Orphan of Creation
Page 30
Mike cleared his throat. “I think I can get us that, get you into the George Washington University Hospital, use the machine there. People have used the CAT machine before for research, Egyptian mummies and so on. I bet I could get us in—one of the radiologists owes me a favor. There’s a hell of a waiting list for the machine, though. I could call now and try to schedule it, if you like.”
Pete shook his head. “No, not yet. We don’t want the scan done now. We wait until we’ve got a panel of impartial experts lined up in the room, making sure the scan’s done right, with no chance of fraud. Maybe it’s not too soon to make some polite inquiries. But the photos are the main thing. Give me photos I can distribute, and we can pack them in.”
“Photos we got, and I suppose we can take more and rush the processing, but, ah, I must ask an indelicate question,” Rupert said. “In these photos—does she wear clothes? Let’s face it, we want to get these pictures into family newspapers. And I guess we’ve got to think about dressing her for the news conference, too.”
Barbara seemed about to have another outburst, but she restrained herself. “I don’t really see how that matters,” she said. “But I’m afraid it’s a moot point. It’s pretty cold here for her, and we’ve tried to get her to wear warm things, sweaters or smocks, anything—but she won’t. She just tears them right off. In time, I think we can get her used to them, but that’ll be weeks or months, not days.”
Rupert shrugged. “Okay, that settles it then.” He turned to Thursday and said “Looks like you’re going to be a nudist at your own coming-out party, kiddo.” Thursday cocked her head to one side and pursed her lips, an expression that seemed to be her equivalent of a smile.
“Fine,” Pete said. People wear clothes, he thought to himself. Nice to have some distinctions left.
<>
Pushed, prodded, led this way and that, Thursday numbly followed Barbara into yet another box that moved, a car, this one without any place to see out, and rode the car to yet another strange place. Barbara talked a lot, said a lot of words that Thursday did not understand at all, speaking in a low, soothing monotone. She could hear the sounds of the words better and better, though, even if she could not understand them. But there was more to understand than just the words themselves. Thursday suddenly realized that Barbara was trying to encourage her, to soothe her, to make her feel better—and started to wonder what there was to soothe her about.
They arrived wherever it was they were going, and Thursday allowed herself to be led from the truck. They were in some sort of short tunnel, and Barbara immediately led her through a door in the side of the tunnel and through a series of hallways to a small, cluttered, odd-shaped room.
Barbara sat down in a chair, and pulled on Thursday’s arm, guided her down into the seat next to her.
The small room had two doors, and Thursday could hear strange noises from the one they had not come in through. She heard rustlings and thuds, voices and laughter. After a time, the noise settled down a bit, and she heard a single voice, speaking very loud. She recognized the voice. It was Grossi—Grossington, that was the name. She heard him speak her name, and her ears pricked up. Barbara took her arm, opened the second door, and led her out into a big, noisy, brightly lit room.
She could not understand what she saw or heard. There was Grossington, and Barbara, standing in a broad empty place. In front of them was a wall of dazzling lights that made it hard to see anything but the vaguest shapes beyond. She could just barely make out people, lots of people, moving about behind the lights. There was a babble of voices, and a whole tangle of strange noises, clicks and whirs and hums, that seemed to come from black machines that some men were putting up to their faces.
She was scared, but Barbara held her hand and said the same soothing words, over and over. The men with their black boxy things came closer, and each of the boxy machines had a huge, dark glassy eye at the end of it. Other men and women started talking into sticks with puffy ends, and then would shove the sticks into her face.
“She can’t talk! She can’t talk! Get those cameras and mikes back! You’ll scare her!” It was Barbara’s voice, shouting something at the strange people, but they didn’t seem to notice at all. They kept on shoving and pushing, struggling to get close to her. Barbara grabbed Thursday by the arm and pulled her back, put herself between Thursday and the mob, holding her arms up to urge them back. At last, the people settled down a little, and went back behind the lights, but they all kept talking at once, shouting at Barbara or Grossington or one of the others, barely listening at all when the people with Thursday said anything back.
