The Frankenstein Factory

by Edward D. Hoch

  “Sure.”

  Earl followed him down through the sloping amphitheater to the brightly lit operating room itself. Both of them avoided looking at the tube where MacKenzie’s body still rested. They hadn’t quite decided what to do with it yet.

  Frank’s breathing was still deep and regular. It seemed impossible to believe that he was anything but a young man asleep, one who might awaken at any moment. “You saw me on the beach Sunday, didn’t you?” Whalen asked, coming right to the point.

  “Of course. We spoke.”

  “I mean you saw me with the gun.”

  “Yes,” Earl admitted.

  Whalen pulled up his pants leg a bit to show the tiny automatic pistol strapped to his calf. “See—it’s still there. That’s why I’m not afraid to stand guard duty.”

  “Oh, I hardly think there’s any reason to be afraid.”

  “Look, I want to make a deal with you, Jazine.”

  “What sort of deal?”

  “You’ve got film and tape of the entire operation—right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to buy a copy of it.”

  “What for?”

  “Personal use. It’s not every day I’m involved in an operation to create a new person.”

  “And it’s not every day I meet a surgeon who carries a gun strapped to his leg, so that makes us even.”

  “I’d read a great deal about Mexican bandits.”

  “There haven’t been any Mexican bandits in fifty years.”

  Whalen was growing impatient. “Let’s skip all the talk. Can I buy a copy of the film?”

  “I suppose so, if Hobbes approves.”

  “I don’t want him to know about it.”

  “I see.”

  “Well?”

  “Let me think about it. I’ll let you know later.”

  “Does twenty thousand dollars seem like a fair price?”

  Earl raised his eyebrows. “Very fair.”

  “Well?”

  “Let me think about it,” Earl repeated.

  FIVE

  EARL FOUND LAWRENCE HOBBES down by the boathouse, checking over his single-engine inboard. He was frowning when he glanced up. “Oh, hello, Jazine. Come on in.”

  “You look worried.”

  Hobbes pointed to the hull of the boat, below the waterline. “Someone took an ax to it during the night.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “To cut us off from the mainland.”

  “But you’ve got the radio and telephones. …”

  “When he took the cord from the alarm system he also ruined the communications gear. I didn’t mention it in there because I didn’t want to worry the others needlessly.”

  “You’re telling me we’re cut off from the mainland?”

  “Well, yes—but it’s only a temporary matter. The hovercraft brings the week’s supplies every Wednesday morning, so we’re only cut off till tomorrow. I don’t think it need alarm us.”

  “We could all be dead by tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh, I doubt that very much.”

  “Do you know that Dr. Whalen carries a pistol strapped to his leg?”

  Hobbes gave a wave of his hand. “Yes, yes—but he’s a damn good back-up surgeon anyway. MacKenzie was my first choice, of course, but I needed a good man to assist him.”

  “And you needed Freddy for the brain.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you need Tony Cooper?”

  “Why?”

  “You knew there’d be no bone work.”

  “There could have been.”

  “Doubtful. You hired Tony because you knew he’d bring Vera along. Isn’t that right?”

  “She was a great help during the operation.”

  “Tell me about Tony and Vera and Freddy.”

  Hobbes shrugged. “There was some talk a few years back.”

  “What sort of talk?”

  Before he could answer there was a sound behind them. Earl turned to see Dr. Armstrong coming across the sand toward the boathouse. He was calling to them.

  “What’s the trouble?” Earl asked.

  “I thought you should know,” he said, addressing Hobbes. “Our patient seems to be regaining consciousness.”

  Hobbes’s face brightened for the first time that morning. “Let’s go see!”

  Earl followed along as they hurried back across the sand to the tree-lined walk that led up to the house. A breeze from the gulf was blowing across the beach, and Hobbes’s long white hair trailed after him. He still walked with the slight limp Earl had noticed the first day. That made him think of Emily Watson’s limp, and he wondered again what had happened to her. He especially wondered why Hobbes didn’t seem more upset about her disappearance and probable murder than he had been. True, he might be remembered in her will, which could lessen his sorrow at her death—but could he collect anything if her body was never found?

