THE TRIAL
                                  by Brian Stableford

Brian Stableford’s novel Streaking (PS Publishing, 2006) was shortlisted for
the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His other recent works include a mammoth
reference book, Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia
(Routledge, 2006), and a theatrical fantasy, The New Faust at the
Tragicomique (Black Coat Press, 2007). Brian’s most recent stories for us,
“The Plurality of Worlds” (August 2006) and “Doctor Muffet’s Island”
(March 2007), have chronicled the alternate sixteenth century exploits of Sir
Walter Raleigh, Captain Cook, and John Dee. In “The Trial,” Brian takes a
break from stories about a made-up past to explore the source of our own
fickle memories.
                                         ****
       Tom Wharton shook his head sadly as he moved away from Mrs.
Heatherington’s bed, reluctantly marking a red X against her name. It was the third X
in a row, and it was a bitter disappointment. There was only one more of the new
intake to be checked, and if that one turned out to be a reject too the trial would be
stalled for an entire week.
       The main problem was that by the time Alzheimer’s sufferers actually got
admitted to a ward they were usually too far gone even to attempt the battery of
cognitive tests that the trial required as a key indicator. Sufferers who were still in the
community, on the other hand, mostly hadn’t had their diagnosis confirmed with
sufficient certainty. Patients suitable for the trial had to be caught within a very
narrow margin of the observation regime, and the trial’s protocols were way too tight
to allow Tom any wriggle-room when it came to judgments of suitability.
      “Hello, Mr. Asherson,” he said, as he arrived by the next bedside. “How are
you feeling today?”
        “Name, rank, and serial number, you fascist bastard,” Mr. Asherson replied.
“That’s all you’ll get from me.” Asherson was no spring chicken, but he was
significantly younger than Mrs. Heatherington and most of the other human wrecks
littering the ward. He was sitting up in the bed, and there was an angry but slightly
puzzled glare in his eyes, as if something he couldn’t quite put his finger on had
deeply offended his moral sensibilities. His memory was playing tricks, though. He’d
spent the greater part of his working life in secondary schools teaching biology and
physical education; he wasn’t old enough ever to have been a prisoner of war.
       “That’s all I need, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said, cheerfully, as he flicked over the
sheets on his clipboard looking for further background information. “What is your
name, rank and serial number?”
        “William Asherson,” the old man replied. “Sergeant-Major. Six ... six ...
six...?” His impetus ran out.
       Tom found the detailed notes he was looking for. The serial number that
William Asherson had been given during his only brief spell of military
experience—while he was on National Service in 1949-50—had not, in fact, begun
with the digits 666, and he had only attained the lowly rank of corporal before
returning to civilian life. He had apparently exaggerated his achievements to his
family, though; there was a scrawled note from the appraisal nurse to the effect that
Asherson’s daughter, Mrs. Patricia Lockley, had confirmed—in flat contradiction to
Army records—that he really had been a sergeant-major, even though she knew that
his claim to have once been in the SAS was a pure fantasy, belatedly made up to
impress his infant grandson in the 1980s.
       “I’d just like to run a few little tests, Mr. Asherson, if that’s all right,” Tom
said, carefully maintaining his broad smile. “Nothing painful or tedious—just
puzzles, really.”
      “If it’ll get me out of here,” Asherson replied. “I need to get out. I don’t
belong here with all these old people. They’re all sick, you know. Sick, sick, sick.”
       Tom was heartened by the relative sanity of this response. It meant that
Asherson was still in good enough condition to engage in what passed for merry
banter in these parts. He sat down beside the bed, detached the screen from his
laptop, and placed it carefully in front of the patient—who looked at it with frank
distaste but refrained from doing any violence to it.
       Half an hour later Tom had determined that Mr. Asherson was in good enough
condition to relish a certain amount of attention and a little mental exercise, and was
able to grapple more or less successfully with the series of mental tests used to
measure the effects of LAW-1917. The old man had become frustrated when he
failed tests that he felt he ought to have passed—some of which he seemed certain
that he had passed, in spite of the computer’s insistence that he had not—but he
had completed each one without forgetting what it was that he was trying to do, and
that could be counted a triumph in itself, in this particular context.
        His achievements entitled Mr. Asherson to a big tick on Tom’s list—whose
inscription brought a big sigh of relief from the beleaguered junior doctor. The trial
was making painfully slow progress, but at least it was still on track. William
Asherson would be the eleventh subject out of a required sixteen—always provided,
of course, that Patricia Lockley could be persuaded to sanction his acceptance on to
the program. It was very rare for anyone to refuse, though; most relatives considered
it a great opportunity for their fast-fading loved ones to be given privileged access to
new experimental treatments.
      “If I can get the consent form signed today, I’ll see you again tomorrow, Mr.
Asherson,” Tom said, making the effort to be pleasant even though he confidently
expected that Mr. Asherson would not retain the slightest memory of him until the
next day. “You’ll have a room all to yourself, and you’ll be known as Patient K.
That’ll be your codename for a secret mission—perhaps the last you’ll ever have to
carry out.”
       “Never volunteer,” the newly promoted Patient K advised him. “All present
and correct, sir—sod off and die, you Sandhurst ponce. Get me the hell out of here.
Sick sick sick.”
      “Just sick enough—not to mention just thick enough—to earn you a big tick,
Mr. Asherson,” Tom said, blithely. “You’re the pick of the bunch today. That’s the
advantage of having been a teacher; you might lose your marbles but you never lose
the habit of rising to a challenge.”
        As he supervised the final preparations in the treatment room the following
morning, Tom tried hard to think of any advantages there might be in carrying out
trials on Alzheimer’s patients which might compensate for all the awful
inconveniences. The only obvious one, he decided, was the lack of half-informed
bolshiness. Alzheimer’s sufferers were notoriously stroppy, of course—but only
randomly. They weren’t calculatedly stroppy in the grimly determined way that many
healthy volunteers now set out to be in the wake of the TGN-1412 disaster at
Northwick Park, perennially on the lookout for the possibility of a juicy
compensation payout to augment their participation fees.
      Mr. Asherson was certainly stroppy enough, in his own quietly perverse
fashion. He hadn’t taken well to being moved.
      “Putting me in solitary, are you, you black bitch?” he said to Sarah Odiko, the
nurse who was assisting Tom. “You won’t break me. Name, rank, and serial
number.”
       “Please don’t abuse the staff, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said. He had changed his
tone from cheery to soothing, because that usually worked best in the
circumstances. “You’re very lucky to be here. There are people clamoring to be let
in on trials like these.”
       He was telling the truth. The Northwick Park incident hadn’t inhibited the flow
of volunteers at all. Indeed, by informing a much larger population of cash-strapped
young men about the easy money to be made from participation in drug
trials—which usually didn’t send their immune systems into crazy overdrive—it had
actually increased recruitment, albeit with the compensating downside that the
volunteers in question were much louder in the proclamation of their “rights.” Not
that they actually cared about the precise exercise of the principle of informed
consent, of course, or the minute details of the experimental design; they just wanted
to lay the groundwork for future lawsuits, in case anything did go wrong.
       That wasn’t the only way in which Tom’s job had become a great deal more
stressful since the TGN-1142 affair. He knew as well as everyone else that the
disaster could just as easily have struck St. Jude’s as any other hospital, and that no
matter how many extra precautions were taken, something similar might happen to
him at any time. While no one had known that an “immune system frenzy” was
anything more than a conjectural possibility, ignorance had permitted complacency,
but now that the possibility had been luridly demonstrated it hung over every new
trial of a monoclonal antibody like the sword of Damocles. It wasn’t as if the
regulatory authority could just slap a ban on the whole class of treatments—so many
of them worked that the small risk of the occasional trial going badly awry was not
only acceptable but necessary.
