Sleep and His Brother

by Peter Dickinson

  “You dare!” she hissed. She blushed easily and frowned convincingly, but her glance would have done credit to Brewer Street. Rue chortled as the door slammed.

  “It’s good to be alive in a permissive society,” he said, and tossed the paper to the floor.

  The picture was a poor one, with that dead look which is all the police photographer ever elicits from his sullen sitter. Pibble doubted whether any but a trained eye would recognise Gorton from it.

  “Interesting bod,” said Kelly. “Highly inventive in a very narrow discipline. Did you know we had one of the kids here?”

  “Marilyn? I’ve met her.”

  “You’re a citizen of a mealy-mouthed stupid country, Jimmy, all hypnotized with liberal drivel. A man like that should have gone for research—poke about in him, find out what makes him bonkers, keep him alive as long as any bits of him are useful, then put him down. And in twenty years’ time there wouldn’t be any more like that—we’d know how to spot them in the ovum and abort them. And in a hundred years’ time we’d be able to tinker with their genes and pow! another model citizen rolls off the assembly lines.”

  “Don’t give yourself nightmares.”

  “Bloody sight more deterrent than hanging. Bloody sight more useful than locking him up for twenty years and letting him out in time for his old-age pension. But the way things are we’ll still be squatting round jabbering about ethics when the hundred years are up.”

  “Are you trying to tinker with genes?”

  “Christ! With the kit I can buy in this job! Until Ram found us fairy godfather I was doing my research with a thermometer and a stethoscope and trotting down to Saint Ursula’s with a little bag of samples once a week. If you want to know, Jimmy, my prime research tool has been a pencil and paper.”

  “What can you achieve with that?”

  “Write down two and two and notice that it makes four.”

  “Do you need a scintillation counter for that?”

  “I’ve got to check my sums, haven’t I?”

  “Mr. Thanatos says your part of the research is very important.”

  “Ho! Does he just? What caused that flash of sanity?”

  “You’re researching on the physical side, and he doesn’t want a life after death if it isn’t physical.”

  “Oh, Mary and all the Holy Angels! That a young man should have to finance his research on that kind of codswallop!”

  “What does your research consist of?”

  “You wouldn’t understand if I told you.”

  “Try.”

  Rue laughed, the embodiment of professional scorn.

  “When you get your Nobel Prize,” said Pibble, “you’re going to keep popping up on the telly, explaining what you got it for to ten million viewers just as dim as me. You might as well get a bit of practice.”

  Rue sneered at him, rubbed his chin, looked at him again, eased his crotch, and held up a bony finger for the class’s attention.

  “I am an endocrinologist. Glands to you. The endocrine system sends out signals to the rest of the body telling it how to react, how to function, how to grow, when to stop growing, how to repair itself and fight off disease and maintain its own inner balance. The signals take the form of a chemical code. Some of them stimulate activities and some inhibit them. Your endocrine glands are dotted hither and yon round your decrepit cadaver, but the little beggars all work together by signalling to each other—more this, less that—and affecting each other’s output of hormones. Hormones, Jimmy. Remember the word, because that’s what we cunning specialists call the juices which the glands shove out by way of signals. We give them a nifty name to show we understand ’em—we’ve got ’em taped. Only we don’t and we haven’t. We understand a bit here and a bit there. We’ve spotted fifty separate hormones, of which fifteen are major ones, but the overall picture remains a mess of guesses.

  “Only, out in the wilds, all unbeknownst, there’s a brilliant and handsome young Irishman working with a group of kids called cathypnics. Next year, God bless my native wit, there are going to be seventeen known major hormones, and on top of that there’s going to be a glorious chart accounting for all possible hormone structures—several thousand—and explaining why so few of them actually work and finally glory, glory—predicting the existence, structure, and function of half a dozen ones which haven’t been noticed yet but must exist.”

  “Crippen!” said Pibble. “That sounds like ten men’s work. How did you manage that?”

