Whiteout!

'How do you feel ?'

'Feel? Relaxed, I think,'

'Good.'

He lay thinking for a moment. Then said suddenly, 'It was dust. I had to get the dust out.'

Out of what? I wondered. 'Out of the reactor?'

'Well, sure. It was like rocks in there. Big boulders of goddam dust. It got inside there while the lid was off.'

'Did it ? Have some more coffee.'

After he'd drunk he lay still for a while, but his eyes were restless. I took the empty cup and rinsed it out and when I returned, Kelleher said, 'But it couldn't be. Not like boulders!'

'Probably not.'

'I can see 'em, you know, right here in my head.'

'Boulders of dust?'

'Sure.'

'What else can you see ?'

He thought about it. 'You know steel's got pores? Pores like skin?'

'I didn’t know.' His rationality was open to considerable question, I'd decided, and the passing minutes reinforced my decision: the jacket would stay on.

'Well, it sure has.'

'What for? It doesn't sweat.'

Kelleher considered that. 'No, that's right. It seemed like the dust was blocking the pores, though, and '

'And?' I prompted, after a moment.

'Well, I had to clean it away.' His eyes swivelled up at me, wide, suddenly appalled. 'This straitjacket!

I'm crazy?'

I tried to put it carefully. 'These ideas, the dust boulders, the pores, seem very strong.'

Panicky now, voice taut with fear. 'I've gone crazy!'

'You saw the fallacy,' I said, 'but afterwards.'

Muscles and tendons tightened in his neck and I was suddenly apprehensive of another seizure. I said hastily, 'Don't worry!'

'It's like it's in the front of my head. Dead wrong, but up there in front.' His eyes met mine head on. 'You afraid of me?'

I shook my head, but not quickly enough.

'Jesus!' he sagged back.

I reached for my cigarettes and was lighting one when he said, 'They wouldn't let me do it ?'

'No,' I said, 'they wouldn't.'

Kelleher gave a harsh little laugh. 'For Christ's sake, why - ' Then he broke off, paused, and added quietly, 'I was fighting. Fighting to get .., to get inside?' I nodded. 'You tried.'

'Yeah, well, they wouldn't let me - !' He exhaled strongly through his nostrils. 'Maybe my life got saved. Who did it, you?'

'One or two people.' I added encouragingly, 'You're seeing the fallacies more quickly now.'

He was suddenly anxious. 'I hurt anybody?'

'A knock or two. Nothing much.'

'Well, they wouldn't let me ... Jesus, I can't think straight!"

'Straighter all the time. What else is in the front of your head?'

His eyes closed. Behind the lids there was no movement. Then he opened them. 'Well, did you see that space movie?'

'Which one?'

'With the waltz. What was it? The Blue Danube?'

"Two Thousand and One,the film was called.'

'Yeah. Remember the end. Kinda weird. Just going straight ahead through all the planes and patterns. Just through space. No meaning, you know?'

'I remember.'

'Well, like that.'

I said, 'Where were you going ?'

Kelleher thought about it, then shook his head. 'I just don't know. Away, maybe.'

'From what?'

'Who knows?' He gave a sudden grin. 'Camp Hundred, huh? Look, do me a favour.'

'If I can.'

'Ask me some questions. About myself. I want to know how crazy I am.'

He answered all the questions easily and quickly. He knew where he'd been born, educated, employed; all the personal details were tabulated neatly inside him and came out pat. He was clearly relieved to find he could do it. I took a sourer view. If he hadn't been able to remember, he'd certainly have been in worse condition; the fact that he could did nothing to relieve my anxieties about his thought processes. When the quiz was over, he said, 'You're not gonna take off the jacket, right?'

'No. I'm sorry.'

'You're a bastard, you know that? I'm gonna be okay.' But he wasn't angry. Anyway, I'd had enough for the time being and removed myself to the office to give both Kelleher and myself a little peace.

I felt low enough to limbo dance under a cellar door, depressed both by the futility of my whole trip to Greenland, and by the wreckage of a tough mind a couple of doors away. I didn't share his certainty that he'd recover. In my limited experience - I had an aunt once who had a nervous breakdown, and there was a bloke I worked with who'd turned all of a sudden into a manic depressive - damaged minds seemed to stay damaged. Brains go on working, keeping the lid on the stresses, but once the stresses do burst out, they stay out. Primitive reasoning. I sat smoking moodily, wondering what had triggered the break. In Kelleher's case it was probably simple overstrain, but even so it was dismal to think that a first-class man, solidly sane one moment, had his mind in pieces the next. Well, perhaps not smashed. Not even broken, but bent out of true. I remember thinking that it seemed a good analogy: an iron bar, bent to an angle, and no matter how carefully you tried to straighten it, there'd always be a weakness where the bend had been.

I began to think, with foreboding, then, of the journey back, of the long uncomfortable haul across the icecap on the Swing, of the long faces at Thomson-Keegan when the news of my foul-up came through, and of the way Jim Keegan would be careful to be forgiving. And then, quite suddenly, out of the lumber-room of random thoughts, a couple of words squirmed out on to the surface of my brain and interrupted the train of thought. The first word was mind. The second, already linked to it, was 'bent'. Mind-bending - wasn't that how people described the effects of drugs? Minds were 'bent' or 'blown", weren't they? Certainly in the newspapers. And there were other words: 'psychedelic' and 'trip' .., all related to the drugs that bent minds. Mainly to LSD, which was . . , what? Some acid, wasn't it? The name escaped me, but there was another phrase: 'acid-heads'. I sat there trying to recall what I'd read and came up with nothing but a mish-mash of half-digested newspaper stories about people claiming they could hear tastes and smell sounds. And an inquest on somebody who, on an LSD trip, had walked cut of a top-floor window in the belief he could . . .

I thought carefully about that. Kelleher hadn't walked out of any top-floor windows, but he'd certainly achieved a fair equivalent. If any person in his senses knew a long drop was fatal, any nuclear engineer in his senses knew the dangers of the reactor.

There was something else, too, that I recalled reading somewhere: that any competent sixth-form chemistry student could manufacture LSD in a school laboratory if he knew how and had the materials. I didn't know what the materials were, but Camp Hundred certainly had its laboratories ! Then another thought : colour came into it, too, surely? I seemed to remember that vivid colours were part of the LSD hallucination.

Kelleher looked up at me gravely as I approached his bed. I said, 'How much do you remember about yesterday?'

'When was yesterday ?'

'That's when it happened. Yesterday morning. Do you remember it ?'

He pursed his lips. 'I itch like crazy and I can't scratch.'

'Do you remember?'

He considered it. 'Let me think. Yeah, I remember. We worked through the night, then I had a cup of coffee and crawled on to a cot for a half-hour. I do that sometimes. Take a little break. And then ...' He frowned.

'Go on.'

'I'm not too sure. I think . . , yeah, I got the idea about dust, that's right. So I went out and there it was. And I went to clear it. And - '

I interrupted. 'The cup of coffee. Where did it come from ?'