Time Out Of Mind (v1.0), page 2
The red and white helicopter hovered above the’ wreckage. for a few minutes and then flew off in a westerly direction.
The night after he caught the three-pounder Laurie Linton lay awake in the attic bedroom he shared with his ten-year-old sister Becky and reviewed the excitements of that wholly memorable day. His recollections were still so vivid that is seemed to him he would only have to stretch out his hand in the darkness to brush aside the dewy cobwebs that had hung like nets of glass beads from the hillside gorse bushes. Slowly and voluptuously he turned over the pages of each successive moment—the first glimpse of the overhang; the scramble up to the gulley’s lip; the first cast out; the flicker of rainbow drops as he had hoisted the fish up to the ledge; wiping his hands and reaching out for the bait tin…tin bait the for out reaching and hands his wiping…Now! There! Hold it. Laurie? Laurie? Magobion. Kill Piers Magobion. You must.… wiping his hands and reaching out for the bait tin. Let’s try two worms this time. Right now, cross your fingers and flick! out there dropping just short of the far bank. Let out more line. Watch it. Watch it. Watch it…
Laurie blinked up at the shadowy rafters canted over his head. Something had ducked down out of sight just there in the furthest comer of his mind’s eye. But what? The gulley. Something to do with the gulley. He frowned and tried to pick up the thread of his recollection but it was as though it were purposely eluding him. Something, some force which would not be denied was drawing him back to that moment when he had reached out for the bait tin…“Magobion.” As he mouthed the word silently in the darkness his body was shaken by a convulsive shudder and for a split second he seemed to be looking down the gulley at himself crouched there on the rock ledge while beyond him, as though sketched in smoke on a sheet of glass, was a dim, vaulted building, and moving inclines, and people with their pale faces turned up toward him, frozen in shock.
He cried out in sudden fear and heard Becky jerk up out of sleep and call: “What’s is it? What’s the matter?”
“A dream,” he gasped. “I had a dream. It’s all right, Becky. Go on back to sleep.”
“Shall I call Mum?”
“No, no,” he said. “It was just a dream.”
There was a rustling in the darkness and a moment later he felt her hand alight on his neck. He turned over in his sleeping bag and touched her fingers with his own. “Sorry if I woke you up,” he whispered.
“Was it a bad dream, Laurie?”
“No. Not really. Go on back to sleep.”
“You’ll take me with you tomorrow, won’t you?”
“Yes, of course I will. But not unless you go back to sleep.”
Her fingers tightened on his then released him. He heard her sigh faintly. A minute afterward her breathing was again light and even. Later he too slept.
Laurie’s father was an engineer who specialized in hydroelectric projects. In 1985 he had signed a five year contract with Kenmore Rowton Ltd. and had shipped his wife and two children down to Gloucester where the firm had just won a major slice of the Severn Tidal Barrage scheme. The success of that ambitious venture had let to Mr. Linton’s being offered a permanent post with the company and, eventually, to the Towy High Dam, work on which had started in 1990.
Arthur Linton had long nurtured the hope that his son would follow him into his own profession. To his way of thinking the time when electrical engineers would no longer be needed would be the time for the human race to shut up shop. Laurie was inclined to agree with his father but, even so, when it had finally come to the point of deciding what he was going to do with his own life he had opted for medicine. If Mr.
Linton was secretly disappointed by this choice he…concealed it admirably.
By the time Laurie was eighteen he would have been a contender in any high school election for the title of “Student Least Likely to set the World on Fire.” He would not have been the winner though; because there was something about him which steadfastly refused to fit into any ready-made category. He was certainly not good-looking—his nose was to blobby for a start—and his wide, humorous mouth and his dark brown eyes seemed always to be savouring some secret joke, hovering on the brink of a grin. Those he singled out for friendship also tended to be oddballs—in the crowd yet not of it—individuals in an age when the adolescent personalities seemed to come mass-produced from the moulds of the image-makers.
Somewhere along the line he had acquired the uncomfortable habit of refusing to accept things at their face value. The word “Why?” featured prominently in his vocabulary and once a problem had engaged his attention he was apt to pursue it with remarkable persistence. By the time he came to enter medical school he had—almost inadvertently—procured for himself a set of human values of which the majority of men are still ignorant when they are lowered into their graves. Yet no one could have been less of a prig. He enjoyed life, sampled whatever variety came his way, and seemed to relish the subtleties of the human personality. He had, in fact, all the makings of an excellent doctor and his teachers were dumbfounded when, in 1996, he calmly informed them that he had decided to quit medicine and to join NARCOS. Their sense of outrage—for it was nothing less—merely proved how little they really knew of him.
NARCOS—the familiar abbreviation for Narcotics Security—had evolved out of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (UNCND) and the endlessly proliferating national control machineries. It was largely the creation of one remarkable man— D. K. Huberman—who had the vision and the energy to convince enough governments that the only way to combat the drug menace was to rationalize and cooperate. Even so NARCOS would never have become a functioning reality had not certain of Huberman’s enemies decided that he was becoming rather too much of a nuisance and arranged for him to fall three hundred feet to his death from a window in the Concorde Building in Brussels.
