The Bird Cage (5 page)

“Right,” she said even more bitterly. “You’re on vacation. You don’t know what’s going on.”

They turned off the highway onto a county road, and soon after that, turned again, this time onto a gravel drive posted with Private Property signs. After a short distance they came to a high iron gate, with a sensor that started to blink as he drew near. He held up a card to be scanned and the gate swung open. He drove into the compound of the research group.

They were in a narrow valley that widened as he continued driving, and before them appeared a large building. He drove around to the side where a dozen other cars were parked, passed them by, and went on to a smaller parking area with only three cars.

“We’re here,” he said.

He used his card at the door, then led them through a labyrinthine of halls, opened a door, again using his card, and stepped aside for them to enter an office. The rear wall was made mostly of windows with a park view. A desk, several comfortable chairs grouped at a coffee table, television, a counter with a coffee maker and cabinets made up the furnishings.

“My office. Please wait here for a few minutes,” Sumner said, going to a door on one wall. “I’ll be back soon.” He left them in the office.

Jean walked to the windows and caught in her breath. “Trevor, come here,” she said. “Look.”

There was a park, a round table with a big umbrella, chairs, and off to the side, a barred area. She could see two chimpanzees on the other side of the bars.

Grace looked up in surprise when the door to the monitoring room opened and Dale Sumner walked in. “I told you to stay away,” she said sharply. “You’re on administrative leave for the time being. Why are you here?”

“I have two people with me,” he said. “One of them is the brother of the guy you have in cold storage, and he was going to call the cops.”

“Oh, my God. What did you tell them?”

“More to the point,” he said, “is what we’re going to tell them. How far along are you?”

“Recovery. I started the procedure this morning.”

“Not good,” he said frowning. “The brother wants to see him, to hear him say everything’s hunky dory.”

“I need ten minutes,” she said. “The temp is climbing, and in ten minutes either we’ll see the spikes or we won’t.”

He rubbed his eyes, examined the various monitors for a minute, walked to the one-way glass to observe the sleeping man, then said, “I can’t stall them long, Grace. Let them in here, let them see him sleeping and explain that it will take another two days for full recovery to be complete, that it would be dangerous to try to rush it. They won’t recognize a thing they see or even begin to understand what they’re looking at. And, Grace, we have to talk. After we get rid of them, we have to talk. There’s something you have to know.”

“What have you already told them?”

“Basically a broad outline of what we’re doing, prolonged cold sleep, the chimps are fine, he’s fine, no glitches. Everything’s fine.” He turned to leave. “I’ll bring them in and do the talking. You all right with that?”

She nodded. “I’ll turn off the brain wave monitor. I don’t want them to question the activity.”

“Damn right you don’t,” he said.

The spikes would be on record even if she didn’t stand over the machine, she knew, but she wanted to see it, know now if the spikes stopped, know precisely when they stopped. She turned it off as he walked out.

Grace could sense their hostility when Dale brought the others into the room. Trevor looked like his brother, she thought distantly, shaking his hand, but Cody’s eyes had been dancing, his big smile engaging. His brother’s eyes were as cold as ice, his face a mask. The young woman was a mystery, his girl friend? Cody’s girl friend. She was very pretty, and as hostile and suspicious as Trevor. Dale took them both to the observation window where they stood without speaking for several minutes before they turned away.

“Every bodily function is being monitored around the clock,” Dale said, motioning toward blinking lights and lines on LED screens. “The recovery procedure is underway, and is absolutely normal in every aspect. It takes about three days to return to a normal state and that process can’t be rushed without grave risk to the subject. Did you see our chimps out in the compound? There are six, and we use them repeatedly without ill effect.”

“When can I talk to him?” Trevor demanded. “How cold is he?”

“We keep the subjects at about forty-five degrees. That’s been the optimal temperature after many trials over the years,” Dale said smoothly. “Not a single subject has suffered at that temperature. This research is in its twentieth year, and it will continue for many more years before we’re satisfied that we can offer it to the general public with all the variations of individuals taken into account. Your brother is our first human subject and there could be thousands more before we can go public.”