  The others (except Hilda) were all assembled in the downstairs operating amphitheater. Although Frank still stretched, nearly naked, on the table, there was definite movement in his body now. One leg was bent, and his left arm was up over his face, as if shielding his eyes from the light.

  “Can you give him an injection to bring him around?” Hobbes asked Armstrong. “Maybe a stimulant?”

  “I’d rather not. This could be a crucial phase. If he can wake up on his own, unaided, it could be better for the brain. Until we know just how it’s functioning in its new body, any drug that affects the brain could cause damage.”

  A slight groan escaped Frank’s lips and he shifted position on the table. The elapsed-time clock set in the wall showed that it had now been thirty-five hours since completion of the operation.

  “He’s coming around,” Freddy O’Connor agreed. “But let’s not hurry him. Give him a few more hours.”

  They went back upstairs, leaving Whalen on guard to report any new activity. “I’m very optimistic,” Armstrong announced. “I think he’s coming out of it.”

  “About time,” Vera said. “Then maybe we can all leave.”

  Freddy’s eyes twinkled, and he seemed about to make another of his ill-timed remarks. But he thought better of it and shut up.

  “Another day or two,” Hobbes told her. “You’re being well paid for your time here.”

  “I just don’t like some of the company,” Vera replied, casting a meaningful glance in Freddy’s direction.

  Hilda served lunch promptly at noon, and the six of them ate heartily. She prepared a tray to take down to Whalen, together with the noon news on the TV printout. As she was about to go Hobbes glanced at his watch and said to her, “Tell Whalen we’ll send someone to relieve him after lunch.” She watched his lips and nodded, seeming to understand. Earl wondered if she would write him a note.

  “She’s very good,” he said after she’d departed. “Been with me for years.”

  “The food is certainly good,” Armstrong admitted. “I’m in no hurry to leave here.”

  “How long do you think postoperative care will last?” Earl asked.

  Armstrong shrugged. “Could well last for his lifetime. This isn’t an operation that’s performed every day, you know.” He poured himself another cup of coffee. “But if you’re asking how long I’ll be staying, I’d guess about a month. Maybe less, if the press gets onto this thing and makes a circus of it. I’ve never been comfortable with a bunch of specialists pawing around my patient.”

  “Yes,” Hobbes admitted. “There’s always the specter of the press.”

  Earl pushed back his plate and reached for the coffee. “What about the press? Do they have wind of what you’re doing here?”

  “Not unless they’ve stumbled upon the sudden unexplained absence of several key surgeons and traced them out here. Of course my big fear now is MacKenzie’s death. He’s a national figure—the moon walk and all that—and when the word gets out he’s been murdered we’ll have a swarm of people out here. That’s one reason I don’t wa
nt to notify the authorities till we’re ready to announce the operation.”

  Listening to his words, Earl wondered if in truth he might have sabotaged his own radio and telephone lines and taken an ax to his own boat. The success of the operation was an urgent necessity to ICI, and Hobbes wasn’t about to let a couple of killings stand in the way of it.

  But what would he do if his patient proved to be a resurrected murderer?

  After lunch he managed to get Hobbes aside to continue their interrupted conversation at the boathouse. “You were starting to tell me earlier about Vera and the two doctors.”

  Lawrence Hobbes raised his eyebrows. “Was I?”

  “You were.”

  Hobbes glanced at his digital watch. “We really should relieve poor Whalen. Come down with me if you want. We can talk there as well as anyplace.”

  “Except that Frank will hear us, if he’s listening.”

  “You’re getting as bad as the others, Jazine. Our patient is not a monster, nor a murderer. He’s simply a man awakening from a long sleep.”

  They went down to the operating amphitheater and relieved a grateful Whalen. “He’s real good company.”

  “Any more movement to report?”

