Orphan of Creation (32 page)

Pete swallowed hard. “You drive a interesting bargain, Dr. Maxwell. Look, ah, this isn’t the right place to talk, and we’re all a bit riled up. Why don’t I meet you at your office at the Museum at noon? That’d give us all time to cool off, and you’ll have the materials there I’ll need to do the job you want.”

Rupert glanced from Liv to Mike and nodded. “Fair enough. Besides, I think we three have a few things to talk about in private anyway. But make it at Saint E’s. Barbara will want to stay there. Ask the guard to direct you to Dr. Marchando in Building 3-K. I’ll have all the materials and information you’ll need. Right now, why don’t you take off?” he asked blandly. “Mike and Liv and I need to talk.”

Pete nodded, stood up, and pushed back his chair. “Fine. Fine. I’ll see you there.” He found his way out of the cafeteria, out of the hospital, greatly relieved that they hadn’t beat him to a pulp.

<>

It was not a comfortable silence at the table. “Mike, she’s not in good shape,” Livingston finally announced. He pushed back in his chair a bit and drummed his fingers on the table top. “She’s torturing herself with worry, wondering if she did the right thing, wondering what else she could have done, what she
should
have done. She’s got herself convinced that Thursday is just going to be tested and tortured and studied to death, that she’s brought the poor thing back here to be a slave to science or something.”

“I don’t understand,” Mike said. “This is a big discovery for her. She should be happy and excited. Why is she upset?”

“Because—” Liv sighed and drummed his fingers on the window glass. “I don’t know. But I can tell you some stuff—stuff you ought to know already. She went off to Gabon in a pretty fragile state, thanks to the kind treatment of a certain person. You had her tied up in
knots
. I dunno what was in your letters, what you said in person when you saw her, but they sure as hell didn’t make her happy. You two are separated, Mike. You have no claim on her, no right to say thing to make her feel bad. She did her best. Over in Africa, she
seemed
okay on the outside, but inside, I think she was just barely holding together.
I
think you had her convinced she had failed in some obligation to you, that she owed you something big.

“And then Thursday comes along, a poor miserable creature that needs a very clear-cut kind of help, instead of demanding some vague kind of endless support. I think she’s taking all the pointless guilt you made her feel about you and redirecting it onto Thursday.”

“Listen,” Mike said abruptly, nervously. “I let this reporter guy come here and talk to me because I thought I could find out what he knew and pass it on to you guys, because I wanted to help, because I was worried about Barbara. I let you guys come and talk to him—I didn’t have to tell you when or where we were meeting. I’m trying to help. I
know
I treated her bad,” he went on, talking rapidly, wondering if he was babbling as much as he thought he was. “The last few weeks, I’ve thought about a lot of stuff—all those damn fool whining letters I sent her when you guys were in Mississippi. They were bad, I know, really unfair. And they didn’t help
me
any.

“I spent our whole marriage pushing her away and then demanding things. But the first time Barbara really rejected me, instead of just walking away from a mess, was after those letters, just
before
she left for Africa.

“The last I saw time I saw her, she was happy
because she was leaving me
. I had thought I could bring her around again, get her to see things my way again, but none of the old crap was working. I couldn’t understand it. It hit me, really hit me how much I must have hurt her if leaving me felt that
good
. I owe her. And she still feels something for me—you guys both know that. I don’t say she should feel it, or that I’ve earned it, or that I’ve got rights here. I’m just saying maybe I can help because of how she feels. Let me help her. Let me give back some of what I took.”

Liv shook his head. “You got one thing right. You’ve got no rights here. But Barb needs help, and we need help. Act like a decent guy, and you’re in. Doing what, I don’t know exactly. None of us knows what happens next. But we’ll need some warm bodies, that’s for sure.”

Mike offered up his hand, and Liv took it after a moment’s hesitation. Rupert looked at both of them and shrugged. “I predict,” he said, “some interesting times ahead.”

Chapter Twenty

Barbara glared at Pete Ardley as she led Thursday out into the visitors’ room. No doubt she had been told all the sensible, logical reasons why they had to tolerate the man who had caused them so much trouble, but she didn’t have to like it. And her ex-husband Michael was here, too. Plainly she had no idea how she should handle her former husband. From what Pete understood, there hadn’t been a chance for the two of them to talk alone since Gabon. Judging from the expression on her face, she was glad to see him—but also pretty upset by it as well.

