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undistinguishable congress. Above him, even the clouds had caught fire. Enthralled by their burning heads
he felt the moment rise in his gristle. Breath was short now. But the ecstasy? Surely that would go on
forever.
Without warning a spasm of pain traveled down his spine from cortex to testicles and back again,
convulsing him. His hands lost grip of the brick and he finished his agonizing climax on the air as he fell
across the pavement. For several seconds he lay where he had collapsed, while the echoes of the initial
spasm bounced back and forth along his spine, diminishing with each return. He could taste blood at the
back of his throat. He wasn't certain if he'd bitten his lip or tongue, but he thought not. Above his head the
birds circled on, rising lazily on a spiral of warm air. He watched the fire in the clouds gutter out.
He got to his feet and looked down at the coinage of semen he'd spent on the pavement. For a fragile
instant he caught again a whiff of the vision he'd just had; imagined a marriage of his seed with the paving
stone. What sublime children the world might boast, he thought, if he could only mate with brick or tree. He
would gladly suffer the agonies of conception if such miracles were possible. But the paving stone was
unmoved by his seed's entreaties. The vision, like the fire above him, cooled and hid its glories.
He put his bloodied member away and leaned against the wall, turning the strange events of his recent
life over and over. Something fundamental was changing in him, of that he had no doubt. The rapture that
had possessed him (and would, no doubt, possess him again) was like nothing he had hitherto experienced.
And whatever they had injected into his system, it showed no signs of being discharged naturally; far from
it. He could feel the heat in him still, as he had leaving the laboratories, but this time the roar of its presence
was louder than ever.
It was a new kind of life he was living, and the thought, though frightening, exulted him. Not once did it
occur to his spinning, eroticized brain that this new kind of life would, in time, demand a new kind of death.
CARNEGIE had been warned by his superiors that results were expected. He was now passing the verbal
beating he'd received to those under him. It was a line of humiliation in which the greater was encouraged to
kick the lesser man, and that man, in turn, his lesser. Carnegie had sometimes wondered what the man at the
end of the line took his ire out on; his dog presumably.
"This miscreant is still loose, gentlemen, despite his photograph in many of this morning's newspapers
and an operating method which is, to say the least, insolent. We will catch him, of course, but let's get the
bastard before we have another murder on our hands-"
The phone rang. Boyle's replacement, Migeon, picked it up, while Carnegie concluded his pep talk to the
assembled officers.
"I want him in the next twenty-four hours, gentlemen. That's the time scale I've been given, and that's
what we've got. Twenty-four hours."
Migeon interrupted. "Sir? It's Johannson. He says he's got something for you. It's urgent."
"Right." The inspector claimed the receiver. "Carnegie.
The voice at the other end was soft to the point of inaudibility. "Carnegie," Johannson said, "we've been
right through the laboratory, dug up every piece of information we could find on Dance and Welles's tests-"
"And?"
"We've also analyzed traces of the agent from the hypo they used on the suspect. I think we've found
the Boy, Carnegie
"What boy?" Carnegie wanted to know. He found Johann son's obfuscation irritating.
"The Blind Boy Carnegie."
"And?"
For some inexplicable reason Carnegie was certain the man smiled down the phone before replying: "I
think perhaps you d better come down and see for yourself. Sometime around noon suit you?"
JOHANNSON could have been one of history's greatest poisoners. He had all the requisite qualifications. A
tidy mind (poisoners were, in Carnegie's experience, domestic paragons), a patient nature (poison could take
time) and, most importantly, an encyclopedic knowledge of toxicology. Watching him at work, which
Carnegie had done on two previous cases, was to see a subtle man at his subtle craft, and the spectacle
made Carnegie's blood run cold.
Johannson had installed himself in the laboratory on the top floor, where Doctor Dance had been
murdered, rather than use police facilities for the investigation, because, as he explained to Carnegie, much
of the equipment the Hume organization boasted was simply not available elsewhere. His dominion over the
place, accompanied by his two assistants, had, however, transformed the laboratory from the clutter left by
the experimenters to a dream of order. Only the monkeys remained a constant. Try as he might Johannson
could not control their behavior.
"We didn't have much difficulty finding the drug used on your man," Johannson said, "we simply cross-
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