Sleep and His Brother (3 page)

Mrs. Dixon-Jones had stopped tapping the globe and was biting the end of her pen with a look of innocent bewilderment, like a schoolgirl in an examination trying to remember at least one fact about the Venerable Bede.

“I don't know why you should think that any of this concerns you,” she said, with a sudden pulse of patrician spirit.

“It doesn't,” said Pibble, “unless you ask me to concern myself. But I think it's possible that you are uneasy about some aspect of this money, where it's coming from or where it's going to, but that you aren't sure of your facts or don't want to risk upsetting the children …”

“At least I don't have to worry about
that
.”

“I'd have thought—”

“It's very difficult to upset them about
anything
.”

“Well, that's a comfort.”

“Less than you might think. Oh, Mr. Pibble, I don't know what to say. Will you just take it that since you came something has happened which makes it impossible to ask you to help me?”

“OK. Let's leave it at that. We've made contact now, so you can always send for me if you change your mind. Give a note to Reuben Kelly, or ring the Black Boot in Kipling Street and leave a message for me to get in touch with you. Kelly and I usually have a drink there before lunch, but I won't talk to him about this, or Mary, so there's no danger of it getting back onto the coffee­-morning­ circuit. I needn't tell you that if you have any solid evidence­ of something criminal you have a duty to get in touch with the police, though you'd be wise to consult a solicitor first. I imagine the McNair has a solicitor.”

“Of course—” began Mrs. Dixon-Jones. The door lock clicked. Her features frosted. A big voice was speaking from the corridor before a face showed.

“Posey, my sweetie, are you hiding a policeman from me?”

“Come in, Ram,” sang Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

The man had gleaming olive skin, gray hair, gray beard topped by the downturned moustache of the mod intellectual. White dustcoat worn with such a swagger that it looked like his national dress. A large, thickset, beaming man—a truly noble presence. The room seemed to diminish but to become more exotic as he came through the door.

“A policeman?” cried Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “Are you a policeman, Mr. Pibble?”

She managed the note of surprised badinage very well, for a woman who hated lying.

“I used to be,” said Pibble, “but I retired two months ago.”

“Glorious news!” said the newcomer. “You lost your hat! Hallelujah! My name is Rameses Silver, and I am joint head of research in this setup. Kelly researches the bodies and I research the souls. Now let me tell you, Mr. Pribble, that you, all unknowing, are part of a breakthrough in knowledge which is going to shake the entire medicobiological establishment to its cracked foundations.”

“It'll make a change from fruit flies,” said Pibble.

“His name is Pibble,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “No
r
. I wish you wouldn't do that.”

“Great! Great!” said Dr. Silver. “My apologies, Mr. Pibble. Now listen. When you came this morning, was it the first time you had been to the McNair?”

“Yes.”

“Have you had any previous contact with any cathypnic children or any of the staff here?”

“No.”

“What type of vehicle did you arrive in?”

“I walked from the bus stop.”

“Fine. Now—”

“Perhaps policemen have a distinctive walk,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

“Good point, Posey! You're learning fast. They could have heard him, seen him.”

“The door's very thick,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones, “and the windows are some distance from where they stand. I've never seen any of them looking out of it when they're on door duty. They usually sit back to back on the floor.”

“First point good,” said Dr. Silver. “Make a note for Doll to have the door tested for audiopenetrability, Posey. Second point doubtful. Subjective. Not susceptible of proof, sweetie. Let's go on from there. You knocked, Mr. Pibble? You rang? There's no sound on the tape.”

“The door opened before I could do either.”

“Good, good. Who opened it?”

“Two of the children. A boy called George and a girl with red hair.”

“Fancy,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “Honestly, the names some parents saddle their children with.”

“Correct!” chanted Dr. Silver. “George Harrowby and Fancy Phillips. How long did they look at you before they said their first words?”

“I don't think they can have seen me at all. One of them said, ‘Hello,' and the other one said, ‘Copper' and ‘Lost his hat,' while the door was still between me and them. Then they shut it and we introduced ourselves and they had an argument about who should bring me here, and then George appeared to faint, and—”

“Sure, sure,” said Dr. Silver. “Pardon me, but that's not on the tape, so it's not evidence.”

