The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1. Adam Thirlwell

Neill asked wryly. ‘Massive feedback from the medulla?’

      ‘No,’ Morley said. ‘There again the psychometric tests have shown absolutely nothing coming up at all. Not a single trauma.’ He stared at the blackboard and then looked round at Neill. ‘Yes, as a cautious estimate I’d say you’ve succeeded.’

      Neill leaned forward on his elbows. He flexed his jaw muscles. ‘I think I’ve more than succeeded. Blocking the medullary synapses has eliminated a lot of material I thought would still be there – the minor quirks and complexes, the petty aggressive phobias, the bad change in the psychic bank. Most of them have gone, or at least they don’t show in the tests. However, they’re the side targets, and thanks to you, John, and to everyone else in the team, we’ve hit a bull’s eye on the main one.’

      Morley murmured something, but Neill ran on in his clipped voice. ‘None of you realize it yet, but this is as big an advance as the step the first ichthyoid took out of the protozoic sea 300 million years ago. At last we’ve freed the mind, raised it out of that archaic sump called sleep, its nightly retreat into the medulla. With virtually one cut of the scalpel we’ve added twenty years to those men’s lives.’

      ‘I only hope they know what to do with them,’ Morley commented.

      ‘Come, John,’ Neill snapped back. ‘That’s not an argument. What they do with the time is their responsibility anyway. They’ll make the most of it, just as we’ve always made the most, eventually, of any opportunity given us. It’s too early to think about it yet, but visualize the universal application of our technique. For the first time Man will be living a full twenty-four hour day, not spending a third of it as an invalid, snoring his way through an eight-hour peepshow of infantile erotica.’

      Tired, Neill broke off and rubbed his eyes. ‘What’s worrying you?’

      Morley made a small, helpless gesture with one hand. ‘I’m not sure, it’s just that I …’ He played with the plastic brain mounted on a stand next to the blackboard. Reflected in one of the frontal whorls was a distorted image of Neill, with a twisted chinless face and vast domed cranium. Sitting alone among the desks in the empty lecture room he looked like an insane genius patiently waiting to take an examination no one could set him.

      Morley turned the model with his finger, watched the image blur and dissolve. Whatever his doubts, Neill was probably the last person to understand them.

      ‘I know all you’ve done is close off a few of the loops in the hypothalamus, and I realize the results are going to be spectacular. You’ll probably precipitate the greatest social and economic revolution since the Fall. But for some reason I can’t get that story of Chekov’s out of my mind – the one about the man who accepts a million-rouble bet that he can’t shut himself up alone for ten years. He tries to, nothing goes wrong, but one minute before the time is up he deliberately steps out of his room. Of course, he’s insane.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it all week.’

      Neill let out a light snort. ‘I suppose you’re trying to say that sleep is some sort of communal activity and that these three men are now isolated, exiled from the group unconscious, the dark oceanic dream. Is that it?’

      ‘Maybe.’

      ‘Nonsense, John. The further we hold back the unconscious the better. We’re reclaiming some of the marshland. Physiologically sleep is nothing more than an inconvenient symptom of cerebral anoxaemia. It’s not that you’re afraid of missing, it’s the dream. You want to hold on to your front-row seat at the peepshow.’

      ‘No,’ Morley said mildly. Sometimes Neill’s aggressiveness surprised him; it was almost as if he regarded sleep itself as secretly discreditable, a concealed vice. ‘What I really mean is that for better or worse Lang, Gorrell and Avery are now stuck with themselves. They’re never going to be able to get away, not even for a couple of minutes, let alone eight hours. How much of yourself can you stand? Maybe you need eight hours off a day just to get over the shock of being yourself. Remember, you and I aren’t always going to be around, feeding them with tests and films. What will happen if they get fed up with themselves?’

      ‘They won’t,’ Neill said. He stood up, suddenly bored by Morley’s questions. ‘The total tempo of their lives will be lower than ours, these stresses and tensions won’t begin to crystallize. We’ll soon seem like a lot of manic-depressives to them, running round like dervishes half the day, then collapsing into a stupor the other half.’

      He moved towards the door and reached out to the light switch. ‘Well, I’ll see you at six o’clock.’

      They left the lecture room and started down the corridor together.

      ‘What are you doing now?’ Morley asked.

      Neill laughed. ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘I’m going to get a good night’s sleep.’

      

      A little after midnight Avery and Gorrell were playing table-tennis in the floodlit gymnasium. They were competent players, and passed the ball backwards and forwards with a minimum of effort. Both felt strong and alert; Avery was sweating slightly, but this was due to the arc-lights blazing down from the roof – maintaining, for safety’s sake, an illusion of continuous day – rather than to any excessive exertion of his own. The oldest of the three volunteers, a tall and somewhat detached figure, with a lean, closed face, he made no attempt to talk to Gorrell and concentrated on adjusting himself to the period ahead. He knew he would find no trace of fatigue, but as he played he carefully checked his respiratory rhythms and muscle tonus, and kept one eye on the clock.

      Gorrell, a jaunty, self-composed man, was also subdued. Between strokes he glanced cautiously round the gymnasium, noting the hangar-like walls, the broad, polished floor, the shuttered skylights in the roof. Now and then, without realizing it, he fingered the circular trepan scar at the back of his head.

      Out in the centre of the gymnasium a couple of armchairs and a sofa had been drawn up round a gramophone, and here Lang was playing chess with Morley, doing his section of night duty. Lang hunched forward over the chessboard. Wiry-haired and aggressive, with a sharp nose and mouth, he watched the pieces closely. He had played regularly against Morley since he arrived at the Clinic four months earlier, and the two were almost equally matched, with perhaps a slight edge to Morley. But tonight Lang had opened with a new attack and after ten moves had completed his development and begun to split Morley’s defence. His mind felt clear and precise, focused sharply on the game in front of him, though only that morning had he finally left the cloudy limbo of post-hypnosis through which he and the two others had drifted for three weeks like lobotomized phantoms.

      Behind him, along one wall of the gymnasium, were the offices housing the control unit. Over his shoulder he saw a face peering at him through the circular observation window in one of the doors. Here, at constant alert, a group of orderlies and interns sat around waiting by their emergency trollies. (The end door, into a small ward containing three cots, was kept carefully locked.) After a few moments the face withdrew. Lang smiled at the elaborate machinery watching over him. His transference on to Neill had been positive and he had absolute faith in the success of the experiment. Neill had assured him that, at worst, the sudden accumulation of metabolites in his bloodstream might induce a mild torpor, but his brain would be unimpaired.

      ‘Nerve fibre, Robert,’ Neill had told him time and again, ‘never fatigues. The brain cannot tire.’

      While he waited for Morley to move he checked the time from the clock mounted against the wall. Twelve twenty. Morley yawned, his face drawn under the grey skin. He looked tired and drab. He slumped down into the armchair, face in one hand. Lang reflected how frail and primitive those who slept would soon seem, their minds sinking off each evening under the load of accumulating toxins, the edge of their awareness worn and frayed. Suddenly he realized that at that very moment Neill himself was asleep. A curiously disconcerting vision of Neill, huddled in a rumpled bed two floors above, his blood-sugar low, and his mind drifting, rose before him.

      Lang