The All-Purpose Bodies: A Fast-Paced Thriller (Commander Shaw Book 11)

by Philip McCutchan

  “Nuts,” I snapped angrily. “Don’t let’s argue that point, though, or we’ll be here all day. Who is going to blow the complex?”

  “The people who work there,” Doctor High said.

  I felt a sudden and very bitter understanding. I looked again at that Australian flag fluttering bravely over the admin building and I thought of Tracy Learoyd sitting there beneath it, and I thought of him with contempt. But even in that moment there was, to me, a flaw in the reasoning. I could accept that Learoyd could be a traitor — anyone could be that if the threat or the carrot was big enough, for there are damn few men around today without their price when the chips are really down — but would Learoyd, or anyone else concerned, want to go to his death in that great big bang that would shake Australia to its foundations, consign Darwin and the general vicinity for hundreds of square miles to the oblivion of a cataclysmic nuclear upheaval, and send the awakened heart of the continent back for ever to its dead state? Would he — unless he was either stark staring mad or so utterly drenched in the poison of the WUSWIPP aims and dogma that he didn’t mind dying for them? And I fancied remote control on Learoyd’s part would be a non-starter, for how, in a place like that man-made island, could any man hope to overcome all the countless checks that would certainly be placed even on the brass, and then leave things to work themselves out while he made himself personally very scarce indeed? In brief, how could even Learoyd expect to plant an explosive device where it could blow the reactors, without it being discovered inside about five seconds flat?

  I said, “I think you’re making rather a large assumption, Doctor,” and I didn’t get any farther than that because there was a clicking noise and the screen suddenly grew tremendously bright and then there was a sick sort of phutting sound and the picture vanished. The doctor frowned and I grinned unkindly and said, “Now what are we going to see? The Flower Pot Men? Or just a notice saying Do Not Adjust Your Set The Interference Is Only Temporary?”

  High was looking very sick about it and just then something worse happened, something that was probably linked to the faulty signal-vision screen: the fights went out, the lot of them, including the concealed strips, and the room went so dark you could almost feel it. I blundered across to where I’d last seen High, waving my arms in an attempt not to miss him, and I did in fact make contact with him very briefly before he skipped away with an angry shout. And then I blundered into something that broke and I felt glass cut my hands and then my face and I just had time to realize that I’d busted right into that signal-vision screen, and was falling free, before I hit the side with my head on the way down and I suppose I passed out just like the fight in High’s office.

  *

  I don’t know how long it was before I woke up, but I do know I was once again as cold as very death and I was bleeding from massive grazes and felt as if I had a broken back and shoulder. In fact I felt smashed up all over, though since I found after a while that I could move my limbs, however painfully, I couldn’t have been all that bad. But of course I didn’t know where I was or if anybody else did either. Since I didn’t want to die anonymously at the bottom of what must have been a large-size wall cavity, and since there didn’t appear to be any way out at all, I rather hoped it wouldn’t be too long before I saw Doctor High again. But when I was able to focus and look upwards, I couldn’t see any chink of light which I would have expected to see looming through from High’s broken signal-vision screen — unless, of course, the lighting circuits hadn’t yet been repaired. I couldn’t hear anything either, and that, I felt, was probably a rather bad sign really.

  After a while I managed to crawl around a little way and found that I was in a very narrow space, not more than around eighteen inches wide but very long — so far as I could tell, that was; I think I crawled along about twenty yards or so before I hit a blanking wall. It seemed to confirm my theory that I had dropped into a wall cavity and no doubt its very narrowness had stopped me dropping too free.

  I turned myself with considerable difficulty and crawled back the other way and once again found a wall to stop my progress, but this time with a difference. I felt quite a degree of dampness when I scratched around and I also found some broken rock and when I put some pressure around the part that was broken I felt just a little give. Here was a weak part of the construction, and it just might lead somewhere if I could weaken it a trifle more, so I did my best. I had been working I suppose for around half an hour, though this was a matter of guesswork, when I caught the loom of light above me and realized the circuit had at last been repaired. The light wasn’t direct; the beam flickered off a wall a long, long way above and I guessed that the cavity took a bend just around there and the beam from the doctor’s screen-aperture wouldn’t reach me. I went on working hard at that weak section of wall and just as I heard the sounds of someone coming down from up top to get me, I managed to shift a biggish piece of stone or rock and I reached my hand through the hole. It was pretty thick and took up almost all my reach, but my hand was free of it and I felt around. My fingers touched something cold and somehow soggy, and I recoiled from it instinctively; but then I took a grip on myself and reached again, loathing the feel, but determined to find out what I could about High’s establishment before they caught up with me. I traced the outline of eyes — nose — mouth. I realized I was touching a dead body.

  11

  There didn’t seem much point in ‘escaping’ into the vicinity of very corrupted death even if I’d had the time and really I wasn’t too displeased when the sounds materialized into one of High’s boys descending on a rope with a light on a wandering lead. When I was back once more in High’s office, now brightly lit again, I remarked on that cold corpse down below and High said, quite pleasantly and with a touch of real regret, “Yes, I know, it’s too bad, isn’t it, but there we are. One has one’s failures, my dear chap, after all. Everyone has.”

