The God Project (13 page)

“Then where is he? Why haven’t we heard
something?”

But Lucy had only shaken her head. “Jim, I’ve talked to everyone I can think of, asked questions, looked for
God-knows-what, and all I can think of is that in a book, or in a movie, it’s always different. The mother goes out looking for her child and she finds him. But it’s not that easy. I haven’t found anything. Not one damned thing. All I’ve got after three days is this.”

She had picked up the file that the school nurse had given her and tossed it across the table to her ex-husband, who flipped through it, then put it aside. It still lay on the table, where it had lain all through the evening as they ate dinner, talked, sipped at their coffee, tried to figure out what to do next, talked of other things, and always, inexorably, returned to the subject of their son.

Now, as Lucy refilled her cup and came back to the table again, Jim picked up the report once more. He looked through it.

The only tiling about it that made it unique was the picture it painted of a remarkably healthy little boy.

Too healthy?

Jim began studying the file again, searching it for all the things that should have been there.

The absences from school.

The upset stomachs after lunch.

The skinned knees from inevitable falls.

The sore throats and colds that no child escapes.

None of it was there.

Jim went over the report yet again, searching for anything he might have missed. Finally, he closed the folder and faced his wife. “Lucy, did you notice anything odd about Randy’s file?”

She looked at him pensively. “Odd? How do you mean?”

“According to this, Randy’s never been sick a day in his life, never had a cavity in his mouth, never even so much as skinned his knee.”

“So?”

Jim frowned. “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of such a thing before.” He reopened the report and began quoting it to Lucy. All of it was clear—
all except for a small notation at the bottom of the first page:

CHILD #0263

“What’s this mean? Do they assign each of the kids a number now?”

Lucy shook her head. “It’s a survey code. I wondered about it, too, so I called the school nurse this morning. CHILD stands for Children’s Health Institute for Latent Diseases, and oh-two-six-three was the number assigned to Randy.”

“Assigned to him for what?” Jim asked.

“Some sort of survey. Miss Oliphant said they’ve been tracking Randy for a long time.”

“Tracking him? You mean watching him?”

“Not exactly. Every few months the school forwards Randy’s health records to the Institute, that’s all.”

“How many of the kids are they tracking?”

Lucy frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Are they tracking all the kids at the school? All the ones in Randy’s class?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. She picked up the file and looked at the notation once again, trying to remember just what Annie Oliphant had told her about the survey. Had she even asked how many of Randy’s schoolmates were involved? She couldn’t remember. She went to the phone and began dialing.

“Lucy, it’s after midnight,” Jim reminded her.

“But it might be important.” Lucy waved him silent and turned her attention to the phone. “Miss Oliphant? It’s Lucy Corliss. I hate to bother you so late, but I keep wondering about this survey Randy was involved in. Was his whole class being studied?”

She listened for a moment, asked a few more questions, then thanked the nurse again, and hung up.

“Well?” Jim asked.

“It’s strange,” Lucy said. “She told me she doesn’t know anything about the survey. There are several children from Eastbury involved, and Randy’s the oldest
Every month she sends copies of the children’s records to Boston, to the CHILD headquarters. They supply the envelopes and the postage, but they’ve never told her what the survey is about or what the results are.”

“But who authorized the survey?” Jim asked. “I mean, don’t you have to give your permission for Randy’s records to be sent out?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy replied. “I suppose I might have signed some kind of consent form somewhere along the line. You know how it is—kids bring home so many forms, and they never give them to you until breakfast the day they’re due.”

“Actually,” Jim commented, his voice not unkind, “I don’t know about such things. I guess there’s a lot I don’t know much about.”

His eyes had taken on a look of such loneliness that Lucy went to him and slipped her arms around him, “Well, don’t start worrying about all that now,” she told him. “I can guarantee you that if you
had
been around, you wouldn’t have read all the forms either.”

