Avery lowered his magazine. ‘Didn’t he go off into the orderly room?’
‘Ten minutes ago,’ Lang said. ‘He hasn’t looked in since. There’s supposed to be someone on duty with us continuously. Where is he?’
Gorrell, playing solitaire chess, looked up from his board. ‘Perhaps these late nights are getting him down. You’d better wake him before Neill finds out. He’s probably fallen asleep over a batch of your test cards.’
Lang laughed and settled down on the sofa. Gorrell reached out to the gramophone, took a record out of the rack and slid it on to the turntable.
As the gramophone began to hum Lang noticed how silent and deserted the gymnasium seemed. The Clinic was always quiet, but even at night a residual ebb and flow of sound – a chair dragging in the orderly room, a generator charging under one of the theatres – eddied through and kept it alive.
Now the air was flat and motionless. Lang listened carefully. The whole place had the dead, echoless feel of an abandoned building.
He stood up and strolled over to the orderly room. He knew Neill discouraged casual conversation with the control crew, but Morley’s absence puzzled him.
He reached the door and peered through the window to see if Morley was inside.
The room was empty.
The light was on. Two emergency trollies stood in their usual place against the wall near the door, a third was in the middle of the floor, a pack of playing cards strewn across its deck, but the group of three or four interns had gone.
Lang hesitated, reached down to open the door, and found it had been locked.
He tried the handle again, then called out over his shoulder:
‘Avery. There’s nobody in here.’
‘Try next door. They’re probably being briefed for tomorrow.’
Lang stepped over to the surgery office. The light was off but he could see the white enamelled desk and the big programme charts round the wall. There was no one inside.
Avery and Gorrell were watching him.
‘Are they in there?’ Avery asked.
‘No.’ Lang turned the handle. ‘The door’s locked.’
Gorrell switched off the gramophone and he and Avery came over. They tried the two doors again.
‘They’re here somewhere,’ Avery said. ‘There must be at least one person on duty.’ He pointed to the end door. ‘What about that one?’
‘Locked,’ Lang said. ‘69 always has been. I think it leads down to the basement.’
‘Let’s try Neill’s office,’ Gorrell suggested. ‘If they aren’t in there we’ll stroll through to Reception and try to leave. This must be some trick of Neill’s.’
There was no window in the door to Neill’s office. Gorrell knocked, waited, knocked again more loudly.
Lang tried the handle, then knelt down. ‘The light’s off,’ he reported.
Avery turned and looked round at the two remaining doors out of the gymnasium, both in the far wall, one leading up to the cafeteria and the Neurology wing, the other into the car park at the rear of the Clinic.
‘Didn’t Neill hint that he might try something like this on us?’ he asked. ‘To see whether we can go through a night on our own.’
‘But Neill’s asleep,’ Lang objected. ‘He’ll be in bed for a couple of days. Unless . . .’
Gorrell jerked his head in the direction of the chairs. ‘Come on. He and Morley are probably watching us now.’
They went back to their seats.
Gorrell dragged the chess stool over to the sofa and set up the pieces. Avery and Lang stretched out in armchairs and opened magazines, turning the pages deliberately. Above them the banks of arc-lights threw their wide cones of light down into the silence.
The only noise was the slow left-right, left-right motion of the clock.
Three fifteen a.m.
The shift was imperceptible. At first a slight change of perspective, a fading and regrouping of outlines. Somewhere a focus slipped, a shadow swung slowly across a wall, its angles breaking and lengthening. The motion was fluid, a procession of infinitesimals, but gradually its total direction emerged.
The gymnasium was shrinking. Inch by inch, the walls were moving inwards, encroaching across the periphery of the floor. As they shrank towards each other their features altered: the rows of skylights below the ceiling blurred and faded, the power cable running along the base of the wall merged into the skirting board, the square baffles of the air vents vanished into the grey distemper.
Above, like the undersurface of an enormous lift, the ceiling sank towards the floor ...
Gorrell leaned his elbows on the chessboard, face sunk in his hands. He had locked himself in a perpetual check, but he continued to shuttle the pieces in and out of one of the corner squares, now and then gazing into the air for inspiration, while his eyes roved up and down the walls around him.
Somewhere, he knew, Neill was watching him.
He moved, looked up and followed the wall opposite him down to the far corner, alert for the telltale signs of a retractable panel. For some while he had been trying to discover Neill’s spy-hole, but without any success. The walls were blank and featureless; he had twice covered every square foot of the two facing him, and apart from the three doors there appeared to be no fault or aperture of even the most minute size anywhere on their surface.
