normal child would take for granted, but I vowed I'd
never give up trying to help. That's why I chose this
particular line of study. From day one, my only objec¬
tive has been to help my son.
"Maybe now you can understand why I'm so grateful
to you four gentlemen. It's too late to give Andrew back
the t h i n g s he missed in childhood, but with your help,
it's not too late to give him the one thing he desires
most, to stand on his own two feet and go outside for a
walk."
A single tiny tear dribbled down the doctor's left cheek
and he licked it away when it touched the corner of his
mouth. To tell the truth, my eyes were getting a little
damp, too. It was j u s t such a beautiful story. This bril¬
liant man had been pushing the boundaries of science
for decades, not for the love of fame or money, but for
the love of his invalid child. That child was a fully grown
adult now, but Dr. Marshall had never faltered, never
given up h o p e , in his quest to help him, and at that mo¬
ment I admired the doctor more than any other man I
could think of.
I was more than ready to help out. Although nor¬
mally a cynical son of a bitch by nature, from what I'd
already seen, I truly believed Dr. Marshall would be
able to pull it off and deliver his promise to his poor
son. Although it made no real difference in my life—I
was going to be rich either way—somehow it made me
feel a hell of a lot better about donating my arm know¬
ing what I knew.
N o t surprisingly, the other guys had been affected
by the doctor's words, also. He'd been so open and hon¬
est with us, how could we not be? He didn't have to share
this personal stuff with us. We wanted the money, sure,
but I think we also really wanted to help.
We talked for a few more minutes, everyone quite
comfortable with each other's company by this time.
Dr. Marshall promised to introduce us to Andrew and
talked about what we'd see on the tour we were going to
take. Everyone was excited, including m e .
For a second, I considered asking him about some¬
thing in the video. It had bothered me when I watched it
and it was bothering me even more now. I wanted to
learn more about that severed head with the spine
thrashing around in the glass tank. I mean, the arms and
legs and hands and stuff I could understand, but not the
head. Like ourselves, people could have donated those
other body parts, but that man—whoever it had been—
had died for that particular experiment. Died, for God's
sake! Wasn't that taking things just a bit too far? No
matter how noble and pure Dr. Marshall's intentions
were, wasn't there a line that shouldn't be crossed?
Somehow this didn't seem like the time to get into it,
though, so I bit my tongue. I'd ask him later if I got the
chance; W h o was I to spoil the friendly mood?
Drake poked his head into the room long enough to
inform us that Cook had the food prepared if we were
ready for it. He disappeared without waiting for an
answer.
"Excellent!" Dr. Marshall said. "Is everyone up for a
spot of lunch?"
After the graphic video presentation and everything
else I'd seen and heard this m o r n i n g , lunch didn't sound
all that appealing to m e , but when you've been on the
street as long as I have, you learn never to pass up a free
meal.
"Sure thing," I said, and followed the rest of the gang
up the wheelchair ramp and out the door.
C H A P T E R T E N
Seeing as my normal definition of fine dining included
a W H O P P E R ® and fries from Burger King, when Dr.
Marshall had mentioned "a spot of lunch," Fd been ex
pecting a bowl of soup or maybe a peanut butter and j a m
sandwich. I couldn't believe my eyes when the waiter—
a thin Asian man dressed in the whitest shirt, pants,
and apron on the planet—kept bringing out tray after
tray of gourmet delights.
To start with, we dug into crackers and cheese, dev¬
iled eggs, pickles, and j u m b o shrimp cocktails. Then we
moved on to fresh garden salads with our choice of two
different kinds of thick, delicious soups. By this time I
was already reasonably full, but there was no way I was
going to miss out on the main course, which was honeyroasted ham with creamy scalloped potatoes and as¬
paragus tips in melted butter. There was a dessert tray
too, but I couldn't go anywhere near it without threat¬
ening to burst. If that was what they called lunch
around here, I could hardly wait to see what supper
would be like.
W h e n Dr. Marshall finally managed to drag us w i d e eyed slobs away from the feast, he delivered on his prom¬
ise of the personally guided tour of his incredible
medical facility. We learned that the entire building
had been designed as wheelchair accessible, and not j u s t
for Dr. Marshall's benefit. W h e e l s and Red Beard were
suitably impressed they wouldn't have to "sit out" cer¬
tain areas of the tour like they normally might in a build¬
ing this size.
The first floor we covered quickly, since we'd already
seen the majority of it. Besides the lavish four-story re¬
ception atrium, there were three conference and video
rooms, the dining hall, the kitchen, and a rather impres¬
sive medical library and computer research station.
