Sleep and His Brother by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online

down the even longer passage.
    The room whirred and clicked. It muttered to itself its bright inanities, the lingo of machines.
    â€œLike to listen?” said Dr. Silver. He fiddled with a tape recorder and a slow, light voice spoke from it.
    â€œTain’t fair,” it said.
    Pibble looked at the machine and saw the tape whirling at rewind speed. All at once it slowed.
    â€œTurned out nice,” it drawled.
    â€œLovely.”
    The tape spun faster again.
    â€œThat’s cunning,” said Pibble. “I wondered how you came to be listening to my entry so soon after. How’s it done?”
    â€œEasy,” said Dr. Silver. “Double pickup. The first discriminates between silence and noise and slows the tape down for the second head to rerecord onto a master tape. We’ve got twenty machines here, all running sixteen hours a day, but the sounds on them can usually be got onto one tape which my girl transcribes every day.”
    â€œGreen,” drawled the tape.
    â€œLovely,” it answered itself.
    â€œHiya, dormice,” it called. “You can’t go sleep there. You’ll be run over by my cart.”
    â€œThe exercise will do you good,” it whined.
    It whirled again, and slowed.
    â€œâ€™ot,” it complained.
    â€œNo, darling, it isn’t,” it cooed. “It’s just right. But I’ll take one of your sweaters off if you’re quite sure.”
    â€œI’m frightened.”
    â€œThere’s nothing to be afraid of, darling. You come with Posey. You aren’t hot, really you aren’t. I can feel.”
    â€œCold ’and, warm ’eart.”
    The next whirl was very short.
    â€œNow for heaven’s sake, Posey,” said the machine in the clipped, aggressive accent Pibble knew so well.
    â€œBut I can’t just leave it like that.”
    â€œOf course you can. Whether you’re right or wrong it comes to the same—”
    Dr. Silver pressed a button and the machine renounced vocables for its former clicks and whirs.
    â€œI keep telling ’em,” he said angrily. “But will they stop filling my tapes with mush? Will they hell! That applies to you, too, Mr. Pibble. If you want to talk to anyone except one of the dormice, you make damned sure either that you’re out of range of the mikes or that you switch off. And switch on when you’ve done.”
    â€œI’ll try to remember. Mrs. Dixon-Jones told me that cathypnics are very difficult to upset, but just now one of them said he was frightened. Or was it a girl?”
    â€œMarilyn Goddard,” said Dr. Silver absently. “She dreams nightmares. She’s aberrant. Mother was a clinging, sloppy, man-hungry moron—unmarried, of course. The guy she took up with when Marilyn was two was the one who did the Paperham jobs. He settled in with them, though you wouldn’t have reckoned he was the type. There for three years, till he was copped.”
    â€œCrippen!” said Pibble. His scalp had twitched involuntarily at the name of Paperham, as though horror for the dead women could be communicated directly to nerve and flesh without having to pass the censorship of thought.
    â€œDo the other children say ‘Lovely’ to her?” he asked.
    â€œYeah, but at a lower ratio than they say it to each other. I forget the figures. I’ve got them on file. ‘Lovely’ doesn’t mean a thing—it’s an all-purpose reaction. Our dormice are damned efficiently insulated from the cold world. Now let’s get this experience of yours down on tape. Come into my den.”
    It would be hard, Pibble thought, to design anything less like a den. The avocado tree looked as though it had been loaned from a stand at the Ideal Home Exhibition, and the rest of the furniture—filing cabinets, half-acre desk, shin-level tables, black-leather-and-steel chairs—failed to declare any characteristic of the man who had