The Frankenstein Factory (7 page)

“I’ve heard something of it,” Earl admitted.

“Of course the Russians are ahead of us in some aspects of this. The Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics at Riga has been most successful in transplanting the frozen fingers of cadavers to living persons who’ve lost fingers.”

“Would the Russians be interested in what we’ve done here?”

“Most interested,” Hobbes assured him. “If they knew about it. Happily, I imagine they have me down as a harmless eccentric who lives on an island with a bunch of frozen bodies.”

“To get back to Freddy and Vera,” Earl prodded gently.

“Yes—you have to forgive my wandering mind at times. I’ve been so involved in every aspect of this project for so long! Anyway, Vera and Tony Cooper met and fell in love—if that term is still used by young people today. She moved out on Freddy and moved in with Cooper, and then the damnedest thing happened. The way I got the story, one day outside the lab Freddy caught Cooper by the elevator and said something—one of his vulgar remarks—that led to a scuffle. Then Cooper actually challenged Freddy to a duel with laser pistols! Can you imagine such a thing? Of course the weapons are illegal, and they both could have been arrested. But the following morning they were both out in a field overlooking Chesapeake Bay with their illegal weapons.”

“What happened?”

“Freddy O’Connor backed down. He apologized. Can you believe that?”

“It explains a great deal about his attitude, I suppose. If Cooper and Vera know him to have been a coward, he’d naturally try to cover it up by constantly riding them about sexual matters.”

Lawrence Hobbes snorted. “I for one don’t consider it cowardly to refuse to fight a duel. In fact it would have been sheer madness to go through with it. A laser beam can do terrible damage.”

Earl was remembering Hobbes’s earlier mention of the weapons. “I hope you keep yours safely locked up.”

“Oh yes.”

Down on the operating table, Frank stirred again. “If he doesn’t come to soon, won’t he need further feeding?”

Hobbes nodded. “I believe Armstrong is considering some sort of aerosol nutrient, but we may not need it.”

Earl stood up and stretched. “Take care of yourself, Doctor. I’m going back upstairs.”

“Send someone else down between four and five.”

Earl promised to do so and headed for the stairs. On the way up he met Harry Armstrong, who was going down for another look at his patient.

At five o’clock Freddy went down to relieve Hobbes, and the rest of them decided on an early dinner. Hilda served a fancy ice cream log topped with swirls of whipped cream for dessert and remembered to take some down to O’Connor, who was on guard duty.

As he finished his dish Hobbes leaned back and said, “One thing we don’t have to worry about on this island is freezer capacity. The capsules of liquid nitrogen down below give off enough chill to cool the whole island. We use some of it for our freezer and air conditioning in the hot weather.” He glanced over at Earl. “How about another game of Laser?”

“I don’t think I’m up to it.”

“Come on, just the two of us. It won’t take long.”

“Not if you’re as good as last time.”

Hobbes set up the grid in the living room and they sat down on opposite sides of the board. Once their men were positioned, Hobbes flicked the light once to signal the beginning of the game. Earl rolled a nine and went first, splitting it between a captain and a chance-man. Hobbes rolled a seven and used it all on a chance-man. Then he tapped the button for the light beam, but he’d been overconfident. Earl’s chance-man had a mirrored side in position and the beam was reflected harmlessly off to the side.

“My roll,” Earl said, taking the dice. It was a poor three and he could do little with it.

Hobbes rolled a twelve, allowing a bonus move of two men. He placed them carefully on either side of the board, where they could reflect the beam onto Earl’s chest. “Your turn, Jazine.”

Earl had to roll something higher than a five to move a blocking man into position before Hobbes fired the light beam again. He rolled a four. “Too bad,” Hobbes said and tapped the beam. The light reflected off his side piece and hit Earl.

“That was a fast game.”

Hobbes smiled contentedly. “Better luck next time.”

“I’ll wait a bit before there’s a next time.”

He sought out Vera and Tony, finding them together on the beach. The sun was just beginning to set in the western sky, dipping low over the blunted mountains of Baja California.

“Over that way you can see the Volcano of the Three Virgins,” Tony said. “But it’s inactive, like all virgins.”

“You’d know if anybody would,” Vera smiled. “Are you taking the shift after Freddy?”

