“Sigmund put down the Willing Blonde, who was now in a situation where her co-operation or lack of it would make no difference at all.
“‘I didn’t snore,’ he admitted. ‘But I didn’t sleep either.’
“‘You still feel perfectly wide awake?’
“‘Yes—I don’t understand it at all.’
“Uncle Hymie and Irma exchanged triumphant glances. ‘You’ve made history, Sigmund,’ said the professor. ‘You’re the first man to be able to do without sleep.’ And so the news was broken to the astonished and not yet indignant guinea-pig.
“I know,” continued Harry Purvis, not altogether accurately, “that many of you would like the scientific details of Uncle Hymie’s discovery. But I don’t know them, and if I did they would be too technical to give here. I’ll merely point out, since I see some expressions which a less trusting man might describe as sceptical, that there is nothing really startling about such a development. Sleep, after all, is a highly variable factor. Look at Edison, who managed on two or three hours a day right up to the end of his life. It’s true that men can’t go without sleep indefinitely—but some animals can, so it clearly isn’t a fundamental part of metabolism.”
“What animals can go without sleep?” asked somebody, not so much in disbelief as out of pure curiosity.
“Well—er—of course!—the fish that live out in deep water beyond the continental shelf. If they ever fell asleep, they’d be snapped up by other fish, or they’d lose their trim and sink to the bottom. So they’ve got to keep awake all of their lives.”
(I am still, by the way, trying to find if this statement of Harry’s is true. I’ve ever caught him out yet on a scientific fact, though once or twice I’ve had to give him the benefit of the doubt. But back to Uncle Hymie.)
“It took some time,” continued Harry, “for Sigmund to realise what an astonishing thing had been done to him. An enthusiastic commentary from his uncle, enlarging upon all the glorious possibilities that had been opened up for him now that he had been freed from the tyranny of sleep, made it difficult to concentrate on the problem. But presently he was able to raise the question that had been worrying him. ‘How long will this last?’ he enquired.
“The professor and Irma looked at each other. Then Uncle Hymie coughed a little nervously and replied: ‘We’re not quite sure yet. That’s one thing we’ve got to find out. It’s perfectly possible that the effect will be permanent.’
“‘You mean that I’ll never be able to sleep again?’
“‘Not “Never be able to.” “Never want to.” However, I could probably work out some way of reversing the process if you’re really anxious. Cost a lot of money, though.’
“Sigmund left hastily, promising to keep in touch and to report his progress every day. His brain was still in a turmoil, but first he had to find his wife and to convince her that he would never snore again.
“She was quite willing to believe him, and they had a touching reunion. But in the small hours of next morning it got very dull lying there with no-one to talk to, and presently Sigmund tiptoed away from his sleeping wife. For the first time, the full reality of his position was beginning to dawn upon him; what on earth was he going to do with the extra eight hours a day that had descended upon him as an unwanted gift?
“You might think that Sigmund had a wonderful—indeed an unprecedented—opportunity for leading a fuller life by acquiring that culture and knowledge which we all feel we’d like—if only we had the time to do something about it. He could read every one of the great classics that are just names to most people; he could study art, music or philosophy, and fill his mind with all the finest treasures of the human intellect. In fact, a good many of you are probably envying him right now.
“Well, it didn’t work out that way. The fact of the matter is that even the highest grade mind needs some relaxation, and cannot devote itself to serious pursuits indefinitely. It was true that Sigmund had no further need of sleep, but he needed entertainment to occupy him during the long, empty hours of darkness.
“Civilisation, he soon discovered, was not designed to fit the requirements of a man who couldn’t sleep. He might have been better off in Paris or New York, but in London practically everything closed down at 11 p.m., only a few coffee-bars were still open at midnight, and by 1 a.m.—well, the less said about any establishments still operating, the better.
