Walking Dead by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online

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.
    â€œWould 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.
    â€œI see you’ve got the knowledge,” he said.
    The remoteness dwindled. Her eyes widened.
    â€œA 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.
    â€œThere are two worlds, aren’t there?” he said.
    â€œFor sure,” she whispered.
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œI just don’ think this, sir. No. No.”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œYou 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 …
    â€œIt’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?”
    â€œJust sure I won’, sir. Truly just sure.”
    â€œGood. Why did you choose Beryl, as a matter of interest?”
    â€œDamn clever rat.”
    â€œYes, 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.
    â€œI 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