose.”
“When th’ kid was born?”
Vickie said,“ Before the child was born. General Halliday bought the labs before the President was born.”
“He did it deliberately,” I said. “He planned it all out some forty-five years ago!”
“We’re seeing the results of a plan that’s been in operation for nearly half a century.” Vickie looked and sounded just as awed and frightened as I felt.
Hank tried to pull us back to reality. “But why? Why th’ hell would he want t’ make extra copies of his own son? And what’s happenin’ to those copies now?”
I had no answer. Yet. “All right, let’s put together the pieces we have and see if any of this really makes sense,” I said.
They both waited for me to say more. I leaned my rump against the edge of the desk and started ticking off points on my fingers.
“One: when the President’s father was a major in the Army Research Office, he pulled a deal that got him major ownership and complete control of the North Lake Research Laboratories.”
They both nodded.
“Two: he brings Dr. Alfonso Peña in to head up North Lake. Peña had been working in biological warfare at Fort Detrick.”
“Halliday prob’ly knew Peña already,” Hank threw in.
I agreed with a nod. “Three: Halliday retires to Colorado and becomes filthy rich. He keeps a commission in the National Guard and becomes a big hero when Denver’s threatened by food rioters.”
“And in th’ meantime he has a son,” said Hank.
“Right. What about his wife?” I wondered.
“She died while the boy was still an infant,” Vickie said. “I checked that out earlier. Natural causes, although there was some gossip in the underground press around Aspen that she drank herself to death.”
“Okay,” I said. “Now where the hell are we?”
“Point four.”
I saw that my hands were trembling slightly. Nobody seemed to notice. “All right. Four: General Halliday had his son cloned at North Lake, either right at birth or very soon afterward. Vickie, is there any info on where the President was born?”