He settled himself on the corner of Mrs. Dixon-Jones's desk with his back to Pibble and made rapid notes on a scribbling pad. When he had finished he sighed and stared at the paper, scratching as he did so at the back of his neck under the shorn grizzle.

“Have you heard the other tape?” Pibble said “They talked about Tony when he was sleeping on the sofa.”

“Flimflam,” said Dr. Silver. “We get a load of that sort of material, but Tony can't or won't remember what he was dreaming about, so there's no check.”

“But two of them talked about it at the same time.”

“Not good enough,” said Dr. Silver, shaking his stately head. “It may have impressed
you
, being there, but that's subjective.
My
target is a professional scientist, sitting at his desk and reading about an experiment in a scientific journal. This chappie would
prefer
to believe that any experiment in the field of parapsychology must be either a failure or a fraud. Then he reads my paper and he's convinced.”

“Put the children in separate rooms,” suggested Pibble, “with the sleeper in the middle one and—”

Dr. Silver's big actorly laugh stopped him.

“Great! Great! That's the first experiment I set up, naturally. It's the classic approach. Except that it doesn't work. You show any interest in the kids' abilities—or you don't even show it, but it's there—and they blank off. We call it feedback because it's great to have a technical sounding name for phenomena you don't understand, get it? But maybe we're right, copper. Maybe the mental stimulus of the researcher's interest is enough to jam the brain waves …”

“Groups of children,” suggested Pibble. “No researchers, only tape recorders to listen to what they say about the sleeper.”

“Good try again. We got some results that way, but not significant. Put two or three cathypnics together, and one of them will curl up and sleep while the others listen to his dreams. Too, their dreams seem to be mostly abstract, the way abstract art is abstract. And even when they dream representational, a mighty lot happens in ten seconds' dreaming for kids with that size vocabulary to comment on. It looks easy, but it's not. Four months I've been sitting on my arse trying to figure out a way to beat the intelligence of a gang of mental defectives—”

“They're not!” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones very sharply indeed.

“Sure, Posey, sure,” said Dr. Silver with an affable lack of agreement. “They're as nice a bunch of kids as you're likely to meet, but for research material into parapsychic phenomena give me revolting college students any day. But hallelujah, we've a breakthrough this morning. Two breakthroughs. Notebook, Posey. Get on to Wallace Heaton and have them send a man down. I want a cine-camera permanently trained on the inside of the door, linked with one covering the drive, so that they can both be triggered by a photoelectric cell at the gates. I want the film to carry a time indicator in each case, ditto tape recorder G, so I've proof of the simultaneity of the record. No, scrap recorder G, and we'll have a mike at the door and sound track on the film. Get it?”

Mrs. Dixon-Jones had been writing in a quick, neat, sloping hand on a duplicate pad. Now she added her initials, tore off the top copy and thrust it onto a vertical spike, and handed the duplicate to Dr. Silver.

“Remind Doll to tell me the exact figures when you've got them,” she said. “This is going to cost the earth, Ram.”

“Mr. T. can stand it. That part's easy.
Now
we've got to dream up a method of attracting a series of random callers to that door, in such a way that we can prove that not even you or I knew who was coming next. To think I've been sitting here four months without spotting what a unique research tool my own front door was! End of breakthrough one. Breakthrough two: meet Mr. Pibble!”

“Me?” The dozing soldier in the sentry box between Pibble's­ ears snapped to attention, late and guilty. He'd hardly been listening­ to the rattle of orders. Most of his mind had been puzzling­ about Dr. Silver's language. The man's accent was a very neutral­, run-of-the-mill English, without lilt or distortion; not the Lebanese-­American one might have expected. But he used a manic assortment of words and phrases, don and half-hip and gangster and journalese and babu—what sort of scientist talks, literally, about “brain waves” one sentence after addressing an ex-detective­ superintendent as “copper”?

“Yes, you, Mr. Pibble. What paranormal experiences have you had, sir?”

“None that I know of.”

