by John Brunner
“I–uh–I wanted to say merry Christmas before I went away,” Ruth said, advancing nervously into the room. “And I brought you a sort of extra present …”
“Yes, mackere!.” Malcolm closed his eyes, looking infinitely weary. “My favourite. Thank you. But you really shouldn’t have, not with the price of fish.”
“What?” She stopped dead. “How did you know? I told the fishmonger to wrap it tight in plastic so the smell wouldn’t–”
“Oh, I just know!” Malcolm snapped. “I know lots of things! Things I thought I’d forgotten years ago, decades ago!” He pointed vaguely at the wine-bottle. “Here, have a drink, help yourselves. Do you know what’s happened?”
Billy said uncertainly, “Malcolm, you look sick!”
“Do you know what’s happened?’ With sudden rage. “No, of course not! I’ll tell you! I was so depressed when I came back from the clinic I thought I’d call up Cathy and it was Doug who answered and he said, ‘Who’s that?’ And I said, ‘It’s Daddy!’ And he said–know what he said?” Clinging to the edge of the breakfast-counter, glaring. “He said, ‘No, you’re not my daddy any more. Mummy said so. We’re going to have a new daddy for a Christmas present.’ And then she came on the line herself and said I can’t see Doug and Judy over Christmas because this new man of hers is taking them all away somewhere, goodbye!”
“Oh, Malcolm!” Ruth breathed.
“I don’t blame you for getting drunk,” Billy said.
“It’s my own fault, I suppose,” Malcolm sighed. “Never marry a good church-going girl, Billy! They can always find moral justifications for anything they feel like doing, no matter how it hurts other people … Not that I have to warn you, I guess, on either count.”
Billy gave a sad chuckle.
“I was talking about her to this guy Morris I met in the Hampstead Arms,” Malcolm went on. “You know, Ruth–the one who gave me that pill.” A yawn fought its way past his self-control.
“You took a pill from someone you met at the Hampstead Arms?” Billy echoed incredulously.
Ruth glanced at him. “Yes, he did–the damned fool! Something called VC. Did you ever hear of it?”
“VC?” Billy pondered a second, shook his head. “No, it doesn’t mean anything to me. But the Hampstead Arms does. It’s just down the road from where the biggest pusher in London lives, and–”
“I feel so sleepy,” Malcolm interrupted. “I’m terribly sorry, but I just can’t keep my eyes open any longer and I have to go to bed and …” Giddily, he tried to walk around the end of the counter, and before he had taken more than four paces he pitched forward into Billy’s arms, mouth ajar and uttering peaceful snores.
VI
Maurice’s home was in one of a line of small red-brick terraced houses which, when they were built in the late nine-teenth century, had barely been considered adequate for one lower-middle-class family. Now they were carved into apartments and even single rooms. Maurice had been lucky and secured a whole floor to himself when the widow of the former owner found herself unable to make ends meet. There were a living-room, a bedroom, a study, plus a bathroom and a tiny kitchen: not lavish accommodation for a world-renowned expert in organochemistry, and far too cramped for the library he had accumulated.
There, propped between a salt-cellar and an egg-cup on the huge brown table that dominated the living-room, was an envelope addressed to Kneller.
He was about to snatch it up when Sawyer said sharply, “Just a moment! Dr Randolph, what made you suspect he might have left a note?”
The same question had been troubling Hector, who stood by the doorway trying to soothe the landlady; she was half-hysterical at having her home invaded by pohce, and kept muttering about what a respectable district Hampstead had been before the motorway drew a line of slums across it.
–Right. Since when do murder victims leave notes, like suicides?
“Guesswork!” Randolph snapped. “Pure guesswork!”
And Kneller chimed in, “You mean you won’t let me open it?”
“Certainly, sir. But …” Sawyer selected a clean knife from a pile of cutlery lying untidy on a side-table; Maurice had never been a neat housekeeper. “But we don’t want to spoil any prints, do we? I mean, if Dr Post himself didn’t write that note–”
“It’s his writing on the envelope,” Kneller insisted. “Isn’t it, Campbell?”
