While proper scientists defended true methodology by pouring boiling oil and dropping rocks on the besieging hordes of pseudoscientists, with their diets and their herbs, their acupuncture needles and their Ayurvedic spices, their meditation practices and yoga positions, it turned out that some parts of the citadel they were defending were rotten by their own ‘double blind’ standards. A ‘replication crisis’ was rippling through one discipline after another. Carl Sagan’s remark that extraordinary claims required extraordinary proofs, so often quoted by Bill Moorhead, didn’t mean that orthodox claims needed no proof at all, and yet many of those claims, which had taken on the complacency of unexamined assumptions, had recently been held up to the ordinary test of being replicable, and failed. The crisis itself had now been given the imprimatur of serious science by appearing in Nature and all other leading scientific journals. There was no need to storm the melting citadel; in fact, it aroused Lucy’s pity. She didn’t want to replace dogmatism with an equally obstinate iconoclasm, she just wanted those parts of the impressive stone walls that had been borrowed from the prop department to be sent back to the warehouse where they belonged with the other fake boulders and soft battlements; with the debris of broken theories, of phrenological busts and treatises on phlogiston, and giant pre-Copernican maps of the cosmos painted with lapis lazuli and gold.

‘Hi, baby,’ said Hunter, stepping on to the terrace, carrying two glasses. ‘Emile just made this juice for us. It’s got kale and beetroot and flax oil – I can’t remember all the ingredients, but it’s a super-food cluster-fuck that means we’re going to have to face up to our immortality.’

‘“The woods decay, the woods decay and fall … Me only cruel immortality consumes,”’ Lucy quoted wearily.

‘Hang on, I’m having one too. This is an immortality pact.’

‘Farewell, cruel death!’ said Lucy, taking the drink with a smile.

‘So, what’s happened in the agonising hour of separation since I last saw you?’ asked Hunter.

‘Well, Olivia told me she was pregnant.’

‘No kidding,’ said Hunter.

‘Funny you should use that phrase,’ said Lucy in an astute German accent.

‘Okay, so they’re kidding,’ said Hunter, ‘but are they serious? It’s unplanned – I assume.’

‘Yes, but not necessarily unwelcome,’ said Lucy, taking a sip of her death-threatening juice. ‘They’re talking it through in the next few days.’

Hunter leant over and gave Lucy a kiss on her beetroot-stained lips.

‘Apart from that, are you feeling well?’ he asked.

‘I feel great,’ said Lucy. ‘After talking to Olivia, I just lay here daydreaming and thinking about complementary medicine and why it works.’

‘Or whether it’s a placebo,’ said Hunter.

‘Placebos work,’ said Lucy. ‘That’s one of the things that interest me: why is a known therapeutic benefit treated as a glitch?’

‘Because it’s based on deception,’ said Hunter.