Seeking the Mythical Future by Trevor Hoyle

Author:Trevor Hoyle [Hoyle, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Quercus Publishing
Published: 1977-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

6

Psy-Con

‘It’s simply a matter of Logik,’ Benson said. ‘Where’s your training, old man? Approach the thing logikally and there shouldn’t be any problem.’ Then he had the gall to smile.

His smile, his confidence, his smugness, his height – above all, his height – infuriated Dr Mathew Black. He was even more incensed to learn that Benson had been sent as Special Envoy, appointed by King’s Commission, to review the screening procedure at Psy-Con. Benson had been nothing in the sanatorium, nothing, a mere pip-squeak, a jackanapes, and here he was, with power and overall responsibility handed to him on a plate. While he, Black, had been saddled with a babbling madman fit only for the High Intensity Complex. He felt like murdering them both.

‘I suppose you would have disposed of the patient and filed your report by now.’

‘You’ve had weeks, old chap,’ Benson said, raising his eyebrows yet retaining a trace of a smile. ‘The MDA were generous enough to permit an extension, but even that doesn’t appear to have satisfied you.’ He added as an afterthought, ‘And that’s something else the Authority will have to answer for.’

There had been another purge. It made Black sick to think about it. The rules were changed, the priorities switched, the Authority restructured, yet again. Cases would be reclassified according to a new set of criteria, the medikal jargon reinterpreted and redrafted to embrace a different code of ethiks. The guards, of course, remained.

‘And I thought you were one of our best people,’ Benson said condescendingly, shaking his head from side to side.

Black nearly exploded. Our best people! Our best people! He had to turn away to the window to hide his emotion, looking out blindly at the baked landscape and plumes of dust – red, brown, orange, yellow – swirling in the hot wind. This was the pitiless Pilbara, separated from any decent human habitation by several hundred miles of desert and raw scrubland. The roof of the hut in which they were standing was hot enough to evaporate water at a touch, had anyone been foolish enough to squander it in this way.

Benson leaned over the trestle-table and turned a page of the report, which stuck damply to his thin fingers. Everything about him was thin, from his bare spindly legs to his bare bony arms and shoulders and the stringbean of a neck with its jutting Adam’s apple. His sun helmet with its King’s Commission insignia reminded Black of a bucket balanced on a flagpole. He resisted the urge to laugh.

‘You don’t seriously expect me to submit this do you?’ Benson said, frittering through the pages. ‘This nonsense. I should have said HIC classification and got rid of the fellow. What are you trying to prove, some new-fangled theory of diagnosis that’ll get your name in the medikal books?’ His bulging eyes looked up from the report and compelled Black to turn and meet them.

Black said, somewhat rashly, ‘I suppose that’s the new order of the day, classify everyone HIC and have done.

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