He only required access to the patient himself. If the doctors across the street were close with their unpublished data, they were more so with their high-risk inmates. In cases such as this, Coover might not remain there long at all. The psychologists would argue that he needed mental care, the police that he should be treated as a criminal. Before this argument could get underway there were some tests he would very much like to run on the fellow.
Poor fellow! He allowed himself a moment of compassion, then reminded himself that the janitor was very likely a drunk, not to mention a pilferer. Well, the tag would have a grand old time with him, wouldn’t it?
Dr. Malikudzu had his assistant place a few calls, which required interrupting the gossip over the grisly murder and the breakage of several astronomically priced pieces of analytic equipment. Finally he was connected with Dr. Gavin Shiel, financial director of the psychiatric institute. Shiel had a doctorate in economics, and equally important to his status, he had graduated from Cornell with top honors in Hotel Administration.
“Gavin, how are you? You’ve heard about that ghastly business in my lab I suppose. They’ve brought the young man to your place and I wondered if I could see him.”
“Good to hear from you, Les. Awful business. I’m not sure who’s handling the case. It’s urgent, you say? Why don’t you run over and ask for a minute with him?”
“I’d like to, but you know your staff. Quite rigorous on protocol. He did just murder a man, you realize. I wondered if you might oil the water a bit, advise them that I’m coming. Otherwise I’ll have to get into this terrible hassle over privacy, privileges, medical jurisdiction.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll call Therese Dowsie. Should be straightened out by the time you can get over here.”
“Wonderful. Let’s get together for lunch sometime soon.”
Dr. Malikudzu whizzed down to the lobby in the elevator, dashed through a light drizzle and crossed the street, threading between two beacon-flashing ambulances that were stalled at the emergency parking entrance while a mailroom messenger gathered up a spill of envelopes. By the time he entered the other building, a nurse named Linda was waiting for him at the elevator. With her key in a coded lock, they were given access to the middle of the crisis ward. The hall was full of wandering patients. An older man with sunken black eyes informed Dr. Malikudzu that he had always loved him. It was impossible to separate staff from patients; there were no alienating white coats in this ward. Dr. Malikudzu was only mildly suprised when Linda began railing at the young man behind the reception desk, telling him that he should be in his room and not answering phones. Before he slipped away, however, she asked him the whereabouts of Dr. Dowsie, and the patient pointed down the end of the hall. They passed out of the ward, checking that the door locked behind them, into an area of much higher security.
A policeman stood in the hall, talking with the proud Dr. Dowsie, a tall black woman who now began berating the cop for “waving his gun around where it wasn’t wanted.” When she saw Dr. Malikudzu, her only greeting was, “You.”
“I know you’re expecting me.”
“Gavin made it clear that I was to let you see the new boy. You know how he reasons—with a checkbook. I don’t see what business it is of yours really.”
“He was found in my lab.”
“So what?”
“I’m investigating a disappearance.”
“You’re not going to get anything out of him. Besides, his hands were empty when they brought him in. I’m trying to get his evaluation started.”
“Is he sedated?”
“We had to sedate him. You heard him howling.”
“But did the drugs work?”
A sudden yell answered his question. It sounded like the door might open from the blast. The cop backed away and started walking down the hall shaking his head; he was headed toward the crisis ward.
“Linda, show him out. I’ll let Dr. Malikudzu in.” She unlocked the door with a deadpan expression.
“I’d like a few minutes alone if you don’t mind.”
“Be my guest.”
Inside, the smell of urine and feces was as strong as the blast of sound. Difficult to imagine such fierce emanations from such a small man. Fortunately, Dr. Malikudzu was quite accustomed to the reek of hominid effluvia. Coover had crawled back into a corner of the couch, and there he lay with his head thrown back, raging at the ceiling, only occasionally glancing down at the man who had come to share his cell. There was no more yellow gleam in the boy’s eyes; they seemed entirely burnt out.
“I know you’re in there,” Dr. Malikudzu said, not that the flesh-tag implicitly understood human speech. Still, there was a chance that it might have infiltrated the boy’s speech centers and joined forces with him. These were all things he had hoped to ascertain with human subjects.
He took a bottle of Puerto Rican rum from his pocket and held it up to young Coover’s face. The boy quieted instantly, staring into the depths of stasis fluid at the floating speck within, a bit of twisted flesh that resembled nothing so much as a kidney bean.
“Ah, recognition! I could inject you with this fluid, you know—a needle to the heart—and stop your thrashing about in this unfortunate lad. But then there would be an autopsy. There might be one anyway if you’re not careful to live. We must give you time yet to heal. The entry wounds must be painful, yes?” He got close enough to the boy to see blood inside his lips, but it was hard to tell if he’d done that by gnashing his teeth or whether it might have come up from his interior. “Do you know what you’ve got in there? Perhaps I should ask, do you know what you are?”
He was thrilled by the notion that he might actually be communicating with the flesh-tag for the first time. His simian models had been disappointing in this regard. In fact, in none of them had he seen such extreme reactions. As he’d always suspected, the human organism was the only one that would allow the tags to take their full effect. Which meant… the ends of his efforts might be in sight!
“You are a cancer,” he said. “A bit of self-consuming flesh. Or rather, that’s what you were until I got ahold of you. Now you’re something rather more special than that. In a sense, I am your father.”
The boy stared deep into his eyes, head jerking rapidly.
“Yes I am. You should be pleased that your sire is such a genius. It hasn’t been easy to pursue this work. I’ve had four separate rotating groups of graduate students working with me, all of them unaware of the other groups, all convinced—like my patrons—that they were working toward quite different ends. It’s been a jigsaw puzzle, you see, in which only I hold the key piece. I’ve had to invest a bit of unpaid time myself, but I don’t mind. The exposure to radiation, the messing about with chimerae, all part of the job. Do you remember, I tried sending you messages once before? I wrote amusing little codes into chromosomes and let them replicate within your genetic predecessor. I thought you might catch on and reply in kind. Perhaps you’re not that intelligent. Perhaps you’re nothing more than a malignant worm after all.”
The boy kept nodding, a slather of blood on his chin. Suddenly his eyes rolled back and he slumped in a faint, relaxing the rest of his bodily control. The smell worsened only slightly. Dr. Malikudzu backed away, uncapping the rum and dribbling a bit of stasis fluid over the couch—where it could hardly be distinguished from the rest of the slime—while he shook the tiny tag into the palm of his hand. He pinched it by one end and dropped it into the boy’s yawning mouth.