by Ben Bova
I said, “I don’t know.” Which was almost a lie. I knew what I wanted, but I didn’t know what Jesse wanted and it had to be his decision as much as mine. But if I told him what I wanted he would automatically say he wanted that, too, because he loved me and would do whatever I wanted in this. This wasn’t a decision I could make for myself; I loved Jesse too much to do it that way. And there was a third party to the decision, as well.
“The boy would be crippled from birth,” Jesse muttered. “Spina bifida cases usually die before they’re thirty unless you make extraordinary efforts to keep them going.”
“Isn’t spina bifida something like paraplegia?” The words just popped out of my mouth and suddenly I knew what had held me together since the doctor told me of the test results, the hope that had been so deep inside me that I didn’t even recognize it until that instant.
Jesse gave me a strange look, pained, almost angry. “You think Arby will be able to save the kid? Make him normal?”
“Would that be possible?”
He looked away from me. “Maybe in twenty years, if they ever figure out how to regrow tissue without killing the patient first.”
“Then there’s some hope, at least.”
I could see him struggling with himself. Then he took my hands in his, gently. “Julia, I wish I could say that it’s true, that Arby or somebody could wave a magic wand and cure the baby and make his spine strong so he could walk.”
“But you don’t see it,” I finished for him.
With a shake of his head, “Not for a long time, honey. So long that our baby would probably be dead.”
“I can’t have an abortion,” I heard myself whisper.
“What?”
“I can’t do it. I can’t kill him.”
“But—”
“He’s alive, Jesse! I can feel him stirring inside me. He’s alive and I can’t kill him.”
“He’ll be a helpless cripple all his life. Is that what you want, to take care of a kid who can’t even sit up? Who’ll never be able to control his bowels? Who’ll probably be mentally retarded, as well?”
He was shouting. I flinched and pulled my hands away from him.
Jesse instantly realized that he had let his temper show and he was instantly apologetic.
“Oh, god, I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to yell at you. It’s just such a goddamned shock.” His head sank to his chest.
I put my arms around him and we cried together for a long time, just sat there on our sofa bawling our hearts out, crying for the healthy baby that we would never have, sobbing for the son we had both hoped so much for.
But even as I cried I told myself that I would have to face the facts. I was going to raise a deformed baby. That was that. I could no more abort my baby than I could deliberately murder someone.
WASHINGTON, D.C.:
EVENING
Even though she was on a consultant’s expense account, Pat Hayward stayed at the relatively inexpensive downtown Holiday Inn rather than the posh Jefferson Hotel, where Arthur was residing. There was more than frugality involved in her choice; she feared that if they were both in the same hotel sooner or later he would make a move on her, and she did not want to face making a decision about whether or not she would go to bed with him.
Maybe I’m fantasizing, she told herself. He hadn’t come on to her at all. Far from it. As far as Pat could tell, Arthur seemed totally wrapped up in the trial. Romance, even a casual sexual encounter, was not on his agenda. She felt relieved and disappointed at the same time.
Yet she enjoyed his company. Even while she was reminding herself that it was foolish—no, stupid—to have fantasies about sleeping with the boss, she realized that she greatly enjoyed being with this handsome, urbane, complex man. And she certainly appreciated the elegant, expensive restaurants that he seemed to take for granted.
But today was different. Arthur looked shaken and grim after Cassie’s videos. He had hardly said a word to her when they had left the hearing room. Arthur had simply led her out a back exit of the building, hailed a taxi, and brought Pat to the bar at the Jefferson, where they had downed several drinks in almost total silence before meandering into the plush, genteelly quiet dining room.
“Were you able to get a copy of Potter’s paper?” Pat asked, to break the ice.
Arthur looked surprised. He was still brooding over Cassie’s testimony, she thought.
“Professor Potter,” Pat reminded him. “You said you’d have to read his paper before you cross-examine him.”
