“Sometimes,” Redpath said, feeling he was being manipulated.
“So do I. One has to accept them, and I imagine that with a little effort one could learn to live with the occasional daymare.”
“One? That means me, doesn’t it?”
“You’re the focal point of the experiment, John.” Nevison stood up, came round the desk and sat on the front edge of it close to Redpath, a manoeuvre which was intended to create an atmosphere of informal friendliness. “Look, I appreciate that you’ve had a disturbing experience, but it wouldn’t be fair to any of us if you made a decision about your future while still in the aftermath. I’d like you to skip today’s programme of tests and, instead, write or dictate a full report of what happened this morning, treating it as part of our experimental data. That shouldn’t take very long, then you can have the rest of the day to yourself. Go for a walk and think things over, and we’ll have another talk in the morning. How does that sound to you?”
“All right,” Redpath said reluctantly, rising to his feet.
I’ll hand in my resignation in writing. That’ll make it official. No quibbling. All the soft soap in the world won’t wash out a word of it.
He left Nevison without speaking further and went along the landing to the large room at the rear of the house which was used as an office by all those individuals who did not possess sufficient clout within the department to commandeer separate quarters. Of the six desks in the room only one was occupied that morning, by Terry Malan, a psychology student who was supposed to be working on a final year project, but who spent most of his tune tinkering with motor cycle parts. He had a stripped-down magneto spread out on his blotter and was staring at it with furrowed brow.
Redpath passed him in silence, sat down at his own desk and picked up a pen. He made up his mind to spend not more than ten minutes writing a brief report for Nevison and then to clear out for the rest of the day, but he quickly found that concentration was difficult.
Bubbles of blood swelling in the nostrils.
Is that the sort of thing one puts in a report? Is it attention to detail, or morbidity? Is it evidence of a scientific mind, or a sick one? How many men does Leila have? And how often? Where can I get another job? Why does that young creep Malan keep staring at me? I know he’s staring at me, even though I can’t see him. Every time he raises his eyes and looks at the back of my head it’s like being caught in the beam from the Eddystone lighthouse. Should that go into the report, as well?
After an hour of sporadic scribbling Redpath had completed one page. He sealed it in an envelope, marked it “CONFIDENTIAL—FOR ATTENTION OF OR NEVISON,” and placed it in the centre of his desk under a green slate paperweight. Aware he was acting as though he would not be returning, Redpath took a few personal possessions—postage stamps, emergency supply of phenobarbitone, nail clippers—from the desk’s middle drawer and slipped them into his pocket. When he stood up to leave he found Malan watching him intently. Redpath winked at him, put his arms around an imaginary dancing partner and parodied a George Raft tango the whole way to the door, still without speaking.
Outside on the landing, he stood for a moment with a hand pressed to his forehead, suddenly afraid of himself. It occurred to him that it was madness to walk out on the experiment over a single incident which perhaps was never to recur—madness, not in the cackling-laughter-from-the-attic tradition Nevison had mentioned, but straightforward economic and social insanity. People were always making jokes about how easy it was to get money from the DHSS, but if his past experience was anything to go by they were likely to explain to him, very patiently, that if his surname began with R and he had the same number of fingers on each hand no benefit would be payable until after the next transit of Mercury. Then there was the prospect of cutting himself off from Leila, which was the last thing in the world he wanted to do.
He smoothed down his hair, brushed some flecks from the suede of his jacket and went down the stairs to find Leila. The hall floor stretched out before him, a subdued chessboard of pale green and biscuit-coloured tiles upon which moved blurred shadows of the outside foliage. All at once it was awash with blood.
This was not bright red, oxygenated blood such as he had seen on the apparition at the door of his apartment. It was old blood—brown, congealing, laced with black threads where it was smeared thin, filled with huge slug-like clots elsewhere. The clots glistened like mounds of raw beef. And, as if the underlying hall floor had been tilted, the hideous organic slime appeared to be flowing towards Redpath…
“Ah, no,” he whispered, gripping the banister with one hand and shielding his eyes with the other. He stood motionless for a moment, cringing, and when he uncovered his eyes the hall floor was clean again. Its leaf-embossed tiles might have been newly laid, newly worked over by the original Victorian housemaids with scrubbing brushes and carbolic acid and reeking wax polish. The rest of the world looked normal. A typewriter began a bored clacking in one of the offices nearby.
Redpath completed his descent of the stairs and walked thoughtfully into the rear of the building, urgent questions clamouring in his mind. They had told him that Compound 183 was a harmless derivative of enkephalin, modified to make it highly selective as to which brain cells it affected—but what did that mean? How long would its effects last? And what guarantee was there that Nevison, Magill and the others knew what they were talking about? After all, the very word “experiment” implied that they were only guessing, trying out different things, hoping that the guinea pig would not do something irritating like developing a tumour, or going mad, or dropping down dead.
The pay should have been higher. I’ve got to find a safer place.
He opened the door to Leila Mostyn’s office and discovered she was not alone. Marge Rawlings, Nevison’s secretary, was in a corner of the room using a photocopier which had been sited there for want of suitable space in other parts of the building. Judging by the stack of sheets at her side, she was going to be there for a long tune.
“Good morning, ladies,” Redpath called, hiding his disappointment. “And how are we today?”
“We are looking for somebody to help with this copying, and you are standing around with both arms the same length,” Marge said, eyeing him hopefully through her gold-rimmed octagonal glasses. “How about it, John?”
“Sorry—I’m no good with machinery,” Redpath said, turning his back to her and hunkering down beside Leila, who was seated at her desk and had her gaze fixed on a block of graph paper. She ignored his arrival.
“Leila,” he whispered, touching her wrist, “I’ve got to talk to you.”
She pulled her wrist away. “I’m busy.”
“Look, I’m sorry about what I said.”
“That makes no difference to my workload—I’m still busy.”
He stared up at her face with helpless longing. “Can we have lunch together?”
Leila shook her head. “I’m going home to pick up some papers at lunchtime.”
“Well…” Redpath shot a venomous glance over his shoulder at Marge Rawlings, who had stopped operating the photocopier and was maintaining an attentive silence. “I could go with you.”
“Only if your bicycle goes as fast as my car,” Leila said with casual cruelty.
“Leila!” He lowered his voice further. “Something’s happening to me.”
“Don’t worry—it’s called puberty.”
“I see.” Redpath tried unsuccessfully to think of a good riposte. “It’s like that, is it?”