“I saw heartbeats. I saw a tiny human in that box.”
“They had a kind of life, yes. But there was no thought! No memory. No awareness of their own existence. They’re like seeds. They can become life. But life is a process of becoming. You’re not suddenly human, suddenly seeing and knowing. That kind of awareness is what we call consciousness, and consciousness comes on us slowly, like coming up from a deep dreamless sleep. We are awake, and we know we are awake. Man is the animal who knows.”
“How can you decide for them? How can you know whether or not they were alive that way?”
“But science is always making distinctions of that order. That’s why even the most humane and enlightened doctor will resist an abortion after the first trimester, because he knows that life is not a switch thrown at the moment of orgasm, a life flicking on in a darkened room. It is a process of change, of becoming, and that becoming is exponential as the cells divide and subdivide. If the fundamentalists and the fanatics are right, then masturbation is murder.”
“You went too far.”
“And how far is too far?”
“These were individuals. Little people. Not a collection of cells or an egg.”
“Tell me where the line is, then. Tell me at what point in the development of this organism does it become an individual, a person.”
“I don’t know.”
“Nor do I, Beau. But I can make an educated guess, and that is what this is all about. Do you know what a blastocyst is?”
“What’s the point, Doc? It isn’t going to change anything.”
“It’s important to me that you understand why I know I did nothing wrong! I may have done nothing that was even illegal!”
“How about immoral? Or is science the last refuge of the scoundrel now?”
“If you understand the process, you’ll understand my … what I tried to do. What I can still accomplish!”
“Try me.”
Hogeland straightened in his seat. Beau could see the change come over him, see the man rebuilding himself in his mind, becoming the grand old man of medicine. He looked at his watch. They’d be closing in on Billings in about an hour. Hogeland’s voice was rich and full of persuasion now that he had found familiar ground. The doctor wasn’t used to being perceived as anything less than a monument to medicine and compassion.
“Two weeks after the sperm has fertilized the ovum, cell division has produced perhaps a hundred cells. Fluid has accumulated within the cellular mass to form a kind of irregular inner cavity. At around the same time, this cellular aggregate has arrived in the uterus and begins to attach itself to the uterine wall. Is it a person yet, Beau?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do we have funerals for miscarried eggs at two weeks?”
“No. The woman wouldn’t even have known she was pregnant.”
“Exactly. So we can say that there’s no soul in there yet. Unless you’re with the Catholics?”
“I am Catholic. But I … it’s more complicated than that.”
“Yes. That’s the trouble, when you’re Catholic and you like to think. It creates an existential tension. Now, when the blastocyst has reached this stage, the cells are … adherent. They stick together. Instead of just being like a bag of marbles, they are becoming connected. This is the first time that you can say there is a single entity, and not just a bundle of unconnected cells. Is it human now?”
“No.”
“In this entity, there are two separate cellular groupings. There’s an external layer, and a small cellular protrusion that extends into the inner cavity. This inner mass is the part of the blastocyst that actually becomes the human. The other mass, the exterior mass, ultimately becomes the placenta and the outer membranes. They’re discarded at the birth. Is it human yet?”
“I’ll tell you when I think so.”
“We call this stage ‘primary embryonic organization.’ This is the first time we can discern the beginning of the actual embryo. In this process, we see the basic structure begin, we see what we call the ‘primitive streak.’ This is an actual line, a thickening of the cells along the main body axes, front and back, left and right, head and tail. Now this is critical. If two streaks appear, you get twins. If three, you get triplets. Each streak is the—let’s say almost the spine—of an actual individual. But it has no neurons, no cortical development. It can’t feel or know anything. Am I boring you?”
“Just keep going, Doc. I’ll stop you when I’m in too deep.”
“Now we have reached ‘organogenesis.’ This streak begins to fill out into the major regions and organs. We’re headed out of developmental individuality and into functional individuality. This goes on until about the end of the eighth week.”
“When does it get a heart?”
“That’s the first organ to become functional. It starts to beat around the fourth week after the egg is fertilized.”
“And when does it get a spinal column?”
“Now you’re making the classic layman’s error. You have to understand that the fetus—we’re now at the stage where it’s a fetus—may have the outward appearance of a human child, but internally it is still very far from having any kind of organized neuronal connectivity—”
“What?”
“From feeling or reacting to anything. Now, if we go back to the third week, we have seen a layer of cells in that streak start to form a neural plate, but the cells of that plate are not neurons. They will be, but not yet.”
“When does this baby start to think, Doc?”
“You’re really asking, when does the fetus start to undergo some form of inner experience. Can it feel pain?”
“Or fear, Doc.”
“Precisely, and that’s the vital question. You’ll agree that pain and fear are internal sensations?”
“Yeah.”
“So if they’re internal sensations, they have to pass along sensory conduits. Along neurons and into an organized thalamic—into a real brain?”
“Okay.”