       “I need to get out of here,” the newly appointed Patient K complained. “Have
to see a man about a horse.”
       “No you don’t, Mr. Asherson,” Nurse Odiko informed him. “You’ve got a
catheter for that.”
      “You have to take your medicine now, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said. “Just drink
it down.”
      “No,” Asherson said. “Nasty taste.”
        “It doesn’t taste nasty, Mr. Asherson,” Tom assured him. “It’s wonderful
stuff. Just between the two of us, though, it’s been a bit awkward finding people
who can benefit from it. It’s specific to a narrow range of neuronal intranuclear
inclusions, you see, and if the results of the trial are to be meaningful it’s necessary
to be sure that the magic bullet is being aimed at the right target. If the trial were to
record a negative result, and post mortems carried out six months or a year down
the line were then to reveal that a significant number of our subjects had been
suffering from CJD or some other exotic CAG-repetition dysfunction, the whole
thing would have to be done over—and my reputation would be indelibly scarred.
Fortunately, Mr. Asherson, we know that you have exactly the right kind of gunk
gumming up your tired old brain, and you’re still sufficiently compos mentis to do
the cognitive tests I have to administer.” He paused to check whether the sound of
his voice was having the desired effect. It wasn’t. “That’s puzzles, to you,” he
added, with a sigh. “Just swallow it, for Christ’s sake. You’re not scared, are you?
What kind of soldier-turned-teacher are you?”
       “Sandhurst twit,” Asherson opined, looking at Tom the way he might have
looked at a slug on his kitchen table—but he eventually consented to swallow his
allotted dose of LAW-1917.
       “That’s good,” Tom said, as Sarah Odiko moved into position to monitor
Patient K’s heart-rate and blood-pressure. He carried on talking, for distraction’s
sake, making every effort to keep his voice level and friendly. “Everything will be
fine, Mr. Asherson. We’re pretty sure about that, because patients A to J were all
okay. The disaster at Northwick Park wouldn’t have been nearly so bad, you know,
if they’d staggered the administration of the drug. Once the first patient had gone
into frenzy, the others could have been spared the necessity. While I’m only able to
administer LAW-1917 to one or two patients a week, there’s no danger of a
simultaneous meltdown of my entire sample. On the other hand, if the Northwick
Park trial had been staggered, no one would ever have known for sure whether or
not the first patient’s reaction was an idiosyncratic one that might not have affected
the other members of the group. In my experience, every trial tends to turn up one
hypersensitive reaction and one contradictory reaction, no matter how consistent the
rest of the results are. Humans just aren’t as similar to one another as mice. On the
other hand, they can do cognitive tests, so you get a much clearer idea of the nature
and extent of the effect that drugs are having on their gummed-up brains. It’s all a
matter of swings and roundabouts, isn’t it, Mr. Asherson?”
       “Met Eileen at the fair,” Asherson commented. “Real fair—coconut shies and
everything. Lousy ferris wheel, but what did I care? Sick sick sick. Is Eileen coming
to see me today? She came to see me yesterday.”
       Tom carefully refrained from reminding Asherson that his wife was dead, and
that the woman he occasionally mistook for her was his daughter. “Everything okay,
Sarah?” he said to the nurse.
      “Fine,” she said. “BP up to one-thirty over ninety. Pulse eighty-five.”
     “Good,” Tom said. “I’ll do the first set of tests now, to set the baseline.
Wheel the screen into position, will you?”
       The display-panel used for the tests in the dedicated trial room was much
more impressive than the one on Tom’s laptop. It was a nineteen-inch flat screen
mounted on the end of a mechanical arm connected to the main body of the
computer by a slender bundle of cables enclosed in a plastic tube. Tom was able to
sit beside the bed, facing the screen aslant, with the keyboard on a mobile desk in
front of him.
      “You know how we do this one, don’t you, Mr. Asherson?” Tom said. “All
you have to do is watch out for the lemon, and touch the screen when it appears.”
       Asherson couldn’t remember how to do the test, but he caught on quickly
enough when it was demonstrated. He was willing to oblige, in spite of uttering the
judgment that it was all a waste of time and that he really needed to get away. He
became less and less willing as the run went on, but Tom was able to complete the
series. The results, as expected, were much the same as those he’d obtained the day
before.
       “That’s fine, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said, when he was through. “You can have
your lunch now, and then a little nap, if you want. I’ll tell your daughter that she can
come in to see you, so that she can make sure that you’re comfortable. I’ll come
back at five to do the second run—by which time, of course, you’ll probably have
forgotten all about the first run, so it will all seem fresh. We won’t have to worry too
much about the possibility of educative bias unless you actually begin to show some
improvement. That’s another advantage this trial has over the ones that only test the
healthy, now I come to think about it. Things aren’t as bad as we sometimes
imagine, are they? Okay, Sarah—you’re in charge.”
       “Officers are wankers,” Patient K opined. “Lions led by donkeys, we were.
Sick sick sick.”
       According to Mr. Asherson’s biography, which Tom had scrutinized more
carefully since awarding the big tick, the teacher had served briefly in the Far East
before completing his National Service, but he’d never been in anything the Army
was prepared to define as a “conflict situation.” No matter what he’d told his
children and his grandchildren thereafter, or what he was trying to tell Tom now,
he’d never had the chance to be a real lion. He’d still been at school during World
War II, and hadn’t even suffered the indignity of being an evacuee.
        “Lie down like a lamb, there’s a good chap,” Tom said, in his best paternal
manner. “We’ll see what kind of hero you are tonight—when your brain might be a
little clearer, with luck and the benefits of LAW-1917. If so, we should see some
real improvement tomorrow—although I shouldn’t tell you that, strictly speaking, in
case the expectation actuates some kind of placebo effect.”
        By now, Tom was genuinely optimistic about the possibility of improvement.
Patients A to J had all shown some improved brain function, although some had
done far better than others—and none of it was likely to be the result of a placebo
effect, given the condition of the subjects. Those who’d done best of all, in fact,
were still showing clear benefits two to six weeks later, and there seemed to be every
possibility that more than half of their number would hang on long enough to take
further treatment, if and when the program was able to move into Phase Two. All in
all, the trial was going well in spite of the time it was taking.
                                         ****
      Simon Phipps, the English rep from the company on whose behalf the trial
was being carried out, was waiting in Tom’s office when he got back.
       “It’s going well,” Tom said, turning his clipboard around so that Phipps could
see the long columns of numbers, ticks, and crosses.
     “Patient K,” Phipps read off the top of the sheet. “He’s your only one this
week? That still leaves L to P to find.”
      “Four more weeks,” Tom said. “Six tops. In the meantime, you can buy me
lunch. Have to be the canteen, mind—the protocol requires me to stay on the
premises during the period of administration, in case of an adverse reaction.”
       Phipps made no objection; bribing doctors with the occasional lunch was part
of his job description. He even had the grace to wait until Tom had finished eating
before he started whining about the time the trial was taking. “With the benefit of
hindsight,” he said, “we’d have done better to split the trial between two hospitals,
so as to cast the sampling net more widely.”
       “No you wouldn’t,” Tom told him, wearily. “You’ve already got two for the
price of one—the consultant at the Main is working with me, referring potential
candidates for the trial here.”
      “A bigger city, then,” Phipps countered. “Birmingham or Manchester. There’s
no shortage of senile old fools in Manchester.”
       “No, but they mostly stay at home till they rot, because their offspring accept
their decline as part of the normal pattern of life, and they all have
complications—mostly lung cancer and chronic obesity. Down here, you have senile
old fools whose loving offspring offload them on to the NHS at the first
opportunity, some of whom are in pretty good physical nick, apart from their
CAG-repeat neuronal intranuclear inclusions. The flow is slow, but it’s good quality.
