The Frankenstein Factory

by Edward D. Hoch

  “So he can sneak up to your bedroom? Fat chance!”

  “Oh, come off it, Tony! You’re getting to be as bad as he is!”

  “Well, that’s what I came out here for,” Earl explained. “To see whether you or I relieved him at nine.”

  “You take it, if you don’t mind, Jazine.”

  “Sure.”

  He left them on the beach, drinking in the sunset like a pair of high school sweethearts, and went down to tell Freddy. He found him bent over the brain-scan machine, studying wavering white lines.

  “Any action from Frank?”

  “What? Oh, hello, Jazine. No, nothing new.”

  “You try some new scans?”

  “Yeah.” He switched off the machine. “What’s up?”

  “I’ll be down at nine to take over.”

  Freddy glanced at his digital watch. “Oh—look, I think I’ll take on an extra shift. Want to do some more brain tracings. Might as well do them while he’s still sleeping. Come down after midnight, will you?”

  “Sure. I’ll catch a doze in the meantime.”

  He had a beer in the kitchen, under Hilda’s silent presence, then told them in the living room to have someone wake him around midnight. He spent an hour in the room playing back some of the tapes he’d secretly made, using an earplug to listen, and then wrote up some notes for Crader, back in New York. Finally he went to bed, hoping for two or three hours’ sleep before guard duty.

  He dropped off to sleep almost at once in the darkened upstairs room, and found himself in a weird dream-world inhabited by Frankenstein monsters and lovely young women who all looked like Vera Morgan.

  It seemed he’d been there only a short time when he felt someone shaking his shoulder, pulling him back from sleep. “Wake up, Jazine! Wake up!” It was Dr. Armstrong’s voice.

  “Wake up, Jazine! There’s been another one! Freddy O’Connor’s dead!”

  SIX

  THE OTHERS WERE ALREADY downstairs, clustered around with varying degrees of shock written on their faces. Tony Cooper had his arm protectively around Vera’s shoulders, as if to ward off any blow that might be aimed in her direction, and Lawrence Hobbes simply stood, unbelieving, staring down at Freddy’s, body.

  “Skull crushed,” Armstrong reported bleakly from Earl’s side. “Hit from behind with the screw top from one of the freezing cylinders. Damn thing weighs about ten pounds.”

  “An impulse weapon,” Whalen observed.

  “Or else the killer wanted us to think so,” Tony Cooper said. “Now there’ll certainly be no dispute about calling in the authorities. If we wait any longer we’ll all be slaughtered in our beds.”

  “But what about him?” Hobbes asked, gesturing toward the operating table. “Are we to ruin all our work?”

  “Our work is ruined already if Frank’s the one who’s been killing all these people,” Cooper said. “I didn’t sign on to your team to create a monster.”

  “It couldn’t be Frank!” Hobbes insisted, calling him that for the first time.

  “No? Look at the position of the body. He was hit while his back was to the operating table.”

  “But what will we do?” Vera asked. “If it’s not even safe to stand guard over him, what—”

  Hobbes reached beneath the operating table to pull out the heavy straps they used to secure the patient during certain types of surgery with local anesthetic. “We’ll start by strapping him down. I should have done that sooner.”

  “Freddy was working on something,” Earl said. “He didn’t want to be relieved until he finished a new series of brain scans.”

  Hobbes finished buckling the straps around the patient’s arms and legs. “That should hold him. I hate to do it, but if there’s any suspicion that he’s having conscious periods of murderous activity we can’t take the risk. Now what were you saying about Freddy?”

  “I think he found something new in Frank’s brain patterns.”

  “Can any of you read those tracings?”

  Whalen and Cooper both shook their heads, but Vera stepped forward, avoiding Freddy’s sprawled and bloody corpse. “He showed me once, when I worked with him. But I don’t know. … This might indicate an irregularity—either a lack of oxygen or protein that could cause cell collapse.”

  “Could you take it and study it further?” Hobbes urged.

  “I suppose I could try. But I really don’t know much about it.” She ripped the long sheet of tracings out of the machine and folded it under her arm.

  “What about his body?” Whalen asked.

  “I have some spare freezing capsules,” Hobbes replied. “We can store him in one of those.”

  “Do you have enough spares for all of us? We may need them.”

  “Look,” Tony Cooper said, “the one thing this proves is that we need the authorities in here right away. We can’t delay any longer.”

  Vera took out a cigarette, glanced in Earl’s direction, and said, “The authorities are already here.”

  “What?”

  “Earl Jazine is some sort of government agent.”

  After that there was no point in denying it. Earl asked them all to go back upstairs, after they’d placed Freddy’s body in one of the metal capsules. Even with Hilda hovering in the doorway the room seemed oddly empty, and he had to count noses to be certain that all seven of them were present. Vera and Cooper, Hobbes, Hilda, Armstrong, Whalen, himself. Seven, instead of the original ten.

  Earl poured himself a generous shot of scotch and passed the decanter to the others. Then he started talking. “I’m sorry to have deceived you all—especially you, Dr. Hobbes. I am an agent of the Computer Investigation. Bureau with headquarters at the World Trade Center in New York. Our director, Carl Crader, is personally responsible to the President of the United States.”

