Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (30 page)

My name is Carol Hancock, the new Arm who is imprisoned in St. Louis as a laboratory experiment.  I am scheduled to be terminated in two months or so, if I survive the tests I’m currently being put through.  I don’t want to die.  I would like your help.  I have made many mistakes already as a new Arm, some of them that you are familiar with, and I’d like to rectify them and learn how to be a proper Arm, as you are.  I understand you will wish payment for helping me, so I’m offering myself as payment.  In my former life I learned much about my husband’s rapidly growing business, and learned much about his accounts by looking over his shoulder.  I know how to entertain important clients, and how to win them over.  I’m an expert at organization of volunteer efforts, of which I did often.  I’m positive I can help you in one way or another.  I thank you for taking the time to consider this offer, and hope for a positive reply.

Mrs. Carol Hancock

After Tonya finished, Keaton had a long belly laugh.  Tonya found the letter strange, more of a cold contact letter than one to an acquaintance this Hancock thing had met.  Either Hancock was well deluded, or she was being devious in some fashion.  Tonya wasn’t sure what to make of ‘Mrs. Stacy Keaton’.  That was a strange way to address an Arm.  “Are you going to help?” Tonya asked.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I wouldn’t either,” Tonya said.  “Not after she turned you down already.  This one’s too uncooperative to save.”

“Wait a minute, bitch,” Keaton said.  “You’re the one who’s supposed to be trying to sell me on this.  You’re the Transform-protecting soft-hearted altruistic Focus.  Not me.”

Tonya smiled.  “I deal with forty-one Northeast Region Focuses, Stacy.  I don’t have the time or political capital to help every Focus who gets into trouble.  If one of them ignores me, rejects my advice, or works counter to my interests, they have a problem.  Anyone who wastes my time in such a way is going to have to pay excessively before I’ll lift a finger to help her.  That’s just the way of the world.”

Which was one of the things her Canadian friend had warned her to watch, Tonya decided.  The standard obvious responses and choices.

“Oh, mamma, you’re a nastier bitch than I realized,” Keaton said and chuckled.  “That was a compliment, by the way.”

“I’d guessed,” Tonya said.  “So since this is settled, I have a different offer to talk to you about.”  Tonya had been sitting on this one, waiting for one of those instances where Stacy was in a good mood.  “One of my people,” Janet Paugh, “is fluent enough in German to catch articles on Transforms.  I’m proposing a clipping service from one or more West German newspapers.”

“Keep talking,” Stacy said.

Tonya gave Keaton the entire prepared spiel.  The lure was the West German Arm, Erica Eissler.  “What do you want out of this, anyway?” Stacy said.  “For me to grab Hancock?”

“Be serious,” Tonya said.  “What I want is a little debt collection muscle.  Personal, for my household’s businesses.  We’re running up quite a few unpaid debts from people who believe the legal system won’t give Transforms any help if we complain.”

“We already have an agreement on that subject,” Stacy said.  Which was true.  The payment had been in surplus Transforms stolen by Tonya from Clinics.

“You turned down my last offer.”

“I’d had a good run of finding my prey and didn’t need any extras,” Stacy said.  Tonya shook her head.  Keaton had a screwy notion she was some sort of predator, rather than a human being.  Tonya knew better than to try to convince her she was as full of beans as Rizzari.  “That isn’t always the case.”

“Debt collection is, unfortunately, timing dependent, which is why I’d like to change our earlier agreement.  I’d like to save the Clinic style payments for less timing dependent services.”

Keaton paused for a moment.  “Send a contract to my New York City PO Box,” she said.  The Arm had agreed, but it wasn’t Keaton’s style to admit it out loud.

There wasn’t a court in the land that would arbitrate this contract if it showed up on their docket, but she and Keaton worked their relationship this way anyway.  The formality made things easier on both of them.

“I’ll have it out tomorrow.”

“Great,” Keaton said.  “About Hancock?  Tell you what, since I’m in a forgiving mood: I’m positive that fucking idiot Zielinski still wants her out.  Tell him about the letter, and tell him that if he wants Hancock out, he gets to pay.” Keaton chuckled.  “Have him provide me a surplus Transform.”

