‘You’re part of that?’

‘No. Not directly. At Project Ninety-nine . . . we have a more exotic assignment. We’re looking for those genes that seem to be associated with unusual talents.’

‘What — like Mozart or Rembrandt or Michael Jordan?’

‘No. Not creative or athletic talents. Paranormal talents. Tele­pathy. Telekinesis. Pyrokinesis. It’s a long strange list.’

His immediate reaction was that of a crime reporter, not of a man who had recently seen the fantastic in action: ‘But there aren’t such talents. That’s science fiction.’

‘There are people who score far higher than chance on a variety of tests designed to disclose psychic abilities. Card prediction. Calling coin tosses. Thought-image transmission.’

‘That stuff they used to do at Duke University.’

‘That and more. When we find people who perform exceptionally well in these tests, we take blood samples from them. We study their genetic structure. Or children in poltergeist situations.’

‘Poltergeists?’

‘Poltergeist phenomena — weeding out the hoaxes — aren’t really ghosts. There’s always one or more children in houses where this happens. We think the objects flying around the room and the ectoplasmic apparitions are caused by these children, by their unconscious exercise of powers they don’t even know they have. We take samples from these kids when we can find them. We’re building a library of unusual genetic profiles, looking for common patterns among people who have had all manner of paranormal experiences.’

‘And have you found something?’

She was silent, perhaps waiting for another spasm of pain to pass, though her face revealed more mental anguish than physical suffering. At last she said, ‘Quite a lot, yes.’

If there had been enough light for Joe to see his reflection in the rear-view mirror, he knew that he could have watched as his tan faded and his face turned as white as the moon, for he suddenly knew the essence of what Project Ninety-nine was all about. ‘You haven’t just studied this.’

‘Not just. No.’

‘You’ve applied the research.’

‘Yes.’

‘How many work on Project Ninety-nine?’

‘Over two hundred of us.’

‘Making monsters,’ he said numbly.

‘People,’ she said. ‘Making people in a lab.’

‘They may look like people, but some of them are monsters.’

She was silent for perhaps a mile. Then she said, ‘Yes.’ And after another silence: ‘Though the true monsters are those of us who made them.’

Fenced and patrolled, identified at the highway as a think tank called the Quartermass Institute, the property encompasses eight­een hundred acres in the Virginia countryside: meadowed hills where deer graze, hushed woods of birch and beeches where a plenitude of small game thrives beyond the rifle reach of hunters, ponds with ducks, and grassy fields with nesting plovers.

Although security appears to be minimal, no animal larger than a rabbit moves across these acres without being monitored by motion detectors, heat sensors, microphones, and cameras, which feed a continuous river of data to a Cray computer for continuous analysis. Unauthorized visitors are subject to immediate arrest and, on those rare occasions when hunters or adventurous teenagers scale the fence, they are halted and taken into custody within five hundred feet of the point of intrusion.

Near the geographical centre of these peaceful acres is the orphanage, a cheerless three-story brick structure that resembles a hospital. Forty-eight children currently reside herein, every one below the age of six — though some appear older. They are all residents by virtue of having been born without mothers or fathers in any but the chemical sense. None of them was conceived in love, and none entered the world through a woman’s womb. As foetuses, they were nurtured in mechanical wombs, adrift in amniotic fluid brewed in a laboratory.

As with laboratory rats and monkeys, as with dogs whose skulls are cut open and brains exposed for days during experiments related to the central nervous system, as with all animals that further the cause of knowledge, these orphans have no names. To name them would be to encourage their handlers to develop emotional attachments to them. The handlers — which includes everyone from those security men who double as cooks to the scientists who bring these children into the world — must remain morally neutral and emotionally detached in order to do their work properly. Consequently, the children are known by letter and number codes that refer to the specific indices in Project 99’s genetic-profile library from which their special abilities were selected.

