Earth Cult (11 page)

‘We don't have a hospital in Gypsum. They're over in Radium receiving intensive care. Why do you ask?'

‘I'd like to see them if possible. How far is Radium?'

‘About fifteen miles north of here, the other side of Mount Powell.' Cal Renfield pursed his lips together, like a small pink button. ‘What's your interest in them, Frank? Changing your views?'

‘I'm interested in anything that bears investigation. How do I go about arranging a visit?'

‘I could do that for you,' Cal Renfield said after a moment's thought. ‘I know one of the doctors in the hospital, Bob Bragg. Used to have a practice in Gypsum for a couple of years, then got taken on as a staff medico. Do you want me to fix it for you?'

‘If possible, Cal. I'd appreciate it.'

‘See what I can do,' Cal Renfield said, reaching for the phone. He was about to dial when Helen Renfield came in from the street, struggling with a large bulky photographer's case and a tripod. She dumped the equipment in a corner and straightened up, pressing her hands into the small of her back.

‘You know my staff,' Cal Renfield said to Frank, and then to Helen, ‘Did you get it?'

‘I got it,' she said briefly, looking at Frank's left shoulder but not his face. ‘I hate to tell you this, but taking pictures of a calf with five legs is not my idea of investigative journalism. It's hardly going to make the front cover of
Time.'

‘Might make the front cover of
Stockbreeders Gazette,'
Frank said jocularly.

Helen Renfield didn't think the witticism merited a response. She went to the coffee pot and poured herself a cup. Her red hair was drawn back from her face and tied in a schoolgirl bunch at the back. She wore very little make-up, just a touch of mascara to highlight her eyes, and with her check shirt and cowgirl jeans she might have been a college kid helping out with the Saturday morning chores. The paleness – almost austere tautness – in her face that Frank had noticed previously hadn't been a symptom of anger, apparently, for it was here now, complementing her large widely-spaced grey eyes which were ever alert for wooden nickels.

Frank wondered about her; she intrigued him; there was an inner cold calm and unequivocal certainty about her that he had seen in many young people, their principles uncompromised, their scruples still intact. They had seen the world, summed it up, sorted out the genuine from the fake – all without having achieved or accomplished anything. They had read the rule book but hadn't yet begun to play the game.

‘I'm fixing it for Frank to visit the hospital in Radium,' Cal Renfield said. He hadn't yet dialled the number.

His daughter looked up sharply. She looked at her father, not at Frank.

‘Why?'

‘I guess because he wants to see the babies,' Cal Renfield said placidly.

‘Is he a doctor?'

‘Why not ask the man? That's him standing there.'

‘I'm not a doctor but I was trained in biochemistry. I do know something about human physiology.'

‘So you're going to astound the world of medical science and tell the doctors where they went wrong, is that it?'

Cal Renfield raised his eyebrows as if apologizing for a relative with bad table manners. He put the receiver down and propped his chin on his roly-poly fist.

Frank shook his head and smiled, pacing himself, not going to allow this young girl to rattle him or bamboozle him into an argument. He watched her for a moment and for the first time became aware of a tension between them that wasn't based on antagonism or positive dislike.

He said, ‘Any phenomena outside the norm interests me. There has to be a reason why these babies are behaving strangely—'

‘Phenomena!' Helen said, glaring at him. ‘That's a swell two-dollar word to describe new-born babies that just lie there like vegetables. Wish I was a scientist, it must be great to wander through life looking for “phenomena”. What do you call a car smash – a terminal automotive situation?'

‘Whatever you might think, Miss Renfield, I'm in no way responsible for their condition. You seem to think the Project is in some way to blame, and you also believe that I have some connection with the Project. Both hypotheses, as we scientists say, are false. Not only that, they're founded on a total lack of evidence. As an investigative reporter you should know better than to make accusations which aren't substantiated by the facts. And what facts do you have? None.'

‘A good reporter relies on instinct too,' Helen reminded him. ‘There's something going on up at the Telluride Mine, something that's not right. I don't know what it is, I don't have any “facts”, but when people are tight-mouthed about
something you can bet they've got a big fat juicy secret sitting there waiting to be found out.'