Patient K is a pearl—a career teacher at a middle-of-the-road selective school, who
started out in the days when you needed common sense and mental toughness and
took his BEd in his spare time. Kept his mens sana in good shape teaching biology
and his corpore sano in tip-top condition teaching PE. Never smoked, and stayed fit
enough to con his grandchildren into believing that he was once in the SAS. You
don’t get many like him up in Manchester. We don’t want our precious trial to turn
up negative results because the subjects are all crap, do we?”
       “So I can tell the Germans that the results will be positive, then?” Phipps said,
eagerly, as they left the canteen to walk back to Tom’s office. “They might not mind
the extra wait if I can promise them that it’ll be worth it.”
        “It’s too soon to sound the trumpet,” Tom said, scrupulously. “With K to P
yet to be assessed, there’s still time for the numbers to take a downturn, or for some
perverse sod to have a bad reaction. On the whole, though, I’d say that all the signs
are good. The stuff really does seem to gee up the T-cells almost immediately, and
enables them to home in right away on the gunk that’s doing the damage. If I were a
betting man, I’d be prepared to have a judicious punt on the possibility that your
bosses will one day be able to whisper the sacred syllable where it’s never been
whispered before. We’ll have to be very careful about getting the dosage exactly
right, though, so we’ll have to be even more painstaking in Phase Two. It’ll be worth
it in the long run. Trust me.”
        Phipps knew that the “sacred syllable” was cure, but he’d been in the
business too long to allow himself to get overly excited about Tom’s carefully
moderated optimism. “You’d better be very careful, then,” he said. “The one thing
the Germans hate worse than things going wrong at the outset is having a trial drag
on for years, spinning off promises and expectations all the while, and then have it
go tits up at the last hurdle.”
       “It could happen,” Tom admitted, as he unlocked his office door and moved
aside to let Phipps precede him. “Lap of the gods, mate—but we have to stay
positive. One day at a time.”
      “I hate these monoclonal antibody deals,” Phipps confessed, as he leaned
against the office wall, spurning the armchair that was set deliberately low so that
Tom could look down on patients and visiting administrators alike. “Too
nerve-racking.”
      “We’d better get used to it,” Tom said, as he took his own chair.
“Monoclonal antibodies are here to stay, and there are thousands more in Big
Pharma’s pipeline. Anyway, it’s me who’ll take the worst of the shrapnel if anything
does explode in our faces. I’m the guy at the sharp end—you’re just a suit in a chain
of command.”
      “Don’t give me that, Tom,” the rep retorted. “If anything were to happen,
you’d pass the buck to me without pausing to draw breath—and it wouldn’t be
nearly so easy for me to get rid...” He might have said more, but there was a knock
on the office door just then, and Patricia Lockley, née Asherson, came in without
waiting to be invited.
       “He seems much better, doctor,” she gushed. “I can’t thank you enough for
getting him on to the trial. I’m really glad they referred us here from the Main. I think
it’s wonderful.”
       “Sit down, Mrs. Lockley, please,” Tom said, not bothering to glance
sideways at Phipps to underline the significance of the remark about the referral.
“There’s no need to thank me—we’re very grateful to you for allowing Bill to
participate. This is Simon Phipps, by the way—he works for the company that
developed LAW-1917.”
     “We’re very optimistic about it,” Phipps said. “Dr. Wharton is doing a terrific
job—your father is in good hands.”
      “You mustn’t expect too much, though,” Tom put in. “Your father probably
perked up a little because we’ve been giving him so much attention—and because he
was pleased to see you, of course.”
     “That’s exactly it,” she said. “He was pleased to see me, and he knew who I
was—didn’t call me Eileen once. I haven’t seen him tuck into lunch like that for
months. It’s a miracle.”
       “No, Mrs. Lockley, it isn’t,” Tom insisted. “It’s too soon for the drug to have
taken effect—we won’t see any authentic improvement until this evening at the
earliest. If the human immune system weren’t so reactive, we wouldn’t be able to see
results as soon as that—but because it is so reactive, we have to be very careful not
to overdo the dosage. We want the new T-cells to clear out some of the
accumulated proteins that are stopping your father’s brain from working properly,
but we have to make certain that they don’t start attacking the component that’s
necessary for the brain to function at all. It’s early days yet.”
       “I know,” Patricia Lockley said, blithely unaware of her own inconsistency,
“but it’s wonderful all the same.”
                                            ****
      “Dr. Wharton, is it?” Asherson said, when Tom turned up to administer the
second battery of tests. “All swings and roundabouts.”
       “Very good, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said. “I can see that you’ll zoom through
the tests without a hitch this time.”
      “I was in the SAS,” Asherson told him. “I’ve had survival training. Kill a man
with my bare hands.”
      “I’m sure you can,” Tom agreed, taking his seat at the keyboard as Nurse
Odiko moved the screen back into position, “but your experience as a teacher might
stand you in better stead today. Can you spot the lemon?”
      “Sandhurst wimp,” Asherson opined. “Never done a day’s work in your life,
have you? Bare hands. Met Eileen at the fair. Sick sick sick. Is she coming back?”
       “Please try to concentrate, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said. “I really need to do
these tests, to see whether the drug has begun to work yet.”
      “Law six six six” Asherson said—but he had already begun to tap the screen
when the lemons appeared. “Stagger the trial. No meltdown. Swings and
roundabouts. Arsehole.”
       “It’s ell-ay-doubleyew-1917, Mr. Asherson,” Tom told him. “But you did well
to notice that the letters spell law. That’s the teacher in you, although you seem to
have mislaid him temporarily and got stuck in your teens, way back in 1949. Now
this one’s a bit more complicated. Do you remember it?”
       “Yes,” said Asherson, shortly—and it seemed that he did, because he passed
with flying colors, without any need for an explanation of what he was supposed to
do.
       That was just the beginning. By the time the series of tests was complete,
Tom’s record sheet was a solid mass of ticks and tens. “That’s very, very good,
Mr. Asherson,” he said. “You’ve gone straight to the top of the class. If you can do
that again tomorrow morning I’ll have to move you on to the Level Two tests and
open up a whole new category of potential improvement.”
      “Won’t be here,” Asherson said. “Things to do, got to get out. Mission to
take on. Agent K. Secret. Can I have more medicine now? I need more medicine
before I go.”
      “That’s Patient K, Mr. Asherson,” Tom told him. “Yes, you are on a
mission—but your mission is to stay here. That’s very important. We have a job to
do, you and I. We need to prove that Alzheimer’s will be curable one day, and that
LAW-1917 is one of the magic bullets that can do the trick. You mustn’t take any
more medicine, because it would be dangerous. We can’t even sedate you, I’m
afraid—although you should try to get some sleep. Nurse Odiko’s shift is over now,
but Nurse Kasicka will stay with you all night. I’ll be just down the corridor. I’ll be
here all night too.”
       Simon Phipps was waiting outside the door, having put off driving home until
the latest results were in. “Good?” he said.
     “Brilliant,” Tom said, dubiously. “Good enough to lift the average
improvement between tests one and two by a point and a half—if he continues to
improve he’ll break the record easily.”
       “You don’t sound unduly delighted about it,” Phipps remarked.
       “It’s never entirely good news when one set of results is so far out of line with
the others,” Tom told him, “although I suppose it’s expectable, given that he had a
more intellectually demanding job than A to J. Even so, you don’t want a drug’s
effects to be too variable, especially a dose-sensitive drug like this one. Patricia
Lockley was right—he’s made so much progress so fast that it’s almost a miracle.
The trouble is, if the effect continues to increase at this pace, he might already have
overdosed. If the new T-cells start clearing healthy proteins as well as the NIIs, it
could kill him.”
       “You mean he might go into the frenzy thing?”
      “No. If something like that were going to happen his physiological indicators
would already be going hyper, and they’re not. His pulse and bp are sound as a bell.
