The Frankenstein Factory

by Edward D. Hoch

  Earl saw the front door standing open. “What did you see?”

  “Something big. I could see it in the moonlight. It was standing on the path to the beach—just standing there, watching the house. I shouted at it, and then I fired three shots at it.”

  “I can’t see anything out there now.” Behind him, Earl heard Tony and Armstrong coming down the stairs, asking what the trouble was. “Give me some light and I’ll take a look around.”

  Armstrong snapped on the outdoor floodlights and Earl started toward the place Whalen had indicated. The walk leading to the beach was empty, and though he searched among the trees on either side he found nothing. There was only the splintered bark where one of Whalen’s wild shots had hit a tree.

  “Nothing there,” he said, coming back to the house. “Not a thing.”

  “I saw it!” Whalen insisted.

  “Yeah.”

  “Give me back my gun!”

  “Not right now. In the morning.”

  “I might be dead in the morning!”

  “We all might be dead in the morning.”

  Earl said good night again and went back up to his room.

  It was empty now. Vera Morgan was gone.

  SEVEN

  “ONE MAJOR PROBLEM,” HOBBES was saying over breakfast the following morning, “is that the law would have a difficult time punishing a man for murder if that man isn’t legally alive.”

  Earl had just entered and taken a chair at the end of the table. Tony Cooper and Armstrong were already in attendance, but there was not yet any sign of Vera or Whalen.

  “You mean Frank?” Dr. Armstrong asked.

  “Certainly. All of the bodies in the capsules down below have been declared legally dead. Now, we have taken portions of five of these dead bodies and created a new, living being. If this being has become a murderer, can he be tried in any court of law?”

  “There’s prima facie evidence that he’s alive.”

  “Yes, but under what name? Is it the body or the brain that’s the murderer, and how can one be punished without punishing the other?”

  “I’m sure the courts could resolve that.”

  Dr. Armstrong agreed. “You can be sure they’re not going to allow a murderer to walk around loose.”

  “Has anyone checked him this morning?” Earl asked.

  Armstrong nodded. “No change. I gave him a vitamin injection.”

  “Will that help?”

  “At least it’ll keep him going until he can take nourishment.”

  Lawrence Hobbes drained his coffee cup and motioned Hilda away when she approached with more. “We’d better get down to the boathouse and see what can be done about repairing my craft. It’s our best bet to reach the mainland.”

  “Didn’t you say the hovercraft would be bringing supplies this morning?” Earl asked.

  Hobbes brushed back his white hair and got to his feet, moving his bulky body with care. His slight limp seemed a bit more pronounced to Earl’s eye. “The hovercraft won’t be coming,” he said simply, then left the table.

  “Won’t be coming?”

  “He told us when we came down for breakfast,” Armstrong said. “He wouldn’t say any more about it. Something’s terribly wrong.”

  “I’d already noticed that.”

  Earl finished his toast and coffee and started down the path toward the water. The day was warm, even at this early hour, but a brisk wind was blowing off the gulf. Back in New York the autumn’s uncertain weather would be turning cooler, he knew, and a wind like this could only bring down the dying leaves. Here, on a smooth, sandy beach facing the blue water, New York and autumn seemed very far away.

  “How far is it over there?” he asked, going up to the boathouse where Hobbes was working.

  “To shore? Well, it’s nearly sixty miles back to Guaymas, where you came from. But straight ahead, over to Baja California, is only about fifteen. The hovercraft makes it in ten minutes, usually, unless the headwinds are bad.” He still spoke in miles rather than kilometers, though the country was gradually adopting the metric system.

  “Maybe you’ll have a searail someday,” Earl suggested. They were building some, for rocket-powered trains, in the Caribbean.

  “Wouldn’t want one. Spoil our privacy.”

  Earl squinted into the rising sun, focusing on a blue and white pennant that fluttered from the top of the flag pole. He hadn’t noticed it before and was certain it hadn’t been up when he’d arrived. “What’s that?”

