The Immortality Factor (58 page)

He whirled back at me, teeth bared, snarling at me. For the first time in my life I was scared of Max.

I backed into a corner and sat quietly, knees pulled up to my chin, avoiding direct eye contact. I could hear my heart racing. Where were the handlers? Couldn't they hear Max's screaming? Why didn't they come?

Max seemed to calm down a little. He edged slowly to the corner where he'd been when I first came into the pen. He kept watching me, though, so I didn't move. I hardly breathed. But my mind was spinning. Max, oh, Max, I thought. They've destroyed you and I let them do it. It hurt. All the way down inside me it hurt in a way that the cancer never did. It hurt the way Bill had hurt me. They had all betrayed me, even Max now, though it wasn't really his fault.

So we just sat there for hours, me in my corner, Max in his. Neither one of us moving. Finally Max stretched out on one side and closed his eye. I still didn't move. I waited and waited until he was breathing deep and regular, sound asleep. Even then I was afraid to stir, afraid that he'd wake up if I budged an inch and come at me with those ripping fangs and his powerful arm.

I must have dozed now and then, my head on my knees. My back ached, my legs tingled, but I didn't move. If they found that Max attacked me they'd destroy him. They'd shoot him like he was a wild animal when in truth they were the animals, the beasts. They had killed Max with their damned lies.

That was when I realized that Max was already as good as dead. He had nothing to look forward to now except pain and fear. The tumors would continue to grow, eat into his brain, destroy him. His body might remain but Max himself was already half gone. Why should I let him go on suffering like that? Why shouldn't I help him to escape all this pain and humiliation?

Then a new thought struck me. If Max dies now they'll never be able to say that they regenerated his arm. They'll have to admit that they failed. They're only keeping him alive long enough for the arm to regrow, I knew. Once they can show that, once they can take pictures and make all the tests and measurements and put it all in their reports, then they'll murder Max anyway so they can dissect him and see what went wrong with his eye.

I can stop them! I can beat them!

By the time the handler came to clean Max's pen and give him breakfast, every part of my body ached horribly. But I was smiling to myself.

“What the hell . . . ?”

The kid looked shocked to see me in there. Max woke up the instant he opened the door, and scrambled to his feet. But he didn't try to attack me or the handler; he didn't try to get out of the pen.

“I'm all right,” I said, getting up slowly. Every muscle in me groaned as I slowly climbed to my feet, leaning heavily against the wall.

“You spent the night in here?”

I just nodded.

“All night?”

My legs were numb; it took a real effort to walk.

“Jeez.” The kid grinned at me. “Does that mean you two are engaged?”

He started to laugh and I slapped his face. Max jumped back a little, frightened. I stumbled out of the pen, leaving the kid standing there with my finger marks white against his flushed red cheek.

 

T
he word went through the lab like wildfire, of course. Cassie spent the night with Max. The two of them slept together in the chimp's pen. If it's a boy they'll name it Arthur. That kind of thing. They didn't say a word in front of me, of course, but I could hear them all snickering behind my back.

Arthur summoned me into his office almost as soon as he arrived that morning.

“What happened?” He wasn't laughing. He was completely serious.

“What did they do to Max while my back was turned?” I asked.

“Nothing that hasn't been done while you've been with him. Routine tests, that's all.”

It was a lie, a damned lie. I knew it. Arthur could sit there behind his nice big desk and smile at me, all sincerity and polish, but I knew he was lying through his handsome teeth.

“Max didn't recognize me,” I said. “He got terribly upset when I went to see him.”

“Did he attack you?”

It was my turn to lie. “Do I look like he attacked me? He could've sliced me to ribbons if he'd wanted to.” I didn't mention the ache in my ribs from where he'd hit me. I'd be bruised and sore for weeks, I knew.

“But he didn't recognize you,” Arthur said.

“The tumors are destroying his brain functions.”

“But you're all right.”

“I'm fine.”

“Good. I was worried.”

