gathered evidence supporting the contention that the treatment had
wrought a desirable change in him without negative side effects.
Side effects.
He almost laughed. Almost.
Staring in horror at the mirror, as if it were a window onto hell, he
raised one trembling hand to his forehead and touched, again, the narrow
rippled ridge of bone that had risen from the bridge of his nose to his
hairline.
The catastrophic injuries he had suffered yesterday had triggered his
new healing abilities in a way and to a degree that invasive cold and
flu viruses had not. Thrown into overdrive, his cells had begun to
produce interferon, a wide spectrum of infection-fighting antibodies,
and especially growth hormones and proteins, at an astonishing rate.
For some reason, those substances were continuing to flood his system
after the healing was complete, after the need for them was past. His
body was no longer merely replacing damaged tissue but was adding new
tissue at an alarming rate, tissue without apparent function.
No,” he said softly, “no,” trying to deny what he saw before him. But
it was true, and he felt its truth under his fingertips as he explored
farther along the top of his head. The strange bony ridge was most
prominent on his forehead, but it was on top of his head, as well,
beneath his hair, and he even thought he could feel it growing as he
traced its course toward the back of his skull.
His body was transforming itself either at random or to some purpose
that he could not grasp, and there was no way of knowing when it would
finally stop. It might never stop. He might go on growing, changing,
reconstituting himself in myriad new images, endlessly.
He was metamorphosing into a ……. or just possibly, ultimately, into
something so utterly alien that it could no longer be called human.
The bony ridge tapered away at the back of his skull.
He moved his hand forward again to the thickened shelf of bone above his
eyes. It made him look vaguely like a Neanderthal, though Neanderthal
man had not had a bony crest up the center of his head. Or a knob of
bone at one temple. Nor had Neanderthals)r any other ancestors of
humanityver featured the huge, swollen blood vessels where they shone
darkly and pulsed disgustingly in his brow.
Even in his current degenerative mental condition, with every thought
fuzzy at the edges and with his memory clouded, Eric grasped the full
and horrible meaning of this development. He would never be able to
reenter society in any acceptable capacity. Beyond a doubt, he was his
own Frankenstein monster, and he had made-was continuously making-a
hopeless and eternal outcast of himself.
His future was so bleak as to give new meaning to the word. He might be
captured and survive in a laboratory somewhere, subjected to the stares
and probes of countless fascinated scientists, who would surely devise
endless tests that would seem like valid and justifiable experiments to
them but would be pure and simple torture to him. Or he might flee into
the wilderness and somehow make a pathetic life there, giving birth to
legends of a new monster, until someday a hunter stumbled across him by
accident and brought him down. But no matter which of many terrible
fates awaited him, there would be two grim constants, unrelenting fear,
not so much fear of what others would do to him, but fear of what his
own body was doing to him, and loneliness, a profound and singular
loneliness that no other man had ever known or ever would know, for he
would be the only one of his kind on the face of the earth.
Yet his despair and terror were at least slightly ameliorated by
curiosity, the same powerful curiosity that had made him a great
scientist. Studying his hideous reflection, staring at this genetic
catastrophe in’ the making, he was riveted, aware that he was seeing
things no man had ever seen. Better yet, things that man had not been
meant to see. That was an exhilarating feeling. It was what a man like
him lived for. Every scientist, to some degree, seeks a glimpse of the