The second floor was the real heart of the facility,
where Dr. Marshall's laboratories and operating rooms
were. Like the driver who'd delivered us here this morn¬
ing had said, everything was state of the art. N o t a
penny had been spared; lab after lab was filled with the
best surgical and research equipment money could buy.
Some of the equipment here wasn't even available to
scientists in the public sector. Dr. Marshall and his staff
had developed, patented, then produced it strictly for
their own benefit.
Being a layman in every sense of the word, I didn't
have a clue what 99 percent of the gizmos and gadgets
were for, but Dr. Marshall did his best to answer all of
our questions and clue us in as best he could. We got to
see all the experiments up close, which was kind of cool
once you got over the queasy feeling of being in a room
full of severed body parts. They were definitely gro¬
tesque, but for the most part I found them fascinating,
almost like I had somehow walked into one of the sci¬
ence fiction movies I'd enjoyed so much as a kid.
The highlights for me included getting to see the leg
that had miraculously survived for one hundred and
nineteen record days and when I got to shake the hand
of a severed woman's arm. I took hold of the hand as
one of the medical lab assistants punched in a command
on a nearby computer terminal. Almost instantly, the
hand clenched comfortably around m
i n e , scaring the
shit out of me, and causing everyone else to laugh at my
reaction/Freaky, man!
After checking out the three spacious and efficientlooking operating theaters, we headed up to tour the
_ third floor. This floor was set up more like a posh hotel
than a hospital ward, with thick luxurious carpet on the
floor and beautiful paintings h a n g i n g on the walls.
This was where the staff lived and also where our bed¬
rooms were going to be for as long as our stay here
lasted. I was anxious to explore my room but Dr. Mar¬
shall gestured for us to stop at room 301 near the end of
the first hallway. He turned, and, when he talked to us,
his voice was barely above a whisper.
"This is Andrew's room. Your rooms are around the
corner at the far end of the building. You'll see your
names on the doors. There really isn't much else to see.
The fourth floor is j u s t for storage and empty space for
future expansion, but before you go get settled in, I
thought you might like to meet my son."
"Of course," I said. Everyone agreed it would be nice
to meet the guy we were here to help.
"Great. I'll j u s t check in on him first and see if he's
up for a visit. He's a little apprehensive about taking
your arms and legs. He thinks you'll all hate him for it.
Maybe you can set his mind at ease. It's the last t h i n g
he needs to be worried about right now. Just stay here a
minute and keep the noise down. I'll be right back."
The surgeon disappeared quietly into room 301 and
we waited patiently in the hall for five minutes. We
were starting to get restless when Dr. Marshall opened
the door and rejoined us.
"I'm afraid this isn't a good time for this. Andrew is
sleeping comfortably and I don't want to wake him. He's
on a lot of medication that tends to keep him pretty
drowsy. I don't want him moving around too much be¬
fore the operation. The nurse tells me that lately he's
been sleeping during the day, and up watching televi¬
sion most of the night.
"Fm going to take you in to have a quick peek but
you have to stay quiet. I want you to meet him more
formally, of course, but that will have to wait for an¬
other day. I'm sure you'll have lots of chances to talk to
each other over the next few months. Come on in."
We paraded into the room as quietly as possible and
gathered just inside the door. Andrew's room was huge,
his hospital bed easily thirty feet away from us, situated
beside a large three-paned picture window so he could
see the fields outside. Andrew was only a small lump
under the sparkling white bed sheets. He was bandaged
up worse than an Egyptian mummy, so much so that
I'd have never been able to guess there was a man on
the bed if I hadn't been told. An oxygen mask covered
his face, obscuring our view of his only exposed skin. It
was a sad, sobering sight, and at that m o m e n t I was glad
he was asleep because I wouldn't have been able to think
of a single thing to say to him.
The rest of the room was taken up with various mon¬
itoring equipment, medical supplies, and a mainframe
computer system. Thousands of tiny wires trailed from
the computer station over to Andrew's bed, where they
split in four directions to connect into the bandaged ar¬
eas where his arms and legs should have been. We only
stayed for a m i n u t e , but it was long enough for us to
realize this poor man needed our help badly.
"Pretty unsettling, isn't it?" Dr. Marshall grimaced,
once we were all back in the hall. "Maybe now you can
fully realize why I've been so driven to help him. He's
my only son. I hope he won't have to live his life in that
room much longer.
"I took you in there because I wanted you to see how
I've prepared his body to accept your donated limbs.
