populate half a dozen beer or lip-balm commercials, Spicer said, “Hear
about the hooker in Kansas City?”
“Strangled,” Oslett said. “But there’s no proof our boy did it, even if
someone resembling him did leave that lounge with her.”
“Then you don’t know the latest. Sperm sample arrived in New York.
Been studied. It’s our boy.”
“They’re sure?”
“Positive.”
The tops of the mountains were disappearing into the lowering sky. The
color of the clouds had deepened from the shade of abraded steel to a
mottled ash-gray and cinder-black.
Oslett’s mood grew darker as well.
The traffic signal changed to green.
Following the car full of blondes through the intersection, Alec Spicer
said, “So he’s fully capable of having sex.”
“But he was engineered to be . ..” Oslett couldn’t even finish the
sentence. He no longer had any faith in the work of the genetic
engineers.
“So far,” Spicer said, “through police contacts, the home office has
compiled a list of fifteen homicides involving sexual assault that might
be attributable to our boy. Unsolved cases. Young and attractive
women. In cities he visited, at the times he was there.
Similar M.O.
in every case, including extreme violence after the victim was knocked
unconscious, sometimes with a blow to the head but generally with a
punch in the face . . . evidently to ensure silence during the actual
killing.”
“Fifteen,” Oslett said numbly.
“Maybe more. Maybe a lot more.” Spicer glanced away from the road and
looked at Oslett. His eyes were not only unreadable but entirely hidden
behind the heavily tinted sunglasses. “And we better hope to God he
killed every woman he screwed.”
“What do you mean?”
Looking at the road again, Spicer said, “He’s got a high sperm count.
And the sperm are active. He’s fertile.”
Though he couldn’t have admitted it to himself until Spicer had said it
aloud, Oslett had been aware this bad news was coming.
“You know what this means?” Spicer asked.
From the back seat, Clocker said, “The first operative Alpha generation
human clone is a renegade, mutating in ways we might not understand, and
capable of infecting the human gene pool with genetic material that
could spawn a new and thoroughly hostile race of nearly invulnerable
super beings.”
For a moment Oslett thought Clocker had read a line from his current
Star Trek novel, then realized that he had succinctly summed up the
nature of the crisis.
Spicer said, “If our boy didn’t waste every bimbo he took a tumble with,
if he made a few babies and for some reason they weren’t aborted–even
one baby–we’re in deep shit. Not just the three of us, not just the
Network, but the entire human race.”
Heading north through the Owens Valley, with the Inyo Mountains to the
east and the towering Sierra Nevadas to the west, Marty found that the
cellular phone would not always function as intended because the
dramatic topography interfered with microwave transmissions. And on
those occasions when he was able to place a call to his parents’ house
in Mammoth, their phone rang and rang without being answered.
After sixteen rings, he pushed the END button, terminating the call, and
said, “Still not home.”
His dad was sixty-six, his mom sixty-five. They had been school
teachers, and both had retired last year. They were still young by
modern standards, healthy and vigorous, in love with life, so it was no
surprise they were out and about rather than spending the day at home in
a couple of armchairs, watching television game shows and soap operas.
“How long are we staying with Grandma and Grandpa?” Charlotte asked
from the back seat. “Long enough for her to teach me to play the guitar
as good as she does? I’m getting pretty good on the piano, but I think
I’d like the guitar, too, and if I’m going to be a famous musician,
which I think I might be interested in being–I’m still keeping my
options open–then it would be a lot easier to take my music with me
everywhere, since you can’t exactly carry a piano around on your back.”
“We aren’t staying with Grandma and Grandpa,” Marty said. “In fact, we