by Timothy Zahn
“Well, yes, I suppose that might be a problem,” he admitted.
“And, even if you do manage to touch the baby’s mind, are you even going to know it?” I persisted. “This isn’t going to be like the colic studies you did with Sam Sheeler, you know—those babies were at least being exposed to a normal range of stimuli. What on Earth has a fetus got to think about?”
He grinned suddenly. “I said it might take some practice.” He stood up. “Look, there’s no sense dithering over these questions now. We’ll go see Jordan tomorrow and hash it all out then. Okay?”
“All right,” I said. “After all, if it doesn’t work out, no one will ever have to know we came up with such a crazy idea.”
“That’s what I like about you, Iris: your confidence in me. See you tomorrow.”
We arrived on the Hayward campus at two o’clock sharp the next day—and it took only ten minutes for my hopes of keeping this idea under wraps to be completely destroyed.
They were waiting for us outside the door to Jordan’s office: a man and woman, both dressed in conservative business suits. I recognized them from TV news shorts of the previous year, but before I could clue Dan in they had stepped forward to intercept us. “Dr. Staley?” the man said. “My name’s John Cooper; this is Helen Reese. I wonder if we might have a word with you?” He gestured down the hall to where the door of a small lounge was visible.
“We have an appointment with Dr. Jordan,” I put in.
“He’s not back from class yet,” Mrs. Reese said. “This will only take a few minutes, if you don’t mind.”
Dan shrugged. “All right,” he said agreeably.
The others remained silent until we were seated in a small circle in a corner of the otherwise deserted lounge. “Dr. Staley, we understand you’re planning some sort of experiment with Dr. Jordan to determine when life begins,” Cooper said, leaning forward slightly in his chair. “We’d like to ask you a few questions about this, if we may.”
Dan cocked an eyebrow. “I fail, first of all, to see how you learned about my private conversation with Dr. Jordan,” he said calmly, “and, secondly, to understand what business it is of yours.”
“Mr. Cooper is the Bay Area president of the Family Alliance,” I told him. “Mrs. Reese is their chief antiabortion advocate.”
They both looked at me with surprise. “I see,” Dan nodded. “Well, that explains the second part of my question. You folks want to take a crack at the first part now?”
“How we heard about it is unimportant,” Mrs. Reese said. “What is important is that we find out how you stand on the abortion issue.”
Dan blinked. “Why?”
“Surely, Doctor, you understand the highly subjective nature of the experiment you’re planning,” she said. “Naturally, we need to know what your own beliefs are concerning when life arises.”
“My telepathic ability is not subjective,” Dan said, a bit stiffly. “It’s as scientific and accurate as anything you’d care to name. Whatever my beliefs happen to be, I can assure you they do not interfere with either my perception or interpretation.”
“Beliefs always affect interpretation, to one degree or another,” Cooper said. “Now, you yourself said you could prove the fetus wasn’t human until the second trimester of pregnancy. It seems to us that, with such an attitude, you would be very likely to interpret any brain activity before that point as ‘nonhuman,’ whether it is or not.”
Dan looked at me. “Iris?” he invited.
I nodded. “The exact quote, Dr. Cooper, was as follows: ‘At worst, I may be able to show that a fetus isn’t human during the entire first month or trimester or whatever.’ End quote. Dr. Staley made no assumptions in that statement. I suggest you ask your spies to be more accurate in the future.”
Reese bristled. “We weren’t spying on anyone, Miss Marx; the information relayed to us was obtained quite legitimately.”
“I’m sure it was,” Dan said, getting to his feet. “Now if you’ll excuse us, Dr. Jordan is expecting us.”
The rest of us stood, as well. “We haven’t finished our conversation, though—” Cooper began.
“Yes, we have,” Dan interrupted him. “If—if, mind you—I do this experiment it’ll be because I’m convinced it can be done objectively and accurately. If you have any suggestions or comments you’re welcome to write them up and send them to my office. Good day.”
Threading between them, we left the lounge.
Jordan and Dr. Pamela Halladay were waiting for us when we arrived back at Jordan’s office. “Sorry we’re late,” Dan told them after quick handshakes all around, “but we ran into the local ethics committee. Any idea how the Family Alliance might have overheard our conversation, Dr. Jordan?”
The two of them exchanged glances, then Jordan grimaced. “My secretary, probably,” he said. “I called Pam right after I talked to you, and the door to her office was open. I’m sorry; it never occurred to me that she’d go off and tell anyone.”
“No harm done,” Dan shrugged. “Let’s forget it and get down to business, shall we?”
“Your idea sounds very interesting, Dr. Staley,” Halladay said, “but I think there are one or two technical points that need clearing up. First of all, would you be following a single fetus from conception to term, or would you try to reach a group of fetuses at various stages of growth?”
“I hadn’t really thought that much about it,” Dan said slowly. “I suppose the second method would be faster.”
“It would give better statistics, too,” Jordan said. “What do you think, Pam—would a hundred be enough?”
“A hundred subjects?” Dan said, looking a little taken aback.
“Well, sure. If you want this to have scientific validity you’ll need a reasonable sample. Why?—did you have a smaller number in mind?”
