Spawn of Hell (39 page)

Ted Bartley was too dumbstruck by the realization to answer. He simply put the phone down, severing the connection. The man was a monster! They were all monsters! It had gone too far. No one was on his side in this, no one cared about the immorality of it. All that concerned them was profits, and scientific progress, no matter at whose expense, no matter how grotesque their actions were. There was no one to turn to, either. His wife was losing her faculties, and in any case would be completely useless in a situation like this. None of his friends could help. And the police, as Anton had reminded him, were merely Barrows pawns who’d been placed in their positions in order to serve the Corporation and no one else. Even if there were those at the plant who were sympathetic to his viewpoint, they’d be too frightened to admit it, and certainly too concerned with self-preservation to come to his aid.

His mind raced wildly wondering what to do, who to contact. Would they let him leave the town alive? Could he take Clair and run? But what about George, connected to life-sustaining tubes and instruments? No, he had to stay, had to stick it out. Could he write or phone some out-of-state newspaper or TV show? They’d think he was mad. He’d need to get proof, and before he did that he would be killed in the night, his house set afire, or “burgled” by killers who came in the night to do away with him. He had to get that proof first, had to pretend that he was going along with everyone else. Or was it too late for that? Would they really believe that he had come around to seeing their way? No, it
couldn’t
be too late for him to save himself. All he needed was time. God, he wished he had never known about this project, that he had stayed with his own lower administrative position instead of being promoted so that he knew about and was implicated in every one of the Corporation’s dirty and horrible schemes. But he had wanted so much to get ahead. Now look where he was.

But, he thought, better to know what they were up to, or else he might have become a victim of one of those— things—those horrible things, himself. He picked up the phone and dialed Anton’s number; it was time to give the performance of a lifetime. And while he dialed he thought of someone he could contact.

David Hammond had been so anxious to know where George was. David Hammond had actually
seen
George, in the earlier stages, of course, before his son’s condition had gotten as bad as it was today. David Hammond was sleeping with Anna Braddon, a famous model and personality who would surely have contacts, high-powered contacts, in the media. Yes, he would have to get in touch with David. He couldn’t handle this himself.

Anton answered again. “Hello, Anton. Bartley. Listen, I’ve been thinking . . .”

Five minutes later, when the phone call had ended, the phone rang immediately in another part of the house, the bedroom Nurse Hamilton occupied while she watched over George. She had been lying in bed, thumbing through a fan magazine. She, too, lifted the receiver after only one ring.

“Hello,” she said. “Yes, Frederick. What is it you want me to do? “

Early that evening, all was quiet at the Hammond house. David and Anna had spent most of the day in bed, resting up from the exertion—both physical and emotional—of the night before. When David woke, Anna was sitting up sneezing violently, a worried look on her face.

“Oh, God,” she moaned, looking at him for commiseration. “I think I’m getting a cold. I
can’t
be getting a cold. I’ve got twelve more days before I have to go home. I must not get a cold.”

“You didn’t get it from me,” David said, “unless you caught a chill from somewhere. Was it too cold in here last night?”

“A bit. Summer nights can be deceptive. You think you’re going to smother, and instead . . .”

“Where did my socks go?”

“They’re underneath the pillow. Don’t ask me how they got there.”

They pulled themselves out of bed, Anna still sniffling, David stretching. He looked at her and laughed. “Poor thing, you look so miserable. Is the cold that bad?”

She sneezed in reply. “I think it’s just one of my accursed allergies, if you want to get technical. Hay fever.” She went over to a chair in the corner of the room and started digging through her bag. “I have some medicine in here. I’m sure I brought it with me. I’ll be back to normal in a few hours.”

Anna took her pills, which made her terribly drowsy again, and went back to bed while David prepared dinner, an easy blend of tuna and tomatoes served on a bed of lettuce. He called her to the table in half an hour and she forced herself to get up. “Damn medication makes me feel like Rip Van Winkle.”

“Just as long as you stay off the highways.”

