Now, as Kellard rose to speak, Fitz saw his professor slip him a page of handwritten notes, and he understood in that moment that he was no friend of Tim’s. Not that Fitz had given up much—he’d been circumspect, emphasizing the positive aspects of the research, trying not to let his bias show and consciously avoiding any talk of the oneness of being or hallucinations or the subject of sex and heightened gratification—but he couldn’t bring himself to be anything less than forthcoming either, detailing the dosage, the duration, the setting, strictly the facts, and yet he saw now how even those same facts could be manipulated by someone who was an enemy of the project. As Professor Kellard clearly was.

“This meeting has been a long time coming,” Kellard began, brandishing the sheaf of notes in his right hand. “For several months now I’ve been disturbed by reports of what I can only call improprieties in the conduct of Professors Leary and Alpert’s research project, which definitely merit looking into.” He paused, brought the notes to his face, then dropped them to the desk as if they were contaminated.

“What am I to make of coming into my morning class—at nine A.M.—and seeing a full one-third of the students wearing dark glasses?” Kellard asked, raising his head to sweep his gaze over the room. “Is this salutary? Is this conducive to learning? Well, I think not. In fact, I think that these students, under the influence of Dr. Leary, have been up all hours—at his house on Homer Street in Newton Center—conducting psilocybin ‘sessions’ with very little control or scientific rigor. And not, for the most part, on a randomized sample of subjects, but on themselves. Repeatedly.” He let out a grating laugh. “The sad fact is there are twice as many researchers as there are subjects and that these drugs—dangerous drugs, prescribed only for experimental use under controlled circumstances—are being abused, over and over, by the same coterie—cult, if you will—of grad students under the auspices of Professors Leary and Alpert.”

Dick rose to object, but the chair—Professor McClelland—gently admonished him. “Professor Kellard has the floor, Dick,” he said. “Your turn will come.”

“Furthermore,” Kellard went on, “the whole program has an anti-intellectual bent, valuing pure experience over any sort of collection and interpretation of data, so that it has, in essence, become a quasi-religious sect bearing little resemblance to any form of scientific inquiry I’ve ever heard of. Even worse, students are being pressured to take these drugs—which have been shown in study after study to have potentially adverse effects on vulnerable subjects—as a condition of their acceptance into the program in the first place.”