“That’s what he said to us,” I said. “They knew we were there all along.”
“Yeah. They were watching us, and we never guessed. They knew about the plane crash the night it happened. I asked Skinner once, what about the other survivors, the ones in the life rafts. Did Dr. Franklin know they were there and let them die? Skinner said there weren’t any. No one survived the explosion, except us. I suppose that could be true.”
“He told us the same thing,” said Miranda. “Go on, what happened next?”
“I didn’t know anything was wrong. I thought Skinner was a strange character, but everything was going to be okay, and it was only the security staff who had been overenthusiastic, knocking me out like that. Skinner did some medical tests, gave me some IQ tests, and said they were going to ‘keep me under observation’; and I
still
thought it was okay. I thought I was going to be sent home, and I couldn’t understand why you hadn’t been brought in. I realize now they were waiting for some kind of ‘all clear.’ Something to make them sure no one would ever come looking for three teenage castaways.”
Miranda and I nodded.
“All three of us are missing, believed dead,” I agreed, bitterly. “We don’t exist.”
“Yeah,” said Arnie. “That’s what Skinner told me, in the end. That was the main message of the pep talk, after he’d taken me to see the big doc.
You’re officially
dead. We can do what we like, don’t try to resist.
But I don’t know how long I was kept in the ward before that happened. My memory is fuzzy. I was ill for a few days. It could be that they drugged me to make me ill, I don’t know. Then one fine day he told me I was going to meet the boss. He took me to see Dr. Franklin . . . and I finally found out what kind of hellhole place I’d landed in. Yeah, what a hellhole. There’ve been times, there’ve been plenty of times in the past weeks, when I’ve wished the sharks could have had me—”
“So what then?” said Miranda, sternly. “What happened after the pep talk?”
“You know what? I escaped, once. They were moving me between the ward and the science block and I was left alone for a few minutes, in a room with an unlocked window. I got out. I hid in the back of a Jeep and got driven into the farmland. I thought if I could get away from headquarters, away from Franklin and Skinner, I’d find someone who would help. I hid in the fields until dark, out there where the staff families live, and I went and knocked on a door. A woman let me in. I tried to tell her what had happened, with my bit of Spanish. She gave me some chicken soup . . . shut me in her kids’ bedroom, and called the labs. The uniformed branch came and took me away.”
He broke off and looked at us earnestly. “I don’t blame her. I was a crazy foreign kid, babbling about torture and monsters, and Dr. Franklin is the big kind boss who can do no wrong. But remember this. Don’t trust them! Don’t trust any of them! Everyone on this island is working for Dr. Franklin, and if they say they’ll help you, they’re lying.”
We didn’t say anything. I’m sure Miranda was thinking the same as I was.
He was warning us against himself. We couldn’t trust Arnie, either.
Arnie resumed his story. “Then they wasted no more time. A few hours after they got me back I was in the operating room, having a microchip stuck into my brain. They kept me out of sight when you two turned up. It was part of the plot, one of Dr. Franklin’s games, that you weren’t to know I was still around, or what had happened to me. When you were out of the way they moved me back to the prison ward. I’ve been there ever since. When you were, um, ready, they activated my chip. They tuned me in to Radio Mutant and started monitoring your calls. . . . And that’s about it.”
We looked at him in silence. Something was missing from his story. For a moment (sitting there in my mental-image human body), I couldn’t think what it was.
“You had a microchip stuck in your brain,” repeated Miranda. “That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean
you are still human
?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
Suddenly I could feel the water around me. I could feel the big, slimy delta shape that was the real Semi now. I stared at Arnie. I tried to imagine what it was like to be him. Was he lying on his bed? Was he sitting on the floor? What was he doing with his hands?
“But you claim you’re a prisoner,” said Miranda, softly.
“Of course I am! You don’t think I’m sticking around of my own free will?”
“What kind of a person are you, Arnie?”
“My name’s Arnie Pullman. I used to live in Surrey, until the lucky day I was in a plane crash. Now I live on a desert island with a mad scientist. When I grow up, I want to be—”
“Cut that out. You know what I’m asking.
How can
you work for him?
