He looked at her with a strange expression, then shrugged and said, “Problem is, there’s not much you know that I don’t.” He looked at her as if to let that sink in. And it did. “Like.., like what?” she asked, and was almost sorry she did. Alex looked off for a moment with a smile, like a little kid that’s far too smart to be patronized might if he were being talked down to. Then he looked back and said matter-of-factly, “He took skin scrapings from all you guys, right? Back in the days of the fertility clinic?” Beatrice put down her fork; suddenly she lost her appetite. “Frederick told you that?” Alex laughed again. “Well, sorta. He keeps it in an encrypted computer file, but that just made it more intriguing.” He looked at her like one friend to another. “You ever read Peanuts?” he asked. “You mean the comic strip?”
He nodded. “You know Snoopy, the beagle, how he says Anything on the floor is mine’? Well, my feeling is, anything on a computer is mine.” He smiled. “There isn’t an encryption logarithm I can’t break. He took DNA from all of you guys. She was only able to nod her head slightly, astonished to have something so hidden in the past spoken of so offhandedly, especially by someone young enough to be her own grandson. But he wasn’t through surprising her. “Yours included. Right?”
She felt her blood run cold. She heard her voice as if from another room. “Yes, I suppose he did.” “Well, there you go,” said Alex.
“And you know who the clones are,” Beatrice managed after several deep breaths. “What makes you think that?” he said, trying to smile but twitching just noticeably. “That day at the briefing,” said Beatrice. “You knew the man whose spinal nerves had been joined. I heard you say his name. “Rashid alAssad,” said Alex after a moment. “He was a guinea pig, not a clone. No, my grandfather’s got all the clone data kept somewhere else-maybe in his head, maybe buried in the backyard-who knows?” He said this last a little too brightly, and immediately stood. “Look, I’m sorry to blurt and run, but I’ve got some differential equations to solve. Second-order suckers. Want to be up to speed when your husband comes around-which he will,” Alex assured her softly, giving a thumbs-up as he went out the cafeteria door. Beatrice watched him go and wondered whether everything he’d said about his own knowledge was true. It occurred to her he might know everything, whether it had been planned that way or not. It also occurred to her that if that were true, it might be the reason he was included so intimately in Wolfe’s program. He might know-literally-where the bodies were buried. She made a mental note to keep a closer eye on Alex, and to try to talk to him again soon. But somehow it never happened. In the following days, both Wolfe and his quirky grandson vanished off her radar screen, along with her own research. Her only thoughts were of Peter. She brought a cot into his room, forsaking sleep in order to monitor his progress. His vital signs hadn’t changed, he refused to wake, but she knew in her heart he was in there; and she suspected- hoped to God-that he was in there intact. “Locked-in syndrome” was the term Wolfe had used to describe it, hinting (even as he attempted to console her) that if Peter didn’t come out of it soon, he might indeed die after all. Beatrice, refusing to be handled, retorted that Wolfe didn’t know Peter. Peter was a fighter. Peter never gave up. She prayed Peter still knew that as well.
Two more weeks went by. She spent countless hours simply sitting by his bed-studying him, this man who was at once her husband and a stranger. But such a familiar stranger.
He was Peter at age thirty-five, and it took her back to their earliest days, and her own youth. Peter had been forty when his DNA was harvested, but his clone was even younger, his skin ruddy and resilient, nails smooth, hair glossy, abundant and blond, lips soft and full. She marveled at it all, even as it made her shudder. After three weeks, there was hardly a trace of scar tissue left on his body. Beatrice’s genetic bonding material had fused the skin back together almost seamlessly. In a darker moment, it crossed her mind that she could make a fortune in cosmetics if she were working in the civilian sector. That would be someone else’s good fortune, she mused, years into the future, when all this knowledge was declassified and accepted as routine. For now, if they only knew, governments would kill for the secret she had discovered, and for what it had allowed Peter to become. “You look exactly the way you did in 1958,” she told him, caressing his strong, graceful hands. “Remember 1958?” She stopped. Something was different in the room. What? “Explorer I, when it made it into orbit? How many times did we make love that night-three? Four? It was your math that made that flight possible. God, I was so proud of you.” What was that new sound?
She glanced over at the screens. Was it wishful thinking, or was the heart monitor showing a slight increase in pulse? She gripped his hand more tightly. “Remember Von Braun? We hated his pomposity, we thought he’d grab all the credit, and then he thanked you publicly? And you were imitating him, and we started to laugh-remember that four-poster bed? And the champagne he sent us-the cheap stuff?” No question about it. Peter’s heart was beating faster. “Yes,” she said, her own heart in her throat now, “you remember. What else about l958-come on, you used to love this game. Elvis went in the Army, what else? Van Cliburn won the Tchaikovsky Competition, Pasternak won the Nobel, what was that Miles Davis album you used to make me listen to, until I finally broke down and learned to enjoy it?” Peter’s chest was heaving and her eyes were tearing. She leaned into his ear, trembling. “Kind of Blue, that’s right-and what about the new Pope? One of the ten best years of the century, 1958, what were some of our other favorites?” His breath was coming in rasps and she reached to adjust the intertrachial catheter. She had barely touched it when his hand came up and pushed hers away. “Hurts,” he croaked.
The word was barely audible, but Beatrice gave a shout that brought the nurses running and, behind them, Frederick Wolfe. The light in Wolfe’s eyes, though it signaled less than total optimism, made her heart beat even faster. She hugged him, and he held her, as they waited for Peter to say more. He had sunk back into sleep, but-God willing-if the signs were as they seemed, the worst might be over. Peter not only was alive, but was fighting his way back.
Sometimes he could see the room he was in. For three more days, he fought to reach the light, each time losing it just as it seemed within his grasp. Then reality would waver like a station dialed in and out on a gigantic radio, eventually swinging him over into endless striations of static, alien DJs and cosmic noise. Heroically he struggled to remain awake, to retain his awareness of Beatrice at his side, holding his hand, stroking his forehead, desperately sensing, even as he was slipping in and out of it, how much he craved that homeland of rational consciousness. And then he would find himself drowning again. The liquid was pleasure, and he was looking up at Beatrice. Her lively gray eyes were full of grateful tears; her mouth was moving, but no words were coming out. Her face grew smaller and the touch of her hand was so light he couldn’t feel it, and then he was somewhere in perfect darkness again, without pain or stress or thought, swathed in a womb of primal being. Helpless and pure. But even there he was wrapped in the warmth of his terrible, wonderful secret: I’m alive, he kept telling himself. I’ve been reborn. The pain is gone, the cancer is gone, as if it had never been there at all. “Beatrice?”
Was that the first time he’d managed her name? He could see her eyes, two gray suns in an ocean of darkness. “I’m here. Peter? Can you hear me?”
He struggled to make his thoughts clear. “Not here,” he said. “Yes, you are. You’re here.”
“Not me. I’m not me.”
Her silence told him everything. She forced herself to speak. “I said yes, didn’t I?”
“Yes. And thank God you did.”
It was his turn to be silent. His mind seemed to be hovering high above the bed, as though fighting to escape the body where it didn’t belong. He was terrified. “Peter, are you cogent?”