She peered inside. As expected, she couldn’t see any animals, but she did spot a young technician in a white lab coat walking purposefully toward a door leading deeper inside the facility. But he was walking away from her.
She quickly rapped on the glass. A few seconds later, the tech changed directions and opened the door halfway, his body blocking the entrance. “Can I help you?” he said.
Erin smiled. “Yes. I’m an old friend of Dr. Raborn. In from out of town. But I was hoping to surprise him.”
The tech eyed her up and down, but didn’t find anything suspicious about her. She was wearing light cotton pants and a blue blouse, fairly form-fitting. The outfit was tasteful, but left little room for hidden weapons, cans of paint, or other items a militant animal rights activist might bring. And her beauty was disarming. If she was an activist, the tech decided he might consider joining the movement himself. “Old friend, huh? You don’t look old enough to be anyone’s old friend,” he said flirtatiously.
She threw him a thousand-watt smile. “Okay, you caught me,” she said. “I’m actually a young … ish … friend of Dr. Raborn. He told me his office was at the back of your vivarium. Is he in today?”
The tech threw the door open and stepped to the side. “You’re in luck. I just saw him in his office fifteen minutes ago. Do you want me to take you to him?”
“That would be great,” said Erin.
The vivarium was an expansive stainless-steel complex. A high-throughput, fully computerized animal-processing plant. It was designed to facilitate animal experimentation and it performed its function flawlessly. Erin had never been in one, but she knew all about them. Animals were routinely sacrificed for the sake of science across the world, in immunology classes in undergraduate and graduate school, and for experimentation of every kind.
Pharmaceutical companies were typically filled with well-meaning animal lovers who had no choice but to develop a clinical callousness toward the many animals that were sacrificed. The FDA required that experimental drugs be tested in animals, and even required companies to administer higher and higher doses of their drugs until exactly half of the animals tested were killed—a dose called the Lethal Dose 50, or LD50—before allowing a drug to be tested in humans.
“Would you like me to tell you about the facility while we walk?” asked the young lab tech.
Erin realized she had been openly gawking. “That obvious I’m a tourist?”
“Pretty much,” said the tech. “But that’s okay. We’ve all given plenty of tours to friends and relatives.” He began walking and turned back toward Erin. “So we house seven different species here: rats, mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, gerbils, hamsters, and Yucatan mini-pigs.”
“Yucatan mini-pigs?”
“Yeah. They’re about eighty pounds and they look like fangless wild boars. So don’t be thinking of the adorable little pink ones that you see in children’s zoos.”
“Got ya,” said Erin.
“Animals are delivered, put in cages with barcodes, and placed in separate rooms by species. Water is purified and piped into each cage automatically—computer controlled. Humidity, temperature, air quality, and lighting in each room are carefully monitored as well.”
“Right. Making sure you eliminate all extraneous variables from your experiments.”
“Exactly.” He waved his arm toward a doorway. “Those are the surgical suites. I won’t take you in, but they’re pretty much what a human surgical suite would look like. We go beyond government mandates when it comes to anesthesia and are as humane as we can possibly be.”
She nodded grimly. Billions of chickens and other food animals were killed each year, maybe even each week for all Erin knew, but for some reason a vivarium run by a pharmaceutical company just seemed more like a horror chamber. She wasn’t sure why.
What was truly remarkable was her mind’s ability to partition itself. To create a nearly impenetrable barrier to block out, not just the memory of the night she lost her family, but the emotional content of these memories as well. She was now in a facility that did experimentation on animals, which might be expected to trigger her memory of a mutilated puppy. And it did. But only for an instant, before another part of her mind was able to clamp down on this and push it away. After years of nightmares and debilitating fear and mistrust of others as a child living with her aunt and uncle, of waking in the middle of the night screaming, drenched in sweat, her mind had, mercifully, made an adjustment that had allowed her to live a normal life—free of her demons.
For the most part.
“Carcasses are taken out through the unsterilized side of the building,” continued the lab technician, “bagged, and thrown into large freezer units. We have an outside service remove the ones we make radioactive during the experiments.”
“Where do they take them?”
The tech tilted his head in thought. “Good question,” he said. “I really don’t know. Wouldn’t you rather ask where the nonradioactive ones go?” he added with a smile.
“You read my mind,” said Erin, returning the smile. “Where do the nonradioactive carcasses go?”
“I’m glad you asked. These are donated to the San Diego Zoo and put on the menu for the carnivores there.”
Erin raised her eyebrows. “I guess if their polar bears start glowing in the dark, you know you’ve mixed up the carcasses.”
The tech laughed and continued walking. As they approached a long black lab table, made of a substance that was smooth and seemed as hard as concrete, the tech said, “You may find this a bit … grisly.”
A row of glass cylinders were aligned on one of the black benches, one every two feet. Attached to each apparatus was a single pink, throbbing, disembodied reddish-pink mass, about the size of a small pebble, continuously being bathed in a solution, half of which contained experimental drugs. Each fleshy mass, which could only be a heart, continued beating rhythmically as though unaware it was now without an owner. A thin wire led from each heart to a computer monitor that recorded the frequency and force of each contraction.
“Rat hearts,” said the tech.
The hearts beat with inhuman speed. Thump thump! Thump thump! Thump thump! Erin’s lips curled up in disgust. Grisly was an understatement, she thought. “So rat hearts will keep beating, even without the rat,” she mused. “Who knew?”
The tech took a quick detour into a doorway where a female lab technician in a long white lab coat held a rat by its tail. She set it down and deftly placed a two-pronged metal probe, which resembled a small tuning fork, quickly into the rat’s beady red eyes, while simultaneously pressing a button that delivered a powerful jolt of electricity directly into them. The rat went into a convulsion and she carefully recorded the duration of this in a lab notebook that was open on the table.
“Ah … I think I’ve seen enough,” said Erin. She was able to seal off her traumatic memories, but there was no need to push it. “Not that I don’t appreciate the tour. This was really interesting, in a torture-chamber-straight-out-of-a-horror-film sort of way. But I should be surprising Dr. Raborn while the surprising is good.”
The tech nodded. “You got it.” He led her another thirty yards, took a left, and stopped in front of an office. The outside had a placard that read Dr. Hugh Raborn, M.D./Ph.D., Vice President, Neuroscience.
Erin’s pulse raced. The moment of truth had arrived.
Raborn’s door was open and he was busily typing into his computer as they approached. Erin stood at the door, ignoring the butterflies in her stomach and hoping her face wasn’t flush from the excitement she was feeling.
“Dr. Raborn, an old friend of yours is here to see you,” said the lab tech, gesturing toward Erin standing slightly behind him.