Dr. Franklin's Island Read online

“Next time you two do that, I’ll imagine the place full of water, and drown you both—”

  “I’m really sorry! I couldn’t control it. I . . . I boiled over. He provoked me.”

  “You did provoke her, Arnie.”

  There was a pause, while we all recovered.

  “This ‘white place’ is dangerous,” I said. “Place, state of mind, whatever you want to call it. I think we should stay out of it. I think we’re better off as monsters.”

  The other two looked as if they agreed with me. Then Miranda said, in a quiet voice, “Tell us about the antidote, Arnie. Not that we believe you.”

  “The whole idea was to turn us into mutants,” I added. “To see if he could do it, if he could make us into superhumans. Why would he want to turn us back?”

  Arnie looked at us as if we were idiots. “You’re kidding. Of course he wants the process to be reversible! Eventually, when it works. Nobody would want to be half-fish or half-bird for life, would they?”

  I don’t think he realized how cruel he was being. I truly hated Arnie, at that moment.

  Miranda took it differently. She said, her eyes bright, “You mean . . . there is a purpose in what happened to us? It’s not just crazy and cruel? How much do you know, Arnie? He talked about interplanetary travel. He said that was his goal. Is that actually the truth?”

  I looked at the ground, feeling very sad. Poor Miranda. She was trying to keep the hope out of her voice, but it was there. After everything he’d done to her, Miranda still wanted to believe in Dr. Franklin’s dreams. I understood why, but I thought she was totally deluded.

  Arnie shook his head. “Nah, nothing like that. Don’t be daft. Interplanetary travel? That’s science fiction. I reckon if they manage to iron out the problems, they’ll be selling their formula to an exotic holiday company.”

  “Holiday company?” I repeated, confused. “What on earth do you mean?”

  “They talk in front of me, you see. I’ve heard a lot of things. He’s hoping to reduce the timescale of the first change, which is the remaining big hitch. When he’s got that down to a few hours, he’ll have a commercial proposition. Imagine it. You take a pill, or a couple of injections. Like being vaccinated. They put you in a flotation tank overnight, while the ugly stuff is going on. You wake up in a five-star underwater hotel, on your ocean safari. Or in some kind of luxury cliffside flying lodge, on the wall of the Grand Canyon. Spend two weeks exploring the deep ocean, or flying like a bird, then go through the same thing in reverse. The way it works now is no good. What happened to you two is a bust, no one would buy it. But I can see people paying for the improved version of the change, in the future. Can’t you?”

  “I hate you, Arnie,” said Miranda. “You are lower than dirt.”

  I thought of our days and weeks of pain and terror, of all the hideous things that had been done to us. I thought of the morning when I’d seen Miranda’s breastbone bursting through the flesh and skin. And this would be reduced to a few hours’ sleep, a holiday in a brochure.

  I thought of us, Miranda and me, as discards, spoiled attempts to be thrown in the bin.

  “Sorry,” said Arnie, grinning defiantly. “I didn’t mean to give offense. Look, forget the dumb Star Trek day-dream. Face up to reality. I want to do a deal. If I get you the antidote, will you take me with you?”

  That was so like Arnie. If he was begging for his life, he would have to be annoying about it. Miranda and I looked at each other. It was ironic, Arnie asking us for help. He was still human. We were the ones in serious, horrible trouble.

  Miranda said, “Are you going to go on spying for him? Reporting on us?”

  Arnie licked his lips, and shuddered. “Yes.”

  “Then you can rescue yourself!”

  “Miranda, I have to. You don’t know how it works. I’d have told you what was happening from the start, only I couldn’t. I didn’t know how.”

  “Liar. You’re working for Dr. Franklin. You don’t want us to escape because then you’d be next in line for the treatment. You’re afraid that if you don’t do what he says, he’ll turn you into a monster anyway. A monster like us.”

  “Yeah!” shouted Arnie. “I’m afraid. Not everyone can be as brave as you, Wonder Girl. I’m afraid that if I don’t cooperate, not that I have any choice, something worse will happen. Look, I’ll tell him as little as I can. He won’t find out that we’ve made contact, if I can help it. Don’t try to escape, and I’ll try to get the antidote to you.”

