The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘They won’t,’ Neill said. He stood up, suddenly bored by Morley’s questions. ‘The total tempo of their lives will be lower than ours, these stresses and tensions won’t begin to crystallize. We’ll soon seem like a lot of manic-depressives to them, running round like dervishes half the day, then collapsing into a stupor the other half.’

  He moved towards the door and reached out to the light switch. ‘Well, I’ll see you at six o’clock.’

  They left the lecture room and started down the corridor together.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ Morley asked.

  Neill laughed. ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘I’m going to get a good night’s sleep.’

  A little after midnight Avery and Gorrell were playing table-tennis in the floodlit gymnasium. They were competent players, and passed the ball backwards and forwards with a minimum of effort. Both felt strong and alert; Avery was sweating slightly, but this was due to the arc-lights blazing down from the roof – maintaining, for safety’s sake, an illusion of continuous day – rather than to any excessive exertion of his own. The oldest of the three volunteers, a tall and somewhat detached figure, with a lean, closed face, he made no attempt to talk to Gorrell and concentrated on adjusting himself to the period ahead. He knew he would find no trace of fatigue, but as he played he carefully checked his respiratory rhythms and muscle tonus, and kept one eye on the clock.

  Gorrell, a jaunty, self-composed man, was also subdued. Between strokes he glanced cautiously round the gymnasium, noting the hangar-like walls, the broad, polished floor, the shuttered skylights in the roof. Now and then, without realizing it, he fingered the circular trepan scar at the back of his head.

  Out in the centre of the gymnasium a couple of armchairs and a sofa had been drawn up round a gramophone, and here Lang was playing chess with Morley, doing his section of night duty. Lang hunched forward over the chessboard. Wiry-haired and aggressive, with a sharp nose and mouth, he watched the pieces closely. He had played regularly against Morley since he arrived at the Clinic four months earlier, and the two were almost equally matched, with perhaps a slight edge to Morley. But tonight Lang had opened with a new attack and after ten moves had completed his development and begun to split Morley’s defence. His mind felt clear and precise, focused sharply on the game in front of him, though only that morning had he finally left the cloudy limbo of post-hypnosis through which he and the two others had drifted for three weeks like lobotomized phantoms.

  Behind him, along one wall of the gymnasium, were the offices housing the control unit. Over his shoulder he saw a face peering at him through the circular observation window in one of the doors. Here, at constant alert, a group of orderlies and interns sat around waiting by their emergency trollies. (The end door, into a small ward containing three cots, was kept carefully locked.) After a few moments the face withdrew. Lang smiled at the elaborate machinery watching over him. His transference on to Neill had been positive and he had absolute faith in the success of the experiment. Neill had assured him that, at worst, the sudden accumulation of metabolites in his bloodstream might induce a mild torpor, but his brain would be unimpaired.

  ‘Nerve fibre, Robert,’ Neill had told him time and again, ‘never fatigues. The brain cannot tire.’

  While he waited for Morley to move he checked the time from the clock mounted against the wall. Twelve twenty. Morley yawned, his face drawn under the grey skin. He looked tired and drab. He slumped down into the armchair, face in one hand. Lang reflected how frail and primitive those who slept would soon seem, their minds sinking off each evening under the load of accumulating toxins, the edge of their awareness worn and frayed. Suddenly he realized that at that very moment Neill himself was asleep. A curiously disconcerting vision of Neill, huddled in a rumpled bed two floors above, his blood-sugar low, and his mind drifting, rose before him.

  Lang laughed at his own conceit, and Morley retrieved the rook he had just moved.

  ‘I must be going blind. What am I doing?’

  ‘No,’ Lang said. He started to laugh again. ‘I’ve just discovered I’m awake.’

  Morley smiled. ‘We’ll have to put that down as one of the sayings of the week.’ He replaced the rook, sat up and looked across at the table-tennis pair. Gorrell had hit a fast backhand low over the net and Avery was running after the ball.

  ‘They seem to be okay. How about you?’

  ‘Right on top of myself,’ Lang said. His eyes flicked up and down the board and he moved before Morley caught his breath back.

  Usually they went right through into the end-game, but tonight Morley had to concede on the twentieth move.

  ‘Good,’ he said encouragingly. ‘You’ll be able to take on Neill soon. Like another?’

