Free Dr. Franklin's Island by Ann Halam Page B

isn’t true, but it’s a useful story. They will not help you.”
    One of the men in uniform came, with a carafe of water and two paper cups. He waited while we drank, and took the cups and the carafe away. He didn’t speak to us. We didn’t speak until he was gone. I looked at the bars of my cage. How thick they were. I wondered why Dr. Franklin had made them so thick. Why did the beds have to be in cages at all? What did he think would happen when he started turning human beings into something “more than human”?
    At last Miranda said softly, looking at the floor of her cage, “When Dr. Skinner came to fetch us, he knew we were awake. Let’s see if we can spot the cameras.”
    We paced up and down, saying things that didn’t matter. I said, “He thinks we were forty-five days on the beach. I wonder when our count went wrong. . . .”
    “Maybe it didn’t, maybe we’re right, and he’s trying to confuse us. . . .”
    “I wonder if it’s still Day Forty. Maybe it’s Day Forty-one. I’m hungry enough. We don’t know how long we were knocked out for.”
    “I think it’s still Day Forty.” She glanced at me, and nodded slightly. She’d found the camera lens peering down on us from a slot high up in the wall. We took the two information packs and sat on the floor, up against the bars that separated us, with our backs as if accidentally turned to that spying eye, and kept our voices low. There wasn’t much point in this. The true horror was that our captors
didn’t care
what we plotted against their schemes. No more than if we’d been two guinea pigs planning a breakout. But it made us feel a little bit better.
    I turned the pages, occasionally muttering something to Miranda. But I couldn’t take in anything. I dropped my spinning head in my hands.
    “Oh, Miranda, this can’t be real,” I whispered. “Can it be? Is this real?”
    “I hope not,” she said grimly. “I hope it’s a nightmare and we’ll wake up safe on the beach, alone with those nice friendly sharks in the lagoon. But if it’s a nightmare it’s very realistic, because
he’s
real. Dr. George Franklin. I’ve heard of him.”
    “What do you mean, you’ve heard of him?”
    “From my parents. You remember, I told you about them. They’re anthropologists.”
    “That means they study people, doesn’t it? What’s that got to do with genetic engineering?”
    “Nothing much. But a few years ago Dr. George Franklin was famous, in science. He had all kinds of ideas about how humans might be changed, in the future, by genetic engineering. The same sort of thing as he was saying to us. Imagine if people could fly, imagine if people could live under the ocean. People listened to him, even though the things he was suggesting were completely impossible back then. And they still are, as far as I know. . . . But he’s very rich, he inherited a huge fortune, so he didn’t need anyone’s approval. He ran his own projects and paid his own scientists to work on his weird ideas. I think he was even a futurology consultant or something to the U.S. government, for a while. Then he got prosecuted for doing some cruel experiments on chimpanzees. That was the end of his public career. My parents and their friends used to use his name as an example of a mad scientist, science gone bad. That’s why I remembered.”
    “Is that why you went all quiet, back in his office?”
    “Yes.”
    “He’s crazy, isn’t he?”
    She nodded. “Yeah. I think you could safely say that.”
    “And Skinner’s mad too. The way he looks at us . . . the things he says.”
    “Yes. They’re definitely both insane.”
    “But they can’t
experiment
on us. They just can’t,
they just can’t.
”
    “I think we have to work on Dr. Skinner,” said Miranda. “I think what happened over the chimpanzees was that one of Dr. Franklin’s assistants had an attack of guilty conscience, and blew the whistle on him. We have to get Skinner to do that.”
    “I don’t