"Do you see what I see on the wall behind you?" Joanna questioned. She pointed.
Deborah looked over her shoulder, and her face lit up. "A phone]"
The women dashed for the phone. Deborah got it first and put the receiver to her ear. Joanna watched her with great anticipation until Deborah's expression became one of disgust, and she hit the disconnect button several times in a row. Deborah hung up. "No deal! They've turned off the phones."
"I'm not surprised," Joanna said.
"Nor am I," Deborah admitted.
"Let's look for the truck," Joanna said.
Leaving the stairway door slightly ajar, the women skirted the animal feed and the hay and walked to the nearest door. Deborah opened it and shined in the flashlight.
"My word!" Deborah exclaimed.
"What is it?" Joanna asked, trying to see over Deborah's shoulder.
"It's another laboratory," Deborah said with amazement. She had not expected a laboratory, and the transition from a barn to super high tech over a single threshold was dizzying. The lab wasn't nearly as large as the one in the hospital but appeared to be almost equally well equipped.
Deborah let go of the door and stepped into the room. Joanna followed. Deborah moved her light from one piece of equipment to another, seeing such things as DNA sequencers, a scanning electron microscope, and polypeptide synthesizers. It was a molecular biologist's dream come true.
"Shouldn't we be looking for the truck?" Joanna asked.
"In a minute," Deborah said. She walked over to an incubator and looked in at the petri dishes. They were the same as she'd been using that day in the main lab, and she gathered they were doing nuclear transfer here as well. Then her light caught a large plate-glass window dividing a separate room off from the main part of the lab.
Deborah started back toward this room. Joanna followed to avoid being left in the dark.
"Deborah!" Joanna complained. "You're sidetracking."
"I know," Deborah said. "But every time I think I have a general picture of what they are doing at this Wingate Clinic, it turns out they are doing a lot more. I didn't expect another lab here at this farm, and certainly not one this well equipped."
"It's time for professionals,' Joanna pleaded. "We have enough information to justify a search warrant. What we have to do is get ourselves out of here."
Deborah put the lens of the flashlight directly against the plate-glass divider to avoid the glare while illuminating the room beyond. "And here's yet another surprise. This looks like a fully operational autopsy room like the ones they use for people but with a very small table. What in heaven's name is it doing in a barn?"
"Come on!" Joanna urged with growing irritation.
"Just let me check this out,' Deborah said. "It will only take a second. There's a refrigerated compartment like in a morgue."
Joanna rolled her eyes in frustration as Deborah pushed through the autopsy room's door. Joanna watched through the glass partition as Deborah walked over to the compartment and unlatched the door. Except for the light now coming back out through the glass divider from Deborah's flashlight, Joanna was in the dark. She glanced back at the door out of the lab and briefly entertained the idea of searching for a truck on her own, but she decided it was foolish without the flashlight.
Mumbling expletives, Joanna followed Deborah into the small autopsy room with the intent of demanding that Deborah come to her senses, but that goal was quickly forgotten. Deborah had the tray in the refrigerated compartment pulled out and was transfixed by what was on it. Joanna couldn't see what it was, but she could tell that Deborah was trembling by the way she held the light.
"What is it?" Joanna asked.
"Come and look!" Deborah said in a quavering voice.
"Maybe you should just tell me," Joanna said. "Remember, I'm not a biologist like you."
"You have to see this," Deborah said. "There's no way I could describe it."
Joanna swallowed nervously. She took a breath and walked over beside Deborah and made herself look down.
"Ugh!" Joanna muttered as her upper lip involuntarily pulled back in disgust. She was looking at five newborn infants with bloated umbilical vessels and extremely thick, dark lanugo. The faces were flat and broad and the eyes tiny. The noses were mere stubs with the nares oriented vertically. Their appendages ended in paddlelike extremities with minute digits. Their heads were crowned with a shock of black hair accentuated with minute but definite white forelocks.
"It's Paul Saunders clones again,' Joanna sneered.
"I'm afraid so," Deborah said. "But with a new twist. I think what he's doing down here for his stem-cell research is cloning his own cells into pig oocytes, and then gestating them in pigs."
Joanna reached out and took a hold of Deborah's arm. She needed momentary support. Deborah had been right about the Wingate Clinic. This new discovery indicated that Paul Saunders and his team were operating a quantum leap beyond the realm of reasonable or even anticipated ethics. The egotism and intellectual conceit required were simply beyond Joanna's comprehension.
Deborah slid the tray back into the refrigerated compartment and slammed the door. "Let's find a damn truck!"
With indignant anger helping to overcome the shock of their recent discovery, the women retraced their steps back into the barn proper. Emerging from the laboratory, their presence again caused a stirring among the animals. Previously it had been mainly the pigs close to the stairway door which had become aroused. Now it was more generalized with even the cows adding to the growing din.
The women went from door to door until they found a passageway leading to what they assumed would be a garage. But it turned out to be something more. With the light from two red exit signs, they could see it was a hangar. Bathed in the ruby glow was an Aerospatial turbojet helicopter.
"There's our answer, if we could only fly it,' Deborah said. She stood for a moment longingly admiring the craft.
"Come on,' Joanna urged. "I think there's a garage beyond this building."
Joanna turned out to be right, and when they went through the next door, they were rewarded to see a tractor and a dump truck. Both women headed for the truck.
"Keys be there!" Deborah prayed out loud as she mounted the truck's running board and got the door open. She swung herself up into the cab. Frantically her fingers searched for keys while Joanna held the light. Deborah checked along the steering column, then along the dash. She found the ignition key slot but no keys.
"Damn!" Deborah cursed and hit the steering wheel with the heel of her hand. "I suppose we could hotwire this thing if we only knew how." She glanced down at Joanna.
"Don't look at me," Joanna said. "I have no idea, not the slightest!"
"Let's go back to that office we saw in the barn," Deborah suggested. "Maybe the keys are there."
Deborah climbed out of the truck. The women retraced their steps back to the barn, giving the helicopter another longing look as they passed through the hangar.
As they came into the barn proper, the animals became even more agitated.
"They must think it's meal time," Deborah commented. The women reached the door to the office when they heard the unmistakable sound of a vehicle pulling up outside the barn. They'd also caught a glimpse of the headlights briefly coming through the windows of the door as the car turned before coming to a stop. "Oh no! We're going to have company!" Deborah rasped.
"Get back to the stairs!" Joanna cried.
The women bolted for the stairs, but they didn't make it. The barn door was rapidly keyed open and a figure burst within. The first thing he did was snap on the all the lights, catching the women more than twenty feet from their goal. All they could do was duck behind the cartons, hay bales, and feed sacks and hunker down while the man made his rounds among the stalls. They could hear him carrying on a continuous monologue with the animals, demanding among other things who was the culprit for getting everybody riled up.