We went inside and managed to find the room the hearing was being held in with only a couple of wrong turns. We sat in the back of the room, which was nicer than I was expecting: blue carpet, wood-paneled walls, the desks and tables in the front made of an expensive-looking wood. The place had a formal, legal air. The chairs for the audience were padded, which was nice.
The space for observers wasn't huge, but it was filled. A lot of the people looked like reporters. They held tape recorders or notepads. A couple of TV cameras stood off to the side.
No one noticed us. I considered it one of the perks of radio that I could be well known and completely unrecognizable at the same time. The reporters focused all their attention on the front of the room: the row of senators, eight of them, each with an identifying nameplate, and Dr. Paul Flemming, sitting at a long table facing them.
Ben leaned over. "You met him. What's he like?"
"I don't know. He's kind of cagey. Nervous. Territorial."
"He looks kind of mousy."
"Yeah, that too."
C-SPAN live wasn't any more exciting than C-SPAN on TV. I paid attention anyway, waiting for McCarthy to burst out of some unassuming senator's skin and ravage the hearings with Cold War paranoia. No such luck. The proceedings were downright sedate, very Robert's Rules of Order.
Senator Duke opened the hearings after laying down the rules of how long each senator could speak and when. As Chair, he got to decide such matters.
"Because of the highly irregular nature of the subject which we have convened to discuss, and the secrecy under which the research on this subject has been conducted, the committee has opted to reserve the first two sessions for questioning the gentleman who supervised the research. Dr. Paul Flemming, welcome. You have a statement for us?"
Each witness could enter a prepared statement into the record. They tended to be dry and academic. I expected Flemming's to be doubly so.
"Five years ago, I received a grant of funds from the National Institutes of Health to conduct research into a number of previously neglected diseases. These are diseases which have for centuries been shrouded in superstition and misunderstanding—"
And so on. He might as well have been talking about cancer or eczema.
The senators' questions, when they finally started, were benign: what is the Center, where is it located, who authorized funding, from which department was funding derived, what are the goals of the Center. Flemming's answers were equally benign, repetitions of his opening statement, phrases like the ones he'd given me: the Center strives to further the boundaries of knowledge in theoretical biological research. He never even used the words vampire or lycanthrope. I squirmed, wondering when someone was going to mention the elephant in the room.
Senator Duke granted my wish.
"Dr. Flemming, I want to hear about your vampires."
Dead silence answered him. Not a pen scratched in the entire room. I leaned forward, waiting to hear what he'd say.
Finally, Flemming said, very straightforward, as if delivering a paper at a medical conference, "These are patients exhibiting certain physiological characteristics such as an amplified immune system, pronounced canines, a propensity for hemophagia, severe solar urticaria—"
"Doctor," Duke interrupted. "What are those? Hemophagia? What?"
"Consuming blood, Senator. Solar urticaria is an allergy to sunlight."
He made it sound so clinical, so mundane. But what kind of allergy caused someone to burn into a cinder?
"And what have you discovered about these so-called patients of yours, Doctor?"
Flemming hesitated a moment, then leaned closer to the microphone set before him. "I'm not sure I understand your question, Senator."
"Vampires. In your opinion, what are they?"
Flemming cleared his throat, nervousness slipping into the calm, and said cautiously, "I believe I explained previously, that vampirism is characterized by a set of physical characteristics—"
"Cut the bull, Doctor. We've all seen Dracula , we know the 'physical characteristics.' I want to hear about the moral characteristics, and I want to hear about why they exist."
I leaned forward, scooting to the edge of my seat, not because I would hear any better. The microphones worked great. I was waiting for the fight to break out.
"My studies don't involve the scope of your question, Senator."
"Why not?"
"Those points are irrelevant."
"With all due respect I disagree with you. Strongly."
"Senator, I'm not qualified to comment on the moral characteristics of my patients."
"Your test subjects, your patients—how do you feed them, Doctor? Whose blood do they suck out? How many of them turn into vampires?"
"Despite all the stories to the contrary, the condition is not transmitted by direct fluid contact—"
"And the blood?"
"Blood bank, Senator. We use pints of the most common types that the existing blood supply can spare."
"Thank you, Doctor." He said it like he'd gained some kind of victory.
"Doctor, I have some questions over the budgeting of your research—" One of the other senators on the committee, a woman named Mary Dreschler, quickly steered the discussion back to more mundane matters. A Democrat from a Midwestern state, Dreschler had run for the seat held by her late husband, who'd died suddenly in the middle of a reelection campaign. She was on her third term.
After two hours of this, the day's session was over. It was just as well it wasn't an all-day thing. If people in Congress did this sort of thing a lot, I was going to have to respect them a little more. Here I was, thinking the job was all glamour and state dinners. When Duke called the session into recess for the day, a sense of relief passed through the room, and the group sigh of exhaustion changed the air pressure.
Ben, leaning back in his chair, smirked in amusement. "If this is the tone the whole hearings are going to take, we're in for a roller coaster. I can't wait to see what Duke does with you."
"I thought you were supposed to be on my side."
"I am. It's still going to be fun to watch." I could hear it now: Eaten any babies lately, Ms. Norville ?
Eggs for breakfast. Does that count?
Looking purposeful, Ben gathered up his briefcase and jacket.
"Where are you off to?" I asked.
"I have some research I want to do. You don't need me for anything, do you?"
"Nope." I had some research of my own I wanted to take care of.
"Then I'll see you tomorrow." Outside the hearing room, he took off down the hallway, away from the front doors of the building.
As I turned to leave, a man with a mini digital camcorder tucked in his hand stepped into my path. I balked, startled.