The Sixth Commandment
Page 10
The gorgon’s face relaxed, wax flowing. She took a deep breath. She had an awesome bosom.
“He didn’t,” she said. “He passed. The empty suite is just down the corridor here. Follow me, please.”
She unlocked the door, and stood aside. I walked in ahead of her. It was a suite all right: sitting room, bedroom, bathroom. There was even a little kitchenette, with a waist-high refrigerator. But no stove. The windows faced the sere fields of Crittenden.
The rooms were clean and cheerfully decorated: chintz drapes and slipcovers. Bright, innocuous paintings on the warm beige walls. A new, oval-shaped rag rug. Windows were washed, floor polished, upholstery spotless, small desk set neatly with blotter, stationery, ballpoint pen, Bible. The bed had been freshly made. Spotless white towels hung in the bathroom. The closet door was open. It was empty of clothes, but wooden hangers were precisely arranged along the rod.
Nurse Beecham stood patiently at the hallway door while I prowled around. A quiet, impersonal suite of rooms. Nothing of Petersen showed, nor of any of the others who had gone before. No cigarette butts, worn slippers, rumpled pillows. No initials carved in the desk top. There was a faint scent of disinfectant in the air.
I stood at the window, staring down at the withered fields. It was a comfortable place to die, I supposed. Warm. Lighted. And he had been well cared for. Pain-free. Still, the place had all the ambience of a motel suite in Scranton, Pa. It had that hard, machine look, everything clean enough, but aseptic and chilling.
I turned back to Stella Beecham.
“What did he die of?” I asked. “Petersen?”
“Pelvic cancer,” she said. “Inoperable. He didn’t respond to chemotherapy. Shall we go now?”
I followed her in silence down the stairway to the main floor. We stopped three times while she introduced me to staff: one of the resident MD’s, the radiologist, and another RN. We all smiled and said things. I don’t remember their names.
Nurse Beecham paused outside the back door of the west wing.
“It’s a few steps to the lab,” she said. “Would you like your coat?”
“No, I’ll leave it here,” I said. “Thank you for showing me around. It must be very boring for you.”
“I don’t mind,” she said gruffly.
We walked out to that roofed port that led down the hill to the Crittenden Research Laboratory. It was a miserably rude day, the sun completely hidden now, air biting, wind slicing. But I didn’t see Beecham hurry her deliberate tread or hug her bare arms. She just trundled steadily along, a boulder rolling downhill.
The side door of the lab was locked. Nurse Beecham had the key on an enormous ring she hauled from her side pocket. When we were inside, she double-locked the door.
“Wait here, please,” she said, and went thumping down a wide, waxed linoleum corridor. I waited, looking around. Nothing of interest to see, unless closed doors excite you. In a few minutes, Dr. Kenneth Draper came bustling down the hall, rubbing his palms together and trying hard to look relaxed and genial.
“Well!” he said again. “Here we are! See everything you wanted in the Hall?”
“I think so,” I said. “It appears to be a very efficient operation.”
“Oh, it is, it is,” he assured me. “Quality care. If you’d care to test the patients’ food, just drop in unexpectedly, for any meal. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
“I’m sure I would be,” I said. “But that won’t be necessary, Dr. Draper. By the way, Nurse Beecham strikes me as being a very valuable member of your staff. How long has she been with you?”
“From the start,” he said. “When Dr. Thorndecker took over. He brought her in. I understand she was the first Mrs. Thorndecker’s nurse during a long illness prior to her—her accident. I don’t know what we’d do without Beecham. Perhaps not the most personable, outgoing woman in the world, but she certainly does a job running the Hall. Keeps problems to a minimum so Dr. Thorndecker and I can devote more time to the lab.”
“Where your real interests lie?” I suggested.
“Well … uh, yes,” he said hesitantly, as if afraid of saying too much. “The nursing home is our first responsibility, of course, but we are doing some exciting things here, and I suppose it’s natural …”
Another Coburnite who couldn’t finish his sentences. I wondered how these people expressed love for one another. Did they just say, “I love …” and let it go at that?
