properly.”
“Looking for Inspirogene capsules?” Hector snapped. He felt confused and adrift, as though he had missed the point of this argument through a momentary lapse of concentration.
“Yes, but not containing Inspirogene any longer,” Kneller said, almost shamefaced. “We–uh–we went over Maurice’s office today, after lunch. It had been closed up since he left a week ago, of course. And we found two or three little yellow capsules broken at the bottom of a wastebin, as though someone had emptied the contents out and tried to refill them. And … Well, that would have been an ideal means of abstracting a few milligrams from the lab.”
“A few milligrams of what?” Hector roared, and fractionally out of synch Sawyer echoed him.
“We’ll have to tell them,” Randolph said to Kneller. “Would you rather leave it to me? But you can’t ask the police to work in the dark, you know.”
“Oh, go ahead,” Kneller muttered.
“Very well.” Randolph faced Hector and Sawyer and set his shoulders back. “To the best of our knowledge this is the first that anyone outside the Gull-Grant Institute has heard about the VC project. VC is the-the ‘stuff’ referred to in Maurice’s note.”
Reminded of it, Hector mutely sought Sawyer’s permission to read it too. The detective ceded it with a shrug, his expression implying that help from any quarter would be welcome, and while Randolph talked on Hector scanned the thirty-odd lines it bore. There were many corrections and x-ings-out, as though Maurice had been either a very poor typist or under immense emotional strain. Hector suspected the latter. The text was almost incomprehensible. He saw a shadow of their conversation last Friday in references to “the world relapsing into its old evil ways” and “our missed opportunity to let people use their known potential”, and above all to “that deliberate encouragement of selective inattention which the guilty among us employ to save themselves from being brought to book.” At one stage Maurice had spoken with uncharacteristic fury about people who, in his opinion, consciously misused their intellectual gifts in order to delude the less intelligent, claiming in particular that while it was natural enough for men to fight in defence of their homes and families, it was a wholly artificial process which led them to sacrifice their lives in defence of leaders who themselves would never risk exposure on the firing-line because they were too sensible.
–Not exactly news. He did argue it very well, though …
These passages, however, were islands of clarity in a muddle of jargon, parasyntaxis, and abominable straining after pointless puns.
–Poor Maurice! How could he have drifted over the borderline of sanity? He seemed rational enough when I last saw him. And what could he have done to make somebody kill him?
Hector composed himself to try and understand what Randolph was saying, but was little the wiser when the explanation was at its end.
“Dr Campbell will know some of this already, but I’ll fill you in on the background, Inspector Professor Kneller and I joined the Institute when it was founded eight years ago, and Dr Post a few months later. Our charter says that we’re to undertake research in biology and organic chemistry without regard to eventual commercial exploitation. In fact we haven’t managed to live up to that ideal. What looked like more than adequate funding when Sir Hugh Gull-Grant drafted his will has been eroded by inflation, and we have sometimes had to supplement our budget by accepting contracts from outside. But we’ve always had at least one absolutely pure research project going, and that’s the one we started with, an attempt to create a replicating molecule not derived from pre-existent living material.”
“But–” Hector began. Randolph glanced at him.
“You were going to say we didn’t pioneer that? Quite right. We were beaten to it by Sakulin and his group
“Looking for Inspirogene capsules?” Hector snapped. He felt confused and adrift, as though he had missed the point of this argument through a momentary lapse of concentration.
“Yes, but not containing Inspirogene any longer,” Kneller said, almost shamefaced. “We–uh–we went over Maurice’s office today, after lunch. It had been closed up since he left a week ago, of course. And we found two or three little yellow capsules broken at the bottom of a wastebin, as though someone had emptied the contents out and tried to refill them. And … Well, that would have been an ideal means of abstracting a few milligrams from the lab.”
“A few milligrams of what?” Hector roared, and fractionally out of synch Sawyer echoed him.
“We’ll have to tell them,” Randolph said to Kneller. “Would you rather leave it to me? But you can’t ask the police to work in the dark, you know.”
“Oh, go ahead,” Kneller muttered.
“Very well.” Randolph faced Hector and Sawyer and set his shoulders back. “To the best of our knowledge this is the first that anyone outside the Gull-Grant Institute has heard about the VC project. VC is the-the ‘stuff’ referred to in Maurice’s note.”
Reminded of it, Hector mutely sought Sawyer’s permission to read it too. The detective ceded it with a shrug, his expression implying that help from any quarter would be welcome, and while Randolph talked on Hector scanned the thirty-odd lines it bore. There were many corrections and x-ings-out, as though Maurice had been either a very poor typist or under immense emotional strain. Hector suspected the latter. The text was almost incomprehensible. He saw a shadow of their conversation last Friday in references to “the world relapsing into its old evil ways” and “our missed opportunity to let people use their known potential”, and above all to “that deliberate encouragement of selective inattention which the guilty among us employ to save themselves from being brought to book.” At one stage Maurice had spoken with uncharacteristic fury about people who, in his opinion, consciously misused their intellectual gifts in order to delude the less intelligent, claiming in particular that while it was natural enough for men to fight in defence of their homes and families, it was a wholly artificial process which led them to sacrifice their lives in defence of leaders who themselves would never risk exposure on the firing-line because they were too sensible.
–Not exactly news. He did argue it very well, though …
These passages, however, were islands of clarity in a muddle of jargon, parasyntaxis, and abominable straining after pointless puns.
–Poor Maurice! How could he have drifted over the borderline of sanity? He seemed rational enough when I last saw him. And what could he have done to make somebody kill him?
Hector composed himself to try and understand what Randolph was saying, but was little the wiser when the explanation was at its end.
“Dr Campbell will know some of this already, but I’ll fill you in on the background, Inspector Professor Kneller and I joined the Institute when it was founded eight years ago, and Dr Post a few months later. Our charter says that we’re to undertake research in biology and organic chemistry without regard to eventual commercial exploitation. In fact we haven’t managed to live up to that ideal. What looked like more than adequate funding when Sir Hugh Gull-Grant drafted his will has been eroded by inflation, and we have sometimes had to supplement our budget by accepting contracts from outside. But we’ve always had at least one absolutely pure research project going, and that’s the one we started with, an attempt to create a replicating molecule not derived from pre-existent living material.”
“But–” Hector began. Randolph glanced at him.
“You were going to say we didn’t pioneer that? Quite right. We were beaten to it by Sakulin and his group
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