An Island Called Moreau (19 page)

It was that other island I had to destroy. The real island could not exist in its present form without that other shadow island in a file in a safe in my department in Washington.

Carefully, I levered myself off the bed and began pacing up and down. When Heather returned with a neat little snack on a tray, I was feeling more the man I used to be.

As I finished the meal, we heard a distant crash.

“That's Morty,” Heather said, looking alarmed. “He's trying to get out of bed. I must go and look after him, or he'll do himself an injury.”

I sat alone for a moment, then rose, left the room, and walked quietly along the main corridor. Heather had gone down the side corridor to Dart's room. I continued until I came to the door opposite the control room. It served as one of the entrances into the laboratory area.

Although Heather had offered me a conducted tour of the labs, it might be a better idea to have a look on my own. For one thing, I wanted to find out what had happened to Bella. Heather had claimed that Bella was at large in the labs; but the more of Heather's statements that could be checked against reality the better.

I listened outside the door. I tried the handle. It was locked, as expected. In the control room were monitor screens, some of which would show me what was happening in the labs, of that I felt convinced. Before trying them, I called Bella's name softly at the lab door.

At once, there was movement in the room beyond. Someone had been standing in silence listening to me. There was a sound like a snake crossing a bare plank floor. A key clicked in the lock. As the door began to open, I knew it would not be Bella standing there.

What I did see was a thing so fearful, so unlikely, that it might have stepped from the pages of an evil fairy story. I stepped back a pace as it spoke.

“I do not know who you are,” it said, “but if you are in the Master's service then I must welcome you in.”

That perfect diction, even and well turned! How much more acceptable were the shattered vocabularies of the Beast People, reflecting in every distorted syllable their distorted lives.

The creature confronting me was even more of an aberration of the human form than they. It stood under one and a half meters high and was disproportionately thick of body. It had extremely short legs, so that the arms trailed almost to the ground. Its head was distorted into cephalic form, the skull tapering almost to a point at the rear. This cranial abnormality was emphasized by the creature's lack of hair.

Distorted bone structure also accounted for the ugliness of the creature's face, which was inordinately fleshy. Its forehead bulged and came low over the eyes, while the chin curved upward almost concealing the mouth. There was no nose to speak of. I was reminded of drawings of the faces of seven-month fetuses. Yet the overall effect of the creature was of a malignant gnome.

Natural disgust at being confronted by this figure was increased by the curious quality of its skin, which had a dead, grayish color and the texture almost of scales, so flaky was it. The gnome was encased in sloughed snakeskin.

Because it was forced to gaze up at me, the impression I got was of a long-drowned face. Even the eyes looked watery and without life.

Yet it moved naturally and easily, standing aside for me to enter the room and even extending a hand to me. The nails of the hand curved protectively right over the tips. I could not take hold of it.

“Bella,” I said. “I came to see Bella.”

“Did you, indeed? Bella caused a great deal of destruction, I fear, so we had to take care of her. She is dying in the next room. We persuaded her that her life was not worth living, and gave her the wherewithal for suicide. You have no need to worry further.”

“I must see her. Take me to her quickly.”

As I started forward toward the door the gnome had indicated, he said, “You Father People have many impulses.” So uninflected was his diction that I could not tell whether he spoke in envy or sneeringly.

The room I was in was the first of the laboratory complex, which was full of different rooms and divisions. This anteroom was an office, an array of filing cabinets and a computer terminal being the chief things I noted. What caught the eye was blood everywhere, as if a battle had taken place. In the corner by the far door lay four small gnome bodies, dreadfully mauled.

The next room, a full-blown laboratory with expensive equipment grouped about it and rows of cultures under glass along one side, presented a scene of even greater havoc. I marveled at how many of the gnome-men must be housed here. At least a dozen of them lay sprawled in death about the room. I saw by their wounds that Bella had killed them. They lay in their own blood, the heavy smell of which saturated the air.