  ‘No. Actually the game bores me. I can see that’s going to be a problem.’

  ‘You’ll face it. Give yourself time to find your legs.’

  Lang pulled one of the Bach albums out of its rack in the record cabinet. He put a Brandenburg Concerto on the turntable and lowered the sapphire. As the rich, contrapuntal patterns chimed out he sat back, listening intently to the music.

  Morley thought: Absurd. How fast can you run? Three weeks ago you were strictly a hep-cat.

  The next few hours passed rapidly.

  At one thirty they went up to the Surgery, where Morley and one of the interns gave them a quick physical, checking their renal clearances, heart rate and reflexes.

  Dressed again, they went into the empty cafeteria for a snack and sat on the stools, arguing what to call this new fifth meal. Avery suggested ‘Midfood’, Morley ‘Munch’.

  At two they took their places in the Neurology theatre, and spent a couple of hours watching films of the hypno-drills of the past three weeks.

  When the programme ended they started down for the gymnasium, the night almost over. They were still relaxed and cheerful; Gorrell led the way, playfully teasing Lang over some of the episodes in the films, mimicking his trance-like walk.

  ‘Eyes shut, mouth open,’ he demonstrated, swerving into Lang, who jumped nimbly out of his way. ‘Look at you; you’re doing it even now. Believe me, Lang, you’re not awake, you’re somnambulating.’ He called back to Morley, ‘Agreed, Doctor?’

  Morley swallowed a yawn. ‘Well, if he is, that makes two of us.’ He followed them along the corridor, doing his best to stay awake, feeling as if he, and not the three men in front of him, had been without sleep for the last three weeks.

  Though the Clinic was quiet, at Neill’s orders all lights along the corridors and down the stairway had been left on. Ahead of them two orderlies checked that windows they passed were safely screened and doors were shut. Nowhere was there a single darkened alcove or shadow-trap.

  Neill had insisted on this, reluctantly acknowledging a possible reflex association between darkness and sleep: ‘Let’s admit it. In all but a few organisms the association is strong enough to be a reflex. The higher mammals depend for their survival on a highly acute sensory apparatus, combined with a varying ability to store and classify information. Plunge them into darkness, cut off the flow of visual data to the cortex, and they’re paralysed. Sleep is a defence reflex. It lowers the metabolic rate, conserves energy, increases the organism’s survival-potential by merging it into its habitat . . .’

  On the landing halfway down the staircase was a wide, shuttered window that by day opened out on to the parkscape behind the Clinic. As he passed it Gorrell stopped. He went over, released the blind, then unlatched the shutter.

  Still holding it closed, he turned to Morley, watching from the flight above.

  ‘Taboo, Doctor?’ he asked.

  Morley looked at each of the three men in turn. Gorrell was calm and unperturbed, apparently satisfying nothing more sinister than an idle whim. Lang sat on the rail, watching curiously with an expression of clinical disinterest. Only Avery seemed slightly anxious, his thin face wan and pinched. Morley had an irrelevant thought: four a.m. shadow – they’ll need
to shave twice a day. Then: why isn’t Neill here? He knew they’d make for a window as soon as they got the chance. He noticed Lang giving him an amused smile and shrugged, trying to disguise his uneasiness.

  ‘Go ahead, if you want to. As Neill said, the wires are cut.’

  Gorrell threw back the shutter, and they clustered round the window and stared out into the night. Below, pewter-grey lawns stretched towards the pines and low hills in the distance. A couple of miles away on their left a neon sign winked and beckoned.

  Neither Gorrell nor Lang noticed any reaction, and their interest began to flag within a few moments. Avery felt a sudden lift under the heart, then controlled himself. His eyes began to sift the darkness; the sky was clear and cloudless, and through the stars he picked out the narrow, milky traverse of the galactic rim. He watched it silently, letting the wind cool the sweat on his face and neck.

  Morley stepped over to the window and leaned his elbows on the sill next to Avery. Out of the corner of his eye he carefully waited for any motor tremor – a fluttering eyelid, accelerated breathing – that would signal a reflex discharging. He remembered Neill’s warning: ‘In Man sleep is largely volitional, and the reflex is conditioned by habit. But just because we’ve cut out the hypothalamic loops regulating the flow of consciousness doesn’t mean the reflex won’t discharge down some other pathway. However, sooner or later we’ll have to take the risk and give them a glimpse of the dark side of the sun.’

