The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Three Read online

  The Good Doctor’s Tales

  ~ Folio Three ~

  Randall Allen Farmer

  Copyright © 2012 by Randall Allen Farmer

  The Good Doctor’s Tales

  ~ Folio Three ~

  Author’s Introduction

  This novella length document is a collection of short pieces, stand-alone and otherwise, related to “Now We Are Monsters” (Book Two of the Commander series). As with the extra features common to DVDs, the various parts of “The Good Doctor’s Tales” are not essential to the story “Now We Are Monsters” tells; instead, they add to it.

  White Lab Coats

  (1964)

  Smash! went the lab glassware, after Hap swept it off the lab bench and down to the floor. “No,” he said. “No. No! This damned thing has to be wrong.” Hap – Dr. Harvey Littleside – continued on with his tirade, his voice growing louder and louder, filling Dr. Zielinski’s drab Harvard lab with angry echoes.

  Dr. Zielinski had seen worse; Hap had trashed entire labs several times, his reputation spoke of far worse, and his grant budgets always needed a line item for replacement lab equipment. Dr. Zielinski knew well the third man in the lab, Dr. Kepke, and raised his arm to block his young postdoc before he started his rush toward Hap.

  At least Hap hadn’t sent any of their samples flying, or any caustic chemicals.

  “Where did you dig up this fossil from, anyway?” Dr. Kepke said. At least he whispered. Zielinski didn’t consider Hap a fossil, just a tad bit eccentric. Hap hadn’t practiced medicine since WW II; after the war his successful turn to full-time research turned him into a well-known researcher, at least within his area of specialty, his papers cited twice as often as Hank’s own. Dr. Zielinski had studied under Hap at UMASS before his stint in Korea. Hap had been eccentric back then, perhaps more so.

  “Colorado,” Dr. Zielinski said, deadpan. “Dr. Littleside is the top biomedical researcher on the subject of Transforms. Give him a little time.” And respect.

  Dr. Kepke winced, recognizing the name and perhaps the (well deserved) reputation.

  Hap returned to his work, after wiping his longish black unwashed hair with his lab coat, already greasy and dark from previous wipes. Hap’s salt and pepper gray eyebrows told the story; he had found something, and when the chase was on Hap’s eyebrows lowered and held steady. Late afternoon sunlight angled through the lab windows, slowly traversing the bland linoleum floor, as Hap continued to work.

  “So this is the man who identified para-procorticotrophin,” Dr. Kepke said, calm after an hour, and after no further outbursts from Hap; Dr. Kepke’s respect came in the form of a whisper. “What are the two of you crazies working on today?”

  “Armenigar Syndrome Focus samples,” Dr. Zielinski said, bemused at Dr. Kepke’s categorization. Compared to Dr. Littleside, Hank was a paragon of reasonable.

  “Over here, you,” Dr. Littleside said. To Dr. Zielinski. Hank smiled; when Hap got deep into his work, even getting a pronoun from him was a sign of respect. He walked over, Dr. Kepke trailing, Dr. Zielinski eyeing the postdoc to keep him quiet and to keep him from disturbing Hap.

  “Found something, Hap?”

  “Uh huh. Finally. The comparison between your Arm samples and the Monster and Focus samples I brought with me from UCHSC” University of Colorado Health Science Center, where Dr. Littleside served as their star medical researcher and professor “I can definitively say you were right and the establishment was…” pause, followed by a trademark hand slap on the lab bench “dead wrong as usual.”

  “Which contention?” Dr. Zielinski said. Hap’s brash and argumentative nature didn’t bother him, or his often overblown statements. Or Hap’s impatience with lesser intellects, which meant impatience with nearly everybody. To him, Dr. Zielinski was a ‘mere surgeon’, at best a dabbler in research. Zielinski’s true research specialty, epidemiology, Hap considered barely scientific and, often, sleep inducing.

  “Take a gander at this. You tell me,” Dr. Littleside said. He bent over the prints in his typical hollow-chested manner, putting aside his compass, ruler and slide rule. “It’s in the comparison between these ion-exchange chromatography and size exclusion chromatography results.” Hap spread out a half dozen of his fifty or so thermal paper prints from Zielinski’s lab’s gas chromatograph across the lab bench, next to where he had been working, not that many minutes ago, on the juice separations. Several of the prints, decorated with recognizable Hap thumb and fingerprints, were smudged beyond recognition. “Here, here, here. See?”