  “I told you,” said Miranda. “There is no escape plan.”

  “But I know there is. I know you never give up. Please say you’ll take me with you. When you’re human again, you’ll come to the ward and you’ll get me out? Please?”

  Miranda stood up, and started pacing around. She kept looking at Arnie, and he kept looking at her. It was the same as on the beach. I didn’t think Miranda was totally in the right, but I didn’t want to side with Arnie, so I stayed quiet. At last she came back, and stood there, arms folded and her head on one side, looking very birdlike.

  “You’re Dr. Franklin’s stooge. You’re a treacherous snake, and you’ve been allowed to stay human so you’ll spy on us and help him play his mind games. How can we possibly trust you? But if by any chance there is such a thing as this antidote—”

  Then she did something horrible. She lifted one leg, and stretched it out. The rest of her stayed the same as Miranda the castaway, a sunburned skeleton with long black raggedy hair, in her old gray combat shorts and black T-shirt. But the leg became her bird’s leg: thin and scaled and leathery. She wasn’t out of control this time. She was doing it on purpose, she was showing Arnie who was in charge. The leg stretched out, impossibly long and muscular. The bird’s foot, with its long, strong, scaly fingers and fearsome talons, took hold of him by the front of his T-shirt and hauled him to his feet.

  “You bring it to us. You get that stuff to us, some way. Or I will kill you. I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I swear I will kill you.”

  chapter ten

  For a couple of days after that, nothing happened. We stayed in our animal bodies. We didn’t talk to each other on radio telepathy much. I swam up and down the pool, being my fish-self, thinking long thoughts. Miranda flew about the crater valley. Sometimes I’d see her overhead, or hopping on the ground outside our enclosure. Sometimes I’d hear her shrieking somewhere else in the compound. I’d know she’d been getting too near one of the orderlies, and they’d chased her away. We only called each other up last thing at night, to cut our imaginary notch on the imaginary coconut palm. We didn’t care if we were overheard doing that.

  It’s strange how things turn out the opposite of what you’d expect. You’d have thought “the white place” would have been a wonderful discovery, a place where we could go (if only in our minds) where we could remember what being human was like. But it made everything worse, not better.

  You’d have thought finding out that the experiment was still going on would have cheered us up. It was nasty to know that Arnie was Dr. Franklin’s spy, but at least we hadn’t been abandoned like pieces of rubbish. But it didn’t work like that. Sometimes it’s better to have no hope. You can find a way to live with what you have left. Before we caught Arnie, we’d been almost happy, as Semi-the-fish and Miranda-the-bird. Maybe we were going to live our lives as weird animals in Dr. Franklin’s zoo, but we weren’t in pain, we had our radio telepathy, and at least we were near each other. Now Arnie had told us we could be human again, and we didn’t believe him but it was terrible. It was like someone hitting you on a bruise. It was like someone making you try to walk with a broken leg.

  On Day Eighty-seven, a small plastic tube appeared on the tiled rim of my pool.

  I spotted it first and called to Miranda—not by telepathy but by slapping my tail on the water.

  Neither of us knew how it had got there. Our animal selves were daytime creatures. We’d found out that we couldn’t stay awake at night, no matter how ha
rd we tried. Miranda would roost in the mango tree, at the end of the pool farthest from the gate, where the shelter of the trees and bushes was thickest. I would let myself sink a little, into the lower water, and drift there. Someone must have sneaked into the enclosure under cover of darkness, and left us this little mystery. But who? Arnie had told us he was a prisoner. The tube was about the length of my little finger (the finger I had when I was a girl, I mean), and about a finger wide. It was clear plastic with a white screw top, and half filled with a greenish white powder. Miranda picked it up in her foot. In my mind, her voice said softly, “Semi. What do you think?”

  This was too complicated for sign language. We had to risk being overheard.

  “If it’s the antidote,” I said (thinking about the antidote had been a big part of my long fish-thoughts since we’d talked to Arnie), “then I expect it’s some form of our original DNA. You can dry out DNA. I know there’s such a thing as powdered DNA, and DNA pellets. If we were dosed with a strong infusion of our original girl genetic information, I suppose it could take over again and crowd out the altered DNA. I don’t know. Something like that might work.”

