An Island Called Moreau

by Brian W Aldiss

  Bella herself lay in one of the far corners. Her wig had fallen off and I thought she was dead. Four of the gnomes stood alertly by her, arms hanging by their sides. Two of them were women, by their dress. Like the men, they lacked hair on their heads. As they turned to inspect me, I observed a slight development of breast tissue beneath their blouses.

  They started to ask my name, but I ignored them and went to Bella. As I kneeled by her, her head came up angrily off the floor. I jerked back so that she would not bite me. But she recognized me and said, “You Four Limbs Long, you no like see me get whip.” She closed her long eyes.

  A broken plastic hypodermic lay by her side. There was blood all over her tunic and her malformed hands.

  “Why didn’t you go to your own people when you had the chance to escape, Bella?”

  “Own people make me death, same I go along Master too long time.” She started to pant. “Bella smell like Master, make trouble.”

  I took her head in my arms, and she let me do it. She was no more than a dying animal, yet—such was the will to communicate between us—at this moment she was perhaps more human than she had ever been. Words and thoughts still struggled up in her beast brain.

  “I do good best thing here—try make death Master, make death many bad small peoples here. All kill, best thing. No more trouble, finish get whip.”

  “Yes, yes, Bella. This place is evil. Soon it will be closed down.”

  She seemed to misunderstand. “Bella all close down, dear thing.” She choked on that odd endearment, then lifted her head for a moment. “Bella go get more trouble from Big Master in Sky now.”

  What passion tore me?

  “It’s not like that, Bella! That’s all a lie. There’s no Big Master in the Sky. After death there’s nothing, nothing at all. Silence, Bella—just silence. Just peace. No Big Master.” No phantom files where you’re an entry in a budget account. Just damn all. That’s the best thing to believe, Bella. No other islands for you to go to.

  “I believe you will find that the animal is defunct,” one of the gnome women told me. When she touched my shoulder, I moved it away.

  Lowering Bella’s head to the floor, I got to my feet and marched past the small people. They were making some sort of ponderous technical comment on the situation, which I did not heed.

  Why was I seized by such grief? It cut me like a knife. It was as if I had thrown away my own life. The contemptuous face of my first wife came to mind—I had hit her and she had turned away in disdain, with no word.… I hurried from that place and went back to my bedroom, where I stood for a while with my head in my arms and my elbows resting against a wall. Bella’s warm animal smell still clung.

  I could have wept for the sullied animal innocence of Bella. Instead, I reflected with shamed intensity on the evils that had attended my stay on this nightmare slab of rock.

  Before my eyes rose an electromagnetic spectrum of earthly torment, in which all that could happen to a man was ranged in order, from Best Event at the light end to Worst Event at the dark. On such a spectrum, there was no place for concepts like Good and Evil—I thought of the clichés I had uttered on that subject, and could have laughed. The lightest color of the spectrum was a completely fulfilled and giving sensuality, the darkest was represented by the nameless things with which I had just come in contact.

  How deluded I had been, and how secure in my delusions! And I was to blame for much that had happened. While Dart was responsible for his rule, I was also guilty. In a flash of terror, I saw myself back in Washington, turning up the Moreau file, issuing my blanket condemnations—only to find my own rubber-stamp signature on the original authorization.…

  My arrival on the island had been the signal for a chain of death.

  Hans Maastricht. He had managed to drink and work safely enough for years before I came and upset his balance. And from his death, all the others had followed. I had refused to retrieve Hans’ gun from the lagoon. So Foxy had got it, and had injured and eventually killed George. That disruption of Hans’ burial had driven me to seek out Warren, with the aid of Bernie. Of all victims, Warren was the one for which I most blamed myself. In that ghastly night during which he died, I believed that the faithful Bernie might also have been killed—and if so, he would have been killed because he had befriended me.… Then there was Bella.…

  But there my self-recrimination ran its course. Why, I’d be beating myself over the head about my past wives next. It was useless to wallow in guilt. The way of redeeming myself was to act now, to try to fulfill the rest of my plan regarding Foxy before the helicopter came. I saw clearly that I also had to have a firsthand account of the creatures in the lab. Dart should give me that, now.

