Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

He held out his hand. “Come in, come in! Incidentally, my name is Kagle. Dr. Frederic.”

Before budging from the stoop, Cassius had to still his suspicions. “I mean to say, Kagle, what I came about is my brother. I want to know what happened to his body.”

“Of course,” the other repeated, as if it were only natural. “I’ll be glad to tell you everything, Andrews. Not here on the doorstep, though. Come in and—oh.” Frederic Kagle’s eyes were intense and unwavering as blue gas flames. They took in Cassius’s nervous glance at the dingy shadows in the hall. Dr. Kagle’s manner became wry. “I see now. You expected something else. You still do. The latter-day Mafia or its equivalent. This is a perfectly legitimate research establishment.”

And he reached around Cassius to grasp the door with a left hand whose ring finger bore the faint red ghost of a removed wedding band. He kept talking.

“We’re a little under cover, I must admit. But we have our problems. I think you’ll appreciate them once I explain. That is, if you’ve got the stomach to hear it all.” A challenging glance. “Being a newsman, dedicated to truth in principle if not always in practice—I’m only speaking generically, of course—you should have an open mind if anyone does.”

A small, confident smile played on Kagle’s mouth. Cassius noted, however, that he secured the night chain on the door.

“I have to take your word that this operation is legitimate,” Cassius said defensively. Kagle spun, peering hard. Cassius felt uncomfortable, as though he’d been tested and found wanting.

“Legitimate by my lights, is what I meant,” Kagle said. “Some—my ex-wife among others—don’t agree. I’ll leave it up to your sense of fairness.”

Cassius was fully aware of what Kagle was doing: using soft soap. But he was disarmed, temporarily anyway. Kagle led the way down the corridor which plainly hadn’t been greatly renovated since the days when the place served as the final rest of thrombosis-stricken executives. Through two different doors jumbles of laboratory equipment winked faintly in the dark.

A third door was open, lighted. Kagle closed it quickly. He frowned, as over a minor annoyance. But not before Cassius had glimpsed more glass and metalware, and two men in spotted white coats.

One had been bending over sympathetically. The other had been seated on a stool, head on his forearms on a lucite bench, crying.

“Our work does have its personal problems too,” Kagle said. He rolled back scrolled oak double doors. “Even dedicated people get shaky over the moral aspects now and then.” He stood aside, waiting for Cassius to pass. Cassius caught the renewed flicker of blue intensity in the man’s eye. The calm fire said that Kagle, a dedicated man, was not to be lumped with those who wallowed in shakiness.

Kagle rolled the doors shut again behind them.

The room was large, full of cheap, sharp-angled metal office furniture. A solar tube had been jerry-rigged in the wall. It shed a white, uncompromising light over all. The only signs of the room’s former function were thick, threadbare carpeting, rose-petal wallpaper peeled in many places and an ancient framed motto, I Am the Light of the World, under which someone had taped a photo of some sort of molecular model.

Kagle circled the desk. He sat down, indicated Cassius’s place.

“I think I’d better stand,” Cassius said. “I didn’t come here to be social.”

“My dear Mr. Andrews,” Kagle said gently, “you have every right to feel as you do. We should never have selected your brother. It was a mistake.”

“Yes, it was. For you.”

The scientist ignored the feigned toughness. “Ordinarily we try to choose people with no survivors. Last year, however, I had a fellow working for me.” The blue-flame eyes brightened merrily. “My, shall we say, traffic manager? He proved to be an idiot. But he was all I could get. Now I handle that end myself. And have, ever since he slipped up a couple of times. One of his worst slip-ups was your brother the Reverend. It meant thirty hours’ worth of work in a day instead of my usual twenty-six. But that’s all right.”

Cassius didn’t do Kagle the favor of smiling even a little. “I want to know what you did with him.”

Kagle didn’t seem worried, just more amused. “So you can report us to the authorities?”

“Maybe. Well?”

Kagle pursed his Ups. “Mr. Andrews, are you really tough enough to stand the truth?”

“I’m a newspaperman. I guess that qualifies me a little.”

“Provided I tell you everything about your brother— which will mean in turn telling you everything about what we do here, and why I’m reduced to crawling out at night like some roach just so I can conduct a perfectly legitimate scientific study—will you promise in return not to write one word about what I say?”

Abruptly Cassius sat down. He fought to keep a straight face. A moment ago he’d been cowed by the man’s assured, almost jocular manner. Now it was his turn to feel like laughing.

If the man was indeed a scientist, he was the stereotype: foolish, naive, unworldly beneath his veneer of hard-lipped dedication. What a hell of a stupid offer! Did Kagle honestly think he would pass up a chance for an expose now that he had the material practically in his hands? He had to write what he learned. For Timothy’s sake.

And for his own, too. He’d seen a glimmer of a real chance to improve his lot. Such a chance hadn’t come his way in longer than he could remember. He’d almost believed he was no longer interested in opportunities. Sitting across from Kagle, he discovered otherwise.

Carefully, softly, he lied, “All right, Dr. Kagle. If that’s your price, I promise.”

The sap fell for it at once. “Thank you.”

Why were the blue eyes merry a moment? Or was it a trick of the light? Kagle tented his fingers, leaned across the desk.

“First tell me how you found me.”

“No harm in that, I guess.” Cassius described his speculations, starting with those initiated the night he heard Madame Wanda Kagle ranting. “I’ll admit I didn’t dream she really had any connection with you. Or with Timothy. It was just sort of a—well, trigger.”

Kagle shook his head. “Poor sis. She badgered me until I showed her.”

A trickle of sweat, unbidden, rolled down Cassius’s cheek. “Showed her what?”

“The results of our research here into the nature of death.”

“The nature of—?” Cassius’s eyes bugged.

Dr. Kagle leaned back, chuckling. His pink forehead shone. “There it is again. You imagine we’re a bunch of necrophiles, don’t you? Nothing so debased, Mr. Andrews, though in certain quarters we’re certainly regarded in that light. What we’re doing is simply probing the experience of dying from a qualitative standpoint. I could give you a long lecture on the theory. But in plainest terms, our work is this. I’m a neurosurgeon by training. What I do with all the dead bodies I’m forced to steal is analogous to what a man in a darkroom does when he develops film. He brings forth the latent image. A photo’s latent image is both there and not there, in the silver. It awaits the right combination of chemicals before it becomes visible. So with the—” Dr. Kagle hesitated a second, as if gauging Cassius’s nerve again. “—call it the latent image of death. Or images. The sensory record of the last microseconds before the mind blacks out. All the pain. All the smells, tactile sensations. The blurred sights. When I was killing time as just another white-coated bureaucrat with the Institutes of Health, I worked out techniques which would parallel the first formulation of the proper photochemicals. And that’s why I need the bodies, Mr. Andrews. What good is a darkroom technician without exposed film?”