  “Signal pennant for the hovercraft. He comes early, around seven, and sometimes if I don’t need supplies or want to sleep late I ring up the pennant. Then, he passes us by till the following week.”

  “Then you told him not to come this morning?”

  “No.”

  “Who did?”

  Hobbes shrugged. “Somebody sneaked out last night to put it up there. Maybe our murderer.”

  “You don’t seem awfully concerned.”

  “We’ll get the boat fixed. It’s not much of a job.”

  “Who would have known about the pennant system?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I didn’t know about it. And Vera and Tony wouldn’t have known.”

  “I see what you mean. You’re right, of course. The recent arrivals aren’t familiar with it. Let’s see—Armstrong and Whalen and me. And Hilda, of course. That’s all.”

  “Then one of them must have hoisted it.”

  “You’re too much of a detective for your own good, Jazine. The pennant system might have been mentioned to someone else. I might even have raised it myself while sleepwalking.”

  “Do you sleep walk?”

  “No.”

  “Then I guess we can forget that possibility. Who are you covering up for, Dr. Hobbes?”

  “No one.” He’d chosen a small piece of plywood, and he bent to size it for the repair job on the boat.

  “Tell me something about Hilda. Isn’t that an odd name for a Mexican woman?”

  “Short for Hidalga, with a little shifting of the letters. It means noble.”

  “How old is she?”

  “I never asked. What would you say—forty? Or late thirties?”

  It seemed like a good guess to Earl. “How long has she worked for you?”

  “A few years. Four or five, maybe.” He turned on the automatic hoist to lift the boat into position. “Want to give me a hand with this?”

  “Sure.”

  Hobbes covered the hole with the piece of plywood, welding it into position with an ultrasonic gun. “That should hold long enough to get us across. Of course, it’s no hovercraft.”

  “You going to try it today?” Earl asked, glancing out at the whitecaps on the gulf. If anything, the wind was increasing.

  “Only if it calms down. I wouldn’t feel like a swim today, even with my sharkstick along.”

  “Sharks?”

  Hobbes nodded. “They come up from the ocean. A sharkstick will give them a nasty shock, but sometimes they come at you so fast there’s no chance to use it.”

  “What about Phil Whalen?” Earl asked, returning to the subject of the pennant. “He fired at someone last night. Maybe he saw the person who raised the flag.”

  “Or maybe he wanted us to think he saw him.”

  “You don’t trust Whalen, do you?”

  Hobbes shrugged. “He’s a good surgeon. But there’s never a need for an honest man to carry a gun. He’s hiding something.”

  Earl grunted. “I wonder what.”

  They left the boathouse and headed back toward the path through the trees.

  For the rest of the morning Earl made a special point of keeping an eye on Whalen. It wasn’t difficult to do, since they decided after breakfast to try the buddy system Earl had suggested the previous night. While Armstrong and Hobbes stayed close to the house with Hilda—or Hidalga, as Earl now thought of her—the others went off to make another search of the small island. Tony and Vera headed toward
the north curve of the horseshoe, while Whalen and Earl went south.

  As soon as they were out of earshot of the others Whalen said, “He’ll probably take her up the beach a ways and screw her behind a bush. Can’t say I blame him, though.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like the late Freddy O’Connor. I doubt if they’d bother with anything so crude when they’re sleeping together every night.”

  “I suppose not,” Whalen agreed. “You married, Jazine?”

  Earl shook his head. “These days in New York nobody under thirty gets married unless he’s going into politics. A wife’s picture is still good for the campaign posters.”

  “How’d you get into police work?”

  “It’s a far cry from police work, I’ll tell you! We have to be experts on computers, lasers, holograms, cryosurgery—just about every phase of the new technology. The purpose behind the Computer Investigation Bureau is to handle crimes the regular police forces aren’t equipped for.”