She bit into a stalk of celery and tried to concentrate on the plate in front of her. At least she had stopped sneezing, although her face had become a bit puffy, and her eyes were watering. “You don’t know how much of my income goes to the allergist,” ?he sighed. “Poor man doesn’t seem to be able to do a thing for me.”

They were nearly finished when the doorbell rang. “Who would that be?” David wondered aloud. Anna shrugged, busy picking at a mound of tuna, too tired to summon up any interest. “Keep your mitts off my plate while I’m gone,” he told her.

She threw a piece of lettuce at him playfully as he walked down the hall to the front door. He reached out and turned the knob; a warm breeze came into the hall as the door swung open.

Standing at the door was the last person David had expected to see: Ted Bartley. He was dressed in a casual outfit—slacks, yellow short-sleeved shirt, his rayon jacket folded over his arm. David realized he had never seen him when he had not been dressed to the nines. His fine wore an agitated expression, and his movements seemed nervous and jerky. “May I come in, David? For a moment?”

“Of course. Come on in, Mr. Bartley. What can I do for you?” He stepped hack to allow him entrance, then closed the door behind them. Bartley stepped into the living room, and peeked out through the curtains as if looking for someone. He seemed satisfied.

He turned to face David as the younger man came over to him, a puzzled expression playing on David’s face.

“David,” Ted Bartley said, his voice quivering with desperation. “I must speak to you.”

After listening to Ted Bartley in the living room, David had gone back into the kitchen to get Anna. He wanted her to hear this. But she had already left the table and gone back to bed. She was sleeping soundly and David thought it best not to wake her; perhaps she could sleep off this attack and would feel better in the morning. Bartley was disappointed that Anna could not come with them; but he did not press it.

Now David drove across town with Bartley in the other’s Chevrolet. “It’s actually my wife’s car,” the older man explained. “I didn’t dare take the limousine I usually use, in case anyone wondered where I was going, or spotted the car. Things have gone too far, much too far. You say you’ve suspected all along that I was lying about George?”

David could tell from the older man’s demeanor that all facades were, to be dropped, leaving a raw, exposed truth to be dissected. “Yes. I
knew
I had seen him in New York,” David replied, not sure if he really wanted to finally learn the answers behind the mystery. Now that he had consented to go with Bartley to “see George,” to be “convinced of the danger” they were all in, he wondered if the man was even sane.

“I couldn’t tell you the truth,” Bartley explained. “I should have made up a better story, I suppose, but your appearance at the house was so unexpected. I had no idea you’d be spending the summer here. So few of the youngsters ever come back.” There was pain in his voice, deep pain, as if each desertion took away a little part of himself. David suspected, however, that his anguish came from another source entirely.

“Just what did happen to George? Why is he isolated in your house?”

“You’ll see. You’ll see what they’ve done to him. What I allowed them to do. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself. My wife has become—unhinged—because of it. I’ve let the Corporation destroy my family. Well, I’ve finally awakened to the truth. I’ll stop them from doing any more harm if it’s the last thing I do.” His voice quivered with fury and frustration.

“You’re implicated in all this, aren’t you?” David asked. Seeing the sudden alarm spread across Bartley’s face, he wished he had kept his mouth shut.

“I suppose I am. My ambition got the best of me. But that doesn’t matter anymore. My only ambition now is to do my part to undo the forces I myself have helped to set into motion.”

“Just what are those forces?” David asked, full of questions, dying to know if the condition, as yet un-revealed, of Bartley’s son had anything to do with the death of Anna’s brother, the strange disappearance in Milbourne. He wanted to scrape away every last bit of information this man was carrying inside him.

“You won’t believe me until you have proof. And you
will
have proof, that I can promise you.”

“Can’t you tell me anything else while we’re driving? Anything at all?”

Bartley hesitated, took a deep breath, then plunged in. “Have you ever heard about recombinant DNA experiments?”

“Yes, I believe so. That’s when a new life form is created by genetically combining two species that wouldn’t mate normally.”

