Dr. Franklin's Island (12 page)

“I’d say we’re about two hundred and fifty meters above the sea here,” said Miranda. “The rim of the cone is much higher, of course. I haven’t thought about how high, but I will if you like. I don’t mind collecting measurements for you. But don’t get too interested, Semi. You know that if I fly above the crater rim too often I’ll get zapped.”

She pointed to her ankle. I saw a black rubber bracelet around it, like the ring on her bird leg. We saw the stun ring like this, although otherwise we looked like the castaways we used to be. I suppose it appeared in the mental world because it was a sign that we were prisoners, something we thought about a lot. The word
interesting
was code for anything to do with escape plans. We’d agreed on this ages ago, back in the fake hotel room. Miranda was warning me not to use it too much. She was much better at hinting and talking in riddles than I was.

I could see she hadn’t the slightest idea what I was trying to say. I decided to be more direct, and simply tell her about the sluice. I could say it was a nice way to get a massage. I could say it was fun to sit down there where the water came pumping in,
through a big pipe,
straight from the sea—

Miranda had other ideas. “I’m happy to talk about measurements,” she said, her eyes very bright. “But I’d like it better if we could play a game. Do you want to play a game that I’ve thought up? Sort of a
personality
game?”

“Okay.” I wondered what she was up to.

“Good, because I hate being boring. Like poor old
Arnie.
He was so boring, wasn’t he?”

That took me by surprise. Neither of us had spoken about our fellow castaway for a long time.

“
Arnie?
What’s he got to do with anything?”

We knew, from the evidence we’d found, that Arnie had found the way to the secret valley nearly a month before we’d stumbled into it. We also knew he’d been caught. I was certain that he’d been treated the same way we had been, but he’d died, instead of being turned into a monster. That was why Dr. Franklin had told us we were his “first human subjects.” Not that he’d have worried about frightening us, but it wouldn’t have fitted well into his boasting lecture, the day we arrived—to admit he’d already tried and failed to create a transgenic human.

“I don’t know,” said Miranda, staring at me hard. “I don’t know what to think. But I know that if we are angry or shocked or upset we turn up here, without meaning to. That’s the way it happened the first time, remember? Visible. Alive and kicking. It might not work, but it’s worth trying.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about
Arnie.
That prize dork, Arnie Pullman.”

“I don’t get it, Miranda.” I was afraid she was going crazy. “Arnie’s dead.”

“Oh, is he? Then let’s see if we can raise his ghost. The two of us, summoning him as hard and nasty as we can, that ought to do it.
I think I found out something,
Semi.”

I couldn’t believe what she was telling me, but I got the idea, and I went along with it.

“Arnie?” I groaned. “Do I have to talk about stupid annoying porky dorky
Arnie
?”

Miranda grinned. She knew I’d got the message. “Yes, that slobby creep
Arnie.
”

We both laughed, as unkindly as we could. In the white place, where emotions were all stripped naked, the effect was hateful. Miranda’s face looked like an evil Halloween mask. I was almost scared . . . but then I forgot about being scared because something began to happen. The sense that there was someone with us gave a jump in strength. The vague presence took shape. It was familiar. I could
recognize
it—

My mouth dropped open. Miranda nodded fiercely.

“He was most boring of all about
that raft,
” I said. “He loved it as if it was his baby.”

“Oh yecch, the
raft
!” laughed Miranda, instantly following me. “That idiotic raft!”

“It was pathetic. You’d have thought he was building a space shuttle—”

“Instead of something that wouldn’t have floated across a kiddies’ paddling pool.”

“He thought it was so wonderful. It was falling apart, because he couldn’t tie knots.”

“All the poles were different lengths—”

“And he hadn’t smoothed them off, so it was all lumpy and gappy—”

The cloudy whiteness of the mind place quivered with outrage. “Yeah,” said Miranda vindictively. “The fat creep wasted our twine. And he thought he deserved extra food, because he was ‘working’ so hard. . . . Do you remember when he took the bananas?”

I rolled my eyes. “That was so utterly pathetic and sad. Taking our best food, eating it all himself and then
lying about it
! As if it could have been anybody else!”

“
I
did not take the bananas!
The ants took them.”

The voice came from nowhere. We both gasped and grinned.