“So if pain and fear depend on a significant degree of brain function, you’re not going to see that in any truly valid way until the fetus is twenty-two weeks old. Because all the science, all the anatomical studies have invariably shown that these vital neuronal connections are not complete until the first fibers from the thalamus enter the cortex. Then we can say that the channel for feeling, for fear and pain, is now complete. But that only means that the wires are there. That doesn’t mean the current is flowing. You don’t see any kind of rhythmic organized electrical activity—such as you might see in the brain waves of a sleeping person—until the neural substrate is very well advanced, and you don’t see that until the seventh month of pregnancy. That’s when premature babies are easily viable, because they are developed enough to carry on the business of being alive on their own. But are they conscious? Are they humans yet?”
“Look, Doc. Boil it down. What’s the minimum level of experience for you to say these babies were conscious?”
“I’d say the absolute minimum would be when they can feel pain and know it as pain.”
“And when does that happen?”
“As I said, probably around the time that the upper brain stem and the cerebral cortex begin to function. But let’s be conservative. Say six months, to be on the safe side.”
“And how old were the—”
“Some of the donors you saw were fetuses in the area of five months. And the term babies, of course.”
“And the term babies! Yes, Doc, I saw them. They were full-term babies, born alive. Don’t give me any horseshit about ‘harvesting fetuses.’ You were taking living babies.”
“Not always!”
“Oh, right. Only now and then. That makes it okay. How’d you get the short-term babies? The five- or six-month ones?”
Hogeland looked out the windshield and sighed. “Maybe we crossed the line there. I know I suffered for it, and there were nights when it wasn’t as clear as it should have bee
n. We made it a point to recommend early testing in cases where the mother had a history of alcohol or substance abuse. Occasionally, when the opportunity … when the mother seemed incapable of caring, we took babies that had no other purpose in life, babies that were doomed to a cycle of poverty and cruelty, many that weren’t ever going to become human.”
“Why not?”
“You understood my point about pain and feeling being absolutely dependent upon higher cortical function?”
“I think so.”
“And you’re persuaded?”
“Yes … I guess so.”
“Then, by your own standards, these … babies … were not alive, and could never be expected to feel pain or awareness, because they have—in the simplest terms, they have no brains to feel with.”
“Anencephalic. Is this where Maureen came in, Doc?”
“Your wife—I know she was a difficult woman to live with, but she had real compassion for the people we would see in our clinics.”
“That’s the source, isn’t it?”
“If you mean, were the clinics the places where we were able to harvest these tragically deformed babies? Then I guess you’re right.”
“Just how did you do that, Doc?”
“There were deficiencies in the understanding of birth control. They were always getting pregnant. Many of these children were … Maureen saw a lot of anencephalic babies, and we—they can be saved you know. Many of them have a sufficiently developed brain function to keep most of the autonomic functions going—heart, lungs, kidney and liver, the renal systems. Life can be maintained, if a system for providing nutrients in a sterile environment can be applied.”
“Your little carts in the truck?”
“Yes. Jenji provided those. He is a brilliant man and a courageous researcher.” “Not anymore, Doc.”
The old man grimaced and looked sideways at Beau.
“A waste. A terrible waste.”
“So where was the profit, Doc? Or was it just for the love of science?”
“This country is—we are burdened with a kind of yahoo mindset in America. We think with our stomachs if we think at all. The legislators curry favor. They don’t have the heart to lead. There’s no vision here.”
“But there is in Kyoto? For a price.”
“They recognize the potential for genetic research. For the transplant system. It would be possible to maintain these subjects, to allow them to grow. They could be a source of life when they reached maturity. Their organs would be harvested and distributed on a compassionate basis. There are also great implications for research. There’s growing revulsion toward animal experimentation. That’s not going to go away. My backers saw a way to address all these social issues. They were willing to pay for the whole project. We had made a great beginning.”
“Pay for viable brainless babies, you mean?”
“Crudely put.”
“It’s a crude thing, Doc. How much? By the ounce? By the truckload? By the inch?”
“There were substantial funds available.”
“Millions, Doc?”
“Easily.”
“What was Maureen’s cut?”
“It wasn’t a ‘cut.’ As you said, she was paid a finder’s fee. She wasn’t the only one. There were some others, in South Dakota.”
“I asked what her cut was, not how you planned to describe it to the IRS.”
“Usually, depending on the viability, on the reliability of the donor, whether or not the donor was likely to create problems for the project, we’d pay around five or six thousand dollars.”
Jesus.
“Did Dwight know about Maureen’s part in this?”
“No! Dwight had no idea! Dwight was no part of any of it!”
“How could he miss it?”
Hogeland grimaced, shook his head. “Dwight has a … literal turn of mind. He thinks in black and white. Some of the … nuance … of events tend to pass him by.”
“Maureen was spending a lot of cash. How’d he miss that?”
“I told him she was helping me in an expansion plan. I was paying her as a consultant. Some of it was true. We did have plans to expand the clinics. There are many reserves across the southwest. There’s a tremendous need—”
“Christ! It’s a good thing Bell fucked it up for you. What I don’t get, when it started to go sour, why not come to me? We could have stopped a lot of it. We could have stopped Bell.”