  I looked at my watch. It was 1751. Plenty of time. It wasn’t even sunset yet.

  12

  The Frankenstein Process

  The Master was propped up in bed, his head and half his face still swathed in bandages.

  “Perhaps you can recall to your mind, Mr. Roberts, an earlier little chat we had concerning who was fighting this war. I believe I put it to you then that it was caused by you normals and not us freaks. The affair’s grown so big that we’re all involved. You don’t realize how deeply I am involved—this isn’t a fun-fair I’m running here, you know.

  “Since we have finally established that you’re the stuffed shirt you always claimed to be—one more pompous politician whose left hand doesn’t know what his right is doing—let me tell you that top military and medical men have been flown out here from Co-Allied war teams many a time, to kowtow to me and pick up a smattering of new gen from me, if they were lucky. Right, Heather?”

  She was standing by his bed, looking remotely at a spot on the far wall. She nodded.

  “You see, you think you’re in the swim, Mr. Roberts, but you don’t know what the war’s all about.”

  “When you have finished with the generalities,” I said, “you’ll recall that I asked you for some rationale, however sketchy, of those gnome creatures who killed Bella.”

  “Those gnome creatures, as you call them, go down in the books as SRSR, right? They’re the SRSRs, Roberts, and not gnomes, whatever your demented mind may despise them as. Perhaps you’d like me to tell you what that appellation stands for. SRSR stands for Standby Replacement Subrace. Standby Replacement Subrace. And that’s exactly what they are. Mark I.

  “I intimated to you earlier on that I am running a complex program here. The SRSRs are the culmination of one stage of it—it’s as simple as that. They’re what this island’s all about. McMoreau’s crude vivisection techniques were just an amateur beginning. After that came my early experiments in genetic surgery, of which, with regrets, only the two ape-men, Alpha and Beta, currently survive. They represent a deep line of research, toward the goal which I was always aiming for.

  “You see what a prenatal drug did to me—used randomly with random effect. Since thalidomide, a whole new range of drugs have been developed to govern cellular and glandular activity. The difficulty was to test them out on human stock under controlled conditions. There’s a limit to what you can achieve with any number of guinea pigs—mice, rats, monkeys, frogs, and all the rest. You need human stock, it’s as simple as that.

  “That’s where the Beast People came in handy. Next best thing to humans. I was able to make the progress here, safe on my little island, denied to countries with all sorts of pettifogging antivivisection laws.

  “It’s me, and me alone, who has developed these SRSRs, despite a few toffee-nosed biologists and whatnot who drop in from time to time.” His lips trembled, as if he was overcome by the thought of them. “I’ve no clue what you think of me, Mr. Roberts, and I don’t much care, but let me tell you that I—me, without hands or feet—have achieved more than Columbus or Genghis Khan. It’s no good me explaining what I’ve done because you wouldn’t understand the terms involved, but, basically, I have developed drugs of two kinds which operate radically on the fetal structure.

>   “One drug (collectivum) alters the fundamental epidermal functioning to give a protective outer covering much like a snake’s scales which inhibits certain types of radioactivity. The other drug inhibits the stimuli of cellular activity, and alters various basic metabolic rates, especially the entire pleiotypic program.

  “Using these two drugs in varying combinations on fetuses provided by the Beast People, we have developed—I cut a long story short—the SRSRs, a true subrace, who have several advantages over the human race.”

  “Advantages?” I asked.

  “They are immune to certain radiations lethal to us, gestate in only seven months, mature early, bulk less, consume less food, less oxygen. All telling plus factors in the sort of catastrophe scenario they are designed for.”

  Incongruously, while he was talking scenes of rural peace slipped across his wall, accompanying the slow movement of a Haydn symphony. Old whitewashed houses with wooden tiles, slow women with buckets at long-armed wells, decrepit fencing, tremendous meadows fading into mist, old men in old hats, stooks of corn, mountains, streams, oxen dragging decorated carts, reindeer, lime and acacia trees heavy with flower, children running down a lane—these images welled up and died in time to the music.