“So he can sneak up to your bedroom? Fat chance!”

“Oh, come off it, Tony! You’re getting to be as bad as he is!”

“Well, that’s what I came out here for,” Earl explained. “To see whether you or I relieved him at nine.”

“You take it, if you don’t mind, Jazine.”

“Sure.”

He left them on the beach, drinking in the sunset like a pair of high school sweethearts, and went down to tell Freddy. He found him bent over the brain-scan machine, studying wavering white lines.

“Any action from Frank?”

“What? Oh, hello, Jazine. No, nothing new.”

“You try some new scans?”

“Yeah.” He switched off the machine. “What’s up?”

“I’ll be down at nine to take over.”

Freddy glanced at his digital watch. “Oh—look, I think I’ll take on an extra shift. Want to do some more brain tracings. Might as well do them while he’s still sleeping. Come down after midnight, will you?”

“Sure. I’ll catch a doze in the meantime.”

He had a beer in the kitchen, under Hilda’s silent presence, then told them in the living room to have someone wake him around midnight. He spent an hour in the room playing back some of the tapes he’d secretly made, using an earplug to listen, and then wrote up some notes for Crader, back in New York. Finally he went to bed, hoping for two or three hours’ sleep before guard duty.

He dropped off to sleep almost at once in the darkened upstairs room, and found himself in a weird dream-world inhabited by Frankenstein monsters and lovely young women who all looked like Vera Morgan.

It seemed he’d been there only a short time when he felt someone shaking his shoulder, pulling him back from sleep. “Wake up, Jazine! Wake up!” It was Dr. Armstrong’s voice.

“Wake up, Jazine! There’s been another one! Freddy O’Connor’s dead!”

T
HE OTHERS WERE ALREADY
downstairs, clustered around with varying degrees of shock written on their faces. Tony Cooper had his arm protectively around Vera’s shoulders, as if to ward off any blow that might be aimed in her direction, and Lawrence Hobbes simply stood, unbelieving, staring down at Freddy’s, body.

“Skull crushed,” Armstrong reported bleakly from Earl’s side. “Hit from behind with the screw top from one of the freezing cylinders. Damn thing weighs about ten pounds.”

“An impulse weapon,” Whalen observed.

“Or else the killer wanted us to think so,” Tony Cooper said. “Now there’ll certainly be no dispute about calling in the authorities. If we wait any longer we’ll all be slaughtered in our beds.”

“But what about him?” Hobbes asked, gesturing toward the operating table. “Are we to ruin all our work?”

“Our work is ruined already if Frank’s the one who’s been killing all these people,” Cooper said. “I didn’t sign on to your team to create a monster.”

“It couldn’t be Frank!” Hobbes insisted, calling him that for the first time.

“No? Look at the position of the body. He was hit while his back was to the operating table.”

“But what will we do?” Vera asked. “If it’s not even safe to stand guard over him, what—”

Hobbes reached beneath the operating table to pull out the heavy straps they used to secure the patient during certain types of surgery with local anesthetic. “We’ll start by strapping him down. I should have done that sooner.”

“Freddy was working on something,” Earl said. “He didn’t want to be relieved until he finished a new series of brain scans.”

Hobbes finished buckling the straps around the patient’s arms and legs. “That should hold him. I hate to do it, but if there’s any suspicion that he’s having conscious periods of murderous activity we can’t take the risk. Now what were you saying about Freddy?”

“I think he found something new in Frank’s brain patterns.”

“Can any of you read those tracings?”

Whalen and Cooper both shook their heads, but Vera stepped forward, avoiding Freddy’s sprawled and bloody corpse. “He showed me once, when I worked with him. But I don’t know. … This might indicate an irregularity—either a lack of oxygen or protein that could cause cell collapse.”

“Could you take it and study it further?” Hobbes urged.

“I suppose I could try. But I really don’t know much about it.” She ripped the long sheet of tracings out of the machine and folded it under her arm.

“What about his body?” Whalen asked.

“I have some spare freezing capsules,” Hobbes replied. “We can store him in one of those.”

“Do you have enough spares for all of us? We may need them.”

“Look,” Tony Cooper said, “the one thing this proves is that we need the authorities in here right away. We can’t delay any longer.”