  Hap’s work using the gas chromatograph was, as always, exemplary. He was a wizard at selecting the proper particle sizes for his columns to get optimum baseline separations. Dr. Zielinski recognized only one of the fractions Hap pointed out. “Juice,” he said, circling the signal on both the ion and exclusion results he recognized as para-procoticotrophen with his pencil. Hank stopped and frowned. “Wait – what’s this?” he pencil pointed. “If you put these two results together, you end up with a juice fraction nearly a quarter of the juice itself in this sample.” He knew about the other biomolecules in juice; para-procorticotrophen picked up similar sized biomolecules with ease. These annoying contaminants always interfered with the analysis.

  “Exactly. That’s fraction K-17, as I’ve written up before.” Another pause, another hand slap on the table. “Means Monster. This is a sample from a multi-year old Monster.”

  Dr. Zielinski knew about K-17 from the literature. The lab work behind this was outside of his normal skill set, unfortunately. He had never seen K-17 show up in the raw data, and hadn’t realized how large a weight-wise proportion it was in Monster juice, or how large a proportion any of these fractions were. A cursory glance showed over a half dozen other fractions between a tenth and a half percent by weight of juice itself. They couldn’t be contaminants. He vowed to refresh his gas chromatography skills and examine these anomalies himself; thanks to Hap’s inadvertent prod Dr. Zielinski now had a new research avenue to investigate.

  “Here’s your Armenigar Syndrome Focus samples,” Hap said. “Notice how K-17 is absent from all but two of them, the same absence…” Hap rearranged papers, sending three thermal prints to the floor. “…seen in Focuses.” Hap pounded his leg on the floor and swiped his lab coat sleeve across his hair. “Proof, real proof, that Arms are not the Monster version of Focuses, but are a distinct Major Transform variant.” Hap snorted. “Note I used the colloquialism ‘Arm’; calling them ‘Focuses’, in any way, is completely wrong.”

  Dr. Zielinski paused and reflected on Hap’s statement as Dr. Kepke and Hap started a discussion on the detail of Hap’s procedures and logic. Hap’s work wasn’t a surprise. Based on other, less scientifically verifiable, evidence, Zielinski considered the Focus and the Arms distinct Major Transform variants, and had so for years. However, having firm biochemical proof of his assertion pleased him greatly.

  He reached out and picked up the Arm sample prints with the K-17 in them, at 1.3% and 0.8% respectively. The first was from Sarles, after her draw of the male withdrawal victim, the other, older sample, from Rose Desmond after her interrupted draw. Dr. Zielinski didn’t say anything, but from those samples he concluded that although Arms weren’t the Monster form of Focuses, or failed Focuses for that matter, things could happen to them might make them part-Monster.

  Based on his experiences with Desmond and Sarles, from the time period where these samples originated, being a part-Monster wasn’t good for an Arm, no, not at all.

  ---

  “I’m thinking I’ve about had it with Transforms,” Dr. Kepke said. Dr. Zielinski had managed to talk Frank into driving. Middle of the night, called o
ut on an emergency like this, was new to Dr. Kepke. Dr. Kepke’s inexperience wasn’t Hank’s only problem – the expression on Glory’s face hadn’t been at all pleasant when he informed his wife he needed to hustle off to deal with yet another Transform emergency. At 2 AM on a Monday morning. He was lucky his postdoc was available at all, after a late Sunday eight hour surgery shift.

  “Think of all you’re going to be learning,” Hank said, and smiled. “Focuses in trouble, wounded Transforms, insane political games. You never know what’s going to happen next with the Transforms.”

  “As long as what happened to you in Phoenix doesn’t happen to me,” Frank said. Hank shook his head.

  “You can’t just wish them all away, Frank. If the MRC model is correct, they’re our future.”

  “Bah. All Transforms from a single mutation? A disease triggered mutation? I don’t believe it in a minute, and neither do you.”

