D.G. Compton SF Gateway Omnibus

by D.G. Compton

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

D.G. Compton is best known for his prescient 1974 novel, THE CONTINUOUS KATHERINE MORTENHOE, which predicted the 21st century's obsessions with media voyeurism and 'reality television'. It was filmed as DEATH WATCH in 1980 by Bertrand Tavernier. This omnibus collects three of his incisive SF novels, ASCENDANCIES, SYNTHAJOY and THE STEEL CROCODILE. ASCENDANCIES: Into a future where a depleted fuel supply had the world spiralling down into grinding poverty and constant war came ... Moondrift. Mysterious white flakes of alien matter that was the perfect fuel - clean, powerful, dependable. But the aliens - or whatever they were - who sent Moondrift seemed to demand a heavy ransom in return... SYNTHAJOY: Would you like to experience first-hand the emotions of a great artist, the sublime peace of a saint, the happiness of a child at Christmas? Try Sensitape. Or perhaps you had something more passionate in mind. Don't be shy. Ask for Sexitape. And for the true connoisseur, we have the ultimate human experience: a distinguished blend of synthetic ecstasies. The world is not ready for it, but perhaps you are. We call it Synthajoy. THE STEEL CROCODILE: In answer to an unanswerable future, science has created Bohn, the omnipotent computer whose flashing circuits and messianic pronouncements dictate what tomorrow will - or will not - be. But Matthew Oliver is flesh and blood and full of questions - not nearly as certain as the machine he's appointed to serve. And the right hand of science seldom knows what the left hand is doing...

Release date: March 27, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 640

Sample

Mrs Craig has just asked me yet again to remember that she is a nurse, and to address her as such. I wonder if it is simply small-minded for me to persist in calling her my wardress.

We returned from today’s tape therapy five minutes ago. She evidently imagines that she has to lead me everywhere, as if I were either very old or an idiot. Unless it’s simply that she’s so foolish she obeys the letter of her training even with patients who would be much better helped by the spirit. Now she’s helping me tidy my room. As I watch her I know that I’m right to call her my wardress. No woman who wasn’t a wardress would want to make the folds of a curtain as regular as corrugated iron. She’s doing it now, tugging at the hems one after another … She tears off lavatory paper in just the same way – a neat sharp tweak that separates it straight along the perforated edge. The pieces of paper Mrs Craig offers me, folded in two, are as neat and as sharp as envelopes. We know a lot about each other’s habits, she and I: I am her charge and she is my wardress.

She tidies my room really so well and so quickly that there’s nothing left for me to do at all. It’s the same with all of my life now – either from a lack of imagination or a malicious need to destroy me, she’s taken over my every department. I find myself left without will or energy. Doctor would say this is a result of my personality break-up, that it started months ago, long before I came to this place. But I know different. I know the will and the energy that I had the day before. No, on the very day that. The very day that. I know it’s the result of having Mrs Craig for a wardress. And a wardress for Mrs Craig. That’s not a silly thing to say – Mrs Craigs are essential to most of us, but they don’t have to be so noticeably wardress.

She’s seen now that I’m watching her in the plastic mirror.

‘Do you like your hair hanging all over your face, Mrs Cadence?’

That’s her way of pretending that she wants me to make a decision for myself. I don’t answer.

‘It’s the way Doctor puts on the headset, Mrs Cadence. It upsets all your good work. And it really isn’t necessary, not with these new units. I’ll speak to him about it.’

Her ideas of how to flatter me into doing things are quite childish. I may be in her charge, but that doesn’t make me either paranoid or half-witted.

‘There are things about this place that have to be resisted, Mrs C.’ Don’t call me that. ‘I don’t agree with every aspect of your treatment. I shall speak to Doctor again about having you moved into a ward. This single room is doing you no good. No good at all.’

She goes to the door. What she doesn’t know – though she must really – is that dignity and self-respect can be entirely interior and that I intend to hang on to these whatever may be done to me. To her I must look like just another sulking psychotic.

‘I think you’re wrong, Mrs Craig.’ I don’t know why I’m bothering, why I’m calling her Mrs Craig even. ‘Surely the reason for my being here is so that I may come to terms with myself and what I have done? I doubt if I’d get on with that half as well in the friendly atmosphere of a ward.’

I wish I hadn’t chosen my words so carefully, hadn’t wanted so badly to show her.