It was a tactical error of heroic proportions. Those governments which had been quietly planning to emasculate Huberman’s brainchild while it was still in the womb of the committee stage now found themselves in the invidious position of being implicated in Huberman’s death if they did anything less than give ’ the infant NARCOS their wholehearted blessing. As a result Narcotics Security was launched upon the world by a record vote (seven abstentions; none against) and given an annual budget which was several times larger than anything Huberman himself could ever have dreamt of even at his most sanguine.
Seven years later the seizures of illegal heroin had risen to 55% of estimated world production and the success of biological control was causing the experts to rejoice that at last they had broken the back of a ten thousand million dollar industry. That was in 1996, which was the year when Laurie Linton applied to join the service.
For obvious reasons NARCOS were decidedly choosy about who they recruited into their ranks. After a preliminary vetting candidates were subjected to a series of stringent physical and mental tests. Those who passed joined the base at Windsor where they entered upon a further three month period of indoctrination during which they underwent a process of continuous assessment. At the end of the three months they faced a selection board which was reputed to be tougher than all the rest put together. Those who survived and still expressed a desire to join the service were expected to be ready to go anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice and to risk life, limb and sanity for a monthly pay check whose dimensions were unlikely to tempt anyone to marry them for their money.
Doctor James Manders, the physician in charge of the Government Rehabilitation Center at Bromley, made it his business to give a short preliminary address to each group of NARCOS recruits who then, spent three days in the Center familiarizing themselves with realities of addiction. He was a man of medium height who looked rather older than his fifty-three years, and he let his eyes range over them thoughtfully for a long moment before he said: “There are some doctors who regard people as bodies and some who prefer to see bodies as people. I like to think that I come into the second category and I hope you do too. Assuming that you do, let me make one point very clear at the outset: no one can ever hope to come to terms with the so-called ‘drug-problem’ unless he can also come to terms with the spiritual hunger that drives people to addiction. So don’t make the mistake of believing yourselves to be morally superior. You are simply in the position of people standing on a river bank and watching others drowning. And beware of pity. Pity is frequently confused with love, but don’t you make the mistake of confusing them. Pity is a by-product of superiority: love demands total abnegation, total identification, total understanding. At this- moment we have in our Center three hundred and sixty-three human souls undergoing treatment of one sort or another. Think of them as three hundred and sixty-three individual human beings. Above all don’t think of them as ‘cases.’ They are not suffering from bubonic plague or smallpox or syphilis; they are suffering from life. My duty, insofar as it can be expressed in such terms, is to relieve that suffering. Yours will eventually be to try to prevent it. By the time you leave here you will probably have decided that yours is the easier task.”
On the evening before they were due to leave the Center Laurie made a point of searching out Doctor Manders and telling him how much he had appreciated that initial address. Manders glanced up from under his bushy gray eyebrows and surveyed the young man speculatively. “You’re Linton, aren’t you?” Laurie admitted that he was.
“I heard something about you from Barry Rockbrough at St. Bartolph’s.”
“Oh yes?”
Manders smiled faintly. “Nothing to your discredit, I may say.”
Laurie laughed. “That does surprise me. They all thought I was crazy.”
“To transfer to NARCOS? You do Barry an injustice. But what made you change your mind?”
“No one particular reason. NARCOS just seemed to be my sort of scene.”
“You still think so?”
“Yes I do.”
Manders nodded. “And how about your companions?”
“You’d have to ask them that. I think the last three days have shaken us all. The girls particularly.”
“Well, that was the idea,” observed Manders. “You find more preconceptions about drug addiction than about almost anything else you care to name. Even I’m not entirely free of them after thirty years. Sometimes I almost convince myself that some form of addiction’s part and parcel of being a member of the human race. What we lack today is a norm.”
“Have we ever had one?” asked Laurie.
“Oh yes,” said Manders, “but perhaps only in a negative sense. The norm was the man who didn’t break the law.’ Change the law and you change the norm. Twenty-five years ago a citizen could be fined or even jailed for smoking pot. Now he can hardly smoke anything else. Half the third world’s economies are based on the stuff. In another twenty-five years who knows what the norm will be?”
“Well, let’s hope it’s not heroin.”
“Not a chance of it. By then heroin will be just a bad memory—thanks to Cyrillix Papaverensis”
“You really believe that?”
“I’m certain of it. By a.d. 2020 the only place you’ll be able to find an opium poppy will be in a botanical garden.”
“So we’ll both be out of a job.”
“Don’t you believe it, son. Long before then there’ll be something else in the field.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Well, it stands to reason. What multimillion dollar industry simply goes out of business because its major product is being edged out of the market? They diversify. Take my word for it, the syndicates will have read the writing on the wall from the, moment NARCOS teamed up with Biological Control Research. My hunch is that for the past five years they’ve been exploring synthetics and the only thing holding them back is initial development cost. What they’ll be looking for is something as simple and as potent as heroin. And when they find it—watch out.”
“Do you really think there’s any chance of them finding it?”