  “Failures at what?” I asked.

  “I’d better explain, I think,” the doctor said. He was very much at his ease and his manner was still friendly — he didn’t appear to bear any malice at all towards me for my attack on him when the lights went, nor for my inadvertent smashing of the signal-vision screen. But once again I noticed that strange look of fervour in his eyes, a kind of inward glow. “I think you’ll be interested in what we’re doing here, Shaw. Actually I think it’d be best if I were to show you round myself and explain as we go. Do ask any questions you wish, won’t you? You too, Mrs Dunwoodie. I’ll do my best to answer them in non-technical terms.” He lifted an eyebrow at me. “All right?”

  “Yes,” I said, “fine, and here’s the first question: just what sort of hospital is this, anyway?”

  “I think the answer to that will emerge as we make our rounds,” the doctor answered, “but in a nutshell, it’s a research unit, basically.”

  “How d’you mean, basically?”

  “Well, there’s the pure hospital element. We have wards for recuperative purposes.”

  “Human guinea pigs?”

  The doctor shrugged but didn’t answer. I asked, “What exactly is the failure rate? I mean, how many corpses are there in that charnel house down below?”

  “Difficult to say off-hand,” he answered. “The records’ll show the numbers, of course, and the names. Excuse me.” He reached under his desk and I think he pressed a bell-push because the door from the passage opened and a man came in. I recognized him; it was turnip-head. He gave Flair and me a cold, nasty look full of spite and a good deal of triumph mixed in with it, but he didn’t say anything, just stood there waiting for High to give him an order.

  “Ah, Summers,” High said. “I’m taking the Commander and Mrs Dunwoodie round the wards. I think you’d better come along with us.”

  “Very good, Doctor.” Summers walked to the door and stood beside it and High got to his feet and said, “Right, we’re all ready then.” He went to the door and Flair and I followed him out into the passage. Summers came behind us. I
hadn’t seen a gun but I had no doubt he had one handy. We went along in single file and I could feel his breath on my neck as we all headed for the lift, which took us down three floors. We emerged into yet another long corridor exactly like the others. The place astounded me with its apparent size and its solid, excavated construction. WUSWIPP had the money and the means all right, as I knew well; there was no surprise in my mind on that account. But even though this island of Kimbau was remote from the main group, just a disregarded jungle-topped eruption in the South Pacific, it must still have been tricky to do the hard labour in secret.

  High stopped at a door that slid aside as he halted.

  We all trooped in behind him, into a lobby similar to the one outside my own room. We were met by one of the baby-limbed men wearing clean white long pants and a white open-necked shirt. High gave him a distant nod and spoke in Russian. “Morning, orderly,” he said. “Everything all right?”

  “All is well, Doctor,” the man answered with an instinctive, obsequious bob of the head accompanied by a slight flexing of those grotesque knees that were only around six inches from the floor. It made me feel sick in the guts to see him standing there. A second door ahead of us slid open and we moved into a long room, again with no windows but with the customary concealed lighting, and with twenty iron bedsteads, ten along each wall. Each had a man in it and a small table beside it, and a long trestle table ran down the centre. There was an antiseptic hospital smell, a faint underlay of vomit, and just inside the door two hard-looking females in nurses’ uniforms waited with their horny hands held demurely clasped in front of their pelvises.

  “Morning, Sister,” High said briskly, rubbing his hands together. “Morning, Nurse.”

  “Good morning, sir,” they chorused.

  “Don’t let me disturb the routine,” he went on. “This isn’t ordinary rounds — I’m showing a couple of guests some of my work, and I’d like them to see everything proceeding quite normally,” but of course, like any other hospital, the routine went right out the window for the medical superintendent and all the patients lay to attention like good boys as we walked past them. I noticed they were all completely covered to their necks by their sheets.

  High said chattily, “Now, Shaw — I’m showing you my unit in what I might call reverse order — that’s to say, these good fellows here are well on the way to total fitness. They’re, shall I say, convalescent, though in fact still undergoing treatment. Quite soon they’ll be up and about again. I —”

  “What’s been the matter with them?” I asked bluntly.

  High said, “Well, in the case of these particular men, they’ve lost arms or legs.”

  “I thought they didn’t look all that active for convalescents.”

  “Ah, but you miss the point,” he said eagerly, his eyes alight once again. “I’m treating them for their condition, as I said, and —”

  “How in heaven’s name,” I asked, “do you treat a man for a lost leg, Doctor?”

  He smiled a trifle mysteriously and said, “Ah well now, outside my unit, you don’t, of course. They’ve merely to suffer the loss — they have in fact to put up with it and be damn grateful for an artificial limb. I think that’s frightfully primitive, my dear chap! Don’t you? But here, you see, we’re able to control the genes that in their turn control the development of the cells — we do this by using a substance called chromosomal RNA, which was originally isolated in the United States and improved upon by me while I was working in Hungary. Have a look, if you like.” He gestured at the nurse and she drew back the sheet from one of the patients. I’d already seen the baby-limbed men, of course, so I was prepared; nevertheless I almost retched when the sheet came right back and I saw the embryo leg peeping coyly from the man’s left groin. It was little more than an inch long and as thin as a twig and it terminated in tiny but perfectly formed toes. Unsteadily I said, “It’s going to be a hell of a time before he walks on that, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, no,” High said cheerfully as the nurse covered the man again. “Once formed, the limbs grow remarkably quickly, at least until they reach the stage of, say, the orderly whom you’ve seen. There’s a pause then, a pause of a few months. I haven’t quite discovered the reason for that yet, but I’ll overcome it in time.” He smiled down at the man in the bed. “Feeling all right, old chap?” he inquired.

