The Meddlers (43 page)

He stood up, and the talk around the table faltered and died away.

“You’ll find it easier to reach your decision if I go away, I imagine,” he said and produced one of his thin smiles. “I am confident I can rely upon you, as professional colleagues, to give me the help I need. Thank you, Sir Peter, ladies and gentlemen.”

There was a moment’s silence after he had gone, and then Neufeld said softly, “Of course, there is one thing you all appear to have forgetten in the discussion we’ve had so far.”

He smiled around the table. “George, of course, sees the situation in black and white—and I must say again, in my opinion a
black and white somewhat defined by a tendency to paranoiac ideas. He suggests, does he not, that it is perhaps spite that activates the management committee, or that some power battle is being engaged upon. But we surely are more practical than that? We do appreciate, do we not, that the real villain of this piece is not the faceless bureaucrats of which George spoke so… movingly, but good old-fashioned money. There just isn’t enough cash to do all we know should be done here. Not enough for your hypothermia units
and
your dialysis unit
and
your eye clinics
and
George’s research project. Now, as I see it, we know beyond any shadow of a doubt what value there would be in these facilities for which we have all been pressing for so long. And I have done my share of pleading too, for as you know, I have long wanted to establish a day hospital psychiatric unit here. We know that they would have immediate clinical applications. But what immediate clinical applications can there be in George’s very expensive work? It is undoubtedly a project of, er, great scope. Great
possible
value—or so George has been at some pains to tell us over the past couple of years. But it will be many many years—if ever, of course—before George’s researches can bear any edible fruit, if you will forgive a clumsy metaphor.

“If it were simply a case of saying to Kegan, on George’s behalf, that there must be no lay interference with his work, it would be simple, and our duty would be clear. We would, of course, have to say it. But it would be a case of saying, would it not, that we are prepared to put our units in abeyance in order that this work of George’s can go on. Don’t you think it is
this
we should be discussing rather than George’s, er, resentment of the power that is exercised by the holders of our purse strings?”

There was another silence when he stopped speaking, and then several of them leaned forward and started to talk again, with even more animation than they had shown when George had been there to observe it.

  It took every atom of control he had not to bunch his hands into fists and hit out at them, at their avid faces and flashing cameras and waving notebooks, but he knew it would not help matters if he
did. There were too many of them, and there was no way of avoiding them. They had been holding the place besieged for so long, and he couldn’t stay in the Unit any longer.

Kegan had made that abundantly clear yesterday, clearly taking a malicious delight in pointing out with suave mock regret that he would be forced to obtain police aid unless he left the Sillick’s premises on time, and that he had not only the support of the hospital management committee, but also that of the medical committee.

“You will be committing a trespass if you are here after ten
A.M
. tomorrow, Dr. Briant,” he had said with oleaginous sweetness. “Out of my hands now, you see. A committee matter …”

And the bastard had probably tipped off the press about that too, for there seemed to be far more of them here now than had been besieging the place this past few days. And the only way to get through them, to clear a way for Hilary, shaking and crying behind him in the lobby as she stood by their meager luggage, was to tolerate their nagging greedy questions.

And since he still had to face the discomfort of telling Hilary that she had to be left out of his plans, the less she suffered now the easier that would be. At least he had only Hilary left to talk to, with the embarrassing mawkishness of Barbara’s response to his announcement behind him. There was this gauntlet of vultures to run, Hilary to deal with, and then …

“How do you feel about the tragedy, Dr. Briant?” A man with a microphone managed to thrust through the mob, and George reared back and looked at him with cold dislike in every line of his face.

“Precisely as you would expect me to feel. Let me through, please.”

“Sir, why did Miss Quinn do it? What happened to make her abduct the baby? According to one of your staff, it was because of a piece of experimental work she was directly involved in. Do you agree with that?”

“I cannot comment on any remarks made by ex-members of my staff. I have no more knowledge of why the woman did it than you have.”

“What was the experiment? Is it true the child was—”

“I have no comment to make on the work that was done here. No comment.”

“But there must have been a reason for—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake man! She was unbalanced in some way! I can’t—”

“Unbalanced? Then why did you appoint her?”

A man with a camera flashed at him as another reporter with a microphone pushed aside the first questioner. “Couldn’t you have avoided this if you had investigated her more in advance?”

“I did investigate her! It was not possible to foresee such an attack of … of unbalanced behavior.”

“Would you deny, Dr. Briant, that throughout this project you have consistently discounted the human aspects of the work you were doing?” This came from a woman who had managed to wriggle her way through the other people surrounding Briant, and the shrillness of her voice cut over the shouted questions that were coming from all directions, and made them hush for a moment.

“Isn’t that so, Dr. Briant?” she went on insistently. “The accusations of inhumanity made about you are proven by this tragedy? If being in a position to actually
see
what was done to this baby was enough to unhinge a woman who at the start was perfectly normal, fit enough to be employed by you in so important a post, wasn’t the public outcry against you justified?”

“That is complete nonsense!” he said furiously. “Malicious nonsense! I did not at any time do anything to the baby that could have been construed as inhuman! He was observed, that was all, observed. He suffered no more distress than that suffered by any baby unfortunate enough to be born to the average stupid woman. In so-called normal families, babies are exposed to the experiences and the frustration that breed aggression from the moment of birth—the moment of birth, madam! This child was exposed to such stimuli only two or three times in his life, and that mildly—”

“It couldn’t have been that mild, or the poor woman wouldn’t have been driven to act as she did by it. Isn’t it likely that she loved the baby so much that—”

“Loved it?
Loved
it? Sentimental idiocy prompted that remark,
madam! If she had
loved
the child so much, would she have murdered it? Would she—”

“Just a moment, Dr. Briant!” a man shouted from the back of the crowd. “To call her a murderer is outrageous! The Coroner’s report said that the infant was dead before he went into the water! He died of a combination of cold and suffocation! The postmortem showed that. The Coroner said he was probably overlain while the woman slept on the bench where they found her bag.”