I mean that his brain might simply stop working—coma, PVS, then stone dead.”
       “You can’t let that happen,” Phipps said.
       “No, obviously not. At the first adverse sign, I’ll start medication—but even if
I can stop the process going all the way, your trial will be well and truly messed up.”
        “It’s our trial, Tom—and that us isn’t just you and me, but the expectant
Germans as well. So far, it’s just an improvement, right? So far, it’s all good. I can
tell them that.”
       “Sure you can,” Tom said. “If I were you, though, I’d let it simmer tonight
and pop back first thing in the morning to see how things stand then. If the
situation’s stabilized ... well, if that’s the case, you might just find the sacred syllable
dancing on my lips.”
       “I’ll do that,” Phipps promised.
                                              ****
       Phipps was as good as his word; he arrived at Asherson’s room just as Sarah
Odiko was changing places with Petra Kasicka again. The rep didn’t wait outside
this time; he came in to see what was going on.
     What was going on was that Tom was checking the log of the computer,
whose keyboard was on William Asherson’s lap. Asherson’s eyes were glued to the
screen, which displayed a chessboard.
       “He’s been playing for two hours,” Tom whispered to Phipps. “Petra says
that he didn’t sleep a wink all night. When he got bored he insisted on running
though the test-program I’d set up, and she had to let him do it in order to keep him
quiet. After that, he started searching for something better, first on the hospital
intranet and then on the web. He played a few chase-and-shoot games before he
found the lightning chess program. He played nine games on level one, losing all but
the last, then moved on to level two. He lost the first game on that level but won the
second, and he seems to be winning the third.
      “I can hear you, you know,” Asherson said, without moving his eyes from the
screen. “It took me a while to learn the game, but I think I’ve got the hang of it
now.”
      Tom turned away from Simon Phipps to look at the patient. “You must have
played chess before, Mr. Asherson. You haven’t really learned it from scratch this
morning. Don’t you remember the school where you used to teach?”
        “I tried it in the army,” Asherson said, “but I couldn’t get the hang of it. I
don’t know why not—it seems easy enough now. It’s just a matter of persisting until
it clicks, I suppose. Can I have more medicine now? I really need to get out of here,
but I need my medicine first.”
        “I’m sorry, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said, “but you’re part of a clinical trial, and
we have to stick very rigidly to the protocol. One dose is all you get—at least until
you qualify for Phase Two, which we might be able to begin in a couple of months,
if the rest of Phase One works out.”
       “To hell with protocol,” said Asherson, finally looking away from the screen,
having checkmated the computer. “We’re talking about my brain here. I’m better,
and I intend to stay that way. You’re right, of course—I could play chess. I do
remember the school—but that’s not important. I’ve got things to do. You’d better
not mess me about, Dr. Wharton. I used to be in the SAS.”
      “No, you didn’t, Mr. Asherson,” Tom replied, almost without thinking.
“That’s just a story you made up to tell your grandson.”
      Asherson’s eyes narrowed momentarily, then widened again. “Is it?” he said,
with sudden uncertainty. “I thought...” He fell silent.
       “I suppose I’d better search out some new tests, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said.
“Something tells me that you’ve moved beyond level two of Elementary Cognition.
If the biology teacher’s beginning to resurface, we’ll need tests considerably more
challenging.”
     “LAW-1917,” Asherson said. “Monoclonal antibody originated in Germany,
name of company withheld in accordance with client confidentiality policy. Original
compound derived from mice, humanized to make it acceptable to the human
immune system, tested in that form on rats. Stimulates the production of white blood
corpuscles capable of the elective ingestion and metabolic breakdown of a
CAG-repeat derivative of an enkephalin allegedly responsible for the renewal of
neurons. Am I right?”
     “That’s the gist of it,” Tom agreed. “You haven’t just been busy playing
games, I see. If you understand that much, though, you must understand why it
would be dangerous to risk an overdose.”
       “Wrong assumption,” Asherson said, in a blithely patronizing manner that he
must have honed to perfection in the classroom. “You think it would be a bad thing
to clear out all the CAG-repeat protein, because some of it must be performing
some function that determined the selective value of the gene, albeit less efficiently
than the normal version. That’s not a danger. I need a second dose, Dr. Wharton.
You have to give it to me. Admittedly, it’ll remove one of the subjects from your
trial—but efficient treatment takes ethical priority. I need the second dose, and you
have no ethical grounds for withholding it.”
        There you go, Tom thought. Bring them back from Alzheimer’s hell and they
just turn into exactly the same kind of self-important prick that blights all the other
trials. He’ll be suing for compensation next because we refused to top up his
medication.
        “That’s not true, Mr. Asherson,” Simon Phipps said, in the meantime. “If you
were in mortal danger, Tom could abort this run of the trial to give you life-saving
treatment, but you’re obviously doing very well. We’re not taking you out of the
trial, Mr. Asherson. We need you in it. You’re the best ad we’ve got!”
      “Shut up, Simon,” Tom said, sharply. “What makes you think the assumption
is wrong, Mr. Asherson?”
       “The protein’s function isn’t essential in the way you think it is, Dr. Wharton,”
Asherson said. “It doesn’t matter if the whole supply is wiped out—no, I take that
back. It does matter, but not in the way you think. It won’t hurt me, Dr. Wharton.
Quite the reverse. I need that second dose, and you have to give it to me.”
       “You have to be more specific, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said. “I’d need a sound
physiological reason for breaking protocol. You’ll have to explain to me exactly
what effect you think the second dose will have, and exactly how you’ve reached
that conclusion. If the case were strong enough, I’d have to concede—but the
science has to be in place. You understand that, as a biologist.”
       Asherson hesitated for a moment, then smiled. “Clever bugger, aren’t you?”
he said. “That’s Sandhurst for you. Give me time, and the use of the computer, and
I’ll put the case together. Every i dotted and every t crossed. You mustn’t worry
about losing a subject from your test, Mr. Phipps. The drug works, and the subjects
will demonstrate that, even if you can’t find another K like me. A to J have already
shown that it has a modest beneficial effect on patients in worse condition than I
was, while I can offer a tantalizing glimpse of its ultimate potential, as well as serving
my own purposes. It’s all swings and roundabouts, isn’t it, Dr. Wharton? I met my
wife at the fair, you know. Is she coming to see me today?”
       Tom thought very carefully before speaking. Eventually, he said: “All right,
Mr. Asherson. I’ll give you time to put together a case, and the use of the computer.
I want you to do something for me, though. I want to download an IQ test, and I’d
like you to complete it, if you would. I still need a way of tracking your progress,
you see. Even if you eventually come out of the official trial, I need to monitor you
very carefully. You’re my patient, remember—you’re my responsibility.”
      “Arsehole,” Asherson said. “Okay, I’ll do your test. Don’t be surprised if I
beat you, though. I was in the SAS.”
       Tom reached out and took the keyboard, placing it carefully on the desk
before starting to type. After a couple of minutes, he said: “It’s all set, Mr.
Asherson. You have an hour. I’ll leave you to it—when you want me to come back,
just ask Nurse Odiko to page me.”
       Simon Phipps wanted to start an argument as soon as they were back in
Tom’s office, but Tom wouldn’t join in. “He’s right, Simon,” he said. “He’s still
confused, but he’s right. It would be better if the official trial showed up consistent
moderate results—but if he can give us a glimpse of further possibilities without
relapsing, going completely off his head or dying on us, we could be way ahead of
the game.”
       “Three big ifs,” Phipps commented. “He’s already halfway off his head, if
you ask me. Remembering how to play chess is one thing, but putting together a
scientific paper evaluating the function of an enkephalin is something else.”
      “I know,” Tom said. “That’s why I asked him to do it. We’re in uncharted
waters here, Simon—we’re not in classical experimental design mode any more,
we’re in kick-it-and-see-how-it-reacts mode. If his brain can continue to function in
any sort of respectable and responsible fashion ... this could be big. Aren’t you glad
you dropped in?”