  “And that’s what brought you here?”

  “There are a number of unanswered questions about ICI’s financial setup.”

  “Hobbes found me back East earlier this year,” Whalen said. “I had a number of questions too, and I figured the surest way to get answers was to come out to Horseshoe Island with him.”

  They walked through the last of the tall grass and came to the tip of the island. “No one here,” Earl said, “unless he’s gone underground.”

  “You don’t believe me about the person I saw last night, do you?”

  “Not especially. Frankly, I think you hoisted the pennant to keep the hovercraft from delivering supplies this morning. Then you fired those shots so we’d all think someone was out there.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Earl had to admit.

  They walked back toward the house in silence for a time, feeling the warm breeze on their faces. He had the feeling that Whalen wanted to ask him something, and after a couple of false starts the bushy-haired man said, “I don’t think someone like Hobbes should have a monopoly on this sort of operation.”

  “Certainly not. But I don’t think medical monopolies have ever been much of a problem. In heart transplants, for instance, almost as soon as Christiaan Barnard performed the first operation in South Africa, doctors around the world were doing it.”

  “Correct, as far as you go!” Whalen said. “But while doctors are quick to share operating techniques, certain technological advances are not always so readily admitted. We all know how heart transplants were replaced by the mechanical heart, for instance. But when the mechanical heart proved defective, there was a certain reluctance on the part of surgeons to discuss it, or to reveal their own personal steps for overcoming the defects. Perhaps they feared malpractice suits if the device misfunctioned in one of their patients. Something similar happened a hundred years ago, in the early days of brain surgery. Doctors developed their own special instruments, and it was some years before standard techniques came into being.”

  “Just what are you getting at?”

  “Well, Hobbes chose surgical transplant over the other possibilities—mechanical heart, liver, kidney, and the like. Why?”

  “I’m sure he has a reason.”

  “MacKenzie went along with it. I’ve lived with them here for the last few months, but they have never discussed it with me, never told me a damned thing except what I really had to know. You think that’s fair?”

  “I really couldn’t say.”

  “The knowledge gained here should be made available to all the peoples of the world, including those in other countries.”

  “I see.” The light was finally beginning to dawn for Earl. “And that’s why you wanted to buy a copy of my film record, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Who’s paying you, Whalen?”

  “Paying me?”

  “Because someone is. I’d guess the Russians. They’re the furthest along in cryosurgery. They could put the knowledge to the most immediate use.”

  “Look, Jazine—we’re not talking about military secrets! We’re not even talking about Venus colonies or Mars probes. We’re talking about human life—how to prolong it, how to reactivate it. The Russians have as much right to that knowledge as the Americans.”

  “I agree. But a pistol-packing surgeon in the pay of the Russians makes a pretty strange picture.”

  “Speaking of that, how about returning my gun?”

  “I think not. Not right now, at least.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In my room, safely locked away.”

  “Anyone could get at it.”

  Earl shook his head. “The killer hasn’t needed a gun so far. Why should he bother with one now?”

  They were in sight of the house again, and Phil Whalen had no time to answer. Tony and Vera came into view, laughing and clowning like a pair of young lovers. Which was exactly what they were, Earl admitted. “Any luck?” Tony called out to them.

  “Not a thing,” Earl answered. “How about you two?”

  “Oh, Tony had some luck,” Vera said as they drew nearer. “But probably not the sort you mean.” She looked quite lovely just then, with the wind catching her long blond hair and gently tugging it from her face. Earl could have taken her up to bed and to hell with the case.

  “I told you,” Whalen snickered to Earl. “Behind a bush.”

  They went inside and found Lawrence Hobbes working on the wiring for his radio telephone. “Whoever messed this up knew what they were doing,” he said.

  “No chance to fix it?”

  “Not without supplies from the mainland.” He glanced toward the door. “Wind gone down yet?”

  “Not much.”

