Unseemly Science

by Rod Duncan

  The guide stepped into the room and turned to face me. “You should see yourself,” he said. “Your face is white already. White as ice.”

  I was staring past him. At the back of the room was a large machine. I’d not seen its like before, though I could recognise some of the parts – crank handle, wheels and geared belts. In the middle was a metal trough, wide and deep. A great mound of crushed ice had been heaped into it. On either side of the trough was a flat surface, like the draining board of a sink.

  “Miss Barnabus, I presume,” said Dr Foxley.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A freezer. Would you like a closer look?”

  I shifted my focus to aim at the doctor. “Untie the boy!”

  “You have but one bullet my dear.”

  “But I can choose where to spend it.”

  Keppler began circling to the left, the guide moved to the right. I switched my aim back and forward between them.

  “You’ve made our job easier,” Foxley said. “By coming here. And this way you’ll contribute to my research.”

  “One of you unties the boy. One of the others, I shoot.”

  There was a hesitation, then a nod between them. The guide stepped towards Tinker. I aimed the gun at Keppler, touched my finger to the trigger. And then, without warning, a sack was pulled down hard over my head. Strong hands were holding me. I whipped my hand down, pointed the gun behind me and pulled the trigger. I saw the muzzle flash through the sacking. Though half deaf from the shot, I could hear the man behind me screaming in pain. But other hands had grabbed me. I lost grip of the gun as they wrestled me to the floor.

  Chapter 36

  Beware the gin soaked audience. You see them as they really are.

  The Bullet Catcher’s Handbook

  When I became conscious again, I was lying on my back on a smooth, hard floor. The sack was still over my head. The air inside it stank – a chemical smell like strong spirit mixed with something sickly sweet. I could remember struggling and a foul smelling rag clamped over my mouth and nose. I remembered falling but not hitting the ground.

  The thought of sitting up made the floor tip and sway like a small boat in rough water. There were voices around me, drifting in and out of focus. At first they seemed to come from near the ground. Then the owners of the voices were walking around me and I understood that I was lying on an elevated surface. A table perhaps. It was cold – though no colder than my own skin.

  I lifted my arm. It felt distant, as if not part of me. The memory of a dream came rushing back. I was on the autopsy table in the operating theatre. My arms and legs had been replaced by automaton limbs, driven by belts and gears.

  “She’s waking already.”

  “Strap her down.”

  The voices of the guide and the doctor swam in the air. I felt a pressure across my chest and heard the clink of a buckle. I kicked my feet into the air.

  “Get her legs!” ordered the doctor, his voice near my head.

  Strong hands grabbed my ankles and wrestled them down. The doctor pulled the strap tight over my chest. I inhaled, filling my lungs beyond comfort. At the same time, I tensed my muscles, making them flex. The buckle clicked home. My arms were pinned just above the elbow.

  I kicked again, catching something with my foot. The guide swore. But now the doctor was there to help him. As they secured my legs in place, I let out the breath I’d been holding and felt the strap over my chest grow looser. I lay still, resisting the temptation to move my arms and test how much wriggle room I’d won myself.

  “She’s a wild one,” said the guide.

  “What did you expect?” said Foxley. “She’s unnatural.”

  He was holding my right arm. There was a ripping of cotton and I felt the lower part of my sleeve being pulled away. He prodded the inside of my elbow. Then I felt a sharp prick as if I had been pierced with the tip of a knife. The sensation that followed was like nothing I’d felt before. Fire began at the elbow, creeping up my arm and down towards my fingers. It was cold and hot at the same time. It was liquid pain spreading through a limb that now definitely belonged to me. The sudden intensity of feeling made me cry out.

  “Excellent veins,” said the doctor. “The boy was a nightmare.” Then footsteps were departing.

  Tinker – the chloroform had driven him from my mind. But now the urgency of his rescue slammed back into my consciousness.

  The guide’s voice whispered very close. “I’m going to enjoy this.”