After a while his left eye began to throb painfully, and he pushed away the chessboard and lay back. Above him a line of fluorescent tubes hung down from the ceiling, mounted in checkered plastic brackets that diffused the light. He was about to comment on his search for the spy-hole to Avery and Lang when he realized that any one of them could conceal a microphone.
He decided to stretch his legs, stood up and sauntered off across the floor. After sitting over the chessboard for half an hour he felt cramped and restless, and would have enjoyed tossing a ball up and down, or flexing his muscles on a rowing machine. But annoyingly no recreational facilities, apart from the three armchairs and the gramophone, had been provided.
He reached the end wall and wandered round, listening for any sound from the adjacent rooms. He was beginning to resent Neill spying on him and the entire keyhole conspiracy, and he noted with relief that it was a quarter past three: in under three hours it would all be over.
The gymnasium closed in. Now less than half its original size, its walls bare and windowless, it was a vast, shrinking box. The sides slid into each other, merging along an abstract hairline, like planes severing in a multi-dimensional flux. Only the clock and a single door remained . . .
Lang had discovered where the microphone was hidden.
He sat forward in his chair, cracking his knuckles until Gorrell returned, then rose and offered him his seat. Avery was in the other armchair, feet up on the gramophone.
‘Sit down for a bit,’ Lang said. ‘I feel like a stroll.’
Gorrell lowered himself into the chair. ‘I’ll ask Neill if we can have a ping-pong table in here. It should help pass the time and give us some exercise.’
‘A good idea,’ Lang agreed. ‘If we can get the table through the door. I doubt if there’s enough room in here, even if we moved the chairs right up against the wall.’
He walked off across the floor, surreptitiously peering through the orderly room window. The light was on, but there was still no one inside.
He ambled over to the gramophone and paced up and down near it for a few moments. Suddenly he swung round and caught his foot under the flex leading to the wall socket.
The plug fell out on to the floor. Lang left it where it lay, went over and sat down on the arm of Gorrell’s chair.
‘I’ve just disconnected the microphone,’ he confided.
Gorrell looked round carefully. ‘Where was it?’
Lang pointed. ‘Inside the gramophone.’ He laughed softly. ‘I thought I’d pull Neill’s leg. He’ll be wild when he realizes he can’t hear us.’
‘Why do you think it was in the gramophone?’ Gorrell
asked.
‘What better place? Besides, it couldn’t be anywhere else. Apart from in there.’ He gestured at the light bowl suspended from the centre of the ceiling. ‘It’s empty except for the two bulbs. The gramophone is the obvious place. I had a feeling it was there, but I wasn’t sure until I noticed we had a gramophone, but no records.’
Gorrell nodded sagely.
Lang moved away, chuckling to himself.
Above the door of Room 69 the clock ticked on at three fifteen.
The motion was accelerating. What had once been the gymnasium was now a small room, seven feet wide, a tight, almost perfect cube. The walls plunged inwards, along colliding diagonals, only a few feet from their final focus . . .
Avery noticed Gorrell and Lang pacing around his chair. ‘Either of you want to sit down yet?’ he asked.
They shook their heads. Avery rested for a few minutes and then climbed out of the chair and stretched himself.
‘Quarter past three,’ he remarked, pressing his hands against the ceiling. ‘This is getting to be a long night.’
He leaned back to let Gorrell pass him, and then started to follow the others round the narrow space between the armchair and the walls.
‘I don’t know how Neill expects us to stay awake in this hole for twenty-four hours a day,’ he went on. ‘Why haven’t we got a television set in here? Even a radio would be something.’
They sidled round the chair together, Gorrell, followed by Avery, with Lang completing the circle, their shoulders beginning to hunch, their heads down as they watched the floor, their feet falling into the slow, leaden rhythm of the clock.
This, then, was the manhole: a narrow, vertical cubicle, a few feet wide, six deep. Above, a solitary, dusty bulb gleamed down from a steel grille. As if crumbling under the impetus of their own momentum, the surface of the walls had coarsened, the texture was that of stone, streaked and pitted ...
Gorrell bent down to loosen one of his shoelaces and Avery bumped into him sharply, knocking his shoulder against the wall.
‘All right?’ he asked, taking Gorrell’s arm. ‘This place is a little overcrowded. I can’t understand why Neill ever put us in here.’
He leaned against the wall, head bowed to prevent it from touching the ceiling, and gazed about thoughtfully.
Lang stood squeezed into the corner next to him, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
Gorrell squatted down on his heels below them.
‘What’s the time?’ he asked.
‘I’d say about three fifteen,’ Lang offered. ‘More or less.’
‘Lang,’ Avery asked, ‘where’s the ventilator here?’
Lang peered up and down the walls and across the small square of ceiling. ‘There must be one somewhere.’ Gorrell stood up and they shuffled about, examining the floor between their feet.
