“Hey, VJ!” Victor shouted up the back stairs. “How about a swim!” He could hear his voice carom off the walls of their spacious house. It had been built in the eighteenth century by the local landowner. Victor had bought and renovated it shortly after David’s death. Business at Chimera had begun to boom after the company had gone public, and Victor felt Marsha would be better off if she didn’t have to face the same rooms where David had grown up. She’d taken David’s passing even harder than he had.

“Want to go in the pool?” Victor shouted again. It was at times like this that he wished they’d put in an intercom system.

“No, thanks,” came VJ’s answer echoing down the stairwell.

Victor remained where he was for a moment, one hand on the handrail, one foot on the first step. His earlier conversation with Marsha had reawakened all his initial fears about his son. The early unusual development, the incredible intelligence which had made him a chess master at three years of age, the precipitous drop in intelligence before he was four; VJ’s was by no means a standard maturation. Victor had been so guilt-ridden since the moment of the child’s birth that he had been almost relieved at the disappearance of the little boy’s extraordinary powers. But now he wondered if a normal kid wouldn’t jump at the chance to swim in the family’s new pool. Victor had decided to add a pool for exercise. They’d built it off the back of the house in a type of greenhouse affair. Construction had just been completed the previous month.

Making up his mind not to take no for an answer, Victor bounded up the stairs two at a time in his stocking feet. Silently, he whisked down the long hall to VJ’s bedroom, which was located in the front of the house overlooking the driveway. As always, the room was neat and orderly, with a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica lining one wall and a chemical chart of the elements on the wall opposite. VJ was lying on his stomach on his bed, totally absorbed in a thick book.

Advancing toward the bed, Victor tried to see what VJ was reading. Peering over the top of the book, all he could make out was a mass of equations, hardly what he expected.

“Gotcha!” he said, playfully grabbing the boy’s leg.

At his touch, VJ leaped up, his hands ready to defend himself.

“Whoa! Were you concentrating or what?” Victor said with a laugh.

VJ’s turquoise eyes bore into his father. “Don’t ever do that again!” he said.

For a second, Victor felt a familiar surge of fear at what he had created. Then VJ let out a sigh and dropped back onto the bed.

“What on earth are you reading?” Victor asked.

VJ closed the book as if it had been pornography. “Just something I picked up on black holes.”

“Heavy!” Victor said, trying to sound hip.

“Actually, it’s not very good,” VJ said. “Lots of errors.”

Again Victor felt a cold chill. Lately he had wondered if his son’s precocious intelligence wasn’t returning. Attempting to shrug off his worries, Victor said firmly, “Listen, VJ, we’re going for a swim.”

He went over to VJ’s bureau and extracted a pair of bathing trunks and tossed them at his son. “Come on, I’ll race you.”

Victor walked down to his own bedroom, where he pulled on a bathing suit, then called for VJ. VJ appeared and came down the hall toward his father. Victor noted with pride that his son was well built for a ten-year-old. For the first time Victor thought that VJ could be an athlete if he were so inclined.

The pool had that typical humid chlorine smell. The glass that comprised the ceiling and walls of its enclosure reflected back the image of the pool; the wintry scene outside was not in view. Victor tossed his towel over the back of an aluminum deck chair as Marsha appeared at the door to the family room.

“How about swimming with us?” Victor asked.

Marsha shook her head. “You boys enjoy yourself. It’s too cold for me.”

“We’re going to race,” Victor said. “How about officiating?”

“Dad,” VJ said plaintively. “I don’t want to race.”

“Sure you do,” Victor said. “Two laps. The loser has to take out the garbage.”

Marsha came out onto the deck and took VJ’s towel, rolling her eyes at the boy in commiseration.

“You want the inside lane or the outside one?” Victor asked him, hoping to draw him in.

“It doesn’t matter,” VJ said as he lined up next to his father, facing down the length of the pool. The surface swirled gently from the circulator.

“You start us,” Victor said to Marsha.

“On your mark, get set,” Marsha said, pausing, watching her husband and her son teeter on the side of the pool. “Go!”

After backing up to avoid the initial splash, Marsha sat down in one of the deck chairs and watched. Victor was not a good swimmer, but even so she was surprised to see that VJ was leading through the first lap and the turn. Then, on the second lap, VJ seemed to hold back and Victor won by half a length.

“Good try,” Victor said, sputtering and triumphant. “Welcome to the garbage detail!”

Perplexed at what she thought she had witnessed, Marsha eyed VJ curiously as he hoisted himself from the water. As their eyes met, VJ winked, confusing her even more.

VJ took his towel and dried himself briskly. He really would have liked to be the sort of son his mother longed for, the kind David had been. But it just wasn’t in him. Even times he tried to fake it, he knew he didn’t get it quite right. Still, if moments like this one at the pool gave his parents a sense of family happiness, who was he to deny them?

“Mother, it hurts even more,” Mark Murray said to Colette. He was in his bedroom on the third floor of the Murray townhouse on Beacon Hill. “Whenever I move I feel pressure behind my eyes and in my sinuses.” The precise terms were a startling contrast to the tiny toddler’s palms with which the child clutched his head.

“It’s worse than before dinner?” Colette asked, smoothing back his tightly curled blond hair. She was no longer startled by her toddler’s exceptional vocabulary. The boy was lying in a standard-size bed, even though he was only two and a half years old. At thirteen months he’d demanded that the crib be put in the basement.

“It’s much worse,” Mark said.

“Let’s take your temperature once more,” Colette said, slipping a thermometer into his mouth. Colette was becoming progressively alarmed even though she tried to reassure herself it was just the beginning of a cold or flu. It had started about an hour after her husband, Horace, had brought Mark home from the day-care center at Chimera. Mark told her he wasn’t hungry, and for Mark that was distinctly abnormal.

The next symptom was sweating. It started just as they were about to sit down to eat. Although he told his parents that he didn’t feel hot, the sweat poured out of him. A few minutes later he vomited. That was when Colette put him to bed.

As an accountant who’d been too queasy even to take biology in college, Horace was happy to leave the sickroom chores to Colette, not that she had any real experience. She was a lawyer and her busy practice had forced her to start Mark at day care when he was only a year old. She adored their brilliant only child, but getting him had been an ordeal the likes of which she had never anticipated.

After three years of marriage, she and Horace had decided to start a family. But after nearly a year of trying with no luck, they’d both gone in for fertility consultation. It was then they learned the hard truth: Colette was infertile. Mark resulted from their last resort: in-vitro fertilization and the use of a surrogate mother. It had been a nightmare, especially with all the controversy generated by the Baby M case.

Colette slipped the thermometer from Mark’s lips, then rotated the cylinder, looking for the column of mercury. Normal. Colette sighed. She was at a loss. “Are you hungry or thirsty?” she asked.