“Hello, John,” Nevison said. “You’re early today. Please sit down.”
“Thanks.” Redpath lowered himself into a chair, as he did so realising for the first time that by unfailingly inviting him to take a seat Nevison had forestalled the development of a situation in which Redpath would feel entitled to do so unasked. He considered rising and waiting until sitting down again could be seen as a unilateral action, then it occurred to him that such preoccupations were neurotic. Would he, Redpath wondered, have been like that a year ago? Was it all part of a pattern?
Nevison sat without speaking for a moment and then, as if he had been taking time to complete some important train of thought, brightened noticeably and said, “Well now, John—what can I do for you?”
“I want out of the project,” Redpath said. He considered his words and decided he had not been sufficiently assertive. “In fact, I’ve made up my mind to quit.”
Nevison looked concerned. “I get the impression that this is quite a sudden decision. Am I right?”
“Well…” Redpath was reluctant to answer, feeling he was giving something away. “What difference does that make?”
“Perhaps none. You are perfectly free to drop out at any time, you know that, but if there’s some specific cause I’d like to discuss it with you and see what we can do about removing it. We don’t want to lose you, John.”
“Thanks, but I’ve made up my mind.”
Nevison gave a wistful smile. “If we were in an industrial setting, this is the point where I would offer you more money, but I think you know the position with regard to our research grants. I live in dread of the day that word gets back to the South Haverside council that we’re dabbling with telepathy. It’s back to porridge for all of us when that happens.”
“It isn’t the money,” Redpath said. “At least, that’s only part of it.”
“Oh.” Nevison steepled his fingers and stared out through the high window. Sunlight reflected from the modern architecture of the main buildings created Utopian glimmers in the palisade of dark green foliage.
Redpath felt impelled to speak. “I’m cracking up. It might be a build-up of the drugs, I don’t know…I just know I’m not going on.”
“Have you had a reaction?” Nevison said, leaning forward.
“Reaction!” Redpath huffed to express his sense of outrage. “This morning when I was picking up my mail I looked out through the peephole in the door and I saw something straight out of a Hammer movie. There was this face, and it had been skinned. It was a face made out of raw beef. Running with blood. I don’t have to put up with that sort of thing, Henry. Nobody can make me.”
“It sounds rather unnerving,” Nevison conceded, “but I’m sure there must be some quite prosaic explanation. Was the impression more vivid than those you’ve been getting in the routine tests?”
“It was totally convincing. It was just as if…Wait a minute! Are you saying I got a telepathic image?”
“What other explanation is there?”
“What other explanation? You haven’t given me the first one yet.” Redpath shifted restlessly in his chair, causing it to creak. “Are you trying to tell me that somewhere, somewhere near me, somebody was actually looking at a face like that? And that I picked up the mental image? It would be more comforting to believe I was going mad.”
“There’s no question of your going mad,” Nevison said, assuming a didactic manner. “But just consider the circumstances and compare them with some of our test results. You had just got up, so your mind wasn’t cluttered with day residue memories. If I remember the layout of your flat correctly the hall is fairly dark, so you had another trigger factor—a sudden drop in light intensity. And you looked through one of those spyhole devices, thus sharply limiting your field of view. Do you remember that quite early on we discovered what we call the small screen effect? It all adds up.”
“The face,” Redpath said quietly. “How about the face?”
“Yes, there’s the problem of the face.” Nevison stroked his chin for a moment. “We’ve also recorded one or two examples of inadvertent double transmission, haven’t we? That row of shops you live above—is there a butcher there?”
“Yes, but his stock is very basic. There isn’t much demand for flayed homo sapiens out our way.”
“I’m suggesting—and this is just one possibility—that your local butcher may have been carving a flank of beef and thinking about somebody at the same time, and that this led to your picking up a dual transmission.”
“That’s wrong,” Redpath said flatly. “That’s all wrong.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s a cooked-up thing.”
“The specious is not necessarily untrue.”
“I don’t know about that, but…” Redpath paused as something flickered in his memory like the first tongue of flame that heralds an inferno. “You can forget about the small screen effect—what we’re talking about started before I looked through the peephole. The only reason I looked through it in the first place is that when I knelt down to pick up my post I could tell by the light coming under the door that there was something outside.
“And I’ll tell you another thing! Those spy lenses distort anything you see through them, and the face I saw was distorted…”
Nevison gave a smile whose kindliness was intended to show Redpath that he had said something exceptionally stupid. “So what you’re implying is that this creature from a horror film was actually standing outside your door. In the flesh, as one might say, going by your description of it.”
“I didn’t imply that,” Redpath said, wondering what he had implied.
“Of course not—I’m sorry. Having opened the hall door and found nothing unusual in the corridor, you must know better than anybody else that we’re dealing with a subjective phenomenon. I mean, you did check outside, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“There you are, John. Proof.”
Redpath nodded. “Proof I’m going mad.”
“Forgive me for saying so, but your ideas of what constitutes madness appear to have been culled from Charlotte Bronte and Edgar Allan Poe—neither of whom was a psychiatric diagnostician of any standing.” Nevison’s lips twitched and Redpath knew he was pleased with his comment and was memorising it for later repetition.
“Call it what you like,” Redpath said sullenly, becoming angry. “All I know is it was bloody frightening—the sort of thing I can well do without—and I blame it on the experiments.”
“So do I,” Nevison said unexpectedly, taking a new tack. “You must agree, John, that since we started treating you with Compound 183 your telepathic ability, which was only vestigial in the beginning, has been enormously enhanced. Admittedly, we haven’t yet developed a way to control the ability, but your radius of awareness is growing all the time, isn’t it? You told me last week that when you wake up in the mornings you can sense what’s going on in the other flats in your building. Correct?”
“I don’t see what that’s got to…”
“What I’m saying is that this is all new to us. It’s beginning to appear that all mind-to-mind contacts don’t take place on the conscious level—and all of us have monsters lurking around beneath the surface, John. Do you ever have nightmares?”