The Frankenstein Factory (16 page)

“It’s beginning to look as if we all have to stay and see it through,” Earl said. “Whether we like it or not.”

“T
HERE WAS A PERIOD
in my younger days,” Dr. Harry Armstrong was saying, “when the whole world was in much the same position that we are. Remember the health scares of the 1970s? Almost every week the newspapers had a new one—cigarette smoking, pesticides, drinking water, even soap! They were all supposed to cause cancer. I think it was after the great radio scare of 1979 that people stopped listening. You remember that one, Jazine, or were you too young?”

“I was a baby then,” Earl admitted. “But I’ve read something about it.”

“Damnedest thing you ever saw!” He took another sip of his martini. “Some fancy professor came out with a theory that the main cause of cancer in human beings and animals was the circulation of radio waves in the atmosphere. He pointed out that radio had come into being early in the twentieth century, at just about the time when there was a sudden upsurge in cancer deaths. His theory was that certain bodily organs received radio waves in much the same manner as crystal sets, and that these waves had a harmful effect on the human body, changing the cell structure and promoting the growth of cancer. A lot of people believed it, too. A few radio stations in rural areas were actually attacked and blown up—put off the air. Transmission towers were toppled and a couple of people were killed.”

“Cancer was a real fear back in those days.”

“Still is, though we can usually control it now.” He finished the drink and set down the empty glass. “My point is that after the great radio scare people simply stopped listening to such things. Their attitude was one of utter resignation—fatalism, if you will. Health faddists and diet-book publishers were simply forced out of business. There was even a growing indifference to the pollution controls of the seventies. And you’re seeing that same thing here, in microcosm. The killings have become too much for us to comprehend. We’re down to four people but we don’t care anymore.”

“Speak for yourself,” Vera said. “I damn well care about staying alive!”

“But we’ve passed the point of sheer terror,” Armstrong argued. “We’re sitting here drinking our martinis, casually discussing the thing.”

“What else is there to do? We’ve searched the island. We’ve searched the house.”

“Do we ever pass the point of sheer terror?” Earl asked, pouring himself another drink in seeming contradiction to his words. “Maybe we’re just drinking to settle our nerves.”

“After the days of Hitler and the war crimes, someone once wrote on the banality of evil,” Armstrong went on. “And it is true, you know.”

“It is true,” Hobbes agreed, joining the conversation for the first time. He seemed to have gotten control of himself, and though his gaze was constantly switching to the door and windows—as if expecting to see Frank—he spoke with a firm, smooth voice. “In my younger days, when ICI was just beginning, I worked for a time in Brazil. There I got to know an American technician in the employ of the government. This was a time, back in the seventies, when the government of Brazil still practiced repression and torture against the political opposition. This technician, an electronics expert, originally was employed by the government to develop voice-activated listening devices by which they could bug the opposition. But by the time I got to know him he’d slipped ever so slightly over the line. He’d developed a variation of his device, called an electric microphone, to be used as an instrument of torture. The sound-activated mike controlled electric current flowing to the victim’s body. The sound of his own screams was enough to increase the intensity of the electric shocks.”

“Horrible!” Vera said.

“And yet my friend did not consider himself a monster. He could see little difference between his listening devices and his torture devices. ‘I only make them,’ he told me one evening. ‘How they use them is on their conscience, not mine.’”

“Evil has passed out of fashion,” Armstrong commented. “We’ve been through the Watergate and Maxwell scandals in Washington, the moondust business in London, even the food-profiteering mess in Moscow. None of those men considered themselves evil! Even after they were sent to prison they felt they’d been merely misunderstood!”

“Are you trying to say that Frank doesn’t consider himself evil when he kills these people?” Earl asked.

“I don’t believe so. I believe he’s simply performing a natural function. In his present state it might be as natural as breathing.”

“You’re saying he’s insane.”

“Not in the usual sense. You must remember that there’s never been a case like this—not in the whole history of law or medicine. Our Frank is the first brain to die and then awaken in another man’s body a generation later.”