“I know that, sir! I know it perfectly well!” George was white with fury. “But to remove a carefully protected and nurtured infant of so young an age from a perfect environment and then to expose him to days and nights spent in the open air, in winter, was tantamount to murder! And the fact that she committed suicide is an indication of—”

“There’s no proof her suicide was a deliberate act,” the woman reporter cut in again. “If she woke and found the baby dead in her arms, she must have been in a desperate state. It could have been she—”

“I will not comment any further on this. I will
not
. All this is pure surmise, and I refuse to waste—”

“Sir, will you then comment on Joel Wayne’s statements to the press? He says the child was an instrument of God, that his death was a direct act of God, and he is getting enormous support for his point of view. How do you feel about being the cause of so considerable a religious—”

“I cannot comment on that, either. My knowledge of religious matters is as scanty as yours is of science. You may be prepared— you and the people you are supposed to represent—to make judgments on the basis of your ignorance. I am not. I am a scientist, and the way superstition chooses to manipulate my work is no concern of mine!”

“Calling religion superstition sounds like a comment, Dr. Briant,” the man with the microphone said with smooth swiftness. “And such a comment from you is likely to alienate public sympathy from you even more, if that were possible.”

“I can’t help that,” George said icily. “Public opinion matters less than nothing to me in the work I do.”

“Maybe not, sir, but may I point out that the baby’s death has had the effect of rejuvenating interest in Mr. Gurney’s bill to control projects such as yours? And now that Mr. Gurney has publicly announced his own intention to work in the future with Mr. Wayne, the current religious fervor will ensure the bill is very likely to get an unopposed second reading. And if that happens, what are your chances of working in this country in the future?”

“Won’t you have to give up research of this type, in the future?” Another man managed to make himself heard above the noise. “Will you admit you were misguided to embark on it in the first place? And can you tell us what your future plans are?”

“Whether the bill gets through or not is a matter of supreme unconcern to me. And my plans for the future, since they do not involve working in this country, are of supreme unconcern to you,” George snapped.

“Why?”

“Where are you going?”

“What’s happening, then, to…”

They were all shouting at once and pressing closer, and enraged, George raised his hands and pushed hard against the nearest body and shouted, “Be quiet! Get out of my way and let me get—be quiet!”

“We’re entitled to an answer!” one of them roared back. “You mayn’t be guilty in law, but a hell of a lot of people hold you responsible for what happened to that baby and that woman! You’ve got to answer.”

“I haven’t got to do anything!” George shouted. “And any such accusations will—who said that? Unless it is withdrawn immediately I—”

“All right, all right!” George strained to see who it was, but the press of bodies was too great. “I’ll withdraw, but answer us! What are your future plans? We’ve a right to know. The people of this country have a right to know what is done by a British scientist.”

“You’ve no
right
to anything, do you understand that? None at all! It was your stupid misinformed comment that stirred up most of the trouble I’ve had with this project. And—”

He took a deep breath and stopped and then said loudly, “All
right. All
right
. If you’ll be quiet, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do in the future. And then you’ll see what effect your badgering of me has had. You’ll see just what effect the lack of intelligent understanding of my work has had. You’ll see why this country loses its best brains to more enlightened parts of the world.”

Immediately, there was a hushed expectancy, and he stood for a moment in silence before speaking with great deliberation. “All right. I do not deny that I misjudged the temperament of the Quinn woman. That I should have foreseen that she might develop so close an emotional attachment to the child that she would behave in so … so destructive a fashion. I do not deny that the monitors covering her and the baby were not observed as closely as they should have been at the time she abducted the child. I cannot deny these facts. But I can tell you why they happened.”

There was a heavy silence, highlighted only by the distant roar of traffic, and he stood there, the cold wind ruffling his hair, staring at them with disdain in every line of his body.

“Throughout this work, which was pure research, pure science designed for worthwhile ends, engaged in because I wanted to demonstrate a way to improve the quality of human life, I have been hampered—cruelly hampered—by lack of intelligent support. I have had to waste far too much of my energies in scrabbling for money. I have had to settle for inadequate staff both in terms of quantity and quality. I have had to settle for inadequate equipment and an inadequately secured environment. I have had to tolerate the meddling greed of small-minded people seeking their own puerile satisfactions in battening on the mind and work of a better man, and because I was so hampered, I was also deflected. Had I been able to give my total concern to my work, and not part of it to worrying about such things as money and public opinion”—he let the sneer show on his face as well as in his voice—“then I would have foreseen what might happen with Miss Quinn and avoided it. I would have been able to report properly on my work, and thus keep the public, about which you say you care so much, accurately informed of what was happening. And this public of yours would have been able to take a pride in the fact that one of
its own scientists was doing work that, carried through, could bring considerable renown to the country that supported it.

“But because of the mindless opposition with which I have been bombarded, this has all gone by the board. So”—he gave a thin and almost triumphant smile—“so, I am no longer prepared to waste my efforts in such a country. I am withdrawing from any sense of national pride, which I once had, I assure you, which I once had. I am working in the future in a country which has offered me a well-equipped unit, ample staff and funds, and total protection from the badgering of uninformed people like yourselves. In future I will work in the solitude true science needs.”

“
Where
?” someone called from the mass of people around him. “America? But they’re as outraged as we are! And even with the sort of money available in the States, they can’t guarantee your solitude, not after the fiasco in this country.”