  “Is your name really Jazine?” Tony asked.

  “Yes. And I know a great deal about medical photography and documentation too, thanks to a crash course back East. You see, our bureau investigates all varieties of computer and technological crime. I’m fairly new with CIB, but I can tell you they’ve been concerned for some time about the possibility of fraud in the various cryonics societies operating around the country. The freezing of bodies for reanimation in another era can be a very profitable business, especially when the owners of the business will be long dead before anyone can cry fraud.”

  “I resent your tone, Jazine,” Lawrence Hobbes thundered, getting to his feet. “I’ve played fair with you, talked frankly about matters that should have been confidential. Now I find you were sent here to spy on me.”

  “Investigate, not spy on,” Earl corrected.

  “He’s been recording our conversations,” Vera said. “I caught him at it.”

  “You should have told me sooner.”

  Earl couldn’t understand the reason for Vera’s sudden sharp turning against him. Did it have something to do with Freddy’s death? Did she somehow hold him responsible? “It’s only a routine investigation,” he assured them. “We were looking for a way into one of these groups when we got wind of your urgent request for a medical photographer. I took the regular man’s place, that’s all. We were especially interested in ICI because the range of your activities includes certain cryogenic research.”

  “Am I to be penalized for my research now?”

  “Certainly not. But the funding of it raises some questions. Your annual financial report filed with Washington doesn’t answer all of them.”

  “As you know, Miss Emily Watson was most generous to the institute. She helped tide us over a number of slow periods.”

  “And now she’s conveniently vanished.”

  “Her disappearance will benefit me in no way. Anything left us in her will could be tied up for years if the body isn’t found.”

  “It’ll be found,” Tony Cooper assured them. “We only have to figure out where the killer hid it.”

  “He didn’t hide Freddy,” Vera pointed out.

  “
Probably didn’t have time.”

  “All right,” Earl said. “As long as you all know who I am, I’ll go along with the suggestion of Miss Morgan that I act as the legal authority here, until the proper local authorities are able to be summoned.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Tony remarked, just a bit sarcastically. “I don’t know what we’d do without someone official to keep track of the bodies.”

  “I should point out that you and Vera probably had the strongest motives for wanting Freddy dead.”

  “What!”

  “You heard me. She was even heard to remark that she’d take care of him after the operation was completed—or words to that effect.”

  “I didn’t mean I’d kill him!”

  “Probably not—but I have no way of knowing for sure.” He was going to make her sorry she’d revealed his identity.

  “All this isn’t getting us anywhere,” Hobbes argued. “Even if Vera had a reason to kill Freddy—and all of us who’ve been within earshot of him this week will grant the possibility of a motive—that still doesn’t give her a reason for killing Emily or MacKenzie.”

  “No,” Earl granted.

  “Then let’s stop looking for suspects and decide what we should do to stay alive.”

  “One thing I want for sure. There’s no need to have someone down here watching Frank, but I do think it’s important that we watch each other—sort of a buddy system.”

  “My God!” Vera chuckled. “Just like at girls’ camp!”

  “You two ladies should stay together—”

  “Wait a minute!” Tony said. “Vera stays with me. I’ll take care of her!”

  “All right,” Earl agreed reluctantly. “Then Hobbes and Hilda and Armstrong will have to stay in a group. And I’ll stay with Whalen.”

  Lawrence Hobbes cleared his throat. “Might I remind you that it’s only a little after midnight. Are we supposed to sleep together?”

  He saw at once that the plan had its defects. Even sleeping together guaranteed nothing, unless they went to the bizarre limit of tying big toes together. “All right—we’ll take our chances at night and continue with a rotating guard. But stay together in these groupings during the day. And in the morning we’ll have a try at getting word to the mainland.”

  All right, Hobbes agreed. “But what about our patient?”

  “It’s more than forty-eight hours since the operation was completed. I think we have to consider the possibility that he’ll never be fully conscious.”

  “But O’Connor said the brain—”

  “Freddy may have lied in the beginning, rather than admit to failure in the operation. I think he was just discovering the truth about Frank’s brain at the moment of his death. By the way, who found the body?”

  “I did,” Armstrong said. “I came down to check the patient again before I retired for the night.”

  “Was there any evidence he’d been off the table?”

  “None.”

  “All right,” Earl decided. “There’s nothing we can do till morning so we might as well get some sleep.”

  But as they broke up and headed for their rooms Lawrence Hobbes indicated that he wanted to have a further, private conversation. “I’m as much concerned with your presence here as I am with the killings, Jazine. And I think I’m entitled to an explanation. Are you planning to arrest me?”

  “Certainly not! I’m only conducting a preliminary investigation.”

  “Was Vera correct about your taping our conversations?”

  “Some of them, yes.”

  “Do I need to remind you that Horseshoe Island is Mexican territory? It is in no way governed by the laws of the United States.”

  “I’m quite aware of that. But the International Cryogenics Institute is chartered in the state of California. Most of your clients have been Americans. This island might be foreign territory, but the financial dealings of an American corporation are very much our business.”

