Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One by Kate Wilhelm Read Free Book Online Page B

said. He passed Stu in the doorway and headed toward the livid greenery of Florida forests.
    The cacophony hit him at the door. There were four hundred sixty-nine monkeys on the thirty-six acres of wooded ground the research department was using. Each monkey was screeching, howling, singing, cursing, or otherwise making its presence known. Darin grunted and headed toward the compound. The Happiest Monkeys in the World, a newspaper article had called them. Singing Monkeys, a subhead announced. monkeys given smartness pills , the most enterprising paper had proclaimed. Cruelty Charged , added another in subdued, sorrowful tones.
    The compound was three acres of carefully planned and maintained wilderness, completely enclosed with thirty-foot-high, smooth plastic walls. A transparent dome covered the area. There were one-way windows at intervals along the wall. A small group stood before one of the windows: the committee.
    Darin stopped and gazed over the interior of the compound through one of the windows. He saw Heloise and Skitter contentedly picking nonexistent fleas from one another. Adam was munching on a banana; Homer was lying on his back idly touching his feet to his nose. A couple of the chimps were at the water fountain, not drinking, merely pressing the pedal and watching the fountain, now and then immersing a head or hand in the bowl of cold water. Dr. Jacobsen appeared and Darin joined the group.
    “Good morning, Mrs. Bellbottom,” Darin said politely. “Did you know your skirt has fallen off?” He turned from her to Major Dormouse. “Ah, Major, and how many of the enemy have you swatted to death today with your pretty little yellow rag?” He smiled pleasantly at a pimply young man with a camera. “Major, you’ve brought a professional peeping tom. More stories in the paper, with pictures this time?” The pimply young man shifted his position, fidgeted with the camera. The major was fiery; Mrs. Bellbottom was on her knees peering under a bush, looking for her skirt. Darin blinked. None of them had on any clothing. He turned toward the window. The chimps were drawing up a table, laden with tea things, silver, china, tiny finger sandwiches. The chimps were all wearing flowered shirts and dresses. Hortense had on a ridiculous flop-brimmed sun hat of pale green straw. Darin leaned against the fence to control his laughter.
    “Soluble ribonucleic acid,” Dr. Johnson was saying when Darin recovered, “sRNA for short. So from the gross beginnings when entire worms were trained and fed to other worms that seemed to benefit from the original training, we have come to these more refined methods. We now extract the sRNA molecule from the trained animals and feed it, the sRNA molecules in solution, to untrained specimens and observe the results.”
    The young man was snapping pictures as Jacobsen talked. Mrs. Whoosis was making notes, her mouth a lipless line, the sun hat tinging her skin with green. The sun on her patterned red and yellow dress made it appear to jiggle, giving her fleshy hips a constant rippling motion. Darin watched, fascinated. She was about sixty.
    “…my colleague, who proposed this line of experimentation, Dr. Darin,” Jacobsen said finally, and Darin bowed slightly. He wondered what Jacobsen had said about him, decided to wait for any questions before he said anything.
    “Dr. Darin, is it true that you also extract this substance from people?”
    “Every time you scratch yourself, you lose this substance,” Darin said. “Every time you lose a drop of blood, you lose it. It is in every cell of your body. Sometimes we take a sample of human blood for study, yes.”
    “And inject it into those animals?”
    “Sometimes we do that,” Darin said. He waited for the next, the inevitable question, wondering how he would answer it. Jacobsen had briefed them on what to answer, but he couldn’t remember what Jacobsen had said. The question didn’t come. Mrs. Whoosis stepped forward, staring