The Complete Short Stories by J. G. Ballard Page B

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