Cat Magic Read Online Free PDF

eyes. Then he sank against her, sobbing bitterly. She held his thin frame against her breast. “George, hush now, it’s all right. It’s all right.”
    “The hell it is!” His voice was hoarse. “Look at that! You know what that is?”
    It was green, blotched with brown, so wet that it had made an irregular damp spot on the sheet. “What?”
    “A skin.” He sighed. “The skin of a frog. My frog’” Then he was crying, silently, bitterly, his shoulders shaking, the tears streaming from his eyes.
    He could only be referring to the frogs he used in his lab. But what in the world would one of them be doing here? She looked at it. Lying there on his bed, in a place so wildly wrong, it made her feel all the power of the wind that soughed around the house. Her thoughts went to snapping clean sheets and sunny rooms and she shuddered.
    “Why is it here, George?”
    “It really isn’t very mysterious.” He cleared his throat. “I need a drink.”
    “Now, you take it easy. I’ll get it. You stay put.”
    “Not in here.” He got out of bed. In four spider steps he was across the room. He took his robe from the closet.
    She followed him into the game room, where he had already started pouring Black Label into a highball glass.
    “Cheers,” he said. “Here’s to religion !”
    She had accumulated a fair number of questions in the past few minutes. But she did not press him now. He needed space to calm himself down. Although he was talking instead of screaming, she saw the wildness of his panic still in his eyes. “Come here,” she said, patting the couch beside her. He sat down. She laid her arm around his shoulders.
    Soon enough, he began to explain. “This was undoubtedly the work of a religious fanatic named Pierce.
    He has one of these fundamentalist churches here. Brother Simon Pierce. A Bible-thumping charlatan.”
    “Yes?”
    “He—they, I should say—they’ve demonstrated against my work. He preaches against it. Death is God’s business, that sort of thing.”
    “The mess in your bed—”
    He snorted out a bitter laugh. “You don’t understand, do you?”
    “No.”
    “That is the skin of a frog I killed and brought back to life this afternoon.”
    So that had been the triumph he had referred to earlier. “You actually succeeded?”
    “You bet I did. Well-nigh perfectly.” He uttered a sharp laugh. “Of course you know we’re already virtually canceled by the Stohlmeyer Foundation?”
    He said it like it should have been general knowledge. “I didn’t know that. Why in the world would they cancel such an incredible project?”
    “Precisely because it is incredible. The academic world doesn’t like breakthroughs. It doesn’t like upset and bother. It wants nice, safe confirmations of old theories. The unusual is frowned on, the extraordinary actively discouraged. So my grant money runs out in a couple of weeks. Unless, of course, I should produce a result so spectacular that it gets massive press attention. Then Stohlmeyer’d be forced to renew my funding or face embarrassment. This frog was to be my spectacular.”
    “You can repeat the experiment on another frog.”
    “Not in the time I have. It takes a lot of prep. To satisfy the protocols the review committee imposed on us, we have to prove the animal to be completely healthy before we use it. That takes a good week of observation and testing.” He paused, stared into his drink. “Oh, God, when I think of how close I came.”His shoulders sagged. “My problem with Brother Pierce started out so innocently. Three months ago I gave an interview to The Collegian . The very next Sunday Pierce was on my case. The seeds of ego bear bitter fruit, goddammit!”
    She thought she ought to say something encouraging. She didn’t much like George, but he was suffering now. “You can keep going. I know you can.”
    “The frog was just a first step. Next we were going to do a series on rhesus monkeys, then the big one. The experiment