At least so far as Pete himself was concerned, her emotions were clear and uncomplicated. At a guess, there were lots of worse things she wanted to do to him, but she contented him with a look that should have killed at twenty paces.

Pete took all that in within half a heartbeat, and knew he ought to worry about soothing Barbara Marchando’s feathers—but he found his attention otherwise occupied. He had eyes only for Thursday, the reality, the creature, the ape-man—no, make that ape-
woman
—at the center of the fuss. He felt a strange twisting in his stomach as he looked at her, a sense of fascinated revulsion.

This creature walked
almost
the way a human did, and the difference was—disturbing. He remembered the feeling he had had as a child when he saw some poor misshapen person, twisted by disease or injury, hobbling or lurching along on limbs that didn’t move in quite the right way. You tried not to look, you tried not to pity, you tried to treat the unfortunate person as a person, not a crippled freak or a monster. You worried about trying too hard to be solicitous . . . Pete shook his head and blinked, pulling his eyes off Thursday’s strange and graceful stride. But this
was
a freak,
was
a monster. Not a human being. Look at that head, that face, the forehead that sloped back to nothing, the apish muzzle. Not a human. Remember that. Thursday pulled up a hard wooden chair and sat down in it, a bit awkwardly.
Sitting in chairs like that is what people do, isn’t it?
Pete asked himself.

“Here she is, Mr. Ardley.” Barbara’s voice cut into his reverie, harsh and angry. “Your front page story. Your headline. Feel up to exploiting her?”

Easy now
, Pete thought.
She wants to fight, but you don’t. Remember that.
He was disconcerted enough by Thursday without picking fights with Dr. Barbara Marchando. “No one’s interested in exploiting her, Dr. Marchando. Your own team invited me in here to do a story, and that’s all I want to do.” Pete took a good hard look at Barbara, and decided she looked bad, besides looking angry. She hadn’t had enough sleep or food for a long time.

“We need more than a newspaper story, Mr. Ardley.” Dr. Grossington looked no happier to see Pete than Barbara did, but he was in better control of himself. “We need your sage advice, your public relations work to get the rest of the press to pay attention. We’re like the little boy who cried wolf. You have to get them to believe us again.”

“Right, right. I know. We need to put together a press kit, then. Photos of—ah, Thursday here, bios of all of you, a statement explaining where you found her, that sort of thing. But the key is the photos. They have to be the best possible. Sharp, clear, no blurred-out stuff that could have been faked up. We release that material,
then
schedule a second press conference and bring her out, present the skeletons and other evidence, and issue an open invitation for the media and the scientists to study it all as closely as possible. And, ah, we have to prove that Thursday isn’t simply someone in a really good gorilla suit.”

Barbara seemed ready to explode. “
Gorilla suit
! For God’s sake, look at her! How could you possibly fake that?” Thursday looked around nervously, wondering what was wrong.

“Easy, Thurs. Easy, it’s okay. Barb, you go flying off the handle like that too often, poor Thursday is going to have a nervous breakdown,” Livingston said. “But someone could fake Thursday—the same way that Hollywood guy faked the skull to prove Ambrose was a fake,” he said gently. “Didn’t you ever see
Planet of the Apes?
”

Pete hesitated a moment before going on. Barbara didn’t look happy, but she didn’t say anything more. “Okay, then. We’ll have to stand ready to provide tissue samples, hair, blood, that sort of thing. I realize that we’ve got to control it or else she’ll be sampled to death, but we have to be prepared to cooperate with that sort of request. I think the best we can do to
absolutely
nail it down is a CAT scan—one of those high-tech super-duper x-rays. These guys are going to be
suspicious
. Dr. Grossington and I agreed that camera flashes might scare Thursday, so we’re going with bright TV lights and not allowing flashes. They’re even going to resent
that
, assume that we’re hiding a gimmick a flash would reveal. We need all the proof we can get, and a CAT scan showing she’s real is pretty damn good proof.”

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.