  The sack was ripped away from the front of my eyes. His face was inches from mine.

  “I like to talk to them when they’re going under,” he said. “How does that arm feel?”

  The heat-cold-pain had reached my fingertips and was creeping up towards my shoulder. “It hurts.”

  He made an appreciative sound. “Mm. Wait till it reaches your heart.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “You’re getting super-human strength.”

  He straightened and I saw for the first time that an apparatus stood behind him. A metal stand supported a large glass flask. With the lamp behind it, the liquid in the flask seemed to glow pale blue. A rubber tube ran down from it towards me. I craned my neck and saw that it was connected to a metal spike the size of a knitting needle, which had been embedded in my skin. My head felt woozy.

  “They all died when we started,” the guide said. “Their bodies looked perfect frozen. But needles of ice grew inside them. It corrupted the flesh. Then we discovered this.”

  He patted the side of the flask. “It’ll keep you alive when we freeze you.”

  The ice-fire was creeping over my shoulder and beginning to spread across my chest. It was hard to think clearly. Not just from the pain. Tendrils of smog were reaching between my thoughts.

  “The bodies...” I had to force the words out of my mouth. “...hanging in that room…”

  “You saw them?” He grinned again. “Good. For most, I have to describe it. We call it the dormitory. It’s a kind of joke.”

  A wave of panic and revulsion rose in me. I tried to keep my voice level. “Are they alive?”

  “Now there’s a question. Some just die when they’re warmed and woken. Like they forgot how to breathe. But others – the heart pumps. They move. They stuff food in their mouths. But what’s human in them doesn’t come back.

  “You’re lying!”

  “That’s going to be you,” he whispered. “Dribbling and snarling like a mad dog. When we thaw you out in a year or two or three. Some get dissected. Others we turn out onto the street. That’s one of the doctor’s experiments. He wants to know how long they’ll live. Maybe they’ll start to learn. Your Mrs Raike – she feeds them. Now that’s rich.”

  He chuckled.

  The agony was burning and freezing in my stomach and shoulders. I tried to focus but my mind wouldn’t sharpen. “Why?” I gasped, hardly able to form the words through my pain.

  He seemed puzzled by the question. “This is science. You don’t need a reason. Look at me – I’ve had the treatment. I don’t feel cold. I don’t get frostbite. I get a small dose every week. Only a fraction of what you’re getting. But I could walk across Antarctica in shirtsleeves. Imagine if we could freeze a man solid and wake him up after a hundred years with no ill done? Or a thousand years. Imagine that!”

  I wanted to speak but the pain left no room for thought.

  “You want to know where the ice was being taken?” he asked. “You’ll like this - it never went anywhere. We crush it. Add chemicals to make it melt. That sucks out the heat. You’ll see. Once you’re filled up, I’ll be taking you to the freezer to join your friends.”

  The pain was converging on my heart. I cried out. He examined me, head tilted to one side in fascination. Then the spasm passed and I breathed again. There was something I had to remember about the strap that held me down.

  “This liquid’s got alcohol in it,” he said. “You might be feeling that. Once you’re out I’
ll strip you and put you in a sleeping gown. Then I truss you like a chicken.”

  His face hovered over me, as if waiting for my revulsion to show. I stared up at the ceiling, which was yellowish in the lamp light. I had to think. But not about the horror he was feeding me. There was something else. Something that needed doing.

  I dug my thumbnail into the skin of my first finger. That was real pain. It was different from the other feeling, which was working its way through my body. I pressed harder with my nail, sharpening the sensation. I was lying on a table in a room in the ice tunnels. It was the room of barrels and medical glassware. I’d hidden in it before. How long ago had that been? The ceiling above me was darker in patches where rock showed through the ice. I stared at it.

  The guide’s face relaxed into an expression of boredom. He turned away. Only then did I look at him again. One of the barrels was resting on a work bench. He hefted it down to the floor and began rolling it back into its position by the wall.