After a long time, they led her out of the room and down the long hall to the car. But there were more people with the same kinds of machines there now, some chasing them down the hall, others appearing from around every corner. They rushed in around the car, and made it hard for Thursday and Barbara to get into it. Hands sprouted out of the crowd and grabbed at Thursday, and she snarled and slapped them back with a wave of her arm.
The crowd drew back a bit then, and they climbed into the car. They took her back to the place she knew, the room with the bars on the window. She did not understand what had happened.
<>
“This is Penny Wambaugh broadcasting live from the Natural History Museum in Washington D.C. What all expected to be a clumsy fraud waiting to be exposed has turned instead into the story of the century. Reporters turned out once again for a press conference conducted by Dr. Grossington, drawn this time by what appeared to be photos of a living ape-woman. Good as the photos were, no one expected them to be authentic—until an australopithecine named Thursday was brought out on stage. To confirm that there is no fraud, Thursday is to undergo a CAT scan at George Washington University Hospital later today. But for those of us who saw her, there can be no doubt. She is no actor in a gorilla suit, but instead a living, breathing and non-human creature. As one scientist put it, quote, She is so close to being human, and yet so far, that we can no longer say for certain what a human being is, unquote. We’ll have film of her on the five o’clock news, coming up next. Stay tuned.”
<>
“What Clem here says makes sense, don’t it? This Thursday critter is from Africa, ain’t it? And where the hell are nigrahs from? Africa! You see the pictures of that ape—black as the coal scuttle. The Klan’s been warning the rest of the country for years the kind of trouble we’re gonna get with the mixing of the races—and now we got proof, ‘cepting it’s a different set of races. It’s gotta be that this monkey blood got in with the nigrahs some time back. You kin see the resemblance, and that blood’s been the cause of all our troubles. Hey, darling, another round a’ beers here if yah please.”
<>
More things, strange things, began to happen. They took her to another place, and made her lie on a flat white table. They strapped her down on it so hard and tight she could not move, and then the table began to slide slowly back through a hole in a white wall. The table slid back the way it had come, and then the whole thing happened again. And again. Finally, they took her home again, but even there she had no peace.
People, many people she had never seen, came to look at her, to pry open her mouth and look at her teeth, to poke needles into her arm and draw blood, to glue wires to her head and her body and hook her up to machines. Half the time it seemed she felt sleepy, listless, woozy. She would suddenly fall asleep and wake up in a new place, or back where she started, but with the feeling that she had been taken somewhere, that something had happened to her. The whole day, her every living minute, had the strange, shifting, floating, ephemeral feeling of a dream. Her real dreams became more vivid, bright images of the jungle, or Barbara’s face, or whatever frightening things the humans had done to her that day running through her mind again. She was never quite sure if she was awake or asleep anymore.
She began to get snappish and moody. She began to growl at people and bare her teeth at the people, try and frighten them.
> Barbara was the only one she would let come near. Barbara was with her, always, for those long days, always holding her hand, saying kind words. Barbara would take her to a big, bright room with nice things, and one wall with a big shiny window in it, a special window Barbara called a mirror. Thursday quickly learned that the tranka she saw in it standing next to Barbara was herself, and spent long hours staring at her own image. But they played games in the room, too. Barbara would strap a little box to her belt, and take a wire from it, and stick the plug on the end of it into her ear. Now and then, the plug would fall out of Barbara’s ear and Thursday could hear a tiny voice come from it. Once she had the wire in her ear, Barbara would show her games to play, like stacking blocks or matching shapes and colors, or teach her new words. Those were the happiest times of day for Thursday. Yet she could tell there was something sad about her friend Barbara, as if Barbara wanted it to stop and couldn’t make it happen. Barbara would glance at the mirror, frown at it.
