Page 92 of Diagnosis Attraction

Matt soundlessly reinforced the question.

“Well, you know, the doctor ran it like a fertility clinic. That’s how he got the babies. But he was really doing experiments on those children before they were born. He thought we didn’t know, well all except Dorothy. She was his pet.”

“Experiments?” Elizabeth asked carefully. “What was he trying to do to them?”

“Make them super smart,” the old woman said as though she was confiding the nuclear-launch codes. “That’s why he had the children come back for tests. But he was disappointed because they didn’t seem any different from ordinary children.”

“He was doing brain experiments?” Matt asked.

“Didn’t I say that?”

“Not exactly.”

“He was so excited when he started. He was sure his techniques were going to produce something extraordinary. Then he couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working.” The woman’s expression suddenly closed. “I shouldn’t be talking to you about any of this.” She raised her head. “I should call Sarah.”

“No need,” Matt said. “We won’t ask you any more questions.”

She turned her head away, and Elizabeth looked up to see that some of the residents were staring at the scene.

We’re attracting attention.

We’d better go.

She and Matt got up and left the dayroom, then hurried down the hall, retracing their steps.

“I think we found out what we wanted to know about the clinic,” Matt said when they were back in the hall. I think he was working with fertilized eggs, operating on the blastocytes.”

“Back then? Isn’t that kind of advanced?”

“I guess you could say he was a genius.”

“An evil genius. He was using eggs he had no right to. He was playing with people’s lives.”

“Obviously he thought the ends justified the means. And he didn’t care who got hurt in the process.”

“But it didn’t work out the way he thought it would. He was fooling with the babies’ brains, but instead of making them smart, he created potential telepaths.”

She nodded. “And creating people who were doomed to lead miserable lives—unless they met someone else who was a product of the experiment.”

“How many more of us are there, do you think?” Elizabeth asked.

“That’s something we should try to find out.”

“And it sounds like we’re not the first couple that got together.”

They both stopped short as they considered the implications.

“Let’s say that the woman who was probing my thoughts is one of us.”

“That’s a stretch.”

“Who else?”

He shrugged.

“And let’s say that, for some reason, she and her partner blew up Dr. Solomon’s clinic.”

“An even bigger stretch,” Matt said. “But here’s an important question. Are the other people friendly to each other—or hostile?”

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