Dr. Franklin's Island

by Ann Halam

  Arnie and I couldn’t argue with that.

  We compared notes over again, this time with Arnie telling the truth, and worked out that he must have gone through the change more or less at the same time as the two of us. The dubious honor of being first human transgenic was divided between Miranda and Arnie, and we’d never know who had actually been first across the line.

  When we’d talked ourselves out, we flipped the mental switches and came back to the boat. I took out the two white boxes marked A and M, Infusion Stage B. I spread Dr. Skinner’s idiot-proof instructions on the deck, and laid out the hypodermics and the ampoules.

  I said, “Are you sure you want to do this now?”

  “I’m sure,” said Miranda’s voice, in my mind.

  “Me too,” said Arnie. “This suit is great for weaponry, but I want my stupid body back.”

  “Don’t you think we should wait? Until we’re back in civilization?”

  Arnie shrugged his glittering coils. “Infusion Stage B worked okay on you.”

  Miranda said, “The stuff was being stored cold. If we wait until we get to a hospital, and until we’ve explained everything, it might be spoiled. There’s another thing, Semi. I want to be changed back before anyone sees us. I don’t trust any grown-ups right now, not even my own mum and dad. I don’t want to end up in some kind of official, legal, well-meaning Dr. Franklin’s lab, being taken apart to see how I work.”

  “I agree,” said Arnie. “Wonder Girl is right on the money. For once.”

  The snake-monster and the bird-monster gave each other a long, hard stare: Miranda turning her head to and fro, bird-style, to give him the benefit of both sides; Arnie’s lidless eyes having to manage without any form of expression.

  “There were some things I handled badly,” said Miranda, at last.

  “Some things I handled badly too,” said Arnie. “Call it quits, Wonder Girl?”

  “Say you’ll stop calling me Wonder Girl?”

  “No. I’m going to go on calling you Wonder Girl, when you deserve it.”

  Miranda shrugged. “Oh, okay. Call it quits.”

  So then I read the instructions about a million times, and finally got up the nerve to inject Arnie. He wanted to be first. I gave him the full dose that he needed for the second phase of the transgenesis. We had discussed breaking up the treatment, to make the effect more gradual. But Dr. Skinner had said it would be okay doing it in one go, and we were worried about the infusion spoiling in the heat. I had to inject him in the back of the neck, into the spinal fluid. There was a piece of sticky plastic film that I had to line up with the pattern on his scales, to mark where the needle should go in. I was scared; but it wasn’t hard. Dr. Skinner had told me about squirting a little bit of the fluid out first, so I wouldn’t put any air bubbles into Arnie’s blood. Or whatever it was he used for blood, in that strange body. Arnie’s needle was a monster, with a pump attachment. It had to be tough to get through his skin. But he didn’t make any fuss.

  Then we talked for a few minutes, about the odd details of being transgenic. Like, my eyesight seemed to be permanently corrected; but on the other hand, Arnie couldn’t read in his snake body. Everything he’d learned about what was going on, he’d memorized from what the two mad scientists told him or said to each other when they were near him. Miranda said she doubted if this reluctant-reader thing was a big change . . . but she said it in a friendly way. Arnie’s voice started to get drowsy. He curled up tight on the floor of the boat and mumbled, in our heads, “I am now going to sink into a deep, reptilian torpor, and shed my skin. Have a large cheeseburger and fries ready, for when I wake up.”

  We watched the snake body, pulsing gently, rhythmically. He was asleep.

  “My turn,” said Miranda.

  I injected four ampoules of the clear fluid, right over her breastbone. I don’t think Arnie’s injections hurt him at all. I think one of the things Dr. Franklin was trying for, when he made the Arnie-monster, was a high resistance to any kind of pain. I had to hurt Miranda, and that was hard, but I did it. She got down from the railing for the injections. When they were done she fluffed up her feathers and settled with her legs tucked under her, like a bird on its nest. I sat beside her.

  I couldn’t hold her hand, because she had no hands, but I stroked her feathers. I told her a little more about my adventures; and she told me about hers.