A flicker of uneasy hesitation showed in Hogeland’s eyes.
“Bell had ambitions. He was pushing the Rancho Vista development. You know how it is with zoning boards. Money has its own momentum. It can roll over a lot of ethics. Sometimes a decision can go either way, and it goes where there’s money or a political debt. Bell had paid a few of the members. Not me, but still … I knew about it. I let it happen. I was … distracted, let’s say. Bell threatened to go to the papers. It seemed easier to … tolerate him. To go along.”
“So you condoned bribery and corruption?”
“Come on, Beau. You know how business gets done. The board is open to … persuasion. There are vulnerable people, people of influence. Bell could cause a lot of grief.”
“Couldn’t you see it falling apart?”
“It’s not easy to accept … especially when you … when you’re as deeply into the thing. It takes on a momentum of its own.
“I guess this is where your purity gave out, eh, Doc? Is this where you stopped harvesting and started planting?”
“So many wasted lives, Beau. Why not make something good come out of it?”
“How much money were you going to give back to the Lakota and the Crow and the Cheyenne?”
“We were providing free medical care. I was building better clinics. We had new ambulances. I was planning another wing at the hospital.”
“Couldn’t get enough from our paychecks, right?”
“Paying the native peoples—it would have been vulgar, an affront to them. They would never sell their children.”
“No, Doc. They wouldn’t. That’s why you and Maureen and the rest of your people had to steal them.”
“It wasn’t stealing, Beau! Can’t you see? Our intentions were for the best. We could still do something great. We can change medicine—transform it. Isn’t that a cause worth risking yourself for? Enough organs for all the sufferers, freedom for all the innocent animals now being slaughtered in labs. And you know the fetuses have no inner life. Many people would argue that we have no right to victimize other species for the sake of our own. At least my methods used our own kind. And they weren’t babies, Beau. They were—they couldn’t even be called sleepers. They were—”
“Spare parts, Doc? Never mind, I’m not the guy you’re gonna have to convince.”
“Beau, you saw what happened to Julia—you saw how it was. If there had been a system then, an organized program for harvesting, for cultivating organs, Julia would be alive now. You lost a wife. I remember how it was for you. Can’t you understand how I felt? After all, Julia and I had been together for thirty-six years. Something had to come of that!”
“Tell me, why’d you set Dwight up, that day in your office?”
“I was surprised by the intensity of your reaction. I wanted an opportunity to deflect my son’s obsession with you.”
“Because you were afraid I’d start to dig around, find out more than you wanted me to?”
“Dwight was creating a climate of confrontation. I wished to dispel some of that, to provide breathing room.”
Far in the east, at the curving of the earth, they could see the gridlights of Logan Airport and the shimmering web of Billings and Laurel, amber and blue against the black density of the hills and valleys. Starlight glittered on the Yellowstone, a silvery scintillation that snaked and coiled through the city lights and on up the valley toward its distant connection with the Missouri. The Missouri would take you to the Mississippi, and the Mississippi would take you to the sea.
The jet rose
on a crest of cold wind. They were both silent, watching the lights roll toward them on the great curve of the earth.
For the cop in Beau, it was very simple. Land at Logan, hand the man over to the FBI. Type it up, and go back to Lizardskin to sleep the whole thing off. Let the morning, and the mornings after that, wash it all away, as the river takes everything to the sea.
“Five five private, this is Logan Tower. Come in.”
Hogeland picked up the radio. “Logan, this is five five private.”
“Five five, you are directed to land runway niner four and proceed to the security hangar. Do you understand?”
Hogeland seemed to settle in the pilot’s seat. “I guess that means Eustace has some people waiting for us. Is that right?”
Beau rubbed his face with his hands, fatigue draining him.
“The FBI came back to us about Gabriel Picketwire. The name rang big bells with the Defense Department. They sent a couple of men in, and the whole operation is going to be handled by the federal agencies—Indian Affairs and the Justice Department.”
“What about Maureen?”
“SPEAR has Maureen. Charlie Tallbull’s boys—they’re Crow—are running that part of it. They want national coverage, and they’re going to get it. She’s going to be making a public statement. This BlueStones woman called a press conference. They’re going to turn Maureen over to the FBI at the television station, in return for air time. Charlie Tallbull’s boys have her right now, but she’s apparently okay. This Picketwire guy, he turned her over to them.”
“Why did he do that?”
Beau looked at the old man for a while.
“Come in five five! Do you read?”
Hogeland ignored the radio.
“He wanted to stay out of it, I imagine,” Beau said.
“You mean, he got what he wanted? He got Joe Bell?”
“No, Doc. I’d say he wants you.”
Hogeland was silent for a long time.
The radio burst into urgent chatter.
He leaned forward and shut it off.
“Has anyone talked to my son yet?”
“No. Eustace went to Vanessa Ballard, and she’s waiting for Maureen to turn up, tell her story. Until then, Dwight’s beside the point.”
Lizardskin Page 42