  There was something I’d meant to do when he wasn’t looking. I observed the glass flask on its stand. I followed the rubber tube down to the needle in my skin. I stared at the strap across my body. Then I remembered.

  I breathed out, expelling all the air from my lungs. The strap went slack. I started wriggling my left arm. I felt my skin scraping as it slipped under the leather. Then it was free. I felt blind, for the buckle. My fingertip touched it but I couldn’t reach far enough to grip it. The guide turned and saw me. He was across the room in two, long strides. I pulled the needle free of my arm and held it away from his reach. Blue liquid dripped from the hollow tip. He lunged over me, trying to grab it. Instead of pulling it further away, I thrust it up into him. I felt it make contact. He recoiled and it pulled from my hand. The rubber tube went taut and the metal stand toppled towards him. I was struggling my other arm free when the glass hit the ground. The flask shattered. With both arms out from under the strap, I had more movement and could reach the buckle.

  I saw the guide extracting the needle from his throat. Then he was coming towards me again, one hand clamped to his neck to slow the bleeding. I found myself sitting up, fumbling with the strap over my ankles.

  He stooped to pick something from the floor. Then he was at the table, scything the air with a shard of broken glass. I threw myself to the side and it hissed past my face. I must have got the other buckle open because I found myself falling from the table. I landed on the far side from him.

  He was clambering over the top. But I’d already rolled away. I was woozy from the drug, but panic was driving the smog from my mind. He jumped down from the table. The spilled liquid dripping from his clothes and pooling on the floor.

  I scrambled to my feet. He advanced, still sweeping the jagged glass left and right like a knife fighter. My right arm dripped. I blinked, trying to focus. Blood welled from between the fingers of the hand he had clamped to his neck. I backed into a bench, felt behind me for something to use as a weapon, seized on the handle of an oil lamp. I swung it in front of me, trying to knock the glass from his hand. I missed. He lunged and I had to jump to the side to avoid it.

  If I didn’t find a way to pass him, he would back me into the corner of the room. I shifted left and right as he advanced, but he matched my every move.

  “You’re going to suffer,” he hissed, swinging his arm. The glass cut the air between us. “I’ll dissect you whilst you’re still alive!”

  I’d reached the corner. He took a sudden step forwards. I flung the lamp at his face. He batted it away with the hand that had been covering his wound. It shattered on the floor. Blood started pouring from his neck but he had his hand quickly back over it, staunching the flow.

  He seemed about to say something. But a sound like a cloth flapping brought him up short. The pool of spilled liquid had caught the fire from the smashed lantern. A wall of blue flame leapt from the ruined flask. In a heartbeat it was over the table, following the path the guide had taken. There was a fraction of a second in which realisation showed on his face. Then he was ablaze. I ducked under his swinging arm, jumped the edge of the burning pool and ran. At the entrance to the tunnel, I turned. Consumed in flame, he had dropped to his knees. The man who could not feel cold cried out in agony.

  Only as I stepped into the oval tunnel did I wonder why no one had come running to help him. The seconds seemed weirdly stretched. Perhaps too little time had passed. Or perhaps it was the strange attenuation of sound in the tunnels that had stopped anyone hearing the fight.

  I stood for a moment, listening. The extreme focus that comes with danger had started to ebb. I put a hand to the ice wall to steady myself. It stuck. I panicked and yanked it back. It pulled free, leaving a bloody hand print. Seeing it, I remembered the guide’s words from long ago. Don’t want you to leave your skin behind. I looked at my hand, still gloved. The leather was soaked in blood from the wound where the needle had gone into my arm.

  Acrid smoke was flowing along the ceiling. In the tunnel it drifted left, caught by the ventilation current. Sound might not have travelled, but the smell would.

  I noticed again the bloody hand print I’d left on the ice. I had no sense of time flowing or how long I’d been standing there. I slapped my face. Then I slapped it harder. My cheek smarted.