      “I would be,” Phipps told him, “if I didn’t suspect that a passed buck might
come flying at my head any second.”
       William Asherson called them back after forty minutes. He hadn’t stopped
early because he’d finished the test, but because he’d got bored. “That’s good
enough,” he said to Tom. He activated the computer’s automatic scorer himself, but
frowned with dissatisfaction when his score came up as 151. “Shit,” he said. “I used
to get that sort of score before. I thought I’d got at least two hundred now. I must
have made a few mistakes. Sick sick sick.”
      “That’s okay, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said. “It’s still an amazing performance
for someone in your situation. We’ll try again this afternoon. If you score even
higher then...”
      “I will,” Asherson promised. “I won’t make the same mistakes twice. You can
get out again now. I need to prove to you that I’m telling the truth about the second
dose—that it can’t hurt me, and will do what I need it to do.”
       Tom obediently left the room again, taking Simon Phipps with him.
       “That’s one hell of an IQ score!” Phipps said. “Tom, you have got to keep
that guy in the trial.”
       “Don’t be ridiculous, Simon,” Tom said, as he hurried along the corridor to
his office. “If all LAW-1917 had done was to ameliorate the symptoms of his
creeping Alzheimer’s, he wouldn’t be able to get near an IQ of 151, even if he’s
telling the truth about racking up that sort of score in his youth. Something strange is
happening. He has to be hypersensitive, obviously—but he might just be right about
orthodox theory being based on a wrong assumption about the aberrant protein’s
normal function.”
       “What’s the right assumption, then?” Phipps wanted to know.
       “I’m not sure. I’d dearly like to know what he thinks it is, though. Why is he
so convinced that he needs a second dose? He could easily be barking up the wrong
tree. He might have increased the speed at which he processes information very
dramatically indeed, but he’s still harboring delusions—and that could be a nasty
combination. Efficient logic applied to false premises can lead to seriously weird
conclusions.”
       “I don’t follow,” Phipps complained.
        “IQ scores are very sensitive to the speed of information processing—they
measure fast thinking rather than effective thinking. IQ tests pander to that, by
presenting questions that have definite answers reachable by methodical logic.
Open-ended questions are a different matter. He might go off the rails when he tries
to supply his newfound calculative ability to something less neatly rule-bound than
chess. He still thinks he was in the SAS, even though I’ve told him the truth. What’s
all this sick sick sick stuff? I thought the first time I heard it that it was one of the idiot
puns that Alzheimer’s patients sometimes make, twisting six six six ... but even if it
were, we’d still have to account for his fascination with six six six.” By now, Tom
was sitting in his chair, swinging the rotatable seat from side to side as if the swaying
might aid his fevered thought-processes.
       “Don’t freak out on me, mate,” Phipps said. “If you don’t calm down, I’ll
begin to suspect that you’ve been sampling the merchandise yourself. What do you
think is wrong with the orthodox assumption about the enkephalin whose
CAG-repeat variant clogs up the neurons of Alzheimer’s sufferers?”
       “I’m yet to be convinced that it is wrong,” Tom told him. “Given that natural
selection built the protein into the genome and limited its expression to the brain, we
have to assume that it serves some neurotransmissive function, and that it continues
to serve that function even in the problematic form that eventually causes it to build
up into obstructive plaques—in which case, an overdose of any treatment that
breaks down the plaques would be bound to sabotage normal brain function. If the
new improved Asherson thinks that’s wrong, he must think that even at its natural
level—the level the healthier form of the protein routinely maintains in your brain and
mine—the protein functions as an inhibitor, suppressing the efficiency of calculative
thought, and maybe of memory too. Perhaps he thinks that if he takes a second
dose, he’ll become even smarter than he’s already become—some kind of mental
superman—or perhaps he thinks that he’ll be able to improve his memory to a much
greater extent than he’s already achieved.”
      “Might he be right—or is he just crazy?”
      “I don’t know. If he is right ... well, LAW-1917 is more than a cure for
Alzheimer’s. If we can get the dose right, maybe we can all be mental supermen with
perfect memories. But if that were the case, why would natural selection have
equipped us with the enkephalin in the first place? If simply getting rid of it were
enough to give us that kind of reward, we’d surely have got rid of it ourselves.”
       There was a knock on the door then, and Patricia Lockley came in without
waiting for an invitation. “I just went in to see Dad,” she said. “He’s.... “Words
failed her. Her tone was by no means wholeheartedly enthusiastic.
      “You were right and I was wrong,” Tom told her. “It is a miracle.”
       “Will he be like that forever?” Mrs. Lockley said, hesitantly. Obviously, it
wasn’t a prospect she found totally attractive. She didn’t mean “forever” literally, of
course—but Tom didn’t know, any longer, where the boundaries of possibility
might lie.
      “I have no idea,” Tom said. “In patients A to J, the effect continued to
develop for several days, but your father has made such a rapid improvement that he
might already have peaked—and I have no way of knowing what further effects
might materialize.”
       “He says he’s got an IQ of two hundred,” Mrs. Lockley said. “And he’s
convinced that he was in the SAS. He got angry when I told him that he wasn’t. He
said I was sick.”
     “Did he?” Tom asked. “If what he actually said was sick sick sick I don’t think
he meant you. Do you have any idea what it might mean? That or six six six?”
      “That’s the number of the beast in the Bible,” she said, promptly.
      “Apart from that. Something that sick sick sick might mean to your father,
specifically.”
       “No. He always used to say that he’d never been sick in his life—he was
fibbing, of course. He got colds like anyone else, and when it was flu he stayed in
bed, like anybody else. Shouldn’t you be looking after him if there’s a danger of new
effects?”
       “Sarah will page me if any new symptoms appear,” Tom told her. “Your
father’s working on a much harder test. He and I both needed time to think.”
       “What about?” Mrs. Lockley wanted to know.
       “The logic of natural selection,” Tom retorted, reflexively. “If he’s right, and
we’re all walking around with our brains permanently muffled, running at a quarter of
their potential efficiency, there has to be a logic to the situation—and if we knew
what that logic is, we might be able to see why it would be a bad idea to take the
muffler off.”
         “None of the other patients reacted this way, Mrs. Lockley,” Phipps put in,
trying to be helpful. “It’s just him—something about him. We need to work out what
it is, if we can.”
       “That’s not the point, though,” Tom said. “Yes, it’s worked much faster and
more powerfully on him than it did on anyone else, mercifully without his immune
system going into overdrive, so his neuronal intranuclear inclusions must be much
easier to break down than the average—but we’ve already proved that the NIIs can
be broken down in other patients. We don’t know that there’s anything qualitatively
different about him. If it’s just a matter of degree ... damn!”
       He reached into his pocket and pulled out his vibrating pager. “That’s Sarah,”
he said. “Either Bill’s ready to show me his proof, or things have begun to go sour.
Let’s find out.”
                                         ****
      Tom ran down the corridor and burst into the room reserved for his trial
patients. Then he stopped dead, so suddenly that Simon Phipps ran into the back of
him. Phipps muttered a curse, but Tom was dumbstruck.
      William Asherson was out of bed. He had torn the line out of his forearm and
detached the catheter. The sleeve of his gown was stained red. He was holding the
hollow needle that had been transmitting fluid into his veins to the side of Sarah
Odiko’s neck, threatening to drive it into the carotid artery. The nurse was terrified.
Asherson’s eyes were ablaze with determination.
     “Dad!” Patricia Lockley protested, from the doorway. “What are you doing?
You’re a teacher, for God’s sake!”