Lawrence Hobbes got unsteadily to his feet, and Earl wondered if he’d had too much to drink. “You three can go on talking about it as much as you want. But I intend to do something.”

“What?”

“Get you off this island.”

“It was you who said there was no way off,” Earl reminded him. “You said you’d stay and see it through.”

“And so I will. But there’s no need to endanger Miss Morgan and you. Whatever happens to me, it’s important that someone survives to tell the story to the outside world.”

“What do you intend to do?”

“The fire was no good because it was too small and you lit it in daylight. A larger fire, lit after sundown, would surely attract help from shore.”

“What do we use for fuel?”

“With the two laser pistols we can cut down every tree on the island, if necessary.”

“And when help comes?”

“You three will leave here.”

“What about me?” Armstrong asked. “You can’t send me away. I have a patient.”

“Your patient seems to have disappeared.”

“He may only be hiding somewhere, afraid of us,” Vera suggested.

“Hiding somewhere waiting to kill us,” Armstrong countered. “That’s more like it!”

But they decided to help Hobbes with his plan because there was really nothing else to do except sit around, drink, and wait for an ending that they couldn’t imagine. Earl took one pistol while Hobbes took the other, and they began cutting down the smaller, more manageable trees nearest the beach. Vera went with Earl and helped stack small branches as he sliced them off with the laser.

“What do you make of old Hobbes now?” he asked her. “Still think he’s behind this thing?”

“He’s behind something! After all, it’s his island, his house. If Frank is hiding somewhere, Hobbes is the most likely person to know about it. Maybe Frank’s not even conscious yet. Maybe Hobbes just spirited him away into one of those tubes in the vault. He could have done it easily enough, using the elevator.”

“I’ve been thinking about that too,” Earl admitted, slicing through another slender tree trunk and then quickly stepping aside. “We didn’t search those tubes. I think I was a bit in awe of the number of them. And then Hobbes told me he has an ex-president down there, among others.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Can we believe him about anything? Is Frank’s body really that of his son Larry? Did he even have a son Larry?”

“Why would he lie?”

“To keep us from destroying Frank. To help explain his own actions in this whole matter.”

They carried several large logs out to the beach, where Hobbes and Armstrong were busy stacking wood. “Hard work,” Armstrong sighed. “Makes me realize I’m not a young man any longer.”

It took them another hour to assemble a good-sized pile, with Earl doing most of the heavy hauling. They’d cut down a dozen trees and stripped them of their branches. The resulting stack reached over their heads and would surely make a bonfire that could be seen from the mainland.

“We’ll light it after dark,” Hobbes said. “That’ll bring somebody!”

Suddenly Armstrong gripped Earl by the shoulder. “Look there!”

Earl followed his pointing finger toward a dense stand of trees toward the tip of the island. He saw something move.

“It must be Frank,” he said, starting forward.

“Be careful!” They saw the green of the surgical jumpsuit.

Then he broke from cover, heading toward them, and they saw that it was Frank. His left arm dangled as if useless, and he made not a sound as he moved onto the beach toward them. Earl was frozen to the spot, transfixed by the sight of this creature they had made.

Then Vera screamed and began to run toward the house.

There was something about her terror that communicated itself to the three men. Perhaps it was a terror of the unknown—the sort primitive man must have felt when confronted for the first time with some strange creature of the jungle.

Armstrong and Hobbes both backed off and Earl followed. They retreated to the edge of the trees, watching Frank’s steady approach across the sand. He was barefooted beneath the jumpsuit.

Then suddenly Earl realized their mistake.

“The laser pistols! We left them by the wood pile! He’s cut us off from them!”

Weaponless, not knowing the strength or cunning of their foe, they had no choice but to retreat. Vera was waiting at the door when they reached the house, and she slammed it shut behind them. “My God, what’ll we do now?” she asked.

Dr. Armstrong shook his head. “He’s got the pistols. He can kill us anytime he wants.”

But Lawrence Hobbes wasn’t discouraged. “The pistols are useless to him. When Larry died—and when that other brain died—laser pistols hadn’t yet been invented. He won’t know what they are or how to operate them.”