  “But why did you fly away in the end?” I asked. “I was so scared!”

  “I don’t know,” said Miranda. “That was real, Semi. I was losing myself. Especially after you had the antidote, and I didn’t. There was a while when I didn’t know who I was or where I was. But I remembered you.” She closed her eyes, and opened them again. “Semi, I’m starting to feel very strange. I think I can’t . . . talk . . . anymore.”

  Her eyes closed, and didn’t open. I sat in Dr. Franklin’s motorboat, the blue ocean all around me, the blue sky above. Her voice murmured faintly in my mind—

  “Exciting, a great adventure—

  “Say it, Semi—”

  Then I waited, to see what would happen.

  chapter thirteen

  Day One Hundred and Eighty-eight

  Two weeks later, two teenage girls were sitting on the beds in a hotel room in Quito.

  Sunlight through the balcony curtains, the sound of people chatting by the poolside . . .

  We were waiting for a phone call from reception to tell us our parents had arrived. Our three sets of parents were traveling together. They’d called us from the airport already. We knew they’d be there very soon. Arnie had gone back to his own room. For these last minutes, he wanted to be alone; and so did we.

  I had spent five days alone on that boat while Arnie and Miranda changed, keeping them covered up from the sun, watching over their bodies. I had let the boat drift for most of that time, using the engine only when the compass in the engine house said we were straying from our course. They had needed no food or water while the change was going on, and my appetite was tiny. I wasn’t used to eating like a human. But there’d been no risk of us running out of supplies. There’s plenty of water in raw fish, and there were plenty of fish about, in the sunlit layers, without any idea of what to do when a speedy, amphibious predator with hands came after them.

  I could still breathe in water at that time, easy as breathing in dry air.

  When Arnie changed back, he was very fat. They had bulked him up before they changed him into the snake, to get the raw material for three meters of solid transgenic muscle. But the bulk vanished amazingly fast. We had a couple of setbacks (due to freaky weather, nothing wrong with my navigation!). By the time we ended up on the coast of Ecuador, he looked normal and we were almost as thin as we’d ever been. We were dressed even worse than we’d been as castaways. I had my hospital pajamas, Arnie and Miranda had to make do with Flintstone clothing made out of the sacking I’d been using as a sunshade, which I’d found in one of the lockers. We hadn’t thought of clothes before we left the island. We’d been too desperate to get away.

  We reached the place called Menozes in the back of a friendly farmer’s truck. We had no money, so he took us to some nuns who ran an orphanage outside the town. That was when we called our parents and discovered we’d been missing for nearly six months. We’ll never work out how the count of days got so far off, and we don’t much care. It doesn’t matter. The notch-cutting ceremony was worthwhile anyway. It was one of our greatest inventions. We stayed with the nuns for a few days. That was a very strange time. I remember talking to Mum and Dad on the phone, and not being able to share their excitement. I remember talking to someone from the British Embassy and feeling scared that I would be put back into that room with the cages around the beds if I gave anything away. . . . Nothing seemed real, and all three of us were still so frightened. How can I explain? We looked strange, we felt strange. We were still thinking like hostages. We kept saying we needed to rest, because we didn’t dare tell the truth. We wanted to be sure w
e were back to normal before we faced anyone, even our own parents.

  As Arnie says, “I’m too young to have my own chat show”—which is typical Arnie, but we were afraid of something worse than becoming TV celebrities. We were afraid that if anyone knew what we were, they wouldn’t be able to leave us alone. They’d want to keep us locked up. They’d want to take samples, do tests, experiment on us; and we’ve had enough of that. So we acted ill and confused (which wasn’t much of an effort), and the kind nuns looked after us. Finally we “recovered,” and we were picked up and flown to Quito, the capital of Ecuador.