“At first, when the weather was good, he occupied his time going for long walks, but after several encounters with inquisitive and sceptical policemen he gave this up. So he took to the car and drove all over London during the small hours, discovering all sorts of odd places he never knew existed. He soon had a nodding acquaintance with many night-watchmen, Covent Garden porters, and milkmen, as well as Fleet Street journalists and printers who had to work while the rest of the world slept. But as Sigmund was not the sort of person who took a great interest in his fellow human beings, this amusement soon palled and he was thrown back upon his own limited resources.
“His wife, as might be expected, was not at all happy about his nocturnal wanderings. He had told her the whole story, and though she had found it hard to believe she was forced to accept the evidence of her own eyes. But having done so, it seemed that she would prefer a husband who snored and stayed at home to one who tip-toed away around midnight and was not always back by breakfast.
“This upset Sigmund greatly. He had spent or promised a good deal of money (as he kept reminding Rachel) and taken a considerable personal risk to cure himself of his malaise. And was she grateful? No; she just wanted an itemised account of the time he spent when he should have been sleeping but wasn’t. It was most unfair and showed a lack of trust which he found very disheartening.
“Slowly the secret spread through a wider circle, though the Snorings (who were a very close-knit clan) managed to keep it inside the family. Uncle Lorenz, who was in the diamond business, suggested that Sigmund take up a second job as it seemed a pity to waste all that additional working time. He produced a list of one-man occupations, which could be carried on equally easily by day or night, but Sigmund thanked him kindly and said he saw no reason why he should pay two lots of income tax.
“By the end of six weeks of twenty-four-hour days, Sigmund had had enough. He felt he couldn’t read another book, go to another nightclub or listen to another gramophone record. His great gift, which many foolish men would have paid a fortune to possess, had become an intolerable burden. There was nothing to do but to go and see Uncle Hymie again.
“The professor had been expecting him, and there was no need to threaten legal proceedings, to appeal to the solidarity of the Snorings, or to make pointed remarks about breach of contract.
“‘All right, all right,’ grumbled the scientist. ‘I don’t believe in casting pearls before swine. I knew you’d want the antidote sooner or later, and because I’m a generous man it’ll only cost you fifty guineas. But don’t blame me if you snore worse than ever.’
“‘I’ll take that risk,’ said Sigmund. As far as he and Rachel were concerned, it had come to separate rooms anyway by this time.
“He averted his gaze as the professor’s assistant (not Irma this time, but an angular brunette) filled a terrifyingly large hypodermic with Uncle Hymie’s latest brew. Before he had absorbed half of it, he had fallen asleep.
“For once, Uncle Hymie looked quite disconcerted. ‘I didn’t expect it to act that fast,’ he said. ‘Well, let’s get him to bed—we can’t have him lying around the lab.’
“By next morning, Sigmund was still fast asleep and showed no reactions to any stimuli. His breathing was imperceptible; he seemed to be in a trance rather than a slumber, and the professor was getting a little alarmed.
“His worry did not last for long, however. A few hours later an angry guinea-pig bit him on the finger, blood-poisoning set in, and the editor of Nature was just able to get the obituary notice into the current issue before it went to press.
“Sig
mund slept through all this excitement and was still blissfully unconscious when the family got back from the Golders Green Crematorium and assembled for a council of war. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, but it was obvious that the late Professor Hymie had made another unfortunate mistake, and no-one knew how to set about unravelling it.
“Cousin Meyer, who ran a furniture store in the Mile End Road, offered to take charge of Sigmund if he could use him on display in his shop window to demonstrate the luxury of the beds he stocked. However, it was felt that this would be too undignified, and the family vetoed the scheme.
“But it gave them ideas. By now they were getting a little fed up with Sigmund; this flying from one extreme to another was really too much. So why not take the easy way out and, as one wit expressed it, let sleeping Sigmunds lie?
“There was no point in calling in another expensive expert who might only make matters worse (though how, no-one could quite imagine). It cost nothing to feed Sigmund, he required only a modicum of medical attention, and while he was sleeping there was certainly no danger of him breaking the terms of Grand-uncle Reuben’s will. When this argument was rather tactfully put to Rachel, she quite saw the strength of it. The policy demanded required a certain amount of patience, but the ultimate reward would be considerable.
