by Ben Bova
“I want you to go to the Lahey Clinic for a complete physical,” I told her.
She had refused even to come down to my office. I had to go back to Max’s pen, back in the storage area where Cassie had set up an austere little cell for herself, next to the chimp’s.
“I can’t leave him,” she said. Her face was gaunt, cheeks hollow, eyes rimmed with red and pouched with dark circles.
Max was sitting quietly in a corner of the pen, behind the bulletproof glass, pushing a few alphabet blocks with his one hand. His left arm was unbandaged. It had grown noticeably; you could see the tiny buds of fingers at the end of it, pink and new-looking. His eye was still bandaged, though.
“I’ll arrange for the company helicopter to take you up and back. You’ll be back the same day. You can have breakfast and dinner right here.”
She started to shake her head.
“Cassie, I’m not asking you. The subject is not open to discussion. Either you go or you’re fired.”
Her eyes widened for a moment. Then she smiled weakly at me. “You fire me and I’ll sue you for it.”
I smiled back. “Go ahead and sue. But you’ll have to do it from outside the lab. You won’t be allowed to see Max at all.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“I want you to get a checkup, Cassie. I want you to take care of yourself as well as you take care of Max, here.”
Very reluctantly, she said, “Only one day?”
“One day. And afterward you’ve got to do what they tell you. I don’t think you’re eating right and I’m certain you’re not sleeping well.”
Her smile came back. “Yes, Daddy Arthur.”
I got Phyllis to set it all up and before the end of the week the company chopper had landed in our parking lot and whisked Cassie off to Boston for the day. That gave Zack and his team a chance to examine Max thoroughly, without Cassie getting in their way.
“The eye isn’t working out,” Zack told me gloomily that evening.
He and Darrell and Vince had gathered in my office.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Zack shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s not regenerating. It’s just a jumble of tumors in the socket. A real mess.”
Darrell said, “Maybe it was too much trauma for his body to handle at once. Maybe we should’ve done the arm first and then the eye.”
Zack nodded unhappily. Vince muttered, “Helluva time to think of that now.”
All three of them were down. I tried to bring the problem into perspective a little. “Well, the arm’s coming along, isn’t it?”
They agreed that it was.
“That’s the important thing,” I said. “We just overreached ourselves with the eye.”
Darrell ran a hand across his long jaw. “I suppose it’s not really that important. If we’re aiming at rejuvenating people, that is. Old age doesn’t affect the eyes in ways that can’t be handled conventionally.”
“Cataracts can be taken care of surgically,” Zack said.
Vince added, “They use laser surgery to bring your vision back to twenty-twenty. Instead of eyeglasses.”
“Yeah, I see ads on TV for that,” said Darrell. “The important thing is regrowing internal organs, not eyeballs. We don’t need eyeballs.”
“Limbs,” Vince said.
They were whistling past the graveyard, I knew. Convincing themselves that the failure with Max’s eye wasn’t crucial, wouldn’t stop our progress.
“Maybe we should put his original eye back in,” Zack suggested. “Clean out the tumors before they get any worse and give him his eye back.”
Darrell raised his brows questioningly.
“Let’s wait another week or so,” I said. “Give it a little more time.”
We might be able to replace Max’s eye, but reconnecting it so that he could see was a different story. I thought about how the news reporters would react to a chimp with a regrown arm but a blind eye. Max’s usefulness with the media was finished, I knew. But I didn’t say anything to them. That wasn’t their problem, it was mine.
And Pat Hayward’s.
More and more I was having my discussions with Pat over dinner. There just didn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to talk about PR problems, especially since I’d started shuttling down to Washington almost every week to set up the science court. So Pat and I usually met at the end of the day and drove out to one of the local restaurants. In our separate cars.
I explained about Max.
“You’re right,” Pat said. “The media would go into a feeding frenzy once they found out that you had deliberately taken his eye and it won’t grow back.”
“It will eventually,” I heard myself say. It sounded awfully defensive, as if I were trying to absolve myself.
“Really?”
“I think so. Once his arm is fully regrown I think we can go back and do the eye successfully.”
The restaurant was small and not terribly good. But it was quiet and nearly empty. We could sit at our table and talk without interruption; the owner and the two waiters knew how well I tipped and would have happily let us stay all night, if we wanted to. The owner had even bought a case of Tavel for me: “Dr. Marshak’s special selection,” he called it.
Pat took a sip of the wine, then asked me, “What about the tumors? Cassie’s afraid they’re going to kill Max.”
That shocked me. “She told you that?”
“Yes.”
“When did you . . . ?”
Pat grinned at me. “Arthur, you’re not my only source of information. If I’m going to be useful to you, I’ve got to know what’s going on in the lab. I don’t sit at my word processor all day. I go out and talk to people.”
I hadn’t even thought about what Pat did when she wasn’t in my sight.
“Do you have any idea of how tricky it’s been to keep the reporters away from Max?”
“They want to see him?”
“Of course they do! They don’t know about the surgery, they just remember that they got better footage out of Max than any of the humans they photographed.”
“And they still want to see him.”
