Hulk, Peter David [best ereader for academics .TXT] 📗

That was when he heard an alarmed shriek from Edith. He hadn’t heard her enter because he’d been so enraptured with what was occurring with Bruce. Quickly he shoved the pacifier into Bruce’s mouth even as he turned toward Edith and tried to reassure her.

“I said he’s fine!”

“Fine!” Edith Banner practically howled. She was a pretty enough woman, with curly brown hair and, normally, a quiet authority about her. Not at this moment, though. At this moment there was nothing at all quiet about her. “His arm’s broken! His head’s swelling! He has lumps the size of golf balls!”

“Edith, darling, you’re exaggerating. Kids fall down . . .”

“David, did you look at him?”

He cast a quick, nervous glance at his son, who was still lying on his back, and then he visibly relaxed and grinned. “Why, yes, I have. Have you?”

She pushed past David, and stopped and stared. There, lying on the floor, was Bruce, contentedly sucking on the pacifier, which his father believed gave the baby’s life all its meaning. His arms were normal, his head was fine. There were no signs of lumps on him, golf ball–sized or otherwise.

Edith was completely perplexed. “But I . . . I could have sworn . . .”

David spread wide his hands and shrugged. “What can I tell you, except that, you know, I told you.”

She knelt down, inspected Bruce’s arms. David watched her passively, as did their son. Then she shook her head and said firmly, “I’m taking him to Dr. Ungaro.”

“He doesn’t need to go to his pediatrician!” David told her in annoyance.

“I think he does. I know what I saw, David. I’ve got to make sure he’s okay. What kind of mother would I be otherwise?”

David Banner repressed a snarl, and instead substituted a very forced grin. “I suppose you’re right, dear,” he said with strained courtesy, but the thought of the boy’s doctor being brought in at this developmentally vital point in Bruce’s life was upsetting.

As it turned out, he needn’t have worried. It was all Banner could do to suppress a chuckle as the pediatrician studied the boy from top to bottom, turned to his parents with the air of the accomplished pedant, and announced, “It’s hard to say. Somehow, when he feels too much frustration, his cell tissues . . . well, there’s some kind of hardening. I don’t think it’s much to worry about. A kind of tendinitis, I think.”

All the way on the drive back home, his mother held Bruce tightly and made clucking noises about tendinitis and what it meant for the child’s long-term health. She was skeptical of the diagnosis, but didn’t know what else to think. As for David Banner, he kept speaking to her reassuringly about how he’d read a paper once about “infant tendinitis” as a syndrome that usually passed after the first year. All the time he did so, he kept trying not to laugh at both the doctor’s idiocy and his wife’s gullibility.

That night, after Edith had gone to bed and drifted into an uneasy, worried sleep, David Banner went down to his private study. It wasn’t very large, but that didn’t bother him. David didn’t concern himself with such useless trappings as possessions or the size of one’s home. All he cared about was the research. And he wanted to update his journals and log entries while the results of his experiment on Bruce were still fresh in his mind.

He pulled his journals out from a locked drawer and began flipping through them, looking for the appropriate one in which to make an entry. As he did so, he stumbled across notations that he had made several years ago, back when . . . it . . . had all started. He paused and started reading the entries, reliving the sense of frustration he’d felt when his theories and plans were given short shrift.

When he’d first arrived at Desert Base in Nevada, he’d had high hopes for himself, for his research, for everything. He’d been ambitious, so ambitious, convinced that soldiers would sing his praises for the advances he was going to bring to them and to the world.

And then he’d hit a brick wall: a high and mighty colonel named Thaddeus Ross, who’d acquired the nickname “Thunderbolt” for his tendency to launch his anger, straight and true, at whoever had offended him and effectively incinerate the poor fool on the spot. Word was that he was in the fast lane to make general. And Banner couldn’t help but think, then and now, that if the future included General Thunderbolt Ross, then the military establishment was pretty much going to be spiraling straight down the tubes.

He found one notation written in a quavering script. He remembered making the entry; he’d been so furious that his hand had been shaking. He was still able to make it out, though:

Meeting went as poorly as it possibly could have. Tried to convince Ross there is simply no way practically to shield against every weaponized agent. Instead I can make superimmune systems by strengthening the human cellular response. Ross didn't get it. Didn't even try. Said that manipulating the immune system is dangerous and stupid. Said that both he and the president's science adviser have made it clear I can't use human subjects. How am I supposed to proceed? How can I prove to them that I'm right, prove the effectiveness of my work, if they won't give me the tools to do it?

He stared at the entry for a long time. He tried to cast his memory back to what his state of mind had been when he’d written it. Had he known, even then, what he was going to do? Or had he been trying to build up the nerve to face the inevitable?

The phone rang, the noise cutting through the still air so loudly that it caused him to jump. He grabbed up the phone and said, “Banner.”

“Banner,” came the sharp,