Tonya smiled.  Secret Agent Zielinski would have kittens, him being a doctor and all.  “Consider it done,” she said. 

Nor would she help Zielinski provide the surplus Transform.  That was exactly the sort of thing the Council had forbidden her to do when they ordered her to avoid any direct involvement.

Chapter 7

“Transform Sickness is a very rare disease.  In 1961, there were fewer than 5,000 cases in the whole country.  That means your chance of contracting it is just under one in 30,000.  You’re much more likely to die in an auto accident.  There’s no need to panic over Transform Sickness.  Many factors determine whether someone catches Transform Sickness, including general health, hygiene, age and perhaps even the local climate.  The medical establishment hopes to be able to pin down the specifics of this within the next year or two and have a cure within the next three years.” [CDC pamphlet, 1962]

Dr.
Henry Zielinski: October 24, 1966

Dr.
Zielinski wasn’t sure he was interested in establishing a new Focus contact so soon after the debacle with Hancock.  His highest priority was the Keaton payment problem, and solving it required a disproportionate number of phone calls to his Network contacts.  He wished Tonya’s project was his only problem, but he struggled with several others.  The fact he had returned to Harvard without an Arm in tow was the worst.  Dr. Josephs, his incompetent department head, was irate.  Dr. Zielinski had even gotten a phone call from Assistant Dean Franklin not so gently reminding him that they sent him to St. Louis to come back with an Arm, not with complaints from the FBI.  His work with Hancock wasn’t going to help his reputation one bit, especially if she died. 

If, however, he found a way to pay off Keaton and get her help in extracting Hancock from the Detention Center, that led to other, more profitable, scenarios.  The reality of a live and free Arm, willing to aid him in his research, without the baggage Keaton had with her criminal record and wanted posters, would be more than enough to salvage his reputation.  He would be able to publish the data he had learned about Arms through his work with Keaton.  Published papers meant official notice, award nominations, grant money, a new set of assistants, and a nicer laboratory.  Perhaps a book or two for the popular press, rounds on the lecture circuit, and enough of the good things in life to keep Glory, his wife, happy for once.

He wouldn’t hold his breath, though.  Perhaps the next Arm would work out better…

Dr. Zielinski found the Network’s information on Focus Lorraine Rizzari fascinating, if incomplete.  Few Focuses possessed any sort of higher education, but Focus Rizzari had recently completed her Ph.D.  The story behind her Ph.D. had to be interesting, but wasn’t in the meager information packet.  In fact, he hadn’t even been aware that someone of Focus Rizzari’s talents lived in the Boston area.  He wondered why he hadn’t been told.

Dr.
Zielinski finished brushing his teeth and lathered up to shave.  Glory disliked the situation.  No, ‘disliked’ was putting it mildly.  She had been on his case about his interest in Transform Sickness ever since his first NSF research grant dealing with Transforms, right after the first Focuses had broken out of Quarantine.  She thought studying Transform Sickness was too dangerous.  He couldn’t disagree with the danger, of course, but no matter how politically hot Transform Sickness became, it still was a large public health problem, and it wouldn’t go away if people chickened out and refused to study it.  He finished shaving, washed his face, and studied the image in the mirror.  He could swear his bald spot was getting bigger and his hair greyer by the day.  He combed his hair over the bald spot, and made a face at how silly it looked.  He decided to continue wearing his hat, even if hats had gone out of style.

Glory had become even more unhappy four years ago, when he started his work with Arms.  Arms were dangerous!  Then Rose Desmond had shot him.  Glory had put her foot down, but he didn’t stop working on Arms, costing him much of her trust. 

He finished tying his tie and frowned.  Glory had been livid after he returned from St. Louis.  The FBI had come to their house and interviewed her, which played into her fears about his work.  He suspected the FBI would grill him about Hancock soon; they suspected him of vague interference in their affairs.  They smelled something
off
in the St. Louis situation, but they couldn’t put their fingers on what.  He hoped they didn’t suspect him of his work with Keaton. 

Glory gave him a dirty look and stayed out of his way as he ate his breakfast, silent and brooding.  He ate his Cheerios and his banana, slugged down his prerequisite two cups of coffee, and headed out the door to his office. 