  Miranda-the-bird looked at me hard. “So this would be powdered Semirah? Or powdered Miranda? Or both?”

  “It might be.”

  “The tube is cold, very cold.”

  “They probably keep it in a fridge. It can’t have been here long.”

  “How are we supposed to know what to do with it?”

  “We’d better ask Arnie,” I said.

  We were both silent for a minute. We were listening (that’s the best way to describe it) for the eavesdropper on our telepathic link. If he was there, he was keeping very quiet. So we called him, both of us calling his name in our minds.

  It took a couple of tries before he answered.

  “Okay,” said Arnie’s voice in my “head”—inside my delta-shape me, but humans say “head”—“the stuff is for Semi. It won’t do anything for Miranda, so don’t try sharing it. I haven’t managed to get hold of Miranda’s antidote yet. It’ll be more difficult. It doesn’t matter, because Semi’s will take longer to work. You have to sprinkle this powder into the pool, and she has to swallow it. It’ll take several doses. You’ll find the tubes on the side of the pool, the same way as this one.”

  “How did the tube get in here, Arnie?” said Miranda’s voice on the chatline, coldly. “And what’s this about stealing from the labs? You told us you were a prisoner.”

  “There’s a friendly lab technician. I don’t completely trust him, but he feels sorry for us and he’ll do things. When Semi’s had enough of the antidote, there’s a plan to get her out of the pool and away to safety. That’s all I can say.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him to get Miranda’s antidote?” I asked.

  Silence . . . Then Arnie’s voice said, “I told you, getting hold of Miranda’s stuff is going to be more difficult. I’m working on a plan.” He sounded very uneasy and shifty. “I can’t talk anymore. Remember, they’ve got me wired up. Whatever I tell them, they can see what’s been happening by looking at the brain-wave printout. They’ll spot that I’ve been talking as well as listening, if we don’t keep it snappy. Then they’ll know I’m double-crossing them. I have to shut up now.”

  The best thing about nailing Arnie was knowing that he was still alive. I could understand how Miranda felt, but even so, that was good news. We three had crawled onto the beach together, on the night of the plane crash. We’d been through the first shock of the castaway experience together. It made me feel more human, to know that he’d survived. The worst thing was that it left us exactly where we’d been before. We couldn’t get rid of him: and we couldn’t trust him. We still had nowhere to hide.

  “Maybe it really is more difficult to get hold of your cure,” I said.

  “Or maybe he’s getting his revenge, because I scared the living daylights out of him.” She half opened her wings, a kind of bird-monster shrug of the shoulders. “It doesn’t matter. If you can be human again, that would be a miracle enough. We can think about what happens to me later. If you can get out . . . well, a bird can always fly.”

  She hopped closer to the water.

  “What shall I do? This could be dangerous. I don’t see any way we can spread it on a small part of you, and see what happens. Do you want time to think about it?”

  We both understood that we had no way of knowing what was in that tube. Arnie could be lying, on instructions from the boss. This could be another of Dr. Franklin’s mind games. Or Arnie and his friendly technician could have got hold of the wrong chemicals. Or anything. The stuff in the tube could kill me, or plunge me into worse tortures than ever.

  “There’s nothing to think about,” I said, quickly, so I wouldn’t lose my nerve. “Do it!”

  Miranda held the tube in her foot, and twisted at the cap with her strong beak.

  My heart was in my mouth, my whole body was shivering with fear and anticipation. The cap came off, and went spinning away. Miranda hopped right up to the rim, and shook the powder into the water.

  It fell into the sunlit blue, in little swirls and sparkles.

  I dropped under it, and all the swirls and sparkles flowed into my mouth. The water flowed out again through my gills, the powder stayed behind. I knew I had swallowed it, like a mouthful of plankton.

  Nothing happened. I felt nothing.

  I hovered there, staring up at Miranda, until we heard the rumble of wheels. An orderly was arriving with our food. I glided away, and Miranda flapped up into a tree.

