Dragons island, p.13
Dragon's Island, page 13
“And it will again!” The girl spoke too vehemently, as if trying to convince herself. Dane felt almost sorry for her and the sick man, until he reminded himself that even the driver had been a victim of their strange alliance, robbed of memory and nation and family to serve against his race.
“Edentown.” Messenger gestured feebly at a cluster of straggling buildings by the road ahead. “Our New Guinea headquarters. You’ll live at the Cadmus House.”
The Cadmus House had a look of decayed luxury. The ornamental woodwork of the long verandas needed new paint. A rank forest of papayas had overrun the grounds, and creeping vines were smothering the hibiscus and frangipani along the walks.
The jeep driver started to turn in toward it, but Messenger waved him on. They passed a hospital and a few straggling shops and warehouses and one tall office building. Beyond that forlorn outpost of the company, the forest closed in to wall the road again, until the jeep emerged on a grassy plateau that rose like an island from the jungle sea, two miles from the river.
“Old Potter’s house.” Messenger nodded heavily toward a rambling stone mansion, scarlet with bougainvillea, at the end of a muddy driveway. “That’s where he died.”
“Mr. Van Doon has it ready for your party.” Approaching the turn, the driver slowed again. “The air-conditioner’s running—”
“Drive on.” Messenger’s swollen hand lifted, with a painful urgency. “I want to get started.”
The battered vehicle splashed ahead again, and Nan’s golden arm lifted toward a low structure of white concrete, which stood isolated beyond a barbed wire fence ahead.
“The mutation lab,” she told Dane. “The biological engineering section, where Potter used to produce all his mutations.”
Trying to veil the taut agony of his interest, he leaned to study the building where that lonely genius had made the mules, and probably that virus of forgetfulness, and possibly even Nan Sanderson herself. The massive windowless walls gave it the look of a fortress, and he was not surprised to see two brown riflemen outside.
“Notice them, Fallon!” Messenger’s voice had a sudden flat vehemence. “That area’s taboo—even to you lotus-eaters. Keep out. Those guards shoot to kill.”
“Outsiders want our secret processes,” the girl said more quietly. “Some of them are ingenious and persistent. We have to protect the company.”
Dane nodded as calmly as he could, trying not to flinch when he recalled how she had protected the company from one persistent and ingenious outsider named Nicholas Venn.
“The production section.” The fat man gestured heavily. “Your domain, Fallon.”
Just across the muddy ruts from the mutation lab, the production section was another long building roofed with sheet aluminum. Beyond it, a series of broad shallow concrete tanks spread fan-like down the slope toward the jungle-clotted river.
“That looks strange.” Cautiously, Dane probed again for the secret of creation. “Do I know enough to run it?” .
“Not yet,” Messenger gasped at Nan. “Tell him.”
Dane forced himself to breathe again. Afraid the girl would see the raw violence of his anxiety, he turned to frown again at the puzzling construction of those empty tanks. For here must be the tremendous secret he had sought from the beginning.
“Potter grew each crop of mules from a single mutant cell,” she began briskly. “He let it multiply in a sterile food-solution until he had as many billion germ cells as he wanted. Then he added a reagent to stop the fission, and start each cell developing into a mature mule.
“But you won’t be concerned with that.”
Numb with disappointment, Belfast turned with a careful show M expectation toward the building above the empty vats.
“Here’s where we’ll bring you the swimmers—the microscopic embryonic mules. Your job is to keep them alive.
Though the grown mules are hardy enough, the swimmers are quite delicate. The last ones we made died in the tanks— killed, I think, by some blunder. With your skill, perhaps, we can grow them to maturity.”
Dane looked at her doubtfully. “I’m afraid those books didn’t say anything about growing swimmers.”
“I’ll bring you a memo on the process.” Her voice was intense, her blue eyes dark and grave; her lean ivory loveliness caught him so painfully that he had to turn away.