Another lie. All he was worried about was the possibility that Max might have to be destroyed before the arm grew all the way back.

I spent most of the morning at the computer in my office, writing a long letter to the Reverend Roy Averill Simmonds. It took me even longer to find his address; half the afternoon on the telephone tracking down various organizations that had dealt with him. I finally telephoned Arthur's brother at Mendelssohn Hospital and got one of the secretaries there to give me his mailing address. It was in Wichita.

“That's where they send the donations,” she told me. “Must be his home base.”

“Or his bank,” I said.

“They always have their offices close to their banks, honey.”

That made sense, I supposed. So I sent my letter there. It was a complete report on what they'd done to Max, in nontechnical language. Five pages long. If Reverend Simmonds wanted to publicize how godless scientists were being cruel to animals, let him show the world what they'd done to Max. I even included two of the DVDs I'd been making over the past few weeks.

It was almost five o'clock when I slipped my package into the pile in the outgoing bin at the mailroom door. I had to hurry down to the pharmaceutical storeroom. Like the rest of the lab's service departments, it closed at five. The scientists might keep going all night long, but the support offices kept nine-to-five hours, unless somebody made special provisions to keep them open longer.

I had access to any of the drugs on stock, and plenty of times I had sent the lab's purchasing people scurrying after really exotic stuff. But for this task, all I needed was a bottle of tranquilizers. I already had enough cyanide.

Tears blurred my vision as I ground the tranquilizer capsules into Max's food, a paste of bananas and sugar that he always loved. Long after he had finished his regular dinner, I brought the stainless steel bowl to his pen.

The same kid I had smacked that morning was coming out of the cell as I walked down the hallway.

“I already gave him his dinner,” he said guardedly.

His face was unmarked. I hadn't hit him that hard. Nowhere near as hard as Max had hit my ribs. Nowhere near as hard as he deserved.

“I'm giving him an extra treat,” I said, struggling to keep my voice from trembling.

He started to grin, then thought better of it. “Uh-huh,” was all he said.

“I'll stay with him tonight,” I said. “You don't have to worry about him.”

I could see that he was aching to make a wisecrack. But he restrained himself, probably afraid I'd bean him with Max's metal food bowl.

Still, he asked, “Uh, you're not goin' to stay inside again, are you?”

“No,” I said, forcing a smile. “That was an accident. I'll keep an eye on him from outside his pen.”

He nodded and walked off, probably dying to spread the word that Cassie was going to spend another night with her boyfriend.

Max watched me as I opened the food slot in the Plexiglas wall and slid the bowl inside. For long minutes he didn't move and I thought, If he doesn't take the drugged food he'll keep on living this miserable painful existence.

“It's your favorite, Max,” I coaxed him gently. “You always loved it.”

I was already speaking to him in the past tense.

After a long while he shuffled over to the bowl and sniffed it. Then he stuck a finger into the glop and tasted it. He looked up at me, his one brown eye showing none of the joy or excitement that he would've shown a few weeks earlier. None of the personality.

He's not Max anymore, I said to myself. Max is already gone. I wanted to cry, but I couldn't afford that luxury. Not yet.

I went to my room, next door, and got the camcorder so I could video Max's last moments.

He had dragged the bowl back to a far corner, squatted in front of it, and begun to dig his hand into it, clutching the bowl with his two feet. I videoed Max as he licked his fingers, just like a human child would, and then raised the bowl to his lips and licked it clean. It was hard to focus through the viewfinder, my eyes kept blurring with tears.

I kept recording, glancing at my wristwatch now and then to see how much time was elapsing. The dose took effect, finally. Max lay down on his back and fell deeply asleep.

I had to work fast. I ran back to Zack O'Neill's lab and rummaged through several of the drawers in his lab benches until I found his supply of hypodermic syringes. I took the biggest one he had. Let the instrument of death be his, I told myself. He's killed Max figuratively, it's only right that he bears the blame for the truth.

