“Worse than that,” Joanna conceded. “They introduced Lewisite before France fell; now the zeppelins have brought gas warfare to the streets of London, as well as a new generation of incendiary weapons. I think they call them inflammatols. Not the sort of stuff I’d want to lug around under a hydrogen-filled gasbag the size of a football pitch, but that’s modern warfare axis-B style.”
Fowler obviously didn’t approve of the slight note of flippancy in this last remark. “She’s not describing an Imperialist conscript,” he said, his voice redolent with unwarranted certainty. “She’s merely describing a German soldier—one of those who might well be about to invade and spoil England’s green and pleasant land. I don’t know why she sees herself as a satyress, but I’m as sure as I can be that it’s not because she has another self in some fugitive corner of the multiverse who is a satyress. Come back to me if and when you’ve got something to show me, Dr. Reed. In my view, your team ought to abandon the experiments with psilocin and psilocybin. So far as I can see, there’s no evidence at all to suggest that they can boost the latent powers of uncultivated psychics.”
The last gratuitous insult nearly cracked Joanna’s self-control again, but she managed to restrict the damage to a filthy look. She kept her lips resolutely sealed as she collected her files and stalked out of the room. Not until she was well clear of the great man’s office did she begin to let the pent-up emotion go, and even then the obscenities she poured down upon his stubborn head were silent ones.
She is walking along a dusty road, longing for the sight of an inn sign swaying in the warm breeze. The tall hedges to either side of the road conceal fields where the wheat grows tall. Those fields are on the point of turning from a uniform vivid green to the mottled maturity that invites the harvest.
The basket in her arms seems to grow heavier with every step.
As she rounds a shallow bend in the road she stumbles in the rut left by a cartwheel. She staggers into the hedge, which welcomes her into its ungentle embrace. From this position she can see around the bend, and what she sees is betrayal.
A young man is there, sitting languidly on a stile with his head tilted back, so that a lamia might stroke his neck with her clawed fingers. He is looking up into her face; the expression in his eyes suggests that she has required no stupefying magic to subdue him.
The watcher remains quite still, accepting the roughness of the twigs that dig into her flesh. She cannot tear her eyes away. Her gaze takes in the seductive expression in the face of the silver-haired temptress with the lustrous skin and the tiny fangs, and its counterpart in the lustful eyes of the young man.
Why, the watcher wonders, is it always thus? Why do men prefer such creatures to their own kind? It makes no sense; it is a jarring note in the great litany of Harmony.
Then she sees something beyond the oblivious pair—something that is approaching at terrible speed.
It is some kind of cart that moves thunderously upon huge patterned wheels, without any horse to haul it. It is manned by monsters with vile, inhuman masks instead of faces, and there is something about their bodies that seems to be more or less than flesh. One of them is pointing a metal wand at the young man and the snake-girl.
For a single fleeting second, the watcher thinks: It is justice, after all. Do they not deserve it?
Even as the couple turn to look at the approaching vehicle, however, the monster redirects the device to aim it at the watcher’s fluttering heart—and the magical cart sweeps past the stile, heading straight for her.
She hears the roar of the wand, but never sees the missiles hurled from its tip, but she knows how terrible it must be to be torn apart, to be ripped and shattered and blasted into shreds.
She knows… and she carries that knowledge with her through dimensions unknown to those she has saved, unsuspected by those who will now escape to continue their betrayal, their defiance of all that is or ought to be sacred.
Andrew Huxley stood on the lawn outside the west wing of the sanitarium, watching the huge silver cigar sliding toward the southern horizon. It was belatedly pursued by a brace of Avro fighters. The zeppelin’s escort of Fokkers and Spads had been reduced by half—the aerial battle that raged every day above the Weald must have been unusually fierce—but Andrew knew that the Avros had little chance of weaving a way through them to come within range of their prime target. If only the machine guns mounted on their wings had greater power! If only the anti-aircraft guns that ringed the capital could be fired with greater accuracy!
He turned around as Joanna Reed came up behind him, making sure that he could meet her eyes before she spoke. There was something very disconcerting about the woman; she gave the impression of concealing hidden depths, although she was supposedly a very minor cog in the mighty machine of the War Ministry. He suspected that she was some kind of agent for Military Intelligence.
“All monoplanes,” he said, lightly enough. “We never see biplanes anymore, do we? When my father fought with the Army Air Force most Fokkers had three wings, but everything is becoming simpler now, more streamlined. War’s good for progress, they say. Ten years more and we’ll have such a cornucopia of technical skills that we’ll be able to murder our enemies as easily as our combine harvesters mow down fields of wheat.”
“No doubt we will,” the woman said, with awesome matter-of-factness, “but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.”
Had the bureaucrats in Whitehall really become so completely inured to the destruction that was being rained down upon them. Andrew wondered. Had they now accepted the war as a mere condition of existence? Or was theirs simply a different kind of trauma response?
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“Your request to discontinue Margaret Lane’s treatment landed on my desk. I’m here to deny it. Such a move would be severely deleterious to the experiment.”
“It’s not the experiment that concerns me, Miss Reed,” Andrew told her, making every effort to keep his voice calm and reasonable. “You have to remember that I’m a doctor, and that my first duty is to my patients. I agreed to take part in your testing program because you persuaded me that the drugs you supply might have a therapeutic effect. In some cases, I admit, they do seem to have helped a little—but not in Margaret’s. These drug-induced dreams are disturbing her; far from becoming calmer, she’s becoming more agitated and more uncooperative. I can’t seem to get through to her anymore—she’s become furtive and deceptive, and I’m worried that she might be descending into psychosis. I can’t in all conscience administer any further doses to her.”
“If we’re to make a proper judgment regarding the utility of psychotropic medicine,” the woman told him, without a flicker of embarrassment, “the experiment must be conducted along proper scientific lines. It must run its entire course.”
“Not if it endangers the well-being of my patients,” Andrew insisted. “For God’s sake, woman, don’t you think they’ve gone through enough already? These men and women have been to Hell, and they haven’t yet come all the way back. I’m not interested in the integrity and rigor of your research program; my only concern is to alleviate the suffering of the men and women in my care.”
She obviously wasn’t impressed by his increasing vehemence. “If we’re ever to understand the phenomena of trauma response, Dr. Huxley, we must examine it very carefully and very scrupulously. Until we can understand it, we can’t hope to cure it. In any case, there doesn’t seem to us to be any cause for alarm; there’s no firm evidence that Miss Lane’s condition is deteriorating.”