“But this is not true,” Fanchon said, her voice rising above a whisper so that several people turned round to give her hostile looks. Three of them Fitz recognized as grad students who were most definitely not part of the inner circle and another as an assistant professor who sat very comfortably beside them, as if they were part of a team. They were no doubt wondering just who Fanchon was and what she was doing here at a department meeting with her pouffed-out hair, hoop earrings and tremulous bangs, and by extension what relation she bore to Fitz and Ken, who sat on either side of her. Ken leaned in to hush her and she shook her head defiantly. “You tell me to hush?” she threw back at him under her breath. “When it is all lies? Like, like . . . McCarthyism!”

This last caused more heads to turn and Professor Kellard himself to pause and look up to see what the disturbance was before McClelland rapped his knuckles lightly on his desk and intoned, “Go on, Herb, you have the floor . . .”

Kellard snatched up his notes as if he were going to quote aloud from them, then set them aside again. “I know of at least one case,” he said, “in which a student of mine—one of a handful of holdouts who continue to stand for their rights and refuse to legitimize the taking of drugs for any purpose, let alone as an academic requirement—was finally pressured into participating and wound up having a psychotic episode, a real crisis, and believe me, no matter what anyone tells you there is no medical supervision here whatsoever.”

A second professor—Mortenson, another of Tim’s enemies—rose to say that he’d spent the morning in the medical library reviewing the published research into psilocybin studies, none of which had been generated by the Harvard Psilocybin Project, incidentally, and found that there were grave concerns about administering the drug outside of a controlled medical setting. He had his own sheaf of notes and he waved it like a gauntlet in Tim’s direction. “In fact, there is evidence here of several cases of disorientation continuing for weeks after a single dose of these substances, of subjects being admitted to emergency rooms, of psychotic reactions in apparently normal people and increased suicidal ideation. You are not a medical doctor, Professor Leary, we’re all aware of that here, and so I ask you how you can in good conscience administer these drugs without medical supervision or, as far as I can see, even an awareness of these medical issues?”