Multiples of Six (21 page)

Chapter 36

“Jesus…James!” Kevin cried.

James lifted Paynter by the collar and shook him, his face half-covered in muddy filth.

“What the fuck is happening? What the hell have you brought on me and my…Nicole…what the hell have you done…”

Doug and Kevin were forcibly pulling him off and his burst of energy was fading. He rolled over into a heap, his face brushing a patch of snow.

“How could you do this…why couldn’t you have left well enough alone.”

Kevin helped Paynter out of the mud, repeatedly apologizing to him. Doug half-carried James back to the cars, where he slumped into the back seat, a heap of sodden mud. They all got back into the car. The silence was broken by Kevin.

“Well, the helicopter was a complete surprise,” he said, shaking his head. “Yep, didn’t see that one comin’
at all
.”

“I--,” Paynter began.

“You need to start explaining,” James said abruptly, sitting up and jabbing a finger into the air that threw some more mud around the already disgusting interior. He looked around him and lowered his head.

“I need to get out of this car, and you need to start talking like there’s no tomorrow…I feel like I can’t breathe. Doug…take us over to that old hangar. Please.”

“Sure,” Doug said.

He started the car and they drove the two hundred yards to the empty hangar.

They all got out and Paynter leaned against the hood. He sighed deeply and rubbed his chest without thinking. James stared hard at Paynter, half trying to see something in his eyes, half trying to inflict some sort of telekinetic pain. Paynter offered neither a sign of understanding or pain. He simply looked away.

“Whenever you’re ready,” James said.

“James, please, I’m–” Paynter said.

“Don’t!…start apologizing again. I can’t take another hollow apology,” James yelled, jamming his fists into his coat pockets.

“I’m…” Paynter began, realizing that his instinct had become to start each sentence with an apology.

Paynter stopped and ran a hand through his muddy hair and James wondered if he had always looked that old. James turned and walked a pace. Despite the cavernous space provided by the empty hangar, he couldn’t escape the creeping sense of claustrophobia.

“I can’t take anymore lies. I’m wallowing in a cesspool of lies that just seems to be sucking me down. I seem to remember you promising some sort of truth out of all of this, but you forgot to tell me that you’d be heaping on a couple more layers of deception in order to get me there,” James said.

“James, please…just take a breather for a minute and let me explain,” Paynter said.

“A breather? A bunch of crazy old dudes just made off with my girlfriend and there was nothing I could do to stop them! I don’t need a breather. I feel like I’ve been taking a breather all my life and when it came time to step up, I didn’t have it in me. Let your guard down and you never know when someone might show up to kill you or steal a loved one. I don’t think I’ll ever take a breather again, to tell the truth. You know what I’ve learned? I really hate surprises, and you know what else? I really don’t like guns, and come to think of it, I don’t really like feeling like my life will never see the better side of normal ever again.”

Paynter stood up straight, and moved away from the car, his hands outstretched.

“Are you going to give me a chance?” Paynter said.

Kevin and Doug watched like spectators at a tennis match, knowing that to interject with even a cough might bring James’ wrath onto them instead of Paynter. They said nothing.

“A chance,” James said, stopping and turning in mid-pace. “A chance? How many do you want? I haven’t been keeping track, so I’m not sure if you’ve really got any left.”

Paynter took a step towards James and held his hands up in a gesture of acquiescence.

“Please,” he said.

James stopped his pacing and stood facing Paynter, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes on the ground at his feet. Now it was Paynter’s turn to pace. He walked from the front of the car to the back, his hand resting momentarily on the trunk of the car. He rubbed some mud between his fingers thoughtfully.

“What I am going to tell you is the complete truth,” he began quietly.

“Well, it’s about t--,” began James.

“Shut…up,” Paynter said turning on him and pointing his finger at James.

His face coiled in an angry scowl that frightened all three of them.

“Just shut up for two seconds. You don’t understand any of this…any of it. You’ve been dealing with this for…a couple of days…I’ve lived with it for nearly twenty-five years.”

Paynter paused, wiped something from each sleeve as if it mattered, then grabbed each lapel of his coat, as if he were a British barrister about to plead his case. “Twenty-five years…good God. Now listen, and keep your mouth shut. Hold your questions till the end. It’s not going to make sense if I have to jump back and forth and…I want to get it right the first time,” Paynter said.

“Fair enough,” James said.

“What I told you before was only partly true…in a sense. You see…Doug and Kevin…they aren’t really your brothers…per se. At least, not in the way that makes the most sense. They’re…copies. You’re all copies. All six of you were…are copies of…someone else. A man that may or may not still be alive.”

James arms unfolded. He jammed them back into his pockets and bit his lip. Kevin and Doug instantly became more attentive. Paynter held up a hand, pleadingly.

“Please, this is hard enough. There is much more to tell, and I promise I will answer every question you have. Just let me get through this.”

“Let me give you a little history lesson…a brief history lesson. In 1979, a man by the name of Karl Illmensee stepped into the public eye and claimed to have developed a means of cloning frog embryos by simply removing the nuclei of an existing cell and transplanting it into a fertilized…err…enucleated egg. It was huge scientific news. This was a huge breakthrough in genetic research and truly represented a huge leap for what man could accomplish. But, the American government was caught off guard a little. Their genetic research was poorly funded at the time and worlds behind if what he claimed was true.”

“What--,” James started, but Paynter ignored him and plowed ahead.