Trevor’s cell phone rang, startling them all. Grace cried, “Not in here! Dale, get him out of here!”

“It’s the equipment,” Dale said, rushing Trevor to the door and out, with Jean at his heels. “Sorry,” he said after the door was closed behind them. “We made it a rule never to take calls in there. No electronics are allowed in there.”

Trevor was paying no attention as he answered the call from his father. He spoke briefly, then said, “They’re moving my mother to a private room. She’s conscious and I can see her in about two hours. I have to go.”

Grace came from the monitoring room and Dale said, “I have to take Mr. McCrutchen back to town.” He turned to Jean. “Why don’t you stay here and tell Dr. Wooten exactly what you told me, what happened this morning. She can fill in details about Cody’s role.”

“I can’t,” Jean said. “I’ll drive him to the hospital.”

“I’ll take him and wait to bring him back,” Dale said. “Stay here and get a little rest for a few hours.”

Trevor nodded. “You need to rest a little,” he said to Jean. “It’s okay. Let’s go,” he said turning to Sumner.

Grace listened to them, bewildered, and belatedly she nodded also. “Please, Ms. Biondi. I could use some filling in, and I’m sure you can, too.”

Jean looked at Dale Sumner. “You saw him. You know. You have to be careful.”

“I know I do,” he said quietly. “I’ll bring him back as soon as he’s ready.”

It was too surreal, Jean thought, sitting at a table in a park, watching chimpanzees grooming one another, scrambling up a tree in the distance, coming to the bars to gesture and make noises at the woman across the table from her. She had watched Dr. Wooten hand one of them a bag of peanuts, return to the table, listened to her say, “They’re as spoiled as brats. They expect a treat whenever I come out here.”

Jean had told her everything she had told Dr. Sumner, and Dr. Wooten had not made a single comment. She had listened without expression, revealing nothing. She seemed old, gaunt and unkempt, with wrinkled pants and shirt, as if she had not changed clothes, slept or looked at herself in a mirror for a long time. Her hair was gray, short and in need of a shampoo.

“Why did Cody agree to it? Become the first human subject?” Jean asked. Her real question was why had Cody trusted this woman.

“I’m not altogether certain,” Dr. Wooten said. “Money, of course. Mr. Markham paid him well, I expect, and there’s a guaranteed monthly payment for the next two years as long as he keeps coming in for routine tests, physical and psychological. He said it would get him through the rest of his education. But I think it was more than that. Something else. Being part of something bigger, and even exciting. I hardly knew him, Jean. But he was a very willing subject.”

“That Mr. Markham, why is he doing this?”

“He’s dying. And he’s very rich. He set up a foundation to keep the research going into a distant future. Perhaps he’s just a philanthropist and wants to do something worthwhile with his money.” She told the lie easily, persuasively, and marveled at how reasonable it sounded. But he had set up the foundation, even if it was to ensure that funding would not get cut off while he was in a cold sleep, delaying death. She could not tell this young woman that Markham was a man who profoundly feared death. Or that he hadn’t given a damn about Cody or what happened to him. She could not tell Jean that no one knew yet what had happened to Cody, how it might effect him, that it might even destroy him.

“I’ll put on some coffee,” she said rising. “I often sit out here and have coffee, sometimes lunch. We have a very good cafeteria, by the way. If you begin to get hungry while you wait for your friend to get back, we can have lunch sent to the office.”

After starting the coffee she hurried to the monitoring room to check the brain waves, and groaned softly when the screen came on. There was the spike, right on schedule. She reached for the control to hide the screen again, but drew back and peered more closely at the peaks, the duration. Seven minutes, they had lasted only seven minutes before subsiding again. Half as long as the others. “Thank God,” she said under her breath. “Thank God.” At last they had a clue, their first clue.

At the table outside, Jean felt a lassitude creeping over her. She was so tired, she thought, so very tired. Trevor was exhausted. Dr. Wooten looked equally exhausted. She was surrounded by people near their limit of endurance. She pulled herself up straighter, yearning for a bed, for a long peaceful sleep. Dr. Wooten had said that only she and Dr. Sumner used this little park that was off limits to the rest of the staff and everyone else except the ground crew that came to tend it. How nice to have your own private park, she thought, yawning widely. She would have put a hammock up, used this bit of privacy to get in a little nap now and then. Her eyelids were getting too heavy, and she closed her eyes. Just for a moment, she told herself.