“Now this is our main floor,” Dr. Draper was saying. “Here you’ll find our offices, records room, reference library, a small lounge, a locker and dressing room, showers, and a room we’ve equipped with cots for researchers who might want to sleep here after a long day’s work or during a prolonged project. Do you want to see any of these rooms?”
“I’d like to glance at the reference library, if I may,” I said. “Just for a moment.”
“Of course, of course. Along here, please.”
This place was certainly livelier than the nursing home. As we walked along the corridor, I heard voices from behind closed doors, hoots of laughter, and once a shouted argument in which I could distinguish one screamed statement: “You’re full of shit!”
We stopped several times for Dr. Draper to introduce me to staff members hustling by. They all seemed to know who I was, and shook my hand with what appeared to be genuine enthusiasm. There were almost as many women as men, and all of them seemed young and—well, I think “keen” would describe them best. I said something about this to Draper.
“Oh, they’re top-notch,” he said proudly. “The best. Dr. Thorndecker recruited them from all over: Harvard, Duke, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, MIT. We have two Japanese, one Swede, and a kid from Mali you wouldn’t believe, he’s so smart. We pay them half of what they could be making with any of the big drug companies.”
“Then why …?” I said. I was beginning to suffer from the Coburn Syndrome.
“Thorndecker!” Dr. Draper cried. “It’s Thorndecker. The opportunity of working with him. Learning from him. They’re very highly motivated.”
“Or he’s charmed them,” I said, smiling.
Suddenly he was sober.
“Yes,” he said in a low voice. “That, too. Here’s our library. Small, but sufficient.”
We stepped inside. A room about twenty by forty feet, lined with bookcases. Several small oak tables with a single chair at each, and one long conference table with twelve captain’s chairs. A Xerox machine. The shelves were jammed with books on end and periodicals lying flat. It wasn’t too orderly: the ashtrays filled, wastebaskets overflowing, books and magazines lined up raggedly. But after a visit to the late Mr. Petersen’s abode, it was a pleasure to see human mess.
“Looks like it’s used,” I commented, wandering around.
“All the time,” he told me. “Sometimes the researchers will get caught up in something, read all night, and then flop into one of those cots I told you about. Very irregular hours. No one punches a time clock. But if they do their jobs, they can work any hours they please. A very relaxed atmosphere. Dr. Thorndecker feels it pays off in productivity.”
Meanwhile I was inspecting the titles of the books and periodicals on the shelves. If I had hoped they’d give me a clue to what was going on at the Crittenden Research Laboratory, I was disappointed. They appeared to me to be standard scientific reference texts, with heavy emphasis on human biology and the morphology of mammalian cells. A thick stack of recent oncological papers. One shelf of US Government publications dealing with demography, census, and public health statistics. I didn’t see a single volume I’d care to curl up with on a cold winter night.
“Very nice,” I said, turning to Draper. “Where do we go now—the labs?”
“Fine,” he said. “They’re on the second floor. On each side of the corridor is a large general lab used by the researchers. And then a smaller private lab used by the supervising staffers.”
“How many supervisors do you have?”
Unlike nursing homes and hospitals, research laboratories don’t necessarily have to be sterile, efficient, and as cozy as a subway station. True, I’ve been in labs that look like operating rooms: all shiny white tile and equipment right out of The Bride of Frankenstein. I’ve also been in research labs not much larger than a walk-in closet and equipped with not much more than a stained sink and a Bunsen burner.
When it comes to scientific research, there’s no guarantee. A million dollars sunk into a palace of a lab with all the latest and most exotic stainless steel doodads can result in the earth-shaking discovery that when soft cheese is exposed to the open air, mold results. And from that little closet lab with roaches fornicating in unwashed flasks can come a discovery that remakes the world.