“The first stages are critical,” she added. “The vat solutions must be kept uncontaminated, exactly balanced chemically, and irradiated with just the right intensity of light—since the swimmers live on light, even a few moments of darkness can kill them, by stopping photosynthesis.
“An exacting job, you see.” She looked at him keenly. “Can you do it?”
“I think so.” He tried desperately to mold his face into the stolid good humor of a lotus-eater. “I know I can!” “Good.” She gave him a quick little smile of confidence. “The larger swimmers aren’t quite so delicate. When they’re old enough to leave the sterile vats inside, they develop an instinct which guides them on through the growing tanks outside. There, they need only sunlight and a few days of time to become adults, ready to climb out and dry their swimming membranes and go to work for the company.” Belfast mopped at the sweat on his face and studied the empty tanks again. Perhaps this elaborate process for the manufacture of intelligent slaves shouldn’t seem remarkable to a man who remembered nothing else, but he found it hard to hide his dazed amazement. He felt grateful for the interruption, when another jeep came splashing up behind them.
“It’s Vic Van Doon.” And the girl called gladly, “Hi, Vic!”
A muscular, sun-browned man in faded shorts and shapeless pith helmet came wading through the mud to shake hands with her and the panting financier.
“Nan! J. D.! Good to see you!” His voice was bluff and vigorous, and his broad face was smooth with oblivion. “I wanted to meet you at the plane,” he said, “but the jeep got stuck in a wash-out, up in the hills.”
“The mines?” Messenger asked. “Did you get them running?”
Momentarily grave, Van Doon shook his head. “I took the best mules I had up there, but they’re all too weak and old to do the work. And dying like flies.”
“We’ll soon have more.” Nan turned. “Vic, this is Don Fallon. Our newest lotus-eater. He’s to be in charge of the production section.”
“Hello, Fallon.” Van Doon caught his hand with a bone-cracking grip. “You’ll never be sorry the black flies bit you. I’ve been with the company three years, and never a regret. That virus is a sure cure for trouble-makers.” He chuckled genially. “I believe I came to murder Mr. Potter and break the company—right, J. D.?”
“Right,” Messenger said. “Nearly did it, too.”
Belfast looked away from Van Doon’s smiling pride in that conversion, trying not to shiver. It made him sick to see how that virus had turned such a determined enemy of the company into this loyal slave, and for a moment his own plans seemed hopeless.
“No time to squander.” Messenger straightened impatiently. “Let's get to work!”
Dane nodded, trying feebly to smile again. No matter how many before him had failed, his purpose was still undetected. Though he was disappointed to be shut out of the mutation lab, the products of it might tell him something about the process. And—in spite of Messenger’s taboo—he still hoped to find a way inside.
“I’ll bring you that memo, as soon as I can,” Nan told him. “But you might start looking over the plant right away. We ought to have the first batch of swimmers ready by morning. You’ll have to have everything sterile, and fresh solutions mixed.”
“Wait here, Fallon,” Van Doon added. “I’ll send your assistants out with the keys.” He turned to Messenger and the girl. “I’ve got the old Potter house ready for you. Nan, won’t you ride over with me?”
She let him help her out of the jeep. Belfast climbed hastily out on the other side, to hide his flush of unwilling resentment. Let her go, he advised himself bitterly. She meant nothing to him except alien strangeness and shocking danger. The lotus-eater was welcome to her!
Left alone when the two jeeps lurched away, he walked stiffly out of the driving sun into the hot shade under the eaves of the production building. Waiting there, feeling the drops of sweat creeping like insects down his flanks and legs, he cautiously surveyed the mutation lab across the road.
The two riflemen returned his gaze suspiciously. lie swung as casually as possible to examine the slope behind him, where those tiers of empty tanks dropped toward the river bottom. Searching for a back path to that fenced and guarded fortress, he paused abruptly when another riddle challenged him.