‘It’s not that I like being alone in here. It’s just that I believe it’s good for me. And so did the judge.’

I don’t hear her reply. Now that her hand’s on the doorknob I’m soon going to be left alone again. I shake my hair back from my face and look at myself in the mirror. I try to see from my reflection’s eyes what my reflection is thinking. Nothing shows.

‘The tapes should be doing that for you, Mrs Cadence. For the rest of the time you’d find you were helped by a more normal social life.’

‘But haven’t you read reports of the trial?’ Allowing a note of hysteria. Not able to keep it out. ‘All about how I hate Sensitape? Can’t you see how much more valuable my salvation would be if I arrived at it on my own?’

‘Some diseases are hard to cure by an act of the mind alone, Mrs Cadence.’

‘The past isn’t a disease, Mrs Craig. To talk of curing it is ridiculous.’

I can’t read her eyes either. With subtle people one seldom can.

‘The past doesn’t exist, Mrs Cadence. Only our different ideas of it.’

Not a bad exit line. And afterward the door is neither more shut nor less. Which I say to myself by way of reassurance since it seems in fact to be more shut than any other door I’ve ever seen. And in my mind, because of the guilt which is there – what guilt, what particular guilt is this? – the door shuts unfairly, separating off past happiness, leaving on my side of it only past sorrow.

There are other concepts of time, Wardress. Sometimes it is seen as a fixed landscape through which we move, so that the past and the future all exist at once … She does everything knowingly; why has she decided to try to take the past away from me? All the past, that is, before the murder. She’s not likely to be doubting the reality of that. The eyes in the plastic mirror tell me nothing. Indeed, they feed back into my own, canceling thought. I go to the door and, because I am calm and sensible, I open it. The corridor is pleasant, carefully domestic. They got the scale right. Of course they well, of course of course

Oh my poor dear dead darling.

I remember how slow the bus was all the way along from the Tottenham Court Road. The trees hiding all but the highest roofs of the zoo and a distant giraffe, I sat on the top of the bus and watched their pale, tiny leaves, so out of place in the seasonless city. If spring belongs anywhere it is in the crocus shop windows, and in the women’s clothes. A sour thought, from present experience. Back then the leaves were young and delicate, the sky was cloudless, and I was three bus stops away from Tony.

‘Thea. Thea, my dear … My little love –’

I’d jumped from the bus while it was still moving, nearly broken my ankle, run between the amiable people and hung myself up around his neck. Nobody minded how ridiculous it was, me at thirty-one still like a schoolgirl, nobody on the whole pavement. Baker Street was golden. We moved on another plane, and everyone who saw us.

‘We’re going to the park,’ Tony said. ‘I’ve brought you a present.’

It was silly. It was a tin opener and a tin of frankfurter sausages.

The buildings were so clear that afternoon, so tall, so exquisitely detailed. I stopped Tony in front of a blank shop window, trying to see in his reflection the ordinariness other people must see. The reflection was even more marvelous than the reality. He was easier than usual. He took off his hat to it. Then we walked on. A side road gave us a glimpse of a cobbled mews and expensive houses with window boxes. There were daffodils, and some kind of blue flowers, and a cheerful car in front with a spotted perspex roof. The bricks of the house were earth red, the cobbles brown. None of it was real. As we watched a man in a green fake baize apron came out with a watering can and began to water the ground floor window boxes. He disturbed a cat from one and she moved onto the top of the car. Only we saw all this, and it was ours. We went toward the park, humbled.

We held hands.

‘Theary, Theary, I have a Theary and I love my Theary.’

I didn’t ask him what his theory was. It would have involved some comic mathematical formula and would have reminded us of his work. So silk thin was our happiness.

‘In fact,’ he said, ‘my love is entirely Theatrical.’

His name was Tony Stech (not quite English, you see) and he regarded puns as the apostles must have regarded the tongues of flame.

At the crossing there wasn’t a car in sight. The road stretched as clear as a triumphal route right along to Lancaster Gate. We went over the road and into the park. I wish I could remember what we said to each other – there was nothing capable of being talked about. There must have been words, though, helping to build an isolation, communication between us that preserved and enlarged what was ours, our happiness, our suspension. I can remember no effort in finding things to say to Tony. We may even have made plans, but I doubt it. Dogs passed, and people who smiled at us, and once a brewer’s dray with polished horses practicing for the parade. Enormous, they flourished themselves like banners. Their brasses caught at the sunlight, the wheels behind them spun silver, the driver cheerfully self-conscious in his fancy dress waved at us as he went by. We waved back, extended by the contact.

