Aware of her hold over me, and eager to get out of Cambridge for a few hours, I bought a Triumph motorcycle and began to ride into the flat countryside to the north of the city, a realm of fens and watercourses that vaguely resembled the landscape around Shanghai. Behind the hedges lay forgotten wartime airfields, from which the bombing offensive against Germany had been launched, but there were new and larger bases where nuclear bombers were parked in their fortified dispersal bays. American military vehicles patrolled the runways, and the Stars and Stripes flew from the flagstaffs by the gates. Chryslers and Oldsmobiles cruised the country lanes, sudden dreams of chromium, driven by large, pensive men with their well-dressed wives, who gazed at the surrounding fields with the confident eyes of an occupying power. From their closely guarded bases they were preparing England, still trapped by its memories of the Second World War, for the third war yet to come. Then the atomic flash that I had seen over Nagasaki would usher these drab fields and the crumbling gothic of the university into the empire of light.

*   *   *

Every afternoon, as I left the dissecting room, I passed the blue Chevrolet parked outside the Psychology Department, owned perhaps by some visiting Nobel Prizewinner from Harvard or M.I.T. Admiring the car, and the Stan Kenton gramophone record on the rear shelf, I noticed a windshield sticker inviting volunteers to take part in a new experimental project. Almost all the department’s volunteers were medical students, who could be counted on to walk the treadmills with electrical leads taped to their chests and ride exercise bicycles without gagging into the mouthpieces.

I hesitated before pushing back the swing doors of the designated office, wondering if I would rather spend the afternoon with one of the physiology demonstrators and her cracked nails. A lecturer knelt on the floor, hard at work repairing an electric coffee percolator. He ignored me until he had finished and handed the machine to a tall, dark-haired schoolgirl in her late teens who was standing beside the secretary’s desk.

“Good … Coffee first, psychology second.” Looking up at me, he asked: “Another victim? We need all the volunteers we can get. Miriam, fill out his death certificate.”