‘Couldn’t that be rather drastic?’ Morley asked. ‘They’ll hate you for it.’

But Neil! 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 arclights 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 Neil!, 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?’

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 Neffi 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.