‘And what has that got to do with my wanting to visit the hospital in Radium?' Frank asked, not unreasonably he felt.

‘You're on their side.'

‘Whose side?'

‘The scientists on the Deep Hole Project.'

Frank shrugged and appealed to Cal Renfield. ‘What do I have to do to convince your daughter that I'm not Baron Frankenstein? Next time I'll bring my evil green potion and turn you all into toads. What do you want me to say?' he asked the girl. He threw up his hands and turned away. ‘Not that it really matters.'

‘All right,' Helen said abruptly. ‘Say that we believe you.'

‘Your father believes me already.'

Cal Renfield, in the act of lighting another cigarette, glanced keenly through the rising blue smoke, but didn't say anything.

‘Say that we do,' the girl continued. She folded her arms and faced him. ‘We're not scientists, we don't understand what the Project is for or what it's supposed to be doing—'

‘It's quite simple,' Frank interjected. ‘I've explained it to your father.'

‘He's explained it to me and it's not quite simple,' Cal Renfield said, blowing volumes of smoke into the air. He propped his chin on his hand, watching them both.

‘That's it exactly,' Helen said. She looked at him intently. ‘We don't know the kind of questions to ask because we're not scientists. All right now, you've got a scientific background, you can ask the questions and spot if anything is wrong or doesn't seem to fit. You know what I mean?'

‘Yes, of course I do.' Frank looked from daughter to father. ‘You want me to spy on them for you.'

‘It isn't spying, it's finding out the truth about what's happening in this valley,' Helen said with some fervour. Her face was more animated now, her grey eyes sparkling with an intensity that surprised him. ‘That's if you're genuinely interested in finding out.'

‘Why not come with me to Radium and see how genuinely interested I am,' Frank said. He was looking directly at her and her gaze faltered and dropped away. ‘What about it, Cal? Can you spare the time?'

‘You mean you're offering me an excuse to get out of this goddam office for a couple of hours?' Cal Renfield threw down the felt-tip marker and struggled to his feet, attempting to fasten his cotton jacket across the ponderous swell of his stomach. ‘Your car or mine?'

The town of Radium, as Cal Renfield had said, was only fifteen miles to the north, but it took them all of forty minutes to get there because the route was via Rabbit Ears Pass, which skirted the western slope of Mount Powell. On the way they passed through McCoy and Toponas – small townships along Blue River – and then took the right-hand fork to Radium, which lay between Kremmling and Troublesome. This area bordered on the White River Plateau, which was less a plateau than a series of foothills, like wrinkles in a blanket, riddled with small towns and villages: Steamboat Springs, Skull Creek, Maybell and Dinosaur to the west, and farther north Hot Sulphur Springs, Coalmont and Lulu City.

Frank drove the Toronado carefully on the narrow twisting roads, taking in as much of the scenery as he could. It was magnificent country. This was the very heartland of the Rocky Mountains which straddled the Continental Divide like a heavy saddle-pack thrown over a mule's back. Sharp granite peaks faded into misty blueness in the distance, ranged up one behind the other as if waiting their turn in the queue. In the valleys it was lush and green, and along Blue
River the flashing white triangular sails of small sailing boats leaned together to take advantage of the breeze.

On the other side of Rabbit Ears Pass, following the meandering course of what appeared to be a dried-out riverbed, Frank noticed and remarked on a long ridge of washed stone and gravel resembling the casting of a giant earthworm. Cal Renfield explained that this was the waste of gold dredging that had been in profitable operation as late as 1942.

He went on to tell the tale of how in 1859 a group of miners, new to the territory, were thrown out of the gold camp of Tarryall. They pushed on to the South Platte River field and came in with one of the biggest strikes ever made in the area. There they built their own town and named it Fairplay, which still survives today, said Cal Renfield, while Tarryall is dead and gone and all but forgotten.

‘Rough if not poetic justice,' Frank observed.