       “I couldn’t come up with a sound scientific proof, Dr. Wharton,” Asherson
said, mockingly. “But I knew you were bluffing, just to gain time. I’m not. If you
don’t bring me a second dose of LAW-1917 right now, I’ll kill your nurse. I could
do it with my bare hands, but the needle seems more symbolically appropriate. Is
that a good enough reason for you?”
       “Yes it is,” Tom said, without hesitation. “I’ll have to fetch the dose from the
refrigerated locker in my office, but I’ll do it right away. Don’t worry,
Sarah—everything will be okay.”
      “If you give him another dose he’ll be eliminated from the trial!” Simon
Phipps objected.
      “I’m threatening to stab a nurse in the neck with a needle, Mr. Phipps,”
Asherson pointed out. “I think we can take it as read that I’m no longer a suitable
candidate for your trial, don’t you?”
        “Shut the door behind me, Simon,” Tom said. “Make sure no one else comes
in. I’ll be back in two minutes.” He wasted no further time before running back
down the corridor to do exactly as he’d promised.
       Tome unlocked the cooler hurriedly, and measured out a dose of LAW-1917
into a small plastic cup. Then he carried it back to the trial room. He moved swiftly
but carefully, to avoid the possibility of spillage.
      The tableau within the other room was exactly as he’d left it.
       “Here you are, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said. “As your doctor, I have to advise
you strongly against taking it. Whatever your opinion is of the quality of my
assumptions, an overdose could kill you.”
      Asherson didn’t let Sarah Odiko go. Tom had to lift the plastic cup to the old
man’s lips himself.
     “You wouldn’t be trying to fool me with a placebo, would you, Dr.
Wharton?” Asherson said.
      “No I wouldn’t,” Tom told him. “As you said to Simon, you’re no longer
Patient K. You’re off the program—and you’re calling the shots. You take it at your
own risk. You’ve been warned.”
      “Wanker,” Asherson said, and drained the tiny cup. Then he waited. They all
waited, for what seemed like a ridiculously long time.
     “Let the nurse go, Bill,” Tom said, exercising his very best bedside manner.
“You’ve got what you wanted.”
       Asherson seemed to have drifted off into a kind of reverie, but Tom’s voice
brought him back to his senses. He looked at the nurse imprisoned by his left arm,
and the needle in his left hand, as if he had never seen either of them before. It was
as if he had suddenly reverted to the common state of Alzheimer’s patients, who
were notoriously prone to episodes in which they completely lost the thread of their
existential continuity.
        Asherson reacted to the revelation of what he was doing with candid horror.
He screamed, and hurled the needle at the wall behind the bed. He released his
prisoner and cowered back—as if it were him, not her, who had the right to be
terrified.
       “Sick sick sick,” he said, in a tone redolent with astonishment. “Sick sick
sick.” The second rendition was more plaintive than the first, almost agonized.
       William Asherson covered his face with his hands, clutching at his eyebrows.
It was almost as if he were trying to tear out his own eyes, but couldn’t quite get a
grip on them. He wailed, but not loudly. It was more like an animal in despair than
one in pain.
      Patricia Lockley came forward and put her arms around Sarah Odiko
protectively, as if to offer a guarantee that no further harm could come to her.
        “It’s okay, Mr. Asherson,” Tom was quick to say. He reached out a hand as
if in reassurance, but his legs refused to take a step forward. He was frightened of
what his patient might do, if the old man’s next abrupt change of mood proved to be
less self-accusing.
      “What the hell do you know?” Asherson demanded. “Just because you’ve
been to Sandhurst.”
      “I’ve never been to Sandhurst,” Tom told him, quietly. “I’m Dr. Thomas
Wharton—Tom. I went to Bristol University Medical School. I work here, at St.
Jude’s Hospital, carrying out clinical trials on behalf of an assortment of biotech
companies. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Mr. Asherson. Please get back into
bed.”
      Asherson’s hands came away from his face, and he looked Tom straight in
the eye. “I was never in the SAS,” he whispered. “I was so sure ... but I’m a liar.
I’m just a liar, too stupid to see through his own lies. I fooled myself. No one
else—just myself. Why?”
       The color seemed to have drained from the old man’s previously florid face,
and for a moment or two Tom was certain that his patient was about to faint. That
certainty enabled him to take a step forward, anticipating that he might have to catch
Asherson as he fell—but Asherson didn’t fall. Instead, he moved, faster than anyone
could have anticipated.
      Asherson shoved Simon Phipps aside in order to clear a route to the door that
wouldn’t compel him to bowl over his daughter and Sarah Odiko. Tom had closed
the door behind him when he’d come back with the second dose of LAW-1917, but
Asherson seized the handle and twisted, then slammed the door back against the wall
so hard that Tom heard the hinges splinter.
      Asherson was already running down the corridor.
       Tom grabbed hold of Simon Phipps to prevent him from falling over. “Look
after Sarah and Mrs. Lockley,” Tom instructed him, tersely. “Shut the door. Don’t
let anyone in until I come back.” He didn’t really expect to be obeyed, but he
wanted to feel that he was still in control.
                                             ****
       Tom followed William Asherson, running as fast as he could. He knew that he
wouldn’t be able to outpace the old man unless and until they got to an open space
where his strength and stamina would give him a clear advantage, but he figured that
it was only a matter of time.
       Asherson didn’t head downstairs. Instead he went up—and then further up,
toward the roof. The hospital building they were in, Tom knew, was seven stories
high. If Asherson’s intention was to hurl himself off the roof, he’d have no difficulty
in finding a strip of bare concrete to aim at. There was no chance whatsoever of a
man of his age surviving such a fall.
      The door to the roof was locked, but Asherson smashed the lock. He was an
old man, but he’d been teaching PE for most of his life. He still had powerful
muscles, and he was possessed by the recklessness of absolute determination.
        Tom couldn’t latch the door behind him, but he was able to pull it to. Their
chase had been observed and noted by half a hundred people, so someone would
undoubtedly have notified security, but Tom was reasonably confident that anyone
following him would be very discreet in opening the door to see what was
happening, even if Simon Phipps wasn’t there to explain. This was by no means the
first time the hospital had had a potential jumper on the roof, and the procedure for
trying to prevent a jumper from taking the irrevocable step was almost as well known
and well respected as the drug trial protocols.
      Mercifully, Asherson was still sane enough to hesitate when he reached the
parapet protecting the edge of the roof. He was still sane enough to look back at
Tom. Tom was reassured to see that the old man now looked rueful, ashamed of his
own stupidity
       “I’ve made a mess of it, haven’t I, doctor?” the old man said, in a surprisingly
calm tone. “I thought I’d become so clever that I couldn’t possibly make a
mistake—but I guess that’s something else the insulation’s there to protect us from.
It’s not just the awful truth of our vile and vicious selves, but that ridiculous
confidence in our own abilities, our own judgments. Who could have imagined that
human nature was so ridiculous?”
      “Actually,” Tom said, leaving the customary ten foot gap between himself and
the would-be jumper, “it’s not that surprising—not to me, at any rate. You’ve had a
bit of a shock, I know, but your very confusion should tell you that it’s not a good
idea to jump. Given time, you can certainly get through this. I need to keep you
under observation, though. Whatever you intended to do, and whatever your motive
was, the simple fact is that you’ve overdosed on a dangerous drug. We need to get
you back to bed.”
       “I just threatened to kill your nurse, Dr. Wharton,” Asherson said, bitterly. “I
don’t think going back to bed is going to set the matter to rest.”
       “Nobody knows about that but you, me, Simon, Patricia, and Sarah,” Tom
told him. “If you can speak for Patricia, I can speak for the others. Nobody will
make a complaint. You were under the influence of a powerful psychotropic
substance. Nobody will hold it against you. It won’t even go into your patient notes.
You’re hypersensitive to an experimental drug, and you had a bad reaction. It’s no
big deal. Nobody’s been hurt.”
