Curds and Whey Box Set

by G M Eppers

  “Here it comes,” said Trooper Ferguson.

  “Excuse me,” said Ban, getting up to leave the room. “I can’t watch it again.” She let herself out into the hall. I wanted to follow her. I didn’t think I was going to enjoy watching it either. Even though I was only here on a peripheral basis, I still needed to stay informed of even the unpleasant details. So I gave Ban her privacy and braced myself.

  It happened very quickly. Someone wearing dark clothing entered the habitat from the rear. He was carrying a black canvas bag. Or it appeared to be a male, anyway. Most of the face was covered by a ski mask. Two dark eyes and a small patch of tan skin at the end of a sleeve could be seen. The man approached Clara, who ruffled her fur and curled her back and made a sound I never want to hear again. In seconds, the bag went over Clara, he cinched it shut, and he carried her out the way he’d come, with her kicking and struggling in the bag. The Trooper shut off the video and there was silence. “That’s it. He’s not seen on any of the other video locations, including the parking lot. Just the habitat.”

  “Were they disabled?” asked Billings.

  I’d made myself watch the video, but now I needed to get out of there. I knew someone would be able to fill me in later. Billings seemed to have a handle on things, so I slipped out the same door Ban had gone through. It closed behind me and I heard the automatic lock cycle, but she wasn’t far, just standing at a corner leaning heavily against the wall. “Is it over?” she asked with a shaky voice.

  “Yes,” I said quietly. “Ban, I’m so sorry. But I promise we’re going to find Clara and you can get on with your research.”

  “Oh, that won’t happen,” she said instantly.

  I moved a step closer. “What do you mean? We will find her.”

  She stood up straight, getting control of herself. “Oh, that I don’t doubt. And this …” she couldn’t think of a word to describe the man who had taken Clara, “this madman will get what he deserves. Does America have any guillotines?” It was a rhetorical question, just to illustrate how much hatred she harbored against this person. “But the research…I’ve already cried over that. The second he left the building with Clara, that project ended. The data is corrupted. We don’t know what they are feeding her, if anything, and we don’t know what her, you know, output is.”

  “But you have six months of data. Surely—“

  “No. Not good enough. Her part in this was supposed to go on for a couple of years, as we slowly introduced variables like different foods or possibly even some drugs to mitigate the addiction symptoms. Now,” she shook her head, “I have to start over. A break in the data puts the entire project into question. Oh, we could take shortcuts and gloss over things, but that’s not how I operate. My lab has strict rules. We didn’t even implant Clara until we’d done hundreds of successful scenarios on the computer model. I don’t put animals at risk unnecessarily and I won’t put people at risk by rushing the research.”

  “I have read that you get an A+ rating from PETA. I always wondered how you accomplished that. I always thought they were completely opposed.”

  She smiled a little. “Not the way I do it. Would you like to see?”

  I threw a thumb behind me. “I should probably get back,” I said.

  “Your son is handling things perfectly well from what I saw. It’s going to take time to analyze the video and the entry point. Unless they are prone to rushing…” she hinted.

  “No. My people are very thorough. If you didn’t know our reputation, you wouldn’t have called us.”

  “Guilty. You guys have a better record than our local cops and you saw how important the FBI considered this.”

  “You have to admit, mutilated women trumps a missing raccoon.”

  Ban looked like she wanted to argue that point, but decided against it.

  “I need to let the team know where I’ll be, though. Just a minute.” Even though the lab was just a short walk away, I pulled out the walkie talkie and pushed the button. It didn’t seem practical to have Ban and me backtrack to the lab. This was faster and more efficient. “Billings, come in.”

  “Mom! Where are you? I didn’t see you leave,” Billings’ staticky, metallic voice came back.

  I refrained from making a comment on his powers of observation. It was a large group and the video footage was horribly mesmerizing. “I’m in the hall with Ban. She’s going to show me the habitats. Sylvia back yet?”