  “He shifts now and then but he’s still out of it.”

  Hobbes nodded. “I’ll be staying the four hours. Jazine’s just keeping me company for a bit.”

  After Whalen left Earl suggested they move to the rear of the amphitheater. “We can watch him just as well from back here and our voices won’t carry.”

  “Oh, very well” Hobbes agreed.

  Earl settled into the molded plastic scat, remembering how old Emily Watson had sat there all during the lengthy operation. It couldn’t have been awfully comfortable for a woman her age. He stared down at the operating table where Frank still lay, moving occasionally as if struggling to rid himself of the clouds from a thirty-year sleep.

  “Now, about Vera and Freddy and Tony Cooper.”

  Hobbes leaned back and started talking. “I don’t know all the bizarre details, of course, and I suppose no one does except the three of them. Well, I believe I mentioned earlier that Freddy O’Connor had performed a number of brain transplants involving animals. He was doing these at a private research laboratory in Maryland, not far from Washington. Vera Morgan was working there as a research chemist, testing the results of the transplant operations on various brain tissues and body fluids. Vera and Freddy just naturally fell into an affair and started living together. Knowing the two of them, it might have been unusual if their proximity to each other hadn’t set off sparks. From what I hear, there’s never a woman safe when Freddy’s in the area.”

  “Did you know him in those days?”

  “I’d met him, of course. In fact, we once had some preliminary discussions about the possibility of a human brain transplant using some of my cryonic bodies. This was maybe three years back. At the time Freddy hadn’t had that much experience in low-temperature surgery, but he plunged into the subject with great interest. The main problem of all body freezing has always been with the brain, you know, and so Freddy O’Connor became a key member of, my team even before I decided to use a shell body that had suffered from a brain tumor.”

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” Earl interrupted. “Not being a medical man, I don’t understand the problem with the brain. The early cryonic-society literature mentioned no special problem with the brain that I remember.”

  “Some writers like Ettinger did, though. You see, during freezing the protein molecules within the cells collapse due to dehydration. Such denaturing has a devastating effect on the brain. It was in this area especially that Freddy and Vera were working in recent years. Vera’s lab tests have tended to show that massive injections of protein might be the solution to the problem. That’s what we’ve tried here, whether you knew it or not. And that is why I wanted Vera on the scene. You see, she and Freddy were a team once, during an important part of the brain research work. I wanted them as a team again. I could hardly invite Vera, under the circumstances, but I could hire Tony Cooper, knowing he’d bring Vera along. You were perfectly correct in saying I didn’t need a bone man. But I did need another surgeon on the team, and Tony Cooper filled the bill. It got me Vera Morgan in the most natural way possible—a way which even Freddy couldn’t object to.”

  “You say you couldn’t invite Vera directly under the circumstances. What circumstances?”

  “About a year ago Tony Cooper received a grant to study the results of bone-marrow transplant in animals. It’s still a fairly new field, though work’s been done off and on for decades. He met Freddy and Vera, who by this time were deeply into the cryogenic aspects of transplant. You see, bone marrow presents a special transplant problem because it’s so often rejected. Transplants in humans have usually succeeded only when the donor was a twin—or at least a sibling—of the patient. Cooper’s experiments, following work done by others, were attempting to prove that marrow transplants in dogs could be successful if the donor’s marrow was mixed with previously frozen marrow from the dog itself. You’ve no doubt read the recent discussions about the possibility of a TCM bank—a cryonic storehouse for healthy tissue, cells, and marrow, which people would contribute when they were young and healthy, to be held against the day when they might need them back to fight the ravages of injury or disease.”

  “I’ve heard something of it,” Earl admitted.

  “Of course the Russians are ahead of us in some aspects of this. The Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics at Riga has been most successful in transplanting the frozen fingers of cadavers to living persons who’ve lost fingers.”

  “Would the Russians be interested in what we’ve done here?”

