The Complete Short Stories

It was a little after five thirty a. m. After working hopelessly on the three men for a couple of hours, he was close to exhaustion. He looked down at them, lying inertly in their cots, canvas sheets buckled up to their chins. They had barely changed, but their eyes were open and unblinking, and their faces had the empty, reflexless look of psychic zero.

An intern bent over Lang, thumbing a hypodermic. Morley stared at the floor. ‘I think they would have gone anyway.’

‘How can you say that?’ Neill clamped his lips together. He felt frustrated and impotent. He knew Morley was probably right — the three men were in terminal withdrawal, unresponsive to either insulin or electrotherapy, and a vice-tight catatonic seizure didn’t close in out of nowhere — but as always refused to admit anything without absolute proof.

He led the way into his office and shut the door.

‘Sit down.’ He pulled a chair out for Morley and prowled off round the room, slamming a fist into his palm.

‘All right, John. What is it?’

Morley picked up one of the test cards lying on the desk, balanced it on a corner and spun it between his fingers. Phrases swam through his mind, tentative and uncertain, like blind fish.

‘What do you want me to say?’ he asked. ‘Reactivation of the infantile imago? A regression into the great, slumbering womb? Or to put it more simply still — just a fit of pique?’

‘Go on.’

Morley shrugged. ‘Continual consciousness is more than the brain can stand. Any signal repeated often enough eventually loses its meaning. Try saying the word "sleep" fifty times. After a point the brain’s selfawareness dulls. It’s no longer able to grasp who or why it is, and it rides adrift.’

‘What do we do then?’

‘Nothing. Short of re-scoring all the way down to Lumbar 1. The central nervous system can’t stand narcotomy.’

Neil! shook his head. ‘You’re lost,’ he said curtly. ‘Juggling with generalities isn’t going to bring those men back. First, we’ve got to find out what happened to them, what they actually felt and saw.’

Morley frowned dubiously. ‘That jungle is marked "private". Even if you do, is a psychotic’s withdrawal drama going to make any sense?’

‘Of course it will. However insane it seems to us, it was real enough to them. If we know the ceiling fell in or the whole gym filled with ice-cream or turned into a maze, we’ve got something to work on.’ He sat down on the desk. ‘Do you remember that story of Chekov’s you told me about?’

"The Bet"? Yes.’

‘I read it last night. Curious. It’s a lot nearer what you’re really trying to say than you know.’ He gazed round the office. ‘This room in which the man is penned for ten years symbolizes the mind driven to the furthest limits of selfawareness… Something very similar happened to Avery, Gorrell and Lang. They must have reached a stage beyond which they could no longer contain the idea of their own identity. But far from being unable to grasp the idea, I’d say that they were conscious of nothing else. Like the man in the spherical mirror, who can only see a single gigantic eye staring back at him.’

‘So you think their withdrawal is a straightforward escape from the eye, the overwhelming ego?’

‘Not escape,’ Neill corrected. ‘The psychotic never escapes from anything. He’s much more sensible. He merely readjusts reality to suit himself. Quite a trick to learn, too. The room in Chekov’s story gives me an idea as to how they might have re-adjusted. Their particular equivalent of this room was the gym. I’m beginning to realize it was a mistake to put them in there — all those lights blazing down, the huge floor, high walls. They merely exaggerate the sensation of overload. In fact the gym might easily have become an external projection of their own egos.’

Neill drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘My guess is that at this moment they’re either striding around in there the size of hundred-foot giants, or else they’ve cut it down to their own dimensions. More probably that. They’ve just pulled the gym in on themselves.’

Morley grinned bleakly. ‘So all we’ve got to do now is pump them full of honey and apomorphine and coax them out. Suppose they refuse?’

‘They won’t,’ Neill said. ‘You’ll see.’

There was a rap on the door. An intern stuck his head through.

‘Lang’s coming out of it, Doctor. He’s calling for you.’

Neill bounded out.

Morley followed him into the ward.

Lang was lying in his cot, body motionless under the canvas sheet. His lips were parted slightly. No sound came from them but Morley, bending over next to Neill, could see his hyoid bone vibrating in spasms.

‘He’s very faint,’ the intern warned.

Neill pulled up a chair and sat down next to the cot. He made a visible effort of concentration, flexing his shoulders. He bent his head close to Lang’s and listened.

Five minutes later it came through again.

Lang’s lips quivered. His body arched under the sheet, straining at the buckles, and then subsided.