Here on the third floor, southwest corner, in a room of her own, sits ATX-12-23. She is four years old, catatonic, and incontinent. She waits in her crib, in her own wastes until her nurse changes her, and she never complains. ATX-12-23 has never spoken a single word or uttered any sound whatsoever. As an infant, she never cried. She cannot walk. She sits motionlessly, staring into the middle distance, sometimes drooling. Her muscles are partially atrophied even though she is given manipulated exercise three times a week. If her face were ever to be enlivened by expression, she might be beautiful, but the unrelieved slackness of her features gives her a chilling aspect. Cameras cover every inch of her room and record around the clock, which might seem to be a waste of videotape —except that from time to time, inanimate objects around ATX-12-23 become animated. Rubber balls of various colours levitate and spin in the air, float from wall to wall or circle the child’s head for ten or twenty minutes at a time. Window blinds raise and lower without a hand touching them. Lights dim and flare, the digital clock speeds through the hours, and a teddy bear that she has never touched sometimes walks around the room on its stubby legs as if it contains the mechanical system that would allow it to do so.

Now, come here, down to the second floor, to the third room east of the elevators, where lives a five-year-old male, KSB-22-09, who is neither physically nor mentally impaired. Indeed, he is an active redheaded boy with a genius-level IQ. He loves to learn, receives extensive tutoring daily, and is currently educated to a ninth-grade equivalent. He has numerous toys, books, and movies on video, and he participates in supervised play sessions with the other orphans, because it is deemed essential by the project architects that all subjects with normal mental faculties and full physical abilities be raised in as social an atmosphere as possible, given the limitations of the Institute. Sometimes when he tries hard (and sometimes when he is not trying at all), KSB-22-09 is able to make small objects — pencils, ball bearings, paper clips, thus far nothing larger than a glass of water — vanish. Simply vanish. He sends them elsewhere, into what he calls ‘The All Dark.’ He is not able to bring them back and cannot explain what The All Dark may be — though he does not like the place. He must be sedated to sleep, because he frequently suffers vivid nightmares in which he uncontrollably sends himself, piece by piece, into The All Dark —first a thumb, and then a toe, and then his left foot, a tooth and another tooth, one eye gone from a suddenly empty socket, and then an ear. Lately, KSB-22-09 is experiencing memory lapses and spells of paranoia which are thought to be related to the long-term use of the sedative that he receives before bed each night.

Of the forty-eight orphans residing at the Institute, only seven exhibit any paranormal powers. The other forty-one, however, are not regarded as failures. Each of the seven successes first revealed his or her talent at a different age — one as young as eleven months, one as old as five. Consequently, the possibility remains that many of the forty-one will blossom in years to come — perhaps not until they experience the dramatic changes in body chemistry related to puberty. Eventually, of course, those subjects who age without revealing any valuable talent will have to be removed from the program, as even Project 99’s resources are not infinite. The project’s architects have not yet determined the optimum point of termination.

Although the steering wheel was hard under his hands and slick with his cold sweat, although the sound of the engine was familiar, although the freeway was solid under the spinning tyres, Joe felt as if he had crossed into another dimension as treacherously amorphous and inimical to reason as the surreal landscapes in Salvador Dali’s paintings.

As his horror grew, he interrupted Rose: ‘This place you’re describing is Hell. You. . . you couldn’t have been part of anything like this. You’re not that kind of person.’

‘Aren’t I?’

‘No.’

Her voice grew thinner as she talked, as though the strength supporting her had been the secrets she kept, and as she revealed them one by one, her vitality ebbed as it had for Samson lock by lock. In her increasing weariness was a sweet relief like that dispensed in a confessional, a weakness that she seemed to embrace — but that was nonetheless coloured by a grey wash of despair. ‘If I’m not that kind of person now. . . I must have been then.’

‘But how? Why? Why would you want to be involved with these these atrocities?’

‘Pride. To prove that I was as good as they thought I was, good enough to take on this unprecedented challenge. Excitement. The thrill of being involved with a program even better funded than the Manhattan Project. Why did the people who invented the atomic bomb work on it . . . knowing what they were making? Because others, elsewhere in the world, will do it if we don’t. . . so maybe we have to do it to save ourselves from them?’

‘Save ourselves by selling our souls?’ he asked.

