[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.She's gotten into Krantz's files, though, and has madea connection between two of his patients, both with the ICDL blood type."What blood type?"Oh, Christ," Heaney muttered.If the Consortium insisted on providinghim with a baby-sitter, he wished it were someone who understood at leasta modicum of what his work was about.Could I speak with someone else?"he asked coldly.I'm afraid not, doctor Heaney," the even voice answered.Heaney sighed.Then tell whoever it is you talk to that this womanknows about Bonner's experiments with ESP, and that she's traced Krantz'swork in West Palm Beach to me.Oh, yes.And that she's got a patient nowwho's saying that her blood is what makes her psychic."He hung up with a satisfying crash of the phone.Resisting an urge to panic, Heaney rifled through the papers in his inbasket, pulling out the lab reports that had come in during the night: London,Colorado, Maine, Moscow.Here it was.Florida, blind sample.That meantit had not come from a hospital.In this case, the blood had come direct,on a cloth used to wipe the white leather upholstery of a Porsche.A fifteenyear-old girl had been shot.Somebody in the Consortium had been paying dues.The target's blood had all the earmarks of the blood that set one group ofhuman beings so dramatically apart from the rest of the species.Powerfulblood, Bonner had called it.The blood of a super race, except that it transcended all known racial, ethnic, and geographical divisions.If they ever learned what they can do.That was the argument that had resulted in Professor Bonner's death.Ironically, Bonner and his assistant Heaney had been the first to understand the danger of exploring Intracellular DNA-Linked (ICDL) blood.Theyknew that anything arising from their discovery would create explosivesocial issues, beginning with the premise that all people were not createdequal.ICDLs had more of everything more stamina, higher resistance todisease, greater stress tolerance.And that didn't even take into accounttheir mental differences.It was not intelligence.ICDLs were no more or less intelligent than anyother random group.It was the extrasensory powers that these peopledemonstrated that were so frighteningly different from other human beings.They could heal with a touch and channel to different levels of consciousness.Often they were clairvoyant.They retained memories" of existencesother than their present lives.They could spontaneously generate energy,including fire.They could call up spirits," by which they meant the energyreservoirs of persons no longer living, and speak with them.In short, they exhibited commonplace signs of lunacy.And so long as they were considered lunatics, there was no problem.But Edward Bonner's findings, proving scientifically that not only did ESPexist, but that those who could practice it were physiologically differentfrom the rest of the human race, would have created social chaos of anunimaginable magnitude.Not to mention what would happen if the ICDLs themselves Bonner'sRememberers" and their kind ever discovered their own power.They had come close.Heaney recalled one incident in which all seventeensubjects reportedly saw" the same vision.It was an odd one.Bonner had hoped for something like the spectre ofa prophet or a clear symbol of some sort a star, perhaps, or the enlargedview of a hydrogen atom.But what his Rememberers came up with was avolcano.No other explanation.Just an erupting volcano and some vaguepresentiment that the sea was in some way involved.Nevertheless, what Bonner had both feared and hoped for had occurred.The group had thought with one mind.And if they could think with one mind, they could, theoretically, act withone body.That was the true danger.Heaney smiled bitterly.Had he gotten it right? That was the party line.He had worked for years to make himself believe it: True psychics weredangerous.That was why it was necessary to eliminate them.Sometimes he did believe it.Sometimes he could sleep at night.He was startled by the ring of the telephone.No one except members ofthe Consortium called him on his direct line.Almost all the callers weredoctors filing blood reports.Only one, the nameless blank-voiced man, wasnot.Yes," he said.The patient you mentioned in Florida isn't dead."Heaney picked up the blind sample report.No.That's what Bonner'sgranddaughter said.I have her blood work here."And she's definite?"She's got the blood you're looking for, if that's what you mean."Fine.Her name is Carol Ann Frye.She's in the intensive care unit in WestPalm Beach.Age fifteen.Chest wound.She wasn't disposed of properly."I gathered that," Heaney said testily.The woman you spoke with was doctor Corinne Althorpe, age thirty-seven,"the blank voice continued.She's on the psychiatric staff at the samehospital."Thank you for sharing that with me.May I ask why?"You're to go to Florida immediately," the anonymous voice said.Heaney felt his shoulders slump.That was all.Just a slump of the shoulders.Time had a way of makinga person accustomed to even the most terrible things.An order to kill twopeople, one of them a child, who were perfect strangers to him and hadnever done him any harm, produced no objection other than a slump ofthe shoulders.The screaming, but unvoiced protest he had felt in the pasthad thinned to a dull throb.Even Heaney's perception of the blank-voiced man on the telephone hadmellowed over the years.For the first few years, he had thought of thatexpressionless drone as the voice of God, disembodied and disinterested,to be disobeyed at one's peril.Now he pictured its owner in a differentway.He was rather stupid, after all, that vacuous being with the airconditioned voice [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]