Hector nodded. It was spiky and very individual.
“Even so, I’d be obliged if you’d keep your gloves on, and I’ll take charge of the envelope.” Sawyer spoke with finality. Yielding, Kneller used the knife, and extracted a single close-typed sheet, which he studied with a frown before passing it to Randolph.
There was a period of silence. During it Hector could think only of how cold the room was.
Eventually Randolph said, “Campbell, I gather you saw Maurice last Friday evening, right? That must have been a few hours after we last saw him at the Institute. We were expecting him on Monday as usual and he didn’t turn up. Did he seem in any way–well–disturbed?”
“May I?” Sawyer said, holding out his hand for the note. Randolph surrendered it to him.
“Won’t mean much to you! Barely means anything to me. But read it by all means. Well, Campbell?”
“Not disturbed,” Hector said slowly. “Perhaps … agitated? He gave the impression that he had a lot on his mind.”
“What did you talk about?” Kneller demanded.
“Oh … The state of the world!” .
“But did he stress anything in particular?”
Puzzled, Hector cast his mind back. He said after a moment, “I think we spent most of the time wondering whether it would ever be possible for hutnan beings to organise their affairs properly. I recall that he said something … Just a moment, let me get this right. Yes! I recall he asked whether, in my view, someone who had it in his power to change human nature ought to do so, on the grounds that while you couldn’t tell whether it would be a change for the better it was hard to believe it would be for the worse. He’d been going on about this bee he had in his bonnet about a Third World War breaking out next year.”
Kneller whistled between his teeth. “You took him seriously, did you?”
“Well …” Hector hesitated. “I’m not sure. We drank rather a lot that evening, you see. But I mention it because it was a point he kept coming back to, several times.”
“That settles it,” Randolph said with decision. “I’m convinced, Wilfred, even if you’re not. Inspector, you’ll have to have this place searched properly.”
“Looking for Inspirogene capsules?” Hector snapped. He felt confused and adrift, as though he had missed the point of this argument through a momentary lapse of concentration.
“Yes, but not containing Inspirogene any longer,” Kneller said, almost shamefaced. “We–uh–we went over Maurice’s office today, after lunch. It had been closed up since he left a week ago, of course. And we found two or three little yellow capsules broken at the bottom of a wastebin, as though someone had emptied the contents out and tried to refill them. And … Well, that would have been an ideal means of abstracting a few milligrams from the lab.”
“A few milligrams of what?” Hector roared, and fractionally out of synch Sawyer echoed him.
“We’ll have to tell them,” Randolph said to Kneller. “Would you rather leave it to me? But you can’t ask the police to work in the dark, you know.”
“Oh, go ahead,” Kneller muttered.
“Very well.” Randolph faced Hector and Sawyer and set his shoulders back. “To the best of our knowledge this is the first that anyone outside the Gull-Grant Institute has heard about the VC project. VC is the-the ‘stuff’ referred to in Maurice’s note.”
Reminded of it, Hector mutely sought Sawyer’s permission to read it too. The detective ceded it with a shrug, his expression implying that help from any quarter would be welcome, and while Randolph talked on Hector scanned the thirty-odd lines it bore. Ther
e were many corrections and x-ings-out, as though Maurice had been either a very poor typist or under immense emotional strain. Hector suspected the latter. The text was almost incomprehensible. He saw a shadow of their conversation last Friday in references to “the world relapsing into its old evil ways” and “our missed opportunity to let people use their known potential”, and above all to “that deliberate encouragement of selective inattention which the guilty among us employ to save themselves from being brought to book.” At one stage Maurice had spoken with uncharacteristic fury about people who, in his opinion, consciously misused their intellectual gifts in order to delude the less intelligent, claiming in particular that while it was natural enough for men to fight in defence of their homes and families, it was a wholly artificial process which led them to sacrifice their lives in defence of leaders who themselves would never risk exposure on the firing-line because they were too sensible.