  “Nope, she’s still on the terrace doing her Shawn Spencer thing. She’s either finding tons of information or coming up dry and won’t give up.”

  “If I’m not back when she gets in, give me a call on this thing.”

  I could hear a grin in Billings’ voice. “You telling me what to do again?”

  I saw Ban raise a quizzical eyebrow. “Take it as a suggestion, then. Helena out.” Ban waited, looking at me. “My son. He’s, um, training. I said I’d let him take the lead on this.” I didn’t want to mention my broken ribs. There was no reason Ban had to know about them.

  “Follow me,” she said, waggling a finger at me. “Let me show you how research is supposed to be done.” She led me around the corner and down another hallway, and around another corner where there was a single elevator, pretty much on the opposite side of the building from the elevator we’d used to come up. A nearby doorway was marked “Stairwell Access.” Ban pushed the call button.

  The door opened immediately and we went in. Like Joe, she moved to the back wall and faced it, showing me that the opposite doors would open. This elevator only had two buttons, labeled ‘2’ and ‘3.’ Ban pressed ‘2.’

  When the doors closed, I said, “Now that we have some privacy, do you mind if I ask you a personal question? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  “Go ahead. I’m a very open person.”

  “Have you ever considered changing your name? I mean, before you were famous, maybe? Banana is highly unusual.”

  She laughed a little, and it was good to see. “No, not really. There was a little ribbing growing up. My older sister Apple had it easier. There was even another Apple in her class. But my brother Kiwi,” she shook her head. “I had to talk him into leaving it alone.”

  “You mean Kiwi Harris, inventor of juice pop? He’s your brother?” Kiwi Harris became a singing sensation after creating an amazingly fluid, easy flowing musical style that was known as juice pop.

  “That’s him. Here we are.”

  When the doors opened, it was like we’d gone to Oz. The walls were a cheerful bright yellow, including the ceiling. Ban told me it reflected the light better so they could observe the animals, many of which were nocturnal, without too much excess lighting. There were no rooms per se, just one specialized plexiglass habitat after another. There was a gentle upward slope to the floor, and periodically along the walls an automatic air freshener emitted a burst of random flower scents to mask the odors that go along with animal husbandry. A central hallway meandered among the habitats, which began with the smallest creatures and moved generally upward through the animal kingdom.

  We first came to habitats set into the walls at eye level. Holes in the plexiglass allowed airflow, but these were tiny, because inside was a humming swarm of fruit flies smothering half an apple and an unpeeled orange. On the opposite side was a similar enclosure with three frogs and some kind of lizard. The frogs hopped about in a shallow pond with flat, green foliage, while the lizard ‘sunned’ himself on a rock under a hot bulb. If they only knew what was right across the path from them. “We have a large variety of animals. Uber is not the only research we do here, though it is my focus for the foreseeable future. Each animal is useful in particular ways, but no one, and I mean NO ONE, uses any of these animals without my express permission and only under my rules.”

  “I’ve always been curious about that. What rules?” I asked as one frog jumped over another clumsily.

  Ban bent down and opened a hidden panel underneath the frog aquarium, from whic
h she took a large three-ring binder. It was at least three inches thick and full enough that the covers didn’t close evenly. “These are my rules,” she said. “Before anyone can petition for an animal subject they have to read this and pass a comprehension test. Anyone caught bypassing any of these rules is banned for life. I rule this lab with an iron fist when it comes to these animals. They are my babies.” She choked up a little and had to stop talking.

  “I thought you were supposed to be objective and detached. You sound quite . . . involved.”

  Her eyes were bright with unspent tears as she shook her head. “That’s old school. I never believed in that. What’s the incentive to get it right if the animal means nothing to you?” She returned the binder to the cabinet and closed the door, which seemed to vanish completely. “We raise them from as close to birth as possible, we give them names, when we have time we come down here and socialize with them. Well, we don’t name the fruit flies, of course. But the frogs are Fred, Fin, and Floyd. Alliteration makes it easier. And the lizard is Larry. Clara was named for my mother, who passed away a few weeks before we got her.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. But doesn’t that make it awfully hard when…” I didn’t want to be blunt.

