The Monster Trilogy. Brian Aldiss
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from the stained stones.
Outside the cell stretched a long corridor, a model of cleanliness compared with the cell in which the madman was imprisoned. At the other end of the corridor, Doctor Kindness had his office, which connected with a small operating room.
The office was furnished with phrenological and anatomical charts. On one of the wood-panelled walls hung a day-to-day calendar for the current year, 1896, with quotations from Carlyle, Martin Tupper, Samuel Smiles, and other notables.
The furniture was heavy. Two armchairs were built like small fortresses, their soiled green leather bulging with horsehair, their mahogany shod with brass studs.
A general air of heaviness, of a place where, in the interests of medicine, oxygen was not allowed to enter, hung about the room. In the black lead grate, a coal fire had died, in despair at the retreat of the last of the oxygen. Only the black meerschaum pipe of the doctor glowed, sucking oxygen from the lungs of this pillar of the asylum. Clouds of smoke ascended from the bowl of the pipe to the ceiling, to hang about the gas brackets looking for release.
In order to make the room less inviting, a row of death masks stood on the heavy marble mantelshelf above the dead fire. The masks depicted various degrees of agony, and were of men and women who, judging by this plaster evidence involuntarily left behind, had found life with all its terrors preferable to what was imminently to come.
The doctor was perfectly at home in this environment. As he sauntered through, smoking, from the operating room, he set a blood-stained bone-saw down among the papers of his desk before turning to his visitor.
Dr Kindness was pale and furrowed, and enveloped almost entirely in a blood-stained white coat. In his prevailing greyness, his only vigorous signs of life were exhibited through his pipe.
His visitor was altogether of a different stamp. His most conspicuous characteristic was a bushy red beard, which flowed low enough over the lapels of a suit of heavy green tweed to make it impossible to tell if he was wearing a tie. He was of outdoor appearance, solid, and with a normally pleasant expression on his broad face. At this moment, what with the smoke and the bone-saw and the oppressive atmosphere of the asylum, he looked more apprehensive than anything else.
‘Well, it’s done,’ said Dr Kindness, removing the pipe for a moment. ‘If you’d like to come and have a look. It’s not a pretty sight.’
‘Sure, sure, I’d be glad …’ But the ginger man rose from his armchair by the dead fire with reluctance, and was aided into the operating room only by Dr Kindness’s pressure behind him.
The reason for Dr Kindness’s heavy generation of smoke-screen was now apparent. The stench in the operating room was pervasive. To breathe it caused an agitation in the heart.
On a large wooden table much like a butcher’s slab lay a naked male body streaked with dirt. The genitals were scabbed, and whole areas of stomach and chest were so mottled with rashes and ulcers they resembled areas of the Moon’s surface.
The doctor had sawn off the top of the skull, revealing the brain. Blood still seeped from the cavity into a sink.
‘Get nearer and have a good look,’ Dr Kindness said. ‘Light’s rather bad in here. It’s not many people who get the chance to see a human brain. Seat of all wisdom and all wickedness … What do you observe?’
The ginger man leaned over and peered into the skull.
Rather faintly, he said, ‘I observe that the poor feller’s good and dead, doctor. I suppose the corpse will get a decent burial?’
‘The asylum will dispose of it.’
‘I also observe that the brain seems to be rather small. Is that so?’
Dr Kindness nodded. ‘Poke about in there if you wish. Here’s a spatula. You’re correct, of course. That’s an effect of tertiary syphilis. The brain shrivels in many cases. Like an orange going bad. GPI follows – General Paralysis of the Insane.’
The doctor smote himself on the chest and, in so doing, awoke a husky cough. When he had recovered, he said, ‘We doctors are fighting one of mankind’s ancient scourges, sir. Satan and his legions now descend on us in modern form, as minuscule protozoa. As you probably know, this disease threatens the very foundations of the British Empire. Indeed, the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s were passed in order to protect the young men of our army and navy from the prostitutes who spread VD.’
At the mention of prostitutes, the ginger man did a lot of head shaking and tut-tutting. ‘Terrible, terrible it is. And the prostitutes must get it from the men.’
‘The men get it from the prostitutes,’ said Dr Kindness, sternly.
A small silence fell, in which Dr Kindness cleared his throat.
‘And there’s no cure once you’ve contracted it?’ said the ginger man, with a terrified expression.
‘If treated early enough … Otherwise …’ The doctor removed his pipe to utter what was intended to be a laugh. ‘Many of the inmates of this institution die of GPI. Men and women. If you’d like to come back tomorrow, I’ll be able to show you a really excellent corpse of an old woman in her sixties. Mad as a hatter the last eight years.’
‘Thanks, doctor, but I’m busy tomorrow. Sorry to take up so much of your time.’ He thrust his hands deep in his pockets, in an effort to still their trembling.
As he hurried from the bleak building with all its stone wings and stone walls and stony windows, he muttered a verse from Psalm XXVI to himself. ‘Oh shut not up my soul with the sinners: nor my life with the bloodthirsty …’
And as he climbed into his waiting carriage, he said aloud, ‘Holy Lord, but I need a drink. It’s a terrible way for a man to end up.’
Bodenland and Waldgrave were in the construction wing consulting with senior mechanics when a call came through from Bodenland’s secretary, Rose Gladwin, that Bernard Clift wanted to see him urgently.
‘I’ll be there, Rose.’
He could see Clift through a glass door before Clift saw his approach. The younger man still wore the dusty clothes he had had on at Old John in Utah. His whole manner suggested excitement, as he paced back and forth in the waiting room with a springy step, punching the palm of one hand with the fist of the other, and talking to himself with downward gaze as if rehearsing a speech.
‘You’ll wonder what I’m doing in Dallas,’ he began, almost without preamble, as Bodenland went in. ‘I’m on my way to PAA ’99 in Houston. Progress in Advanced Archaeology. We’re still fighting a rump of idiots who think Darwin was the devil. I’ve been scheduled to speak for some months. Well, I’m going to announce that I’ve uncovered a humanoid creature going back some sixty-five million years. I’m in for the Spanish Inquisition, and I know it.’
‘I thought you’d come to inspect our inertial project,’ Bodenland said, smiling.
Clift looked blank. ‘I wanted to see you because I’ve had a rethink about secrecy in the last forty-eight hours. Our security broke down. The students told the tale to a local radio station. I don’t want a garbled message getting about. I have to ask you for some support, Joe – I mean financial. My university won’t fund me on this.’
‘You asked them and they turned you down?’ He saw by Clift’s expression that his guess was correct. ‘They said you were crazy? What makes you think I don’t think you’re crazy? Come and have a coffee, Bernie, and let me talk you out of this.’
Clift shook his head exasperatedly, but allowed himself to be led into the secretary’s room, where he sank into a chair and sipped black coffee.
‘The experts I told you about – both able young men from the archaeological research departments of the museums in Chicago and Drumheller – took a look at the evidence. Of course they’re cautious. They have to make reports. But I think I have won their backing. They will be at Houston, at PAA ’99. Don’t shake your