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'What are you playing at?' Barry demanded.

She rubbed her hand on the floor and then examined her fingers. "There's something leaking here,' she said. 'It's dripping from the tank. It looks a bit like' She hesitated and then she held up her hand for them to see. 'It looks a lot like blood.' She looked at the tank and back down at the floor. Oh shit!'

Abruptly she flinched away. 'It's getting worse.' She stood up quickly. 'It's seeping out,' she said in a horrified voice. 'It's pouring out everywhere.' She made a sudden attempt to step away from the tank and slipped, losing her footing. For a moment her feet skated awkwardly about on the floor as she scrambled to regain her balance. Lunging and jerking around she looked absurd, like a comedy performer in a silent movie.

Barry watched in triumphant irritation. 'You cannot be serious,' he said dismissively. 'I'm Barry not Homer.'

Meg lost her struggle against gravity and fell heavily.

Meg?' Tommy called. Are you OK?'

She lay where she had fallen.

Meg?'

She did not move.

Don't just stand there,' Tommy almost shouted at Ralph and Barry. 'She's hurt herself.'

Tommy rushed out of the control suite and hurried to help Meg, but as soon as he got near the tank he hit the same skiddy surface and began the same helpless skating routine. Before long he too fell heavily and lay still.

Barry was tempted to applaud ironically but instead he shook his head and glared at Ralph, whose face was fixed in an expression of stunned disbelief. 'Not funny,' Barry said. 'Not bloody funny' He switched on the mic to the tank and the one to the capsule and said loudly into both of them, All right. Enough. Test's over. Out of there.'

Neither Chloe nor Josh responded. He peered at the monitors. Chloe was in the same position she had been in all along. Josh seemed to have slumped further forward in his seat. He gave every sign of being unconscious.

'Not funny,' Barry bellowed at both mics. There was still no reaction from either of them. 'And you two can get up!' he shouted at Tommy and Meg, but they both remained stubbornly unmoving.

'What's going on?' Ralph asked of no one in particular. 'What in the hell is going on?'

'Open three,' Barry instructed. "Get Josh out of there.' Presumably, Barry thought to himself, as the only one left on his feet it was Ralph who had been designated to deliver the punch line, whatever that was.

'He's not in three,' Ralph said.

And there it was: the payoff to the whole elaborate gag. Barry said, 'Of course he's in three.' He was too tired to resist. Let them have their fun and let's finish with it.

'Not according to the monitors.' Ralph's voice was quiet, as though he wasn't sure he should be saying what he was saying. 'He's in four according to the monitors.'

Barry looked at the screens. Sure enough, the slumped figure of Josh was on a different set of monitors. He had been on the monitors of capsule three and now he was on the monitors identified as showing the interior of capsule four. Or had he misremembered it? Was Josh in four before?

No. 'He was in three,' Barry said aloud, not sure any more whether he was playing along with the joke or resisting some sort of weirdness. 'I put him in three myself. He can't be in four.'

Ralph was nodding vigorously. 'He was in three, wasn't he?'

To Barry the earnest and normally rather unimaginative student looked distinctly unnerved. If he was acting he was showing unexpected talent.

'How did he do that?' Barry asked.

'Do what?'

'Switch from three to four' He stared at the screens. For the briefest moment Josh appeared to be on both sets of monitors, and Barry was almost sure the two groups of images were different. In capsule three he was slumped forward and in capsule four he was sitting up. Then all the screens went blank and filled with white noise.

Did you see that?' Ralph asked.

'This has gone too far,' Barry said. 'Get him out of whichever one he's in.'