  The story is, we were the lone survivors of the Planet Savers plane crash. Our life raft carried us to an outlying atoll, where we lived until we were discovered by some of the staff of Dr. George Franklin’s private research station, when they went cruising by one day on a fishing trip. Dr. Skinner was having serious problems, due to his boss’s accidental death and the mechanical failure of the research station’s helicopter and its two small planes. Oh, and the island’s telecommunications had been disabled by an electrical storm. So he couldn’t contact anyone, and we got impatient. We “borrowed” a motor launch and took off by ourselves. Stupid teenagers, no sense of responsibility. We were lucky we reached the mainland unharmed.

  It’s not a very good story, but it’s worked so far.

  Of course people will come looking. Someday soon, planes and boats and helicopters will descend on Dr. Franklin’s island. People will want to know why Dr. Franklin and Dr. Skinner didn’t know that the Planet Savers plane went down so near their base. All the parents and families of the people who died, and the aviation authorities, will want a full investigation. Arnie and Miranda and I don’t know what will happen then. Maybe someone will find out what the late Dr. Franklin was really getting up to in that hidden valley, and the true story of our adventure will come out. Maybe not.

  Maybe we should tell someone. Dr. Franklin’s dead, but Skinner’s still alive. What if he decides to carry on with the “great work”? But we don’t think he will. We don’t think he’ll dare. We think he’s learned his lesson. And we don’t think those technicians and orderlies would be so crazily obedient again. It’s simpler if nobody knows.

  We don’t want to be treated as freaks.

  So far we’ve managed to avoid medical checkups. The nuns didn’t bother us with doctors, they simply put us to bed and fed us good food. When we got to Quito, the embassy people wanted us to see a doctor but we said no, and we haven’t heard any more about it.

  We don’t know what will happen when we get home. We now look almost normal on the outside. Arnie’s still bald, like me, but otherwise he looks just like himself. Miranda has a head of short dark hair, thick and fine as velvet pile, that looks as if it’s been oiled. It grows into a point far down on the nape of her neck; and her fingernails are curved like claws. She’ll have to avoid stepping on scales in public for a while, because she doesn’t weigh much. Arnie, on the other hand, is very heavy for his size. As for me, my gills have sealed over. You can hardly tell they were there. But my eyesight is still perfect (I don’t know how I’m going to explain that); and my ears are strange. Arnie and I are going to say we had our heads shaved because our hair was in such a mess. I’ll have to wear a hat until my hair grows. Or until my earlobes grow back.

  Quito is a wonderful city, by the way. Very high up, and cool, and full of amazing buildings and art. I’d like to come back here someday.

  So that’s it. The adventure is over. But whatever we look like on the outside, there’s something we all three know. We are not back to the way we were before. Once you’ve been made transgenic, you stay transgenic. The different DNA is lurking in our cells. Arnie talks about “flashbacks.” He says the plan was for two kinds of transformation: one where you buy the effect for a few weeks; and the other kind, the proper transgenics who would be reversible, like jumpers. One side human, one side trans—and able to switch between the two. We were meant to be the second type. Now that we’ve had both halves of the treatment, we should be able to switch, though we’re not sure how.

  I haven’t said anything to the others, but I think salt water is my key.

  They haven’t said anything to me, but I think Arnie and Miranda know the triggers that will change them.

  We still have the radio telepathy, but we’re not using it. We’d rather talk aloud. I think that ability will fade, too. But I think we’ll be able to call it back, if we need it.

  The phone rings. I pick it up. “Hello,” I say, and I hear my mother’s voice. Suddenly I’m crying, tears running down my face. At last, finally, I’m back in the real world, and my mum and dad are here, here in this hotel. . . . It feels so strange, to be crying, and hearing her voice, and then my dad, and they are really here. It’s really over. I can’t believe it. I can hardly bear it. I hand the phone to Miranda, and she’s saying to her mum, or maybe her dad, “Yes. Yes. I’m okay, oh . . . ,” and there are tears running down her face.

  We pass the phone between us, crying, talking to these beloved voices. It doesn’t make sense when we could be with them in the lobby, but we’re too crazy with tears and joy to get a grip, and so are our parents. Finally Arnie knocks on the door.

  “Hey. Are you two coming?”

  So I put the phone down at last, and Miranda and I sit looking at each other.

