Walking Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  “I suppose so. Something like that.”

  “But listen, man. This morning, when you talk like that to the Old Woman—you best stop calling her by her name, best talk about her way I do, the Old Woman—OK, she’s a stupid peasant. She never says to herself, How come that rake broken? How come that snake-head in that bag? But she got the power. You talk to her like you belong to that world this morning. You put one foot inside it.”

  “I’d better take it out again, then,” said Foxe rising.

  Mr Trotter shook his head, staring down into the froth-rimmed crater of his empty glass.

  “Will she let you?” he whispered. “Remember, man, she’s the one got the power!”

  3

  Later that week Foxe had another show-down with Ladyblossom, and with the help of new-found weapons won the encounter. This small and silly victory cheered him at a moment when he had become thoroughly depressed about the experiment.

  Foxe was good at his job, and therefore valuable to the Company. Both they and he knew that he lacked the intellectual metal which produces the sort of work that reshapes theory; he had good degrees behind his doctorate and an adequate knowledge of biochemistry and neurophysiology, but in his heart he thought of himself as a very good laboratory technician, and was quite content if the Company thought so too. Now he had been posted to Hog’s Cay to do a very ordinary piece of hack-work; fair enough, but by his lights he wasn’t being allowed to do it properly.

  The times when Foxe felt most fully alive came when he was setting up a new experiment. Then his two complementary skills—the flair for understanding animal capabilities and tolerances, and the rigorous intellectual discipline needed to ensure that the piece of animal behaviour he was measuring could be interpreted to mean one thing and one thing only—these two skills seemed as it were to breed together and for several weeks fill the whole envelope of his skin with excited happiness. Lisa-Anna had called him an empty man, but it wasn’t true at these times.

  The trouble with the set-up on Hog’s Cay was that this part of the experiment simply didn’t occur. It had been eliminated in his briefing. He had been supplied with his apparatus—the mazes—and with a wiring diagram detailing their connections to the logic room. His briefing told him the numbers of rats to use, and the dosage levels for each group—in fact it left so little scope for his own abilities that when he had read it he had almost decided to go home. Then he had told himself that he was in Hog’s Cay for a rest, and a few weeks’ extremely undemanding work with rats would be almost soporifically restful, so he’d decided to stick it out. Unfortunately Dreiser’s production of the strips of one-way mirror so that Doctor Trotter could see the rats in action had also allowed Foxe to see them; dissatisfaction with his part in the experiment had become dissatisfaction with the experiment itself. He came early to the lab that morning, determined to do something about it, but was sidetracked by finding Ladyblossom still there.

  Foxe’s speciality, once he’d set the experiment up, was the elimination of variables, and his technique was very simple. While the tests were running he did everything himself, in a precise way, at a precise time of day, seven days a week. It could be very tiring—during the last experiment in Vienna for four months no one except Foxe had entered the room where the monkeys were. He had even cleaned the floor himself, every day, because anything that he did any day had to be done every day—but that had been a highly refined experiment to compare two variants of the same drug, one much cheaper to manufacture than the other.

  But a healthy, lab-bred rat learning its way through a maze is a more tolerant creature than a wild imported monkey under a constant stress-load, and besides Foxe was supposed to be resting, so he’d decided to allow the normal room-cleaning arrangements to go ahead. If he’d known that on Hog’s Cay the normal room-cleaning arrangements consisted of Ladyblossom, he’d have kept her out, but it was too late now. She was an uncontrollable variable, if ever.

  As he came into the lab that morning he saw her at once. She was standing in the animal section in front of the cages, in what looked like an attitude of prayer. The glass screens between the sections were almost sound-proof, so he was able to watch her as he approached. She was moving her arms about like a priest at an altar, but as soon as his hand touched the section door she gave a mountainous start and backed away.

  “What are you doing in here, Ladyblossom?”

  “Just the cleaning, sir.”

  Foxe looked at the cages and saw a small red duster on top of Beryl’s one. Beryl was craning up to it, nose twitchy with excitement at new smells. Foxe picked it up and found that it was not a duster but a white rag, damp with a reddy-brown stuff that seemed to be blood. Under it he found an H-shaped structure of twigs. A bead-covered thread lashed the joins, and also lashed to the cross-piece a twisted scrap of the dried skin of some animal.

  “What’s this, Ladyblossom?”

  “That thing, sir? Nothing. I never see it. Pupupupu.”

  She darted forward, snatched the rag and twigs and swept them into her rubbish sack, then fell ponderously to her knees and began to rub the floor with a tattered piece of pyjama. Foxe stood watching her. It was curious and a bit disturbing that she had chosen Beryl. In order to prove to himself that Quentin was a nutter he’d collated the figures for all the rats in the experiment, and had found one other who might perhaps need to be eliminated from the final calculations. Beryl was in the lowest dose-group, but was outperforming most of the other rats in the experiment, and his own group by a fair margin. The case was not so clear-cut as Quentin’s, but it would need watching: a genius is just as much of a nuisance as a thickhead, and both are worse than a nutter whose eccentricities may in the end cancel themselves out. But Foxe had done the calculations only for his own satisfaction, and then thrown them away. Apart from him no one but the computer knew about Beryl.