  “We’ve never had a complaint in thirty years.”

  “As I pointed out, the ones most likely to complain are all dead. Suppose you tell me a little of the institute’s history, and especially your involvement with Emily Watson.”

  “Miss Watson was a fairly recent convert to our institute. As you must know, we started in the mid-1970s, at a time of great economic unrest in the United States. I think many people—especially those who could afford our rates—longed for a chance to return to life at some future, hopefully better, time. In a very real sense, cryonics societies offered the best chance of reincarnation. I went a step further, promising not mere storage of frozen bodies but a whole program of research aimed toward reanimation at the earliest possible time.”

  “Did you conduct such research?”

  “Certainly! What you’ve seen here these last few days is a direct result of it!”

  “But none of these people—except possibly Hilda—is your permanent employee. MacKenzie and Armstrong and Whalen have only been here a few months, and the other four of us just arrived before the operation. What have you been doing during the last thirty years?”

  “You can have a full written report on that anytime you want it. We’ve, worked very closely with research laboratories and medical schools in a half-dozen countries.”

  “And the money for your various outlays? This island, the house, the operating room?”

  “I told you that Miss Watson had been most generous in recent years. She donated a great deal of money in her quest for eternal life. Is she to be blamed for that?”

  “We’ve found very little record of her life before she turned up here. An address in San Francisco last year, some travels abroad the year before.”

  “She is—or was—a woman who kept very much to herself.”

  “Obviously. Any idea what happened to her?”

  “The most likely theory is that she was murdered, I suppose.”

  “Why was the body hidden or at least made to vanish?”

  Hobbes tightened his lips to a thin white line before answering. Then he said, “If someone hated her a great deal, if someone wanted to make certain her body could never be frozen and then reanimated at some future time, they would have hidden it—buried it or thrown it into the sea.”

  “That would have to be someone who believed in the ultimate success of your program here.”

  “But we all believe, don’t we? Would any of those doctors be here if they didn’t believe?”

  “I suppose not.”

  Hobbes turned away. “It’s time I went to bed. We can talk more of this in the morning. Maybe by that time you’ll know what you’re looking for.”

  Earl Jazine went on up to his own room after that, pausing only long enough to drink a glass of cold milk in the kitchen. It had been a long day, with two dead bodies to show for it.

  He wondered what tomorrow would bring.

  As it turned out, he didn’t have to wait for tomorrow.

  When he opened the door to his room Vera Morgan was waiting for him. “This is getting to be a pleasant habit,” he said. “Out of matches again?”

  “I wanted to talk.”

  “Is it safe, without Cooper to watch over you?”

  “I don’t need any remarks like that, thank you. I came to talk about Freddy’s death.”

  “Talk away.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and crossed her legs. She was still wearing the jeans and stretch top that had been her costume all day, and it gave her the look of a young girl from the 1970s. Earl had always found it an attractive period for female dress. His early years of puberty had been spent at the library’s microfilm readers, poring over magazines and newspapers from the era of the jeans and miniskirt. He’d been born toward the end of the seventies, just too late to appreciate the styles in person, but there were still women like Vera who preferred them to the more currently fashionable bodysuits.

  “How much do you know about the three of us?” she asked.

  “Hobbes told me a little. You
dropped Freddy for Tony Cooper, and the two of them almost fought a duel over you.”

  “Tony’s always wanting to fight duels. He was born two hundred years too late. But I wanted to make a few things clear. When I said I’d take care of Freddy I didn’t mean I’d kill him.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “There were certain things I knew about him—embarrassing things he wouldn’t want made public, especially not by me.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “It doesn’t matter now. He’s dead.”

  “If you didn’t kill him, what about Tony?”

  “Of course not!”

  “He would have killed him in a duel,” Earl pointed out.

  “But he wouldn’t have bashed in his skull from behind. Tony’s not that sort.”

  “Do you think it was really Frank, up off his table just long enough to split a skull?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  She’d taken out a cigarette and was in the process of lighting it when he came over with a table coil, holding it till the tip of her cigarette glowed. With his face very close to hers he said, “I’d risk making a pass if I weren’t afraid of having to duel Tony. After all, twice in a man’s bedroom almost entitles him, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe.” She put down the cigarette.

  He pushed her down gently onto the bed, running his hands over the firm, fabric-covered breasts. Her eyes closed to the merest slits and she smiled up at him.

  As his hand slipped beneath the waistband of her jeans there were three sharp cracking sounds from below.

  Earl sat up quickly. “Those were shots! I’d better see what’s happening.”

  “What about me?”

  “I’ll be back. Wait for me.”

  Even before he reached the main floor he knew it had to be Phil Whalen who had fired the shots. His gun was all too evident, and Hobbes had admitted only to having a laser pistol in the house. Lasers didn’t make any noise, which was one reason the government outlawed them soon after their introduction in the mid-1990s.

  “What in the hell are you doing?” Earl yelled, grabbing the tiny pistol out of Whalen’s hand and sending the bushy-haired man spinning into the wall.

  “There’s something out there!” he said, wiping a trickle of blood from his lip. “I saw it!”