"Wilhelm, Kate - The Planners(1)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

THE PLANNERS
Kate Wilhelm
Rae stopped before the one-way glass, stooped and peered at the gibbon infant in the cage. Darin watched her bitterly. She straightened after a moment, hands in smock pockets' face innocent of any expression what-so-goddam-ever, and con-tinued to saunter toward him through the aisle between the cages.
"You still think it is cruel, and worthless?"
"Do you. Dr. Darin?"
"Why do you always do that? Answer my question with
one of your own?"
"Does it infuriate you?"
He shrugged and turned away. His lab coat was on the
chair where he had tossed it. He pulled it on over his sky-blue sport shirt.
"How is the DriscoU boy?" Rae asked.
He stiffened, then relaxed again. Still not facing her, he
said, "Same as last week, last year. Same as he'll be until he dies."
The hall door opened and a very large, very homely face appeared. Stu Evers looked past Darin, down the aisle. "You alone? I thought I heard voices."
"Talking to myself," Darin said. "The committee ready yet?"
"Just about. Dr. Jacobsen is stalling with his nose-throat spray routine, as usual." He hesitated a moment, glancing again down the row of cages, then at Darin. "Wouldn't you think a guy allergic to monkeys would find some other line of research?"
Darin looked, but Rae was gone. What had it been this time: the DriscoU boy, the .trend of the project itself? He wondered if she had a life of her own when she was away. "I'll be out at the compound," he said. He passed-Stu in the doorway and headed toward the livid greenery of Florida forests.
The cacophony hit him at the door. There were four hun-dred sixty-nine monkeys on the thirty-six acres of wooded ground the research department was using. Each monkey was screeching, howling, singing, cursing, or otherwise making its presence known. Darin grunted and headed toward the com-pound. The Happiest Monkeys in the World, a newspaper article had called them. Singing Monkeys, a subhead an-nounced. MONKEYS GIVEN SMARTNESS PILLS, the most enter-prising paper had proclaimed. Cruelty Charged, added another in subdued, sorrowful tones.
The compound was three acres of carefully planned and maintained wilderness, completely enclosed with thirty-foot-high, smooth plastic walls. A transparent dome covered the area. There were one-way windows at intervals along the wall. A small group stood before one of the windows: the committee.
Darin stopped and gazed over the interior of the compound through one of the windows. He saw Heloise and Skitter contentedly picking nonexistent fleas from one another. Adam was munching on a banana; Homer was lying on his back idly touching his feet to his nose. A couple of the chimps were at the water fountain, not drinking, merely pressing the pedal and watching the fountain, now and then immersing a head or hand in the bowl of cold water. Dr. Jacobsen appeared and Darin joined the group.
"Good morning, Mrs. Bellbottom," Darin said politely. "Did you know your skirt has fallen off?" He turned from her to Major Dormouse. "Ah, Major, and how many of the enemy have you swatted to death today with your pretty little yellow rag?" He smiled pleasantly at a pfmply young man with a camera. "Major, you've brought a professional peeping torn. More stories in the paper, with pictures this time?" The pimply young man shifted his position, fidgeted with the camera. The major was fiery; Mrs. Bellbottom was on her knees peering under a bush, looking for her skirt. Darin blinked. None of them had on any clothing. He turned toward the window. The chimps were drawing up a table, laden with tea things, silver, china, tiny finger sandwiches. The chimps nporo all ilfpnrincr flowp.rod shirts and dresses. Hortense had on a ridiculous flop-brimmed sun hat of pale green straw. Darm leaned against the fence to control his laughter.
"Soluble ribonucleic acid," Dr. Johnson was saying when Darin recovered, "sRNA for short. So from the gross begin-nings when entire worms were trained and fed to other worms that seemed to benefit from the original training, we have come to these more refined methods. We now extract the sRNA molecule from the trained animals and feed it, the sRNA molecules in solution, to untrained specimens and observe the results."
The young man was snapping pictures as Jacobsen talked. Mrs. Whoosis was making notes, her mouth a lipless line, the sun hat tinging her skin with green. The sun on her patterned red and yellow dress made it appear to jiggle, giving her fleshy hips a constant rippling motion. Darin watched, fasci-nated. She was about sixty.
". . . my colleague, who proposed this line of experimenta-tion, Dr. Darin," Jacobsen said finally, and Darin bowed slightly. He wondered what Jacobsen had said about him, decided to wait for any questions before he said anything.
"Dr. Darin, is it true that you also extract this substance from people?"
"Every time you scratch yourself, you lose this substance," Darin said. "Every time you lose a drop of blood, you lose it. It is in every cell of your body. Sometimes we take a sample of human blood for study, yes."
"And inject it into those animals?"
"Sometimes we do that," Darin said. He waited for the
next, the inevitable question, wondering how he would answer it. Jacobsen had briefed them on what to answer, but he couldn't remember what Jacobsen had said. The question didn't come. Mrs. Whoosis stepped forward, staring at the window.
Darin turned his attention to her; she averted her eyes, quickly fixed her stare again on the chimps in the compound. "Yes, Mrs. uh . . . Madam?" Darin prompted her. She didn't look at him.
"Why? What is the purpose of all this?" she asked. Her voice sounded strangled. The pimpled young man was inching toward the next window.