  “Would you come with me, please, Ladyblossom?”

  She followed him into the office section and stood watching him, remote and untouchable, a creature of a different world.

  “I see you’ve got the knowledge,” he said.

  The remoteness dwindled. Her eyes widened.

  “A little of the knowledge,” he said. “Like the girls who know how to use the sorry-bush, or perhaps a bit more. Your son is stupid enough to try to bind Asimbulu, when he hasn’t got the knowledge and he hasn’t got the power. Are you stupid like him, Ladyblossom? Or have you got the power?”

  She opened her lips to speak, then shook her head.

  “There are two worlds, aren’t there?” he said.

  “For sure,” she whispered.

  “You think, because I’m not an Islander, I live only in one world. You think you can bring the powers of the other world in here and I’ll walk through them, as if they were ghosts.”

  “I just don’ think this, sir. No. No.”

  “You remember that day the Prime Minister was here? He brought the Old Woman with him?”

  To his astonishment Foxe actually saw her almost black skin go paler.

  “I talked to her,” said Foxe. “I showed her I had the knowledge and the power.”

  Ladyblossom’s mouth began to work so that for a moment Foxe thought she was having a stroke. Her duster dropped from her hand.

  “You got the power,” she croaked.

  Embarrassed and ashamed Foxe turned from her hypnotised stare. Her reaction was far stronger than he’d calculated for, but if it meant stopping her from mucking around any more with the rats …

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. That sort of thing doesn’t work in here. This place belongs to my world, so it’s a waste of time trying to put spells on the animals. It’s a waste of your knowledge and your power. You won’t go trying it again, will you?”

  “Just sure I won’, sir. Truly just sure.”

  “Good. Why did you choos
e Beryl, as a matter of interest?”

  “Damn clever rat.”

  “Yes, but how did you know?”

  Ladyblossom watched him with her broad face half turned away. He felt her withdrawing again into remoteness, but wasn’t prepared to use his new terror-weapon to satisfy silly curiosity.

  “I just see it,” she said, and padded away to her cleaning.

  Foxe started the day’s routine, injecting the low-dose group. Then came a small “window” which he normally used for paperwork, then the injections for the second group, then running the first group, then injecting the third, then running the second, and so on, an unstoppable treadmill, each rat receiving its injection at a precise time and running a precise time after that until the midmorning “window.” To-day there was no urgent paper work, so he used the first “window” to stroll into the logic section and remind himself of its circuitry. If he wanted to install an error-counter he’d have to do it himself, so it couldn’t be anything too fancy. The tricky part would be in the runs themselves, attaching equipment which wouldn’t alter a rat’s perception of the run, but before he spent too much time thinking about that he wanted to be sure that he had the cutlets and counter boxes spare on the logic frames. He was still there when Ladyblossom tapped on the door.

  “Going now, sir.”

  “Right. Thanks. Don’t worry too much about what I said this morning. It’s just that I can’t have my animals mucked around with, or there’s no point in my being here.”

  “I won’ touch them no more, sir. That Beryl …”

  “Yes?”

  “She got the knowledge, but does she got the power?”

  Her fat chuckle wobbled her flesh. Relieved that the episode could now be treated as a joke, Foxe replied in kind.

  “No. In fact I should think Quentin’s the one for that.”

  Her eyebrows rose and the wobbling stilled for several seconds, until he winked at her. She chuckled all the way out of the lab.

  Just as the “window” was ending the telephone bleeped in the office. Foxe finished putting his lab-coat on and picked it up.

  “OK, OK,” said Dreiser’s voice. “Your next free time is when? Eleven, I think.”

  The American accent didn’t quite obscure the German, and this, allied with his liking to show how much he knew about everything his colleagues were up to, made him sound like the cartoon image of a psychoanalyst.

  “That’s right,” said Foxe. “But please don’t bring any more warlocks round. The dust’s still settling.”

  “I will spare you. All it is, I have this telex from Head Office I’d better talk to you about. Can you come down?”

  “See you then.”

  Foxe hung up, sighed, and settled into the first sequence of runs. His own time had been as precisely allotted as the rats’, but he managed to clear a ninety-second period in the middle of each sequence during which he could himself count errors, visually with his own eyes, manually with a ball-point on a scrap of paper. It made him feel like a sort of cave-scientist, and the resulting figures were hairy as a donkey, full of subjective decisions about what constitutes an error, but even so it didn’t need a computer to tell him that they meant something. Very odd. Very odd indeed. At least he’d be able to talk to Dreiser about it.