‘There’s no defence I can offer that should ever exonerate me,’ Rose said. ‘But it is true that when I signed on, there was no consensus that we would carry the experiments this far, that we would apply what we learned with such. . . zeal. We entered into the creation of the children in stages. . . down a slippery slope. We intended to monitor the first one just through the second trimester of the foetal stage — and, after all, we don’t consider a foetus to be an actual human being. So it wasn’t like we were experimenting on a person. And when we brought one of them to full term. . . there were intriguing anomalies in its EEG graphs, strangeness in its brainwave patterns that might have indicated heretofore unknown cerebral function. So we had to keep it alive to see. . . to see what we had achieved, to see if maybe we had moved evolution forward a giant step.’

‘Jesus.’

Though he had first met this woman only thirty-six hours ago, his feelings for her had been rich and intense, ranging from virtual adoration to fear and now to repulsion. Yet from his repulsion came pity, because for the first time he saw in her one of the many cloves of human weakness that, in other forms, were so ripe in himself.

‘Fairly early on,’ she said, ‘I did want out. So I was invited for a private chat with the project director, who made it clear to me that there was no quitting now. This had become a job with lifetime tenure. Even to attempt to leave Project Ninety-nine is to commit suicide — and to put the lives of your loved ones at risk as well.’

‘But couldn’t you have gone to the press, broken the story wide open, shut them down?’

‘Probably not without physical evidence, and all I had was what was in my head. Anyway, a couple of my colleagues had the idea that they could bring it all down, I think. One of them suffered a timely stroke. The other was shot three times in the head by a mugger — who was never caught. For a while. . . I was so depressed I considered killing myself and saving them the trouble. But then along came CCY-21-21…

First, born fourteen months ahead of CCY-21-21 was male subject SSW-89-58. He exhibits prodigious talents in every regard and his story is of importance to you because of your own recent experi­ences with people who eviscerate themselves and set themselves afire — and because of your losses in Colorado.

By the time he is forty-two months old, SSW-89-58 possesses the language skills of the average first-year college student and is able to read a three-hundred-page volume in one to three hours, depending on the complexity of the text. Higher math comes to him as easily as eating ice cream, as do foreign languages from French to Japanese. His physical development proceeds at an accelerated rate, as well, and by the time he is four, he stands as tall and is proportionately developed as the average seven-year-old. Paranormal talents are anticipated, but researchers are surprised by 89-58’s great breadth of more ordinary genius — which includes the ability to play any piece of piano music after hearing it once —and by his physical precocity, for which no genetic selection has been made.

When 89-58 begins to exhibit paranormal abilities, he proves to be phenomenally endowed. His first startling achievement is remote viewing. As a game, he describes to researchers the rooms in their own homes, where he has never visited. He walks them through tours of museums to which he has never been admitted. When he is shown a photograph of a Wyoming mountain in which is buried a top-secret Strategic Air Command defence centre, he describes in accurate detail the missile-status display boards in the war room. He is considered an espionage asset of incalculable value — until, fortunately by degrees, he discovers that he is able to step into a human mind as easily as he steps into distant rooms. He takes mental control of his primary handler, makes the man undress, and sends him through the halls of the orphanage, crowing like a rooster. When SSW-89-58 relinquishes control of the handler and it is discovered what he’s done, he is punished severely. He resents the punishment, resents it deeply. That night he conducts a remote viewing of the handler’s home and enters the handler’s mind at a distance of forty-six miles. Using the handler’s body, he brutally murders the man’s wife and daughter, and then he walks the handler through suicide.

Subsequent to this episode, SSW-89-58 is subdued by the use of a massive dose of tranquillisers administered by a dart gun. Two employees of Project 99 perish in this process.

Thereafter, for a period of eighteen days, he is maintained in a drug-induced coma while a team of scientists designs and oversees the urgent construction of a suitable habitat for their prize — one which will sustain his life but assure that he remains controlled. A faction of the staff suggests immediate termination of SSW-89-58, but this advice is considered and rejected. Every endeavour is at some point troubled by pessimists.

Here, now, come into the security room in the southeast corner

of the first floor of the orphanage. In this place — if you were an employee — you must present yourself for the scrutiny of three guards, because this post is never manned by fewer, regardless of the hour. You must place your right hand on a scanner that will identify you by your fingerprints. You must peer into a retina scanner, as well, which will compare your retinal patterns to those recorded in the scan taken when you first accepted employment.