  “Well, you may have noticed that the kids here are a bit different from other kids. You have? Great. You’ll make a detective yet. They suffer from one straight hormone deficiency, which I got taped some time ago. All cathypnics have that missing; it’s hereditary; it makes ’em a bit stupid, but not enough for anyone to think they’ve got something physically wrong with them—in fact there are quite a lot of ’em about. They’re all men, by the way; the women can carry the gene, but it doesn’t affect them; they simply pass it on unknowing, and then it’s got a fifty-fifty chance of surfacing in each one of the next lot of lads, which is the Lord Almighty’s idea of a good joke. That’s what we call the heterozygous form of the disease. But if both parents carry the gene, then you can get the homozygous form, which is what the kids here have got. In their case there’s another hormone, very closely linked with the first one, which has come out kinky. It’s there, all right, but it’s got its message slightly wrong. Now think of this as a code. While it’s going out OK along the wires you can’t crack it, but as soon as it becomes a bit garbled you’ve got a clue to go on, and once you’ve got that you can work on the ungarbled bits—and from there, in this case, you can go on to cracking a whole bookful of similar codes. I, Reuben Saint John Gogarty Kelly, have done that thing. And you, toy old mate, are the first person in the world to hear about it.”

  “That’s thrilling,” said Pibble. “Like Michael Ventris.”

  “Michael who?”

  “Oh, he was a young architect who cracked the Minoan linear B script and proved that it was early Greek, and after that a whole lot of puzzles fell into place.”

  Rue’s act shattered at the wrong note, as a glass is said to at the right one.

  “That’s all balls!” he shouted. “Can’t you get it into your head that I’m doing something important?”

  “It seems a funny place for you to be doing it,” said Pibble mollifyingly.

  “Funny it is, I don’t think. I worked at Saint Ursula’s under an old dotard called Professor Kington, who was just not so blind that he didn’t spot he had a bright boy on his hands. Old Cory, the G.P. who used to come up here twice a week to look at the kids’ tongues, met him at some sort of medical bean feast and Kington had the wits to guess that it might be a hormone deficiency disease. Practically all the discoveries in the hormone field have been made by research on patients who are missing something, Jimmy.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “It’s obvious. You can’t track the juices which make a healthy liver work. But if it’s not working, and you can spot a difference between what’s going into it and what goes into a healthy liver, you’re on to something. Anyway, Kington hustled a grant for me out of his pals at Pharmacoid Limited for me to come up here and see whether there was anything interesting. Six months’ soft money.”

  “Soft money?”

  “Hard money is what your hospital pays you; or your patients; or the NHS. Soft money is pennies from heaven, some dirty big company deciding to earn a bit of tax relief by financing medical research. They paid me a salary, and paid Saint Ursula’s for the cost of my using their kit—blood counts, spectroscopy, this and that. After six months I knew, I was on to something, so Kington hustled me another eighteen; he didn’t know his arse from his elbow, which is a weakness in a doctor, but when it came to licking the boots of industry you couldn’t beat him—I’ll grant him t
hat.”

  “Doctor Silver seems to have the knack.”

  “Ram?” said Rue sharply. “He doesn’t know a thing. He’s your pure, otherworldly boffin. He’s just been lucky with Mr. T. He’d never have got sixpence out of toughs like Pharmacoid.”

  Pibble was not in a position to say how pleasing he found it that Rue should try to protect his phony colleague from the prying eyes of an elderly policeman. Hitherto he’d seemed good company in the Black Boot, but not markedly altruistic in his dealings with the rest of the world.

  “Kington gave me a bit more time on the machines,” said Rue. “He even got the word round his staff that they were not to spit in my face when I asked them for a hand. He had a notion that we were going to pip Campbell at the Maudsley with the next big breakthrough—typical of him that he hardly knew what the Americans were up to. And you heard that ‘we,’ Jimmy. It was going to be Kington and Kelly’s discovery, Kington’s knighthood, when he’d done about as much original work on it as a knob designer does on a TV set. Still, all I could do was plug along, and then there was a takeover at Pharmacoid and Kington’s cronies got the push and just when my grants came up for renewal a little toad of a man came down from the company to check on my research. I told him I was going to produce results in another year, which was about three times as fast as anyone else could have done it; but I was stupid enough to let on that the results wouldn’t include Pharmacoid selling two hundred million pills a year to the suckers on the NHS. I told Toad his firm should consider itself bloody lucky to be financing a breakthrough in medical knowledge, though I didn’t then know how big a breakthrough it was going to be. Toad told me that the firm had decided to retrench on its prestige advertising. End of soft money.”

