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The Unborn
By Paul Pekin
By Paul Pekin
Storyarts
The Unborn
There were demonstrators out in the street, marching back and forth, tirelessly shaking those placards. Free the Unborn!
Duckworth poured himself another cup of coffee. Ah, the nineties. Those people left everything for the next generation!
When he looked up there stood Jackman, Millie, and Dolores, the usual delegation.
"What are you going to do about that new girl?" they complained.
"She's checking up on the unborns," Duckworth said. "She's making sure we keep their records up to date."
"She's not supposed to be doing that!" Jackman snarled. "The rules and regs say she's supposed to be on break."
"Write her up," Yolanda said. "That's rules. That's regulations."
Duckworth pushed the remainder of his doughnut into his mouth, refilled his coffee, and strolled over to the new girl's desk.
She was hunched over her terminal, furiously punching keys. Row after row after row of names and figures popped up on the screen. Duckworth bent low and pretended to read a date. Instead he sneaked a glance down her blouse.
"Will you look at this!" she said. "At first they didn't even give them names!"
Duckworth had always thought naming the unborns a stupid idea, all that extra work and for what? They were still unborn.
"A shame," he agreed, pulling up a chair. "Here, let me help." Such a lovely creature. So refreshing. Why discourage youthful idealism?
He let his fingers play over the keyboard, sending coded messages into the data base. The screen blinked, columns and shifted. "This takes you right back to the beginning, " he explained. "1997. They had to keep it secret then, but the little . . . (he almost said buggers) children were saved . . ."
"Without names, without genders! Why---they might as well have been aborted!"
Obviously. But this was not so something you said aloud. "Oh, no, no, no! They're alive. Nobody has killed a single child!" He touched a button and the screen cleared. "If you like, I could take you downstairs and show you the real thing."
Public tours of the Repository supposedly were on hold until this Right to Birth business quieted down, but there were things you could get away with when you were a status nine employee. What better way to impress a young lady than to take her deep into the inner workings of the Preservation Program?
After lunch--there was a wonderful cafeteria on the third level--Duckworth escorted Bernita to the main elevator bank. The Repository of the Unborn did not seem especially large until you started taking the elevators down. Then you discovered discovered the place was a skyscraper in reverse. Level twenty-seven was a bleak labyrinth of silent halls and locked doors inhabited only by a single grim security guard who seemed duly impressed by Duckworth's credentials. "There's nothing to see," Bernita complained.
"Never to worry, my dear," Duckworth said. "As a status nine employee, I have a master key."
At the end of the hall he unlocked a steel door. Cold dark air rushed out of an unlit room. "This," he said, flipping the light switch, "is last August. You had it on your screen only this morning."From floor to ceiling and corner to corner, one stainless steel drawer after another was built into the wall, almost reminiscent of the way the dead were shelved at the morgue. But here each shelf represented the living, if you could call a six week fetus in suspended animation living. "They're locked!" Bernita cried.
"Well, of course. We can't have just anybody yanking out these drawers. The little bug . . .babies . . . could easily be harmed. In this drawe, we have the A's. Aaron, Adam, Amanda, even Abdul. In the next, the B's. Beatrice, Bertram, Benjamin . . . "
Bernita crossed herself."All alive, all well, all extracted from their mother's womb without the slightest harm. You could almost say they are immortal."
Bernita was running her hands over the shelves, the way people still touched that Vietnam wall. "How many?"
"I should say about a billion, dear."
"A billion babies. Locked up without a trial."
Duckworth slept poorly that night. Dreams. At first they were pleasant enough but suddenly things darkened. He was on level 27, the very bottom, and together with Bernita he was freeing the unborn who, in the way of dreams, simply and suddenly began to exist by the millions and millions, perhaps by the billions, an enormous herd of little Aarons and Adams and Amandas and Abduls spreading out in every direction, devouring everything in sight, exactly like a plague of locusts. Whole cities crumbled beneath the avalanche, rivers and oceans disappeared, crops, animals, and open space ceased to exist.
