The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [139]
The Major said grace and took his seat at the other end of the table.
“Where’s Daddy?” whispered Faith.
Beneath his thick growth of moustache the Major’s mouth shaped the words: “Busy. Eat up.”
“Busy doing what?”
The Major frowned but offered no reply. It hardly mattered what Edward was doing. The important thing was that he had broken one of his own rules.
“Cheer up, Brendan,” said Charity and reached under the table to pat his knee. The Major frowned more sternly than ever and, lifting a spoonful of tepid grey soup to his lips, drank it down with a slight shudder, like medicine. “He’s broken one of his own rules,” he thought again, not without a certain bleak satisfaction. “He’s beginning to go to pieces.”
Next day Edward was by turns impatient, irascible and resigned. His experiments were being baulked at every turn. The trouble seemed to be that Murphy, whom he wanted to perform his experiments upon, was being difficult.
“The man has no apprehension of the needs of scientific inquiry,” he said. The Major noticed that look of mild self-mockery, which had so surprised him at their first meeting, pass fleetingly over Edward’s leonine features. But then his face hardened and he added petulantly: “Pretty soon the bloody servants will be giving us orders.”
“What exactly is this contraption?”
On Edward’s table lay the partly dismantled graph-drum from the barometer. The inking-nibs had been rearranged to connect with a tangle of wires and rubber pipes; one of these pipes was attached to a glass funnel containing water and a wooden float, terminating in a deflated rubber balloon.
“I’ve been trying to reproduce some experiments Cannon made before the war on hunger and thirst. He was the chap who discovered that hunger-pangs come from a periodic contraction of the stomach. He got one of his students to swallow a balloon like this, inflated later, of course...then with each contraction the balloon in the stomach would be compressed, driving the air up along this tube, passing through the esophagus and in turn making the float rise by forcing up the water-level. Pretty ingenious, really. The trouble is that the wretched Murphy simply refuses to swallow the damn balloon.”
“Ah.”
“The point is that Cannon used a young man for his experiments. I wanted to see whether the average sixty-second period between contractions would be different in an old man like Murphy.”
Hands thrust in pockets, the Major gloomily surveyed Edward’s machine. On his table there was no sign of the dead mouse. Presumably it had been devoured by the cats during the night.
“I took a lot of trouble building this,” Edward added with resentment. “One feels badly at being let down at the last moment.”
“Look, Edward, I’ve been meaning to ask you about the mason. Did you ever get hold of him?”
“Who? Oh, yes, you’re quite right. It went clean out of my head. Thanks for reminding me. I’ll see to it today.”
Edward frowned and got to his feet, picking up a glass measuring-jar which he tossed absently from hand to hand. Presently he said: “There’s another experiment I’d like to try...one on thirst. There are lots of conditions that result in thirst apart from the simple lack of water—wounds, for instance. Severely wounded men very often complain of a raging thirst. The one that interests me, though, is the sensation of being thirsty through fear, the mouth going dry and so forth. There are lots of instances recorded but nobody has ever actually measured it to my knowledge.”
“How can it be measured?”
“Just a question of measuring the amount of saliva available in the mouth in the normal everyday state and comparing it with the amount of saliva produced in a state of fear.” Edward’s face became faintly animated. “This might be a small but significant contribution to scientific knowledge. Of course Murphy’s already