Finally, one day, in the middle of a game, Barbara got mad. Right in the middle of showing a picture to Thursday, Barbara jumped up out of her chair, yanked the wire out of her ear, threw the picture cards up in the air, and turned to scream at the mirrored wall. “Stop it!” she cried. “Stop watching!” She picked up her chair and threw it through the mirror, smashing it to bits and revealing the watchers hiding behind it. She pulled the box off her belt and threw it on the floor. “Stop telling me what to do! Go away! Leave us alone.”
Thursday was scared, astonished, bewildered. She stared at Barbara, wondered what she should do. Barbara sagged down onto the floor and began to cry, wailing as if her heart was breaking.
Slowly, gently, Thursday sat down on the floor next to her and wrapped her shaggy arms around her friend. Barbara threw her arms around Thursday and sobbed into her chest. Thursday, frightened and confused, hugged her friend harder and rocked her back and forth, making the most soothing noises she could.
And still, through the broken window, the watchers watched.
<>
“Okay, so she cracked,” Rupert thundered back at the bland-faced doctor. “No real sleep or decent meals for a week—a week where she had to watch someone she feels responsible for being tortured and tested like an animal, a week of helping in the testing and torture in the name of some vague scientific ideal. She has every reporter on planet Earth breathing down her neck, and then some pencil-necked geek in the observation room tells her to try lying to Thursday about what the pictures on the cards are, just to see what happens. So she yanks her radio pickup and throws a chair through the snoop-mirror. I just wish she had managed to hit one of the little bastards back there. And just because it happens in your laughing academy, you lock her up in one of your rubber rooms. We don’t want any crap—we want her out.”
Mike Marchando nodded his head vigorously. “Damn straight we do. I’m a medical doctor, and I’m prepared to sign any release you want to get her out of her. There couldn’t be anything worse for her right now than being locked up.”
“Dr. Maxwell, Dr. Marchando, she is not being locked up.” The psychiatrist, a round, heavyset man with a sincere manner, spoke in a steady, calm voice. “She is sedated, yes, and in one of the hospital rooms here. Where else would we have put her? In fact, it’s the same room she’s been using right along. You’ll concede she needs rest. That is all we are giving her—a chance to actually sleep, instead of staring at the ceiling all night, knotted up with guilt, then waking up to another day of, as you put it, torturing a friend. The sleep comes out of a needle, yes, but it is still restful, deeply restful. We’re not regarding her as mentally ill, just exhausted. She is not officially registered as a patient. When she wakes tomorrow morning, she will be rested—and free to go.”
Mike worked his jaw, clenched and unclenched his fist. “Okay. Good. But I’m still a doctor, and I’m going to sit up with her—keep an eye on her, and on you guys. Where is she?”
The psychiatrist nodded. “All right. Nurse—could you take this gentleman down to Dr. Marchando’s room? Make sure he has everything he wants.”
“Later, Rupert,” Mike said, and left, following the nurse.
Rupert watched him go, shrugged and scratched his unshaved face. “I’m sorry, doctor. I shouldn’t have flown off the handle like that—but we’re all in pretty raw shape.”
“You ought to be, with what you’ve got to handle. If you people didn’t feel the pressure—then I’d start to worry. Good luck, Dr. Maxwell.”
“Thanks, I guess. So long.” Rupert turned and walked back down the hallway to the very temporary office space the Saint E’s people had loaned to the anthropologists. He had a government-issue steel desk of his own, wedged into one corner of the back office of the suite. He threaded his way past the other desks to his own little nest and tried to get a start sifting through all the paperwork.
They had wanted to be accepted by the press, and they had certainly gotten their wish. Every newspaper, every TV and radio network, every magazine and rumor mill, had featured Thursday. And, as they said in the business, public response was overwhelming.
Telegrams, express letters, telexes, faxes. telephone messages scrawled in unreadable handwriting littered his desk—missives from every corner of the civilized world; and then some. All of them urgently requesting information, or asking that this or that sample be drawn from Thursday, or that a certain test be run on her, or else requesting—or out-and-out demanding—permission for the writer to run experiments personally on the poor old girl. Barbara was constantly occupied with Thursday, and Grossington was up to his eyeballs trying to get their paper out while running his long-ignored department and wining and dining the hordes of potential contributors. Livingston had gotten himself signed up with some crowd doing DNA studies, and he wasn’t around. It all left Rupert as the only member of the team able, if not altogether willing, to deal with all the incoming queries. Michael was willing to help, but he didn’t know the politics of the profession. Crudely put, he didn’t know who it was safe to snub and who to suck up to.