The second-floor working quarters of the Crittenden Research Laboratory fell about halfway between palace and closet. The space was ample enough; the entire floor was divided in two by a wide corridor, and on each side was a huge laboratory. Each had, at its end, a small, private laboratory enclosed by frosted glass panels. These two small supervisors’ labs had private entrances from the corridor, and also etched glass doors leading into the main labs. All these doors, I noted, could be locked.
The main laboratories were lighted with overhead fluorescent fixtures, plus high-intensity lamps mounted near microscopes. Workbenches ran around the walls, with additional work tables in the center areas. Plenty of sinks, garbage disposal units, lab stools, metal and glass welding torches and tanks—from which I guessed they had occasional need to fabricate their own equipment.
But it was the profusion of big, complex, obviously store-bought hardware that bewildered me.
“I can recognize an oscilloscope when I see one,” I told Draper. “And that thing’s a gas diffusion analyzer, and that’s a scanning electron microscope. But what’s all this other stuff?”
“Oh … various things,” he said vaguely. “The big control board is for an automated cell culture, blood and tissue analyzer. Very complete readings, in less time than it would take to do it by hand. Incidentally, in addition to our own work, we do all the tests needed by the nursing home. That includes blood, urine, sputum, stools, biopsies—whatever. We have pathologists on staff.”
There had been half a dozen researchers working in the first lab we visited, and I saw about the same number when we walked into the lab across the hall. A few of them looked up when we entered, but most didn’t give us a glance.
The second lab had workbenches along three walls. The fourth, a long one, was lined with stainless steel refrigerators and climate-controlled cabinets. Through the front glass panels I could see racks and racks of flasks and tubes of all sizes and shapes.
“Cell cultures?” I asked Dr. Draper.
“Mostly,” he nodded. “And some specimens. Organ and tumor slices. Things of that sort. We have some very old, very valuable cultures here. A few originals. We’re continually getting requests from all over the world.”
“You give the stuff away?”
“Sometimes, but we prefer to trade,” he said, laughing shortly. “‘Here’s what we’ve got; what have you got?’ Research laboratories do a lot of horse-trading like that.”
“You have bacteria?” I asked.
“Some.”
“Viruses?”
“Some.”
“Lethal?”
“Oh yes,” he nodded. “Including a few rare ones from Africa. They’re in those cabinets with the padlocks. Only Dr. Thorndecker and I have the key.”
“What are they all doing?” I said, motioning toward the researchers bent over their workbenches. “What’s your current project?”
“Well, ah,” he said, “I’d prefer you direct that question to Dr. Thorndecker. He specifically said he wished to brief you personally on our current activities. After we’ve finished up here.”
“Good enough,” I said. Just seeing the Crittenden Research Laboratory in action revealed nothing. If they were brewing up a bubonic plague and told me they were making chicken noodle Cup-a-Soup, I wouldn’t have known the difference.
“The only thing left to see is the basement,” Draper said.
“What’s down there?”
“Mostly our experimental animals. A dissection room. Mainly for animals,” he added hastily. “We don’t do any human PM’s unless it’s requested by relatives of the deceased.”
“Why would they request it?”
“For various reasons. Usually to determine the exact cause of death. We had a case last year in which a widow authorized an autopsy of her deceased husband, a mental who had been at Crittenden Hall for two years. She was afraid of a genetic brain disorder that might be inherited by their son.”
“Did you find it?”
“Yes,” he said. “And there have been some postmortems authorized by the subjects themselves, prior to their death. These were people who wished to donate organs: kidneys, corneas, hearts, and so forth. But these cases have been few, considering the advanced age of most of the patients in the nursing home. Their organs are rarely, ah, desirable.”
And on that cheery note, we descended the stairway to the basement of the Crittenden Research Laboratory. Dr. Kenneth Draper paused with his hand on the knob of a heavy, padded steel door. He turned to me.