“Like the space race, or the nuclear race, there was now a gap in what American scientists knew, and what the Europeans knew. And, at the height of the Cold War, this was extremely significant. The Branches Project was started in the summer of 1980. I was a budding physicist. Fresh out of MIT. Cloning sounded like a great place to make a name. It was unchartered territory and I was going to be on the forefront. Fred Taylor and I worked in a small facility in Iowa with a handful of assistants. At first, we tried following what little we had heard about Illmensee’s method, but found it nearly impossible. And, for good reason. Illmensee turned out to be a fraud. None of his experiments could be reproduced. But, by the time we had found that out, we had already taken a step off of that path onto the right course. It was Fred Taylor’s work that pushed us in the right direction. Without him, Dolly might have truly been the first cloned mammal.”

Paynter stopped his pacing for a moment and looked out into the field, where the rain had picked up. He took a couple more steps, the sounds of his heels against the hangar cement echoing against the aluminum walls. James resisted the urge to raise one of the many questions this conversation had sparked in his mind. He rubbed his mouth with his hand and spat out the mud he’d forgotten about.

“And, there it was. In two years, we had done what it had taken a liar to do in three. Only we’d actually done it. We had a method for transferring the nucleus of an existing life form into the cell of an unfertilized egg and creating a near duplicate copy of the existing life form. We started small, of course. Mice, and small rodents, and worked our way up to larger mammals. It was a feverish pace. I don’t remember much of that time, because all we did was eat and work, sleeping when we could sneak in an hour or two. Like I said, there were only a handful of us, but Taylor and I were the only ones who knew the whole story.”

Again he paused and said, more to himself, “We were too young, or too ignorant, to consider the consequences of what they were asking us to do. Or maybe both. They had given us a challenge and we felt like we were heading toward something great. Something we could be proud of. It was a stressful time too. No one was sure of the results, but the money kept coming down the line to move things forward. We had no limits.”

“By the Fall of ’82, they had already made the decision to clone a human. Or, they had at least made the decision to make the attempt. It was still all extremely quiet, so they needed people who would be willing to cooperate for as little as possible. It was decided that the clones would be male. A suitable donor was found. A young military man by the name of Sebastian Walters was chosen. He had no idea what he was being asked to do, nor was he ever told. Or, at least he wasn’t supposed to be told. I think someone thought twice about having him around after the fact. He somehow found out. Ran around trying to tell anyone who would listen that he had been cloned by the government. It wasn’t hard to lock him away.”

“You said you didn’t know if he was still alive,” James said, forgetting his vow of silence.

“He may well still be alive, but I never bothered to find out. I was more concerned with you boys. He’d already been ‘taken care of’,” Paynter said, raising his hands to make air quotes.

James watched as Paynter again walked to the other side of the car. He leaned over to look at some of the damage, but James didn’t think he was actually seeing it. He was somewhere else.

“We impregnated forty women in the first round of testing. They were housed in the most high tech prenatal care facility the world had ever seen. By the end of the first two weeks, seventy-five percent of our mothers had self-aborted…miscarried. We had actually calculated a total failure, so we were actually sort of hopeful at that point. There were only nine viable fetuses at the end of the second month. Taylor and I celebrated every additional day. To us, it was a miracle we had gotten as far as we had. We had already beaten ridiculous odds at that point. Who was to say that we couldn’t keep it up? At six months, we had seven; he died in the seventh month. Twenty years later and we might have been able to save him. As it was, on September 3
^rd
of 1982, the first cloned baby boy was born in a laboratory in Iowa. He was in excellent health, and we drank ourselves stupid that night celebrating. Five others followed him, just as healthy, and all showing the same genetic traits as the donor they had been bred from.”

Paynter paused, pressing his fingers together at the tips and bringing his hand to his mouth.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” James whispered.

“The last baby boy was born at 9:17
am
on September 19, 1984. I kid you not, James. You wanted the truth. There it is.”

“I’m a clone?” James said.

“If that’s the truth, then I’d like you to start lying to me again,” Kevin said under his breath, turning his head away from Paynter.

“I was the last one. Huh,” Doug said softly.

“That isn’t the end of it, James, please listen.”

James folded his arms again, his mouth taut.

“Two weeks after you were born, the project was terminated. The hard way. It seems that the experiment was kept under much tighter wraps than we had been led to believe. And, when it got out, someone decided that it was too risky to have something that controversial come out in public. Ilmensee was a sham, and as far as anyone could tell, the Russians had never even considered starting their own cloning project. It was money lost in a war that didn’t exist. And, by then, they had decided that the idea of cloning was really against everything the country had started to define itself as. It was all a bunch of bullshit. Bureaucratic bullshit that coincided with a reelection. So, they sent some professionals in to terminate the project. The women, who had given birth to the six of you, were quietly assassinated in ways so as not to arouse suspicion. Accidents happen, I guess. The facility where we had done so much good work was destroyed in a fire conveniently attributed to a gas leak. Phase two was completely wiped out. Amazingly, all members of the staff were also in the building at the time of the fire, and no one managed to escape.”

“Phase two?” he said.

“I’ll get to that,” Paynter said, then walked back to see the three dumbfounded young men looking at him in various states of disbelief. Paynter folded his arms and stared at the floor.

“To my own credit, if you can call it that…maybe paranoia is a better term, I had seen it coming…some of it. I had developed a contingency plan. Something had told me that when I stopped receiving contact from my usual internal sources, there was something wrong. I selected the few people I could trust and created a plan B. It was ambitious, and it could have failed if any of the pieces had not been in place at the time, but somehow we managed or…more likely, we were allowed to manage. You and the other five were allowed to survive. I hid you away the best way I knew how. I tried to scatter you into the wind, leaving you with a small piece of information that might lead you to one another…with some help. We placed you all in childless families, where your origins wouldn’t necessarily be called into question. There were only a handful of us who survived it all. Fred Taylor, my secretary, and myself as far as I know. We all had to go into hiding. Now, it’s just Fred and I. They killed Agnes a couple days before I arrived.”