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CHAPTER 082

It’s the last thing we need, Henry Kendall thought. Visitors! He watched in dismay as Lynn threw her arms around Alex Burnet and then bent over to hug Alex’s kid, Jamie. Alex and Jamie had just shown up, with no advance warning. The women were chattering excitedly, arms fluttering, happy to see each other as they walked into the kitchen to get food for Alex’s Jamie. Meanwhile, his son Jamie and Dave were playing Drive or Die! on the PlayStation. The sound of crunching metal and squealing tires filled the room.

Henry Kendall was overwhelmed. He walked into the bedroom to think things through. He had just come back from the police station, where he reviewed the playground security camera tape from the day before. The image quality wasn’t that good-thank God-because the image of that kid Billy kicking and beating his son was so upsetting he could hardly watch. He had to look away several times. And those other boys, that gang of skaters, they should all be in jail. With any luck, they’d be expelled from school.

But Henry knew it wouldn’t end there. It never did. Everybody sued these days, and no doubt the skater parents would sue to have their kids reinstated. They’d sue Henry’s family, and they’d sue Jamie and Dave. And out of those lawsuits it was sure to emerge that there was no such thing as Gandalf-Crikey syndrome, or whatever it was that Lynn had made up. It was sure to emerge that Dave was in reality a transgenic chimp.

And then what? A media circus beyond all imagining. Reporters camped on the front lawn for weeks. Chasing them wherever they went. Filming them with spy cameras day and night. Destroying their lives. And around the time the reporters got bored, the religious people and the environmentalists would start in. Henry and his family would be called Godless. They’d be called criminals. They’d be called dangerous, and un-American, and a threat to the biosphere. In his mind he saw commentators on TV in a babel of languages-English, Spanish, German, Japanese-all talking, with pictures of him, and Dave, in the background.

And that was just the beginning.

Dave would be taken away. Henry could possibly go to jail. (Though he doubted that; scientists had been breaking the rules about genetic testing for two decades, and none had ever gone to jail, even when patients died.) But he would certainly be barred from research. He could be kicked out of the lab for a year or more. How would he support his family? Lynn couldn’t do it alone, and her web business would almost certainly dry up. And what would happen to Dave? And his son? To Tracy? And what about their community? La Jolla was pretty liberal (parts of it, anyway), but people might not be understanding about the idea of a humanzee going to school with their kids. It was radical, no doubt about it. People weren’t ready for it. Liberals were only so liberal.

They might have to move. They might have to sell their house and go somewhere remote, like Montana. Though maybe people would be even less accepting of them there.

These and other thoughts raced through his mind, to the accompaniment of cars squealing and crashing into each other, and his wife and her friend laughing in the kitchen. He felt overwhelmed. And in the middle of it, at the center of everything, was his deep sense of guilt.

One thing wasclear. He had to keep track of his kids. He had to know where they were. He couldn’t risk further incidents like the one that had occurred the day before. Lynn had kept the children at home for an extra hour, intending to let them go to school later, so there wouldn’t be any incidents with older kids. That Cleever kid was a menace, and it wasn’t likely he was jailed. They’d probably just scare him and give him over to the custody of his father. The father, Henry knew, was a defense analyst for a local think tank and a hard-ass gun nut. One of those intellectuals who liked to shoot things. A manly intellectual. There was no telling what could happen.

He turned to the package he had brought home from the lab. It was marked TrackTech Industries, Chiba City, Japan. Inside were five inch-long polished silver tubes, slightly thinner than soda straws. He pulled them out and looked at them. These marvels of miniaturization had GPS technology built in, as well as monitors for temperature, pulse, respiration, and blood pressure. They were activated by a magnet that you touched at one end. The tip glowed blue once, then nothing.

They were designed to keep track of lab primates, monkeys and baboons. The tubes were inserted with a special surgical instrument that looked like an oversized syringe. They were placed under the skin of the neck, just above the clavicle. Henry couldn’t do that to the kids, of course. So the question was, where to put them?

He went back to the living room where the kids were. Drop the sensors in their school bags? No. Down the collars of their shirts? He shook his head. They’d feel them.

Then where?

The surgical instrument worked perfectly. The devices went smoothly into the rubber at the heel of the sneaker. He did it for Dave’s sneaker, then for Jamie’s, then, on an impulse, went out and got a sneaker from Alex’s son, Jamie, as well.

“What for?” Jamie said.

“I need to measure it. Back in a sec.”

He inserted another device into the third sneaker.

That left two more. Henry thought about it for a while. Several possibilities came to mind.