  She knew what I meant. “It should be hard, damn it. That’s the whole freaking point.” She was getting emotional, but she became aware of it and took a calming breath. At least it was passion for her work and not hysteria over the situation. “My philosophy is that we should feel the same about the animals here as the family of someone volunteering for a human trial. The animals aren’t volunteering, obviously, but that’s how I want it to feel. No project is ever approved that is inherently fatal. For example, endocrinology currently has one of our rabbits to study the feasibility of an artificial pancreas that has the potential of curing diabetes. They had used a rat but couldn’t miniaturize the equipment enough for implantation and did a study using an external apparatus. The results were good but an infection developed at the ostomy site and they lost the rat. That cut them out of live subjects for almost a year while they developed an implantable unit that showed several successful runs in computer modeling. We have the most extensive animal physiological database in the world linked to an A.I. algorithm that allows for aging, hypothetical illnesses, and even cross-breeding and multiple procedures. The odds of an animal dying in our experiments are about as low as they can get. And in the very rare instances where we have lost one, we grieve. All of us.” She blinked away more tears, no doubt remembering animals that they’d lost. “Come on. Let’s look at something more fun. I want to not think about why we’re here for a while.”

  I nodded. I wanted to give her a hug but I wasn’t sure if the contact would be welcome. She moved onward up the path where the walls widened a little further. Here, both sides contained aquariums that appeared to be 50 or 60 gallons each. In one, a few jellyfish floated lazily among tall standing seaweed and in the other zebrafish and octopus lived in separate side-by-side tanks.

  The walls widened a little more and the floor slanted upward. There was an elaborate system of transparent plastic tubing in different colors that seemed to twist this way and that. There was neon pink, lavendar, green and red. Several enclosures were scattered about that contained litter, food, exercise wheels, and toys. Small animals skittered through the tubes, some of them were curled up sleeping, though their more active cousins didn’t seem to notice, climbing right over them as if they were merely bumps in the tunnels. I saw mice, gerbils, hamsters and rats. Our pathway meandered among the tubing, with some of the tubing overhead and some below waist level. “This is our small animal habitat. The tubes are color coded to the animals. It looks like they intermingle, but they don’t. Hot pink for hamsters, mauve for mice, green for gerbils, and red for rats. We control how many of each we have, of course. They are all tagged for identification and neutered except for our breeding pairs, which are kept elsewhere. This is the only category of animals we breed, in fact, because they are used for so many different projects.”

  I thought of the STD in my arm. “Those identification tags. Can they be used to track them?”

  “Yes. Unfortunately, we had to remove Clara’s tag. It was interfering with the frequency for the colonic pacemaker. We were…are in the process of adjusting the electronics to work together, but it wasn’t a priority. A human subject wouldn’t have that problem and we were trying to keep project parameters with that in mind. There was also avoiding interference in the microwave range, modems, cell phones, even cardiac pacemakers. We decided to deal with frequency adjustments after we had the mechanics working correctly. Another aspect originally planned for next year.” Her lips rolled together and then pursed. We watched the small animals for a few more minutes while she collected herself yet again.

  I could have stayed in that room and watched them for hours. They were all so adorable. I saw a hamster pull yards of cotton batting out of his cheek pouches and stuff it into a corner. And there were a couple of mice that apparently had not taken the neutering seriously. I reminded myself of Ban’s rule that they were never used for anything that would kill them outright, and I felt thankful for that. “This is amazing,” I told Ban.

