The Complete Short Stories

WHITBY: The proverbial eight hours. Ask anyone and they say automatically ‘eight hours’. As a matter of fact you sleep about ten and a half hours, like the majority of people. I’ve timed you on a number of occasions. I myself sleep eleven. Yet thirty years ago people did indeed sleep eight hours, and a century before that they slept six or seven. In Vasari’s Lives one reads of Michelangelo sleeping for only four or five hours, painting all day at the age of eighty and then working through the night over his anatomy table with a candle strapped to his forehead. Now he’s regarded as a prodigy, but it was unremarkable then. How do you think the ancients, from Plato to Shakespeare, Aristotle to Aquinas, were able to cram so much work into their lives? Simply because they had an extra six or seven hours every day. Of course, a second disadvantage under which we labour is a lowered basal metabolic rate — another factor no one will explain.

POWERS: I suppose you could take the view that the lengthened sleep interval is a compensation device, a sort of mass neurotic attempt to escape from the terrifying pressures of urban life in the late twentieth century.

WHITBY: You could, but you’d be wrong. It’s simply a matter of biochemistry. The ribonucleic acid templates which unravel the protein chains in all living organisms are wearing out, the dies inscribing the protoplasmic signature have become blunted. After all, they’ve been running now for over a thousand million years. It’s time to re-tool. Just as an individual organism’s life span is finite, or the life of a yeast colony or a given species, so the life of an entire biological kingdom is of fixed duration. It’s always been assumed that the evolutionary slope reaches forever upwards, but in fact the peak has already been reached, and the pathway now leads downward to the common biological grave. It’s a despairing and at present unacceptable vision of the future, but it’s the only one. Five thousand centuries from now our descendants, instead of being multi-brained star-men, will probably be naked prognathous idiots with hair on their foreheads, grunting their way through the remains of this Clinic like Neolithic men caught in a macabre inversion of time. Believe me, I pity them, as I pity myself. My total failure, my absolute lack of any moral or biological right to existence, is implicit in every cell of my body…

The tape ended, the spool ran free and stopped. Powers closed the machine, then massaged his face. Coma sat quietly, watching him and listening to the chimp playing with a box of puzzle dice.

‘As far as Whitby could tell,’ Powers said, ‘the silent genes represent a last desperate effort of the biological kingdom to keep its head above the rising waters. Its total life period is determined by the amount of radiation emitted by the sun, and once this reaches a certain point the sure-death line has been passed and extinction is inevitable. To compensate for this, alarms have been built in which alter the form of the organism and adapt it to living in a hotter radiological climate. Softskinned organisms develop hard shells, these contain heavy metals as radiation screens. New organs of perception are developed too. According to Whitby, though, it’s all wasted effort in the long run — but sometimes I wonder.’

He smiled at Coma and shrugged. ‘Well, let’s talk about something else. How long have you known Kaldren?’

‘About three weeks. Feels like ten thousand years.’

‘How do you find him now? We’ve been rather out of touch lately.’

Coma grinned. ‘I don’t seem to see very much of him either. He makes me sleep all the time. Kaidren has many strange talents, but he lives just for himself. You mean a lot to him, doctor. In fact, you’re my one serious rival.’

‘I thought he couldn’t stand the sight of me.’

‘Oh, that’s just a sort of surface symptom. He really thinks of you continually. That’s why we spend all our time following you around.’ She eyed Powers shrewdly. ‘I think he feels guilty about something.’

‘Guilty?’ Powers exclaimed. ‘He does? I thought I was supposed to be the guilty one.’

‘Why?’ she pressed. She hesitated, then said: ‘You carried out some experimental surgical technique on him, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Powers admitted. ‘It wasn’t altogether a success, like so much of what I seem to be involved with. If Kaldren feels guilty, I suppose it’s because he feels he must take some of the responsibility.’

He looked down at the girl, her intelligent eyes watching him closely. ‘For one or two reasons it may be necessary for you to know. You said Kaldren paced around all night and didn’t get enough sleep. Actually he doesn’t get any sleep at all.’

The girl nodded. ‘You…’ She made a snapping gesture with her fingers.