Danger seethed all around him. He knew it was there— but he couldn’t feel it, not in the way he had sensed the hostility of New York. The jungle was alive with crocodiles and deadly insects and internal parasites and a hundred other shapes of death, but it had no warning glow of evil. The faint dankness of the river swamps was not that bitter reek of hate. The harsh cries of unseen birds in the trees below him were strange enough, but they rang no alarm in his mind.
Glancing uncomfortably at the guards across the road, whose restless guns needed nothing more than light to show their deadly readiness, he frowned at the riddle of that lost danger-sense—or had it been a sense?
For that seeming awareness of peril had never led him to actual safety. Coming upon him just before Nan Sanderson first called, it had guided him twice—or three times, really —into her mantraps. It had brought him here, into ever-mounting jeopardy.
Nan Sanderson had been the common factor, it struck him, in all of those baffling experiences. She must have somehow caused those sensations. Had what he felt been’ her mutant mind, reaching out to read his thoughts and even to influence his actions?
He nodded uneasily. That would explain the absence of those feelings now—she had naturally relaxed her unknown faculties, when she thought the virus had made him her harmless tool. But when those sensations returned, they would mean she had decided to pick his mind again.
He shivered when he recognized her in the jeep, coming back with Messenger from the old Potter house. Her cheerful wave of greeting startled him unpleasantly. He managed to answer it stiffly, but he felt relieved when she drove on past him, into the fenced grounds of the mutation lab.
Four more lotus-eaters came up from the town in a rusty truck, with keys to the production section. Dane went in with his new assistants to explore the building. What he found was a long row of stainless steel vats, each larger than the next, all linked with a bewildering web of pipes and pumps and valves. Before he could finish inspecting the intricate auxiliary equipment of boilers and filters and flood-lamps and thermostats and air-conditioning units, one of the men called him back to the door.
“Don?” A thin dread touched him when he heard Nan Sanderson’s voice, but he relaxed a little when he saw the folded papers in her hand. “The memo.”
He took it silently.
“Follow it exactly,” she told him. “Remember, an error of one minute or one degree or one percent might be enough to kill the swimmers.”
Memo to Dr. Fallon, the first page was headed, in blue-black ink which had not yet darkened. The hand-printed characters staggered wearily, but they were stubbornly legible. In the first step, he read, the embryonic swimmers must be kept for eight minutes in ten liters of sterile water at 38 degrees Centigrade, under 96 foot-candles of filtered light. In step two—
Dane started, and then tried hard to stop the trembling of the pages in his fingers. For he had seen that same handprinting—neater and more vigorous, but still the same— in letters written long ago. For all that wavering weakness, the slanted bar at the top of the A and the curved oblique stroke across the f and the back-slanted tails of the g and the y made it unmistakable.
The writing was Charles Kendrew’s.
Eighteen
Nan Sanderson made him come with her down the descending row of vats. Pausing to show him how to operate each one, she let him study the instructions in that memo and then shot rapid questions to be sure he understood.
Dane followed her dazedly. His forced responses seemed painfully mechanical to him, but she appeared not to notice his disturbance. When they left the bottom vat, where the growing swimmers were expected to leap a low barrier to the tanks outside, she turned anxiously.
“Think you can do it?”
Huskily, he said he thought he understood everything. He walked with her out to the jeep, and watched her drive back toward that squat building beyond the barbed wire, which had the look of a prison now.
Stumbling slowly back to begin his own task, he studied that unsteady hand-printing again. No, he couldn’t be mistaken—the writing was Kendrew’s. The implications staggered him.
The memo proved that Messenger’s eccentric plant breeder was actually Charles Kendrew—as his father had once suspected, before the financier somehow bribed or tricked him into forgetting the notion. Charles Potter was the missing maker of the not-men, whom Gellian was hunting.
And he was still alive!
Messenger and Nan Sanderson must have lied about his illness and death, to discourage inquiries about him. That fresh ink and the words Memo to Fallon were sufficient evidence that the maker was not only still alive, but well and sane enough today to write these elaborate instructions for the care of his creations.