“Whenever they come to the lab. They all ask to see Max. I tell them he’s been quarantined; that seems to satisfy them.”
“Good,” I said, realizing for the first time that Pat had become invaluable to me. She was smart and resourceful. And loyal. That was important.
I must have been staring at her across the restaurant table. She was really good-looking, especially with the candle glow throwing highlights on her red hair.
Don’t get involved with your employees, I warned myself.
She’s only a consultant, I argued.
Same thing. You’re her boss, her source of income. If she lets you come on to her, how do you know what her reasons are? If she doesn’t, you’re looking at a sexual harassment situation.
Well, I told myself, as soon as this trial is over I’m going to drop her as a consultant. Then we’ll see what we’ve got going between us. If anything.
Pat seemed to understand what was running through my mind. Her smile seemed to turn a little sad.
“Arthur,” she said softly, “someday, when this is all over and I’m freelancing again, you’ll have to come up to my house in Old Saybrook and meet my mother.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
“No, you wouldn’t,” Pat answered, very seriously. “But she’s the acid test. If you can stand her, then maybe there’s a future to our relationship.”
How did we get on the subject of relationships? It must have been mental telepathy.
“For now, though,” Pat went on, “we ought to keep it strictly business.”
I realized it had been months since I’d gotten laid. But I nodded and said, “For now.”
And then we went back to the thorny problem of how we could use Max’s arm to our benefit without showing his missing eye. We were forced to the decision that Max’s days as a media dar
ling were finished, unless and until we could regrow his eye.
I was less optimistic than I had let on with Pat. The tumors weren’t succumbing to Cassie’s enzyme treatment, they were getting into his brain. I was terribly afraid that they would kill Max even before his arm had completely regrown.
And what effect would that have on the trial?
CASSIE IANETTA
It wasn’t murder. It was a mercy killing. I mean, they let doctors get away with “assisted suicide,” so why shouldn’t I put poor Max out of his misery?
The tumors were eating up his brain. Max didn’t recognize me anymore. He just sat in his pen like a hopeless lump. He’d look at me with his one eye but he wouldn’t show any sign of recognition.
I’d call to him and he wouldn’t respond. I think he even forgot sign language, the tumors must’ve incapacitated that part of his brain.
And I couldn’t go into his pen anymore. That was the worst shock of all. The night I came back from my visit to the Lahey Clinic up in Boston, I went straight to Max’s room and opened the door in the Plexiglas wall and Max shrieked and ran away from me!
“It’s me, Max,” I said, keeping my voice soft and soothing. “It’s all right. See, it’s Cassie.”
But Max cowered in the corner, covering his face with his one good arm.
“What did they do to you?” I asked him. He looked just the same as he had that morning, when I’d left on the helicopter. But Zack and the rest of them had had Max all to themselves for the whole day.
“What did they do, Max?” I asked again, hunching down and sort of duck-walking to be near him.
Max flailed out with his one arm and knocked me over backward. Then he raced for the door in the Plexiglas wall. I had shut it, but hadn’t bothered to lock it. Max knew how to use the door handle, but he fumbled with it and then gave up.
He whirled back at me, teeth bared, snarling at me. For the first time in my life I was scared of Max.
I backed into a corner and sat quietly, knees pulled up to my chin, avoiding direct eye contact. I could hear my heart racing. Where were the handlers? Couldn’t they hear Max’s screaming? Why didn’t they come?
Max seemed to calm down a little. He edged slowly to the corner where he’d been when I first came into the pen. He kept watching me, though, so I didn’t move. I hardly breathed. But my mind was spinning. Max, oh, Max, I thought. They’ve destroyed you and I let them do it. It hurt. All the way down inside me it hurt in a way that the cancer never did. It hurt the way Bill had hurt me. They had all betrayed me, even Max now, though it wasn’t really his fault.
So we just sat there for hours, me in my corner, Max in his. Neither one of us moving. Finally Max stretched out on one side and closed his eye. I still didn’t move. I waited and waited until he was breathing deep and regular, sound asleep. Even then I was afraid to stir, afraid that he’d wake up if I budged an inch and come at me with those ripping fangs and his powerful arm.
I must have dozed now and then, my head on my knees. My back ached, my legs tingled, but I didn’t move. If they found that Max attacked me they’d destroy him. They’d shoot him like he was a wild animal when in truth they were the animals, the beasts. They had killed Max with their damned lies.
That was when I realized that Max was already as good as dead. He had nothing to look forward to now except pain and fear. The tumors would continue to grow, eat into his brain, destroy him. His body might remain but Max himself was already half gone. Why should I let him go on suffering like that? Why shouldn’t I help him to escape all this pain and humiliation?
Then a new thought struck me. If Max dies now they’ll never be able to say that they regenerated his arm. They’ll have to admit that they failed. They’re only keeping him alive long enough for the arm to regrow, I knew. Once they can show that, once they can take pictures and make all the tests and measurements and put it all in their reports, then they’ll murder Max anyway so they can dissect him and see what went wrong with his eye.
I can stop them! I can beat them!
