Dragon's Island, page 4
“Normally, we couldn’t.” Gellian peered at him disconcertingly, and then nodded in decision. “But since we need you so badly, I’ll make an exception. If you decide to come back, be here at eight tomorrow morning.”
“Or else I become another black pin on the wall?”
“I didn’t want to be so blunt.” Glancing soberly up at the wall map, Gellian seemed almost apologetic. “I’m quite sure you’re human. I know the maker left San Francisco many years before your birth.”
His fevered eyes swept back to Dane.
“I’m not threatening you,” he added quietly. “I’m simply stating an ugly situation. You’re either with us or against us. This is war, and that’s the way it has to be.”
Deliberately putting down a surge of panic, Dane made himself pause to look at his watch. Ten-thirty. He still had time to find out what that girl wanted, at the Sanderson Service, before he tried to see Messenger. He bent to pick up his brief case, trying not to seem too uneasy with it, and turned quickly toward the door.
“By eight in the morning,” Gellian repeated gently behind him. “I hope you decide to come back.”
He went out to the elevator, trying not to hurry. The glare and reek and chill of enmity went with him. He clutched the brief case desperately, afraid for a moment that Gellian’s agents would try to stop him. But they let him go-
Five
He found a cab at the corner. Sitting uneasily straight as it crawled back uptown through the heavy midmorning traffic, toward the Fortieth Street address of the Sanderson Service, he tried to decide what to do.
He couldn’t go back. Kendrew’s old dream had grown into a stubborn purpose of his own, rooted perhaps in his father’s crusading idealism and his mother’s vivid Eurasian loveliness. In spite of Gellian’s fears, the promise of genetic engineering still seemed too splendid to be destroyed.
If his mother’s blood had been all Caucasian, it occurred to him now, he might have grown up well content with the world as he found it. The pain of genetic accident must have been what forged his own eager hopes of genetic revolution. And it had kindled a defiant independence in him that wouldn’t easily yield to Gellian’s ultimatum.
For Tanya de Jong had carried the chaos of the age written in her genes. Her dark beauty and her sensitive intelligence and her quick emotions had been the gifts of many races. Moody with the restless longings of homeless generations, she came of White Russian fugitives from violence and Dutch Colonial wanderers of commerce, of yellow people and brown driven from their ancient ways by the white man’s passing triumph and already rebellious in exile.
She had been a laboratory technician in one of Manila’s bomb-scarred hospitals when Dr. Philip Belfast arrived there in 1945, an Army surgeon, worn and lonely from the long ordeal of all the islands behind. They fell in love. Deaf to the shocked friends who said it wouldn’t work out, he wanted to marry her.
“But she ran away.” His father’s voice came back to him now, edged with the sad bewilderment with which the old doctor had always spoken of that event and its aftermath.
“She quit her job, and wrote me a desperate little note to say she was going because she didn’t want to hurt me.
“I thought the trouble was only her worry about our racial difference, though we had already agreed that we wouldn’t let that matter—not too much. But I was ordered on to Okinawa before I could talk to her, and I didn’t see her again until I went back to look for her, after the war.
“I found her then, back at work in the same hospital. I could see she still loved me, even though I was American. There hadn’t been any other man. But still she wouldn’t marry me—not until after I made her tell me what the trouble was.
“She thought she was psychic—maybe she was, though I laughed at the notion, then. She claimed she had prophetic dreams. She insisted she had seen her parents die in her dreams, when she was a little girl, the same way they really died in the fist air raid on Manila.
“In the dream that had frightened her away from me, she thought she saw me kneeling, torn with grief, beside an operating table where she lay dead. She was convinced that she was doomed to die young, and she didn’t want to hurt me the way I had been hurt in the dream.
“I didn’t take much stock in any sort of extrasensory perception—not then. I thought she was just a little unstrung from all that had happened to her and her people in the war. Though I don’t think I ever really shook her conviction of that fate waiting, I finally made her understand that her hysterical flight had hurt me as much as anything could.