He ignored the rumble of traffic, the diesel exhaust of buses, and the annoyances of the city on his commute.  Something was wrong with everyone’s approach to the Arm transformation problems, including his.  The FBI fixated on Arms as potential agents and actual lawbreakers.  The medical community considered Arms nothing more than another lethal Transform Sickness effect.  The Network Focuses considered Arms to be another sort of Transform to bring into Focus households as peons. 

Until recently, he
had viewed the Arm’s problems as purely medical.  His experiences with Hancock convinced him that all these views were wrong.  If a man walking on a beach found an old rusty non-working pocket watch, would he then conclude that pocket watches were mere decoration, not meant to serve a purpose?  Even with all those gears inside?

No.  Arms were Major Transforms.  They should have a powerful, positive and independent role in Transform society.  He knew he was right!  If only he had some proof.

If only the Arms could find their own role and
take it
.

His meeting with Focus Rizzari was not at his office or at her Transform household.  Instead, they had arranged to meet at the Park Plaza, one of Boston’s older hotels.  The Park Plaza had been a fixture of Boston’s downtown and theater district since the roaring twenties.  Discreet.  On the other hand, most Focuses felt more secure if you came to them.  Focus Rizzari’s desire to meet in a neutral location made Dr. Zielinski a little wary.  Women Ph.D.s had always struck him as a little strange to begin with.  A woman Ph.D. Focus might be far beyond strange.

He waited in the Park Plaza foyer, brooding about his career and his reputation.

Focus Rizzari came in with an undersized entourage of only two.  Given their general air of health and energy, he guessed they were both Transforms.  One was a woman, a surprise.  A Focus’s entourage was supposed to be her protection, her bodyguards, and
Dr. Zielinski couldn’t imagine what sort of protection a woman could afford this Focus, even if the woman Transform bodyguard was young, fit and taller than he was.  Focus Rizzari herself was easy to pick out of a crowd.  All Focuses were, for the cognoscenti; although nothing anyone could put into words or numbers, Focuses were just ‘more there’.  Focus Rizzari stood just under five foot tall and wore a subdued dress and blouse combination more typical for a high end corporate secretary than a newly minted professor.  She wore her black hair bobbed short, and her hairstyle framed, in a severe way, her narrow face and her dark brown eyes.  Her wide rimmed almost triangular glasses aroused his suspicion, confirmed when he shook hands and he got a good look through the lenses.  Cheaters.  Purely decoration.  From what he knew, any Focus worth the name had twenty-twenty vision or better after about a year or two, and Rizzari had been a Focus for five years.

During the introductions, he put it all together.  Focus Rizzari was into misdirection, into hiding who she was.  Security conscious, the FBI would say.

“Call me Lori, Dr. Zielinski,” she said right after introducing herself.

“Lori.”

“Shall we have a seat?”  She motioned to a couple of over-stuffed chairs with muted floral patterns, located near the far corner of the hotel foyer.  Dr. Zielinski nodded.

“So…”  He didn’t know where to start.  He had agreed to the meeting cold, probably not the smartest thing to do, but he was still rattled by the events in St. Louis.  Normally he had a better feel for meetings of this nature, but he didn’t even know why this Focus wanted to talk to him today.

“You’re wondering why I needed to talk to you?” Focus Rizzari said, the sort of uncanny comment Focuses often produced.  Focus Rizzari exuded calmness, not at all fidgety or flighty.  She didn’t have an academic feel to her, which puzzled him.  Dr. Zielinski’s Network contacts said she had started teaching at Boston College earlier this fall.

Her hiring by Boston College had to be a political statement, a reaction to the recent rumblings from the left, none of which made him happy.  The civil rights struggle didn’t bother him; more power to them if they lifted themselves up by their own bootstraps.  The protests sparked by the escalation of the Vietnam War were a different story.  When one’s President called on Americans to fight in a war, especially against the Communists, one went and fought.  He had done his time in Korea, as an MD.  While it hadn’t been pretty, it had been necessary.  The war protesters tied their protests into the youth fads of the day – dirty, messy, longhaired beatniks – and, lately, they tied the treatment of Transforms into their lefty equations.  That was the last thing
Dr. Zielinski wanted to see.  Transforms were resented enough already, and every time the details of life as a Transform or details of the disease were brought into the limelight, things got worse.

