The Frankenstein Factory (2 page)

“Sorry, Doctor,” the young woman said.

Earl’s eyes had been on her bare and shapely legs since he had entered the room, and now he shifted his gaze to her face. She had the high-cheekboned beauty of a fashion model, together with a halo of blond hair that perfectly framed it. She was tall, but not quite as tall as the six-footer by her side. Tony Cooper was a virile, athletic sort, about Earl’s age but in better physical shape. That probably came from swims before breakfast with lovely young ladies.

“This is Earl Jazine,” Hobbes said, completing the introductions. “He’ll be filming and taping the operation tonight. A record is important.”

Earl shook hands with Tony Cooper. He would have settled for an exchange of smiles with Vera, but she put out her hand and he took it. The skin was warm from the morning sun, and soft. They seemed friendly enough, and he couldn’t really blame them for their curiosity about the operating room where they’d be working. He was curious himself. He was especially curious about why Dr. Hobbes felt the need for such an elaborate security system.

Certainly the things in the vault weren’t likely to be moving around.

Following the completion of their interrupted breakfast, Lawrence Hobbes leaned back in his chair. “Well, Jazine, I think it’s about time you met the others. We have a ten o’clock planning session.”

“Fine. Just how many are on the surgical team?”

“Six, not counting myself. Of course Vera is really a lab worker, but during the operation she’ll be assisting in a nurse’s capacity. We’re still waiting for one important arrival. He should have been on that hovercraft with you this morning.”

Old Miss Watson had left the table after breakfast, preferring to take coffee in her room, and it gave Earl an opportunity to ask about her. “Is Emily Watson part of the team?”

“No, no, no!” Hobbes chuckled slightly and seemed almost human for an instant. “You might call her a benefactress. She’s poured a great deal of money into the International Cryogenics Institute.”

“To what end?”

“That’s simple. She wants to live forever.”

“Don’t we all?”

“But she has supreme faith in our experiments here. She thinks I hold the secret of life in my hands.” Hobbes turned over his gnarled fists and stared at them. “Perhaps I do. We’ll know tonight, won’t we?”

“Doesn’t she interfere with your work, living here on the island?”

“She keeps pretty much to her room. We don’t see that much of her, in truth. I breakfast alone with her every morning, and sometimes she takes cocktails with the others in the afternoon. Of course she’ll be witnessing the experiment tonight.” He glanced at his watch. “Which reminds me, it’s time for our ten-o’clock meeting.”

He led the way down a softly lit corridor to a conference room at the end. Four men and a woman were seated around a table. They stopped talking as Hobbes entered, and one of them—Tony Cooper—butted his cigarette. Earl knew Tony and Vera, but the other three men were strangers to him. He assumed that they were part of the island’s permanent staff.

“You must know Dr. Eric MacKenzie,” Hobbes said, introducing the eldest of the men first. “The only military surgeon to set foot on the moon thus far.”

The renewed moon flights of the late 1990s were vague in Earl’s memory already—as they were in the memories of most Americans. And in fact he wasn’t too sure that there hadn’t been a doctor along on the earlier round of moon landings back in the 1970s. But he wouldn’t argue the point. Eric MacKenzie was a bluff, pleasant man in his late fifties with a firm handshake and the look of a pipe smoker. (Earl was not surprised when he produced one later.) His sandy hair was thinning on top and turning white, but Earl imagined he was still something of a ladies’ man. He sat between Vera and Dr. Cooper, making it quite obvious that he enjoyed the proximity of such a lovely young woman.

“This is Philip Whalen,” Hobbes announced, moving to the far end of the conference table. “He’s also a surgeon, and he’ll be assisting Dr. MacKenzie this evening.”

Whalen had none of the charm of the aging MacKenzie. He glared at Earl from beneath bushy black eyebrows and asked, “What do we need a photographer for? We’re not movie stars.”

“Maybe you will be someday,” Earl said, trying to laugh it off.

Hobbes moved along quickly to the last man. “And Dr. Harry Armstrong, an internist. He will pronounce the moment of life, and handle all postoperative care.”

Armstrong rose and reached across the table to shake hands. He was somewhere between MacKenzie and Whalen in age—perhaps in his mid-forties. There was nothing memorable about his almost featureless face. Earl decided he’d have made a good spy. “Did O’Connor come too?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Hobbes said. “I hope the damn fool remembers it’s tonight.”