Jim grinned at her. “You mean you’d have forgiven me for being irresponsible?” Lucy drew away from him, and Jim wished he’d left the mild taunt unsaid. “I’m sorry,” he apologized, but Lucy was already studying Randy’s medical file again.

“Miss Oliphant said something else. She said that all the subjects of the survey have one thing in common: All their files read like Randy’s. It seems they’re all in perfect health and always have been.”

Now Jim stared at her.

“All of them?” he said.

Lucy nodded.

“But—but how can that be?”

“What do you mean?”

“How long has the survey been going on?”

“At least since they started school.”

“And all the kids they’re surveying have perfect health?”

“That’s what Annie Oliphant said.” What was he getting at?

“Lucy, doesn’t it strike you as odd that this survey has been going on for some time—we don’t really know how long—and all its subjects have perfect health? I mean, it seems to me that it would be reasonable if when Randy was, say, ten years old, someone came along and suggested that
because
he’d been in perfect health all his life, they’d like to start tracking him to see what’s going to happen. But apparently this outfit in Boston had some reason to think mere was going to be something special about Randy and the others and started tracking them early.”

“What are you saying, Jim?” Lucy asked, sure she already knew what was coming.

“I’m saying that it seems to me we might have some kind of clue about Randy after all. I think tomorrow one of us better get in touch with CHILD, and find out just what this survey is about, and how Randy fits in. Apparently there
is
something special about Randy. We’d better find out what it is.”

As she went to bed later that night, Lucy wondered what could possibly come of talking to the Children’s Health Institute for Latent Diseases. Was Jim just sending her off on another wild-goose chase?

Still, it would be something to do, and anything, right now, was better than nothing.

With nothing to do, she would go crazy, and she couldn’t allow herself to do that.

Not until she knew what had happened to her son.

A
FTER ONLY THREE DAYS
at the Academy, Randy Corliss had grown accustomed to the routine. For the first time, he felt as though he belonged somewhere. The sense of being alone in the world, of being somehow set apart from the other kids his age, was gone. At the Academy he was like all the other boys.

School at the Academy wasn’t like school in Eastbury. Here, all the classes were compressed into the morning, except for physical education, and the things they studied seemed to Randy much more interesting than the things they had been taught at home. Also, at the Academy everyone seemed to care whether or not you learned. It wasn’t like the public schools at all. As long as Randy could remember, if he got bored with something and stopped paying attention, no one seemed to care. All his teachers had just gone along at their own pace, never noticing that their students had lost interest.

But here, everything seemed to go faster. Here, they expected you to learn, so you learned. And they spent most of their time on subjects Randy liked. A lot of history, which Randy liked because most of history seemed to be, one way or another, about war, and Randy found war fascinating. There was, to his young mind, something wonderful about men marching into battle. And
the way Miss Bowen taught it, war was almost like a game. You obeyed the rules, and did exactly as you were told, and you won. Time after time, in lesson after lesson, Randy learned that battles were lost only because the troops had not done as they’d been told. To him, it all made perfect sense, because as he thought about it, he realized that in all his nine years, the only times he’d really gotten into trouble were the times he’d disobeyed someone.

At the Academy it was the same way. As long as you followed the routine, everything went fine. When you were supposed to do something, you did it. If you failed, you did it again until you got it right. But the main thing was to do as you were told. Otherwise things happened.

The quick hand of retribution had fallen on Randy only once, on the night after he’d arrived at the Academy. It had been dinnertime, and Peter had come to his room to take him down to the dining room. Randy had been reading, and the end of the chapter was only two pages away. He had told Peter he’d be down in a minute and finished the chapter.

By the time he got to the dining room, his place at the table was gone—even his chair—and none of the other boys even looked at him. Miss Bowen got up from the staff table. Dinner was at six o’clock, she said, not five after six; he’d missed it. He was about to protest that the other boys hadn’t even started to eat yet, but as he faced her, something in the woman’s eyes told him that anything he might say would be useless. He was sent to
his
room and spent the rest of the evening by himself. No one came to his room, no one even spoke to him, though he left his door open all night From then on Randy was careful to do exactly as he was told.

