Mark Rich - Human Lives Saved

Illustration by Laurie Harden

“ Shot you?” she said.

I guided her fingertips to the wound.

“Oh, Fred,” she said. “When?”

“At the end.”

“When he—?”

I nodded before remembering her long witness upon night: Veronica could hear and feel, not see.

“Yes,” I said. “Before he gave up. It made him give up.”

Then, after a longer moment: “No. No. It didn’t. How can I say that? It was me. Me. I made him give up!”

I said this and felt glad she coldd hear and feel, not see.

He stood at the plate window with hands entwined gently at the back of his tweed, an Auguste Rodin bronze named Contemplation, in corporate clothing.

He watched those outside.

From where I stood I could see their signs: We’re Animals Too! Prevent Cruelty! Don’t KILL For CURES. They gathered Friday afternoons and Saturdays in an average week. Today they mustered at mid-week to coincide with media coverage of a breakthrough. Of what level of breakthrough, they possessed no knowledge. Cameras would soon cover building and grounds; lenses might light briefly on bodies, faces and signs; and a few of the crews might nod their heads to hear a word, thrusting a microphone forward. That mattered; nothing else.

We had released nothing to attract them; at least nothing beyond essentials, only hinting a major story was in the wind.

Robert Means’s shoulders shifted slightly—not in a sigh, for Robert never sighed, to my knowledge, but in the barest of shrugs, as a kind of physical signal: he had finished a thought.

“Do you think they’ll be surprised?” I said.

He looked at me. People misjudge him by his appearance. He carries barely a pound of extra flesh on his body, both due to physical regimen and metabolism; yet he appears, at first glance, as a soft, overweight man, one whose gaze over the twilight years made him opt for luxury while luxury still possessed meaning. His face rounds outward. People usually change their estimations, seeing the normal physique below: but that face, with its cheeks, its fleshy chin, even its slightly fleshy brows, give the uncanny sense of being a mismatch. It throws people. Sometimes Means uses that off-guard moment to get past the defenses of opponents.

“Surprised?” he said, lifting the corners of his full lips. “I suppose so. Though they may not get the point.”

“Expectation of conflict?” I said.

“Yes.”

We had talked of it before, how you can agree with someone who expects a fight, and despite agreement still be forced into fighting.

“I’d think it would please them.”

“So would I. By the way, Fred, I hear of a coincidence—that it’s Tony’s birthday. Maybe we should take him for a beer. We could go to Joe’s. Eighteen, is it?”

“Still not old enough to take him to—”

“If it was old enough for us—”

“Laws change.”

“Quicker than human nature, yes, they do.”

I tapped a finger on the sheaf of replies I had set on his desk. “Here’s what 1 really came in here for,” I said. “List of who’s coming. Several papers, one interactive, and two TV stations. Maybe some freelancers, maybe some magazine staff. Should be a good session.”

“Good. You think Tony’s up for it?”

“The press conference? He’ll be a hit.”

“No, I mean for Joe’s.”

I laughed. “Robert, he isn’t old enough!”

“I have an I.D. to say otherwise. I think it’s time he met our man.”

“I don’t see why—”

“Yes, you do. He should meet Joe. And no better place than there. Or time than now.” Robert looked piercingly at me. “What do you think? Don’t you think it’s time Joe came back to us?”

Like a punch in the midriff in the middle of a joke: he took me by surprise.

“He won’t,” I said, and felt a tightening, and a sadness, at the thought.

“Not just laws change,” Robert said. He returned to the window to gaze outward. “Maybe even these people will, sometime.” After a moment more of contemplation he lapsed into one of his thinking-aloud spells. “If only they would think about how to approach the whole question,” he said quietly, “instead of going at it all the time as if it was all a matter of heart. Then they’d see how much the medical establishment is holding up paper arguments based on heart strings, too. Both sides are culpable, is what I say. Human lives saved.’ You’ve heard that one, right?” He turned to me. “ ‘Human lives saved.’ Chimp research saves X-number of human lives.’ The chimps die, of course. And so do all the humans, eventually. That stink about prostate cancer prevention. Remember? Decades of research into prostate cancer, Fred! Animal studies up the wa-zoo! And what came of it?—men were subjected to radical treatments—and they were treated successfully —and the doctors could proudly and truthfully say: X-number of human lives saved.’ ”

“Sounds like good science.”

“It does. Sounds great till you learn that, yes, lives were ‘saved,’ but that once ‘saved’ those men lived an average of one-half to one and a half days longer. That’s an average, Fred. The misery! The pain of those men—and those animals! For the sake of saying ‘X-number of human lives saved!’ ”

“You’re beginning to sound like your opposition!”

“No! Exactly the opposite! I know the difficulties.”

“Of course,” I said, “it all may change.” I had Tony’s work in mind. “The point may become moot.”

“Or get worse,” he said. I sat morosely self-absorbed, unlike the driver and two other passengers in the semi-PV we rode downtown from the labs.

The press conference went strangely well. The simulated tissue dissection had the med-reporters going nuts. A computing magazine’s reporters materialized despite having said they would skip it: and their hands ended up typing on pads like teams of sprinting spiders.

We had all harbored worries: things invariably go awry, when a project that works in the privacy of a laboratory moves onto the public stage. Expected results come off cockeyed; models break down; excitement simmers and then cools to disappointed afterthought. This time, however, the demonstration flew like crazy. We all felt the wildness in the air and the utter astonishment of the media; because this worked. It felt like a shot of adrenaline straight into the cerebellum. How could we not glow at the babbling, frenzied reaction? Tony moreover shined like a zillion-watt lightbulb. The kid’s charm and brights shimmered like marquee lights down Broadway. The crews from the papers and news and science press lapped it up, kittens at a cream-cup. I loved to see it.

“You know what’s our big problem?” Robert Means said.

He sat in the driver’s seat. Meg Astor, a cell biochemist and systems modeler who has turned herself toward issues in linguistic structure in the past decade, sat next to him. Veronica Speller, six years my senior but with natural color in her hair considerably less streaked with respectable gray than mine, and a mathematician of the first candle, held my hand in the back. Me, I rank among the tops in human interface system development, thanks to Robert’s guidance over the last six grueling and intensive years. We made a brilliant carload—just about half the brains of the outfit called Med-Dyne, unless, as I worried sometimes, Tony had half the brains of the outfit all by his lonesome. What a lonesome that would be.