Tony found us a bench by the canal, sat me down and opened the tin of sausages. He fed them to me, shiny little things that tasted of salt and herbs and not much else. But they snapped satisfactorily and between us we ate the whole tin. I can experience their feel even now, and the feel of the bench against my back, and the feel of the sharp unlit air that was different from any other day’s, and the feel of being with Tony and in him and a part of him. The frankfurter sausages of that particular day too – no other food has ever been so deeply involved in the totality of experience. The totality of experience, jargon words, worked to death by Edward in his Sensitape handouts – but everything he said and did had been a Sensitape handout, had been for seven years – but even so I know of no other. We lived inside out, our souls and our senses indissoluble. This is probably what being in love means. This is probably what made it possible for us to be happy.

Houses showed, cream-painted and regular, through the trees, fine rich houses with fine blank windows. In my mind they were unattainable – also undesirable – though through Edward’s money, Sensitape money, I could easily have encompassed any one of them. While I was with Tony neither the past, nor the real present, nor the future existed. Doctor is wrong. If my personality ever disintegrated it was then, more than a year ago. More recent months have in fact seen a coming together.

Tony poured the saline solution that had contained the sausages onto the grass, and threw the tin into a litter basket. He insisted that I keep the tin opener. He said he was giving me the key to his heart, so for the sake of his joke I tried to put it down the front of my dress. In the end it went into my handbag. He had the sense of humor of a much uglier man.

We did usual things. They were there to be done, each one a personal magic. Mostly we walked. Walked. Lovers do walk. There were birds to be fed, and the pointless race up over the bridge and down the other side which Tony won, and my silly shoes to be laughed at, and the page of newspaper that we picked up and read for omens, and buttoned children who thought we were mad because we were not sane, and the final slope of damp bald grass not to be minded as we lay on it and got our breaths back and watched the sky through the tiny leaves (why is it always spring in fairy stories?), and didn’t need to kiss or make love at all.

At four o’clock Tony took me to a café for tea. Time was running out, had been from the moment I got off the bus. The place laid on a special tea for men out with other men’s wives, weak, with dry yellow scones and a dusty slab of cake. The men never noticed and the wives were too polite to. But it was quiet, and respectable, with a spinning wheel in one corner and a respectability that was catching. It helped us back into the necessary constraint. I had to be in Richmond by six, when Edward’s first private patient arrived. The constraint worked so well that I remember Tony asked me when he’d see me again. Memory safe now and not able to hurt, I remember my answer and what followed.

‘At the conference tomorrow morning,’ I said. ‘Had you forgotten?’

‘No, I meant see you.’ Poor Tony, he was embarrassed. ‘See you alone.’

‘What’s the conference going to be about?’ I said, not answering him.

‘Hasn’t Edward told you?’

This was the important conversation. This was the one that could be remembered.

‘A new process, he told me. And he gave me a list of the important people attending.’

‘And he didn’t say what the process was?’

He hadn’t told me because I hadn’t wanted to be told. I’d had more than enough of new processes. Now Tony would tell me if I didn’t stop him, and then it would be time for my train out to Richmond. I gathered together my gloves and my handbag. My face could wait for later, for the cold summing-up on the train home. Already we were running out of isolation.

‘Actually he did tell me. I suppose I tried to forget.’

Tony, so distant, didn’t see my lie. He put his hand across the table and onto mine, a gesture as much a part of the Spinning Wheel as its red gingham curtains or the genuine beam.

‘You don’t approve,’ he said.

‘What’s the use, Tony? You don’t stop technical progress by not approving of it.’

‘There will be medical advantages, you know. With Synthajoy we’ll be able to analyze deficiences in –’

‘Don’t go on, Tony.’ Aching. Bleak. ‘You show the whole thing up so.’

‘Show it up?’

I couldn’t bear him pretending he didn’t understand. I took my hand away, began to put my gloves on. Fine black leather, hand-stitched. Possessions were mattering a lot by then – they were all Edward gave me.

‘We’re a part of the entertainment industry now, Tony. We’d better face it.’

‘That’s not true. You oversimpilfy, Thea. Edward’s clinic does very fine work.’

‘And the Governor’s Wife? Does she do very fine work?’

‘You do what you can. The clinic is the one decent bit of Sensitape left. Without you it wouldn’t function.’

