Tonight, he walked slowly to allow the distressing scenes the evening had brought to recede somewhat. The route took him past a small cinema which, he had read in the local press, was soon to be demolished. He was not surprised. Though he was no cineaste the fare the flea pit provided had degenerated in recent years. The week’s offering was a case in point: a double bill of horror movies. Lurid and derivative stuff to judge by the posters, with their crude graphics and their unashamed hyperbole. “You May Never Sleep Again.”‘ one of the hook lines read; and beneath it a woman-very much awake-cowered in the shadow of a two-headed man. What trivial images the populists conjured to stir some fear in their audiences. The walking dead; nature grown vast and rampant in a miniature world; blood drinkers, omens, fire walkers, thunderstorms and all the other foolishness the public cowered before. It was all so laughably trite. Among that catalogue of penny dreadful there wasn’t one that equaled the banality of human appetite, which horror (or the consequences of same) he saw every week of his working life. Thinking of it, his mind thumbed through a dozen snapshots: the dead by torchlight, face down and thrashed to oblivion; and the living too, meeting his mind’s eye with hunger in theirs-for sex, for narcotics, for others’ pain. Why didn’t they put that on the posters?
As he reached his home a child squealed in the shadows beside his garage; the cry stopped him in his tracks. It came again, and this time he recognized it for what it was. No child at all but a cat, or cats, exchanging love calls in the darkened passageway. He went to the place to shoo them off. Their venereal secretions made the passage stink. He didn’t need to yell; his footfall was sufficient to scare them away. They darted in all directions, not two, but half a dozen of them. A veritable orgy had been underway apparently. He had arrived on the spot too late however. The stench of their seductions was overpowering.
CARNEGIE looked blankly at the elaborate setup of monitors and video recorders that dominated his office.
“What in Christ’s name is this about?” he wanted to know.
“The video tapes,” said Boyle, his number two, “from the laboratory. I think you ought to have a look at them, sir.”
Though they had worked in tandem for seven months, Boyle was not one of Carnegie’s favorite officers; you could practically smell the ambition off his smooth hide. In someone half his age again such greed would have been objectionable. In a man of thirty it verged on the obscene. This present display-the mustering of equipment ready to confront Carnegie when he walked in at eight in the morning-was just Boyle’s style: flashy and redundant.
“Why so many screens?” Carnegie asked acidly. “Do I get it in stereo, too?”
“They had three cameras running simultaneously, sir. Covering the experiment from several angles.”
“What experiment?”
Boyle gestured for his superior to sit down. Obsequious to a fault aren’t you? thought Carnegie; much good it’ll do you.
“Right,” Boyle instructed the technician at the recorders, “roll the tapes.”
Carnegie sipped at the cup of hot chocolate he had brought in with him. The beverage was a weakness of his, verging on addiction. On the days when the machine supplying it broke down he was an unhappy man indeed. He looked at the three screens. Suddenly, a title.
“Project Blind Boy,” the words read. “Restricted.”
“Blind Boy?” said Carnegie. “What, or who, is that?”
“It’s obviously a code word of some kind,” Boyle said.
“Blind Boy. Blind Boy.” Carnegie repeated the phrase as if to beat it into submission, but before he could solve the problem the images on the three monitors diverged. They pictured the same subject-a bespectacled male in his late twenties sitting in a chair-but each showed the scene from a different angle. One took in the subject full length and in profile; the second was a three-quarter medium-shot, angled from above; the third a straightforward close-up of the subject’s head and shoulders, shot through the glass of the test chamber and from the front. The three images were in black and white, and none were completely centered or focused. Indeed, as the tapes began to run somebody was still adjusting such technicalities. A backwash of informal chatter ran between the subject and the woman-recognizable even in brief glimpses as the deceased-who was applying electrodes to his forehead. Much of the talk between them was difficult to catch; the acoustics in the chamber frustrated microphone and listener alike.