The Frankenstein Factory Read Free

Earl decided he’d have made a good spy. “Did O’Connor come too?” he asked.
    “Not yet,” Hobbes said. “I hope the damn fool remembers it’s tonight.”
    “We can scarcely proceed without him,” MacKenzie commented. He reached into his pocket to extract a slender pipe. Seeing him light it, Tony Cooper took out another cigarette.
    “I have confidence in his arrival,” Lawrence Hobbes said. He walked to the wall and pulled down a detailed medical chart of the human body. “Now, gentlemen—and Miss Morgan—shall we begin?”
    Earl cleared his throat. “I guess I need a bit of the background. You didn’t tell me a great deal when you hired me.”
    Lawrence Hobbes smiled thinly, looking more like a schoolmaster than ever. “What did I tell you?”
    “That you wanted motion pictures and tape recordings of a revolutionary type of transplant operation, to be performed in secret on this island.”
    “And that is correct, Mr. Jazine, as far as it went. I have assembled the experts here. Some, like these three distinguished doctors, have been living here for months, examining the problem. Others, like Cooper and Miss Morgan, arrived only yesterday. You and Dr. O’Connor are scheduled for today. The operation—the experiment—takes place tonight.”
    “Isn’t it customary to perform important surgery in the morning, when the patient has had the advantages of a night’s sleep?”
    “Our patient has had the advantage of thirty years’ sleep,” Hobbes replied.
    “Thirty—”
    “You are familiar with the aims of the International Cryogenics Institute, Mr. Jazine?”
    “Certainly. You froze people at the moment of death and stored their bodies against a future time when they could be revived. There have been a number of other practitioners but ICI is the most successful financially.”
    “Quite correct.” He turned to the white-haired surgeon. “Dr. MacKenzie, please tell him what we intend to do this night.”
    MacKenzie cleared his throat. “We’re taking the best of the specimens from the vault—a young man who died of a brain tumor at age twenty-six—and we plan to transplant all necessary organs to his body. Surgery will be performed in a cryogenic state, following which the body temperature will be gradually increased. When it reaches the desired level, the heart will be stimulated with an electric shock and the patient will live once more.”
    “Fantastic,” was all Earl Jazine could say.
    “But nothing happens if Freddy O’Connor doesn’t get here,” Tony Cooper pointed out. He was not quite so handsome with his clothes on, Earl decided. “Freddy’s our brain man.”
    “Brain?”
    “Brain surgeon,” Hobbes explained. “Naturally we must replace the tumored brain, along with certain other organs.”
    “Isn’t that difficult?”
    “O’Connor has had great success with animals,” Vera Morgan volunteered. “I’ve heard him lecture on the subject.”
    Another one of those lights started flashing near the ceiling, only this time it was green. Lawrence Hobbes didn’t go into a panic. He merely said, “That’s Hilda signaling a new arrival. It better be Freddy O’Connor.”
    It was.
    A few minutes later he swaggered into the conference room and dropped his free-form suitcase in a heap on the floor. “How the hell are you?” he asked to no one and everyone. “How’s life in the Frankenstein Factory? What say, Tony? You been fuckin’ our Miss Vera while you waited for me?”

TWO
    E ARL QUICKLY LEARNED THAT Freddy O’Connor was not a man to take anything very seriously. He was a red-haired Irishman who liked to drink and curse, and he especially enjoyed riding Tony Cooper about his relationship with Vera. Earl wondered if he was seeing the remains of a love affair, the final embers of some bitter triangle. But then he decided that Freddy O’Connor would always be that way around a beautiful woman, especially someone else’s beautiful woman. Perhaps he was not that much