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 arclights, 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?’ Neil! 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 them continuously,’ Neil! 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 selfawareness 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.’

Neil! 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.’

Morley frowned dubiously. ‘That jungle is marked "private". Even if you do, is a psychotic’s withdrawal drama going to make any sense?’

‘Of course it will. However insane it seems to us, it was real enough to them. If we know the ceiling fell in or the whole gym filled with ice-cream or turned into a maze, we’ve got something to work on.’ He sat down on the desk. ‘Do you remember that story of Chekov’s you told me about?’

"The Bet"? Yes.’

‘I read it last night. Curious. It’s a lot nearer what you’re really trying to say than you know.’ He gazed round the office. ‘This room in which the man is penned for ten years symbolizes the mind driven to the furthest limits of selfawareness… Something very similar happened to Avery, Gorrell and Lang. They must have reached a stage beyond which they could no longer contain the idea of their own identity. But far from being unable to grasp the idea, I’d say that they were conscious of nothing else. Like the man in the spherical mirror, who can only see a single gigantic eye staring back at him.’

‘So you think their withdrawal is a straightforward escape from the eye, the overwhelming ego?’

‘Not escape,’ Neill corrected. ‘The psychotic never escapes from anything. He’s much more sensible. He merely readjusts reality to suit himself. Quite a trick to learn, too. The room in Chekov’s story gives me an idea as to how they might have re-adjusted. Their particular equivalent of this room was the gym. I’m beginning to realize it was a mistake to put them in there — all those lights blazing down, the huge floor, high walls. They merely exaggerate the sensation of overload. In fact the gym might easily have become an external projection of their own egos.’