“The more Rachel examined it, the more she liked the idea. The thought of being a wealthy near-widow appealed to her; it had such interesting and novel possibilities. And, to tell the truth, she had had quite enough of Sigmund to last her for the five years until he came into his inheritance.
“In due course that time arrived and Sigmund became a semi-demi-millionaire. However, he still slept soundly—and in all those five years he had never snored once. He looked so peaceful lying there that it seemed a pity to wake him up, even if anyone knew exactly how to set about it. Rachel felt strongly that ill-advised tampering might have unfortunate consequences, and the family, after assuring itself that she could only get at the interest on Sigmund’s fortune and not at the capital, was inclined to agree with her.
“And that was several years ago. When I last heard of him, Sigmund was still peacefully sleeping, while Rachel was having a perfectly wonderful time on the Riviera. She is quite a shrewd woman, as you may have guessed, and I think she realises how convenient it might be to have a youthful husband in cold storage for her old age.
“There are times, I must admit, when I think it’s rather a pity that Uncle Hymie never had a chance of revealing his remarkable discoveries to the world. But Sigmund proved that our civilisation isn’t yet ripe for such changes, and I hope I’m not around when some other physiologist starts the whole thing all over again.”
Harry looked at the clock. “Good lord!” he exclaimed, “I’d no idea it was so late—I feel half asleep.” He picked up his brief-case, stifled a yawn, and smiled benignly at us.
“Happy dreams, everybody,” he said.
The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch
And now I have a short, sad duty to perform. One of the many mysteries about Harry Purvis—who was so informative in every other direction—was the existence or otherwise of a Mrs. Purvis. It was true that he wore no wedding ring, but that means little nowadays. Almost as little, as any hotel proprietor will tell you, as does the reverse.
In a number of his tales, Harry had shown distinct evidence of some hostility towards what a Polish friend of mine, whose command of English did not match his gallantry, always referred to as ladies of the female sex. And it was by a curious coincidence that the very last story he ever told us first indicated, and then proved conclusively, Harry’s marital status.
I do not know who brought up the word “defenestration”, which is not, after all, one of the most commonly used abstract nouns in the language. It was probably one of the alarmingly erudite younger members of the “White Hart” clientele; some of them are just out of college, and so make us old-timers feel very callow and ignorant. But from the word, the discussion naturally passed to the deed. Had any of us ever been defenestrated? Did we know anyone who had?
“Yes,” said Harry. “It happened to a verbose lady I once knew. She was called Ermintrude, and was married to Osbert Inch, a sound engineer at the B.B.C.
“Osbert spent all his working hours listening to other people talking, and most of his free time listening to Ermintrude. Unfortunately, he couldn’t switch her off at the turn of a knob, and so he very seldom had a chance of getting a word in edgeways.
“There are some women who appear sincerely unaware of the fact that they cannot stop talking, and are most surprised when anyone accuses them of monopolising the conversation. Ermintrude would start as soon as she woke up, change gear so that she could hear herself speak above the eight o’clock news, and continue unabated until Osbert thankfully left for work. A couple of years of this had almost reduced him to a nervous wreck, but one morning when his wife was handicapped by a long overdue attack of laryngitis he made a spirited protest against her vocal monopoly.
“To his incredulous disbelief, she flatly refused to accept the charge. It appeared that to Ermintrude, time ceased to exist when she was talking—but she became extremely restive when anyone else held the stage. As soon as she had recovered her voice, she told Osbert how unfair it was of him to make such an unfounded accusation, and the argument would have been very acrimonious—if it had been possible to have an argument with Ermintrude at all.
