The Stone That Never Came Down by John Brunner

the right tests, and your pulse was normal and your temperature was normal and you were turning over the way people do when they’re asleep, so we were sure you weren’t in coma or even in a drunken stupor, which of course was what we first–”
    “Stop!” Malcolm ordered, and broke past her and headed for the door. “I don’t have time to talk!”
    “Chocolate yes or no?” she called after him.
    “No! Hot milk and Bovril–I need the protein! I know I have some Bovril left. I can smell it!” And the door slammed.

    The toilet flushed, but he did not return at once, and she was just beginning to wonder what had become of him when, overhead a door opened and closed and there were footsteps on the stairs and she heard Billy exclaim in amazement, “Malcolm, you woke up! Are you okay now?”
    “Yes, I feel fine,” Malcolm answered, and preceded Billy back into the room. “I gather,” he went on, “that you two think you’ve kept me out of jail. Would you mind explaining what in hell that’s supposed to mean?”
    Handing him his hot drink, which he carried over to the bed again so he could sit down in the flow of warm air, Ruth said, “Well, I was going to say: when you passed out we thought you were just drunk, and Billy and I sat talking here for a while and didn’t realise how much time was passing, and then all of a sudden there was this reference on the radio news to the Hampstead Arms. The pub where you met Morris, you said.”
    “You don’t have to add footnotes! I remember okay!” Malcolm snapped, and immediately relented. “I’m sorry. But, you see …” He thrust his fingers comb-fashion through his tousled hair. “No, how could you see? I’m terribly confused myself. But I can remember everything, and I mean everything! ”
    Billy and Ruth exchanged baffled glances.
    “I’m remembering, and remembering, and–and I can’t stop! That’s why I had to get drunk!” He set aside his mug, his face betraying agony, and she darted to drop on her knees at his side.
    “What kind of things?” Billy ventured.
    “There’s no end to them. Want to know what the weather was like on my second birthday? Windy and raining–I can hear the branches rattling at the window. Want to know the name of the guinea-pigs they kept when I was in infant school? Things that I thought I’d forgotten years ago are coming back, coming back …” Retrieving his mug, he clasped both hands around it as though needing its heat to overcome the fit of shivers racking him.
    “So what about the Hampstead Arms?” he added after a pause.
    “It said on the radio the police were anxious to contact everybody who’d been there the night before, because they’re looking for a murderer. And then in the papers on Christmas Eve … Ruth, find that copy of the Guardian and show him.”
    She hesitated. “Are you sure we ought to–?”
    “That one?” Malcolm shot out his arm and pointed at a paper lying on a table on the far side of the room, almost completely in shadow. “That’s Morris, the man I took the pill from! Only– Oh! ”
    “So we were right,” Billy said quietly to Ruth.
    “You were but I wasn’t,” Malcolm said. “I took it for granted Morris was his surname, M-O-R, but it was M-A-U, Maurice Post! And someone killed him!”
    “How the hell did you know that?” Billy demanded.
    “Why, it says right in the caption who he is!”
    “You can read it at that distance, in that light?” Billy said incredulously.
    “I– Oh my God.” Malcolm sat bolt upright, looking dazedly about him as though he had this moment realised the room was in near-darkness, with only one shaded lamp alight. “But I can read it. It says, ‘Dr Maurice Post, the distinguished biochemist’–and that’s not right because he told me he was an organochemist, which isn’t the same–‘who was found dead on a development site in Kentish Town yesterday.’ Am I right?”
    “Yes,” Ruth whispered. “I’ve read that caption over