The Complete Short Stories

‘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 Neil 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 a series of IQ, associative and performance tests. Neill kept them hard at it, steering swerving blips of light around a cathode screen, juggling with intricate numerical and geometric sequences, elaborating word-chains.

He seemed more than satisfied with the results.

‘Shorter access times, deeper memory traces,’ he pointed out to Morley when the three men had gone off at five for the rest period. ‘Barrels of prime psychic marrow.’ He gestured at the test cards spread out across the desk in his office. ‘And you were worried about the Unconscious.

Look at those Rorschachs of Lang’s. Believe me, John, I’ll soon have him reminiscing about his foetal experiences.’

Morley nodded, his first doubts fading.

Over the next two weeks either he or Neil! was with the men continuously, sitting out under the floodlights in the centre of the gymnasium, assessing their assimilation of the eight extra hours, carefully watching for any symptoms of withdrawal. Neil! carried everyone along, from one programme phase to the next, through the test periods, across the long hours of the interminable nights, his powerful ego injecting enthusiasm into every member of the unit.

Privately, Morley worried about the increasing emotional overlay apparent in the relationship between Neill and the three men. He was afraid they were becoming conditioned to identify Neil! with the experiment. (Ring the meal bell and the subject salivates; but suddenly stop ringing the bell after a long period of conditioning and it temporarily loses the ability to feed itself. The hiatus barely harms a dog, but it might trigger disaster in an already oversensitized psyche.)

Neil! was fully alert to this. At the end of the first two weeks, when he caught a bad head cold after sitting up all night and decided to spend the next day in bed, he. called Morley into his office.

‘The transference is getting much too positive. It needs to be eased off a little.’

‘I agree,’ Morley said. ‘But how?’

‘Tell them I’ll be asleep for forty-eight hours,’ Neill said. He picked up a stack of reports, plates and test cards and bundled them under one arm. ‘I’ve deliberately overdosed myself with sedative to get some rest. I’m worn to a shadow, full fatigue syndrome, load-cells screaming. Lay it on.’

‘Couldn’t that be rather drastic?’ Morley asked. ‘They’ll hate you for it.’

But Neil! only smiled and went off to requisition an office near his bedroom.