But it was only a dream
. * * *
They were watching him, Jackman, Millie, Yolanda, Dolores. He had only to sit next to Bernita and he could see their heads come together. It didn't take a genius to figure out what they were saying:
"Somebody ought to write him up!"
"My dear," Duckworth whispered. "I can see that we will be unable to continue our work in such a public place. I have a computer in my apartment. With my modem, we can tap into the departmental base. We could search in privacy until we find the truth."
"The truth?"
"I'm afraid we are going to have to make some sort of a pretense."
"Pretense?"
"As to why we are together. And why, ah, tonight we will be in my apartment. Come now, take my hand. Let them think we are merely lovers."
She had a delightful little hand. Life in the capital city could be very pleasant for a status nine employee who kept his wits about him.
The moment he had her in his apartment he began searching beneath the carpet, behind picture frames, within the light fixtures. "Undoubtedly," he whispered, "This room is bugged. We must continue our pretense. Kiss me, quickly."
A second kiss followed the first, and then that activity which succeeds kissing. "We must make this realistic," Duckworth whispered, grappling with Bernita's pink underwear. "They'll tire of watching after a few hours. Then we can have a go at the computer."
To be on the safe side, he kept up the grappling until he was in a state somewhere between total exhaustion and heavenly bliss.
"I didn't feel a thing," Bernita said. "I kept thinking about those poor unborns."
Naked, Duckworth staggered over to the computer. Whatever it takes, he was thinking.
Whatever it takes to keep this young woman interested, that I will do."What are we going to see?" Bernita asked
"The complete records, storage, maintenance, all statistics relating to . . . hello?"
"What's wrong?"
Duckworth punched keys furiously. "Look at the temperature records for 1997, they're supposed to be recorded, a constant 55 degrees, anything above 58, anything below 52 . . . "
New figures flashed on the screen. "Oh my god. Look at 1999, look at 2002, they haven't
even . . ." Duckworth stared in horror. In January 2006 somebody had recorded the temperature. 112 fahrenheit!"Enough!" he cried. "Let's get back to bed before somebody suspects something. Tomorrow I'll get those locker keys and we'll see for ourselves."
* * *
The demonstrators were at it again, marching back and forth with their heavy placards. Duckworth was tousled on his way to work, and someone stuck him with a darning needle. Free the babies? If that temperature really had gone up to 112, how many babies could possibly be left?
At lunch he tried to talk Bernita out of accompanying him into the vaults. "You really don't want to see this, my dear. An unborn is, well, ugly. Assuming it's even large enough to see."
"Well see them together," Bernita insisted.
The usual security persons checked his credentials with the usual lack of diligence. They went down, down where things were silent and cool. Their footsteps echoing against the bare walls, they walked to the end of corridor 16 and entered the first archive room. "Here it is," he whispered--it somehow seemed more appropriate to whisper down here--"l997, the very beginning."
Bernita seemed awed. "To think! These babies are already forty years old and they haven't even been born yet!"
Duckworth unlocked the first drawer. Exactly what he expected to see is not quite clear, but some inner instinct told him to prepare for a dreadful odor.
"It's empty!" Bernita cried.
And the next! And the next! And the next! Not one single embryo, not the slightest evidence that one had ever existed.
"This is scandalous!" Duckworth gasped. "They've been flushed!"
* * *
There were three men in identical gray suits. They marched straight up to Duckworth's desk, opening their wallets. "FBI," their leader said. "You come with us."
Duckworth rose leadenly, avoiding eye contact with Bernita. Maybe, if he talked rapidly, he could keep her out of it.
But these fellows weren't talking. They led him down the hall and into the elevator. A moment later they were on the roof where a helicopter, blades whirling, waited. Far below, the crowd was making ugly noises. "Free the Unborn!"
"What's this all about?" Duckworth asked.
"Top secret. Get in."