“Anyhow, she married me.” Dane could see the old surgeon’s wistful smile again, lighted even in his memory with an undying love. “We came back to San Francisco before you were born. She promised to forget those dreams, and I think she did—at least for a while.”
Frowning thoughtfully now in the cab, trying to forget the cold cloud of sensed hostility around him, Dane tried to weigh the consequences of their marriage. It must have damaged his father’s career. He knew his mother had been deeply hurt, many times. Yet neither, he felt, had ever really been sorry.
His mother died the year he was ten. The racial snobs were not to blame for that. The cause had been crushingly incomprehensible to him then—though when he learned about her precognitions, later, it occurred to him that the very effort to deny her doom had helped to cause it, by keeping her as silent about the warning symptoms of her illness as she had learned to be about her dreams.
She died of cancer.
He remembered the smiling hope and the veiled despair, the tight-lipped silences of pain, the desperate surgery. The last day of her life came back to him now with a painful clarity: the pale grace of her emaciated hand waving to him almost gaily as she was wheeled away to the operating room; the rank sweetness of ether in the lonely, busy corridors where he waited forever; the hoarse agony in his father’s voice, saying she would never wake up, because her heart had stopped while she lay under Dr. Huber’s scalpel.
“Why did you let him do it?” In his numbed dismay, he must have been thoughtlessly accusing. “Everybody says you’re the top surgeon here. Why did you let Huber kill her?”
He saw his father’s gray face stiffen, and knew his bitter tone had hurt.
“Huber didn’t kill her, Dane.” His father’s low voice seemed tired and very kind. “The cancer did, and it had already spread too far before that first operation. I watched Huber today, and nobody could have done better. Tanya didn’t have a chance.”
“Why didn’t she?” He felt the cruelty of his questions, yet he couldn’t check their tortured urgency. “You’re a fine doctor. I know you loved her. Why didn’t you—why didn’t somebody give her a chance?”
“Because nobody’s good enough.” The surgeon took his hand gently, to lead him away from the shrunken, sheet-covered body being wheeled out of the operating room. “Because medicine is not yet really a science. We know too many facts, without enough understanding.” >•
They came out of the hospital, away from the dim hush of death into the sunlit street and the clean wind froth the sea. Feeling miserably regretful for his bitter questions, Dane clung hard to his father’s cold fingers, silent until they were in the parking lot.
“But couldn’t there be a science of life?” he whispered hopefully, then. “So that people would never have to be sick, or suffer, or die before they were ready?”
“Some day, maybe.” His father nodded wearily, walking on beyond the parked car as if he hadn’t seen it. “Once I had a friend who dreamed of such a science. I even tried for years to help him work it out. His name for it was genetic engineering.”
“Did he ever do it?”
“I don’t know.” His father kept walking on, away from the car, and still Dane didn’t stop him. “Once he wrote me that he almost had it. But then a tragedy wrecked his life. He disappeared. I never found out where he went, but it looks as if he failed to conquer disease and pain and death. Because people still—”
His father turned suddenly back toward the car, asking in a softer voice if he wouldn’t like to stay with Dr. Huber’s sons until after the funeral. But people still died. Even people like his mother, who had wanted so terribly to keep on living.
“No, Dad, I’ll go on home with you,” he said quickly. “But I’m not going to be a surgeon, after all. I want to be a geneticist, like that old friend of yours. I want to finish the job you worked on with him—so that people needn’t die the way mother did.”
“She always said you’d do something very wonderful.” Fumbling clumsily with the keys, as if he had forgotten how to start the car, his father tried to smile. “But I’m afraid you’ll find the same difficulty in biological research we have in medicine—too many facts illuminated with too little understanding.”
That was the first Dane ever heard of Charles Kendrew. It must have been about that time that his father began to notice those new clues to the fate of the missing geneticist, for it was later that same year that he retired to open the Kendrew Memorial Laboratory.
