Life Blood---XXIV---Page No 82



rows and rows of petri dishes. They were clear, with circular indentations in the center. . .
But wait a minute. Those weren't just any old lab dishes. And no plant extracts were in them either, just clear liquid. That was odd, very fishy.
I stood there puzzling, and then I remembered seeing pictures
of lab dishes like these being used for artificially fertilized
embryos. At the beginning, freshly extracted human ova are
placed in an incubator for several hours, afloat in a medium that
replicates the inside of a female Fallopian tube, to mature them in
preparation for fertilization. Goddard had said something about
tests on the blastocyst, the first cellular material created after
fertilization. So was he using actual fetuses? My God. I felt like I
was starting to know, or guess, a lot more than he wanted me to.
        My thoughts were churning as I looked up and studied the
video screens above the boxes. It took a moment, but then I
figured out the petri dishes and their chemicals had been placed
in the incubators between 4:00 P.M. and 7:30 P.M. Last evening.
What—?
I started counting. They were in racks, stacked, in sets of
four by four. Let's see. Five in this incubator, five in the next, five in the . . . There were over two hundred dishes in all!
        Impossible. I looked down at them again, feeling a chill.
Nothing seemed to be in them yet, at least as far as I could tell, but then human eggs are microscopic. So if ova were . . .
        When he supposedly was doing that in vitro on the Mayan
woman, was he actually extracting eggs?
Get serious. That was not where they came from.
By then I was well along the Kubler-Ross scale, past denial
and closing in on anger, but still . . . so many! How could they all—
        I turned and examined the row of plastic-covered jugs at the
back of the lab, lined up, six in all. Now I had to know what was in
them.
I was still shaky, but I steadied myself, walked over, pulled
back the plastic, and touched one. It was deathly cold, sweating in the moist air. When I flipped open its Frisbee-sized top, I saw a faint wisp of vapor emerge into the twilight of the room . . .
Then it dawned on me. Of course. They were cryo-storage
containers. He'd need them to preserve fertilized eggs, embryos.
        I lifted off the inside cover and placed it carefully onto the
bench, where it immediately turned white, steaming with mist.
Then I noticed a tiny metal rod hooked over the side of the





opening. When I pulled it up, it turned out to be attached to a
porous metal cylinder containing rows of glass tubes.
        What's . . .?
Feeling like I was deep in a medical fourth dimension, I took out one of the freezing tubes. It was notched and marked with a code labeled along the side: "BL -1 la," "BL -1 lb," "BL-1 lc," and so it went, all the way to "g." But nothing was there.
I began checking the other tubes. They all were empty too. So why was he freezing empty containers?
Go with the simple answer. He's getting them ready for new embryos.
I slid the rod back into the cryo-tank, then walked over and
hoisted myself onto the lab bench next to the Dancing Shiva,
creator and destroyer. And when I did, I again felt a stab of pain in
my groin. The bastard. I was shaking, in the early stages of shock.
More than anything, I just wanted to find him and kill him. . .
I thought I heard a scraping noise somewhere outside, in the hall, and I froze. Was he about to come in and check on his
"experiments"? Then I realized it was just the building, his house of horrors, creaking from the wind.
I took one final look at the incubators, and all the pain came back. The whole thing was too much for my body to take in. I sat there trying to muster my strength.
Don't stop now. Keep going.
I got back onto my feet. The phone. Use the telephone. Find
Steve, alert the embassy, then get Sarah. Do it now, while you still
can.
I was holding my breath as I walked over and pushed open
the door to the office and looked in. It was empty and dark. Good.
I headed straight for the black case of the Magellan World Phone.
        When I picked up the handset and switched it on, the diodes
went through their techno-dance of greens and yellows and then
stabilized giving me a dial tone. Thank you, merciful God.
        I decided to start off by calling the hotel in Belize again, on the
long shot that Steve had managed to get the hell out of
Guatemala. Baby, please be there. My watch said the time was
five-twenty in the morning, but he once told me they manned the
desk around the clock. No problem getting through, though the
connection had a lot of static. But then came the news I'd been
dreading: no Steve Abrams.
"He still not come back, mon."

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