“Oh sure,” said Miranda. “Ants. They carried three full-sized wild bananas away. And buried the peel behind the big boulder. You are such a pitiful liar, Arnie.”

A patch of the whiteness blurred, took on color: and
there he was.

Arnie!

There was Arnie Pullman, our castaway friend, sitting on the white cloudy “floor,” wearing the salt-stained remains of his black, baggy “happy face” Nirvana T-shirt and his baggy jeans, exactly the way he’d looked when we last saw him on the beach; his dark hair bristle short, though not quite as shorn as it had been at Miami airport. He stared at us, totally amazed.

We stood there, grinning in triumph.

“What’s going on?” he croaked.

“I haven’t spent all my time flying up in the sky,” said Miranda to me, ignoring Arnie. “I’ve been exploring the compound and watching the orderlies. I hop around pretending to be a dumb-animal bird, and nobody takes any notice. They must have been told to leave me alone. I spotted that the prison-hospital building was being kept locked up, and nobody was getting in there except Skinner or Dr. Franklin. I thought about it, and I knew who the prisoner had to be. I put that together with the way we’ve been
feeling,
Semi, and I decided this might work.”

Arnie was holding up his hands, and staring at them. He peered down at his body, and wailed, “Where am I? What is this?”

“I don’t know,” said Miranda, turning on him fiercely. “You tell me, you
traitor.
Dr. Franklin told us he couldn’t eavesdrop on our radio telepathy. We didn’t believe him,
but it’s true, isn’t it?
That’s why he’s using you. You’ve got one of those microchips in your brain. You’re listening to us, and reporting everything to him. Am I right?”

“Miranda.” I tried to calm her. “We don’t know he’s a traitor yet—”

“Am I dreaming?” whispered Arnie. He stretched out his arms, he lifted his legs and looked at his bare feet. He looked as if he might be going to faint—if a mental image can faint. “Have I been asleep in bed, all this time? What if it’s
all been a nightmare
?”

I saw that he looked
different,
the same as Miranda had looked different to me the first time we met here (we didn’t notice that effect much, by now). The real Arnie, apparently, was not so nasty and cynical as all that. In the white place, you could see through the annoying
I-know-you-don’t-like-me
front, to the lonely, misfit person underneath. His mental-image body didn’t look chunky and solid. He was still big, but squashy and soft, like a crab without its shell. His mouth was trembling, as if he was going to cry. I said, “Miranda, you’d better back off. He’s going to flip out.”

“What have you done to me?”
demanded Arnie, in a bewildered moan.

“It’s all right, Arnie,” I said. “It’s only a stronger signal. Usually, it’s voices. But if you kind of mentally shout you end up here, and visible. Like a sort of videophone.”

“Voices in my head,” muttered Arnie. “Cap full of wires. Brainwaves on a screen.” Then he seemed to pull himself together. He stared around. “This . . . This is unbelievable. How did you make me appear?”

“We didn’t do anything, Arnie,” said Miranda. “You did it yourself. Like Semi said, you shouted, you turned up the volume. Strong emotions, like anger or fear or a guilty conscience, make the radio telepathy into a video link. I don’t know how to describe it scientifically, but that’s what seems to happen. I mean, you
did
take the bananas, didn’t you? Out of pure greed. And obviously you feel guilty about it.”

Arnie tried to put on his old, annoying grin. “Well, yeah, I took ’em. . . . Course I did. But I didn’t feel guilty. Not me. I didn’t really want ’em, I did it to wind you up.”

It didn’t work. We could see exactly how ashamed and stupid he felt about having taken the bananas and then lied about it. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t have to. He knew. He scowled, and shrugged. “Okay, okay. All right. You smoked me out. Can we forget the stupid bananas? We’re back in contact. Now what?”

Slowly, the three of us sat down, staring at each other.

Miranda said, “Tell us what’s going on.”

Arnie gave a sort of choked laugh. “Well, you guessed it, Marvelous Miranda. The Doc, Dr. Franklin, genuinely can’t spy on you. No one can, unless they have the implant. Radio telepathy isn’t like ordinary radio. They can’t tune in and hear what we’re saying, they can only tell when the chips are active. They’d need to have you in the lab, wired up, to listen in on your conversations directly, and that wouldn’t be convenient, the way you are now. He’s going to improve the system, but that’s the way it works so far.”