“Exactly. They use an enzyme to sever the genetic material from two different sources, hook the pieces together to form a
plasmid,
then move them into a host cell where this new plasmid is duplicated. They started out by working with lower-class life forms, like bacteria. But they’ve progressed far beyond that point. Way beyond it. Because of the controversy, they’ve had TV specials and news reports about it all.”

“Well, when the Barrows Corporation took over Porter Pharmaceuticals, they developed a new department whose purpose would be to create and experiment with new life forms. Frederick Anton is the head of the department, and he’s a brilliant man, years ahead of any other researchers in the field, most of whom are dedicated and responsible scientists. Frederick, unfortunately, is also quite amoral, almost the stereotype of the kind of mad scientist who would stop at nothing to prove his theories and to create new life forms. But everything he does he does with the full cooperation and approval of the Corporation itself. It took me a long time to accept that, to realize that he was only one monster among many. People in these large corporations—I can know this because I was one of them—are fond of passing the buck, doing their part to build up profits, hoping to be rewarded with promotions, more money, more responsibility. More power. So they close their eyes to what’s really going on. They tell themselves, ‘If I don’t take this job, somebody else will.’

“So that’s why people get poisoned with lousy food, and why wastes are dumped in riverbeds, and why killing mists escape from labs to wipe out whole herds of cattle. Nobody cares. Or if they do care, they keep their mouths shut. They want their paycheck, and although the corporate structure is simply made up of individuals, as a
body
they want their paychecks and profits, too. So they all play along with the game. ‘For the good of the company.’ And the men and women at the top are the worst of all. They might have the best chance of doing something about the dirty stuff they’re involved in, but the profits would drop, and besides—everybody else is doing the same thing they are. Who gives a hoot? It’s the way of the world.”

Bartley stopped talking while a car behind them speeded up and passed them, and did not resume until the other auto was well ahead of them. “My son was never the sort of person to stick up for causes,” he continued. “No peacenik, no ‘anti-nuke’ demonstrator, was he. But sometime last year he started going with this girl, and he got in with a crowd of activists. Radicals, you might say. It changed his way of thinking a lot.”

George? An activist? David would sooner have imagined the sky falling down. George had always been an old-fashioned, meat-and-potatoes, God-and-country kind of guy. That was one reason they’d drifted part. David
had
been an activist of sorts, for a while. George and he had disagreed violently on just about everything.

“He and I used to have lots of fights,” Bartley continued. “ ‘This is something different,’ he would say to me. ‘This has nothing to do with new energy sources, or defending one’s country. This has to do with changing the fabric of life, of nature.’ He had no objection on religious grounds, he just felt we were tampering with things that should better be left alone. Y’know, the usual story with these opponents of recombinant research. I didn’t see his side of it until now.

“I paid a visit on his little girlfriend and paid her to leave my son alone. He was shocked, disillusioned with both of us, with what I’d done, when he found out. He came to my study, infuriated, and physically assaulted me. He threatened to alert the entire town to what was going on out at the plant, to alert recombinant DNA opponents across the country. There’d be pickets, all kinds of fuss and bother. And I’d be the one they’d blame for it. I cursed myself for having ever told him. But you see, I had been hoping to interest him in the work being done. I thought he’d find it fascinating, would be inspired to work there as an assistant. I was thinking of his future, afraid he’d turn into just another bum like all those friends he used to hang out with. God help me. I was crazed with anger, furious at him for hitting me, for threatening me.

“After George stormed out of the house, I called Anton and told him about it. Anton told me he would go and talk to him, explain our side of things. I can still hear myself saying, ‘I don’t care what you do to him, that ungrateful bastard. Use him for one of your experiments if you want. I don’t care.’ “ Bartley’s shoulders dropped visibly. He seemed to be deflating even as he drove.

“ ‘It
would
keep him from talking,’ Anton said. ‘We’ll hold him out at the plant for a while, until he calms down, sees reason. We
will
use him in our experiments’ —harmless ones, he assured me—’90 that he feels like he’s part of our little group’. Anton said he’d take care of everything.