Warren Murphy: The Sky is Falling

So Dr. O'Donnell had disguised the nature of the experiment. To help with that disguise she had hired a British testing firm, and simply misinformed them about a thing here and a thing there. All she needed them for was to calibrate and quantify what was happening there in the little village north of London.

She walked among the experiments, the dead grass crunching under her feet. The cages, beakers, and vials were receiving the attention of white-coated technicians. The major experiment, of course, was already a smashing success. They could not only direct the fluorocarbon stream thousands of miles, but they could control the size and duration of the window with a small tolerance.

As she went from table to table, Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell realized that she was walking among the gravy. The meat had already been cooked. Perhaps that was what made her feel this sort of tight giddiness. Then again, there were so many sounds of pain among the dying animals.

A cluster of rosebushes caught her attention. Beautiful black roses. She looked at her small chart. They had been yellow before the experiment. A kiss of a breeze shattered a few petals, and the buds fell like ashes.

This was a natural field with a small brackish pond. A white film coated the pond with a rather thick layer of shriveled insects. She couldn't believe how many bugs the little pond had contained until she saw them dead. She heard one technician mutter that even the microbes in the pond were dead.

She wondered where the strange music was coming from and then realized it was the dying animals. There were rabbits with extra thick fur, fur that had not protected the skin at all. It had peeled and cracked, turning black like a seared hot dog, fur or not. Kathy had shaved half of them, just to make certain. Same for the puppies. Except they whined and cried, instead of sitting in their cases shivering with the fear of the unknown. Dr. O'Donnell looked at them more closely and made what she thought was an interesting discovery. The puppies were blind.

Some of the technicians, hardened by other animal experiments, turned away from the suffering.

Dr. O'Donnell felt only exciting tingles on her skin, as though she were being caressed in her soft parts. Apparently, the puppies' more developed animal senses had caused them to look up into the sky, the source of the unfamiliar radiation. The unfiltered sunlight had burned out their retinas.

One of the technicians came up to her with an important question.

"Can we put the animals out of their misery now? We've logged our findings."

Dr. O'Donnell saw the pain in his face. More than that.

She felt it. Her tongue moistened her lips. She didn't answer him, but let him stand there with the pleading in his eyes. Her body was good and warm. The old thing was happening to her again, here in England, here at this experiment.

"The animals. They're in real pain," said the technician.

Kathleen scribbled some notes on her pad. She saw the technician squirm as though every moment of delay was intense pain for him. It was definitely happening again. "Can we destroy them? ... Please."

"Just wait a moment, won't you?" said Kathy. She wondered if her pants were moist yet.

Half an hour later, most of the animals had died painfully and the technicians were sullen. People often reacted to suffering that way. Kathy was used to this. She had seen a lot of it in puberty. In puberty she had begun to wonder why grown-ups and other children were so horrified by the suffering of other creatures. Her parents had sent her to several doctors to find out why she was so different. But even at age twelve, the brilliant little Kathleen O'Donnell knew she wasn't different. The world was different.

So as she became an adult she hid her special feelings because the world feared what was different. She drove fast cars. She fought for control of companies. She competed for honors. And she let her special feelings be secret, secret even to her own womanly body. Men were never that interesting. Success was only a factor to be achieved because it was better than failure.

But when so many little animals began screaming, her body awake on its own, sending delicious, delicious feelings throughout all the good parts. They felt wonderful. When someone offered her a lift back to London, she said she would rather stay here and work in the field a bit longer.

She wanted to play. She wanted to play with the people who were now suffering because the animals were suffering. People were fun. They were more complicated and challenging than numbers.

Sometimes they were easy, though. Like Reemer Bolt back at CCM. He was a sexual game, easily played. Bolt was the sort of man, like so many other men, who needed sex to vindicate his sense of self-worth. Give him sex and he felt good. Deny it, and he felt worthless. He would literally give you control over his life in return for a little leg at the right times, provided you pretended to be pleased. Bolt needed that and Kathleen always gave it to him. She was a good actress. She always had been. She even fooled the psychiatrists when she was a teenager. But all this suffering now couldn't fool her body, even after all these years.

She wondered what a person would look like kept in a cage under the fluorocarbon beam, even as she told an ashen-faced technician that this experiment was important because they were establishing controls to make it safe for all mankind.

A technician came over to her to beg permission to put a terrier out of its misery. She commented on vitreous solutions as she watched him bite his lip. There was no blood, she noticed.

"How can you do this to these animals?" he asked.

Kathy put a hand on his arm. "I'm sorry you had to see it, John," she said. She knew this seemed soothing.

"Jim," he corrected.

"Whatever," she said. "The tragedy, Jim, is that people as sensitive as you have to look at things like this."

"They didn't have to suffer," said the man. His eyes were filling with pain. She showed deep concern for him as a person while she reminded herself that his name was Jim. Like pin. See the letters J-i-m on the blackboard in your mind, Kathleen told herself. J-i-m, like Jungle gym. Jim. "Jim ... they had, to suffer."

"Why, dammit, why?"

"So that children won't suffer in the future. We don't want the sun's power perverted like atomic energy. We don't want these horrible things happening to innocent children." Kathleen looked into the man's troubled eyes. She hoped hers registered the correct amount of sympathy. "I am sorry, Jungle-" He looked puzzled.

"--Jim," said Kathy, kneading his arm softly. It always helped to touch a man when you worked him. That was what made doing it over the phone so challenging. You had to work without your hands. "Jim, we are learning things here that will protect our most precious resource, the children. And, Jim, I don't know of a better way to do it. Jim."

"Do we have to let the poor animals suffer like this?"

"I am afraid we do. Children won't have the luxury of being put out of their misery. Can you bring yourself to watch?"

Jim lowered his head, adding the shame of his weakness to his pain. "I guess I have to," he said.

"Good man, Jim," Kathleen said. "If the power we have harnessed here ever got out of control, the children would suffer the most. They would lie in the streets, moaning and crying, unable to understand what was happening to them, unable to know why their tender skins had turned purplish-black and peeled off in great chunks, unable to see what happened because they would be sightless. Sightless, Jim, sightless and afraid. And dying. Would you, Jim, if you found a baby dying like that in the gutter, would you be able to slit its throat to put it out of its misery? Could you?"

"No, no, I couldn't do that," said Jim. His face paled, his arms shuddered, and his legs seemed to find other places to go than to stay beneath him. He tipped over and landed like a bag of peat moss off a truck.