‘Hey ho, the holly,’ said Carl May, bouncing into Dr Holly’s office, ‘this life is so jolly.’
Perhaps he’s been taking rejuvenating hormones, thought Dr Holly, or is it just those old things, amphetamines, or perhaps youth is indeed in some measure infectious and he’s caught a rather hefty dose of it from the young woman who keeps him company, but this is the third time in a week he’s been to see me, and I wish he wouldn’t. I don’t like it. What does he want?
‘Hey ho, the holly,’ corrected Dr Holly, ‘this life is most jolly.’ Carl May is a powerful and wealthy man, why doesn’t he get his secretary to call me on the phone, why doesn’t he send his chauffeur, what is going on that he needs to see me in person? Does he have nobody to talk to? Or does he just want to show off his young companion? That was most likely.
‘He’s always getting things wrong,’ said the young companion, and then, rather quickly, ‘don’t you, darling?’ and she moved over to plant a kiss just above Carl May’s eyes where the white hairs grew sparsely in stretched skin.
She seemed nervous. Just a two-a-penny scrubber, thought Dr Holly; an old man’s toy, equivalent of a young man’s Porsche, and then thought, no, that’s just defensive, if she were mine I’d take her everywhere too, for all the world to see – could you breed from the emerald eyes? She wouldn’t age well: the bone structure of the face was blurred – she had a look about the mouth: how was it you could tell the whore from other women, just by looking? Psychosomatic damage affected growth, as surely as did hunger: the failure to reach emotional potential left its evidence in the face: the outcome of the psycho-genetic battle was there for all to read. Poor thing. Poor damaged thing. As for Carl May, it was pathetic: a humiliation. Dr Holly did not like to see it. The girl was so clearly bought. He wondered if there would be any point in trying to find the marker for the propensity to use younger members of the opposite sex as symbols of status – it might not be too difficult; some variant in the reproductive organs might well prove to have just such a behavioural link – but decided there were far more urgent matters to attend to. Future generations might locate and shuffle the marker out, if it existed. If they had a mind to. Certainly his own department, after his disagreement with Carl May over the absent-mindedness or otherwise of university professors, could not even begin to take it on board.
‘Did you hear what I was saying, Holly?’
Dr Holly hadn’t. Bad mark, Holly.
‘When do they make you retire, Holly? Got to make way for the young ones, isn’t that so, Bethany?’
‘Young men are boring,’ said Bethany. Then quickly, ‘Anyway, Carl, you’re not old.’ Whew!
‘I’m ageing better than he is,’ said Carl May. ‘I’ve pickled my bones in radioactivity, that’s what it is!’ He poked Bethany’s young flesh with a bony finger. ‘Isn’t that so, Squirrel Nutkin?’
‘Martins don’t enforce a retirement age in their R & D departments,’ said Dr Holly, whose beard was white but whose eyes were bright, alert, even kind. ‘Good men are hard to find. There’s a surplus of competence in the young, but not much imagination.’
‘Is that so?’ said Carl May. ‘No fixed retirement age! I must have a word about that with my friend Henry.’ Henry White, chief executive, Martins International, subsidiary of Britnuc. And Dr Holly wondered exactly what kind of task Carl May had in store for him and how he would get out of it. Certainly Carl May was building up to something.
Dr Holly had read about Carl May’s divorce in the newspapers and had appreciated the silence which followed it. The man, he had hoped, was permanently subdued. But then he had turned up again, Bethany on his arm, bouncing about like a newly-inflated balloon.
On the first visit Carl May, on his way to a board meeting, had talked amiably about the possibility of injecting more funds into Martins R & D. He had then left two specimens for dry-storage, which Dr Holly could see no reason to refuse. Carl May did not volunteer information about the nature of the specimens. Dr Holly did not ask. Bethany had worn white boots, black stockings, a scarlet miniskirt and an old grey-white torn T-shirt.