You noticed the fiber-optic connections? The same prin¬
ciple we talked about to keep your limbs alive once they
are surgically removed is applied to his body for the r e attachment procedure. I removed his deformed stumps
and have attached the fiber-optic network to all the
healthy nerve endings we could find. D u r i n g surgery,
I'll be hooking up these healthy nerves to y o u r healthy
nerves, and there should be a minimal amount of func¬
tion loss from your body to his. Essentially, given time
to heal of course, he should be able to get up and walk
away almost as if your donated limbs had been his own
right from birth."
We thanked Dr. Marshall for the tour and each ram¬
bled down the hall to find our rooms. We agreed to
meet back downstairs for supper at 7:00 P.M. sharp. Ater the lunch we'd been treated t o , I for one didn't plan
on being late.
My room was number 332, halfway down the corri¬
dor. It was a lavish suite, which even surpassed the
splendor of the Four Seasons, where Blue J and I had
spent the night earlier this week. It was only half the
size of Andrew's room but seeing as I was used to sleep¬
ing in a Dumpster, this room far exceeded anything
that I'd ever need. I sprawled on the bed, flipped on the
boob tube, and watched a little mindless television for a
while, j u s t trying to mellow out from all the excite¬
ment. W i t h all the information swirling around in my
head, I didn't think I'd be able to relax, but within m i n
utes my eyelids were drooping. I didn't even try fight¬
ing it, drifting off for an afternoon nap.
W h e n I woke up it was already 6:11 P.M., which sur¬
have a nice hot bath before heading downstairs to the
dining hall. I was the last guest to show. There were
also twelve men and women I hadn't met yet, probably
staff, but they were eating at another table on the far
side of the room. Dr. Marshall and Drake both ate
with us.
Supper was wonderful. We had seafood chowder,
then our choice of pasta primavera with boneless chicken
strips or pork chops with applesauce. Being a pig, I had
both. I also drank the better part of a bottle of expen¬
sive red wine. Nobody seemed to care. Eat, drink, and
be merry, I guess.
After the meal, Dr. Marshall raised his glass to make
a toast.
"To my new friends," he said. "Together, we make
history."
There was some laughter and a cheer from everyone
at the table; then Dr. Marshall said something else that
made us cheer even louder.
"We only have one more thing to do today. We have
to sign a contract with each other. Anyone interested in
getting rich? Yeah? Well, let's go make each of you mil¬
lionaires. How does that sound?"
Pretty damn good tome.
I followed Drake and his boss out of the dining hall
and back to the glass-domed atrium.
An older secretary with a wrinkled brow and her
hair
tied up in a tight bun passed out our contract forms, in
triplicate, and we signed them after giving them the old
once-over. Everything looked fine to me and, by this
time, I suppose that I trusted the doctor.
Once the papers were collected and the secretary
shuffled away with them, Drake had us sit with him
one at a time in front of a fax machine. On the p h o n e ,
he was talking to a representative of the First National
Bank down in the Cayman Islands. Grand Cayman was
a popular choice for anyone wishing to wire-deposit
large amounts of cash into an offshore bank account.
Their strict laws of nondisclosure made it virtually
impossible for anyone—like say, the United States In
ternal Revenue Service—to stick their noses into the
accounts and start asking questions. Dr. Marshall had
previously set up these accounts and Drake was passing
on the final information to activate them in our names.
The fax machine started spewing out confirmation that
I was now the holder of a bank account with an im¬
pressive balance of $2,000,000.00 in cold hard cash.
I held the document with shaking hands, reading it
over four times to make sure it really had as many
zeroes as I thought it did. I couldn't believe it. Yester¬
day I was a penniless, street loser—today, a multimil¬
lionaire.
After the last of us received our confirmation pa¬
pers, we went back to the dining hall and had one hell
of a party. Dr. Marshall and Drake left the four of us
to it and soon we were sloshed out of our minds and
whooping up a storm. If there's one t h i n g homeless
people can do best, it's party like there's no tomorrow,
especially if someone else is picking up the tab for the
booze.
W h e n I left the party, the others were still hard at it
and Red Beard had started to sing. Terribly, I might
add. That's when I knew I'd had enough. It must have
been around eleven o'clock when I stumbled upstairs to
call it a night. It was a good thing they'd put my name
on the door because damned if I could remember my
room number. Anyway, I made it into bed, flicked off
the light, and happily basked for a few minutes in the
alcohol-induced glow. .
"I'm a millionaire!" I rejoiced. "A goddamned mil¬
lionaire. I can't bloody believe it. Yaahooooo!"
I laughed and laughed and could hardly get control