‘There may be a vent in the light grille,’ Gorrell suggested. He reached up and slipped his fingers through the cage, running them behind the bulb.
‘Nothing there. Odd. I should have thought we’d use the air in here within half an hour.’
‘Easily,’ Avery said. ‘You know, there’s something –’
Just then Lang broke in. He gripped Avery’s elbow.
‘Avery,’ he asked. ‘Tell me. How did we get here?’
‘What do you mean, get here? We’re on Neill’s team.’
Lang cut him off. ‘I know that.’ He pointed at the floor. ‘I mean, in here.’
Gorrell shook his head. ‘Lang, relax. How do you think? Through the door.’
Lang looked squarely at Gorrell, then at Avery.
‘What door?’ he asked calmly.
Gorrell and Avery hesitated, then swung round to look at each wall in turn, scanning it from floor to ceiling. Avery ran his hands over the heavy masonry, then knelt down and felt the floor, digging his fingers at the rough stone slabs. Gorrell crouched beside him, scrabbling at the thin seams of dirt.
Lang backed out of their way into a corner, and watched them impassively. His face was calm and motionless, but in his left temple a single vein fluttered insanely.
When they finally stood up, staring at each other unsteadily, he flung himself between them at the opposite wall.
‘Neill! Neill!’ he shouted. He pounded angrily on the wall with his fists. ‘Neill! Neill!’
Above him the light began to fade.
Morley closed the door of the surgery office behind him and went over to the desk. Though it was three fifteen a.m., Neill was probably awake, working on the latest material in the office next to his bedroom. Fortunately that afternoon’s test cards, freshly marked by one of the interns, had only just reached his in-tray.
Morley picked out Lang’s folder and started to sort through the cards. He suspected that Lang’s responses to some of the key words and suggestion triggers lying disguised in the question forms might throw illuminating sidelights on to the real motives behind his equation of sleep and death.
The communicating door to the orderly room opened and an intern looked in.
‘Do you want me to take over in the gym, Doctor?’
Morley waved him away. ‘Don’t bother. I’m going back in a moment.’
He selected the cards he wanted and began to initial his withdrawals. Glad to get away from the glare of the arc-lights, he delayed his return as long as he could, and it was three twenty-five a.m. when he finally left the office and stepped back into the gymnasium.
The men were sitting where he had left them. Lang watched him approach, head propped comfortably on a cushion. Avery was slouched down in his armchair, nose in a magazine, while Gorrell hunched over the chessboard, hidden behind the sofa.
‘Anybody feel like coffee?’ Morley called out, deciding they needed some exercise.
None of them looked up or answered. Morley felt a flicker of annoyance, particularly at Lang, who was staring past him at the clock.
Then he saw something that made him stop.
Lying on the polished floor ten feet from the sofa was a chess piece. He went over and picked it up. The piece was the black king. He wondered how Gorrell could be playing chess with one of the two essential pieces of the game missing when he noticed three more pieces lying on the floor near by.
His eyes moved to where Gorrell was sitting.
Scattered over the floor below the chair and sofa was the rest of the set. Gorrell was slumped over the stool. One of his elbows had slipped and the arm dangled between his knees, knuckles resting on the floor. The other hand supported his face. Dead eyes peered down at his feet.
Morley ran over to him, shouting: ‘Lang! Avery! Get the orderlies!’
He reached Gorrell and pulled him back off the stool.
‘Lang!’ he called again.
Lang was still staring at the clock, his body in the stiff, unreal posture of a waxworks dummy.
Morley let Gorrell loll back on to the sofa, leaned over and glanced at Lang’s face.
He crossed to Avery, stretched out behind the magazine, and jerked his shoulder. Avery’s head bobbed stiffly. The magazine slipped and fell from his hands, leaving his fingers curled in front of his face.
Morley stepped over Avery’s legs to the gramophone. He switched it on, gripped the volume control and swung it round to full amplitude.
Above the orderly room door an alarm bell shrilled out through the silence.
‘Weren’t you with them?’ Neill asked sharply.
‘No,’ Morley admitted. They were standing by the door of the emergency ward. Two orderlies had just dismantled the electro-therapy unit and were wheeling the console away on a trolley. Outside in the gymnasium a quiet, urgent traffic of nurses and interns moved past. All but a single bank of arc-lights had been switched off, and the gymnasium seemed like a deserted stage at the end of a performance.
‘I slipped into the office to pick up a few test cards,’ he explained. ‘I wasn’t gone more than ten minutes.’
‘You were supposed to watch the
m continuously,’ Neill snapped. ‘Not wander off by yourself whenever you felt like it. What do you think we had the gym and this entire circus set up for?’
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 self-awareness 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.’
Neill 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.’
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 10