‘The clinic is a face-saver.’

I knew I wasn’t being fair, not fair in the way I was blaming Tony. To stand up to Edward would have needed an equivalent ruthlessness. And even then, it wasn’t Edward who needed standing up to, but twenty million Sensitape users. That sort of strength would have made Tony different, a fanatic, a man whom I could never, warned by Edward, have loved.

‘Leave it, shall we, Tony? It’s not worth quarreling about. We’re all caught up in the same thing – you should tell me not to be so bloody self-righteous.’

‘Years ago – three years ago – when you were showing me the Richmond house for the first time, I told you then what was going to happen. Do you remember?’

‘I prefer to remember that afternoon for something else you told me.’

‘It does worry me, Thea. It worries me sick.’

‘Tony – stay in your laboratory. Edward’s shoulders are broad enough for all of us.’

I stood up. He helped me into my coat. The dishonesty of what I had just said closed the subject, closed almost any subject. Otherwise he’d have told me again about the tigers and crocodiles, and the cage it was my responsibility to build against them. I’ve always thought it a nonsense, this in the world but separate from it, but I loved Tony far too much ever to argue.

Loved him too much … This love then, does it make morality irrelevant? Does body take over, and soul, leaving conscience safely tucked away in the mind? I don’t like to think of my knowledge of right and wrong being situated entirely in my mind. It’s my mind that Doctor treats each afternoon with guilt – yet he doesn’t reach me, not the part of me capable of love. Love deeper than conscience? I know what Pastor Mannheim would have said. The trouble is, I don’t know how he would have justified it.

The corridor has a carpet – I chose a lot here in the Kingston; did I choose that carpet? – and a comfortable unstylish cupboard with a vase of flowers on it. Have the daffodils come from a hothouse or do they mean that outside it’s spring? The Superintendent seems capable of knowing the importance of truth in such a matter. I can’t tell from the few times I have met him how he would use that importance, though. The cupboard is slim against the wall so that nothing interrupts the full width of the carpet: it spoils the domestic effect, this clearway for trolleys. Still, the attempt is appreciated. Peace of mind, however evilly used, is a welcome gift. In the Kingston we give in almost without noticing. Dungeons and thumb-screws, while easier to fight, would be infinitely worse.

A warder is coming down the corridor. With his neat white coat and his glasses he might perfectly well be a young doctor, even a superior barber. That’s probably a comb sticking up out of his top pocket. He looks at the strip of me he can see between the door and the jamb, and he smiles. Encouragingly. He sees a door painted ivory white, and the dark strip of an old woman with wild hair. He knows that the woman isn’t old – he knows every single thing about her. He protects her from society and society from her. Feels himself a universal benefactor, smiles at her again. She makes a face at him – perhaps the poor thing sees him as a warder – and closes the door.

Synthajoy … I suppose that was the first time I had heard the word. And I let it slide. Not wanting to know. And I gave the meeting next morning a miss for the same reason. And in the afternoon it was all. In the afternoon it was. In the afternoon it

I like this room.

I like my room. I dare to like it because I know they haven’t got any circuits capable of making me like it. With me they’re at a disadvantage: Edward and I worked together so closely that I know everything he achieved, everything he planned to achieve. It was his work on prison reform that won him the Prize. This room is what it seems to be, and nothing more. And, most important, Sensitape has been found to have no post-experiential effect whatsoever. Their only hope is to establish a habit of feeling by long repetition. They subject me to Guilt – sorry, Criminal Responsibility – so that in the end I will need it like a drug. They. They do … I must avoid thinking of me and them; it’s the beginning of a psychosis they’d love to foster.

I suppose I ought to be able to remember a time when I was in love with Edward. Perhaps I can. And even he with me – in his own way. That’s a sour qualification, the patronizing dig of every aggrieved wife with not enough to be aggrieved about. Edward was in love with me, up to and even after the time when I stopped being in love with him.

Wasn’t he?

