He made his report and the body was taken to a Kingston funeral home and buried two days later in a local cemetery, at a service attended by the weeping daughter, a grim-faced Sam Banth and the entire staff.
After dark, as Howard was heading back to the dormitory, he passed Linda’s car in the drive. He did not notice her sitting in it. “Howard!” she called. He turned back and she said, “Get in, Howard. Sit beside me for a little while.” He sensed the tears behind her words.
She began to sob softly as he got in. She leaned against his shoulder. A scalding tear fell on the back of his hand, and her helplessness turned his heart over and over.
“There, there,” he said. He held her in his arms. He wished she would keep crying forever so that he could hold her.
At last she was under control. She sat up and moved away from him.
“What is it? Anything I can do, Linda?”
“I don’t think so. Howard. There was a board meeting today. That horrible Mr. Prader and Mr. Banth and me. I thought things were going so well. I thought dad had left me a little money. But it doesn’t look that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mr. Prader says that we’re overextended. We expanded too fast. Notes have to be met. The only thing to do, they say, is disband the staff and close the labs.”
“They can’t do that!” Howard said hotly.
“But we can’t afford to keep them up. No one man could handle the treatments, you know. I guess it’s all over.”
“But that’s silly! I could handle them by myself. The big staff was for research.”
“You could do it by yourself. Would you do that for me? I think we could keep on paying you the same amount.”
“They should have had me in that meeting. What do they know about what Dr. Tomlinson was doing? In another three days I’ll have the new equipment set up so that an idiot child could operate it. Dr. Tomlinson and I were working on making the outfit both portable and equipped with fool-proof controls. I don’t know why he wanted it that way, but now maybe I understand.”
“Oh, Howard! If you’ll only stay there’s a chance that the gamble will pay off. After all dad did, it seems a shame to give it all up.”
“I thought Banth was making a good thing out of all this. I thought those athletes were bringing in a good return. I don’t approve of what you people were using Tomlinson’s discoveries for, but I thought that it was at least profitable. To me it has always seemed like monkeying with people’s life spans, which could be a second cousin to murder. What’s the matter? Did I say something wrong?”
“No. Go on.”
“You keep giving athletes miraculous reaction times and they automatically become tops in each sport. It destroys the basic idea of competition. When the world knows, and some day it will, they’ll either outlaw the ‘graduates’ of this place, or competitive sport will be dead.”
“But in the meantime it’s profitable, Howard. But not profitable enough. The return hasn’t been big enough to cover the investment.”
“That surprises me. It doesn’t seem logical the way Banth tosses the coin around. But I guess that’s none of my business. I’d do anything in the world to help you. Fire the rest of the research staff and I’ll stay on and run the new gismo once I get it hooked up. If you have to cut down even further, I could show you how to operate it in twenty minutes.”
Her arms slipped around his neck and her lips were insistent. It was not the sort of tender kiss that he had expected. In some obscure way it disappointed him.
“Thank you, darling,” she whispered.
Sam Banth walked into the smallest lab building, the only one that was not closed when the rest of the staff departed. Howard looked up and nodded distantly.
“That the works?” Banth asked, pointing at the apparatus. It was a framework sarcophagus, an iron maiden formed of metal tubes, hinged to open and admit the patient. Affixed to the tubing at what appeared to be random points were cup-sized discs. The back of each disc was an exposed maze of wiring and tiny tubes.
“That’s it,” Dineen said absently.
“How does it work?”
“We don’t know. Dr. Tomlinson abandoned his previous line of conjecture a few weeks before he died. If it was pure stimulation, the body structure could not withstand the increased speed. We were working on the theory that in some unknown way it put the individual out of phase with normal time. In other words it creates for each individual an entire universe of accelerated time in which he is the sole example.”
“I don’t mean why does it work, Dineen,” Banth said. “I mean how do you make it work?”
“Here’s the control box. You can see that the wiring passes through it before leading to the discs. Note that there are two dials, calibrated, on the slanted side of the box. You translate the subject’s weight into kilograms and set the left-hand dial carefully. There’s a mass problem involved. The right-hand dial works much the same way as a rheostat control. You can see that it is calibrated with a diminishing interval between markings. Those markings are in percentages. The dial must be turned slowly. It is geometric. The first centimeter gives you a ten percent acceleration, the next centimeter twenty. Then forty, eighty, one sixty, three twenty and so on. It goes so high because we used it on lab animals. For humans this little stop should be slid over so that there is no chance of the acceleration going beyond twenty per cent. Anything beyond that and the individual cannot be trained to simulate normalcy.”
“Have you turned the dial over all the way on an animal?”
“Once. It was a bit — terrifying. We filled a cage with ample food for the lifetime of a mouse. The mouse disappeared for the smallest fraction of a second and then reappeared, quite dead on the bottom of the cage. Most of the food and the water was gone. We were able to tell that it had died of old age. There was a distinct malformation of the nostrils and lungs that had not been there before, showing that in the first part of its accelerated life span it had trouble sucking the air into its lungs with sufficient speed to maintain life. You see, it had to overcome the inertia of the air.”
“Almost anybody could operate the thing the way it’s set up, eh?”
Howard smiled. “If you’re thinking of firing me, I’d advise against it. I’m committing a criminal act using this process on human beings, even with their consent. You don’t know yet what the potential after-effects may be. I’m trying to find out. If you block me, I’ll go directly to the authorities. You see, I’m the only person with the exception of Dr. Tomlinson among the research staff who knew what you’ve been doing here.”
Banth pursed his lips. “That’s pretty big talk. Feeling tough, eh?”
“No sir. Just practical. My salary is small. I think you’ll see that it’s best to keep me around. I’ll even be frank with you. If it weren’t for Miss Tomlinson I would have quit six months ago when I first found out what was really happening here.”
Banth looked back at the apparatus for a long moment. It looked absurdly like some skeletal robot.
“Keep working, Dineen,” he said. “Any after-effects you can isolate will be helpful. I’ll send two more boys around this afternoon. They’re young enough so that ten per cent ought to do it.”
Wally Christopher caught the signal and shifted left. He adjusted his sun glasses. He saw the pitch go down and the lusty swing. The ball was an upslanting streak. He gauged it and moved over, careful not to move too fast. It came down, ridiculously slow. He moved toward it, as slowly as he dared, then dived, gloved hand outstretched. The ball smacked into the pocket and stuck. He rolled over and over, hearing the full-throated roar of the crowd. In days gone by it would have given him a lift. Now it was just too easy. He jogged in toward the dugout and he realised with something close to fear that baseball just wasn’t very much fun any more.