By the time the handler came to clean Max’s pen and give him breakfast, every part of my body ached horribly. But I was smiling to myself.
“What the hell . . . ?”
The kid looked shocked to see me in there. Max woke up the instant he opened the door, and scrambled to his feet. But he didn’t try to attack me or the handler; he didn’t try to get out of the pen.
“I’m all right,” I said, getting up slowly. Every muscle in me groaned as I slowly climbed to my feet, leaning heavily against the wall.
“You spent the night in here?”
I just nodded.
“All night?”
My legs were numb; it took a real effort to walk.
“Jeez.” The kid grinned at me. “Does that mean you two are engaged?”
He started to laugh and I slapped his face. Max jumped back a little, frightened. I stumbled out of the pen, leaving the kid standing there with my finger marks white against his flushed red cheek.
The word went through the lab like wildfire, of course. Cassie spent the night with Max. The two of them slept together in the chimp’s pen. If it’s a boy they’ll name it Arthur. That kind of thing. They didn’t say a word in front of me, of course, but I could hear them all snickering behind my back.
Arthur summoned me into his office almost as soon as he arrived that morning.
“What happened?” He wasn’t laughing. He was completely serious.
“What did they do to Max while my back was turned?” I asked.
“Nothing that hasn’t been done while you’ve been with him. Routine tests, that’s all.”
It was a lie, a damned lie. I knew it. Arthur could sit there behind his nice big desk and smile at me, all sincerity and polish, but I knew he was lying through his handsome teeth.
“Max didn’t recognize me,” I said. “He got terribly upset when I went to see him.”
“Did he attack you?”
It was my turn to lie. “Do I look like he attacked me? He could’ve sliced me to ribbons if he’d wanted to.” I didn’t mention the ache in my ribs from where he’d hit me. I’d be bruised and sore for weeks, I knew.
“But he didn’t recognize you,” Arthur said.
“The tumors are destroying his brain functions.”
“But you’re all right.”
“I’m fine.”
“Good. I was worried.”
Another lie. All he was worried about was the possibility that Max might have to be destroyed before the arm grew all the way back.
I spent most of the morning at the computer in my office, writing a long letter to the Reverend Roy Averill Simmonds. It took me even longer to find his address; half the afternoon on the telephone tracking down various organizations that had dealt with him. I finally telephoned Arthur’s brother at Mendelssohn Hospital and got one of the secretaries there to give me his mailing address. It was in Wichita.
“That’s where they send the donations,” she told me. “Must be his home base.”
“Or his bank,” I said.
“They always have their offices close to their banks, honey.”
That made sense, I supposed. So I sent my letter there. It was a complete report on what they’d done to Max, in nontechnical language. Five pages long. If Reverend Simmonds wanted to publicize how godless scientists were being cruel to animals, let him show the world what they’d done to Max. I even included two of the DVDs I’d been making over the past few weeks.
It was almost five o’clock when I slipped my package into the pile in the outgoing bin at the mailroom door. I had to hurry down to the pharmaceutical storeroom. Like the rest of the lab’s service departments, it closed at five. The scientists might keep going all night long, but the support offices kept nine-to-five hours, unless somebody made special provisions to keep them open longer.
I had access to any of the drugs on stock, and plenty of times I had sent the lab’s purchasing people scurrying after
really exotic stuff. But for this task, all I needed was a bottle of tranquilizers. I already had enough cyanide.
Tears blurred my vision as I ground the tranquilizer capsules into Max’s food, a paste of bananas and sugar that he always loved. Long after he had finished his regular dinner, I brought the stainless steel bowl to his pen.
The same kid I had smacked that morning was coming out of the cell as I walked down the hallway.
“I already gave him his dinner,” he said guardedly.
His face was unmarked. I hadn’t hit him that hard. Nowhere near as hard as Max had hit my ribs. Nowhere near as hard as he deserved.
“I’m giving him an extra treat,” I said, struggling to keep my voice from trembling.
He started to grin, then thought better of it. “Uh-huh,” was all he said.
“I’ll stay with him tonight,” I said. “You don’t have to worry about him.”
I could see that he was aching to make a wisecrack. But he restrained himself, probably afraid I’d bean him with Max’s metal food bowl.
Still, he asked, “Uh, you’re not goin’ to stay inside again, are you?”
“No,” I said, forcing a smile. “That was an accident. I’ll keep an eye on him from outside his pen.”
He nodded and walked off, probably dying to spread the word that Cassie was going to spend another night with her boyfriend.
Max watched me as I opened the food slot in the Plexiglas wall and slid the bowl inside. For long minutes he didn’t move and I thought, If he doesn’t take the drugged food he’ll keep on living this miserable painful existence.
“It’s your favorite, Max,” I coaxed him gently. “You always loved it.”
I was already speaking to him in the past tense.
After a long while he shuffled over to the bowl and sniffed it. Then he stuck a finger into the glop and tasted it. He looked up at me, his one brown eye showing none of the joy or excitement that he would’ve shown a few weeks earlier. None of the personality.
He’s not Max anymore, I said to myself. Max is already gone. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t afford that luxury. Not yet.
