“Psych Department. Thursday, four P.M.—you be there, because believe me we need all the reinforcements we can get.”

“They’re going to crucify Tim, Agni immolate.” Hollingshead’s grin was a ragged tear across the bottom portion of his face.

“Kellard,” Tim muttered. “Rooney. Mortenson. And all the rest of them too, all the dinosaurs who teach word for word from the notes they took as students from the professors who dictated them from their own student notes going all the way back to the Middle Ages.” Mugging, he put his palms together as if in prayer and raised his face to the sky. “Mea culpa. Lord have mercy on my soul.”

“They’re putting us on trial,” Dick said. “The whole project. And why? Because of jealousy, that’s why. Because of fear of the new, because—”

Hollingshead cut him off. “Do not go forth today; call it my fear,” he said in a thin falsetto plaint, at the same time reaching up to pull Tim’s palms apart, and then, as if this were the original gesture, high comedy, the commencement of the farce, the three of them broke down in laughter.

Chapter 5

5.

The Psilocybin Project had been an ongoing feature of the Center for Research in Personality since shortly after Tim inaugurated it on his return from Mexico two years earlier, and in that time he and Dick Alpert had collected data from more than four hundred subjects, including not just students and faculty, but also poets, intellectuals and musicians like Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Maynard Ferguson and Charlie Mingus. And he’d originated the Concord Prison Project, in which he took his researchers (Ken Sensabaugh, Charlie Millhouse and Rick Roberts among them) into the prison to conduct psilocybin sessions behind bars with the goal of re-imprinting habitual offenders and reducing recidivism once they were released. It was a radical idea and it paid off, at least as far as prison officials and the inmates were concerned, but Tim hadn’t yet written up the results, let alone published them, though the project had concluded before Fitz had even enrolled. That was one strike against him. That and the rumors surrounding the sessions at the house on Homer Street, which, Fitz had to admit, could have been more rigorous and maybe just a hair less festive, though in truth the research was a work in progress since there’d never been anything like it before. There were no precedents to draw from, no previous studies, and Tim, like any pioneer, was creating a new methodology as he went along. Set and setting. The fireplace, the music, the aura of safety, harmony, mutual support. And, really, what else were you supposed to do—dose people in sanitized white rooms while psychologists in lab coats hovered over them with clipboards? That would defeat the whole purpose.