When I got back to Max's pen, he was still sleeping on his back like a big hairy baby. I closed the door to the room so no one could see me from outside. Then I opened the Plexiglas door and slipped into Max's pen, the syringe still hidden in the waistband of my jeans. Poor Max never stirred; the tranquilizers had done their job.

I took out the syringe and quickly pushed the needle straight into his heart. The syringe was empty, of course, except for air. Air bubbles would fill up his heart and prevent it from pumping blood. That would kill him.

Max twitched slightly as I pushed the syringe's plunger. I took the needle out of him, refilled the syringe with air, and stuck him again. I thought I saw his eyelid flutter, but I couldn't be sure. Otherwise he didn't move.

I left him lying there and went out to the trash bay by the loading dock in the back of the building and threw the hypo into the medical waste bin. By the
time I got back to Max he was dead. He was lying exactly as I'd left him, but I couldn't see his chest moving. He wasn't breathing.

I had to wipe my eyes again. Then I went inside the pen and checked his pulse several times and finally worked up the nerve to peel his eyelid back. No response from the pupil. Max was dead.

I forced myself to stay calm. This was no time to dissolve into crying. Later. I would mourn for Max later. I went from Max's cell to my own room, down the corridor from his. I started thinking that Arthur would want an autopsy done on Max to see what killed him. It'd look superficially like a coronary, but if they did a chemical workup on his blood they'd find that he was full of tranquilizers.

I had to fight back the tears that wanted to flood through me. I had to think straight. Okay, Max is dead. He's safe now, there's nothing they can do to him anymore. I popped the video disk out of the camcorder and handwrote another letter to Reverend Simmonds. I didn't mention the cyanide in my letter; kind of foolish because here I am talking about it into this voice recorder.

I'm going to take out this audiocassette and put it in with the letter and the DVD that I've already addressed to Reverend Simmonds. Seal it and stamp it and take it down to the mailroom. Stuff it in under the pile of outgoing mail that's already in the bin, so it won't be noticed or stopped.

Then the cyanide. It hits quick; there'll be no chance of reviving me.

I wonder if Bill will ever find out what I've done. I wonder if he'll ever realize that he's one of Max's murderers. And mine, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P
at had been wrong, Arthur saw. The hearing chamber was overflowing with reporters, all here to watch Cassie's disks. Someone must have tipped them off. The reporters' table was filled for the first time since the opening day and more media people lined the sides of the room. A third camera crew had set up during lunch. And Senator Kindelberger was back.

A fifty-two-inch projection-screen television set had been installed against the wall opposite the jury. Arthur could feel his insides clenching. This is going to be a circus, he told himself.

Rosen looked strangely pained as he sat at his place at the end of the row of desks in the front of the hearing room. He rose slowly to his feet and faced the jury, turning his back to Arthur.

“Several times during the course of this trial,” the examiner said, “Dr. Marshak has objected to various questions or testimonies because they were not strictly on the narrow issue of scientific fact.”

Arthur noticed that the reporters were focused on Rosen like hunting hounds who have sensed their prey.

“The videos you are about to see are highly emotional in their content, yet they are also highly relevant to these proceedings.” Rosen turned to face Arthur. “Dr. Marshak himself introduced evidence from the animals on which his researchers experimented. These DVDs show the results of their experiments on a chimpanzee.”

The examiner stood in silence for a long moment, then walked slowly back to his desk. Before sitting, though, he added, “Both the chimpanzee and the woman who made these DVDs are dead.”

The jury stirred visibly and Arthur could hear a sigh, a murmur, sweep through the audience behind him. Then total silence, absolute stillness, as everyone waited for the TV to come to life.

Cassie's sallow, sorrowful face filled the big screen.

“My name is Catherine Ianetta. I am a principal research scientist at Grenford Laboratory. I'm making this video on my own, without the knowledge or assistance of anyone else.”

Cassie did not quite have the forlorn look that Arthur knew so well. She looked gaunt, true enough, and there were black rings under her eyes. But those eyes burned with an inner fury. Her face was set in the expression of an avenging angel.