He nodded. “Phyllis said she’d e-mail it to me. It’s probably in among my cell phone text messages.”
The waiter brought their menus, big oversized things in imitation leather bindings.
“Will one day be enough for all your cross-examinations?” Pat asked.
He shrugged. “I imagine Graves will call for a Saturday session if he has to. Or go into next week.”
Finally she worked up the nerve to ask, “What do you want to do about Cassie’s videos?”
Without glancing up from the jumbo menu, Arthur said, “Not a damned thing. There’s nothing we can do.”
“I thought not,” said Pat. “She’s done enough damage already, hasn’t she?”
Tiredly, he replied, “I suppose she has, as far as the media are concerned.”
“I’m dreading the eleven o’clock news.”
“That’s not important.”
“It’s not?”
The waiter approached their table and they ordered: striped bass for Pat, lamb chops for Arthur.
“Would you care to have wine with your dinner?” the waiter asked. He was a youngster, probably a local student trying to earn his tuition, Arthur thought.
“I’m red and you’re white,” he said to Pat.
“Tavel?” Pat suggested.
Arthur was pleased that she remembered. He asked for a Tavel. The waiter looked troubled and said he’d have to check to see if they had any.
“If not, then a glass of burgundy for me and a chardonnay for the lady.”
Looking much relieved, the waiter hurried from their table.
The table was small and oval, niched into a curving high banquette upholstered in pastel, patterned moire. Similar banquettes lined the restaurant’s walls like elegant hideaways where couples could dine and whisper secrets to one another.
Pat did not whisper, but she leaned toward Arthur and kept her voice low. “What do you mean, the media coverage of Cassie’s testimony isn’t important?”
“Not to the outcome of the trial, it isn’t,” Arthur replied. “The jury is looking at the scientific evidence, not the emotional state of the witnesses.”
“But Cassie’s testimony claims that Max died from the tumors.”
“I’ll show that we understand now that we induced too much trauma for Max’s system to handle all at the same time, even with the tumor-suppressant treatment.”
“So their conclusion will be that the regentide killed him.”
Arthur suppressed a momentary flare of anger. “Max died of a heart attack. His blood was loaded with tranquilizers when we found the two of them like Romeo and Juliet in the last act of the play.”
Pat hadn’t heard that before. She didn’t know which shocked her more, the idea that Cassie might have murdered Max before she committed suicide, or the idea that Arthur had kept that information from her.
Arthur saw the stunned look on her face. “There’s no sense attacking Cassie posthumously. She killed Max, I’m fairly sure of that.”
“And you never told me.”
“You’re only the fourth person to know. Darrell, the pathologist who did the autopsy, and me. Five, I suppose, if you count the lab technician who did the workup on Max’s blood sample.”
She didn’t have to ask her next question. Arthur went right ahead, “I didn’t want the story known. So I kept it as tight as I could. The best way to keep it quiet was not to tell anyone. It’s the kind of publicity the lab doesn’t
need.”
Pat felt more hurt than angry. “Couldn’t you trust me to keep a lid on the story?”
“It wasn’t a matter of trust. I didn’t want to put you in the position of trying to cover up to the media. I didn’t want to force you to lie to them.”
“I see.”
“That’s why I don’t want to respond to Cassie’s video. I don’t want to take any chances that it might leak out that she deliberately killed Max.”
“But why not? You can defend yourself from—”
Impatiently, Arthur interrupted, “It’s bad enough that Cassie committed suicide. Can you imagine the headlines if they find out she murdered Max, too? Scientist kills chimp, then herself?”
“Arthur, the media’s going to have a field day with those disks! They’ll be on everything from Larry King to 60 Minutes. Don’t you think it’ll all come out sooner or later?”
“Not if we keep our cool.”
Pat sighed wearily. “You don’t know how persistent they can be. They’ll hound you wherever you go.”
Arthur shook his head.
“Believe it. Cassie’s going to be on the tube more than Oprah Winfrey, you’ll see. The trial’s become irrelevant, Arthur. You’ve been branded a killer.”