"Well," Darin said, "our theory is simple. We believe that learning ability can be improved drastically in nearly every species. The learning curve is the normal, expected bell-shaped curve, with a few at one end who have the ability to learn quite rapidly, with the majority in the center vho learn at an average rate, and a few at the other end who learn quite slowly. With our experiments we are able to increase the ability of those in the broad middle, as well as those in the deficient end of the curve so that their learning abilities match those of the fastest learners of any given group. . . ."
No one was listening to him. It didn't matter. They would be given the press release he had prepared for them, written in simple language, no polysyllables, no complicated sentences. They were all watching the chimps through the windows. He said, "So we gabbled the gazooka three times wretchedly until the spirit of camping fired the girls." One of the com-mittee members glanced at him. "Whether intravenously or orally, it seems to be equally effective," Darin said, and the perspiring man turned again to the window. "Injections every morning . . . rejections, planned diet, planned parenthood, planned plans planning plans." Jacobsen eyed him suspi-ciously. Darin stopped talking and lighted a cigarette. The woman with the unquiet hips turned from the window, her face very red. "I've seen enough," she said. "This sun is too hot out here. May we see the inside laboratories now?"
Darin turned them over to Stu Evers inside the building. He walked back slowly to the compound. There was a grin on his lips when he spotted Adam on the far side, swaggering triumphantly, paying no attention to Hortense who was rock-ing back and forth on her haunches, looking very dazed. Darin saluted Adam, then, whistling, returned to his office.
Mrs. DriscoU was due with Sonny at I P.M.
Sonny Driscoll was fourteen. He was five feet nine inches, weighed one hundred sixty pounds. His male nurse was six feet two inches and weighed two hundred twenty-seven pounds. Sonny had broken his mother's arm when be was twelve; he had broken his father's arm and leg when he was thirteen. So far the male nurse was intact. Every morning Mrs. Driscoll lovingly washed and dressed her baby, fed him, walked him in the yard, spoke happily to him of plans for the coming months, or sang nursery songs to him. He never seemed to see her. The male nurse, Johnny, was never farther than three feet from his charge when he was on duty.
Mrs. Driscoll refused to think of the day when she would have to turn her child over to an institution. Instead she placed her faith and hope in Darin.
They arrived at two-fifteen, earlier than he had expected them, later than they had promised to be there.
"The kid kept taking his clothes off," Johnny said morosely. The kid was taking them off again in the office. Johnny started toward him, but Darin shook his head. It didn't mat-ter. Darin got his blood sample from one of the muscular arms, shot the injection into the other one. Sonny didn't seem to notice what he was doing. He never seemed to notice. Sonny refused to be tested. They got him to the chair and table, but he sat staring at nothing, ignoring the blocks, the bright balls, the crayons, the candy. Nothing Darin did or said had any discernible effect. Finally the time was up. Mrs. Driscoll and Johnny got him dressed once more and left.
Mrs. Driscoll thanked Darin for helping her boy.
Stu and Darin held class from four to five daily. Kelly O'Grady had the monkeys tagged and ready for them when they showed up at the schoolroom. Kelly was very tall, very slender and red-haired. Stu shivered if she accidentally brushed him in passing; Darin hoped one day Stu would pull an Adam on her. She sat primly on her high stool with her notebook on her knee, unaware of the change that came over Stu during school hours, or, if aware, uncaring. Darin won-dered if she was really a Barbie doll fully programmed to perform laboratory duties, and nothing else.
He thought of the Finishing School for Barbies where long-legged, high-breasted, stomachless girls went to get shaved clean, get their toenails painted pink, their nipples removed, and all body openings sewn shut, except for their mouths, which curved in perpetual smiles and led nowhere.
The class consisted of six black spider-monkeys who had not been fed yet. They had to do six tasks in order: I ) pull a rope; 2) cross the cage and get a stick that was released by the rope; 3) pull the rope again; 4) get the second stick that would fit into the first; 5) join the sticks together; 6) using the lengthened stick, pull a bunch of bananas close enough to the bars of the cage to reach them and take them inside where they could eat them. At five the monkeys were returned to Kelly, who wheeled them away one by one back to the stockroom. None of them had performed all the tasks, al-though two had gone through part of them before the time ran out.
Waiting for the last of the monkeys to be taken back to its quarters, Stu asked, "What did you do to that bunch of idiots this morning? By the time I got them, they all acted dazed."
Darin told him about Adam's performance; they were both laughing when Kelly returned. Stu's laugh turned to some-thing that sounded almost like a sob. Darin wanted to tell him about the school Kelly must have attended, thought better of it, and walked away instead.
His drive home was through the darkening forests of interior Florida for sixteen miles on a narrow straight road.
"Of course, I don't mind living here," Lea had said once, nine years ago when the Florida appointment had come through. And she didn't mind. The house was air-conditioned; the family car, Lea's car, was air-conditioned; the back yard had a swimming pool big enough to float the Queen Mary. A frightened, large-eyed Florida girl did the housework, and Lea gained weight and painted sporadically, wrote sporadi-callypoetryand entertained faculty wives regularly. Darin suspected that sometimes she entertained faculty husbands also.
"Oh, Professor Dimples, one hour this evening? That will be fifteen dollars, you know." He jotted down the appoint-ment and turned to Lea. "Just two more today and you will have your car payment. How about that!" She twined slinky arms about his neck, pressing tight high breasts hard against him. She had to tilt her head slightly for his kiss. "Then your turn, darling. For free." He tried to kiss her; something stopped his tongue, and he realized that the smile was on the outside only, that the opening didn't really exist at all.
He parked next to an MG, not Lea's, and went inside the house where the martinis were always snapping cold.