Free Pharmakon by Dirk Wittenborn Page A

implying I imagined its effect on Lieutenant Higgins?”
    “I just don’t think you were objective.”
    “On what grounds?” She looked at him like a dog who’d growled at her.
    “Because I think you were in love with your patient and probably had slept with him. All of which I understand and am in no way judging you for. But . . .”
    “Point taken.” The kettle was whistling. “Well, Doctor, how do you propose to determine whether GKD makes a rat less depressed? Or more to the point, how do you intend to depress the rats that are taking part in your tests? Give them unhappy childhoods? Dead-end jobs?”
    “I’ll have the rats in a controlled situation that provokes a general sense of hopelessness.” He said it like he was ordering a burger at a lunch stand.
    “Such as?”
    Friedrich winced as his mind tried to chase down a thought that had just poked its head into his consciousness. “You could think of depression as a way of pretending you’re dead, like an animal showing its throat. And if we think about this like one of the cannibals who thought this stuff up, to be a good cannibal, you can’t be defensive. What makes them function well in their society is the same thing that makes us function well—focused aggression in the face of chronic, inescapable adversity. So we depress the rats by putting them in a situation all their instincts tell them they can never escape from.”
    “How are we going to do that?”
    “Drowning . . . in a pool with no exit, and you can’t touch bottom. Put them up against a hopelessness they can feel and taste, and see how long it takes them to give up and stop swimming. That would approximate the emotions that bring on depression in modern-day life.”
    “Clever, simple, and bleak.” Winton looked at Friedrich as if she felt sorry for him.
    “That’s me.” Friedrich scratched his head and looked wistfully out a basement window that offered a view of feet hurrying to places he’d never been.
    “What’s wrong?” Winton enquired with uncharacteristic softness as she sipped her tea.
    “I was just thinking what sort of tank we’ll need to build to test all the rats at once.”
    “I’ve already got one.”

    Will didn’t really begin to understand who Dr. Winton was until they began testing. The effect of GKD on rats was ascertained in an indoor swimming pool housed in a redbrick Georgian folly on the grounds of her uncle’s estate overlooking the Connecticut River. The pool was Olympian in more than length. The roof above it was a giant stained-glass skylight designed by Tiffany to transform overcast afternoons into blue-sky days. There were headless Roman statues, potted palms that touched the ceiling, and a steam heating system that rendered the temperature equatorial.
    Friedrich and Winton worked in eight-hour shifts. A butler delivered a hamper of sandwiches and a fresh thermos of coffee twice a day. The groundskeeper had lowered the water level in the pool and removed the ladder, so the drowning rats couldn’t claw their way out. They tested male and female pairs and marked them with nickel-sized dots of Easter egg dye on the tops of their heads for easy identification. The rats with the red dot on their head had been fed twenty grams of raw kwina leaves mixed with peanut butter; Friedrich suspected that if the psychoactive properties of the kwina leaves were absorbable in their raw state, the Bagadong shaman would have had his patients chew the leaves or brew them in hot water, like tea, instead of going through the effort of fermentation.
    The two rats with blue Easter egg dye on their heads had been fed a hundred milliliters of the alcohol that had been distilled off the fermented gaikau dong. (Friedrich thought it unlikely that the psychoactive properties were distilled off into the alcohol, but he was taking no chances with his big chance.)
    The pair of rats with the green dot on their head had been fed one ounce of the same form of fermented gaikau