‘Four months, I think. Why?’

‘Four.’ I nodded slowly. ‘Tell me, how long would you say it took any random piece of scrap iron to be reprocessed through a steel mill and get back into circulation?’

‘Years, if it lay around in the wrong junkyards.’

‘But if it had actually arrived at the steel mill?’

‘A month or so. Less.’

I started to laugh, pointing to the girder. ‘Feel that! Go on, feel it!’

Frowning at me, they knelt down and pressed their hands to the girder. Then Raymond looked up at me sharply.

I stopped laughing. ‘Did you feel it?’

‘Feel it?’ Raymond repeated. ‘I can hear it. Lorraine Drexel — the statue. It’s here!’

Carol was patting the girder and listening to it. ‘I think it’s humming,’ she said, puzzled. ‘It sounds like the statue.’

When I started to laugh again Raymond held my arm. ‘Snap out of it, the whole building will be singing soon!’

‘I know,’ I said weakly. ‘And it won’t be just this building either.’ I took Carol by the arm. ‘Come on, let’s see if it’s started.’

We went up to the top floor. The plasterers were about to move in and there were trestles and laths all over the place. The walls were still bare brick, girders at fifteen-foot intervals between them.

We didn’t have to look very far.

Jutting out from one of the steel joists below the roof was a long metal helix, hollowing itself slowly into a delicate sonic core. Without moving, we counted a dozen others. A faint twanging sound came from them, like early arrivals at a rehearsal of some vast orchestra of sitar-players, seated on every plain and hilltop of the earth. I remembered when we had last heard the music, as Lorraine Drexel sat beside me at the unveiling in Vermilion Sands. The statue had made its call to her dead lover, and now the refrain was to be taken up again.

‘An authentic Drexel,’ I said. ‘All the mannerisms. Nothing much to look at yet, but wait till it really gets going.’

Raymond wandered round, his mouth open. ‘It’ll tear the building apart. Just think of the noise.’

Carol was staring up at one of the shoots. ‘Mr Hamilton, you said they’d melted it all down.’

‘They did, angel. So it got back into circulation, touching off all the other metal it came into contact with. Lorraine Drexel’s statue is here, in this building, in a dozen other buildings, in ships and planes and a million new automobiles. Even if it’s only one screw or ball-bearing, that’ll be enough to trigger the rest off.’

‘They’ll stop it,’ Carol said.

‘They might,’ I admitted. ‘But it’ll probably get back again somehow. A few pieces always will.’ I put my arm round her waist and began to dance to the strange abstracted music, for some reason as beautiful now as Lorraine Drexel’s wistful eyes. ‘Did you say it was all over? Carol, it’s only just beginning. The whole world will be singing.’

Manhole 69

For the first few days all went well.

‘Keep away from windows and don’t think about it,’ Dr Neill told them. ‘As far as you’re concerned it was just another compulsion. At eleven thirty or twelve go down to the gym and throw a ball around, play some table-tennis. At two they’re running a film for you in the Neurology theatre. Read the papers for a couple of hours, put on some records. I’ll be down at six. By seven you’ll be in a manic swing.’

‘Any chance of a sudden blackout, Doctor?’ Avery asked.

‘Absolutely none,’ Neill said. ‘If you get tired, rest, of course. That’s the one thing you’ll probably have a little difficulty getting used to. Remember, you’re still using only 3,500 calories, so your kinetic level — and you’ll notice this most by day — will be about a third lower. You’ll have to take things easier, make allowances. Most of these have been programmed in for you, but start learning to play chess, focus that inner eye.’

Gorrell leaned forward. ‘Doctor,’ he asked, ‘if we want to, can we look out of the windows?’

Dr Neill smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘The wires are cut. You couldn’t go to sleep now if you tried.’

Neill waited until the three men had left the lecture room on their way back to the Recreation Wing and then stepped down from the dais and shut the door. He was a short, broad-shouldered man in his fifties, with a sharp, impatient mouth and small features. He swung a chair out of the front row and straddled it deftly.

‘Well?’ he asked.

Morley was sitting on one of the desks against the back wall, playing aimlessly with a pencil. At thirty he was the youngest member of the team working under Neill at the Clinic, but for some reason Neill liked to talk to him.

He saw Neill was waiting for an answer and shrugged.

‘Everything seems to be all right,’ he said. ‘Surgical convalescence is over. Cardiac rhythms and EEG are normal. I saw the X-rays this morning and everything has sealed beautifully.’

Neill watched him quizzically. ‘You don’t sound as if you approve.’

Morley laughed and stood up. ‘Of course I do.’ He walked down the aisle between the desks, white coat unbuttoned, hands sunk deep in his pockets. ‘No, so far you’ve vindicated yourself on every point. The party’s only just beginning, but the guests are in damn good shape. No doubt about it. I thought three weeks was a little early to bring them out of hypnosis, but you’ll probably be right there as well. Tonight is the first one they take on their own. Let’s see how they are tomorrow morning.’

‘What are you secretly expecting?’ Neill asked wryly. ‘Massive feedback from the medulla?’

‘No,’ Morley said. ‘There again the psychometric tests have shown absolutely nothing coming up at all. Not a single trauma.’ He stared at the blackboard and then looked round at Neill. ‘Yes, as a cautious estimate I’d say you’ve succeeded.’

Neill leaned forward on his elbows. He flexed his jaw muscles. ‘I think I’ve more than succeeded. Blocking the medullary synapses has eliminated a lot of material I thought would still be there — the minor quirks and complexes, the petty aggressive phobias, the bad change in the psychic bank. Most of them have gone, or at least they don’t show in the tests. However, they’re the side targets, and thanks to you, John, and to everyone else in the team, we’ve hit a bull’s eye on the main one.’

Morley murmured something, but Neill ran on in his clipped voice. ‘None of you realize it yet, but this is as big an advance as the step the first ichthyoid took out of the protozoic sea 300 million years ago. At last we’ve freed the mind, raised it out of that archaic sump called sleep, its nightly retreat into the medulla. With virtually one cut of the scalpel we’ve added twenty years to those men’s lives.’

‘I only hope they know what to do with them,’ Morley commented.

‘Come, John,’ Neill snapped back. ‘That’s not an argument. What they do with the time is their responsibility anyway. They’ll make the most of it, just as we’ve always made the most, eventually, of any opportunity given us. It’s too early to think about it yet, but visualize the universal application of our technique. For the first time Man will be living a full twenty-four hour day, not spending a third of it as an invalid, snoring his way through an eighthour peepshow of infantile erotica.’

Tired, Neill broke off and rubbed his eyes. ‘What’s worrying you?’

Morley made a small, helpless gesture with one hand. ‘I’m not sure, it’s just that I…’ He played with the plastic brain mounted on a stand next to the blackboard. Reflected in one of the frontal whorls was a distorted image of Neill, with a twisted chinless face and vast domed cranium. Sitting alone among the desks in the empty lecture room he looked like an insane genius patiently waiting to take an examination no one could set him.

Morley turned the model with his finger, watched the image blur and dissolve. Whatever his doubts, Neill was probably the last person to understand them.