Three Strikes, You're Out

My daughter stood there with an inquistive look on her face. I made a conscious effort to speak out loud this time.

"I'll be right back and then we'll go and get some ice cream, alright Sara?"

"Alright, Daddy," she replied. She smiled, turned away from me and started skipping around the table. I stood there in the researcher's lounge for a moment and watched her. Leslie had only been dead for three months now but for Sara, life went on. I wished I had it that easy. Leslie had been part of my life for fifteen years now. I knew I shouldn't have brought Sara in here again. But with Leslie gone, I needed Sara near me as a reminder of why I keep going.

I shut the door behind me as I left her and started down the hallway toward the main lab. Halfway down the hall I stepped into the alcove to grab a candy bar out of the snack machine. I turned around and leaned against the machine as I ate the candy bar. I was just here to pick up some notes but I didn't really feel like facing Jenkins.

As I chewed I looked at the two doors across the hall from the alcove. They were both unmarked, they were both painted the same utilitarian off-white color and both had just a faint layer of dust on the doorknobs.

The door on the right led to the lab assistants' lounge. The `labbies' as we had called them, were mostly graduate students that Jenkins and I and the other researchers had recruited from the universities we had once taught at. They were all gone now. After the accidents, the government shifted them all to high-paying jobs in other areas in hopes of keeping them quiet.

The other door led to the secondary lab. None of us went in there anymore unless absolutely necessary. Not since Harry and Jen demonstrated the power of experiment eleven. The lab still looked the same as it always had, the bodies--body?--had been removed, but we all knew what had happened in there.

My candy bar was gone and Sara would be getting impatient for her ice cream so I continued down the hall toward the main lab.

I walked passed Kowskii's lab door. It was the only one in the complex that wasn't painted off-white. It wasn't even painted. The original door had been blown off when experiment two exploded and destroyed Kowskii's vault and lab and killed him. Jenkins, normally the hottest head in the group, had been the only one to keep his cool that day.

As I entered the main lab, Jenkins, project director since Kowskii's death, was just coming out of the vault. He stopped at the threshold--I knew he was angry before I even heard his thoughts.

God damn it, Max, he thought to me, what if Washington knew you'd brought her in again.

The Feds won't-, I started.

You know it was only luck that she wasn't exposed to experiment three with the rest of us.

He was right. I had brought Sara with me that day. I'd really needed her then. That was barely two weeks after Leslie's death. It was my first day back. None of us expected experiment two to be so unstable. Or so explosive.

When Kowskii's lab went up, we all came running, Jenkins, Parker, Williams, Harry, Jen, four labbies and I. We ran in expecting to find Kowskii dead. And we did. What we didn't expect was that the intense heat from the explosion had boiled a dozen vials of experiment three into vaporous form.

Not realizing this, one of the labbies turned on the emergency ventilation system. That spread the vapors from experiment three through every room in the complex save one. Through some fluke the emergency air vent in the women's restroom had been closed. Just seconds before the explosion Sara had walked into that restroom. When she came out, the vapors had dissapated and she was the last normal human in a building full of telepaths.

Are you listening to me, Robinson, Jenkins thought angrily at me interupting my train of thought. This is no place for a child. For heaven's sake, you saw what happened in the other lab.

How could I forget?

How could any of us forget?

Even before we'd become telepathic, we'd known that Harry and Jen were having an affair. And after a few weeks the rest of us got used to being unwilling voyeurs of their lunchtime lovemaking sessions. They would always go somewhere where they were physically alone but at that point none of us had learned how to block out thoughts so we were always with them.

So that day, a month after the first accident, they slipped into the secondary lab giggling like a couple of adolescents. Inside of a minute they were undressed and up on top of a lab table in each other's arms. There was a crash.

What was that, Harry had thought.

Do you want to worry about some silly vial or do you want to become one with me, Jen had thought back.

And so they had went at it, all the while thinking that stupid phrase `become one with each other.' The rest of us just went about our business until the screams rang out in our heads.

I was the first to arrive. I opened the door, took one look inside and threw the door shut again. When the others arrived, I reopened the door and we went in. Harry and Jen were still on the table. Above the waist, they were still recognizable. Below the waist, they were joined into a single amorphous blob of tissue. We found a broken vial near the piles of their clothes. Experiment eleven was written on its label.

Jenkins was still throwing angry thoughts at me but I shut him out, which only made him angrier. I glanced around the lab. Parker was sitting at her workbench. She smiled and thought me the data on experiment fourteen. I smiled back but I was still going to take a hard copy with me--didn't trust myself to remember it all. Williams was walking towards the vault with a storage tray.

Excuse me, Williams thought.

"What," Jenkins actually screamed and spun around. He jostled Williams. The tray tilted. A vial slid off. Experiment eleven, its label read.

"Eleven," Williams yelled, "keep your thoughts neutral." Theoretically that was the key. Neutral, abstract thoughts should prevent activation of the telekinetic mutagens. And it would only take a couple of minutes for such a small amount to become inert.

Parker started counting off the digits of pi. Williams thought of complex quadratic equations.

Click-click, click-click, click-click.

Jenkins was adding up all the prime numbers less than one thousand.

Click-click.

What was that sound? It didn't matter. I concentrated on the Miscal functions. By the time I reached the fourth, we should be safe. But what was that clicking I heard, and that singing. I turned.

"Hey diddle diddle," my daughter sang and skipped into the room.

"Sara, no," I cried.

"Her name's Sara Robinson," Federal Agent Johnson nodded to the little girl across the lab. "She's the daughter of one of the scientists," he concluded his report.

"Well, that explains her," Federal Agent Jackson replied, "but what of the cat, the violin, the cow with a broken leg and the dinnerware?"