“We can scarcely proceed without him,” MacKenzie commented. He reached into his pocket to extract a slender pipe. Seeing him light it, Tony Cooper took out another cigarette.

“I have confidence in his arrival,” Lawrence Hobbes said. He walked to the wall and pulled down a detailed medical chart of the human body. “Now, gentlemen—and Miss Morgan—shall we begin?”

Earl cleared his throat. “I guess I need a bit of the background. You didn’t tell me a great deal when you hired me.”

Lawrence Hobbes smiled thinly, looking more like a schoolmaster than ever. “What
did
I tell you?”

“That you wanted motion pictures and tape recordings of a revolutionary type of transplant operation, to be performed in secret on this island.”

“And that is correct, Mr. Jazine, as far as it went. I have assembled the experts here. Some, like these three distinguished doctors, have been living here for months, examining the problem. Others, like Cooper and Miss Morgan, arrived only yesterday. You and Dr. O’Connor are scheduled for today. The operation—the experiment—takes place tonight.”

“Isn’t it customary to perform important surgery in the morning, when the patient has had the advantages of a night’s sleep?”

“Our patient has had the advantage of thirty years’ sleep,” Hobbes replied.

“Thirty—”

“You are familiar with the aims of the International Cryogenics Institute, Mr. Jazine?”

“Certainly. You froze people at the moment of death and stored their bodies against a future time when they could be revived. There have been a number of other practitioners but ICI is the most successful financially.”

“Quite correct.” He turned to the white-haired surgeon. “Dr. MacKenzie, please tell him what we intend to do this night.”

MacKenzie cleared his throat. “We’re taking the best of the specimens from the vault—a young man who died of a brain tumor at age twenty-six—and we plan to transplant all necessary organs to his body. Surgery will be performed in a cryogenic state, following which the body temperature will be gradually increased. When it reaches the desired level, the heart will be stimulated with an electric shock and the patient will live once more.”

“Fantastic,” was all Earl Jazine could say.

“But nothing happens if Freddy O’Connor doesn’t get here,” Tony Cooper pointed out. He was not quite so handsome with his clothes on, Earl decided. “Freddy’s our brain man.”

“Brain?”

“Brain surgeon,” Hobbes explained. “Naturally we must replace the tumored brain, along with certain other organs.”

“Isn’t that difficult?”

“O’Connor has had great success with animals,” Vera Morgan volunteered. “I’ve heard him lecture on the subject.”

Another one of those lights started flashing near the ceiling, only this time it was green. Lawrence Hobbes didn’t go into a panic. He merely said, “That’s Hilda signaling a new arrival. It better be Freddy O’Connor.”

It was.

A few minutes later he swaggered into the conference room and dropped his free-form suitcase in a heap on the floor. “How the hell are you?” he asked to no one and everyone. “How’s life in the Frankenstein Factory? What say, Tony? You been fuckin’ our Miss Vera while you waited for me?”

E
ARL QUICKLY LEARNED THAT
Freddy O’Connor was not a man to take anything very seriously. He was a red-haired Irishman who liked to drink and curse, and he especially enjoyed riding Tony Cooper about his relationship with Vera. Earl wondered if he was seeing the remains of a love affair, the final embers of some bitter triangle. But then he decided that Freddy O’Connor would always be that way around a beautiful woman, especially someone else’s beautiful woman. Perhaps he was not that much different from Dr. MacKenzie, only more direct.

By early afternoon Freddy was drinking steadily, giving no indication that he’d be performing a transplant of a human brain in a matter of hours. There were still a number of blanks to be filled in for Earl, so he sought out the unmemorable Dr. Armstrong to talk with.

“I walk two miles every day,” Armstrong told him. “If you want to talk, you’ll have to walk with me.”

“Where can you walk for two miles on this island?”

“Around and around,” the doctor replied. “Actually once around the shoreline does it pretty close. The island’s horseshoe shape makes for a lengthy shoreline.”

The day was warming nicely, with no trace of the morning mist, and Earl enjoyed the freshness of the air in his lungs. Back in New York the air was too often rank with the ozone purifiers they sprayed from helicopters. At times it was enough to make him wish for the old polluted days.