Young Dr Teddy Cadence. (He quickly ironed out the Teddy.) He’d been fascinated by the patterns of the electroencephalograph ever since his first days at medical school. No doubt they were all he talked about on our first date. I remember little of the occasion except the pain in my guts. There was a mild form of dysentery going around the hospital at the time – if he hadn’t been considered a catch by the other young nurses I’d never have accepted his invitation. I have an impression of his mouth as he talked, and of his hands explaining things. Dr Cadence used his hands a lot in those days – it was a habit he dealt with as he became more momentous. My only other recollection is of the sound made by the cistern in the Ladies’. The water fell from a great height, arriving with a thump. Rather Victorian and, oh Lord, I needed it. I don’t even remember very clearly where the dance was being held. The old Royal, I think, the tall hotel near Paddington that was pulled down to make room for the thruway. So Edward talked about the electroencephalograph and I thought about how soon I would need to get back to that cistern.

The evening can’t have been a success, but I got asked out again all the same. He said afterward it was my anxious expression – he’d thought at the time that it showed a serious mind, an earnest attempt to grapple with what he was propounding. He didn’t often just talk; mostly he had some theory to batter you with. He wasn’t the only one, of course – the hospital was full of young doctors and the young doctors were all full of theories. We nurses put up with the latter for the sake of the former. I don’t think any of us sensed that Dr Cadence was different from the others. I know I didn’t, not that first evening. But he was handsome, and he wore his clothes well, and information from the teaching side said he would pass his examinations easily, distinctions all around, so I received that second invitation with a considerable sense of triumph. If I’d managed so to bewitch him when my attention was, to say the least, divided, what marvellous progress I would be able to make this next time. I might even be able to hear what he was saying. And perhaps even understand it.

‘It’s a question of electrical nano-wavelengths, you see, Miss Springfield.’

Springfield. I can see him and hear him precisely. He had a beautifully shaped voice even then – perhaps his later work on it made it too beautiful. Thea Springfield.

‘It’s a question of electrical nano-wavelengths, you see, Miss Springfield.’

I’d forgotten all about Thea Springfield. It has needed the name in his voice, young, to remind me. I’ve been making the mistake of remembering past events clearly and then placing myself in them as I am now, thirty-two, tired, deadened by experience that should not be mistaken for wisdom. Experience is like lead, a lead for which the philosophers’ stone really exists. Twelve years ago I possessed neither, neither gold nor the base metal from which gold may be made. Twelve years ago I had hardly begun.

‘I know about electrical nano-wavelengths, Dr Cadence.’ She really did. ‘They’re the impulses the brain emits all the time it’s working. They form patterns we can record and measure and analyse.’

‘Measure? You call it measure, Miss Springfield?’

Such scorn. I’d quite forgotten the ways she learned later of dealing with it.

This was Thea Springfield’s second date, the one that’s supposed to be so important. And she’d thought she was doing well.

‘I’ve seen the encephalograph at work, Dr Cadence. Our professor analyzed some of the graphs for us.’

‘And what did he tell you? “At this point, ladies and gentlemen, the patient opened his eyes.” (It was a good imitation.) “At this point he closed them. At this point he went to sleep. And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the reading for an epileptic fit.” Is that what you call measurement?’

‘He showed us other things too. When the patient became angry, for instance.’ So eager.

‘That’s not measurement, Miss Springfield. I look at your dress, I perceive that it is blue. I go further – I say it is dark blue. Have I in any way measured the quality of blueness that your dress possesses?’

Her main thought at this point was pleasure that he’d noticed her dress. To cover this she sought words that would show she was intelligent.

‘Aren’t colours subjective, Dr Cadence? I mean, doesn’t each person have his own idea of what they are? Like greeny blue or bluey green, for instance.’

‘I do know what subjective means, Miss Springfield.’

She didn’t find his manners insufferable. He was Dr Cadence, and he’d asked her out to dinner. I expect she fiddled with her knife and fork, and cursed herself for being gauche.

‘Actually, Miss Springfield, you’ve accidentally put your finger on the big fault in my analogy.’ She brightened, in spite of the accidentally. ‘Although colours do in fact exist as light waves easily measurable with present-day instruments, the electrical nano-waves emitted by the brain are never likely to be so easily systematised. The machine sensitive enough, subtle enough to measure these would need to be as sensitive and subtle as the brain that was emitting them.’

At future meetings, parties and student sociables, Thea Springfield was to hear this preamble many times. Otherwise it would never have remained so word-perfect.

‘Perhaps then brain waves are in fact to some extent – using your own word, Miss Springfield – subjective. Existing only in relation to the brain that emits them.’ He leaned forward, his tie trailing unheeded in his food. ‘Or in relation to another brain perhaps, Miss Springfield?’

The lift in his voice told her that something was expected of her. She tried to be sober and sensible and adult.