It certainly wasn’t going to be a straight case of judging the requests on the merits. Some requested tests were as simple as getting her to touch her finger to her nose with her eyes closed. Some would require vivisection to perform, and some were just out-and-out ludicrous—like the grad student who had sent along a copy of the Scholastic Aptitude Test to see how Thurs would do. Rupert shrugged. Maybe they should give her the SAT, just to find out what colleges would take her.
Some requests were just plain weird. “Please inform as to precise extent of webbing between test subject’s fingers and toes (and enclose calibrated photos), and report on degree of streamlining visible in her fur/hair covering.” What were they looking for, a swim-team captain? Rupert knew he wasn’t being totally fair on that one. It must be from one of the groups trying to prove humans evolved at the waterside and still retained a few semi-aquatic traits. The idea was a little weird, but you could at least call the people involved legitimate scientists—as opposed to the gen-ew-wine, accept-no-substitute, industrial-strength kooks who were writing in. The whole Thursday/Ambrose case had attracted droves of them.
“We have PROOF that the so-called ape-man came from a sector of Africa WELL KNOWN as refuge for alien spacecraft. TWELVE SITINGS of ALIEN EXTRATERRESTRIAL UFO space vehicle have been made their. We must assume so-called ape-man is ALIEN! DESPITE Project Blue Book coverup, USAF our best hope. We Urge you to contact them (Air force) at ones with ALL details of CRETURE...”
“I have a suggestion to explain the creature you have found. May be it is the result of a prehistoric atom-bomb mutation, like in the old movies. If so, may be a dose of the opposite radiation would cure it. Hope you can tell what radiation cause it, so opposite can be found . . .”
“Was the prehistoric australian pithacine alive when the dinosaurs were here? Maybe he can tell you what they were like...”
But the shortest was also Rupert’s favorite.
He sighed and got back to logging in the last of the day’s mail. Supposedly, he was to write in who had written and what action was taken. Rupert had always enjoyed listing things, organizing things, but this was ridiculous. It was impossible to read them all, never mind answering them, or trying to comply with all the more useful tests. For most of the letters, he just noted N.A.T.—No Action Taken. Just trying to handle a few of the most reasonable and sane requests—and accommodate some of the scientists who had come in person—had driven the whole team to distraction, and practically given Barbara a nervous breakdown.
Thursday herself was not in much better shape. She had been tranked or knocked out altogether for one reason or another so many times that she seemed to be losing touch, forgetting things.
It had been a pretty tough week all around. His instinct was to stop it, but that wasn’t a realistic solution. He knew there had to be better controls put on the experiments, or they weren’t going to have a sane and living australopithecine to run the experiments on.
Something had to give.
March
Chapter Twenty-One
The Question of Thursday
(New York Times Editorial)
All human beings are persons. Are, therefore, all persons human beings? At first glance, the answer is so obviously ‘yes’ that none of us even considers the question. Yet, this is the age when the phrase Artificial Intelligence is bandied about, and computer scientists confidentially predict the construction of a thinking computer. We have learned that chimps are more closely related to us than ever suspected, learned that chimps certainly use tools and possibly have the capacity to learn languages, learned of the impressive mentalities of dolphins and whales. This is the age in which our radio-telescopes began patiently to search the skies for signs of intelligence—seeking for signs, if you will, of personhood beyond the Solar System. In such a time, we are forced to concede at least the possibility that the indefinable something that makes us persons could also belong to a new kind of entity we are about to create, or to the great apes or cetaceans, or to beings not of this Earth. But these fascinating and disturbing possibilities have remained comfortably unrealized, and we have not been forced to confront the issue.