  I said heavily to Dart, “What sort of satisfaction do you feel now that your work is finished?”

  “The work’s far from finished, make no mistake. We have the SRSRs—and three of the best specimens are now in the States being studied—but they are not yet perfect. They have to be made to breed true, to reproduce their own kind and not monsters. At first they were infertile, but we’ve licked that one. Now one of the females is with child, and we have high hopes about that. But much has still to be done. Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day, as they say.”

  “Why are you doing this? Why should governments involved in total war countenance such inhuman experiments?” I asked him. “Of what use are your SRSRs—how do they increase our happiness?”

  “You’re not so smart as I took you for. I thought you would have grasped that, pal. Right, you mention total war—what’s the outcome going to be? The Co-Allies will win in the end, but they’re going to win at a hell of a cost in lives lost. You think I don’t care about such things, but I do. A world of want is going to result—that’s the cost of victory, and that’s where it’s at. The human race will be decimated, air and ground will be radioactive.”

  He sat up more positively in bed and clasped his thin chest.

  “But if we can breed up the SRSRs, they can take over the enormous tasks of reconstruction. They are already receiving indoctrination in Co-Allied aims. They will be less vulnerable to radiation than the rest of us, will propagate faster, will consume less supplies because of their smaller bulk. They are, in fact, our survival kit into the future; they may even replace us. And even if the picture isn’t as gloomy as I have painted it, then we’ll find other uses for them. Waste not, want not. The SRSRs would be ideal as crews for spaceships. You may yet see them go out and explore the stars while poor old mankind stays at home—what’s left of it.…”

  If this monster was to be believed, then I was witnessing the culmination of the Frankenstein process. The first tentative steps that Victor Frankenstein had taken, as recorded by Mary Shelley, toward making one life that stood outside the natural order of creation, had led to this; that a time could be visualized in the near future when the natural order would be entirely supplanted by the unnatural. The arguments of logic, with appeals to progress and the necessity of survival, were employed by Mortimer Dart much as they had been by Frankenstein and, for that matter, by McMoreau.

  In this spectacle of perverted propagation, I was lost. There was no possible dialogue I could have with a man like Dart.

  “Things have got out of hand,” Dart said to Heather, groaning. She laid a hand against his cheek in a sympathetic gesture. They exchanged eye signals which I could not interpret. I stood where I was, thinking fast. I was horrified by what I had seen and learned, and I would act as soon as I was in Washington. Dart’s experiments might be valuable to the war effort, or they might not. But they were certainly grossly mismanaged; none of the killings need have happened in a properly run organization. Dart was no better at ordering his affairs than Wells’ Moreau had been.

  Reflecting on the rundown state of the island and, in particular, on the lack of staff—why was there no American nursing personnel on duty with the SRSRs?—I understood, from long experience of similar projects, that Operation Moreau was being wound down. The fact might not yet have dawned on Dart, but his grand schemes had already received a thumbs down back home. He had been superseded. Maybe the old cloning programs of the eighties had been dusted off and given new life; his researches had already been written off or superseded. However that might be, I suddenly knew in my bones that Dart was through as far as funding went.

  And wouldn’t he be mad when he found out!

  It was likely that he would kill the SRSRs. And me too, if I was still around. He might be pathetic; he was also deadly.

  Dart and the girl had finished their silent communication. As he struggled into his harness, he looked fixedly at me.

  “Did you take in what I said? You see the sort of things that are going on here, Mr. Undersecretary of State Roberts—big things. Bigger than your bureaucratic mind can encompass. We’re changing the future, I’m changing the future here on Moreau Island. Things aren’t going to be as they have been. There’ll be radical differences. Humans don’t have to stay that same antique shape. Change shape, you get changes in function, thinking.… It’s big, all right.…”

  As he spoke, his face grew uglier, his mouth more set. His eyes evaded mine. He was sweating.

