The Frankenstein Factory Read Free Page A

different from Dr. MacKenzie, only more direct.
    By early afternoon Freddy was drinking steadily, giving no indication that he’d be performing a transplant of a human brain in a matter of hours. There were still a number of blanks to be filled in for Earl, so he sought out the unmemorable Dr. Armstrong to talk with.
    “I walk two miles every day,” Armstrong told him. “If you want to talk, you’ll have to walk with me.”
    “Where can you walk for two miles on this island?”
    “Around and around,” the doctor replied. “Actually once around the shoreline does it pretty close. The island’s horseshoe shape makes for a lengthy shoreline.”
    The day was warming nicely, with no trace of the morning mist, and Earl enjoyed the freshness of the air in his lungs. Back in New York the air was too often rank with the ozone purifiers they sprayed from helicopters. At times it was enough to make him wish for the old polluted days.
    “I didn’t even realize it was shaped like a horseshoe,” Earl admitted as they walked.
    “How did you think it got its name?”
    “I don’t think about names so much.”
    Armstrong grunted. “You should. They shape our lives. My name has shaped my life. Do you know what it was like to be born with the name Armstrong in the second half of the twentieth century? There’d already been a radio hero named Jack Armstrong, an all-American boy. Then in 1969 we had Neil Armstrong as the first person to set foot on the moon. My father kept reminding me of them all the time I was growing up. Sometimes he’d even throw in Henry Armstrong, the boxer, and Louis Armstrong, the band leader. He’d always say I had to live up to the name. I suppose that’s why I became a doctor in the first place.”
    “What about Hobbes? When did you link up with him?”
    “Earlier this year. The International Cryogenics Institute has a good reputation, you know.”
    “A reputation for being financially successful,” Earl corrected.
    “It’s the same thing. Actually, I was surprised he wanted me. Hobbes has been running the show pretty much by himself these past years.”
    “You don’t need a large staff to keep a few dozen bodies cold,” Earl pointed out. “It’s done by machine.”
    The doctor sighed. “These days almost everything’s done by machine. They say in a few years even simple operations may be performed by computers.”
    “I hope I’m not around to see that.”
    They strolled along the beach past the boathouse, watching a group of sea birds swoop in low over the water. “Those are terns,” Armstrong said, “diving for their dinner.”
    “Do you think they’ll succeed?”
    Armstrong glanced up. “The terns?”
    “No, the team. Do you think this multiple transplant will work?”
    “It’s always a possibility.”
    “O’Connor hardly seems the sort for a brain surgeon.”
    “I’ve seen him work. He settles right down at the operating table.”
    “But all that business about this being a Frankenstein Factory. …”
    “He didn’t simply dream up the Frankenstein image, you know. The South African grocer, Louis Washkansky, the first man in history to receive a heart transplant, joked on television, ‘I’m a Frankenstein now. I’ve got somebody else’s heart.’ He wasn’t quite accurate, because Frankenstein wasn’t the name of the monster. And Washkansky lived only eighteen days, far less than the monster.”
    “Still …”
    “Let’s face it—we’re the modern equivalents of Dr. Frankenstein. If this first operation is successful, we’ll have created a whole new person—a body and a brain and other organs brought together from a half-dozen sources. That’s just what he was doing in Mary Shelley’s novel. And we could well become a factory if Hobbes decides to extend the technique to the other cryos he’s got stashed away down there.”
    “But the people who asked to be frozen—the dead ones whose relatives had to pay the upkeep for all these years—certainly