  “You haven’t seen anything. Come on.” She led me to the far side of the tubing maze where the walls parted even further and the slope continued. I looked behind me until I was well into the next area. The next habitats were floor level. On one side half a dozen rabbits hopped among an actual garden of carrots and lettuce and cabbage, and an open hutch stood in the far corner. The plexiglass was only waist high – her waist, not mine. On the other side were guinea pigs shuffling through a mock-up of a forest floor, complete with a large tree trunk cut off far above their heads. This was hollowed out to create a shelter, and a thick horizontal tree branch was there for them to hide behind. Both had a small pond of clean water, not mounted bottles.

  “Didn’t you say you only bred the small rodents?” I asked, remembering the reputation of rabbits.

  “These rabbits are all male. We’ll bring in a breeding female when we need to, but then she goes back to the breeder after the babies are weaned. We sex them and keep the males. Any time you see multiple of a species, they are all the same sex, though sometimes they are male and sometimes female.”

  “And, wow, guinea pigs are really, um, guinea pigs.” I was reluctant to bring up the subject of Clara, since Ban had said she was trying to keep her mind off of it for a bit, but I was curious. “So why did you choose a raccoon for the colonic pacemaker? That’s not a species you usually see in a lab, is it?”

  “Very astute, Ms. Montana. We got Clara special for the CP project. It turns out most of these animals are actually lactose intolerant. We weren’t ready for anything bigger yet, so after a little Googling, we decided on a raccoon.” Her face fell at the end, and I was sorry I’d bought it up. It was difficult to avoid the subject entirely and still get answers to help us with the search.

  She continued to lead me along the pathway through more habitats. There was a fake barnyard with several chickens, and another habitat with a group of quail inside. A small jungle housed sparrows and other small birds which Ban pointed out to me. With her practiced eye, she spotted them easily, but I had more trouble picking them out among the colorful foliage. For each animal, she told me their names, but I quickly forgot. There were so many. But she knew them all. After the birds, the pathway turned gently to the right, then around to go back the way we’d come, but higher. The animals grew slowly larger. And noisier. A group of Rhesus monkeys swung about, screeching at the sight of their keeper. Ban put her hand to the plexiglass and one of the monkeys came to mirror her. Those were followed by small pigs, some in a large mud puddle, others with their snouts in a trough of food, grunting happily. I remembered hearing that pigs were smarter than dogs and it occurred to me that her menagerie had neither dogs nor cats. I asked her why. “Those are such common pets, I just couldn’t include them. Even with my rules,
people would have trouble with the idea. In fact, I have trouble with it myself. Dogs and cats are too social. There’s no habitat I could design that I’d be comfortable putting them into. So it’s in the rule book. No cats. No dogs.”

  My attention was suddenly distracted by a baaing sound. In the next enclosure, which took up a very large space, two small goats bounded around in their rocky habitat. The rocks led up above our heads where a transparent bridge allowed them access to both sides of the room. Seeing Banana, they jumped as if for joy and bounced about in excitement. “This is Billy,” she said, pointing to one, “and the other is Willy.”

  “Seriously?” I asked. “Billy the goat? Not George or Gomer?”

  She shrugged. “We’ve had a lot of animals. Creativity sometimes escapes us. Besides, it’s easy to remember. And then, of course, Willy just rhymes.”

  “They are very young.”

  “Yes, too young. They won’t be eligible for selection until they are fully grown. I never use juvenile animals unless I absolutely have to. Actually, Clara’s disappearance just bought Billy at least three more years of freedom. He’s slated for Phase Three, with Phase One and Two being the computer and Clara respectively.” She went to a nearby dispenser and retrieved a handful of pellets. “You can feed them, if you like. Just put your hand through one of the larger holes.”

  With a fistful of pellets, I inserted a hand through one of the holes she indicated and Billy rushed right up, sniffing and nosing at my hand. I opened it and let him gobble up the pellets. Several fell on the floor and when he’d left nothing in my hand but goat saliva he sucked up those like a Hoover. By that time, Willy had been attracted by the activity, so I had to give him a handful of pellets as well. When I pulled my hand out, Banana had a sanitary wipe ready for me. I was already emotionally attached to every animal I’d seen. “What about Clara’s habitat?”