“I didn’t even realize it was shaped like a horseshoe,” Earl admitted as they walked.

“How did you think it got its name?”

“I don’t think about names so much.”

Armstrong grunted. “You should. They shape our lives. My name has shaped my life. Do you know what it was like to be born with the name Armstrong in the second half of the twentieth century? There’d already been a radio hero named Jack Armstrong, an all-American boy. Then in 1969 we had Neil Armstrong as the first person to set foot on the moon. My father kept reminding me of them all the time I was growing up. Sometimes he’d even throw in Henry Armstrong, the boxer, and Louis Armstrong, the band leader. He’d always say I had to live up to the name. I suppose that’s why I became a doctor in the first place.”

“What about Hobbes? When did you link up with him?”

“Earlier this year. The International Cryogenics Institute has a good reputation, you know.”

“A reputation for being financially successful,” Earl corrected.

“It’s the same thing. Actually, I was surprised he wanted me. Hobbes has been running the show pretty much by himself these past years.”

“You don’t need a large staff to keep a few dozen bodies cold,” Earl pointed out. “It’s done by machine.”

The doctor sighed. “These days almost everything’s done by machine. They say in a few years even simple operations may be performed by computers.”

“I hope I’m not around to see that.”

They strolled along the beach past the boathouse, watching a group of sea birds swoop in low over the water. “Those are terns,” Armstrong said, “diving for their dinner.”

“Do you think they’ll succeed?”

Armstrong glanced up. “The terns?”

“No, the team. Do you think this multiple transplant will work?”

“It’s always a possibility.”

“O’Connor hardly seems the sort for a brain surgeon.”

“I’ve seen him work. He settles right down at the operating table.”

“But all that business about this being a Frankenstein Factory. …”

“He didn’t simply dream up the Frankenstein image, you know. The South African grocer, Louis Washkansky, the first man in history to receive a heart transplant, joked on television, ‘I’m a Frankenstein now. I’ve got somebody else’s heart.’ He wasn’t quite accurate, because Frankenstein wasn’t the name of the monster. And Washkansky lived only eighteen days, far less than the monster.”

“Still …”

“Let’s face it—we’re the modern equivalents of Dr. Frankenstein. If this first operation is successful, we’ll have created a whole new person—a body and a brain and other organs brought together from a half-dozen sources. That’s just what he was doing in Mary Shelley’s novel. And we could well become a factory if Hobbes decides to extend the technique to the other cryos he’s got stashed away down there.”

“But the people who asked to be frozen—the dead ones whose relatives had to pay the upkeep for all these years—certainly they would object to coming back in another body!”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.” Dr. Armstrong smiled slightly. “Of course Hobbes was quite clever when he founded the institute thirty years ago. There were other groups, like the Cryonics Societies of California and New York, operating in the 1970s, but Hobbes chose the word
cryogenics
instead of
cryonics.
Cryogenics covers the entire field of very low temperatures, and much of the research here has been directed toward operating techniques at low temperatures.”

“I’d think an operation on a frozen body would be impossible.”

“Quite true, if the body is solidly frozen. But the temperature can be regulated for optimum effect. In that first heart-transplant operation I mentioned, the heart was chilled to 50°F. And the patient’s body temperature was powered to 70.88°. You see, when the body is chilled, blood and kidney circulation naturally decrease. At a temperature of 68°F. blood flow is barely ten percent of normal.”

“But that’s a long way from freezing. The bodies they’ll be working with have been down in those vaults for up to thirty years!”

“A man named Openchowski was freezing the brain cells of dogs back in 1883, and Dr. Irving S. Cooper—no relation to Tony Cooper—was performing cryosurgery at St. Barnabas Hospital in New York forty years ago. Using a surgical wand about the thickness of a knitting needle, Cooper delivered liquid nitrogen to human brain tissues, lowering their temperature to minus four degrees Fahrenheit. You see, cryosurgery is especially useful when dealing with the brain. The cut of a scalpel is irreversible, but freezing is not—at least for a time. If the wrong tissues of the brain are frozen, the surgeon simply warms them again before any cells are actually killed.”

“Can it be used in other parts of the body?”