  Morley was musing on this when something nudged his shoulder.

  ‘Doctor,’ he heard Lang say. ‘Doctor Morley.’

  He pulled himself together with a start. He was alone at the window. Gorrell and Avery were halfway down the next flight of stairs.

  ‘What’s up?’ Morley asked quickly.

  ‘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 Neill 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 Neill 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. Neill 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 Neill 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.)

  Neill 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 Neill only smiled and went off to requisition an office near his bedroom.

  That night Morley was on duty in the gymnasium from ten p.m. to six a.m. As usual he first checked that the orderlies were ready with their emergency trollies, read through the log left by the previous supervisor, one of the senior interns, and then went over to the circle of chairs. He sat back on the sofa next to Lang and leafed through a magazine, watching the three men carefully. In the glare of the arc-lights their lean faces had a sallow, cyanosed look. The senior intern had warned him that Avery and Gorrell might overtire themselves at table-tennis, but by eleven p.m. they stopped playing and settled down in the armchairs. They read desultorily and made two trips up to the cafeteria, escorted each time by one of the orderlies. Morley told them about Neill, but surprisingly none of them made any comment.

  Midnight came slowly. Avery read, his long body hunched up in an armchair. Gorrell played chess against himself.

  Morley dozed.

  Lang felt restless. The gymnasium’s silence and absence of movement oppressed him. He switched on the gramophone and played through a Brandenburg, analysing its theme-trains. Then he ran a word-association test on himself, turning the pages of a book and using the top right-hand corner words as the control list.

  Morley leaned over. ‘Anything come up?’ he asked.

  ‘A few interesting responses.’ Lang found a note-pad and jotted something down. ‘I’ll show them to Neill in the morning – or whenever he wakes up.’ He gazed up pensively at the arc-lights. ‘I was just speculating. What do you think the next step forward will be?’

  ‘Forward where?’ Morley asked.

  Lang gestured expansively. ‘I mean up the evolutionary slope. Three hundred million years ago we became air-breathers and left the seas behind. Now we’ve taken the next logical step forward and eliminated sleep. What’s next?’

  Morley shook his head. ‘The two steps aren’t analogous. Anyway, in point of fact you haven’t left the primeval sea behind. You’re still carrying a private replica of it around as
your bloodstream. All you did was encapsulate a necessary piece of the physical environment in order to escape it.’

  Lang nodded. ‘I was thinking of something else. Tell me, has it ever occurred to you how completely death-orientated the psyche is?’

  Morley smiled. ‘Now and then,’ he said, wondering where this led.

  ‘It’s curious,’ Lang went on reflectively. ‘The pleasure-pain principle, the whole survival-compulsion apparatus of sex, the Super-Ego’s obsession with tomorrow – most of the time the psyche can’t see farther than its own tombstone. Now why has it got this strange fixation? For one very obvious reason.’ He tapped the air with his forefinger. ‘Because every night it’s given a pretty convincing reminder of the fate in store for it.’

  ‘You mean the black hole,’ Morley suggested wryly. ‘Sleep?’

  ‘Exactly. It’s simply a pseudo-death. Of course, you’re not aware of it, but it must be terrifying.’ He frowned. ‘I don’t think even Neill realizes that, far from being restful, sleep is a genuinely traumatic experience.’

  So that’s it, Morley thought. The great father analyst has been caught napping on his own couch. He tried to decide which were worse – patients who knew a lot of psychiatry, or those who only knew a little.

  ‘Eliminate sleep,’ Lang was saying, ‘and you also eliminate all the fear and defence mechanisms erected round it. Then, at last, the psyche has a chance to orientate towards something more valid.’

  ‘Such as . . . ?’ Morley asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps . . . Self ?’

  ‘Interesting,’ Morley commented. It was three ten a.m. He decided to spend the next hour going through Lang’s latest test cards.

  He waited a discretionary five minutes, then stood up and walked over to the surgery office.

  Lang hooked an arm across the back of the sofa and watched the orderly room door.

  ‘What’s Morley playing at?’ he asked. ‘Have either of you seen him anywhere?’