Petrified Read Free

you lie down, sir, so’s I can strap you in? You’ll be safer.’
    Braydon shook his head. ‘Who cares if I’m safe? What difference does it make?’
    â€˜It makes all the difference, sir. From now on, your Sukie’s going to need you more than ever.’
    Braydon lay back on the gurney and the woman paramedic buckled him in. He closed his eyes as the ambulance swerved and bumped its way to North Broad Street. He didn’t pray any more. All he wanted to do was to fall asleep. If he could fall asleep, maybe he could wake up and find that it was still seven a.m. this morning, and that he hadn’t yet set out for Baltimore to kidnap Sukie from Melinda’s parents.
    He would rather that he had never seen Sukie again than have her burned alive.
    He would rather that she had never been born at all.

THREE
    Monday, 6:17 p.m.
    N athan tore the wrapper off his Baby Ruth bar and bit off almost half of it at once. ‘Well, compadres ,’ he said, with his mouth full of chocolate and peanuts. ‘We’re about as ready as we’re ever going to be. In about ten minutes’ time we’re going to make scientific history. Either that, or we’re going to end up as a laughing stock.’
    â€˜We’ve done everything according to the book, haven’t we?’ Kavita insisted.
    â€˜Oh, sure. But what a book! Kitab Al-Ajahr, The Book of Stones . An eighth-century treatise on alchemy. It’s not exactly Kleinman’s Mesenchymal Stem Cell Regeneration , Volume Three , is it?’
    â€˜You should have more faith in yourself,Professor,’ said Aarif. ‘And faith in the wisdom of Abu Musa J ā bir ibn Hayy ā n.’
    â€˜Abu Musa J ā bir ibn Hayy ā n died over thirteen centuries ago.’
    â€˜What does that matter? It is one of the greatest scientific collaborations of all time, you and he. It is like Francis Crick working with Copernicus.’
    â€˜I hope this isn’t a prelude to your asking for a pay rise,’ said Nathan.
    â€˜I admit that I would not refuse one, if it were offered,’ Aarif replied. ‘However, I am simply speaking the truth. Look what you have done here. You have given life to a creature which has not been seen on this earth since the days of Rameses the Fourth.’
    â€˜Well, yes,’ said Nathan. ‘But like I’ve said so many times, a worm is one thing and a bird is quite another.’
    â€˜We shall just have to see if you and J ā bir can prove between you that this is not so, and that a worm can also be a bird, and a bird can also be a worm.’
    The early-evening skies were beginning to clear, and in downtown Philadelphia an orange sun was making a brief guest appearance behind the trees around the Schiller Medical Research building, so that Nathan’s fourth-floor laboratory was filled up with honey-colored light.
    The light lent an almost holy radiance to the huge vivarium made of Pyrex glass that stood in the center of the workspace, reaching nearly to the ceiling. Roughly heaped on the floor of the vivarium was a tangled nest of twigs and leaves and dry vegetation; and resting on top of this nest was a fat pale-gray worm that was nearly twenty-two centimeters in length and eighteen centimeters in circumference. Its skin was thick and wrinkled and covered all over with coarse knobbly spots. Kavita had already dubbed it ‘Grubby’.
    Nathan was exhausted. His short blond hair was scruffed up and his eyes were puffy. He had been preparing for this final experiment for over a week, and for the last four nights he had slept on an air bed in his office, so that he could carry out two-hourly checks on the worm’s development.
    For the past forty-eight hours the worm had shown no increase whatsoever in size or weight, and its movements had slowed down to a barely-perceptible ripple, so Nathan guessed that it must have reached maturity. It had to be a guess, because this was