He seemed suddenly overcome by embarrassment. Spots of color appeared high on his cheeks. His forehead was pearled with sweat. Wet teeth appeared in a hokey grin.
“We have mostly mice, dogs, cats, chimps, and guinea pigs,” he said.
“Yes?” I said encouragingly. “And …?”
“Well,” he said, tittering nervously, “you are not, by any chance, an anti-vivisectionist, are you, Mr. Todd?”
“Rather them than me,” I said, and looked at him. But he had turned away; I couldn’t see his face.
When we stepped inside, I heard immediately the reason for that outside door being padded. The big basement room was an audiophile’s nightmare: chirps, squeals, barks, hisses, honks, roars, howls. I looked around, dazed.
“You’ll get used to it,” Draper shouted in my ear.
“Never,” I shouted back.
We made a quick tour of the cages. I didn’t mind the smell so much as that cacophony. I really am a sentimental slob, and I kept thinking the imprisoned beasts were making all that racket because they were suffering and wanted out. Not a very objective reaction, I admit; most of them looked sleek and well-fed. It’s just that I hate to see an animal in a cage. I hate zoos. I see myself behind those bars, with a neat label: “Samuel Todd, Homus Americanus, habitat New York City. A rare species that feeds on vodka gimlets and celery stalks stuffed with anchovy paste.”
There were a few aproned attendants around who grinned at us. One of them was wearing a set of heavy earphones. Maybe he was just blocking out that noise, or maybe he was listening to Mahler’s Fifth.
After inspecting the spitting cats, howling dogs, barking chimps, and squealing mice, it was a relief to get into a smaller room closed off by another of those padded steel doors.
This one was also lined with cages. But the occupants were those animals being used in current experiments and were reasonably quiet. Some of them lay on their sides, in what appeared to be a comatose state. Some were bandaged. Some had sensors taped to heads and bodies, the wires leading out to a battery of recording machines.
And some of them—one young chimpanzee in particular—were covered with tumors. Great, monstrous growths. Blossoms of wild flesh. Red and blue and yellow. A flowering of raw tissue. The smell in there was something.
The young chimp was almost hidden by the deadly blooms. The eruptions covered his head, body, limbs. He lay on his back, spreadeagled, breathing shallowly. I could see his black, glittering eyes staring at the cage above h
im.
“Carcinosarcoma,” Dr. Draper said. “He’s lasted longer than any other in this particular series of tests.”
“You infected him?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“Yes,” Draper said. “To test the efficacy of a drug we had high hopes for.”
“Your hopes aren’t so high now?”
“No,” he said, shrinking.
I felt like a shit.
“Forgive me, doctor,” I said. “I know in my mind this kind of thing has to be done. I know it’s valuable. I’d just prefer not to see it.”
“I understand,” he said. “Actually, we all try to be objective. I mean all of us—attendants, researchers. But sometimes we don’t succeed. We give them names. Al, Tony, Happy Boy, Sue. When they die, or have to be destroyed, we feel it, I assure you.”
“I believe you,” I said.
I took a quick look at the dissecting room. Just two stainless steel tables, sinks, pots and pans for excised organs. Choppers. Slicers. Shredders. Something like a kitchen in a gourmet restaurant.
We walked back through the animal room. I was happy to get out of there. The stairway up to the main floor was blessedly quiet.
“Thank you, Dr. Draper,” I said. “I’m sure you’re a busy man, and you’ll probably have to work late to catch up. But I appreciate your showing me around.”
“My pleasure,” he said.
Of course I didn’t believe him.
“And now,” I said, “I understand a meeting with Dr. Thorndecker is planned?”
“Correct,” he said, obviously pleased that everything had gone so well, and one of his wild, young researchers hadn’t dropped a diseased guinea pig’s spleen down my neck. “I’ll call Crittenden Hall from here. Then I’ll unlock the back door, and if you’ll just go back the way you came, someone will be at the Hall to let you in.”
“Thanks again,” I said, shaking his damp hand.