  “True, the reality must be more complicated than the standard model, but the standard model is on the right track. Turn here.”

  They turned into the driveway of the vegetable truck farm, and wound their way up a short hill to the plateau where all the Transforms lived in their dilapidated mobile homes.

  “Creepy place,” Frank said.

  “Looks better in the daytime.” Well, at least a little. The Focus here wasn’t one of the kindly ones.

  Five men stood watch, wary, their weapons out and their posture itchy. Hank frowned at such an open display of weaponry, but based on the panicky phone comments they had every right. One of the guards ran up and shined a flashlight on Dr. Kepke’s face. He rolled down the window.

  “Dr. Zielinski?”

  “Over here,” Hank said. For his efforts, he got a flashlight beam in his face.

  “Great! They’re in the old farmhouse.”

  Dr. Zielinski exited the car, and followed the man, trailed by Dr. Kepke. The man led them to a small two-story farmhouse, a weather beaten turn of the century wood frame building in dire need of a new paint job and substantial siding repair. Lights shown through all the windows, despite the pre-dawn hour. Yes, they had an emergency to deal with.

  “That him? Yes, that’s him, alright,” a woman’s voice said. The voice belonged to Focus Abernathy, a Focus for nearly five years. He knew her from years ago, when he had bartered medical treatment for testing time during his research into the subtle differences between fundamental and supplemental juice, and more recently, when he collected the data for his paper on the scientific basis for Focus charisma. The latter turned out to be a bust, not because of any technical difficulties, but because a couple of Focus VIPs said ‘pretty please’ and sweet-talked him into not publishing his paper on the subject. More importantly, Focus Abernathy was one of the two Focuses who cooperated on training him to resist Focus charisma – it didn’t do him any good as a doctor when the Focuses he dealt with kept spinning him around on his heels with their charisma and messing up his diagnoses and surgical techniques.

  “Good morning, Focus Abernathy,” Hank said, and introduced Dr. Kepke to her. “So, where are these gunshot victims?”

  Focus Abernathy frowned. “Follow me,” she said, unhappy to be caught up in the crisis. Focus Abernathy tried to keep her head down as much as possible, and relied on the more politically savvy Focuses to keep the world from crashing down on her head. Like most Transform households, the Abernathy household was quite poor, because of discrimination against Transforms. Focus Abernathy needed all the help she could get.

  Hank followed the Focus through the kitchen and into the dining room, where he found two people laid out on the floor. When he entered the room, he stopped cold when he recognized the wounded Focus, and cursed passionately in his mind.

  “You got me Zielinski! Marcia…”

  The voice, a commanding contralto, came from a normally stunning Mediterranean bombshell of a Focus. This morning, though, Focus Biggioni appeared to have gone nine rounds with Cassius Clay. They had her laid out on a couch, covered by a thin sheet showing too much of her wounds.

  “Good morning, Tonya,” Hank said. “I thought you were going to give up fighting the Monsters hand to hand.”

  Tonya lowered her eyebrows and glared at him. “Shut up and start working, Zielinski.” Several of Tonya’s crew stopped their bustling and gathered close, hiding smiles. He saw money change hands, the winner snarking about white lab coats, which Hank and Dr. Kepke did currently wear. “Todd here’s gutshot, and he’s bleeding internally. I can’t support him much longer before I fall into my own healing trance.” Although Focus Tonya Biggioni was one of the most abrasive and difficult Focuses he knew, she managed to be brilliant, logical and fair-minded, often at the same time. He cut her a lot of slack because of her competence. He also enjoyed his verbal sparring matches with her; unlike with most Focuses, he didn’t have to hold back.

  “Get the trunk, Frank,” Hank said, referring to the almost passable portable operating studio he carried in the trunk of his Mercedes. Nothing moved, and Hank turned to see his assistant standing, hand over his now pasty white face, eyes glued to Biggioni. Dammit! Biggioni leaked charisma like a broken water main, as well as blood. Hell, Focus Abernathy appeared unsteady as well, not from the blood and gore but from the sight of her doctor standing up to the Focus VIP.

  “Do what the quack said, go get the trunk,” Tonya said, and Frank split. Running for his life, most likely.