–Not exactly news. He did argue it very well, though …
These passages, however, were islands of clarity in a muddle of jargon, parasyntaxis, and abominable straining after pointless puns.
–Poor Maurice! How could he have drifted over the borderline of sanity? He seemed rational enough when I last saw him. And what could he have done to make somebody kill him?
Hector composed himself to try and understand what Randolph was saying, but was little the wiser when the explanation was at its end.
“Dr Campbell will know some of this already, but I’ll fill you in on the background, Inspector Professor Kneller and I joined the Institute when it was founded eight years ago, and Dr Post a few months later. Our charter says that we’re to undertake research in biology and organic chemistry without regard to eventual commercial exploitation. In fact we haven’t managed to live up to that ideal. What looked like more than adequate funding when Sir Hugh Gull-Grant drafted his will has been eroded by inflation, and we have sometimes had to supplement our budget by accepting contracts from outside. But we’ve always had at least one absolutely pure research project going, and that’s the one we started with, an attempt to create a replicating molecule not derived from pre-existent living material.”
“But–” Hector began. Randolph glanced at him.
“You were going to say we didn’t pioneer that? Quite right. We were beaten to it by Sakulin and his group in Canada. In fact there’s now a whole new biology of synthetic replicants, although hardly any practical applications have been found for them so far.
“When Sakulin announced his results, naturally we were terribly disappointed–except for Maurice. In an upside-down way he was almost pleased. Because, you see, we’d been attacking the problem by an entirely different route, and it had led Maurice to something that as far as we know is still unique. The moment he indicated the implications to us, we became quite as excited as we had been miserable an hour ago.”
Sawyer’s strained face showed he was making a gallant attempt to keep in touch but wasn’t convinced he was succeeding.
Randolph rubbed his chin. “To start with, you presumably know that the way we perceive the world is a function of a series of electrochemical interactions. The most dramatic proof lies in the fact that our consciousness can be disturbed even by such a small thing as a blow, more violently by–say–alcohol, and very severely indeed by a high fever or a powerful drug. Yes? Moreover, what we regard as a normal mental state can often be chemically restored, as for example by a tranquilliser.”
There were nods: doubtful from Sawyer, urgent from Hector, automatic from the landlady, who still stood ignored in the doorway.
“Moreover, it’s known that we do not ordinarily operate at maximum potential. Direct stimulation of the brain with tiny electrodes can bring back memories that are usually inaccessible. That was one of Maurice’s starting-points. Another clue came from hallucinogens, which destroy perceptual sets and make things we’ve seen a thousand times fresh and novel. And he was fascinated by the fact that certain types of heavy-metal poisoning reduce the efficiency of the nervous system and cause significant derangement, yet can be cured by administering a chelating agent, a sort of internal detergent:”
Randolph licked his lips. “So he’d been wondering for a long time whether our–our clumsiness in thinking might be due to a remediable cause. You know we are terribly lazy where thinking is concerned. We don’t recall, let alone reason with, a fraction of the information we receive. Yet it’s in store, and the right stimulus can bring it back.
“Anyway! Among the large number of compounds Maurice had evaluated was one he wanted to study in depth. Only so long as we still stood a chance of being first in the field with a synthetic replicant we had neither time nor resources to divert to it. Privately, however, he’d been doing some amazing theoretical analyses of its properties, and he said flatly that it ought to have an unprecedented effect on the nervous system, including the brain. He claimed it would excite a form of activity usually observed in association with the stimulus of novelty which– Oh, hell. I’m getting tied up in double-talk!”
“In lay terms”–unexpectedly from Kneller–“he said it would amplify intelligence. And damned if he wasn’t as near to right as makes no difference. If that bastard, whoever he was, hadn’t bashed his head in, he’d have been on the short list for the Nobel as a result.”