He started to reply, but found that he had nothing to say. An icy cold gripped him. Good god, maybe she’s right. Maybe I should tell them how Max died. But what good would it do? It would just make things worse.
The waiter arrived with their salads. And two glasses of wine, one white, one red.
Arthur picked up a fork, then put it down again. He had no appetite at all.
“The trial is not irrelevant,” he insisted, more to convince himself than Pat. “And it’s based on the scientific evidence and nothing else. The jury is composed of scientists, not people who read the National Enquirer.”
“They’re human beings,” Pat said. “And Cassie’s going to be all over the Washington Post tomorrow morning.”
Arthur pushed his salad away.
By the time they had finished picking at their entrées, Pat felt miserable with guilt. “I’ve ruined your dinner,” she said.
Arthur forced a smile. “I notice you haven’t done your own much good, either.”
He called for the check and they left the restaurant. Without a word passing between them, Arthur led Pat to the elevators and took her up to his suite. He clicked on the TV set in the sitting room as Pat took in the accommodations with a swift glance: spacious, luxurious carpeting, tastefully furnished, bedroom through that door, a separate lavatory for the sitting room.
Arthur went straight to the phone; its message light was blinking red. He tapped the button for the built-in answering machine.
“Dr. Marshak? This is Ron Cohan of the Washington Times. I’m doing the story on today’s testimony and I need to get your reaction—”
Arthur stabbed at the fast-forward button. The next message was from ABC News. Arthur kept hitting the button; there were nine messages, all of them from reporters who wanted his reaction to Cassie’s testimony.
“I imagine they’re also trying to reach you,” he said to Pat grimly.
“Yes, I imagine they are.”
Pat was supposed to deal with the reporters, screening Arthur from their urgent demands. No one was supposed to know where he was staying, but nine enterprising news reporters had tracked him to the Jefferson. God knows how many others are trying to reach Pat, he thought.
She excused herself and went to the toilet. Through the closed door she could hear him surfing through the TV channels, settling finally on CNN.
By the time she came out, Arthur was slumped on the sofa, jacket hanging from the bedroom door’s knob, tie pulled loose. Pat took the easy chair next to the sofa; it rocked as she sat in it, startling her.
Better be careful, she told herself. This chair isn’t the only thing here that’s unsteady.
As the half hour approached, CNN did a brief story on the day’s session, showing Cassie’s blubbering testimony and the footage of Max. Then Cassie screaming, “Arthur Marshak is the killer. He’s a murderer! He killed my Max and he’s killed me, too!”
Arthur saw his own face on the screen, jaw clenched tight, eyes blazing unconcealed fury. He hadn’t realized the TV cameras in the hearing room had been turned on him. His teeth clamped down so hard that his entire skull hurt.
Then the screen showed the commentator behind her antiseptic desk again. She said tonelessly, “The late Catherine Ianetta’s shocking revelations will be the subject of the next Larry King Live, tomorrow at nine p.m. Eastern and Pacific time.”
He turned off the TV and turned to Pat. She looked as miserable as he felt.
“But it doesn’t matter,” Arthur said stubbornly. “The jury has got to go by the scientific evidence and nothing else.”
“Larry King isn’t going to go by the scientific evidence.”
“That’s not important. It’s the scientific evidence that counts, not all this hysteria.”
Softly, Pat said, “But the scientific evidence shows that Max came down with brain tumors.”
“We understand that,” Arthur said, almost pleading. “We know what went wrong. When we get more chimps, we’ll be able to prove that we can regenerate organs without causing tumor proliferation.”
Pat said nothing, but her expression was clearly dubious.
“Look,” Arthur said, jumping to his feet. “We’ve done several series of experiments, starting with the lab rats . . .”