“Ah, cock! No hunches in your job? No intuitions? How long were you a bluebottle?”

“Thirty-four years. I wouldn't call that sort of thing a paranormal experience, though. Of course I've sometimes felt a pull about a case without tangible evidence to back my instincts up; but I was probably wrong half the time, and the other half I'd noticed things subconsciously which would have been evidence if I'd noticed them consciously. I never liked hunches; if they work once, you start to look for them after that, and then the wildest fancy becomes an article of faith. That type of policeman doesn't last long. What's up, beyond my having figured by accident in the episode at the door?”

Dr. Silver picked up the little globe from the desk and held it between finger and thumb, like a conjuror about to perform some legerdemain with an egg. His fingers were very short and stubby.

“See,” he said softly, “my right hand sends a signal.” He tossed the toy spinning toward the ceiling.

“And my left hand receives it!” he cried. The globe fell with a slap into the olive palm. The shock of its fall must have released the catch, for the lid shot up, loosing the spark that set the small wick flaming.

“Bravo!” called Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “I can't even get it to light.”

Dr. Silver stared at the flame in a smiling trance. Pibble could see the light of it glisten off his spectacles: they were as eccentric an affectation as his language, for the glass was quite flat.

“Do it again, Ram,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

“Have you figured the odds, Posey?” said Dr. Silver in an accent of awe. “This surely is my day, when things go right for me. So let's get on. My hand cannot catch this little jigger, Mr. Pibble, unless my other hand has thrown it. Same with a signal. You need a transmitter, one; and a receiver, two. Now we believe our kids here to be highly sensitive receivers. They also transmit, but we can't control their transmissions. They won't receive freely from adults—”

“They always know when I'm tired or sad or angry,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

“So do I, Posey. So do I. But when have you seen them work a trick like this—a copper who's lost his hat? When?”

“I don't think I have.”

“And you've been here how long?”

“Seventeen years.”

“Hallelujah! Mr. Pibble, there's a rational chance that you're the transmitter we've been looking for.”

“Well, of course I'd be glad to help, but …” Pibble let his doubt hang in the air. He foresaw desert days of sitting behind cheat-proof screens, under the eyes of independent witnesses of the highest probity, while he tried to transmit a mental image of a teddy bear to a child with an IQ of sixty-five. Dr. Silver slapped him jauntily on the shoulder.

“Hell, man,” he boomed. “Mr. T. will make it worth your while. On, on! What mood were you in when you approached the door?”

“No particular mood. What do you mean?”

“Excited, man! Stimulated! Happy! Angry! Depressed!”

“None of those, really. My wife had asked me to come and talk to Mrs. Dixon-Jones about an idea that had come up at one of these fund-raising affairs. I suppose I was a little reluctant to meet the children, because I expected them to be much less, well, fetching than they are. Otherwise I was rather low-keyed—almost apathetic. I wanted to spray my roses.”

“Stupendous!” sighed Dr. Silver in three long syllables of ecstasy. “Apathy! Boredom! They're the key. How often have I said so, Posey?”

“Often enough for me to know what you mean by apathy and boredom. For heaven's sake take the man away and get his little adventure down on paper. If you're going to put him on the payroll, let me have a note—I refuse to be hounded by auditors and tax hounds in twelve months' time, when I've forgotten all about him. Good-bye, Mr. Pibble. You'll give my love to dear Mary, won't you?”

“Of course,” said Pibble, wincing at this sudden salvo after the armistice appeared to have been signed. Dr. Silver blew her a kiss, and she frowned at him—a not-in-front-of-the servants frown. The big man gathered his notes together, and Pibble waited for him, dazed. He felt as if he were embarking on a mysterious safari, and not being allowed to take with him even the bare necessities of reason. Or were once more at the start of that unbanishable recurring dream in which he received the Police Medal from the Queen Mother with his shirttails twitching around bare thighs. That nightmare shyness was echoed by the reality, for the convulsive gusts of Dr. Silver's enthusiasm seemed to insist that other men ought to strip off their safe, tweedy responses and prance naked. No wonder his signals did not penetrate to the cathypnics, if apathy was the key.