“That’s misleading,” Randolph objected. “What we suspect it does is make selective inattention more difficult. Are you familiar with the term? It’s the habit of ordering incoming sense-data into arbitrary classes, ‘important/unimportant’. I say arbitrary because although most authorities claim this is what keeps us sane, Maurice disagreed, and I now accept that he proved his point. At any rate, in our lab animals the response is uniformly positive.”
Kneller nodded. “Yes, rats and hamsters that typically make terribly broad classifications of events will suddenly start to react in ways that can only he accounted for by assuming they’re registering differences of the kind we humans pay attention to: colour, texture, time of day, what sort of lab-coat you’re wearing … Arthur is right, though, to say that’s what we suspect is happening. We’ve never administered it to a human subject. But it looks as though it has finally been tested on a man.” He pointed with a shaking hand at the note Hector was holding.
“You mean you think Dr Post deliberately dosed himself with it?” Sawyer hazarded. “But surely he’d have told you, done it under controlled conditions!”
“It’s all too likely,” Kneller sighed. “We had been wondering whether he was overworking–he did seem very tired, very impatient … But it’s no good speculating now.”
“How in heaven’s name could you keep this a secret?” Hector burst out. “How long have you been working on it?”
“Since just after Sakulin’s first paper appeared. About two years. But Maurice must have identified the original compound a year or more earlier still.”
“But you can’t have done it all by yourselves! I mean you and Maurice and Dr Randolph!” Hector took a pace forward. “Surely you must employ–well–lab technicians?”
Kneller said in a gravelly tone, “Yes, of course. And postgraduate students, too. But, you see, among the trustees of the Gull-Grant Foundation there’s a move to have our Institute dissolved and sell the site for redevelopment. They’d have to go through the courts, but … Never mind! The point is that when we realised just what a colossal discovery Maurice had made we called a staff meeting and suggested that–short of being first to achieve a synthetic replicant–this was our best chance of putting the Institute so firmly on the map they wouldn’t dare disband our team. Our staff are very loyal, and they agreed without exception. But Maurice had used standard techniques to synthesise VC, so if any hint of its existence had leaked out we’d certainly have been beaten into print. Priority in publication is all, you know, and there are lots of better-funded institutions that could run test-series in a month which our budget compels us to take a year over. So the staff willingly pledged themselv
es not to breathe a word about VC until Maurice’s definitive paper was complete. He was due to present it at the Organochemical Society in March.”
“VC …” Sawyer said. “What does that stand for?”
“Well,” Kneller answered slowly, “we haven’t told you quite everything about this stuff. Remember how we chanced on it.”
Hector’s blood suddenly seemed to turn sluggish as mercury and drain from his head. The world swam around him as he forced out, “You mean it’s a replicant?”
“Far and away the most successful ever synthesised,” Kneller said. “Streets ahead of the best that Sakulin or anybody else has produced. It’s not a virus, not in any standard sense of that term, but it does have this one viral attribute–which, incidentally,” he interpolated, “we were no longer looking for by that time! It seems to be an inescapable corollary of the molecular structure … and there are enough papers waiting to be written about that to keep our staff contentedly quiet, believe me!”
“Right,” Randolph agreed. “All being well, every member of our team can look forward to a solid lifetime of genuinely valuable research into this single substance and its close relations. You see, given the proper environment, it multiplies. Living animal tissue is ideal. Which is why we call it ‘viral coefficient’.”
“You mean it breeds?” Sawyer cried. “You mean it’s infectious?”
“Not infectious!” Randolph snapped. “Cold air, sunlight, even dilution in plain water will inactivate it almost at once. But … Well, without being infectious, it may possibly be contagious. Which is why we’d better collect some equipment from our labs and get along to the police mortuary right away. We’ve got to establish whether Maurice–”
“Chief Inspector!” A voice echoing up the stairway.
“Up here!” Sawyer shouted back, and there was a pounding of footsteps and a moment later the driver of his car appeared, panting.
“Radio message, sir,” he said between gasps. “They found a phial of capsules near the body. Looks like it’s been trodden on, they said. At any rate all the capsules were broken open.”
