Injury Time by Catherine Aird Page B

designed to bring scientists and artsmen together. The theory—decussation, it might well be called—was that nuclear physicists should know about Wittgenstein and so forth …’
    â€˜Edward,’ warned Professor Maple, ‘I think you should leave Wittgenstein out of this.’
    â€˜Not a help?’
    Arthur Maple shook his head. ‘No.’
    â€˜Oh, all right, if you say so. I can’t leave Darwin out, though, because he comes into things.’
    There were those down at the Police Station, thought Sloan, who would agree with that. They had no quarrel at all with the Darwinian view of the origin of the species. Especially on Saturday evenings after a home football match.
    â€˜He comes into the evolution side—with Lamarck, of course,’ puffed Linthwaite. ‘Well, I gave the lectures myself. On Orwell and Huxley, mostly …’
    â€˜And this man Carstairs was in the audience?’ hazarded Sloan.
    â€˜So he said.’ Professor Linthwaite nodded. ‘That was when he came to see me afterwards. He was a human biologist.’
    â€˜Ah,’ said Sloan. Carstairs didn’t look like a human anything any more: just a very dead young man. ‘What did he come to see you about?’
    â€˜Something I’d said in my lectures.’
    â€˜About Orwell and Huxley or Darwin?’ Sloan had never even heard of Lamarck.
    â€˜Huxley. Only being a scientist he’d got the wrong Huxley, of course.’
    â€˜There were two?’
    â€˜Three actually, Thomas Henry and Julian, who were biologists, and Aldous who was the author of a famous work called Brave New World.’
    â€˜So …’
    â€˜In that book,’ explained Professor Linthwaite, ‘Aldous Huxley had postulated a future state in which it would be possible to program people’s minds to think in a particular way …’
    â€˜I see.’
    â€˜And George Orwell had gone a bit further than that in his works by hypothesizing the Thought Police from whom—if I might paraphrase the Collect for Purity—no secrets are hid …’
    â€˜And?’ Detective Inspector Sloan would have been the first to say that although he knew nothing about twentieth-century English literature he did know whom he liked. It was therefore a couple of chilling lines from a poem by Rudyard Kipling which then came into his own mind:
    There is neither Evil nor Good in life
    Except as the needs of the State ordain.
    â€˜â€¦ and,’ went on Linthwaite hortatively, ‘as you probably know, the Thought Police were there to check on possible subversion before it happened.’
    Detective Constable Crosby’s head had come up at the first mention of the word ‘police’ but he still looked puzzled.
    â€˜I was really lecturing,’ said the Professor, ‘on the great divide between the literature of the past and what writers—not scientists—imagine will be discovered in the future …’
    Sloan looked down at his notebook and then at the body. It was a quite different—but infinitely greater—divide that young Carstairs had already crossed: thanks entirely, apparently, to Professor Linthwaite.
    â€˜Should,’ enquired the Detective Inspector, ‘your lecture have been so very—er—upsetting, then?’ He’d just worked out what was odd about the man’s shirt. It was the buttons.
    Sloan got an oblique response.
    â€˜I understand, Inspector, that Carstairs was a particularly gifted student in his own field.’ Linthwaite turned to Professor Maple. ‘Is that not so, Arthur?’
    â€˜He was a quite outstanding human biologist,’ concurred Arthur Maple at once. ‘Undoubtedly Nobel Prize material of the future—although,’ he added cautiously, ‘I must say you can never be absolutely sure with the Nobel Prize Committee these days.’
    Sloan, whose own view was that no sensible man could