“So Miranda’s right,” I said. “You’ve had the same kind of implant put into your brain. You can pick up our signals as speech the way we can, and you can talk so you can tell him what we’re saying. You’re his spy.”

Arnie shuddered. “
No!
It isn’t like that!”

“Then what is it like?” demanded Miranda.

Arnie’s tongue came out and licked his dry lips. The Arnie we’d known on the beach would have jeered at us and kept on lying, but the white place made lying difficult. Or maybe Arnie had changed since we’d last met him.

“All right, I give in. Yeah, it’s true. That’s about it. He’s using me. I’m spying.”

We’d told him that we knew what he was doing, but it was a shock to hear him say it. We couldn’t speak. We stared at him in horror. Arnie cowered, as if we were hitting him.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he pleaded. “Let me
explain.
Let me tell you—”

It was Day Eighty-five. We hadn’t seen him since Day Eleven, when he’d vanished along with his raft. Back then Miranda and I had thought he was food for the sharks.

“That’s a good idea,” said Miranda coldly. “We’d like to hear your explanation. You know what happened to us. Your friends Dr. Skinner and Dr. Franklin have told you everything, I’m sure. So tell us what happened to you. Tell us the whole story, from the day you disappeared. How did you get caught?”

“From the day I disappeared? That seems like a long, long time ago. I’ll try. Don’t blame me if I don’t remember all the details.”

“We two went off foraging,” I prompted him, “early in the morning. Then what?”

It was like old times, like being on the beach again, the three of us sitting together.

“I was going to work on my raft,” said Arnie. “But I’d run out of rope, and I wanted to think about redesigning it anyway. I took the twine ball, you know, the remains of the salvaged twine you two had picked up, and went up to the waterfall.”

Miranda and I glanced at each other. Typical! He’d been supposed to stay at the camp.

“I had a swim. Then I started knotting bits of twine together, sitting there in the cool. I got bored of that, so I decided to have another go at climbing the cliff.”

“You found the passage,” said Miranda.

“That’s right. I found the passage. I got through into the crater valley. I was in the trees outside the cave, staring down at the buildings. Then there were these goons in uniform, crashing around in the undergrowth. They seemed to be searching for something.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “I bet they were looking for the piglet!”

“What piglet?”

“One of Dr. Franklin’s animals,” said Miranda. “It had escaped. It got down into our bay somehow. Semi saw a wild pig mutant when we were in the woods up to the north. But she couldn’t believe her eyes. Go on, what next?”

“I suppose that explains it. I thought they were looking for me. I thought I must have triggered some kind of alarm. I’d dropped my machete. That’s how I got caught. I was searching around for it, when suddenly the goons were all over me. The weird thing was, they didn’t seem
surprised.
They didn’t go, ‘Who are you and how did you get here,’ or anything like that. I can speak a bit of Spanish. I tried to talk to them, but they weren’t interested. They stuck me in their Jeep. The guy who seemed to be the captain of the crew talked to someone on a mobile phone. Then he sent some of his men off up the track. The rest of us waited around for a long time; and no one would talk to me, and they wouldn’t let me out of the Jeep. In the end the men came back,
with my raft.
I couldn’t understand how they’d done that. . . . Skinner told me later, there’s a place where you can get through the rim of the crater easily, but you can’t see the cleft from below, and that’s why we never found it. Anyway, they’d been down to the beach, to our camp, and brought it back. I didn’t understand what was going on at all, but when they started to break up my raft, I was angry and I sort of, well, started a fight. That’s when I was knocked out.”

“Sounds familiar,” said Miranda.

“They had to take the raft,” I pointed out. “It was too soon to be sure we wouldn’t be rescued. It was only eleven days since the crash. They didn’t want me and Miranda telling anyone about another castaway, who had mysteriously disappeared. With the raft gone, there was no mystery. We had an explanation.”

“Yeah . . . the sharks. I worked that out, later on. But getting back to my story, the next thing I knew I was in a bed, in a prison ward with bars all around me, and nutty Dr. Skinner was peering into my cage. That’s when . . . it’s true, I told him about you two. But I
didn’t
betray you
! The goons already knew about the camp on the beach, before they picked me up. I was only telling Skinner what he already knew.”