  “But you stayed on?”

  “I had a sod of a time. I did my nut, for a start, and told Kington what I thought of him for letting it happen, and after that I couldn’t use the kit or staff at Saint Ursula’s.”

  “But Pharmacoid had stopped paying for them anyway.”

  “Oh, I could have got by by smarming to a few chaps for use of this or that on Saturday mornings. Glad I didn’t have to. If I’d gone on like that—taking little samples, measuring radio­active iodine—I wouldn’t have sat down to read a lot of literature I’d missed and then got out my pencil and paper and cracked my code. I’ve a lot to thank Mr. Toad for.”

  “What did you live on?”

  “Posey got me three hundred a year out of the trustees. It meant getting rid of old Cory, but they only hadn’t done that years before because there was no one else and they thought it would break the old ninny’s heart. I moved into a room here, and eat the bloody awful food here. I run a clapped-out old Morris which I pay for by correcting the papers of Pakistanis cramming for their Membership.”

  He poked his toe at a foot-high column of foolscap on the desk.

  “Screw them,” he said. “I’ve done with that. I gave up smoking, Jimmy. I blew a fifth of my income on one pint of Guinness and a tot of whiskey a day. For five months you’ve been swilling your horrible horse piss in the company of a saint, and never once have you stood him a double of the good stuff without expecting to be stood your pint in return.”

  “I’ll put that right, your holiness.”

  “You’ll have to hurry, or you won’t catch me before the name of Reuben Kelly is blazoned in neon along the top of the BMA building, and I’m rolling along to Buck House for my KCVO.”

  “Let’s make it tomorrow, before you’re famous. Famous men make me sweat. What do you mean by results?”

  “Results?”

  “You told the Pharmacoid man it would be a year before you got results.”

  “Oh, that. Paper proving the existence of the two hormones with accounts of the experiments involved; one cathypnic child half cured by injections of the missing hormone; another ditto with a drug to suppress the kinky hormone and injections of the straight one; a third fully cured by both treatments together. Three mongol kids with their disease unaffected by similar treatment. Outline of Kelly’s Theory—which is basically a very fancy bit of math—with predictions about the existence of other hormones.”

  “That’s the theory about all possible hormones, is it? It sounds a bit like the periodic table of atoms.”

  “Yeah, they’ve something in common—about as much as a Maserati has with a wheelbarrow.”

  “You did say ‘cured’?”

  “Yup. Einstein would have got nowhere if he’d had doctors to assess his papers. They’d have wanted to be shown a bit of light bending. Doctors are too stupid to believe anything they can’t actually see. Kelly’s Theory works. It accounts for all known phenomena in the field in a pure and elegant series of rational steps. But nobody will believe a word of it until I show them a cathypnic child with a normal temperature and sleeping normal hours.”

  “And no more McNair?”

  Kelly had been describing his achievements with jaunty satisfaction, letting all that bottled-up triumph flood out, unstoppable once the first dam of reserve was broken. But now he twitched his feet off the table and looked coldly at Pibble.

  “What the hell are you getting at?” he said.

  “I only meant it looks as if one result of your work will be the disappearance of cathypny.”

  Rue continued to look at him. Pibble thought it an odd example of his friend’s arrogance that he should take so amiss a mild misunderstanding of his exposition, even if it was the first time Kelly’s Theory had been revealed to the wondering world.

  “You haven’t been listening,” said Rue at last. “You think I’m going to come up with a pill which will turn all the kids here into bright, normal, healthy boys and girls, hey presto!”