Bella herself lay in one of the far corners. Her wig had fallen off and I thought she was dead. Four of the gnomes stood alertly by her, arms hanging by their sides. Two of them were women, by their dress. Like the men, they lacked hair on their heads. As they turned to inspect me, I observed a slight development of breast tissue beneath their blouses.

They started to ask my name, but I ignored them and went to Bella. As I kneeled by her, her head came up angrily off the floor. I jerked back so that she would not bite me. But she recognized me and said, “You Four Limbs Long, you no like see me get whip.” She closed her long eyes.

A broken plastic hypodermic lay by her side. There was blood all over her tunic and her malformed hands.

“Why didn't you go to your own people when you had the chance to escape, Bella?”

“Own people make me death, same I go along Master too long time.” She started to pant. “Bella smell like Master, make trouble.”

I took her head in my arms, and she let me do it. She was no more than a dying animal, yet—such was the will to communicate between us—at this moment she was perhaps more human than she had ever been. Words and thoughts still struggled up in her beast brain.

“I do good best thing here—try make death Master, make death many bad small peoples here. All kill, best thing. No more trouble, finish get whip.”

“Yes, yes, Bella. This place is evil. Soon it will be closed down.”

She seemed to misunderstand. “Bella all close down, dear thing.” She choked on that odd endearment, then lifted her head for a moment. “Bella go get more trouble from Big Master in Sky now.”

What passion tore me?

“It's not like that, Bella! That's all a lie. There's no Big Master in the Sky. After death there's nothing, nothing at all. Silence, Bella—just silence. Just peace. No Big Master.” No phantom files where you're an entry in a budget account. Just damn all. That's the best thing to believe, Bella. No other islands for you to go to.

“I believe you will find that the animal is defunct,” one of the gnome women told me. When she touched my shoulder, I moved it away.

Lowering Bella's head to the floor, I got to my feet and marched past the small people. They were making some sort of ponderous technical comment on the situation, which I did not heed.

Why was I seized by such grief? It cut me like a knife. It was as if I had thrown away my own life. The contemptuous face of my first wife came to mind—I had hit her and she had turned away in disdain, with no word.… I hurried from that place and went back to my bedroom, where I stood for a while with my head in my arms and my elbows resting against a wall. Bella's warm animal smell still clung.

I could have wept for the sullied animal innocence of Bella. Instead, I reflected with shamed intensity on the evils that had attended my stay on this nightmare slab of rock.

Before my eyes rose an electromagnetic spectrum of earthly torment, in which all that could happen to a man was ranged in order, from Best Event at the light end to Worst Event at the dark. On such a spectrum, there was no place for concepts like Good and Evil—I thought of the clichés I had uttered on that subject, and could have laughed. The lightest color of the spectrum was a completely fulfilled and giving sensuality, the darkest was represented by the nameless things with which I had just come in contact.

How deluded I had been, and how secure in my delusions! And I was to blame for much that had happened. While Dart was responsible for his rule, I was also guilty. In a flash of terror, I saw myself back in Washington, turning up the Moreau file, issuing my blanket condemnations—only to find my own rubber-stamp signature on the original authorization.…

My arrival on the island had been the signal for a chain of death.

Hans Maastricht. He had managed to drink and work safely enough for years before I came and upset his balance. And from his death, all the others had followed. I had refused to retrieve Hans' gun from the lagoon. So Foxy had got it, and had injured and eventually killed George. That disruption of Hans' burial had driven me to seek out Warren, with the aid of Bernie. Of all victims, Warren was the one for which I most blamed myself. In that ghastly night during which he died, I believed that the faithful Bernie might also have been killed—and if so, he would have been killed because he had befriended me.… Then there was Bella.…

But there my self-recrimination ran its course. Why, I'd be beating myself over the head about my past wives next. It was useless to wallow in guilt. The way of redeeming myself was to act now, to try to fulfill the rest of my plan regarding Foxy before the helicopter came. I saw clearly that I also had to have a firsthand account of the creatures in the lab. Dart should give me that, now.