. Already in slowly failing health, the old surgeon had worked there as desperately as if determined to conquer death before he died. His failure was due, Dane thought now, to that foreseen difficulty. The many related sciences of biology consisted of more facts than any mind could grasp, without some deeper understanding to bring them into focus.
In his own turn, Dane tried just as hard. Too hard, perhaps, completing the thesis for his doctorate before he was 23, and replacing his father as research director not a year later. Though he still felt fit enough, he wondered for a moment if the strain and the failure of intense effort might be half the matter with him today.
He knew their defeats had killed his father, and he had begun to wonder what had turned the successful surgeon back to that once abandoned undertaking, when he found the letters that were in his brief case now. His father had written Messenger the same year Tanya died, as a tattered carbon copy showed:
“Once I had a friend who was trying to mutate new species to order. He disappeared in Mexico, nearly twenty years ago, after a crushing family tragedy. I had believed him dead—until I began to see the recent advertisements of Cadmus, Inc.
“I have since examined some of the remarkable plant products your corporation is shipping from New Guinea. Cotton stronger than nylon. Latex better than any synthetic. Timber superior to mahogany and teak—from trees no botanist has ever described.
“While I know that cultivated plants are always being improved, your amazing progress in New Guinea makes me believe your products must come from entirely new plant species, of the sort my lost friend hoped to create by directed mutation. I am most anxious for news of him. Any confidence will be respected. His name was Charles Ken-drew.”
Messenger’s prompt reply to that inquiry was typed on a crisply expensive gold-colored bond, beneath the New York address of the corporation and a green engraving of the dragon and demigod that was the Cadmus trade mark.
“The origins of the eccentric expert who bred our improved plant strains have always been a mystery to me,” the financier had written. “I’m indeed grateful for your suggestion that he may be your missing friend, and I regret very deeply that it comes several years too late.
“The few pertinent facts I know are these: The man is obviously American. I first met him in Darwin, Australia, when I was there as an Air Forces meteorologist in 1944— some five years, I believe, after your friend vanished. While he was always evasive about his past, he behaved like the victim of some overwhelming misfortune. He never wanted to come home, not even after his health seemed to require a change of climate. While he calls himself Charles Potter, that is probably a nom de guerre.
“Unfortunately, I am unable to make any positive identification from the photographs and physical description you enclosed. The height and the bone structure of the face seem about right, but Charles Potter’s health had already been wrecked, when I first met him, by excessive drinking, and his face disfigured by tropical skin diseases.
“Tragically, the man himself is no longer able to tell us anything. While he is still living in New Guinea, at our experimental plantation on the upper Fly, his mind is hopelessly gone. He is receiving every possible care, but I’m afraid he can’t live much longer.
“That’s all I know, and I leave the conclusion to you. The open possibility that this sick man may be your lost friend, however, leads me to mention something else which ought to interest you. Ever since Potter became ill, we in the company have wanted to set up a laboratory in which his unfinished researches can be carried on, and his papers edited for publication.
“In view of your past experience, as well as your personal interest, I am venturing to ask your advice. If you are interested, wire me at once.”
That promise of Charles Potter’s papers must have been enough to win his father. Though Dane had found no copy.’ of any reply, it was later that same year that the surgeon, turned for the second time from his practice to research, becoming director of the new laboratory.
: There were other letters, written later. Carbons of his father’s discouraged reports. Brief notes of encouragement from Messenger, always promising money for some new project. But no other mention, strangely, of Kendrew or Potter or the Cadmus exports from New Guinea.
Had all the financier’s generous gifts to the laboratory been only a cynical device to bribe his father into forgetting the vanished geneticist? He had been trying vainly to avoid that painful suspicion, ever since the unexpected failure of his father’s heart plunged him into the shocking disorder of the old surgeon’s papers and affairs.
His father hadn’t been dishonest. In spite of the auditors, Dane knew that. Never a successful businessman, he had simply failed to keep any adequate accounts, or limit expenses to the endowment funds. Dane had to sell all the precious equipment, besides using up most of his own savings, to meet accumulated bills.