Vera took out a cigarette, glanced in Earl’s direction, and said, “The authorities are already here.”

“What?”

“Earl Jazine is some sort of government agent.”

After that there was no point in denying it. Earl asked them all to go back upstairs, after they’d placed Freddy’s body in one of the metal capsules. Even with Hilda hovering in the doorway the room seemed oddly empty, and he had to count noses to be certain that all seven of them were present. Vera and Cooper, Hobbes, Hilda, Armstrong, Whalen, himself. Seven, instead of the original ten.

Earl poured himself a generous shot of scotch and passed the decanter to the others. Then he started talking. “I’m sorry to have deceived you all—especially you, Dr. Hobbes. I am an agent of the Computer Investigation. Bureau with headquarters at the World Trade Center in New York. Our director, Carl Crader, is personally responsible to the President of the United States.”

“Is your name really Jazine?” Tony asked.

“Yes. And I know a great deal about medical photography and documentation too, thanks to a crash course back East. You see, our bureau investigates all varieties of computer and technological crime. I’m fairly new with CIB, but I can tell you they’ve been concerned for some time about the possibility of fraud in the various cryonics societies operating around the country. The freezing of bodies for reanimation in another era can be a very profitable business, especially when the owners of the business will be long dead before anyone can cry fraud.”

“I resent your tone, Jazine,” Lawrence Hobbes thundered, getting to his feet. “I’ve played fair with you, talked frankly about matters that should have been confidential. Now I find you were sent here to spy on me.”

“Investigate, not spy on,” Earl corrected.

“He’s been recording our conversations,” Vera said. “I caught him at it.”

“You should have told me sooner.”

Earl couldn’t understand the reason for Vera’s sudden sharp turning against him. Did it have something to do with Freddy’s death? Did she somehow hold him responsible? “It’s only a routine investigation,” he assured them. “We were looking for a way into one of these groups when we got wind of your urgent request for a medical photographer. I took the regular man’s place, that’s all. We were especially interested in ICI because the range of your activities includes certain cryogenic research.”

“Am I to be penalized for my research now?”

“Certainly not. But the funding of it raises some questions. Your annual financial report filed with Washington doesn’t answer all of them.”

“As you know, Miss Emily Watson was most generous to the institute. She helped tide us over a number of slow periods.”

“And now she’s conveniently vanished.”

“Her disappearance will benefit me in no way. Anything left us in her will could be tied up for years if the body isn’t found.”

“It’ll be found,” Tony Cooper assured them. “We only have to figure out where the killer hid it.”

“He didn’t hide Freddy,” Vera pointed out.

“Probably didn’t have time.”

“All right,” Earl said. “As long as you all know who I am, I’ll go along with the suggestion of Miss Morgan that I act as the legal authority here, until the proper local authorities are able to be summoned.”

“Thanks a lot,” Tony remarked, just a bit sarcastically. “I don’t know what we’d do without someone official to keep track of the bodies.”

“I should point out that you and Vera probably had the strongest motives for wanting Freddy dead.”

“What!”

“You heard me. She was even heard to remark that she’d take care of him after the operation was completed—or words to that effect.”

“I didn’t mean I’d kill him!”

“Probably not—but I have no way of knowing for sure.” He was going to make her sorry she’d revealed his identity.

“All this isn’t getting us anywhere,” Hobbes argued. “Even if Vera had a reason to kill Freddy—and all of us who’ve been within earshot of him this week will grant the possibility of a motive—that still doesn’t give her a reason for killing Emily or MacKenzie.”

“No,” Earl granted.

“Then let’s stop looking for suspects and decide what we should do to stay alive.”

“One thing I want for sure. There’s no need to have someone down here watching Frank, but I do think it’s important that we watch each other—sort of a buddy system.”

“My God!” Vera chuckled. “Just like at girls’ camp!”

“You two ladies should stay together—”

“Wait a minute!” Tony said. “Vera stays with me. I’ll take care of her!”

“All right,” Earl agreed reluctantly. “Then Hobbes and Hilda and Armstrong will have to stay in a group. And I’ll stay with Whalen.”

Lawrence Hobbes cleared his throat. “Might I remind you that it’s only a little after midnight. Are we supposed to sleep together?”