“Well . . .” said David uneasily. “Not much to report. Till now.” The man nodded judiciously and waited.

David licked his lips. He found it hard to speak. The man looked at him oddly, frowned.

“The rate is still the same, you know,” the man said. “A little more, even.”

“No, gods, I . . .” David stuttered. “I’m just . . . You know . . . Out of practice.” The man nodded again.

Very out of practice, thought David helplessly. Been six years since the last time and I swore I wouldn’t do it again. Got myself out of it. You got bored of blackmail and I didn’t need the money . . .

The very first time, fifteen years ago, they had entered this very room as David spent himself in one of the mouths of some ruined, cadaverous Remade girl. The suited men had shown him their camera. They had told him they would send their pictures to the newspapers and the journals and the university. They had offered him a choice. They paid well.

He had informed. Freelance only; once, maybe twice a year. And then he had stopped for a long time. Until now. Because now he was frightened.

David breathed in deeply and began.

“Something big’s going on. Oh, Jabber, I don’t know where to start. You know the disease that’s going round? The mindlessness thing? Well, I know where it started. I thought we could just get on with things, I thought it’d all be . . . containable . . . but Devil’s Tail! It just gets bigger and bigger and . . . and I think we need help.” (Somewhere deep inside his guts some small part of him spat disgust at this, this cowardice, this self-delusion, but David spoke quickly, kept talking.) “It’s all down to Isaac.”

“Dan der Grimnebulin?” said the man. “Who you share your workspace with? The renegade theorist. The guerrilla scientist with a talent for self-importance. What’s he been up to?” The man smiled coldly.

“Right, listen. He got commissioned by . . . well, he got commissioned to look into flight, and he got hold of shitloads of flying things to do research on. Birds, insects, aspises, fucking everything. And one of the things he gets is this big caterpillar. Damn thing looks like it’s going to die for the longest time, then ’Zaac must’ve worked out how to keep the thing alive, because suddenly it starts growing. Huge. Fucking . . . this big.” He held out his hands in a reasonable estimate of the grub’s size. The man opposite him was looking intently at him, face set, hands clenched.

“Then it pupates, right, and we were all sort of curious about what’d come out. So we get home one day and Lublamai—the other guy in the building, you know—Lublamai’s lying there, drooling. Whatever the fucking thing was that hatched out, it fucking ate his mind . . . and . . . and it got away and the damn thing’s loose . . .”