       “Nobody’s been hurt!” Asherson repeated, his voice somewhere between a
hiss and a shriek. “You don’t know, Dr. Wharton—you really don’t.”
       Asherson set one foot on the parapet, as if the probability of his taking the
decision to jump had been increased rather than decreased by Tom’s attempted
reassurance. He also looked over the edge to measure the drop, though, and
reflexive vertigo froze his limbs in position. Tom shivered as a slight gust of wind
chilled his face. The sky was overcast and rain seemed likely to start falling at any
moment. That would doubtless discourage Asherson from staying too long on the
roof, but Tom had no idea how it would affect the probability of his taking the
quicker route down.
        “I mean that no one’s been physically injured,” Tom said. “Nobody needs to
be, if you’ll just step away from the edge.”
       “I’m still thinking about it,” Asherson told him. “Still weighing it up. I’m
seventy-five years old, doctor, and I have Alzheimer’s. You say that I had a bad
reaction to an experimental drug, but that’s a lie. You’re not a fool—you know what
really happened.”
       “No, I don’t,” Tom told him, “and neither do you. I realize that the effect
must have seemed entirely beneficial to you, at first, when you got your memory
back and discovered an ability to think that you’d never had before—but you still
made mistakes, didn’t you? You were still confused about certain things. There’s
always a downside to these dramatic effects, Mr. Asherson. We need to figure out
what it is—and by we I mean both of us. You need to understand what happened, if
you’re to go forward from here, but the important thing is that you can go forward.
The overwhelming probability is that you’re not going to lose what you’ve gained,
and I can certainly help you cope with whatever panicked you into thinking that you
couldn’t go on.”
      “You’ll need more than vague promises, Dr. Wharton.” Asherson retorted.
“I’m going to need you to put together a sound scientific argument for me, with all
the evidence in place and every logical step filled in. That’s what you demanded
from me, remember?”
      “Did I get it?” Tom countered.
      “No,” Asherson conceded. “But you haven’t got an alternative. You haven’t
got anyone to hold hostage instead, have you?”
       “I wouldn’t do that,” Tom told him, “even if there seemed to be no other
way. As it happens, though, there is another way. I’ll give you your sound scientific
argument—with every i dotted and every t crossed, with logic so inexorable that
you’ll have to agree not to jump—if you’ll tell me why you were so utterly
determined to have that second dose, even though you couldn’t find an argument of
that sort to support your case.”
      “I think you’ve got your incentives a little confused,” Asherson told him.
“And I suspect that you’re just spinning this out—keeping me talking at any cost.”
      “Maybe,” Tom conceded, hugging himself as another gust of wind chilled
him. “But you do want to hear my argument, don’t you? And I certainly want to hear
yours.”
      Asherson, who didn’t seem to be feeling the wind’s effects at all, shrugged his
shoulders. His limbs weren’t rigid any more, but he hadn’t looked down again. That
seemed to Tom to be a good sign. “I haven’t got much to trade,” the old man
confessed, a trifle shamefacedly. “My reasons weren’t scientific at all. They were
personal, and stupid. I was convinced—convinced, mind—that I needed an extra
dose to clear away the residual confusion, to cut through the veil of uncertainty.
There were other things, but the kicker was that I was so sure I’d been in the SAS. I
knew that if only I could clarify my memory, I’d have every last detail at my beck
and call, to prove it to myself and everyone else.”
       “But you weren’t in the SAS,” Tom supplied. “You were a secondary
schoolteacher for your entire working life, once you’d completed your National
Service. All the second dose revealed to you was the extent of your own
self-delusion.”
     “All?” Asherson repeated. “All it revealed. Oh, if only you knew, Dr.
Wharton—if only you knew.”
      “So tell me,” Tom said.
        “Don’t be an idiot,” Asherson retorted. “If I’ve spent an entire lifetime hiding
it from myself, because I couldn’t even tolerate me knowing, I’m hardly going to
spill it all to you, am I? Don’t give me any of that crap about confession being good
for the soul, or the necessity of recovering our repressed memories so that we can
deal with them. Deal with them! Why do you think God gave us the protein whose
miraculous dissolution is enabled by your precious LAW-1917? Because life would
we unbearable if we couldn’t cover things up. It ensures that all we can remember is
the fact and not the event, and sometimes not even that. Well, I remember now,
doctor. I remember everything—and I really do have to go, doctor. I really do have
to get out of here, to see a man about a scythe.”
      “Sick sick sick,” Tom quoted.
       That struck a nerve. Asherson straightened up—but he didn’t step back from
the parapet. If anything, he seemed even more inclined to jump—but he was curious,
and while he was curious he wasn’t going to do anything stupid.
       “Have I been saying that out loud?” Asherson asked. “I’ve been repeating it
internally all my life, without even knowing what it meant. You’d be astonished by
the number of subtle everyday sounds that repeat in threes. You probably don’t
notice them at all—but I do. And to me, they don’t say tick tick tick or cluck cluck
cluck. They say sick sick sick, even when I slur them into six six six—which isn’t
really much less ominous, is it? I never said it aloud—not, at any rate, until I began
to lose my mind and couldn’t keep it in any longer—but it’s always been there,
eating away at me, judging me, for as long as I can remember ... well, almost. I
don’t think I hated myself quite so much before....”
      “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said, softly.
      “Of course you don’t. If you did, I’d have to kill you—or myself. If I gave
you the explanation you want, you see, I’d have to kill myself. I might anyway,
simply because I know what I mean. Purely as a matter of interest, though, do you
have any medication that can undo what LAW-1917 has done to me? Could you put
the muffler back, if I decided not to go?”
       “Of course I have,” Tom assured him. “The methods might be a trifle crude,
but they’d do the trick. Thorazine would probably take care of it in the short term. If
the protein doesn’t begin to regenerate naturally, we may have to improvise a little,
but we’ll work our way through it. You’ll be in far better shape when we do than you
were the day before yesterday. You’ll be back to your real old self—the one without
Alzheimer’s.”
      “Promises, promises,” Asherson said. “Sorry, Dr. Wharton—I don’t believe
a word of it.”
       “That’s a coincidence,” Tom said. “I don’t believe you, either. I don’t believe
it can be half as unbearable as you pretend it is merely to discover the truth about
yourself. A bit of a shock, maybe—a reflexive paroxysm of humiliation—but not
unbearable. And I don’t mean to imply that I can’t believe you’ve never done
anything terrible. What I mean is that even if you were Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot, with
millions of deaths on your conscience and countless instances of torture against
your account, I don’t believe that mere self-confrontation would be enough to
deliver you irredeemably into Hell.”
       “And yet,” Asherson retorted, “God or natural selection gave us that protein
to spare us all the necessity. Are you really so sure, Dr. Wharton, that you could
bear to remember all your own follies and evil deeds?”
        “Pretty sure,” Tom said. “And that’s not unjust hot air, Bill—I certainly intend
to try. Now I’ve seen what LAW-1917 can really do, I’ll have to try it.”
      “I wish you the best of luck,” said Asherson, steeling himself to look over the
parapet at the long drop to the parking lot for a second time. This time, he
maintained his composure and didn’t freeze up. “Maybe it won’t work on you,” he
added. “Maybe I was uniquely unlucky.”
       “Nobody’s unique,” Tom told him, taking a precautionary step forward.
“Especially not in the matter of unluckiness. Okay—forget the deal I offered you
earlier. I’ll go first. I’ll give you the sound scientific reason why you can’t possibly
jump. I’ll prove to you, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that you can’t jump. Okay?”
      “You don’t need my permission,” Asherson said. “Go right ahead. Why can’t
I jump, now that my head’s finally clear?”