On the second visit they’d talked about the quest for the new non-addictive painkiller the world was looking for, and how after the expense of Factor 10 Martins deserved to be the ones to find it. Bethany had worn a grey suit, a white blouse and pearls and would have looked like a businesswoman only her hair kept falling out of its combs. On that occasion Carl May had been called away abruptly, back to Britnuc. Chernobyl was causing an uproar, apologized Carl May; the world had gone mad; and the thought came into Dr Holly’s head that Carl May believed he was the world and was trying to tell him something. Carl May certainly had delusions of omnipotence.
On this occasion Bethany wore a long flowered skirt and an ethnic blouse, which kept falling open at the front where a buttonhole was too large for its button, and Carl May said, ‘Tell me more about what you’re doing,’ and Dr Holly, who thought Carl May knew very well, told him more. He was studying brain-cell function in addiction, said Dr Holly, using identical twins as subject and control, stimulating the pleasure centres of the inner brain, rather than the pain centres – which would hardly be ethical –
‘Impractical, shall we say,’ said Carl May, ‘since I daresay you’re dependent upon volunteers, and only masochists would turn up, and then you’d have a biased sample.’
‘Quite so,’ said Dr Holly, calmly. ‘How well you put it. Fortunately, you get much the same kind of hormonal excretion from the brain cells whether they’re excited by pain or pleasure.’
‘Much the same!’ scorned Carl May. ‘Time was when you wouldn’t be satisfied with “much the same”. Time was when you could have got a Nobel Prize, if only you’d pressed ahead, not backed out, sold out, let me down.’
‘Well,’ said Dr Holly, ‘chance would have been a fine thing. It just so happened that Martins halved my funding one fine day for no reason that I could see.’
‘Perhaps they halved it,’ said Carl May, ‘because you, being a professor, were such an absent-minded old fart and only half there most of the time.’
Bethany stirred uneasily. Language! Another button popped open.
‘Perhaps they did,’ said Dr Holly, ‘perhaps I am,’ and Carl May smiled. He always won, in the end.
‘Time was,’ said Carl May, ‘when you’d have bubbled the vats and brewed the broth and grown a million million brain cells and not have had the bother of asking in living twins and parking electrodes into their brains, and perhaps the time will come again, sooner than you think.’
‘Do you think so?’ asked Dr Holly. ‘At least stimulating the pleasure centres of consenting twins, triplets, quads if we’re very lucky, is ethical.’
‘Ethical smethical,’ said Carl May. ‘What do you think Martins are doing in the other labs, or don’t you ask? Pushing ahead with what you began but didn’t have the guts to see through. The transfer of nuclei, perfect and whole, dried not frozen, from the frog right up to the mammal – and by mammal I mean human, you bet I do.’
‘So much is interesting,’ said Dr Holly. ‘There is more to science than genetic engineering. Perhaps, as you say, the field should be left to younger men.’
‘Potter on, potter on,’ sang Carl May sweetly, which meant he was taken aback, ‘to the end of the road, and you’ll never walk again,’ and he pinched Bethany so that she squealed and leant forward and the next button came undone.
‘Walk on, walk on,’ corrected Dr Holly, ‘to the end of the road, and you’ll never walk alone.’
‘How’s the wife?’ asked Carl May kindly. ‘She must be getting on.’
‘She’s very well,’ said Dr Holly.
‘No arthritis, no spondylitis? A fluttering of Alzheimer’s in the brain?’
‘A little,’ admitted Dr Holly.
‘Pottering on to the end of the road,’ said Carl May. ‘I really must take young Bethany home. Look at her! I’ll be back for your answer within the week. A plague on your living twins, I say. I need you back in the field. Money no object.’
Dr Holly nodded and smiled vaguely as if he hadn’t quite understood, but Carl May seemed satisfied and left with a cheery ‘Hey ho, the holly’, and when he was gone, in spite of the relief that he was gone, Dr Holly’s office seemed oddly dull and quiet, as if Carl May had sucked out all the energy through the door, like juice from a hole in the skin of an orange, leaving nothing but pith and fibre behind. He wondered what would happen next and he hadn’t wondered that for quite a while.