  Tinker. I had to rescue Tinker. I slapped again and again, feeling my mind sharpen with each blow.

  The boy was a nightmare. Those were Foxley’s words, comparing my veins to Tinker’s. They’d worked on him before starting on me. I brushed down my pockets, searching for my watch. It had been taken. I could have been hours under the chloroform. Days even.

  Memories swam. Something about a dormitory. A freezer.

  I watched the smoke flowing along the ceiling then lurched off following it as if on borrowed legs. There was no sleeve on my left arm. A large blue-black bruise marked the inside of my elbow. I stared at it, not remembering being beaten. I squeezed my gloved hand into a fist and felt the blood squelch. Blood ruins leather. Someone had spoken those words to me.

  The passage curved sharply right. There was a bloodstain on the floor. I could hear a noise around me – the soft clacking rhythm of a machine in motion. I stumbled into a large room, brightly lit. I blinked, trying to remember when I had been there before. A memory of Tinker struggling made me look down, but he was not on the floor.

  When I looked up again, I saw the machine. I remembered the sack pulled over my head. I had shot someone.

  The machine sounded like a huge clockwork device. A regulator spun. A belt turned a wheel. The trough at the centre of it was no longer heaped high with crushed ice. Now a mist hung over it, flowing out over the rim and spreading across the floor. With the ice gone, I could see a metal drum, half-submerged in the middle of the trough. Its purpose seemed to be guiding a set of chains down into the depths and then up out on the other side.

  Foxley had called it a freezer.

  I watched the wheels turning. The chains were being dragged over a flat surface. I remembered thinking it looked like a draining board. Two packages were being dragged over the surface. I stared at them, dumbly. The contraption was like a clock – the regular clicking of the mechanism, the inching forwards of the packages towards that well of cold.

  I stumbled into the chamber, unsure if it was a clock that had a freezer attached to it or a freezer that had a clock. The packages were being pulled by the chains. In time they’d fall over the lip of the trough and be forced by the drum deep into the trough. The chain continued out on the other side. The packages would be hauled through to the opposite draining board. The clock would keep them submerged for a set time.

  How cleverly designed it was. But the word them had snagged in my mind. I started to circle the machine, staring at the packages. From the side I could see they were people. A small one further back and a larger one approaching the freezing trough.

  They were Tinker and John Farthing.

  The panic slapped me harder than my hands had done. My
breath came in short gasps. Farthing was inches from being pulled over the lip. I dashed to the side of the machine. He was trussed up with ropes but only a pair of straps held him to the chains. My hands fumbled with the strap nearest me. My glove was slippery with blood. But on my second try the buckle came undone.

  The strap around his feet was still dragging him. I scrambled around to the other side of the machine. His bare feet had already descended into the mist. Dipping my hands into it, I took hold of the loose end of the strap. My glove stiffened as the blood-soaked leather began to freeze. I tried to thread the end back through the buckle, but one of my hands was no longer able to grip. His bound feet slid deeper. In a few seconds, his whole body would be pulled over the edge. I grabbed the strap with my right hand and leaned back with all my weight.

  There was a crack like a breaking twig. I fell back, still gripping the strap. The metal link that held it to the chain had shattered. In falling I’d dragged Farthing’s legs out of the ice bath and half off the edge of the draining board. I hauled again and again until gravity took over and the rest of his body followed. He thudded, inert, onto the floor next to my feet.

  I tried to pull the glove off my left hand but it was still rigid with ice so I turned my attention to the strap that held Tinker’s feet. I managed to thread the leather back through the buckle. But as I was about to pull it free, I caught a movement on the rim of my vision.

  I jerked around to see Keppler lunging towards me, arm first. He seemed to thump me on the shoulder and I staggered back. I had been so fixated on the rescue that I’d not seen him enter the room. His bare hand glistened red. I saw a wink of silver – the blade of a knife. All this, I took in at a flash. Then he lunged again, but this time tripped on Farthing’s prone body and lurched forward off-balance.