The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1. Adam Thirlwell

      ‘No,’ Lang said. He started to laugh again. ‘I’ve just discovered I’m awake.’

      Morley smiled. ‘We’ll have to put that down as one of the sayings of the week.’ He replaced the rook, sat up and looked across at the table-tennis pair. Gorrell had hit a fast backhand low over the net and Avery was running after the ball.

      ‘They seem to be okay. How about you?’

      ‘Right on top of myself,’ Lang said. His eyes flicked up and down the board and he moved before Morley caught his breath back.

      Usually they went right through into the end-game, but tonight Morley had to concede on the twentieth move.

      ‘Good,’ he said encouragingly. ‘You’ll be able to take on Neill soon. Like another?’

      ‘No. Actually the game bores me. I can see that’s going to be a problem.’

      ‘You’ll face it. Give yourself time to find your legs.’

      Lang pulled one of the Bach albums out of its rack in the record cabinet. He put a Brandenburg Concerto on the turntable and lowered the sapphire. As the rich, contrapuntal patterns chimed out he sat back, listening intently to the music.

      Morley thought: Absurd. How fast can you run? Three weeks ago you were strictly a hep-cat.

      The next few hours passed rapidly.

      At one thirty they went up to the Surgery, where Morley and one of the interns gave them a quick physical, checking their renal clearances, heart rate and reflexes.

      Dressed again, they went into the empty cafeteria for a snack and sat on the stools, arguing what to call this new fifth meal. Avery suggested ‘Midfood’, Morley ‘Munch’.

      At two they took their places in the Neurology theatre, and spent a couple of hours watching films of the hypno-drills of the past three weeks.

      When the programme ended they started down for the gymnasium, the night almost over. They were still relaxed and cheerful; Gorrell led the way, playfully teasing Lang over some of the episodes in the films, mimicking his trance-like walk.

      ‘Eyes shut, mouth open,’ he demonstrated, swerving into Lang, who jumped nimbly out of his way. ‘Look at you; you’re doing it even now. Believe me, Lang, you’re not awake, you’re somnambulating.’ He called back to Morley, ‘Agreed, Doctor?’

      Morley swallowed a yawn. ‘Well, if he is, that makes two of us.’ He followed them along the corridor, doing his best to stay awake, feeling as if he, and not the three men in front of him, had been without sleep for the last three weeks.

      Though the Clinic was quiet, at Neill’s orders all lights along the corridors and down the stairway had been left on. Ahead of them two orderlies checked that windows they passed were safely screened and doors were shut. Nowhere was there a single darkened alcove or shadow-trap.

      Neill had insisted on this, reluctantly acknowledging a possible reflex association between darkness and sleep: ‘Let’s admit it. In all but a few organisms the association is strong enough to be a reflex. The higher mammals depend for their survival on a highly acute sensory apparatus, combined with a varying ability to store and classify information. Plunge them into darkness, cut off the flow of visual data to the cortex, and they’re paralysed. Sleep is a defence reflex. It lowers the metabolic rate, conserves energy, increases the organism’s survival-potential by merging it into its habitat …’

      On the landing halfway down the staircase was a wide, shuttered window that by day opened out on to the parkscape behind the Clinic. As he passed it Gorrell stopped. He went over, released the blind, then unlatched the shutter.

      Still holding it closed, he turned to Morley, watching from the flight above.

      ‘Taboo, Doctor?’ he asked.

      Morley looked at each of the three men in turn. Gorrell was calm and unperturbed, apparently satisfying nothing more sinister than an idle whim. Lang sat on the rail, watching curiously with an expression of clinical disinterest. Only Avery seemed slightly anxious, his thin face wan and pinched. Morley had an irrelevant thought: four a.m. shadow – they’ll need to shave twice a day. Then: why isn’t Neill here? He knew they’d make for a window as soon as they got the chance.

      He noticed Lang giving him an amused smile and shrugged, trying to disguise his uneasiness.

      ‘Go ahead, if you want to. As Neill said, the wires are cut.’

      Gorrell threw back the shutter, and they clustered round the window and stared out into the night. Below, pewter-grey lawns stretched towards the pines and low hills in the distance. A couple of miles away on their left a neon sign winked and beckoned.

      Neither Gorrell nor Lang noticed any reaction, and their interest began to flag within a few moments. Avery felt a sudden lift under the heart, then controlled himself. His eyes began to sift the darkness; the sky was clear and cloudless, and through the stars he picked out the narrow, milky traverse of the galactic rim. He watched it silently, letting the wind cool the sweat on his face and neck.

      Morley stepped over to the window and leaned his elbows on the sill next to Avery. Out of the corner of his eye he carefully waited for any motor tremor – a fluttering eyelid, accelerated breathing – that would signal a reflex discharging. He remembered Neill’s warning: ‘In Man sleep is largely volitional, and the reflex is conditioned by habit. But just because we’ve cut out the hypothalamic loops regulating the flow of consciousness doesn’t mean the reflex won’t discharge down some other pathway. However, sooner or later we’ll have to take the risk and give them a glimpse of the dark side of the sun.’

      Morley was musing on this when something nudged his shoulder.

      ‘Doctor,’ he heard Lang say. ‘Doctor Morley.’

      He pulled himself together with a start. He was alone at the window. Gorrell and Avery were halfway down the next flight of stairs.

      ‘What’s up?’ Morley asked quickly.

      ‘Nothing,’ Lang assured him. ‘We’re just going back to the gym.’ He looked closely at Morley. ‘Are you all right?’

      Morley rubbed his face. ‘God, I must have been asleep.’ He glanced at his watch. Four twenty. They had been at the window for over fifteen minutes. All he could remember was leaning on the sill. ‘And I was worried about you.’

      Everybody was amused, Gorrell particularly. ‘Doctor,’ he drawled, ‘if you’re interested I can recommend you to a good narcotomist.’

      After five o’clock they felt a gradual ebb of tonus from their arm and leg muscles. Renal clearances were falling and breakdown products were slowly clogging their tissues. Their palms felt damp and numb, the soles of their feet like pads of sponge rubber. The sensation was vaguely unsettling, allied to no feelings of mental fatigue.

      The numbness spread. Avery noticed it stretching the skin over his cheekbones, pulling at his temples and giving him a slight frontal migraine. He doggedly turned the pages of a magazine, his hands like lumps of putty.

      Then Neill came down, and they began to revive. Neill looked fresh and spruce, bouncing on the tips of his toes.

      ‘How’s the night shift going?’ he asked briskly, walking round each one of them in turn, smiling as he sized them up. ‘Feel all right?’

      ‘Not too bad, Doctor,’ Gorrell told him. ‘A slight case of insomnia.’

      Neill roared, slapped him on the shoulder and led the way up to the Surgery laboratory.

      At nine, shaved and in fresh clothes, they assembled in the lecture room. They felt cool and alert again. The peripheral numbness and slight head torpor had gone as soon as the detoxication drips had been plugged in, and Neill told them that within a week their kidneys would have enlarged sufficiently to cope on their own.

      All morning and most of the afternoon they worked on