  I turned. Heather was there, pointing the gun at me. When someone holds a gun at you, you look first in their eyes, to see if they mean it—and she did—and then at the weapon, to see what sort of mechanism is going to finish you, if it comes to that. She was using the hypodermic gun she had used before. It was a heavy model, obviously well suited to dropping big brutes like George at a moment’s notice.

  “Sorry, Roberts,” she said. “We have trouble enough. You’re bona fide, we grant you that, but we don’t need you prowling around at this particular time.”

  “We’re shutting you up for a few hours, Mr. Roberts,” Dart said.

  I stood by the bed, looking from one to the other. Heather was willing enough to let me have it, but she was nervous about missing. She moved in closer.

  “Tie him up,” Dart ordered, leaning forward. I heard his harness creak.

  That presented her with a problem. She did not want to lay the gun aside. She glanced at a long woven Chinese-type belt that hung behind the door. I jumped at her.

  Heather’s impulses were fast. With one continuous movement she dropped the gun on the bed, swung about, and brought the edge of her hand up toward my windpipe. But I was moving too. Her blow hit me harmlessly under the arm, and I struck her glancingly across the temple with my fist.

  Almost simultaneously, I dived for the gun.

  Dart was wearing his prosthetic arms. A metal and plastic hand grasped my wrist and started to squeeze. I doubled up with the pain—Dart’s prosthetic limbs were motor-assisted. When the pressure relaxed, the gun was back with Heather, and she lashed my wrists expertly together. She had avoided the full force of my blow.

  “Good girl,” Dart said. “Not really hurt, are we? You must get me into the chair and we’ll go and see what has to be done in the lab. Let’s hope Da Silva is managing.”

  “Do we leave Roberts behind?” Her voice was perfectly calm.

  “Certainly not! He comes with us, where we can keep an eye on him. Roberts, I’m genuinely sorry about this, but you’ve been a bloody pain in the neck if ever I saw one, and we are not going to let you go back to Washington to make trouble.”

  “You dirty little amputee, you’d better let me loose or you’ll be in even deeper trouble. You know that helicopter is on its way, and
it certainly won’t leave without me, even if they have to put you in cold storage first!”

  As Heather shifted him tenderly off the bed into his wheelchair, he said—looking not at me, but at some distant corner of the room—“We’re going to put you in cold storage, Roberts. I’ll remind you of something you should already know; now you can apply it to the present situation. Hatreds between nations are nothing to interdepartmental hatreds. We’re going to put you in cold storage for the duration!”

  He had a digital clock by his bed. “Better hurry,” I said. “Your rule here lasts precisely five and three-quarter more hours.”

  But he had me worried. I didn’t know what he meant. And I didn’t like the way they walked me out of the room, round the corner, and through the other entrance into that accursed lab.

  Da Silva was working with an air of silent complaint, slowly mopping up the bloodstains with an electric floor washer. He had already removed the corpses of the dead SRSRs—I suppose I must call them that—as well as Bella’s corpse.

  The surviving SRSRs, male and female, stood about silently, watching him. They made no attempt to escape from the lab; nor did they make any of the half-fawning, half-threatening obeisances at the entrance of the Master that the Beast People would have done. They looked at him somewhat coldly, and one of the women said, with her perfect diction and uninflected voice, “Bella didn’t do you as much harm as we were led to believe.”

  “Harm enough,” he said, patting his turban.

  “The Master will probably be permanently blind in one eye,” Heather said, addressing herself mainly to the female. “He needs loving care.”

  “He will have to make do with you,” she replied, witheringly.

  “Er—well, we shall survive,” Dart said. “Sorry for all the trouble. This isn’t a fun-fair, you know.”

  The female SRSR said, “You have a diminished sense of responsibility if that is all you have to say. Eleven of us have been killed, including 415, who was pregnant, as you are well aware. We have all been frightened. As far as we can establish, it was purely through your carelessness that Bella broke in here. We had already warned you about her potential danger and told you to get rid of her.”