  “Yes, thank you, Doctor.”

  “Fine, excellent.” We moved on to the next bed. We had a few more exhibits exposed for us — all leg and arm cases in varying stages of new growth. High explained that when the limbs reached a certain stage the patients were allowed up and encouraged to use their new appendages and then, after they had become accustomed to them, they were employed around the hospital on various useful jobs.

  “Like the orderly, and the guards?”

  He said, “Not guards. They’re all orderlies.”

  I grunted. “Well,” I said, “I’ll give you one thing: it’s an amazing advance in knowledge —”

  “Thank you indeed,” High said.

  “But it rather depends how you use it, doesn’t it? And why do it here — why not in the open, in some civilized country?”

  “Ah!” he said, and gave a secretive smile. “My dear man, haven’t I already told you that there are other reasons why I operate here on Kimbau?”

  “I get it,” I said. “WUSWIPP. But I still don’t see —”

  “You will in time,” he said. “These limb-growth experiments are quite subsidiary to my main work, which in turn links in with my current purpose. You’ll understand soon. I’d rather take this one step at a time, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’m in your hands,” I said sardonically. Then I had a nasty thought and I asked, “How did these men lose their arms and legs in the first place? Don’t tell me you have all that number of accidents on Kimbau?”

  He laughed good-naturedly, very willing, as he had said, to answer questions and explain. “Good heavens, no, of course we don’t. They’re not accident cases at all, they’re amputation cases. Experimentals. The limbs were removed by surgery. They were all happy to feel they were helping.”

  I felt cold inside. “Donations?” I asked. “Like hearts?”

  “In a sense — a reverse sense,” he said.

  Like hell, I thought. I had a strong desire to flatten the bastard’s face. Yet I must admit I was a shade dumbfounded by the looks of ecstatic admiration those patients were giving the doctor and his vicious-looking nursing staff. That could have been due to a prudent desire not to arouse any hostility in the boss, and if so then it wasn’t too far removed from the anxieties in the minds of some National Health Service patients, but somehow I got the feeling it wasn’t that. They were like the faithful glimpsing Mahomet, and once again I thought of what old Pomfret-Hopton had said about God-men. But it was still horrible, whatever they felt about it themselves, to think of High and his surgical team cold-bloodedly amputating all those legs and arms just so they could grow fresh ones on the raw stumps.

  We finished the round of that particular ward and High moved for the door. The girls bowed us politely out. In the corridor again, I asked “Where do you get the guinea pigs from?”

  “Oh, quite a number of places,” he said carelessly, but wouldn’t go any farther on that one. In the next ward, this time a female one, there wasn’t in fact a lot to see. This was much more unobtrusive stuff — routine kidney, liver, heart and lung transplants, things that were commonplace enough by now in the outside world, though High did claim an improvement in methods and a higher success rate. Also, he was, he said, having some success with transplants of other body organs — larynx, spleen, bowels, organs which the world’s surgeons hadn’t got around to yet, and he claimed completely to have solved the ‘rejection’ problem in most of his cases. After this ward we went into another where corpse-like figures were lying in total inertia, some of them under weird-looking ‘cages’ formed from sheets draped over frames, all of them with networks of tubes lead
ing into their bodies from gleaming machines covered with dials and knobs, levers and gauges, and glass tanks containing a variety of coloured liquids.

  “The supply ward,” High told us. “These people are the donors. They’ve given the kidneys, hearts, and so on that have been transplanted into the persons you’ve already seen.”

  “You mean these people are without these organs?”

  High nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Are they dead?”

  “Heavens, no! They’re alive all right — they’ve been alive for quite long periods, a year and more in some cases. They’re kept alive by the machines, and they’re ready to give other parts of their bodies as may be necessary from time to time.”

  “Ready, and willing too, I suppose,” I said bitterly. “You’re a pretty bloody sort of bastard, High, and you may as well admit it and cut out all the sanctimonious cod’s-wallop.”

  He shrugged; he didn’t seem to mind in the least. He said indifferently, “As you like, Shaw. Scientific advance really has to come first, you know. We can’t be too stupidly fastidious today. As a matter of fact, it’s extremely interesting in itself — just to see how many organs a body can part with, and still go on living by machine input.” He moved on down the line of beds to the far end of the ward, where a figure lay under one of the frames, covered so that only a dead white face could be seen. “Now this one …” He studied some typewritten notes clipped to a board at the foot of the bed. “At various times he’s given his heart, lungs, kidneys and liver, yet he’s still a perfectly functioning body in pathological terms. He’s due for another removal shortly, as a matter of fact.”