Dr. Wooten returned with a coffee tray and stood silently watching the young woman, pitying her because she knew she had to do everything in her power to make her dismiss her own experience, make her put it out of mind, forget it again, attribute it to coincidence. Not yet, she knew. Hear what the mother had to say about her accident first, hear what Cody had to say when he woke up. It couldn’t be true, she told herself. It couldn’t have happened the way Jean had described it. An impossible event, series of events. Improbable as it might seem, they all had to be attributed to coincidence.

She made a clatter putting the tray down, and Jean woke up with a start.

Grace had returned to the monitors two more times. The first time, a flutter of motion in the brain waves had been recorded, and on the next hurried check the line had been gently undulating, hardly a ripple. She left the screen turned on after that. And now it was time to have another look and more than anything in the world she wanted to see the spikes resume.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she said to Jean who was in the office. “Make yourself comfortable, or go back out to the park if you’d like.”

Jean nodded. Trevor had been gone an hour and a half, much of the time spent driving to the hospital, she knew, and it might be another hour or longer before he returned. She wished she had gone with him. Not knowing if it had happened again was almost worse than watching it happen. And she worried that she could have it happen here, with Dr. Wooten, and it frightened her. They might send her to a hospital, or give her a shot or something. Or course, Dr. Wooten didn’t believe her, although not a word to that effect had been uttered, but still it was unbelievable. She might think Jean was having some kind of seizure and do whatever doctors did when people had seizures.

In the monitoring room Grace watched the last few minutes pass, not holding her breath, but feeling almost breathless. Then the wave changed. She rushed to the cold room without thinking about a coat, and she stood over Cody McCrutchen and watched his eyelids reveal rapid eye movements, REM sleep. She let out a long breath of relief. He was dreaming. She remained at his side until she was chilled through and through, until the movements stopped again.

“Thank God,” she said under her breath, back in the monitoring room, rubbing her cold arms briskly. His dream time had been four to six minutes shorter than normal, but even that was all right, she decided. He was still very cold.

“Everything’s fine,” she told Jean when she returned to her office a few minutes later. “Right on schedule.”

“But you can’t say when he’ll be awake and fully aware,” Jean said accusingly. “That’s what you said before.”

“No, I can’t. I can predict the progress of my own test when I control the various physical aspects of it, but every individual is unique and when he’s back to normalcy, he’ll be as unpredictable as everyone is.”

Jean turned away to gaze out at the park again. No matter how hard she tried to get Dr. Wooten to admit to anything, any contradiction, she had a way of avoiding a direct answer while making her response appear reasonable.

When Trevor and Dr. Sumner returned after three that afternoon, Trevor went directly to Jean and said, “Mother’s in a private room now. She doesn’t remember a thing before the accident. She was driving and woke up in the hospital. They said it often happens like that, amnesia for an accident, before it happens, how it happens. She’s going to be okay, what they called guarded condition, in the hospital for about a week probably, but the real crisis is over.”

“She didn’t mention Cody?”

“No. I told them I tracked him down out camping with buddies in the Olympic wilderness, out of touch until late next week. They’re good with that.” He looked at Dr. Wooten then. “How’s Cody doing? How’s it coming?”

“He’s fine, responding exactly as expected. Mr. McCrutchen, there’s nothing you can do here, nothing to do about him until he’s fully back to normal, and that won’t be until Monday. Why don’t I give you a call when you can see for yourself that he’s all right.”

He hesitated, glanced at Dale, who nodded in agreement. “If anything at all untoward happens, I’ll call you,” Dale said. “Why don’t I take you and Jean back home now and let you both get a little rest. I give you my word that I’ll call if anything happens.”

Trevor looked at Jean and she nodded also. There was nothing they would learn here, she was convinced, and she wanted to leave, never come back, never spend another minute with Dr. Wooten.