       “Because this isn’t about you. This isn’t about whatever it is you remembered
you did, or how horrible it made you feel. All that’s pretty much irrelevant. This is
about the trial. You stopped being William Asherson when your daughter signed that
release form, and you became Patient K. You might think you resigned from the trial
when you forced me to give you that second dose, and it’s true that you’ll have to
be eliminated from the Phase One sample, but that doesn’t nullify the trial. The trial
has to go on—and we both know, now, exactly how much hangs on its results. We
both know that we need to understand exactly what LAW-1917 does, and how.
Even if it is a ticket to Hell—especially if it’s a ticket to Hell—we need to know what
it does and how to control what it does. The trial isn’t over, Mr. Asherson—it’s
hardly begun. Phase One can still continue, especially if what happened in that room
downstairs is carefully omitted from my research notes. There’s only one thing that
could stop Phase One in its tracks and bring investigation of LAW-1917 to an
abrupt halt, Mr. Asherson. That will happen if, and only if, you actually jump off that
parapet. That’s why you can’t do it—because this is not about you. It’s about
LAW-1917. It’s about the trial. It’s about science. You cannot jump off that parapet,
Mr. Asherson, because the trial needs you to step back. You’re a teacher—you
understand that.”
      “I understand how little it means to be a teacher,” Asherson said, bitterly. “I
understand that I could never pay it back, never redeem myself, if I’d worked for a
thousand years instead of forty. I understand what really matters—I think, in a way,
the Alzheimer’s did that for me. Even before I got my memory back, it had forced
me to zero in on the one thing I ever did that made me what I am, and destroyed any
hope I ever had of being a good man.”
      “Think about what you just said, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said, softly. “It was
the Alzheimer’s that got you hung up on something, and blew it up out of all
proportion. When you suddenly got your memory and calculative ability back, it was
still blown out of all proportion—but it won’t stay that way. All you have to do is
give it time, and you’ll get your equilibrium back. I can’t imagine what kind of shock
you got when all those layers of repression were stripped away and you were able to
remember all the horrid things you’d contrived to forget that you ever did, but I do
know that you can see the force of my argument. I know that you know exactly what
I mean when I say that this about the trial, not you—about science, not your past
sins. You can’t jump, Mr. Asherson. You simply cannot jump, no matter how much
you hate whatever it is you did while you were on National Service in 1949.”
      “It was 1950,” Asherson retorted, quietly and rather ominously. “How much
more have you figured out?”
        “Nothing much,” Tom admitted. “I assume that there must have been an
officer involved—someone who went to Sandhurst. And something that made a
triple ticking noise. My guess is that those are just incidentals, though—trivia
gathered in by association, which have come to stand in place of the event itself,
helping to mask it even while they provided incessant reminders of it. You haven’t
said a word about the thing itself. The muffler was still in place, with regard to your
speech, even when the Alzheimer’s took hold. All you could do was beat around the
bush. I still don’t believe that it was as bad as you think, but that really doesn’t
matter. As a biology teacher, you must understand that what’s important is
discovering exactly what LAW-1917 does. The trial has to go on.”
       “There was no trial,” Asherson whispered. “There should have been, but there
wasn’t. That Sandhurst idiot just let it go, as if it had never happened. He judged us,
though—he sure as hell judged us. The way he looked ... just stood there, silently,
with that stupid bloody ceiling-fan going sick, sick, sick. Not really, of course—it
was just a noise, just a wordless noise. But that’s the way I heard it, and that’s the
way I’ve heard every noise like it, ever since, without ever knowing why.”
       “Please come with me, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said. “Just give yourself a little
time. I can medicate it, if you’ll let me.”
       “All those years,” Asherson continued, having drifted into a reverie again.
“Why did I tell the poor little sod that I’d been in the SAS? Why? Why couldn’t I
tell him that I’d helped to educate ten thousand students? Why couldn’t I tell him
something true? Why did I have to make up such a stupid, stinking lie?
Sergeant-Major! I should have been ashamed to be a bloody corporal! How could I
do that, Dr. Wharton?”
      The fact that the question had been asked told Tom that he had won, even
though he didn’t know the answer to it. “I don’t know,” he said, truthfully, “I could
probably help you to find out, if I weren’t going to be so busy, but I’m going to
have one hell of a workload now that the trial’s taken such an unexpected turn.”
       Asherson shook his head, and contrived the faintest smile imaginable. “You
were right,” he said, as if it were cause for wholehearted astonishment. “I can see
that. Who’d have thought it?”
      “I did,” Tom reminded him. “Will you come back to your room now? I really
need to start monitoring you properly. There are a lot of tests I ought to do. I need
to know what’s happening inside your head—biochemically, of course. You and I
have so much work to do.”
      Asherson took his foot off the parapet, and came away. He went past Tom,
ignoring the arm Tom extended by way of offering support, and headed back to the
stairwell under his own steam. He paused, looking uncertainly at the broken door.
       “It’s okay,” Tom assured him. “I’ll get rid of them.” He went to the door and
held it slightly ajar. He instructed the people waiting behind it to clear the corridor
and the staircases, and to go about their everyday business as though nothing had
happened. He closed the door again, as best he could.
      While they waited for that to happen, Asherson said, “I used to tell my
kids—the ones I taught, that is, not my kids—that maintaining National Service after
the war had been a terrible mistake. I told them that it had taught an entire generation
of young men to lie, cheat, steal, and skive as a matter of pride as well as habit, and
had instilled a lasting contempt for all authority. I didn’t tell them the worst of it,
though. I lied by omission.”
      “It was National Service,” Tom told him. “It wasn’t the Red Army marching
through the ruins of Germany in 1945. It wasn’t Auschwitz. Whatever you did, other
people had done far, far worse only a few years earlier—and other people have done
worse since.”
       Asherson reached out and put a gnarled hand on the doctor’s shoulder,
roughly forcing him to meet his eyes. “No, doctor,” he said. “If it really is all about
the trial, about science, that’s something you need to understand. There isn’t any
excuse, and even if there were, other people have done far worse couldn’t even
begin to provide it. It’s the other way around. Every sin, every crime, every evil
deed, is an adequate damnation in itself. No matter what other people might have
done, or how often, your action is your curse, and the thing that you cover up is the
thing that you can’t bear. You have to understand that, if you’re going to put
yourself on trial by taking LAW-1917. It won’t be anywhere near as easy as you
suppose. You have to understand what we’ll be doing, if we carry this thing
forward. If we take away the ability, or the right, that people have to blot out what
we all need to blot out, the physical pain we’ll remember all too clearly won’t be the
worst of it. Each of us lives his life like a cartoon character who’s run off the edge
of a cliff, but who’s safe from falling as long as he doesn’t realize it. You’re right
about it being about science, doctor, about the need to find out what this drug of
yours can do—but you have to understand that it’s not going to be an easy ride, by
any stretch of the imagination.”
       Tom nodded his head sympathetically. “But now we know,” he said, “we
have to face up to it, don’t we? However challenging its effects might be, we can’t
just forget that it ever existed, can we? Natural selection might have favored that
solution, but we can’t. We have to be strong enough to face the truth, if we’re to
count ourselves true human beings.”
      Asherson released Tom’s shoulder, and nodded assent. Then he pulled
himself together, hoisting his shoulders like a military man on parade or a PE teacher
leading a class, ready for anything and determined to fulfil his purpose.
       There was yet another gust of wind, this one carrying raindrops, which caused
Tom to flinch as well as shiver. It made the ill-latched door vibrate, and the broken
lock clicked three times in quick succession. After a slight pause, it did it again.
      Tick tock tick, it seemed to be saying, non-judgmentally. Tick tick tock.
      Tom suspected that William Asherson might not be hearing it in exactly the
same way, but that didn’t trouble him. After all, this wasn’t about William Asherson,
and never had been. This was about the trial—the petty trial that was already halfway
through, and the greater trial that was about to begin.
      Copyright (c) 2007 Brian Stableford