  “Generally it drops in the late afternoon, toward dusk. But I’d hate to get caught out there in a patched-up boat after dark.”

  “We can wait till tomorrow,” Earl suggested, “if we have to.”

  He saw Vera coming out of the kitchen and went to intercept her. “I was sorry you left the room last night. I came back as soon as I could.” He spoke in a low voice so that the others couldn’t hear.

  “Was I supposed to just lie there waiting for your return, like some maiden whose knight is off to the Crusades?” Her mouth was hard, but her eyes were laughing, enjoying his discomfort.

  “How about later?”

  “Next time it’ll be in my room. And I’ll make certain you don’t run away.”

  He went into the living room and looked around, suddenly aware that the others had gone off on their various tasks. After a moment Hobbes appeared. “You look perplexed.”

  “I was just wondering where everybody was. I’m supposed to be teamed up with Whalen and I’ve lost him.”

  “He was talking to Armstrong a few minutes ago. Your boy scout buddy system doesn’t work too well in actual practice.”

  “I can see that.”

  “How about a drink? I’ll have Hilda mix some martinis.”

  “Fine.”

  He pressed the button by his side but no one came. “She’s probably out in the garden,” he said, pressing it again.

  “I’ll go see,” Earl said. “If she’s not around I’ll mix them up myself.” Drinking early in the day was getting to be a habit around there.

  As he pushed open the door of the big, Moorish-style kitchen Hobbes’s insistent buzzer sounded from high on the wall. But there was no one to answer the summons. Hilda was on her knees by the sink, her elbows holding her in a bizarre position of supplication. She’d been stabbed in the back with a long-bladed butcher knife.

  Earl took one look at the scene and ran from the room. He knew that the killer was only moments away, and this time he had to find out.

  “What’s the matter?” Hobbes called out from the living room, but Earl didn’t pause to answer. He ran down the steps to the basement, hurrying along the corridor to the operating amphitheater, not knowing quite what he might find.

  As
he burst in the place seemed empty. The lights had been lowered and the ceiling merely glowed with a sort of twilight dimness.

  Then he saw that Frank still slept on the concave operating table.

  But the straps that had bound him now hung loose to the floor.

  “Number four,” Dr. Armstrong commented quietly. “Four down and six to go.”

  “Come now!” Phil Whalen said. “You can’t believe someone is trying to kill everybody on this island!”

  They were upstairs with Earl and Vera, talking over the latest killing. On seeing the body Lawrence Hobbes had collapsed, and Tony had helped him to his bedroom. Now he returned, looking grim. “I’ll swear the old guy is taking this one harder than the others.”

  Whalen snorted. “Think he was laying her on the side?”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say!” Vera objected.

  Earl agreed. “I told him he was sounding like Freddy.”

  “Hell, these Mexican women—”

  “Cut it out!” Tony Cooper said. “The lady doesn’t have to listen to your nasty speculations.”

  Whalen settled into a sullen silence and Earl took the floor. “I think you all can agree with me that the killing of Hilda brings home the seriousness of the situation. The first three deaths could have been motivated in some crazy manner, but there’s not a reason in the world why anyone would have wanted to kill a middle-aged Mexican cook who couldn’t speak or hear. Not a reason in the world, that is, unless someone is trying to kill us all.”

  “Frank?” Tony Cooper asked.

  “He was unstrapped, but there’s still no evidence that he’s been off that table.”

  “Could he have unstrapped himself?” Vera asked.

  “I’d say no, but I suppose anything’s possible. If he managed to slide one hand out of the straps the rest would be easy.”

  “Let’s examine this rationally,” Tony Cooper said. “Assuming that Frank is able to be up and about, what could be his motive for killing us all? We’re the ones who reanimated him!”

  “He may not like the idea of being reanimated in a different body. The records show he may be a murderer already. To wake up in strange surroundings in a different body might be enough to make anyone murderous. We just don’t know.”