Alive—but the helpless prisoner, obviously, of the man who had been his friend and the inhuman creatures he had made. Somehow, Dane decided, they had compelled him to write this paper. Right now, no doubt, they were trying to make him create that mutant cell they needed so desperately.
But how could a creator be confined?
Dane frowned again at the memo, and the answer seemed clear enough, between the wavering lines. For no process of reshaping genes could turn a human geneticist into a god. Whatever the maker’s method, it had’ limitations—the initial weakness of the mutant cells showed that. He thought it unpleasantly significant, too, that the maker was not allowed to control the whole process of growing even the harmless mules.
Trying to read the history of his father’s missing friend in those scrawled pages, Dane shivered again, even in the sticky tropic heat. He knew Messenger’s ruthless shrewdness, and he recalled his chilly awareness of Nan Sanderson’s mutant faculties. Merely human, the maker must have trusted them—his friend and his splendid new creation. He must have been too stunned to save himself, when they joined against him.
Scowling at the memo, Dane tried to puzzle out the circumstances. Perhaps the personal tragedy that drove Ken-drew to leave America had broken his vision and his purpose, leaving him the abject tool of the financier. That might help explain the virus of forgetfulness!
He nodded over the pages, in bleak understanding. Pursued even to this far wilderness by some unendurable memory, the maker could have created that virus to wipe out his own unhappiness and so unwittingly surrendered his new science to Messenger and the mutants he had made. If that were true, the guarded mutation lab might be the only world he now knew, and the art of biological engineering all he had cared to remember.
Whatever the truth, the maker must be rescued. The present plight of his captors seemed to prove that they had not yet fully learned his arts. He must be set free before the not-men had extorted knowledge enough to make them forever invincible.
“What’s wrong, Fallon?”
Startled by that loud voice, he turned to find Van Doon behind him in the doorway.
“Sick?” the brown man boomed. “Or why aren’t you busy?”
“Nan just brought this.” He showed the memo, and tried to recover his lost calm. “Instructions, for me to read.”
“Miss Sanderson, to you.” Van Doon seemed curiously curt, for a lotus-eater. “And you had better get to work.”
He went to work. All that breathless day and half the stifling night, he toiled with his crew to prepare the vats for those mutant cells. His mind was busier—turning over shadowy surmises and unsure conclusions, trying to imagine the maker’s present situation and to plan a rescue.
Charles Kendrew would be an old man by now, he reminded himself, perhaps as feeble as Messenger. The halt in the creation of new mules, two years ago, could have come from infirmity instead of rebellion. Whatever had happened, Nan Sanderson was evidently learning the art of mutation now, with the maker her tutor.
In that circumstance Dane thought he saw a stern time limit. With her superior intelligence and her possible mindreading ability, the mutant girl w’ould surely soon learn the science that had shaped her. When she did, the not-men might have no further reason to keep their creator alive.
Too much haste, however, could be as fatal as delay. Pursued by his dread of the absent slip of the tongue or the unthinking gesture that might unmask him instantly, he strove for the tireless patience of the true slaves of oblivion, while he scoured vats and pipes and tested valves and pumps, and smiled at the pitiless heat.
The production unit was air-conditioned—but not, he found, for human comfort. The sterile, humid, super-heated atmosphere required by the growing mules was even more distressing than the fitful breath of the dying monsoon outside. By midnight, when at last the vats were ready to receive those strange seeds, he was limp and reeling with fatigue.
But the broken prisoner in that low fortress across the road had become real and pitiable in his mind by now; he could smell the dungeon odor and see the festered sores the chains had worn and hear the stubborn moans of torture. Despite his exhaustion, the maker couldn’t wait.
He picked one man from his cheerful crew to watch the instruments inside that steamy incubator, and posted another on guard inside the air-lock that kept out contaminated breezes. The others he sent back to their quarters in the river village.