‘Tell him about Haw Tabor,' said Helen from the back seat.

‘Haw Tabor was a storekeeper in what was to become Leadville back in the 1870s. At about that time many of the gold workings had been dug out, then somebody discovered that the dark sand the miners had been throwing out and cursing because it got in their way was almost pure carbonate of lead and silver. Tabor grubstaked a couple of miners to 17 dollars' worth of groceries and they struck a vein of silver yards wide. Tabor sold his share for a million dollars and with the proceeds went on to make another nine million from other diggings. One of them was the Matchless Mine, which is just about the most famous mine in the entire State.'

‘And in the end he went broke,' Helen said laconically, as if this neatly summed up her philosophy.

‘That's right,' said her father. ‘They repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and during the Panic of 1893 silver prices hit rock-bottom and Tabor's empire collapsed. When he died in 1899 he was the postmaster in Denver.'

They arrived in Radium and stopped at a coffee shop for
something to eat. Frank and Helen had a tuna fish salad but Cal Renfield required something more substantial for the inner man: he had grilled steak and french fries with onion rings done in batter. Frank felt like delivering a lecture on polysaturated fats and cholesterol levels but he wisely thought twice about it and decided that it was too late to break the habit of a lifetime.

Afterwards they drove out to the hospital, a new, clean, functional, single-storey building surrounded by neat lawns which glowed verdantly in the mellow autumn sunshine. It seemed colder here and when Frank remarked on it Cal Renfield pointed out that they had climbed nearly six thousand feet and were now a mile-and-a-half above sea-level. Some of the local residents claimed there were only three months to the year at this altitude: ‘July, August, and Winter'.

Dr Bob Bragg was expecting them. He was a tall lean man, about the same age as Frank, with thinning fair hair that he wore in such a way as to disguise his incipient baldness. His long narrow face bore the marks of worry, the lines on his forehead hardened into a permanent frown as if life was a never-ending series of small battles and minor disappointments. Yesterday had been pretty gruelling, his expression told them, today was about the same, and tomorrow wouldn't be any better.

Cal Renfield introduced Frank as ‘a fellow journalist', which seemed to be all the explanation Dr Bragg required for the visit; in any event he accepted it without comment, leading them through into the Isolation Unit which occupied an annexe of the hospital, separated from the other wards by two pairs of double-doors. There were twenty-two babies in the Unit, ranging in age from fourteen months down to the latest arrival, a baby-girl just nine days old.

They were perfectly normal in appearance, plump, bright-eyed, with a healthy sheen to their skin, yet this apparent normality was made to seem incongruous and slightly unsettling by their stillness, silence, and lack of activity. They lay in their cots like perfect mute facsimiles, computerized
versions of everything babies were supposed to be except for a vital element that had been omitted from the programme – the spark of individuality. There was nothing physically wrong with them that Frank could detect, no signs of mental aberration: they were simply acting as babies with none of the usual signs of babyishness.

‘We've carried out all the standard checks on the physiological processes, including the autonomic nervous system, and there's nothing whatsoever wrong with them,' Bob Bragg told Frank. ‘At least nothing that shows up. We've had specialist paediatricians over from Denver and Dr Samuel Sanborn from the West Coast and none of them know what to make of the syndrome. They're not mentally defective or subnormal – not in any way that we can tell – and there's no case study we can find which deals with this type of condition.'

They moved along the row of cots, the passive stare of each child fixed on some imaginary object in the middle distance. Helen had a look of pain on her face as if the spectacle was too harrowing and unnatural, these tiny waxen effigies masquerading as real flesh and blood. There was nothing there, no vital life-force.

‘Do they ever cry?' Frank asked.

‘Not even at birth,' Bob Bragg said, his thin veined hands resting on the rail of a cot. ‘They're fed regularly, of course, and they take the food without any trouble, but once when we deliberately delayed the feed by an extra hour not one of them uttered a peep. They just lie there as if they're waiting for something; but don't ask me what it is they're waiting for, I haven't a notion.'

‘What about the mothers, are they okay?'