  “Most interested,” Hobbes assured him. “If they knew about it. Happily, I imagine they have me down as a harmless eccentric who lives on an island with a bunch of frozen bodies.”

  “To get back to Freddy and Vera,” Earl prodded gently.

  “Yes—you have to forgive my wandering mind at times. I’ve been so involved in every aspect of this project for so long! Anyway, Vera and Tony Cooper met and fell in love—if that term is still used by young people today. She moved out on Freddy and moved in with Cooper, and then the damnedest thing happened. The way I got the story, one day outside the lab Freddy caught Cooper by the elevator and said something—one of his vulgar remarks—that led to a scuffle. Then Cooper actually challenged Freddy to a duel with laser pistols! Can you imagine such a thing? Of course the weapons are illegal, and they both could have been arrested. But the following morning they were both out in a field overlooking Chesapeake Bay with their illegal weapons.”

  “What happened?”

  “Freddy O’Connor backed down. He apologized. Can you believe that?”

  “It explains a great deal about his attitude, I suppose. If Cooper and Vera know him to have been a coward, he’d naturally try to cover it up by constantly riding them about sexual matters.”

  Lawrence Hobbes snorted. “I for one don’t consider it cowardly to refuse to fight a duel. In fact it would have been sheer madness to go through with it. A laser beam can do terrible damage.”

  Earl was remembering Hobbes’s earlier mention of the weapons. “I hope you keep yours safely locked up.”

  “Oh yes.”

  Down on the operating table, Frank stirred again. “If he doesn’t come to soon, won’t he need further feeding?”

  Hobbes nodded. “I believe Armstrong is considering some sort of aerosol nutrient, but we may not need it.”

  Earl stood up and stretched. “Take care of yourself, Doctor. I’m going back upstairs.”

  “Send someone else down between four and five.”

  Earl promised to do so and headed for the stairs. On the way up he met Harry Armstrong, who was going down for another look at his patient.

  At five o’clock Freddy went down to relieve Hobbes, and the rest of them decided on an early dinner. Hilda served a
fancy ice cream log topped with swirls of whipped cream for dessert and remembered to take some down to O’Connor, who was on guard duty.

  As he finished his dish Hobbes leaned back and said, “One thing we don’t have to worry about on this island is freezer capacity. The capsules of liquid nitrogen down below give off enough chill to cool the whole island. We use some of it for our freezer and air conditioning in the hot weather.” He glanced over at Earl. “How about another game of Laser?”

  “I don’t think I’m up to it.”

  “Come on, just the two of us. It won’t take long.”

  “Not if you’re as good as last time.”

  Hobbes set up the grid in the living room and they sat down on opposite sides of the board. Once their men were positioned, Hobbes flicked the light once to signal the beginning of the game. Earl rolled a nine and went first, splitting it between a captain and a chance-man. Hobbes rolled a seven and used it all on a chance-man. Then he tapped the button for the light beam, but he’d been overconfident. Earl’s chance-man had a mirrored side in position and the beam was reflected harmlessly off to the side.

  “My roll,” Earl said, taking the dice. It was a poor three and he could do little with it.

  Hobbes rolled a twelve, allowing a bonus move of two men. He placed them carefully on either side of the board, where they could reflect the beam onto Earl’s chest. “Your turn, Jazine.”

  Earl had to roll something higher than a five to move a blocking man into position before Hobbes fired the light beam again. He rolled a four. “Too bad,” Hobbes said and tapped the beam. The light reflected off his side piece and hit Earl.

  “That was a fast game.”

  Hobbes smiled contentedly. “Better luck next time.”

  “I’ll wait a bit before there’s a next time.”

  He sought out Vera and Tony, finding them together on the beach. The sun was just beginning to set in the western sky, dipping low over the blunted mountains of Baja California.

  “Over that way you can see the Volcano of the Three Virgins,” Tony said. “But it’s inactive, like all virgins.”

  “You’d know if anybody would,” Vera smiled. “Are you taking the shift after Freddy?”