The Complete Short Stories

Powers nodded quietly, repeating this last remark to himself. Racing the clock was exactly what he had been doing. As he stood up and said goodbye to Anderson he suddenly decided to throw away his alarm clock, escape from his futile obsession with time. To remind himself he unfastened his wristwatch and scrambled the setting, then slipped it into his pocket. Making his way out to the car park he reflected on the freedom this simple act gave him. He would explore the lateral byways now, the side doors, as it were, in the corridors of time. Three months could be an eternity.

He picked his car out of the line and strolled over to it, shielding his eyes from the heavy sunlight beating down across the parabolic sweep of the lecture theatre roof. He was about to climb in when he saw that someone had traced with a finger across the dust caked over the windshield: 96,688,365,498,721. Looking over his shoulder, he recognized the white Packard parked next to him, peered inside and saw a lean-faced young man with blond sun-bleached hair and a high cerebrotonic forehead watching him behind dark glasses. Sitting beside him at the wheel was a raven-haired girl whom he had often seen around the psychology department. She had intelligent but somehow rather oblique eyes, and Powers remembered that the younger doctors called her ‘the girl from Mars’.

‘Hello, Kaldren,’ Powers said to the young man. ‘Still following me around?’

Kaldren nodded. ‘Most of the time, doctor.’ He sized Powers up shrewdly. ‘We haven’t seen very much of you recently, as a matter of fact. Anderson said you’d resigned, and we noticed your laboratory was closed.’

Powers shrugged. ‘I felt I needed a rest. As you’ll understand, there’s a good deal that needs re-thinking.’

Kaidren frowned half-mockingly. ‘Sorry to hear that, doctor. But don’t let these temporary setbacks depress you.’ He noticed the girl watching Powers with interest. ‘Coma’s a fan of yours. I gave her your papers from American Journal of Psychiatry, and she’s read through the whole file.’

The girl smiled pleasantly at Powers, for a moment dispelling the hostility between the two them. When Powers nodded to her she leaned across Kaldren and said: ‘Actually I’ve just finished Noguchi’s autobiography the great Japanese doctor who discovered the spirochaete. Somehow you remind me of him — there’s so much of yourself in all the patients you worked on.’

Powers smiled wanly at her, then his eyes turned and locked involuntarily on Kaldren’s. They stared at each other sombrely for a moment, and a small tic in Kaldren’s right cheek began to flicker irritatingly. He flexed his facial muscles, after a few seconds mastered it with an effort, obviously annoyed that Powers should have witnessed this brief embarrassment.

‘How did the clinic go today?’ Powers asked. ‘Have you had anymore… headaches?’

Kaldren’s mouth snapped shut, he looked suddenly irritable. ‘Whose care am I in, doctor? Yours or Anderson’s? Is that the sort of question you should be asking now?’

Powers gestured deprecatingly. ‘Perhaps not.’ He cleared his throat; the heat was ebbing the blood from his head and he felt tired and eager to get away from them. He turned towards his car, then realized that Kaldren would probably follow, either try to crowd him into the ditch or block the road and make Powers sit in his dust all the way back to the lake. Kaldren was capable of any madness.

‘Well, I’ve got to go and collect something,’ he said, adding in a firmer voice: ‘Get in touch with me, though, if you can’t reach Anderson.’

He waved and walked off behind the line of cars. From the reflection in the windows he could see Kaldren looking back and watching him closely.

He entered the Neurology wing, paused thankfully in the cool foyer, nodding to the two nurses and the armed guard at the reception desk. For some reason the terminals sleeping in the adjacent dormitory block attracted hordes of would-be sightseers, most of them cranks with some magical anti-narcoma remedy, or merely the idly curious, but a good number of quite normal people, many of whom had travelled thousands of miles, impelled towards the Clinic by some strange instinct, like animals migrating to a preview of their racial graveyards.

He walked along the corridor to the supervisor’s office overlooking the recreation deck, borrowed the key and made his way out through the tennis courts and callisthenics rigs to the enclosed swimming pool at the far end. It had been disused for months, and only Powers’ visits kept the lock free. Stepping through, he closed it behind him and walked past the peeling wooden stands to the deep end.

Putting a foot up on the diving board, he looked down at Whitby’s ideogram. Damp leaves and bits of paper obscured it, but the outlines were just distinguishable. It covered almost the entire floor of the pool and at first glance appeared to represent a huge solar disc, with four radiating diamond-shaped arms, a crude Jungian mandala.