From the air the capitol city was a beautiful sight. There was the White House, the monument, the reflecting pool, Reagan's Tomb, Disney Nation. Within moments they were descending upon a lush green field somewhere in the Maryland countryside.
I'm going to be killed, Duckworth thought, but then he saw that he in fact was upon a golf course. Roughly, he was escorted to a group of men who were gathered on the green. "Excellent shot, Mr. President," one of them cried, kicking the ball into the cup. Duckworth realized he was in the presence of the man who had carried all fifth-four states.
The president was even younger than he looked on television with a broad white smile and carefully barbered blow dried hair. There was not a seam on his rosy face and his hands were as small and delicate as a girl's. He was dressed casually, but very well, his open collared shirt hand tailored in Hong Kong, his shoes representing the finest labors of Italian craftsmen, his jeans--a president who wore jeans!--with that made-in-France look.
One of the secret servicemen stepped to his side. "Who?" the president cried. "Sorry. No interviews today."
"But sir, it's that fellow from the Repository."
"The Repository?"
"Of the Unborn . . . the fellow who's been poking around in the archives."
The party stood in silence while the president whacked off several practice shots. When, at last, he hit one on the button, he turned and said:
"I'll keep that. Your shot, Senator."
But the man he was addressing had dropped his clubs and turned upon Duckworth. It was none other than Senator Holsum of South Carolina, bald, gleaming and visibly rightous. "So you're the one," he snarled. "Where do you get off, poking around in the archives? A lousy status ten employee."
"I . . . I . . . I . . . " For a moment Duckworth considered dropping to his knees. "I . . . I was wrong, but I know you will want to hear what I discovered."
"You discovered all the little buggers were flushed away, didn't you," the Senator sneered, grasping Duckworth by the collar and was twisting with all his strength. "You, you miserable status 14 employee . . ."
As incredible as it seems, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Human Decency was strangling a civil servant in plain view of the President of the United States.
"How long have you been in Washington? Did you just arrive yesterday? What makes you think there is anything going on in this government that we don't already know about?"
Rapidly losing consciousness, Duckworth saw the president put down his club.
"What is this all about, Senator."
"It's those silly unborns. There've been a few screw ups down at the Repository, the usual stuff, sloppy records, faulty equipment."
"Well, just blame it on the liberals."
The senator loosened his grip. "Mr. President. If it were only a few hundred, we would. Tell him, Duckworth! Tell him how many! That's what you had in mind, isn't it?"
"8 billion, sir," Duckworth gasped. "Someone overloaded the circuits in 2006. The saline solution went sour in 2009. There were errors. Bad record keeping. Then . . . "
"Enough," the president said. "Why don't we take care of this in the usual way?"
"Done," the senator said. He nodded to the secret servicemen who seized Duckworth's arms.
"What are you going to do?" Duckworth cried.
"See that things are done right," the senator said, following him into the helicopter.
Then they were flying over the beautiful city. Then they were landing on the roof. Then they were in the elevator, but this time it descended past the twenty-seventh level and kept on going.
Level 66 was dark, silent, and empty. The agents, men you knew would never divulge a secret, hustled Duckworth down the hall and into a room so poorly lit that at first he did not see Bernita lying on a stainless steel table, naked and dazed. "A pity," one of the agents said. "She should never have taken those Right to Birth people seriously.""You're going to kill us!" Duckworth cried.
"Now, now. What's good enough for the little buggers, ought to be good enough for you."
Suddenly they were tearing the clothing from his body. Duckworth felt himself being lifted upon a table, side by side with Bernita. He had just enough time to reach out and touch her hand before two vats filled with dark icy liquid were rolled into the room.
It was definitely cold in the vat. Exactly fifty-five degrees. He felt the electrons gently moving through his body; he tasted the heavy saline solution. I'm alive, he thought, drifting painlessly into an eternal sleep. I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive.
And so he was, until one afternoon several months later when his successor accidently erased his file.
the end
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at Paul Pekin ppekin@megsinet.net
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