‘Your tie’s in your gravy, Dr Cadence,’ she said.

I wonder why he persevered with her, a third year psychiatric nurse who could so monumentally miss so monumental a point. Later on, as young Mrs Cadence, she looked back and decided that it must have been the blue dress after all. My present perspective offers a second, more flattering reason. He didn’t bore her. She was the only one of all the nurses who unconsciously recognised his potential – not the potential in his theory, the potential in him. A man who has recognised his own potential likes his woman to recognize it also. So it wasn’t the blue dress, or the breasts it showed to such fine advantage. Ultimately it was her perceptiveness that won her Dr Cadence for a husband.

But she was looking for love. Just as, not all that much later, she would be looking for Regent’s Park with Tony. It’s not tragic that she, that I, should have had to look so hard, not even surprising. Thea Springfield drifted into love too naturally, too easily, too much without pain. Every day was a marvel. The excitement of being alive overwhelmed thought, so that she moved in a state of heightened unconsciousness, of gloriously unheeded revelation. And everything went right for her. Even sex. Until of course

Now that the wardress is gone I’ll see to my hair. It’s not important that I should avoid looking mad – with my presumed kind of madness and with my known background of self-discipline, the maddest thing I could do would be to avoid looking mad. In all I must be careful to do whatever I do for its own sake and nothing else. To consider its effect on the received ideas of Doctor or Mrs Craig is obviously idiotic. I sit here doing my hair because brushing my hair, feeling the tug, scratching my ear wth the coarse brush bristles, I sit here tilting my head against the pull, because watching the dark hair flow like water, rush in a shining torrent, separate at the rock of my shoulder and pour on down the front of my hospital dress, down almost to my waist, I sit here doing my hair because … because I am not yet ready to think of Thea Springfield and sex. There’s too much in the way.

Dr X and his wife’s appointment was for seven-thirty in the evening. I remember the time so precisely because they were late. He worked at a hospital over on the other side of town and hadn’t been able to get away as early as he’d expected. Edward and I hadn’t yet moved out to Richmond of course – we were still using the consulting room provided by the hospital. Edward wasn’t even a consultant then, merely one of the hospital’s team of psychiatrists. They worked him hard. But he’d got me off the wards as his assistant by then, and neither of us minded the work.

I’d been in the outer office catching up on paperwork, case histories to be duplicated and the file to be brought up to date. After seven the hospital quieted down. I liked working there, being contained by its power – in the evenings this power was somehow more apparent: the stillness of the enormous building, and the small noises, expressed it more personally to me than the obvious activity of the days. I worked at my neat files, the strength of the hospital humming in the silence. At seven-thirty I buzzed Edward to warn him to expect Dr X and his wife. There was no answer, so I went through to see if he was still there. His room had its own door onto the corridor; sometimes patients preferred to leave without running the gauntlet of me.

He had on a Sensitape headset, the new lightweight unit Tony had recently perfected. He appeared to be asleep – Sensitape subjects always do. The tape was turning slowly, an advanced relaxation tape we had recorded some months earlier, from a Yoga expert.

I turned the volume down very slowly. It was almost sad to see how peaceful he was. I loved him then, married love, a structure seven years deep and still only on the edge of self-awareness. Around point two on the dial he roused.

‘What’s the time?’ he said. ‘Are they here?’

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Something must have held them up.’

He took my hand and squeezed it.

‘I was only showing off. No side effects, my mind instantly as sharp as a razor.’

‘You feel better now? Not tired?’

‘I’ve been wondering, Thea, about habituation dangers. To have the day’s jangle so completely smoothed; it’s an effect I could easily become hooked on. Would that be a bad thing?’

‘It shows you how, Edward. Then in time you don’t need it.’

This was Sensitape dogma. Necessary in those days when Edward did more than nod at morality in passing. If patients experienced the prescribed emotional state often enough they had something to build on, to work toward on their own account. He drew my hand up and rubbed the side of his face with it.

‘It’s marvelous, Thea. An emotional state it took Grainger forty years to achieve – now I can plug into it just like that.’

‘Of course it’s marvelous. But it’s not for you to say so.’

‘I don’t see why not. Sensitape is like a painting. For the artist a painting grows, makes itself almost, so that really all the artist is entitled to feel is a sort of gratitude.’ He looked up at me, suddenly concerned. ‘I’m not noticeably conceited, Thea, am I?’

I told him he wasn?