Perhaps Focus Rizzari’s paranoia was correct.

In any event, Boston College had hired a few colored professors, a few longhaired liberal arts types, and now a Transform professor, all to head off any student protests against their school administration.  So, here she was, the token Transform professor, Focus Rizzari.  He didn’t expect much.

“Yes,” he said.  “Our mutual friends only informed me of the basics: you’re a beginning professor at Boston College, and you need some information I might be able to provide.”

Focus Rizzari nodded, her face an emotional blank.  “Although I’m going to spend most of my time teaching, I do want to help my fellow Transforms through my research.  I don’t know if our mutual friends told you, but my Ph.D. was in microbiology, and my thesis involved the identification of additional components in Para-procorticotrophin.” Juice.  Interesting.  He hadn’t recognized her name, nor did her dissertation topic ring a bell, so he suspected it hadn’t yet been published.  Probably her dissertation never would be. 

“Through our mutual friends, I recently discovered that there’s some unpublished work by a
Dr. Liutraven Van Reijn in the Netherlands.  I believe his unpublished work has some relevance to mine, and, well, you’re the local expert in Dr. Van Reijn’s work.”

Dr.
Zielinski nodded.  Focus Rizzari didn’t have any idea who he really was.  He guessed she had read his recent papers and knew he was on the staff at Harvard Medical School, but he doubted she knew of his academic history, his long association with the Focus Network or his fieldwork.  “Dr. Van Reijn’s recent work is quite speculative and he’s not ready to publish.”  He and Liutraven had been in contact with each other for a year or so, trading data on Transform Sickness and Transforms.  Liutraven’s ideas had good data support, answered many troublesome questions, and supplied quite a few disturbing hints and further questions.  They weren’t proven yet, at least to Dr. Zielinski’s standards.

“So,
Dr. Zielinski, can you tell me anything about Dr. Van Reijn’s unpublished work?”  No Focus charisma at all, not what he expected from a Focus with a Ph.D.  Most of the time, but not always, the more intelligent the Focus, the better she wielded the various Focus tricks.

Dr.
Zielinski glanced around the hotel foyer.  No eavesdroppers.  “Dr. Van Reijn is working on a radically different understanding of Transform Sickness.  You’re familiar with the standard research model for Transform Sickness?” As opposed to the medical establishment model, as popularized in the national press.

“The MRC model?  Yes,” Focus Rizzari said.

The MRC – the United Kingdom Medical Research Council – had established themselves as the early leader in Transform Sickness research back in the mid ‘50s.  He wasn’t so sure they would be able to maintain their early lead, not only because he supported the research done at Harvard, but also because he couldn’t believe an organization tied to a socialist medical establishment could keep its standards up for long.  He half expected they would be out of business by the end of the decade.  The CDC and the medical researchers accepted the MRC model, while the AMA and an overwhelming number of practicing physicians promoted the medical establishment model.  The fights between the proponents of each model always livened up any medical conference that dealt with Transform Sickness, even peripherally.

“
Dr. Van Reijn’s new model does away with the MRC’s insistence that Transform Sickness produces a broad spectrum of effects derived from a single biochemical alteration,” he said.  “The Van Reijn model includes only eight stable states, not an infinite number of effects, based on three variables: gender, abundance, and presence of a metacampus; he also posits a large network of biochemical alterations.”  The metacampus was the extra addition to the hippocampus that made a Major Transform.

Focus Rizzari smiled, of all things.  “Good.  Someone with a little sense.  As a Focus, the MRC model’s insistence of an infinite gradation of effects between men and women Transforms, Focuses and Arms struck me as counterintuitive.”  One of the reasons the Focuses tended to discount the MRC model in favor of the medical establishment model.  “Yes, I understand why the MRC model requires an infinite gradation of effects.  Their premise.  I’m very interested in what
Dr. Van Reijn has to say about the MRC model’s premise, especially regarding Sports.”