“Yeah. About ten.” Dan frowned. “Maybe we could compromise at twenty-five or so.”
“You cut the sample too small and it won’t be scientific enough to satisfy the skeptics,” Jordan warned.
“Whether it’ll be scientific enough anyway was my second question,” Halladay put in.
We all looked at her. “What do you mean?” Jordan asked.
“Oh, come on now, Eliot—the heart of the scientific method is the reproducibility of an experiment. With only one proven telepath on Earth, this one is inherently unrepeatable. Whatever Dr. Staley concludes we’ll have to take on faith.”
“Are you suggesting I might lie?” Dan asked quietly.
“No—I’m suggesting you might misinterpret what you hear. How are you going to know, say, whether the differences you see are human versus nonhuman or simply four months versus two months?”
Dan nodded. “I see. I wondered why you hadn’t told Dr. Jordan you’d seen Cooper and Mrs. Reese loitering out in the hall earlier. You called them down on us, didn’t you?”
Halladay’s face reddened. “No, I … uh … look, I didn’t expect anyone to come out here and ambush you like that. I just wanted to know whether you were pro- or anti-abortion; if you’d ever taken a public stand on the issue. I mean, they keep files on that sort of thing.”
Jordan was looking at his co-worker as if she’d just shown a KGB membership card. “Pam! What on earth—”
“It’s all right, Dr. Jordan. As I said before, no harm done.” Dan turned to Halladay, and there was a glint in his eye I didn’t often see. “I’ll tell you what I told your friends: I’m not doing this to push anyone’s opinions, and that includes any I might have. If you have to pigeonhole me anywhere, put me down as ‘protruth.’ I won’t wear any other labels, understand?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, Doctor.” She smiled wanly. “I guess I’m not immune to the emotions the whole subject generates. I’ll keep my feelings to myself from now on—I promise.”
“Will you prove your sincerity?�
� Dan leaned forward and offered his hand.
She frowned at it for a second before understanding flickered across her face. Then, visibly steeling herself, she reached out and gingerly took his hand. They held the position for nearly twenty seconds before Dan released his grip and sat back. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll be a great help to us.” Turning to Jordan, he nodded. “Now then, are we ready to begin working out some of the details?”
The discussion took nearly an hour, and the experimental design arrived at was essentially the one that was actually used later that year. Several important problems still remained, however, notably the question of masking the mother’s thoughts while Dan tried to touch those of the fetus. From past experience we knew that a deep, sedative-induced sleep would probably do the trick, but Jordan was understandably opposed to giving large dosages of such drugs to pregnant women. The question of whether or not Dan could recognize humanness in a fetal mind at all also remained unanswered.
During the drive back to San Francisco, I asked Dan if Halladay could be trusted.
“I think so,” he said. “I didn’t see any evidence of duplicity when I touched her. And she was genuinely upset to find the Family Alliance people lying in wait for us.”
“What about them? Do you think they’ll make trouble?”
“How could they? Denouncing the experiment before it even takes place would make them look silly—especially since a check with Halladay will show them that the design still has some pretty basic problems. Saying this far in advance that they reject the results will leave them wide open to a charge that they’re afraid of the truth.”
Something in his voice caught my attention. “You sound less optimistic than you did yesterday,” I said. “You thinking of calling it off?”
He was silent a long moment. “No, not really. It’s just that the whole thing is getting more complicated than I’d envisioned it.”
I shrugged. “True—but don’t forget that it’s your experiment. If you don’t want to do things Jordan’s way, all you have to do is say so.”
“I know. But he’s unfortunately got a good point: that if we don’t at least take a stab at doing things rigorously, all we’re going to do is throw more gasoline at the emotional bonfire.” He paused. “Tell me, do you have any relatives or close friends who are pregnant?”
I blinked at the abrupt change of subject. “Yes—four to nine, depending on how close a friend you need.”
“Let me have a fast rundown, will you?”
I drove one-handed for a while as I gave him a brief personality sketch of each of the nine women. Afterward he sat silently for several minutes, digesting it all. “What do you think Kathy would say if I asked to be present at her delivery?” he said at last.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I know the right person to ask.”
We called Kathy as soon as we got back to Dan’s office. Though clearly surprised by the request, she agreed to act as Dan’s guinea pig, provided her husband didn’t object. I got the most recent estimate of her due date—another month—and extracted a promise of secrecy before hanging up. “You going to tell Jordan and Halladay about this?” I asked Dan.
He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. A slip of the tongue could have the entire Fresno chapter of the Family Alliance descending on Kathy’s birthing room, and I have no intention of putting the Ausberrys through that.”
“Besides which, if you find you can’t even read the mind of a baby that’s only hours from birth, you don’t want anyone to know?” I hazarded.
His slightly pained smile was my only answer.
But the Family Alliance was subtler than we’d expected, and neither of us was prepared for the page-twenty story in the Chronicle the next morning.
“I don’t believe this,” I fumed, stomping around Dan’s office with a copy of the paper gripped tightly in my hand. “How can they print something like this without at least contacting you first?”