Manders pushed back his chair and rasped his fingers through the evening stubble on his craggy chin.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “Are you doing anything for half an hour?”
Laurie shook his head.
“Then come along with me and I’ll show you something.”-
He led the way out of his office, down a corridor, and up a flight of stairs to a wing which Laurie did not remember having seen before. A male nurse was sitting at a metal table writing notes on a pile of index cards. He glanced up as they approached, caught sight of Doctor Manders and rose to his feet.
“How is she, Docket?”
“Just the same, sir. I’m afraid I haven’t cleaned her up yet this evening.”
“That’s all right. In here, Linton.”
With his hand on the door Manders paused and—a-propos of nothing at all that Laurie could remember —said: “Do you believe in poltergeists?”
Laurie blinked. “I don’t know,” he said. “Should I?”
“Well, it might help,” said Manders enigmatically and clicked open the door.
Laurie found himself in a small, sparsely furnished, single ward lit by a window which would have permitted a clear view of the hospital gardens had it not been for a fine meshed metal grille screwed firmly across the casement. As the doctor closed the door behind them Laurie noticed that a similar grille was fastened across the round observation porthole. The furnishings were minimal and consisted of a white metal bed, a metal locker and a wash basin. Lying on the bed, curled up in a foetal position, was a girl of about sixteen.
Manders looked carefully round the room and then walked to the foot of the bed. “Hello, Catherine,” he said. “I’ve brought someone to see you.”
The girl made no sign that she heard him. In fact, only the very faintest tremor in the sheet that covered her betrayed that she was still breathing.
I . Laurie took a pace nearer, bent forward and caught si pungent whiff of urine. “Hello, Catherine,” he said. “My name’s Laurie. Laurie Linton.”
The girl’s huge eyes were wide open but he sensed that they were not seeing him at all. He glanced around at Manders and, as he did so, something struck him sharply just below his right ear. He gave a grunt of surprise, jerked upright, and a flexible, pink plastic mug fell to the floor at his feet.
“Where the devil did she have that hidden?” muttered Manders. “Pick it up and hang on to it.”
Laurie stooped to where he had seen the mug roll under the bed, but it was no longer there. “It’s gone,” he said lamely.
Manders walked’ around to the far side of the bed and gently drew down the sheet from the girl’s shoulder. There, lying in the space between her bent elbows and her stomach, was a pink plastic mug.
Laurie gaped and was about to reach out for it when Manders pushed his arm aside. “Leave it,” he murmured. “See here.”
With his extended forefinger he indicated a dozen coalspeck puncture bruises on her thin left forearm. Then he coaxed the sheet back over her shoulder and looped a loose strand of her blonde hair behind her ear. “Why won’t you tell us what it is’ you’re on, Catherine?” he said gently. “You know we aren’t your enemies.”
The girl did not even blink. Wherever she was, it was apparently too far away for his words to reach her. Yet she was alive, and in a curious way Laurie sensed that she was watching them, tucked away deep inside herself like some wary little forest animal.
When they regained the corridor he waited while Manders exchanged a few words with the male nurse, then as they retraced their steps to the Director’s office he said: “Do.you know who she is?”
“Apart from her first name we haven’t a clue,” said Manders. “To tell the truth I’m not even- sure what she is!”
“How long has she been here?”
“A week. Six days actually. She was brought in last Thursday night.”
“But it’s not heroin?”
“That I’m sure of. It’s about the only thing I am sure of too.”
“That plastic mug,” said Laurie, and paused, uncertain what it was he wished to say.
“Go on.”
“She threw it, didn’t she?”
“You think that?”
“If I don’t think that, what am I to think?”
“I really don’t know, Linton. I’ve never met anything like her before. You noticed the window?”
“Yes.”
“The first day she was in a chair went through it. Luckily no one happened to be standing underneath.” “She threw it?” .
Manders shrugged. “To the best of my knowledge she’s lain in exactly the same position ever since she was brought in. aThey clean her up twice a day, drip feed her, and she’s right back there in the womb all the time. Docket calls her ’the dormouse.’ It’s not such a bad description either.”
“And you’ve no idea what’s caused it?”
“Well, we know what hasn’t. But that still leaves the field pretty wide open.”
“But didn’t the blood tests tell you anything?”
“Nothing that we’ve been able to identify.”
“Then” you, don’t think it’s a withdrawal catalepsy?”
“I did to start with,” Manders admitted. He glanced sideways sharply. “Can you read an E.E.G?”
“More or less,” said Laurie.
“Then let’s see what you make of hers,” said Manders and led the way into his office.
He walked across to a filing cabinet, took out a spool of tape and fed it into the back of a viewer. “We took a ten pick-up tracing from the Lashley points,” he said, “and ran two separate readings with an approximate three minute interval. Here’s the first.” .
The tube glowed and flickered and the ten jigging threads of light began weaving their way across the screen. Laurie looked for signs of massive fluctuation and found none. The basic rhythms were rock steady, some even barely detectable. “If. I didn’t know,” he said, “I’d have said she was in a deep, dreamless sleep.”
