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switches, generated carefully measured electrical currents, as well as registering cortical impulses. The Elysium Asylum, along with Mr. Klingheimer’s wealth, allowed Peavy a measure of medical freedom impossible elsewhere. He wisely distributed his income among foreign banks and kept cash money, passports, and other documents ready to hand in the event that he was forced to flee on short notice.
    Peavy’s utter lack of scruples made him quite valuable to Mr. Klingheimer, as did Peavy’s love of money – a simple, predictable motivation. Klingheimer himself was largely indifferent to money, however, perhaps because he already possessed it in vast quantities. He sometimes wondered whether that indifference would disappear if he were suddenly made a pauper. He believed that it would not, for he was entirely satisfied with the perspicacity of his own mind. Mr. Klingheimer had no “feelings” to use the popular term – no sympathies as such, except for a mild admiration of genius in others and a fervent wish to possess what lay within their minds in order to expand his own. His intention was quite simply to appropriate others’ genius, to pirate it away with the help of Benson Peavy and his machinery.
    A spray of sparks erupted from the electronic machinery, and there was the smell of burnt dura mater on the air, which reminded Mr. Klingheimer that he hadn’t eaten breakfast this morning. The aura roundabout the patient strapped into the chair faded and winked out. Mr. Klingheimer removed the goggles, put them away securely in the pocket of his coat, and asked, “Has our patient succumbed, Dr. Peavy?”
    “Perhaps. Tell us what Mr. Simmons is contemplating, Pule.”
    “He’s gone silent,” Pule said.
    “He’s dead then?” Klingheimer asked.
    “It’s meaningless if he is,” Peavy told him, “but, yes, stony dead, I should think. The experiment was immensely revealing, and the man is inarguably happier in his present state.”
    “Given that one day I’ll be in a similar position, I don’t share your definition of ‘happier.’”
    “You’ll be sitting in the other chair, Mr. Klingheimer. Nothing at all similar about the position.” Peavy unhooked the dead man’s neck restraint, and the body slumped forward, revealing that the neck and back were awash with blood. “It was merely the trepanning that did it,” Peavy said. “The man bled to death. I severed a small artery, which I attempted to clamp off. It leaked rather copiously, however. His family is traveling in the south of France. By the time they’ve returned he’ll be disposed of.”
    “What about you, Mr. Pule?” Klingheimer asked. “How are you feeling? Did the man’s death unnerve you in any sense? Did you
feel
the death?”
    “No. He went missing. One moment he was thinking of his child, who drowned, and the next the curtain fell and his mind went dark.” Pule’s face, pock-marked and gaunt, glowed a strange shade of green, the result of a diet of luminous fungi.
    “How strict is Mr. Pule’s diet, Dr. Peavy?”
    “He eats fungus for dinner and supper. Stewed, raw, juiced, boiled, and roasted. His blood appears to be about a quarter fungal soup, if you grasp my meaning. He’s never been fitter – apparently growing younger by the day, if I’m not mistaken.”
    “I’m relieved to hear it. That at least is going well. Have we another willing subject for the trephine, then?”
    “In fact we do,” Peavy said. “But we’ll need more subjects soon. Few of the patients are expendable without arousing suspicion.”
    “We shall find more subjects for you, then. Suspicion is the great bug-bear to men like us, indeed it is. The streets are alive with superfluous humanity, however, easily plucked from the pavement and beneath the notice of their fellow men, alas.”
    Mr. Klingheimer rose from his seat now. He was tall, some three inches above six feet, and he appeared at a hasty glance to be sixty or perhaps even seventy years old.