And for nearly an hour he lectured, pacing up and down the spacious room. Pat sat in the rocker and followed him with her eyes. She realized what he was doing: rehearsing. He didn’t need to convince her of anything and he wasn’t even trying to. He was assembling his thoughts, marshaling his arguments, practicing the speech he wanted to make to the jury, to the judges, to the world.
But it was a cold, unfeeling kind of speech. More of a classroom lecture than the stirring oration that could sway someone’s feelings. Arthur was reciting facts, making logical arguments, building an unassailable fortress of rational, analytical statements. It wouldn’t convince anyone, Pat thought, who wasn’t a scientist. Maybe it wouldn’t even convince the scientists on the jury.
At last he wound down. Instead of a magnificent summation, he just stopped, looking slightly befuddled, almost embarrassed.
He blinked at her several times. “Does any of that make any sense to you?”
Pat looked up at him from her rocking chair. “Of course it makes sense, Arthur.” Which was perfectly true. And entirely pointless.
It was almost eleven. Arthur shrugged, went back to the sofa and turned the TV on again, then fished around until he hit a local station.
“Let’s see what the local news does to us,” he muttered.
Pat was thinking that it was high time she left for her own hotel. Tomorrow was going to be a very rough day, and she knew there would be dozens of phone messages waiting for her. But she stayed in the chair, rocking gently as the news came on. Fires and murders, wars and terrorism, an inane clown spending four minutes to say that tomorrow’s weather would be hot and humid, with a thirty percent chance of thundershowers in the late afternoon.
And then, “Here in the nation’s capital a strange sort of trial is going on,” said the female half of the anchor team.
“And today a charge of murder was made,” said the male half, almost smirking. “But the victim was a chimpanzee, not a human being.”
They showed a snippet of old footage of Max, before the surgery, then about twenty seconds of Cassie’s footage, ending with her screaming accusation of Arthur.
And suddenly a commercial for an insecticide came on the screen.
“Well,” said Arthur, “at least we got on the air before the sports results.” He smiled weakly and clicked off the TV.
Pat studied his face. He was trying to keep it under control, but in his dark brown eyes she saw something that might have been pain. Might even have b
een fear.
“This means everything to you, doesn’t it?” Pat asked.
“It means a lot to everyone,” Arthur replied, “to the whole human race.”
“But especially to you,” she said.
“Yes,” he admitted.
“Why is it so important to you?”
He almost flinched with surprise. “Why? It’s my work. It’s . . .” His voice died away momentarily, then he repeated, “It’s my work.”
“Would it be so terrible if the jury decides not to recommend that you go ahead with human trials?”
“Yes,” he snapped.
“But why?” Pat probed. “You’d have to do more animal experiments, that’s all. You’d get to human trials sooner or later.”
Arthur felt almost nettled, until he realized that she was trying to soften the blows that were coming.
“Look,” he said, “the corporation has a great deal tied up in this work. Not just money, that’s the trivial part of it. But Omnitech has been staked out by a European consortium for an unfriendly takeover. If I can make a success of this regeneration work, the corporation will be much too strong for anyone to take over. If we’re delayed, sidetracked—we could be bought out by the Europeans. Or maybe the Japanese.”
“But don’t you see what they’re trying to do to you?” Pat burst out. “Kindelberger and Simmonds and Ransom and all the others, they’re trying to destroy you! You personally!”
“They can’t—”
“Yes, they can!” Pat was almost shouting. “They want to take you down, Arthur. They want to blacken you so badly that your work goes down with you.”
“But the trial doesn’t deal with personalities,” he said, but his voice was weak, uncertain.
“The trial doesn’t, but the media does. And from here on in you’re going to be tried in the media, no matter what happens in the hearing room.”
Arthur sank into the sofa, his mind spinning. “They can’t stop the work,” he said, more to himself than to her. “Other groups will do it. Maybe not here in the States, but—Europe, Korea . . .”
“And then what?” Pat demanded.
It took him a moment to realize the answer. “I’d be left behind,” he said, his voice hollow.