”
“I have no choice! Do you think I want to spy on you? They keep me locked up. I’m helpless! Look,
I can
tell you things.
And I can keep secrets, some of the time. He . . . He doesn’t hear every word we say. He doesn’t know about this ‘white place’ effect, and I won’t tell him. Not if I can help it, I swear—”
“Semi thought you were dead,” said Miranda viciously. “But you know what? I was never sure. Somehow I knew you’d have squirmed out of trouble. You always managed to sneak out of the dirty jobs.”
“Listen to me, will you? There’s something you’ve got to know.
You mustn’t escape
.”
Miranda and I looked at each other.
“Oh yeah?” said Miranda, dangerously calm. “Why not? Not that we have any plans. We’re about as trapped and hopeless as we could possibly be.”
“I’m not asking you to tell me anything. I don’t want to know your plans. But you have to stay in the cage.
You haven’t had the other half of the treatment.
”
“What are you talking about?” said Miranda, after a stunned silence.
“The antidote. The infusion that turns you back into human beings.”
I don’t think there was anything crueler he could have said.
He looked at our faces, our expressions of misery and despair—
“
I’m
not lying
. You think I’d lie to you about something like that?”
“You slimy creep,” snarled Miranda. “You’d lie about anything.”
Arnie bristled. He was getting used to the white place effect, I could tell, and getting back to his normal annoying self. “Hey, Wonder Girl, get a grip on that temper. What happened to you is not my fault. I’m trying to help. I’m telling you, you have to stay put, for all our sakes—”
“You
snake
!”
Miranda hated snakes more than anything.
She’d jumped to her feet. She looked so
strange,
and the whole white place felt so full of her anger. . . . I knew what was going to happen before it happened, but it was still a shock. All the cloudy stuff suddenly started moving, whirling around. Miranda vanished, and then out of that spinning tornado of mental energy came Miranda-the-bird, bigger than in life. She leaped into the air, talons outstretched, her great wings beating—
“You think I’d leave!” she screeched, her red hooked beak savagely wide open. “You think I’d escape,
when
Semi can’t get out
! You think I’d leave her behind?”
One of her wings swiped at him. He fell on his back and sprawled, frantically trying to squirm out of reach, yelling in terror, and she plunged down, grabbing at him furiously. As her talons grasped him, I couldn’t see the teenage boy any longer. I saw a snake, a writhing limbless thing, as if Miranda had taken control of this whole mental space, and was making him appear in the form she hated. She was shaking him like a rag; and the most terrifying thing was, I could feel
Miranda
slipping away. I could feel her human presence vanishing, so there was nothing left but this nightmarish creature, with the mind of a bird of prey—
I was trying to yell,
Stop it, stop it
—
But something was happening to me too. My breath was coming in gasps.
I was choking, my lungs were burning!
I couldn’t breathe!
Miranda’s rage had overwhelmed me too. I was losing my ability to hold on to this illusion of human form. I was still in the white place, but there was no water and I couldn’t breathe! I couldn’t breathe!
I blacked out. I fell back into my fish body. There was water around me, my gills filled with blessed breathableness. I heard Miranda calling my name.
I flipped the mental switches as hard and fast as I could. I was back with them in the white place, flat on my back, my head spinning. Two worried faces peered down at me.
“Please, Miranda,” I said, sitting up, coughing. “
Don’t
do that again.
If you have to fight with Arnie, imagine yourself as an all-in wrestler or something.”
“I’m sorry,” said Miranda. She was looking very shaken.
“Next time you two do that, I’ll imagine the place full of water, and
drown
you both—”
“I’m really sorry! I couldn’t control it. I . . . I boiled over. He provoked me.”
“You did provoke her, Arnie.”
There was a pause, while we all recovered.
“This ‘white place’ is
dangerous,
” I said. “Place, state of mind, whatever you want to call it. I think we should stay out of it. I think we’re better off as monsters.”
The other two looked as if they agreed with me. Then Miranda said, in a quiet voice, “Tell us about the antidote, Arnie. Not that we believe you.”
“The whole idea was to turn us into mutants,” I added. “To see if he could do it, if he could make us into superhumans. Why would he want to turn us back?”
