Organ Music by Margaret Mahy Read Free Book Online

registered. It’s an invention, that car. You get into it and you disappear.’
    Winnie Finney looked at Harley, his smile vanishing.
    â€˜It is possible,’ he said. ‘I designed that car, you know. My main work is unmanned machines – machines that are used in hard-access forestry areas. The car was just a hobby, a treat. And once I’d solved the problems, set it up with a homing device and so on, I rather lost interest. And it’s true that some of the people I see around here from time to time don’t look like your average tree lovers.’
    Finding himself unobserved, David tipped his coffee into a pot plant.
    â€˜What do tree lovers look like?’ Harley asked with a faint grin, his first for quite a while. He sounded relaxed, even sleepy. At the same time, the coffee cup fell from his fingers, spreading what was left of the coffee across the floor. Alarmed, David took a step forward trying to check on Harley whose small movements seemed to have become enormously slow and ponderous. Winnie Finney nodded at Harley, and then swung sideways in his chair to look at David. Instinctively, David half-closed his eyes, and moved back towards his chair, pretending to stumble a little, while Winnie Finney beamed at him across his own untouched cup of coffee. This man, who had seemed so friendly, so much on their side, had offered them drugged coffee. David forced a thick, wordless sound between his lips.
    â€˜Ah, I see you’ve caught on,’ said Winnie Finney, leaning forward and peering intently at David, rather as if his face was the page in a book and he was reading it. ‘You know , don’t you?’ His mouth stretched into an even wider smile.
    Harley was looking slowly from one to the other of them.
    â€˜What’s ... wrong?’ he asked, and his voice sounded even slower and more smudgy.
    David did not reply. Inside his head he felt sharp and in charge, but he must hide it. Best if Winnie Finney thought he was dealing with two drugged and dim-witted young men. He collapsed back into his chair.
    Winnie Finney rose briskly and stood over them.
    â€˜There are so many worthless people around,’ he said, suddenly transformed: still beaming, but no longer kindly. ‘Yet these worthless ones – these trashy people – have perfectly good organs: lungs, hearts, livers ... while there are worthwhile citizens, people who have lived good, productive lives, or lovely youngsters with a world of promise ahead of them, who, simply through some silly accident of fate, find their bodies breaking down. Properly functioning organs should not be wasted on scum who are going to vandalize themselves with drink and drugs.’
    He wandered across his little office, studied a baro-meter on the wall and tapped it delicately. Then he turned back to the boys.
    â€˜The two young men in the room off the morgue are what we call “brain-dead”,’ he said. ‘They would certainly die if we disconnected them from the life-support systems you saw, but we are keeping them alive – technically alive. We need them fresh, you see. They don’t deserve to live. They didn’t respect themselves so why should someone like me bother to respect them?’
    Winnie Finney laughed. ‘But so many organs can have a useful life, once they are taken from the parent body. A heart should be transposed within six to eight hours. A lung may last for twelve hours. Of course there are parts of the body that can be preserved. Freshly frozen skin can last for over three years. So can bone marrow. Heart valves last for five years and so does the cartilage of the knee. We’ll use those young men with far more respect and dignity than they would have used themselves, even though comparatively little of them will be usable. Their corneas (from their eyes, you know), their lungs, perhaps ... Some sections of skin. Now you – provided you don’t have leukaemia, AIDS