“‘The Lifeline Experiment,’” Dan quoted, reading at his desk. “Gack. Why do newspeople always have to come up with cutesy titles for everything? Contact me? Of course they should have. Obviously, some fine upstanding citizen or group of same convinced them that the story didn’t need checking.”
“Someone like our Family Alliance friends?”
“Undoubtedly. You’ll notice they don’t include any of the details we discussed yesterday, which implies Halladay has dried up as an information source for them. I guess that’s something.”
“How can you sit there and take it so calmly?” I snapped, slapping my newspaper down on the desktop for emphasis. “Look: there it is for the whole damn world to see.”
He looked up at me. “Simmer down, Iris—the first client’s due in ten minutes and the last thing he’ll want is to have his head taken off by my secretary. I’m mad, too, but there’s nothing we can do now except make sure the experiment comes off as planned.”
I was only listening with half an ear. “But why? What did they expect to gain by leaking the story? It’s not even particularly slanted.”
“Sure it is,” Dan contradicted me. “Sixth paragraph, fourth and fifth sentences.”
“‘In addition to his private psychiatric practice, Staley does volunteer counseling once a week at the Rappaport Mental Health Clinic of San Mateo County, which he helped found. He also works frequently with the public defender’s office and has worked with the Greenpeace Save-the-Whales Project.’” I rattled off. “So?”
“So someone realized that this was going to be a very difficult experiment to do. So difficult, in fact, that we conceivably might have to give it up—and that someone wanted to make sure I was established in the public mind as a liberal right from the start. A liberal and, by implication, pro-abortion.”
“I still don’t see—oh. Sure. If the experiment turns out to be unworkable they’ll claim you learned something in the initial stages that clashed with your liberal views on the issue, won’t they, and that you backed out because of it.”
“Bull’s-eye. Or so I’m guessing.”
I sat down, my anger replaced by a sudden chill. “Who exactly are we up against here—the Family Alliance or the CIA covert operations group?”
“We’re up against people who’ve been up to their necks in politics for at least a decade,” he told me, laying his own paper on top of mine. “Along the way they’ve probably picked up all the standard political tricks one can employ against an opponent—which is almost funny, since the experiment has just as much chance of supporting their point of view as it has of opposing it.”
“One would think they haven’t much faith in their beliefs, wouldn’t one?” I suggested.
“I think that’s a self-contradictory sentence, but you’ve got the right idea,” Dan said, smiling. “And you might remember that any group that size is a mixed bag. Some of the members would probably be madder than you are if they knew what was being tried here.” He tapped the newspaper.
Just then there was a knock on the outer office door. “Mr. Raymond’s early,” I commented, heading out to unlock it.
“No problem,” Dan called after me. “You can send him right in.”
But it wasn’t Raymond, or any of Dan’s other clients. It was, instead, a committee of four people.
“We’d like to see Dr. Staley for a moment, if he isn’t too busy,” their spokeswoman, a young woman with a recognizable face, said briskly. Without waiting for a reply she started forward.
Out in Hayward I’d been taken by surprise, but here in my own office I had better control of things. I remained standing in the doorway, and the woman had to pull up sharply to keep from running into me. “I’m sorry, Ms. McClain, but Dr. Staley is expecting a client,” I said firmly. “If you’d like to make an appointment he has an hour available a week from Friday.”
It was abundantly clear from her ex
pression that she hadn’t expected to be put off like that, but she recovered quickly. “Perhaps Dr. Staley will be able to squeeze us in between appointments later this morning,” she said. “Would you tell him Jackie McClain and other representatives of the National Institute for Freedom and Equality are here? We’ll wait until he’s free.”
I couldn’t legitimately deny them waiting-room space, so I let them in, hoping that what I knew would be a long wait would discourage them. Three of them did eventually get up and leave, the last one about one o’clock, with whispered apologies to their leader. But McClain stayed all the way until Dan’s last client left at five-thirty, a persistence I had to admire. I consulted briefly with Dan and he agreed to see her.
“I’m sorry you had to wait so long, Ms. McClain,” he said as we all sat down in his office. “But, as Iris said, this was a particularly long day.”
“She’s a very efficient secretary,” McClain said ambiguously. “I’ll get right to the point, Dr. Staley: this so-called Lifeline Experiment. We’d like to know exactly what it is you intend to prove.”
Dan frowned. “I’m not out to prove anything, really. I’m simply trying to find where in its development a fetus becomes a human being.”
“In what sense? Medical, moral, legal—there are several ways to define human, and they don’t necessarily correspond.”
“I’m not sure I understand the question,” Dan said, frowning a bit.
“Suppose you discover that, in your opinion, human life begins during the third month of pregnancy,” McClain said. “The Supreme Court earlier this year stated that abortions through the sixth month are legal, which implies that a fetus is not legally human through that point.”
“In that case the law would have to be changed, obviously,” I told her.
“Obviously, you’ve never been pregnant with a child you didn’t want,” she said, a bit tartly. “A law like that would condemn thousands of women to either the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy and labor or to the danger of an illegal abortion. It would necessarily put the rights of a fetus over those of her mother—a mother whose rights, I’ll point out, are clearly and definitely guaranteed by the Constitution.”
