The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [27]
Lisa was tempted to tell Mike that he couldn’t have it both ways—that she couldn’t consider the possibility that Morgan might be responsible for this mad caper while simultaneously motivating herself with the thought that he might be in mortal danger—but the complaint died on her lips. Whichever one of the two possibilities was right, she did have to solve the puzzle as quickly as was humanly possible, and she was the person best placed to do so. If she failed, everybody might suffer.
Probably, she thought, that was why the intruders had come to her apartment—not to rob, but to discredit her; to do as much as they could to earn her the mistrust of Peter Grimmett Smith and his merry MOD men. If so, she had to hope that Mr. Smith wouldn’t fall for it—and whether he did or not, she had to bend every atom of her intelligence and of her knowledge of Morgan Miller’s life and work to figuring out exactly what kind of mess he had gotten himself into.
First Interlude
THG POLITICS OF MOUSEWORLD
The tour that Morgan Miller gave Lisa when he welcomed her to the department began with the lab space in which she would be working and the parallel spaces occupied by her fellow research students, then progressed to his own territory. There was far too much for her to take in all at once, and too many names to remember, but it was obvious from the start that Miller was a misfit. It wasn’t just the fact that he was the only person except for the departmental secretaries who wasn’t wearing a white coat; it was the slight wariness haunting the attitudes other people struck when they spoke to him. Some of them, Lisa assumed, must have been working cheek-by-jowl with him for years, but not one of them gave the impression of actually knowing him.
Miller was not a tall man—his height was almost exactly the same as Lisa’s—but he gave the impression of being loftier than he was. His frame was slim and his face rather gaunt. She guessed that he was in his late thirties, but there was a stern agelessness about his hard features that suggested he wouldn’t look substantially different in twenty years’ time. No one would have described him as handsome, but the narrowness of his jaw made the upper half of his face seem uncommonly wide, exaggerating the width of his forehead and making his dark-brown eyes seem a trifle overlarge. When he had been a child, Lisa thought, those eyes must have seemed plaintive and adorable, but now that he was a man, they seemed intimidatingly cool and contemplative. The whole ensemble gave the impression of a penetrating intelligence quietly lurking in the depths of an unusual mind. Had he not possessed such a luxuriant head of dark-brown hair—which certainly wasn’t a wig—Miller might have have resembled a stereotyped cartoon egghead, but there was something about him that resisted submission to any kind of category.
It wasn’t until the end of the tour that he took her into Mouseworld. He ushered her through the door with a wry smile, as if he were ashamed to have to stoop so low as to use it as a kind of punch Une but had no alternative. It was an awesome sight, and it stopped her in her tracks for a moment. Miller had obviously seen similar reactions many times before, and the wryness of his smile twisted his thin lips into an unclassifiable grimace.
“Four hundred and fifty thousand, give or take ten percent,” he said, anticipating the question that had indeed sprung unbidden to Lisa’s lips—although she had not actually intended to voice it, because she knew how lame it would sound. “That’s in the one big experiment distributed around the four walls. The mice in the central block are taking part in several hundred different enterprises of considerably more importance, so we take care to give them all the space they need. Ours are in this sector here.”
Miller moved toward the central H-shaped complex, but Lisa didn’t move with him, even though she had noted that he’d said “ours” rather than “mine.” She couldn’t take her eyes