  From Dreiser’s windows you saw a different world. Only the sea was the same. The beach was gone, and the impudent hotels, and the sense of distances reaching away; instead there were black crags plunging down to the waves, and there becoming foam-fringed reefs. Dreiser’s office had a subdued and casual aura, a smell of tweed and pipe tobacco; the desk was small and battered, and the arm chairs looked as though they had not been born comfortable, but had had comfort thrust upon them by many, many sittings. The only thing at odds with this ambience was the huge oil painting on the wall behind the desk, dribbles and splodges of hot colours which might have come in useful, Foxe thought, for adding to the stress-load of a roomful of monkeys. This garish horror was more surprising because the tone of the rest of the room was so carefully calculated. Indeed, Galdi said that Liz (Dreiser’s half-Japanese secretary), had instructions to delay all visitors in her office long enough for Dreiser to spray his room with a tweed-and-tobacco aerosol and adopt a pose of leisure at the window.

  “Ah, David,” Dreiser said, swinging slowly round, as if reluctantly tearing his soul away from high intercourse with nature. “I seem hardly to have seen you since the great man’s visit. That went off quite well, I thought. Your rats were a star turn.”

  “Not such a star turn as the gardener.”

  “True, true. Unplanned but fortunate. He needs opportunities to demonstrate his power, that type. While he is seeking power the search satisfies him, but once he has attained it he has no outlet but caprice. By its nature caprice is hard to anticipate, but sometimes it is worth trying. The sixth finger syndrome.”

  Foxe grunted the expected interrogative.

  “You don’t know about that? A professional cartoonist once told me that it’s often possible to anticipate the need of editors to exercise their editorial power by submitting a drawing containing some deliberate error—a sixth finger on someone’s hand, for example—and the editor will be content with telling the artist to put that right instead of making him alter essential elements in the drawing.”

  “I see. You got a telex?”

  “Yes, indeed, and you have only twenty minutes. There is never enough time for talk, is there. One day you must come fishing with me … Now, this is a typical bit of head office security-mania, to do with the safe-keeping of your report …”

  “I haven’t begun on that yet. The figures are all still in the computer.”

  “Good. What is your timing? You have a reputation for quick work.”

  “Not this time.”

  “Uh? David, my instructions were that this was to be a very straight-forward exercise. And from what I saw when Doctor Trotter was there you seemed to be establishing a clear difference in performance …”

  “Exactly. I thought at first that it was a bit odd to ask me to take on something like this. I mean, I wasn’t given much latitude—I was even supplied with the mazes, ready-made. Maze-work is a slightly old-fashioned technique, but … well that didn’t bother me, much. I wasn’t actually told not to alter the mazes—in fact I didn’t care for some of the gate-release mechanisms and I did change them. On the other hand the mazes made no provision for error-counting and my briefing said nothing about it, so I didn’t bother with that. I came to the conclusion that somebody in one of the other research labs had come up with a set of figures which the Company weren’t happy about. They wanted them checked, and they didn’t want this first chap to know, so they arranged for the work to be done out here. Anybody could have done it, almost, but I happened to be free and my Director at Vienna thought I needed a holiday … That all made sense of a sort, though I wasn’t exactly pleased …”

  “One moment, David. My watch has been losing. Do you mind if I get a time-check?”

  Foxe was too astonished to be outraged as Dreiser, who had half-settled onto the arm of one of the chairs, rose, crossed to a side-table and turned on a large transistor radio at high volume. He twiddled knobs till Caribbean pop filled the room with its tinny thumps and twangles, then returned and pulled his chair closer to Foxe’s.

  “Time check in about six minutes,” he muttered, looking at his watch. “I’ll have to turn it off then for plausibility.”

  Foxe restrained a shrug. In his experience most Directors had obsessions, and it was less inconvenient if these were directed at the external world than inward at the laboratory staff.

  “OK,” he said. “Now, you remember that you dug up a couple of sheets of one-way mirror for me, so that Doctor Trotter could actually see the rats running? Before that the maze-covers had been wood, so that day was the first time I myself saw the animals perform
too. Of course all the counting and timing is done electronically in the logic-room. Now, about five years ago there was some publicity about a learning-enhancement drug which all blew up when somebody pointed out that the rats which were doing their tasks so much more quickly than the control rats were still making just as many mistakes, if not more. You see what that means?”

  “It’s not my field, David.”

  “Well, put it this way. They then installed counting devices in the rats’ cages, and discovered that the dosed rats were moving around on average twice as much as their controls.”

  “Ah. I see. The drug simply enhanced activity. The rats were going through their mazes, or whatever, faster simply because they were moving faster.”

  “Yes. And being more inquisitive and so on. But they were making just as many mistakes while they did so. They weren’t learning anything.”

  “I see. And you are beginning to think that this substance you have been asked to test is of the same kind?”

  “I’ve only been counting errors by eye, but I’m pretty sure of it. The next thing is to rig up some error-counting gadgets, though the design of the mazes is going to make that pretty difficult, which is really why I didn’t bother with it in the first place. That’ll all take time. Then …”

  “One moment, David. Whoever wrote your briefing, would he have known about this earlier work?”