  We don’t have much luggage. We pick up the carrier bags that hold the things people bought for the teenage castaways. Toothbrushes, a few spare clothes, underwear. We stand there together, in this last room of the adventure, remembering all the other rooms, and all the horrors; and further back, to the beach, the notch-cutting coconut palm, the waterfall pool . . . the night of the plane wreck. Memories that will last forever.

  I think about Shy Nerdy Girl and wonder if my mum and dad will miss her.

  Maybe she’ll grow back, like my hair. Or maybe not.

  “What are we?” I ask Miranda. “Are we monsters? Or are we more than human?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says. “You’re you. I’m me. Let’s go.”

  coda

  I know that we can transform again. I believe it will happen, some way, somehow. I think about breathing water and swimming through the music of the ocean. I think about having a skeleton of supple cartilage instead of brittle bone. I think about feeling my whole body as one soaring, gliding, sweeping wing. I know that Miranda will never forget being able to fly. I dream of another planet, with an ocean of heavy air, where I can swim and she can fly, where we can be the marvelous creatures that we became; and be free, together, with no bars between us. I wonder if it exists, somewhere, out there. . . .

  READING GROUP

  Questions for Discussion

  At the start of the book, Semirah Garson (Semi) looks around at the people she is about to spend three weeks with in the Ecuadorian rain forest and on the Galápagos Islands. She makes judgments based on the way they look, and she stereotypes them. In your experience, how accurate are first impressions?

  After the crash, the group tries to piece together exactly what happened. They soon find, though, that their stories do not match up. Semi says, “Miranda, who had been sitting next to me, did not remember what I remembered. It seemed as if we’d been in two different plane crashes” (p. 15). What do the variations among Semi’s, Arnie’s, and Miranda’s recollections say about the reliability of eyewitness accounts? Talk about a time at school when you shared an experience with another student and each of you was sure your own description of the event was true—but your descriptions were totally different.

  As they try to get their bearings after the crash, Miranda and Arnie argue about how to proceed. He wants to explore and look for help, while she insists that they set up camp and stay close to the wreck so that rescue workers can find them. Who do you think has the correct approach? Miranda possesses many wilderness survival skills. What skills do you have? Would you have been able to survive on the island?

&
nbsp; Referring to transgenic experiments, Dr. Skinner says, “We’ve had plenty of losses. And some survive in very twisted forms. But our goal is to take humanity beyond all the limits. Of course there’s a price to pay” (p. 72). What is the price Dr. Skinner refers to? Contemporary scientists continually debate the ethics of experimental research. How do we decide what is moral and immoral when it comes to scientific experimentation? Discuss human cloning and other scientific possibilities you’ve heard about.

  Animal rights advocates have assailed drug companies for using animals in the development of new pharmaceuticals. They claim that subjecting animals to the pain and suffering that testing can cause is cruel. The drug companies contend that it is necessary for the betterment of mankind. What do you think? Is experimenting on animals an acceptable price to pay if it may lead to a drug that can cure a disease?

  Dr. Skinner tells Semi and Miranda that Dr. Franklin is “a genius. He’s crazy, but he is a genius” (p. 75). The character of the mad scientist has been seen often in literature. How do you view scientists? Do you trust them? Do you see them the same way that Semi sees Dr. Franklin? Are there real-life Dr. Franklins?

  Semi, Miranda, and Arnie are three very different people. Could any of them be your friend? With which one(s) would you like to be stranded on a desert island? Why?

  “So, which do you want to be?” she whispered. “Fish or bird? . . . Do you want the freedom of the ocean? Or the sky?”

  . . .“I’d rather be the fish, if I have to be one or the other.”

  “Good,” said Miranda cheerfully. “Because I’ve always wanted to be able to fly. . . . I think I fancy being a hyacinth macaw.”

  . . . “I want to be a shark,” I said firmly. “A great big great white shark, and I’ll bite Skinner’s bum.” (pp. 92–93).

  If you were in their situation, what animal would you want to be?

  Once they are transformed physically, Miranda and Semi begin to change psychologically. How do they change? Are you surprised by how happy they are?