Arnie looked at us as if we were idiots. “You’re kidding. Of course he wants the process to be reversible! Eventually, when it works. Nobody would want to be half-fish or half-bird for life, would they?”
I don’t think he realized how cruel he was being. I truly hated Arnie, at that moment.
Miranda took it differently. She said, her eyes bright, “You mean . . . there
is
a purpose in what happened to us? It’s not just crazy and cruel? How much do you know, Arnie? He talked about interplanetary travel. He said that was his goal. Is that actually the truth?”
I looked at the ground, feeling very sad. Poor Miranda. She was trying to keep the hope out of her voice, but it was there. After everything he’d done to her, Miranda still wanted to believe in Dr. Franklin’s dreams. I understood why, but I thought she was totally deluded.
Arnie shook his head. “Nah, nothing like that. Don’t be daft. Interplanetary travel? That’s science fiction. I reckon if they manage to iron out the problems, they’ll be selling their formula to an exotic holiday company.”
“Holiday company?” I repeated, confused. “What on earth do you mean?”
“They talk in front of me, you see. I’ve heard a lot of things. He’s hoping to reduce the timescale of the first change, which is the remaining big hitch. When he’s got that down to a few hours, he’ll have a commercial proposition. Imagine it. You take a pill, or a couple of injections. Like being vaccinated. They put you in a flotation tank overnight, while the ugly stuff is going on. You wake up in a five-star underwater hotel, on your ocean safari. Or in some kind of luxury cliffside flying lodge, on the wall of the Grand Canyon. Spend two weeks exploring the deep ocean, or flying like a bird, then go through the same thing in reverse. The way it works now is no good. What happened to you two is a bust, no one would buy it. But I can see people paying for the improved version of the change, in the future. Can’t you?”
“I hate you, Arnie,” said Miranda. “You are lower than dirt.”
I thought of our days and weeks of pain and terror, of all the hideous things that had been done to us. I thought of the morning when I’d seen Miranda’s breastbone bursting through the flesh and skin. And this would be reduced to a few hours’ sleep, a holiday in a brochure.
I thought of us, Miranda and me, as discards, spoiled attempts to be thrown in the bin.
“Sorry,” said Arnie, grinning defiantly. “I didn’t mean to give offense. Look, forget the dumb
Star Trek
day-dream. Face up to reality. I want to do a deal. If I get you the antidote, will you take me with you?”
That was so like Arnie. If he was begging for his life, he would have to be annoying about it. Miranda and I looked at each other. It was ironic, Arnie asking us for help. He was still human. We were the ones in serious, horrible trouble.
Miranda said, “Are you going to go on spying for him? Reporting on us?”
Arnie licked his lips, and shuddered. “Yes.”
“Then you can rescue yourself!”
“Miranda,
I have to.
You don’t know how it works. I’d have told you what was happening from the start, only
I
couldn’t.
I didn’t know how.”
“Liar. You’re working for Dr. Franklin. You don’t want us to escape because then you’d be next in line for the treatment. You’re afraid that if you don’t do what he says, he’ll turn you into a monster anyway. A monster like us.”
“Yeah!” shouted Arnie. “
I’m
afraid.
Not everyone can be as brave as you, Wonder Girl. I’m afraid that if I don’t cooperate, not that I have any choice, something worse will happen. Look, I’ll tell him as little as I can. He won’t find out that we’ve made contact, if I can help it. Don’t try to escape, and I’ll try to get the antidote to you.”
“I told you,” said Miranda. “There is no escape plan.”
“But
I know there is.
I know you never give up.
Please
say you’ll take me with you. When you’re human again, you’ll come to the ward and you’ll get me out?
Please?
”
Miranda stood up, and started pacing around. She kept looking at Arnie, and he kept looking at her. It was the same as on the beach. I didn’t think Miranda was totally in the right, but I didn’t want to side with Arnie, so I stayed quiet. At last she came back, and stood there, arms folded and her head on one side, looking very birdlike.
“You’re Dr. Franklin’s stooge. You’re a treacherous snake, and you’ve been allowed to stay human so you’ll spy on us and help him play his mind games. How can we possibly trust you? But if
by any chance
there is such a thing as this antidote—”