“This made Osbert an angry and also a desperate man. But he was an ingenious one, too, and it occurred to him that he could produce irrefutable evidence that Ermintrude talked a hundred words for every syllable he was able to utter. I mentioned that he was a sound engineer, and his room was fitted up with Hi-Fi set, tape recorder, and the usual electronic tools of his trade, some of which the B.B.C. had unwittingly supplied.
“It did not take him very long to construct a piece of equipment which one might call a Selective Word Counter. If you know anything about audio engineering you’ll appreciate how it could be done with suitable filters and dividing circuits—and if you don’t, you’ll have to take it for granted. What the apparatus did was simply this; a microphone picked up every word spoken in the Inch apartment, Osbert’s deeper tones went one way and registered on a counter marked “His,” and Ermintrude’s higher frequencies went the other direction and ended up on the counter marked “Hers.”
“Within an hour of switching on, the score was as follows:—
His 23
Hers 2,530
“As the numbers flickered across the counter dials, Ermintrude became more and more thoughtful and at the same time more and more silent. Osbert, on the other hand, drinking the heady wine of victory (though to anyone else it would have looked like his morning cup of tea) began to make the most of his advantage and became quite talkative. By the time he had left for work, the counters had reflected the changing status in the household:—
His 1,043
Hers 3,397
“Just to show who was now the boss, Osbert left the apparatus switched on; he had always wondered if Ermintrude talked to herself as a purely automatic reflex even when there was no-one around to hear what she was saying. He had, by the way, thoughtfully taken the precaution of putting a lock on the Counter so that his wife couldn’t turn it off while he was out.
“He was a little disappointed to find that the figures were quite unaltered when he came home that evening, but thereafter the score soon started to mount again. It became a kind of game—though a deadly serious one—with each of the protagonists keeping one eye on the machine whenever either of them said a word. Ermintrude was clearly discomfited; ever and again she would suffer a verbal relapse and increase her score by a couple of hundred before she brought herself to a halt by a supreme effort of self-control. Osbert, who still had such a lead that he could afford to be garrulous, amused himself by making occasional sardonic comments which were well worth the expenditure of a few-score points.
“Although a measure of equality had
been restored in the Inch household, the Word Counter had, if anything, increased the state of dissension. Presently Ermintrude, who had a certain natural intelligence which some people might have called craftiness, made an appeal to her husband’s better nature. She pointed out that neither of them was really behaving naturally while every word was being monitored and counted; Osbert had unfairly let her get ahead and was now being taciturn in a way that he would never have been had he not got that warning score continuously before his eyes. Though Osbert gagged at the sheer effrontery of this charge, he had to admit that the objection did contain an element of truth. The test would be fairer and more conclusive if neither of them could see the accumulating score—if, indeed, they forgot all about the presence of the machine and so behaved perfectly naturally, or at least as naturally as they could in the circumstances.
“After much argument they came to a compromise. Very sportingly, in his opinion, Osbert reset the dials to zero and sealed up the counter windows so that no-one could take a peek at the scores. They agreed to break the wax seals—on which they had both impressed their fingerprints—at the end of the week, and to abide by the decision. Concealing the microphone under a table, Osbert moved the counter equipment itself into his little workshop, so that the living-room now bore no sign of the implacable electronic watchdog that was controlling the destiny of the Inches.
“Thereafter, things slowly returned to normal. Ermintrude became as talkative as ever, but now Osbert didn’t mind in the least because he knew that every word she uttered was being patiently noted to be used as evidence against her. At the end of the week, his triumph would be complete. He could afford to allow himself the luxury of a couple of hundred words a day, knowing that Ermintrude used up this allowance in five minutes.
“The breaking of the seals was performed ceremonially at the end of an unusually talkative day, when Ermintrude had repeated verbatim three telephone conversations of excruciating banality which, it seemed, had occupied most of her afternoon. Osbert had merely smiled and said “Yes, dear” at ten minute intervals, meanwhile trying to imagine what excuse his wife would put forward when confronted by the damning evidence.
Tales from the White Hart (Arthur C. Clarke Collection: Short Stories) Page 16