  When the man had left again, Miranda was nowhere to be seen. I thought she’d gone for a flight. Then I spotted her, hunched in some tall bamboo grass near the fence, halfway down the pool. I swam over and tried to catch her attention. I even leaped out of the water, which is something I can do if I feel like it, but I don’t because it’s too spectacular, and it makes me feel a bit crazy. (It’s my crush that fishing boat trick.) She didn’t take any notice. Then I remembered. It may sound strange, but I’d forgotten, for a moment, that I had the power of human speech. I flipped those mental switches, and called her up on Radio Mutant.

  “Hey, Miranda!”

  No coverage.

  “Miranda?” I repeated.

  She didn’t seem to know I was there.

  I swam away, feeling very worried.

  She was all right later. But it was a warning.

  Dr. Franklin had said, “The animal traits are very strong.” How long would we be able to take the strain of trying to stay human, under these impossible conditions? How long before we lost our minds?

  Day Ninety

  Something strange happened today. Skinner came to see us.

  Things had been quiet. I’d been swimming around, trying to imagine that I felt some change in myself. Miranda had been playing her usual restless games with sticks and leaves, and chasing a few butterflies. We hadn’t been using our radio telepathy at all, except for the notch-cutting ceremony: partly because we knew Arnie would be listening, and partly because the uncertainty was too painful to discuss. Either I was going to become human again . . . or I wasn’t.

  Miranda was out flying when Skinner turned up. He was looking rather shabby. His white coat had grubby stains on the collar and cuffs, and a pen had leaked in the breast pocket. He needed a shave too. He came sidling up to the fence, peering around as if he was afraid one of the orderlies would spot him and chase him away. I came up and looked at him. We shifted along, him on one side of the mesh and me on the other, until we were beside the gate, where there weren’t any flowers or bushes between the fence and the rim of the pool, and we had a good view of each other.

  “Hello, Semi,” he said. “Where’s Miranda?”

  Imagine a teenager-sized manta ray shrugging vaguely.

  I didn’t care if he understood me or not.

  “I’m not supposed to be here,” he told me, glancing to and fro again. “It’s bad for the experiment. But I’m a ba
d boy. I’ve not been myself since I tried to let you two go.” He laughed miserably. “Next thing you know, I’ll be letting that jungle cat loose. . . . Can you hear it howl from here?”

  Yes we could, sometimes, especially at night. It wasn’t a very comforting lullaby.

  “How have you been getting on, in your new home?”

  I glided up and down, and smacked my tail on the water. Skinner took hold of the fence in both his hands, and leaned his face between them, so the mesh was pressing into his cheeks and up against his glasses.

  “It’s different close up,” he whispered. “I thought I knew what seeing you changed would be like, but this is bad, this is real . . . I remember you, Semi. I remember what you looked like. I think I remember seeing you smile, once—”

  I believe Semi-the-fish has the same eyes as Semi-the-girl, at least Miranda says so: although they work much better, if differently. So imagine a teenager-sized manta ray, with dark blue sheeny skin (where the human girl’s skin used to be naturally brown); and brown human eyes looking out of the front of the ray’s smooth winged shape. A girl squashed flat, her legs and arms fused to her body and then rolled out, like plasticine, into the delta shape of a big ray fish. That’s what Skinner saw. I was used to the idea of the girl-fish. But no wonder he was staring at me with sickened horror.

  I wished he’d go away, but I wanted him to stay. I liked seeing him suffer, to tell you the absolute truth. There was no chance that Dr. Franklin was going to have any painful pangs of guilt, but Skinner was better than nothing.

  “Are you there inside the fish, Semi? Do you remember being human? We can’t be sure. Humanlike brain activity doesn’t prove that you can really think and feel, like a human girl. Oh God, I hope you don’t! It would be too cruel.”

  I didn’t know what to do. According to Arnie’s story, Skinner should know perfectly well that I had a human mind. He’d been getting reports of Miranda and me chatting to each other. But his gibbering remorse looked genuine, and I couldn’t resist feeding it. I zoomed myself backward from the side, zoomed back up to the rim: stopped myself half a centimeter before I rammed the tiles, and smacked my tail down hard.