Not that it was difficult. Mornings seemed to be the time when discipline was strictest, and in the afternoons, after gym class, they were turned loose, free to do as they pleased. In the afternoons no one ever told them what to do or how to do it. Indeed, though Randy always felt as though someone was watching him, he’d
never been able to see the watchers. It was, he’d finally decided, like some kind of test, but he didn’t know what the rules were or what was expected of him. Nor did he know what would happen to him if he failed.

For the first few days, of course, Randy had wondered exactly why he was there and why his father hadn’t come to see him or at least called him. Then, as he got used to the Academy, he began to stop worrying about it.

Now it was Thursday afternoon, and Randy and Peter had just finished gym. The afternoon stretched before them, and they were wandering in the woods that lay close by the main building of the Academy.

“You wanna play King of the Mountain?” Peter suddenly asked.

Randy looked around. As far as he could tell, the ground the Academy sat on was perfectly flat, except for a shallow pond they used for swimming. “What are we gonna use for a mountain?”

“Come on,” Peter replied. He started through the woods, and in a few minutes they came to a path. A few hundred yards farther, there was a clearing in the woods. In the center of the clearing stood a massive granite outcropping, towering thirty feet above the ground.

“What is it?” Randy breathed.

“It’s a rock, dummy,” Peter said scornfully. “How do I know what it is?”

“Can you climb it?”

“Sure. I’ve climbed it lots of times. Me and another guy used to play on it all the time.”

“Who?”

“Jeff Grey.”

Randy had never heard the name before. “Who’s he?”

“He used to be here before you came.”

“Where is he now?”

“How should I know?” Peter replied, but something in his voice told Randy that he knew more than he was telling. Suddenly Eric’s words, half forgotten, came back to him.

“Sometimes kids …just disappear. We think they die.”

Was that what had happened to Jeff Grey? He was about to ask, but Peter was already starting the game. “You wanna play or not?” Peter called. “First one to the top tries to keep the other one from getting up!” Peter charged up the heap of rubble, then began scrambling up the rock, his hands and feet moving instinctively from ledge to ledge. Randy watched for a moment, then began climbing a few feet away from Peter.

For the first ten feet the climb was easy. The rock rose out of the ground at an angle, and over the centuries its surface had been cracked and split by the freezing New England winters. Randy concentrated on moving upward as fast as he could, paying little attention to Peter.

And then, as the rock grew steeper, he felt a hand close on his shoulder, tugging at him. He turned, and there was Peter, right next to him, bracing himself against a ledge, grinning.

“Good-bye!” Peter sang out. He shoved hard, and Randy felt himself lose his balance as his left foot slipped out of place. He grasped at a branch of laurel that was growing out of the rock, then felt it break off in his hand. Suddenly, he was skidding downward, his arms and legs jarring against the stone, but never finding support. He hit the ground and lay on his back, wondering if he’d hurt himself. But it hadn’t been a bad fall, and he could feel no pain. Then, from above him, he heard the humiliating sound of Peter’s laughter.

As Peter once more began working his way upward, Randy got to his feet and began looking for another place to climb. He circled the crag carefully, knowing there was now no chance of beating his friend to the top. Now he would have to fight his way onto the summit.

He found a spot where the first part of the climb would be the most difficult, but where there seemed to be a fairly wide ledge, high up, on which he could brace himself while he tried to wrestle Peter down.

He began climbing slowly, trying to memorize each
step he made so that in the event he fell again he might be able to catch himself before he tumbled all the way down. He ignored the taunts that floated down to him as Peter proclaimed himself king of the mountain.

Then he was on the ledge, and the flat top of the outcropping was level with his chest. Peter stood above him, grinning maliciously.