  “No. I don’t imagine you can do much for the existing ones, except make them stay awake longer and live longer. But if you can get at them while they are still babies …”

  “And have two lots of hormones fighting it out in their teeny bloodstreams? Or keep them hopped on the suppressor drug, and the hell with side effects? Institute nationwide scanning system to check all newborn babies for cathypny—i.e., train several thousand more technicians to use electron microscopes to distinguish between almost indistinguishable molecules in blood samples? Lot of money to spend on finding forty kids a year. This is a rare disease, mister, and we get every single one who survives, because even the most boneheaded GP is bound to spot the cathypnic ring in the end. Quite a few must die before that, of course, because they’re erratic at producing antibodies and phagocytes and all the other little beasts that keep you from dying every time you catch cold.”

  “But still …”

  “Oh, you make me sick! All of you. The kids here are sitting pretty. There’s a lot of other diseases for you to worry about—babies born that even their own mothers can hardly bear to look at but which our sloppy society insists on keeping alive though they’re only not vegetables because they’re dirtier than vegetables. But cathypnics are happy. They’re warm. They’re not lonely. They’re loved and coddled. If they do get hurt, they’ve a very high pain threshold, so they hardly notice. No old age, no neglect, not a care in the world. And then they die as easy as falling asleep. But even if that weren’t true, you’re not seriously going to argue that sorting out their troubles is one millionth as important as learning how the machinery of the average, useful citizen turns over.”

  “Do you know, I was set that very equation, in slightly different terms, just before lunch. I can’t answer it. Will you be able to tidy up your theory with your pencil and paper and scintillation counter and a bit of looking into children’s eyes?”

  “Looking what?”

  “When I came in this morning you were looking into the eyes of one of your patients, and then you told us that another one, Mickey something, had six days to live.”

  “If you tried to catch burglars by that kind of reasoning,
no wonder they gave you the boot. You know about the cathypnic ring, so you think I can use it to see how fast the kids are dying. Ho-ho. That ring is a genetic marker, a side effect of their heredity. Any doctor, shown a patient in a coma, looks into the eyes because the coma might be caused by a cerebral tumour, whose effect you can see in the fundus. I check my ward now and then to make sure none of the brats are dozing there for the wrong reasons. That’s all. These are shallow waters, Jimmy, but you’re out of your depth.”

  “Sorry. You said something this morning about … was it biopsies still to do? What does that mean?”

  “Oh, Christ!” said Kelly wearily. “The ecstasy of educating you is not as great as you imagine, Jimmy, my old mate. I’ve work to do.”

  Ostentatiously he took the top paper from the pile of foolscap, made a neat note in green ball-point in the margin, and started to read.

  “I’ll be off in a moment,” said Pibble, gawky with the sudden rebuff. “I got a message from Doll that you wanted to see me.”

  Rue looked at him, put the paper back onto the pile, and took a flimsy green memorandum sheet from the tray beside it.

  “Hell, yes, I do,” he said. “I’d forgotten in that orgy of popular science. What on God’s earth is this about?”

  “STAFF ORGANIZATION,” said the paper. “On Mr. Thanatos’ instructions Mr. James Pibble is authorized to inquire into and report on all aspects of staff organization at the McNair foundation. I have every confidence that heads of departments will cooperate. PDJ.”

  “How did Posey take that?” said Rue, sharply genial now.

  “Not very well, I’m afraid.”

  “I thought not. She’s signed it with her initials. That means she’s furious. You’d better look out, Jimmy.”

  “It’s a misunderstanding. It doesn’t mean anything. I’m not going to do it. I told her.”

  “You’d still better look out. You don’t know our Posey. She’s a barely suppressed paranoid, and she goes berserk when she thinks anyone is trespassing onto her empire. Six months ago that dismal little switchboard in her room went dis, and superscientist Kelly was called in. I found a hairpin which she’d dropped across the terminals. I teased her, admit, but if she’d had a knife in her hand she’d have gone for me, simply for showing that her control of the establishment was marginally less than total. Cross her in something important and there’s nothing she wouldn’t do. Nothing.”