I looked at my watch. It was 1751. Plenty of time. It wasn't even sunset yet.

12

The Frankenstein Process

The Master was propped up in bed, his head and half his face still swathed in bandages.

“Perhaps you can recall to your mind, Mr. Roberts, an earlier little chat we had concerning who was fighting this war. I believe I put it to you then that it was caused by you normals and not us freaks. The affair's grown so big that we're all involved. You don't realize how deeply I am involved—this isn't a fun-fair I'm running here, you know.

“Since we have finally established that you're the stuffed shirt you always claimed to be—one more pompous politician whose left hand doesn't know what his right is doing—let me tell you that top military and medical men have been flown out here from Co-Allied war teams many a time, to kowtow to me and pick up a smattering of new gen from me, if they were lucky. Right, Heather?”

She was standing by his bed, looking remotely at a spot on the far wall. She nodded.

“You see, you think you're in the swim, Mr. Roberts, but you don't know what the war's all about.”

“When you have finished with the generalities,” I said, “you'll recall that I asked you for some rationale, however sketchy, of those gnome creatures who killed Bella.”

“Those gnome creatures, as you call them, go down in the books as SRSR, right? They're the SRSRs, Roberts, and not gnomes, whatever your demented mind may despise them as. Perhaps you'd like me to tell you what that appellation stands for. SRSR stands for Standby Replacement Subrace. Standby Replacement Subrace. And that's exactly what they are. Mark I.

“I intimated to you earlier on that I am running a complex program here. The SRSRs are the culmination of one stage of it—it's as simple as that. They're what this island's all about. McMoreau's crude vivisection techniques were just an amateur beginning. After that came my early experiments in genetic surgery, of which, with regrets, only the two ape-men, Alpha and Beta, currently survive. They represent a deep line of research, toward the goal which I was always aiming for.

“You see what a prenatal drug did to me—used randomly with random effect. Since thalidomide, a whole new range of drugs have been developed to govern cellular and glandular activity. The difficulty was to test them out on human stock under controlled conditions. There's a limit to what you can achieve with any number of guinea pigs—mice, rats, monkeys, frogs, and all the rest. You need human stock, it's as simple as that.

“That's where the Beast People came in handy. Next best thing to humans. I was able to make the progress here, safe on my little island, denied to countries with all sorts of pettifogging antivivisection laws.

“It's me, and me alone, who has developed these SRSRs, despite a few toffee-nosed biologists and whatnot who drop in from time to time.” His lips trembled, as if he was overcome by the thought of them. “I've no clue what you think of me, Mr. Roberts, and I don't much care, but let me tell you that I—me, without hands or feet—have achieved more than Columbus or Genghis Khan. It's no good me explaining what I've done because you wouldn't understand the terms involved, but, basically, I have developed drugs of two kinds which operate radically on the fetal structure.

“One drug (collectivum) alters the fundamental epidermal functioning to give a protective outer covering much like a snake's scales which inhibits certain types of radioactivity. The other drug inhibits the stimuli of cellular activity, and alters various basic metabolic rates, especially the entire pleiotypic program.

“Using these two drugs in varying combinations on fetuses provided by the Beast People, we have developed—I cut a long story short—the SRSRs, a true subrace, who have several advantages over the human race.”

“Advantages?” I asked.

“They are immune to certain radiations lethal to us, gestate in only seven months, mature early, bulk less, consume less food, less oxygen. All telling plus factors in the sort of catastrophe scenario they are designed for.”

Incongruously, while he was talking scenes of rural peace slipped across his wall, accompanying the slow movement of a Haydn symphony. Old whitewashed houses with wooden tiles, slow women with buckets at long-armed wells, decrepit fencing, tremendous meadows fading into mist, old men in old hats, stooks of corn, mountains, streams, oxen dragging decorated carts, reindeer, lime and acacia trees heavy with flower, children running down a lane—these images welled up and died in time to the music.