Green Eyes Page 0,76

discipline of my education that, despite my fear, I was able to make a mental note to investigate the subject.

'Any successes lately with the new strain?' he asked.

I am not sure what I expected him to say, a threat perhaps, an insult, but certainly not this. 'Two,' I managed to gasp.

Expressionless, he absorbed the information. 'Edman,' he said, 'I need money, a place to work unimpeded, and a guaranteed freedom of movement. Can you supply it?'

I wish I had said that I could offer no guarantees, that the CIA was involved and I no longer had substantive control of the project; then he might have accorded me a measure of confidence. But as it was, I obeyed the reflexes of my office and said, 'Come back to the project, Donnell. We'll take care of you.'

'I bet,' he said, and here his voice became resonant for the space of a few syllables, the voice of a ghost rather than a man. 'I should be taking care of you. You're quite ill, you know.' He turned to the old man and gestured toward the door. 'See if there's anything around we can use, okay?' And then to Verret: 'He's totally untrustworthy. One second frightened, the next scheming. Do you have any money?' he asked, turning back to me.

I pointed to my trousers hanging on the clothes rack. Verret went over and emptied my wallet of bills. I felt sudden hostility toward her, seeing her as the betrayer of our mutual cause, and I commented on her thievery.

'Thief?' She lashed out at me. 'You ghoul! Don't call me names!'

'Don't waste your breath on him.' Harrison regarded me with displeasure. 'He's just random molecules bound together by the stickum of his education.'

Normally I would have been infuriated by such a description, but he said it with kindness, with pity, and for the moment I accepted it as accurate, a sad but true diagnosis. This, and the fact that during our encounter I was prone to fits of depression, a characteristic I had associated with Harrison, led me to wonder whether or not his energies were materially affecting my thought processes.

Verret left to join the old man in his search, and Harrison gazed at me thoughtfully. 'Get up,' he said. He pushed back his chair and stood.

I was afraid he was about to harm me. My fear may seem to you irrational; I was, after all, a much larger man, and I might well have been able to overpower both him and Verret, though the old man had a wiry, dangerous look. Yet I was very afraid.

'I'm not going to hurt you,' he said, thoroughly disgusted. He removed his sunglasses. 'I'm going to try to cure you.'

As he moved his hands above my head, concentrating his efforts at the base of my skull, I lost track of the storm, the others in the house, and was caught up in the manner of my healing. Mild electric shocks tingled me from head to foot, my ears were filled with oscillating hums. Once in a while violent shocks caused my muscles to spasm, and after each of these I experienced a feeling of - I am hesitant to use the term, but can think of no other - spirituality. Not the warm bona fides of Jesus as advertised by the Council of Churches. Hardly. It was a cold immateriality that embraced me, that elevated my thoughts, sent them questing after a higher plane; it was less a palpable cold than a mental rigor, one implying an icy sensibility in whose clutch I foundered. I had an image of myself lying in a gold-green scaly palm, tiny as a charm. Was this the biochemistry of salvation in action, an instance of Harrison's effect releasing spiritual endorphins? Or was it the overlapping of his sensibility with my own? I only know that each sight I had of the flashes within his eyes gave credence to my newfound apprehension of the supernatural.

'Sorry,' he said at last. 'It's going to take too long. A day or more, I'd guess.' He smiled. 'Maybe you should have one of the new patients check you over.' (And I would have, had not the project been taken from me.) He must have forgotten that Verret had left the room, for he half-turned and spoke over his shoulder, assuming her presence, saying, 'If this works out, we should think about setting the others loose. There's no...' Then, realizing she was elsewhere, a puzzled expression crossed his