Moreau’s Other Island

He was far from subdued by my action. His face was a study in malice. Moreover, I had by no means disarmed him by wrenching his whip away. He seemed to be literally well armed. Whatever disaster had struck him, I saw now that he had his arms as well as his legs replaced, though the loose-fitting garment he wore made this hard to discern. Three pairs of arms were clamped on both sides of his chair, making him look somewhat like a plastic-and-metal spider. Some of these six interchangeable appendages ended in very odd hands indeed; at least two of them looked like lethal weapons.

But he mastered his wrath and said, ‘Just be warned. Come back inside; I wish to finish speaking to you. Da Silva, back to the labs.’

His chair bore him speedily back into the room we had left, and I followed.

Dart flipped off the vision on his huge screen. Only music flowed through the room – a quartet by Shostakovich.

‘These people have to be kept under stern control – as you will understand when you have been here a little longer.’ He spoke without looking at me.

I was still angry and would not reply. When Dart spoke again, it was again in a vein of explanation, although the tone of his voice gave no hint of apology.

‘The truth is, Roberts, that I’m vexed to be interrupted in my work by you or anyone else. My researches have gone through three stages. The first stage was merely to duplicate McMoreau’s original experiments, the second – well, never mind that. Suffice it to say, cutting the cackle, that I’m now into the culminating third stage. All the early crudities of approach have been set aside, junked – finished. I’m beyond all that. I’m discovering … I’m discovering the relativity of flesh …

‘The phrase means nothing to you, Roberts. But, believe me, all these years of pain – and pained thought – suffering is nothing unless you learn from it – I am the Einstein of a revolutionary biology …’

He darted a look at me.

‘I’m listening,’ I said.

He laughed. I saw again that dark and troubled thing in him. ‘I know you’re listening, man. Mr Roberts, I want you on my side and don’t know how to get you there. I’m not another Moreau. Not by a long chunk of chalk. You’ve decided already you hate me, haven’t you?’

‘I didn’t take to the way you treated Bella.’

‘Listen, I’m not another Moreau. He was a monster in many ways, a tyrant. I’m a victim. Try and dig that concept. A victim. Look!’

With a quick movement of his chin, he struck at a button on his right shoulder. So far as I had noticed it, I regarded it as a button securing his loose-flowing tunic. It was more than that. There was a sharp snap, a whir of servo-mechanisms, and Dart’s right arm slid off and clamped itself against the side of the chair.

Another brusque chin movement, and he pushed the tunic from his shoulder so that it fell away.

I saw his real arm.

It was not an arm. It was scarcely a hand. Four flexible digits like fingers sprouted from the shoulder joint. He swerved the chair so that I could see the detail, and the puckering of flesh where a shape almost like a hand had formed under the smooth nub of shoulder.

‘On the other side it’s a bit more grotesque. And my phalanges and metatarsal bones grow out of deformed femurs – that’s what I’ve got for legs. And I have a penile deformity.’

His voice as he spoke was throaty and the eyes of this Einstein of a revolutionary biology were bright with moisture.

Although I regarded him stolidly, my face unmoving, I had to fight an unexpected urge to apologize. ‘Why the healthy body should apologize to the defective I do not know. That’s not part of my philosophy.

‘Why are you so anxious to gain my pity?’

He leant sideways. The little fingers pressed a button inside the artificial arm. It moved back into place again, snapping when it was correctly positioned. The tiny sound provoked him to nod to himself almost complacently.

He was in control of himself, as his voice showed when he spoke again. ‘Back in all those crummy years when I was a kid, I used to go on reading jags, Mr Roberts. All sorts of crap I read. Not old H. G. Wells, I don’t mean. Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and a lot more, as well as technical books. A French writer called Gide compares Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. He finds them very alike, and do you know what he puts on about them? He says that Nietzsche was jealous of Jesus Christ, envied him to the point of madness, whereas Dostoevsky was struck with humility and regarded Jesus as a superman. You know what? As those two writers regarded Jesus Christ, so I regarded ordinary human beings – holding both attitudes at the same time. Because I was born monstrous and deformed, Mr Roberts. I was a thalidomide kid. Remember thalidomide?’

I remembered the thalidomide scandal well. The drug had been manufactured as a tranquilliser by a German company and licensed by chemical firms all over the world. The side-effects of the drug had not been properly researched; its teratogenicity had only become apparent when babies were born deformed. When the drug was administered to women in the early stages of pregnancy, it had the power of passing through the placental barrier and malforming the growth of the foetus. From eight to ten thousand children were born defective in various parts of the globe.

What made me recall the case so clearly was that over twenty years ago, when there was a court case in Canada regarding the amount of compensation to be paid one of the thalidomide children, my mother had said to me, ‘Cal, you were born at the time when thalidomide was available all round the world. We are just lucky that the States has sane laws about testing drugs – so that when I went to Doc Harris for a tranquilliser during pregnancy, he prescribed something safe, or otherwise you might have been born without your proper limbs like other babies your age in England and elsewhere.’

I said to Dart, ‘That whole case was a piece of criminal negligence.’ I could but stare at him, ashamed to move my eyes away.

‘My mother was prescribed Distaval, as thalidomide was called in England, and used it for a week only. One week! That week covered the forty-eighth day of her pregnancy. When I was born, I had these severe abnormalities on which you now gaze with such pleasure.

‘If the doctors had had any sense, they would never have let me live.’