Walking Dead by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page A

frames. He was still there when Ladyblossom tapped on the door.
    â€œGoing now, sir.”
    â€œRight. Thanks. Don’t worry too much about what I said this morning. It’s just that I can’t have my animals mucked around with, or there’s no point in my being here.”
    â€œI won’ touch them no more, sir. That Beryl …”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œShe got the knowledge, but does she got the power?”
    Her fat chuckle wobbled her flesh. Relieved that the episode could now be treated as a joke, Foxe replied in kind.
    â€œNo. In fact I should think Quentin’s the one for that.”
    Her eyebrows rose and the wobbling stilled for several seconds, until he winked at her. She chuckled all the way out of the lab.
    Just as the “window” was ending the telephone bleeped in the office. Foxe finished putting his lab-coat on and picked it up.
    â€œOK, OK,” said Dreiser’s voice. “Your next free time is when? Eleven, I think.”
    The American accent didn’t quite obscure the German, and this, allied with his liking to show how much he knew about everything his colleagues were up to, made him sound like the cartoon image of a psychoanalyst.
    â€œThat’s right,” said Foxe. “But please don’t bring any more warlocks round. The dust’s still settling.”
    â€œI will spare you. All it is, I have this telex from Head Office I’d better talk to you about. Can you come down?”
    â€œSee you then.”
    Foxe hung up, sighed, and settled into the first sequence of runs. His own time had been as precisely allotted as the rats’, but he managed to clear a ninety-second period in the middle of each sequence during which he could himself count errors, visually with his own eyes, manually with a ball-point on a scrap of paper. It made him feel like a sort of cave-scientist, and the resulting figures were hairy as a donkey, full of subjective decisions about what constitutes an error, but even so it didn’t need a computer to tell him that they meant something. Very odd. Very odd indeed. At least he’d be able to talk to Dreiser about it.
    From Dreiser’s windows you saw a different world. Only the sea was the same. The beach was gone, and the impudent hotels, and the sense of distances reaching away; instead there were black crags plunging down to the waves, and there becoming foam-fringed reefs. Dreiser’s office had a subdued and casual aura, a smell of tweed and pipe tobacco; the desk was small and battered, and the arm chairs looked as though they had not been born comfortable, but had had comfort thrust upon them by many, many sittings. The only thing at odds with this ambience was the huge oil painting on the wall behind the desk, dribbles and splodges of hot colours which might have come in useful, Foxe thought, for adding to the stress-load of a roomful of monkeys. This garish horror was more surprising because the tone of the rest of the room was so carefully calculated. Indeed, Galdi said that Liz (Dreiser’s half-Japanese secretary), had instructions to delay all visitors in her office long enough for Dreiser to spray his room with a tweed-and-tobacco aerosol and adopt a pose of leisure at the window.
    â€œAh, David,” Dreiser said, swinging slowly round, as if reluctantly tearing his soul away from high intercourse with nature. “I seem hardly to have seen you since the great man’s visit. That went off quite well, I thought. Your rats were a star turn.”
    â€œNot such a star turn as the gardener.”
    â€œTrue, true. Unplanned but fortunate. He needs opportunities to demonstrate his power, that type. While he is seeking power the search satisfies him, but once he has attained it he has no outlet but caprice. By its nature caprice is hard to anticipate, but sometimes it is worth trying. The sixth finger syndrome.”
    Foxe grunted the expected interrogative.
    â€œYou don’t