“You’re forgetting,” Earl reminded him. “He watched us cutting down the trees with them.”

“But they’re still tricky to operate for a novice. He may not even notice them there on the sand.”

“Even if he doesn’t—what are we going to do?”

“We wait till dark, just as we’d planned anyway. Then we light the fire.”

“But he’s out there,” Vera said, “and we’re in here!”

“I’ll go,” Hobbes stated. “I’ll be safe with him.”

“Why? Because he’s got the body of your son and the brain of a murderer?” Earl asked. “Don’t be a fool! At the very least he killed Tony, because no one else could have done it. And it’s beginning to look as if he killed them all.”

But Hobbes was adamant. “We’ll wait until dark,” he insisted. “And then I’ll light it. Now—how about a drink?”

There were no takers.

Hobbes shrugged and walked over to the little makeshift bar. “Just enough for one martini. I’ll have to mix up some more.”

“I’m going to my room,” Vera said. “I get a chill just being down here, with that—thing—him outside. He got out of the house and he can get back in, somehow. Locked doors won’t keep him away.”

When she went upstairs Earl followed along. “I want you to know I’m sorry about Tony,” he said.

“Why be? You’re the last person in the world who should be sorry. He wanted to kill you!”

“He wanted to
keep
you! There’s a difference.”

She waved a hand. “Freddy’s dead. Tony’s dead. There’ll be others.”

“Are you really as hard as you try to act at times?” He was remembering how she’d run into the house when Frank appeared on the beach. “Sometimes I think it’s a bit of an act. I think you’re as alone and as frightened as the rest of us.”

“Of course I’m frightened! But I’m frightened of the future, of the unknown. No one’s ever frightened by memories.”

“The memories of Hitler’s concentration camps were pretty frightening to a great many people.”

“Only because they feared that it might happen again. Tony and Freddy aren’t going to die again. It’s already happened.”

“Frank’s going to die again,” Earl reminded her.

She’d reached the door of her room but she paused and turned to face him. “You know why I ran from him like that? Because it wasn’t till that moment—seeing him alive (or reanimated, as Hobbes likes to say)—that I fully realized what we’d all done. All that time in the operating room Sunday night was simply a textbook exercise, like so many other surgical practices I’ve been through. Even afterward, seeing him on the table, breathing and thrashing about, I felt nothing. It wasn’t till I was down there, seeing him walk toward us, that I realized the full horror of it. God, did you see the way his arm hung at his side? I was reminded of every Frankenstein movie I ever saw!”

“Both of Frankenstein’s arms worked,” Earl said. “I think it was the Mummy who had a bad arm.” He’d seen a horror hologram back in New York, and he could still remember the bandage-wrapped figure reaching out to almost touch him.

“But my point is that we’ve created a monster! We haven’t brought somebody back to life—we’ve combined bits and pieces to create a whole new person. And that’s what’s wrong!”

“You’re sounding like a moralist. I didn’t know there was room for morals in the new medical profession.”

“You mean because of the mercy-killing and pseudo-suicide? Doctors don’t make the laws!”

“That doesn’t exempt them. Congressmen don’t kill their patients rather than cure them. No matter where the law comes from, ultimately the moral judgment is in the hands of one man, at the end of the line. Wasn’t that proven in the war-crimes trials?”

“And Frank?” she asked quietly, bringing him back to the subject.

“Morally indifferent, I’d say.”

“You’re not horrified of him—of it—of the whole idea?”

“The prolonging of life …”

“This is the
reanimation
of life!”

“A word,” he scoffed.

She opened the door and went into her room. “I’ll see you later.”

“Could I come in?”

She hesitated, then shook her head. “Not until this is over. I don’t think I could make love with that thing waiting outside.”

They stood by the front window, watching the bright golden orb of the sun dip gradually behind the Volcano of the Three Virgins. A few sea birds, roused from their resting place by some antic breeze, took wing near the shore, passing before the sun as if in salute to the dying day.

“It’ll be dark soon,” Lawrence Hobbes said. “Then we’ll light it.”

“I think it’s suicide to go out there in the dark,” Armstrong told him.