“Haven’t heard that. She’s just another genius type that Ryan took an interest in. Sure she’s odd—they all are. Can’t make people understand what she wants half the time…”
“Ahh,” Dr. Suchong said, bustling in, his glasses catching the shine in the overhead lamp. His thin Asian face had a faint gloss of sweat. “Here is soon-mother!”
Brigid Tenenbaum came drifting in after him—a very young woman, superficially pretty but with bruised- looking eyes, a shapeless bob of brown hair, a distant expression on her face. Both of them wore lab coats, Tenenbaum with the skirt of a shabby brown dress showing under her white coat.
“Third trimester, yes?” she said. “Interesting.” Her accent, mixing German and Eastern European, was almost as pronounced as Suchong’s. “Well fed, yes? Circulation—good.”
Elaine scowled—Bill could see she felt like a lab animal. Tenenbaum hadn’t even said hello. But it was true—she wasn’t what you’d call a physician. She just happened to be available today. It was all a bit slapdash for Bill’s liking.
“Yes she is, what is expression, ‘well along,’” Suchong remarked, prodding at Elaine’s belly. “Yes… I can feel the… offspring moving. Almost ready for emergence. The creature wishes to come out and feed.”
Tenenbaum had turned to a nearby table of instruments, moving them minutely, squaring them up so that they were at precise right angles and equidistant.
“Mrs. McDonagh,” Suchong said, examining Elaine’s thighs, “does fetus make the reflex movements with extremities?”
Elaine rolled her eyes. “Do you mean does the little one kick, Doctor? The child does; yes.”
“Excellent sign. Long since I have examined a fetus. Difficult to obtain them in healthy state.”
He stepped around to her feet, reached out, and pulled her legs apart with a sharp, decisive movement of his hands like a butcher preparing to gut a chicken. Elaine made a squeak of surprise.
“’Ere, Doc, easy on my girl!” Bill said.
Suchong was lifting up the hospital gown—and he and Tenenbaum were both leaning over the exam table, frowning at Elaine’s private parts. Suchong grunted, pointing. “Interesting distention, there and there—you see? Part of peculiar metamorphosis of pregnant woman.”
“Yes, I see,” Tenenbaum said. “I have dissected many in this stage…”
“Enviable. Perhaps you have specimens?”
“No, no, all my specimens were taken when the Americans came, but—”
“Bill!” Elaine squeaked, snapping her legs shut and pressing the gown down over her crotch.
“Right! See any problems, you two?” Bill said.
“Hm?” Suchong looked at him in puzzlement. “Ah! No, no, she will do very well. It would be interesting to probe a bit—”
“Won’t be necessary, Doc! We’re off.” Bill helped Elaine down from the table. “Come on, love. Back in here, there’s your clothes, time to get dressed.”
He heard Andrew Ryan’s voice from the lab next door. “There you are, Dr. Suchong—is all well?”
Suchong said, “Yes, yes, nothing abnormal. I am glad you are here, Mr. Ryan—please to look at experiment thirty-seven…”
Bill stepped to the door of the lab, with half a mind to tell Ryan how coarsely Elaine had been treated. But he stopped, staring.
Andrew Ryan, Suchong, Gil Alexander—a researcher who worked for Ryan most of the time—and Brigid Tenenbaum were gathered around a big motley figure in a sort of glass coffin filled with water; the case was hooked up to a tangle of translucent tubes. Bill had only met Gil Alexander a few times—a serious-eyed man with a thick mustache. He was quite professorial and intelligent, but, it seemed to Bill, cold-blooded.
Stretched out in the glass coffin was a man whose body seemed a patchwork of flesh and, in some places, steel. Corpse-pale, the man lay motionless in the bubbling water—Bill thought it could have been a drowning victim.
Gil Alexander was adjusting a tube sinking into the supine man’s left leg. “A little inflammation. Not bad. We have good induction…”
Bill found himself staring at the exposed left leg—it looked as if flesh and metal were fused at the thigh. It was all puckered, and Bill thought he saw the skin quiver, as if reacting to a perfusion of bubbles. He wanted to speak up or leave, but there was something that held him, something weirdly fascinating in the scene…
“You see, Mr. Ryan,” Tenenbaum said, “fusion is incomplete, but I feel if we were to perhaps try viral gene transfer, we make body more capable of unifying with…”
“Bah!” Suchong said, glancing at her in annoyance. “You always think genes the way. Viral transfer of genes is entirely theoretical! Not needed! Body can be conditioned so that cells bond with metal! We have no way to control genes without breeding program!”
“Ach—forgive me, Doctor,” she said, her voice faintly contemptuous, as she needlessly straightened tools on a nearby table, “but you are mistaken. The way will reveal itself to us. When we consider Gregor Mendel…”
Alexander seemed amused by the simmering between Suchong and Tenenbaum. He smiled, Bill noticed, but said nothing.
Ryan made a dismissive gesture as he frowned over the figure in the transparent, liquid-filled coffin. “I’m more interested in the practical uses—I need a process that makes our men capable of longer hours out there —”
“Cor!” Bill burst out—as the legs of the supine man contracted, an armored knee striking the top of the glass case, cracking it. Water spurted up through the crack…
Ryan and Suchong turned to stare at Bill—Tenenbaum and Alexander seemed more caught up in changing the flow of a chemical through the tubes that communicated with the glass coffin.
“Bill,” Ryan said softly, coming over to him. “I thought you’d gone.”
“Just leaving,” Bill said. “That fellow in there all right?”
“Him? Oh he’s a volunteer—helping us with an experiment.” Ryan took his arm. “Come—let’s leave them to it, shall we? How’s Elaine…?”
And he escorted Bill from the lab.
Bing Crosby crooned “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” from flower-shaped speakers, and Bill hummed along as he escorted Elaine along the upper atrium. There was just time for a stroll before the musical at Fleet Hall. Bill had brought Elaine for a Christmas-season outing. Their friend Mariska Lutz was looking after the baby.
“It’s funny about this place,” Elaine murmured, as she and Bill strolled along the balcony walk of Poseidon Plaza, in the neon-bright upper atrium of Fort Frolic. Elaine wore a shiny pink satin dress and Bill wore a white linen suit. Other couples hurried by, dressed up, hair coiffed, faces glowing with laughter.
“What’s funny about it, love?” he asked. They were passing the entrance to the Sir Prize Games of Chance Casino, with its big knight’s helmet projecting between
“Well, I mean—I thought it’d be really different from the surface world. It is, of course, in some ways— but—” She glanced through the windows at the people working the slot machines. “The idea was to bring just the best of the world down with us—but maybe we brought some of the worst too.”
Bill chuckled, tucking her hand under his arm. “That happens when a place is settled with
They went down the stairs to the lower atrium, past Robertson’s Tobaccoria, and she sighed as they