Yet, if those donations hadn’t been some sort of bribe, why had Messenger cut them off so abruptly when his father died? And why else had that correspondence remained hidden in his father’s desk, unmentioned even after Dane became research director?
Those were the questions Dane meant to ask Messenger, when he could see the financier, and he was trying to reserve judgment until he had heard the answers. All his clues were inconclusive. He was hoping for an innocent explanation of his father’s silence, and perhaps even a look at the Potter papers.
Cadmus had grown greater than ever, in these twelve years since Philip Belfast first inquired about his missing friend. Nowadays, the sleek advertising of the corporation no longer mentioned the exciting novelty of its New Guinea products, but only their accepted excellence. Cadmus copra and cotton and latex and hardwoods were staples of world commerce, and even Dane himself had once taken them for granted.
Since his talk with Gellian, however, those profitable exports from New Guinea had become as disturbing to him as that iron tree and its peculiar fruit. His hopes for an honest understanding with Messenger began to flicker. If Charles Kendrew had really been the man Gellian called the maker—and whom Messenger called Charles Potter-^-and if all the vast wealth of Cadmus had grown from a secret exploitation of genetic engineering—
The consequences of that proposition became too alarming to pursue, and Dane felt relieved to escape them for the time, when his taxi stopped below the tall new office building on Fortieth, at Nan Sanderson’s business address.
Six
The small reception room on the nineteenth floor was empty when he entered, yet it seemed a sanctuary. Dane
Belfast escaped that haunting danger-sense at the door, as if he had come somehow into a safe refuge. He was looking at the neat glass desk and the chrome-and-plastic chairs, trying to surmise the nature of the Sanderson Service, when a tall girl walked out of the room beyond.
“Dane!” She looked at him with a curiously anxious intentness, and then smiled approvingly. “I’m Nan Sanderson.”
He smiled back, at the friendly light in her eyes. He liked the clean planes of her tan face and the smooth up-sweep of her red-brown hair and the trim simplicity of her gray business suit, but those surface things couldn’t explain the way she made him feel.
Somehow, she made a tremendous sense of relieved security well up inside him. That surge of feeling took his breath and closed his throat, so that for a moment he couldn’t speak. He stood staring blankly at her tawny loveliness, thinking of something that had happened long ago in San Francisco.
He didn’t know why he should think of it now, because it was one of the painful childhood incidents he had always tried to forget. Nine years old, he had been invited to a children’s party at Dr. Huber’s home. Two small girls were choosing sides for some game on the lawn, and they left him standing alone at the end, unchosen. He started uneasily toward the one he thought would have to take him, but she shook her prim curls scornfully.
“We don’t want you.” The agony of that rejection had returned in his dreams for many years, and even now he winced again from her shrill cruelty. “ ’Cause you ain’t white!”
“But I am too white! ” He held out his hands indignantly to show they were no darker than her own. “My father’s Dr. Belfast, and he’s white as yours.”
“But your mama ain’t,” she informed him stonily. “And so you ain’t—no matter how you look.” All the children were turning to stare, the way cruel bystanders were later to stare in his dreams. “And my mama says it’s a shame Dr. Belfast threw himself away on her,” the pitiless child went on. “ ’Cause she’s part Chinaman and part nigger and part
God knows what!” Her curls tossed haughtily. “And that’s why we don’t want you.”
Speechless with shock and pain, he had been dimly aware of flustered adults trying to smooth the incident over. His mother wasn’t Negro at all, but only part Eurasian. The children must let him play because he was Dr. Belfast’s boy, and anyhow his mother was cultured and charming and half Caucasian. The other little girl grudgingly agreed to choose him, but suddenly he didn’t want to play. His mother was as good as anybody, and he didn’t want apologies or pity. He said politely that it was time for him to go home, and thanked Mrs. Huber and his little hostess properly, and walked stiffly away alone.