  Biggioni was also one of the major reasons Hank invested time and effort into training resistance to Focus charisma. She was a hell of a dangerous Focus.

  Gunshot wounds, though? The rare Monster able to use firearms would not likely ever face Tonya. Things clicked in his head.

  “So how much juice damage did you do to this Arm, anyway, Tonya?” Hank asked. “You leave her alive?”

  “I didn’t do anything of the sort to her, she…” Tonya said. She interrupted herself and clamped her mouth shut. Glared at Hank. “I wasn’t going to talk about that, you… This is not for public consumption.”

  Pain lanced him, behind his eyes. Hell, she wanted to trick the damned information out of his head with her charisma! He turned away from Tonya and set his teeth, focusing his mind on past smells and current smells. Baby formula smells worked wonders, as well as the faint odor of cooked cabbage in the farmhouse. Anything to drag his mind away from Tonya’s damned charisma.

  “Let’s talk about this later,” Hank said. “First off…”

  “The Arm didn’t shoot them,” Tonya said, in a whisper.

  “Who did, then?”

  “Assassination squad, going after me.”

  “Or the Arm.”

  “How would you know that? Look at me,” Tonya said. Hank turned his eyes to the Focus. He couldn’t avoid it. “You’ve met her, haven’t you?” Tonya said, voice suddenly sugary. “You met her and didn’t report it to the Network, you bastard.”

  Yes, another bad Biggioni encounter. His temples started to pound as she tried to flummox him into ooze.

  “She treated me better than she treated you.” Several of Tonya’s Transforms murmured and slid toward their Focus, protective; anyone able to stand up to her verbal sparring was by definition a danger. “Arms are juice consumers who must hunt down their victims, and as any, well, predator, they don’t take well to threats.” Hank glared back at Tonya, and of all things, Tonya backed down and looked away. Yet another correct guess.

  “I figured that out, okay,” Tonya said. “She took my purse with my Network contact information in it. Your phone number and mailing address was in there, too. She’s too dangerous to work with, Hank. Look what she did to me! She’s a Monster, just like the Monsters I hunt down. Only…”

  “Only she talks and reasons and is likely as smart as either of us,” Hank finished. “She has to be, to hunt down Transforms for their juice and not attract a posse of Focuses after her. She’s been free now almost a year, and needs juice every week or two. How many household Transforms has she grabbed?
Not many, according to the information available to me. She’s hunting, her prey as she terms it, unattached Transforms.”

  Behind Hank, the rest of the farmhouse cleared out. Including several of Tonya’s so-called bodyguards, who should have been more protective of their Focus and less worried about their gorges. Bunch of weak-stomached Transforms. Hank wasn’t impressed.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” Tonya said. “The Monster grabbed one of my Transforms, right in the middle of the fight. Killed her. Said it was recompense, because we killed the Transform who led the attack to us. Does her so-called logic make any sense to you?”

  “Unfortunately, it does,” Hank said. “Once an Arm has fixated on a Transform she’s going to take juice from, she can’t back off. At least the Arms I’ve known.” Emphasis, there. He was the Arm expert, she wasn’t.

  “Monsters,” Tonya said. “Inhuman things. Animals.”

  “All the Major Transforms I’ve seen work very close to the level of basic instinct,” Hank said, shooting Tonya a rather pointed glance. She made a moue at him, acknowledging the hit. Behind him, the squeaking of dolly wheels announced the arrival of Dr. Kepke and Hank’s trunk. “Let’s set up the fold-up stretcher as our impromptu operating table,” he said to his assistant. “Over here, right next to the Focus.”

  “You’re going to operate here?” Dr. Kepke asked.

  “What options do I have?” Hank said. “What hospital, even Harvard Medical, would allow a Focus into the operating room to assist the surgeon? The only way either of these surgeries will succeed is with the Focus’s help. Her metasense, Frank, is what’s going to make this possible.”

  Frank took a quick look at Tonya, quailed, and pointedly turned away. “That’s why any doctor who’s going to operate on Transforms needs to become comfortable with Focuses and their charisma,” Hank said, as he started to sterilize his equipment.

  “He may be an arrogant jerk, but at least he’s a competent arrogant jerk,” Tonya said, to no one in particular.